124260 KO Critical Media Analysis (2015S)

This course will explore how reproduction technologies, from the printing press to the camera to the phonograph, changed our relationship to culture, and how new digital technological innovations, from youtube to free remixing software, are actively re-transforming the nature of culture’s circuit of creation and consumption in the Internet Age. This will be achieved by investigating the ideas of Remix Theory, a burgeoning school of Culture and Media Studies that explores the idea that technologies and culture do not evolve independently, and that we find ourselves currently at the nascent point of a cultural paradigm shift towards a dominant Remix Culture.
Lawrence Lessig has argued that as a result of technologies of mass production introduced over the last five centuries, the general public became “just consumers of culture, not also producers.” Lessig characterizes this cultural paradigm shift as a move from “Read/Write” (R/W) to “Read/Only” (R/O) culture. Yet, over the course of the last century a strong counter-discourse to this prevailing model of R/O culture slowly developed. From postmodern pastiche and collage to DJ and hip-hop remix aesthetics, culture has been democratized by new theories and digital technologies to the point that in the current era culture occurs “in a networked, participatory environment, which breaks down the boundaries between producers and consumers and instead enables all participants to be users as well as producers of information and knowledge.”
This course will introduce students to Remix Theory and Remix Culture through collage films such as Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, Orson Welles’ F For Fake, and Carl Reiner’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid to contemporary youtube film mash-ups and memes; through the postmodern collage artworks of Andy Warhol and Richard Hamilton (and through their Victorian and Surrealist forebears) as well as street graffiti; to musical hybridization from Musique concrete to Jamaican dance-hall, Hip-Hop, and contemporary mash-ups. Exploring the consequences of this new R/W culture for the production and consumption of cultural artifacts will also allow us to introduce and engage with a number of key theoretical ideas in Culture and Media studies, such as questions of authenticity, original v. copy, and the conflict between authorized and deauthorized voices. Along the way we will consider these issues alongside various theoretical paradigms, such as Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage, Max Ernst’s theory of collage, Stuart Hall’s model of mass communication, postmodern theories of intertextuality and authorship (Barthes, Foucault), questions of copyright and ownership, and the semiotic differences between old and new media.