Beware The Dinosaur's Lawyers!

Watching broadcast media, one of the giants birthed of industrialization in the Twentieth Century, struggle with the recent Olympics was enjoyable.

Wimbledon Flashmob

Early on, CTV's London desk was showing video of a flash mob at Wimbledon.  The broadcast anchor said, "I don't get this at all, why would people do this?  What a waste of time."

He doesn't get why people would do back flips to get on mainstream media?  Dude, your entire career is predicated on what they are doing... did you enjoy getting made up for your camera time today?  Does your agent do what those people are doing all the time just to get your mug in front of more cameras?  Do you throw a fit when they bring you the wrong tie?

The 'let them eat cake' distance that the corporate broadcast media has from a bunch of sweaty fools having a good time on a hill at Wimbledon underlines how truly out of touch they are.

Technology has miniaturized, communications have become a widely distributed two-way medium, yet the corporate broadcast media cling to their unidirectional economic model, frantically milking it for all it's worth before the weight of inevitability forces change.  I'm not saying there won't be a place for professionally created media, but technology is allowing for smaller, niche groups to make what they want, how they want, and do it well while still making a living selling to niche audiences.  The days of centrally controlled media are ending because the need for expensive corporate backing are no longer a technical necessity.

Where once an artist had to gather the corporate power of a massive enterprise behind them in order to get their hands on the technology needed to broadcast their story, they now find themselves increasingly able to create their vision and distribute it themselves, assuming the wallowing dinosaur doesn't have a room of lawyers on hand, which they do.  Deinnovation by legislation.  Deinnovation by lawsuit.

Sita Sings The Blues

A couple of years ago I came across Quinn Norton's brilliant column in MaximumPC on the calamity that was Nina Paley's attempt to express her own miserable breakup using a brilliant mash up of Flash animation, Annette Hanshaw's blues, and The Ramayana.  To call this copyright theft is ridiculous... this mash up is insane (and brilliant - I use it every year teaching media arts).  Yet Paley was run out of business by copyright trolls (lawyers) who look for out of date art, copyright it, then lay in wait, hoping to squeeze money out of something they purchased from other copyright lawyers - an open market of dead artist's work being held to prevent new art from forming.

If that isn't an example of the desperation of the broadcast media system, I don't know what is.  They are so intellectually bankrupt that they can only recycle and steal other ideas.  The corporate media machine continually pumps out near identical films at virtually the same time, desperately trying to tap into cultural memes that they aren't agile enough to keep up with.  Indy and social media media create far more current, personalized and pertinent media in the early 21st Century, and younger viewers are cottoning on to it, even while everyone tries to dodge the wallowing dinosaur's departments of lawyers.

There will always be money to be made in a good bit of story telling, and digital media is nothing if not a good bit of story telling (even the news).  What we're seeing now is a slow, painful adjustment as the habits we invented around expensive, industrially driven broadcasting give way to cheaper, individualized, technology supported media.  Professional media isn't dead, but we don't require millions in corporate backing to produce it any more.  Don't expect an industry worth more than two trillion dollars to give up on squeezing it though.

I'd hope that instead of trying to cobble together another massive production, corporate mega-media would be trying to spin off divisions that support small, agile groups feeding niche markets, but I don't imagine that's the case.  The problem with really big animals that are ideally suited to a specific environment is that they are horrible at adapting.  They're great while the ecosystem stays the same, but the minute the social media asteroid appears, they just keep trying to do what they've always done, thrashing around, hoping to hold off the inevitable, until they are extinct.


Note: thanks to Quinn & Nina, Sita will be shown again in the middle of our Flash animation unit this year.  I'm looking forward to another year of grade tens wrestling with who owns what, what art is, how no one is free from influence, how The Beatles could steal other people's musical influences and then lock down their own for ever, what is appropriation of voice, and the future of media art. That one little column led me to a wonderful teaching piece that is still raising hard questions for hundreds of students years later.  Thanks!

Lessons From Skills Canada

Friday I chaired the video creation Skills Canada regional competition in Guelph.  Ours was a competitive division with five teams who had to film, edit and post-produce a preplanned thirty second ad in four hours.  Only three teams could place and only the top team could move on to the provincial competition.

Some observations stood out:

• The hard deadlines came as a shock to many of the students, who aren't used to them any more (we don't really require hard deadlines in class any more)
• The competitive nature of the competition concerned a number of the teams, who couldn't comprehend being allowed to lose in school (we don't really integrate competitive winning and losing in class any more)
• The sense of satisfaction that resulted from getting a quality piece of work done in the time given surprised many of the students (we don't really allow students to develop a sense of satisfaction from completing work on time - on the contrary, a number of students recently told me at parent teacher interviews that they are sick and tired of knocking themselves out to complete work by deadlines only to see slack and idle students hand in the same thing whenever they get around to it).
• At the rewards ceremony many of the students were at a loss as to how to act when they'd won (stony faced and blankly indifferent were the norm, broken up by the odd grin).  They were also unable to recognize what losing gracefully looked like.
• In the automotive technology section the announcer said, "congratulations gentlemen" only to realize that one of the gold medalist was female (from our school!) and back pedal.   If we're going to break the gender assumptions around skilled trades, it starts here (and is).
• Skills Canada has reinforced for me (yet again) that media arts isn't an arts course so much as it's a technical skills course that includes artistic input (like carpentry).  We just got rather brutally cut for new students while being administered by the fine arts department, I think in great part because what we're teaching is being administered by a department that doesn't know how to present us or what to do with us.

Skills Canada is a wonderful program that empowers students to embrace their passions in the skilled trades.  Often looked down upon by the academically prejudiced teachers (all university grads deeply ingrained in academia), many of these students with smart hands and kinesthetically focused minds look like failures to the pen & paper classroom teacher.

Our school is fortunate to have a busy and wide ranging technology department with many course options.  Those hands-smart, kinesthetic thinkers must suffer in smaller schools full of class rooms and little else.

Having participated in Skills Canada for two years now, I'm a fan.  I plan to encourage our computer engineering students to put their names in for the IT competition, and our media arts students to jump into the crucible, they come out tempered by the experience.

As one of the grade 12s said at the end of the day, "I was put off by the competition and now I'm sorry I never tried this before.  It was a great experience, and a great challenge.  I wish I had a chance to do it again, now that I've tried it, I want to do it again better."  That is the greatest lesson of competition, it clarifies how you can improve in no uncertain terms, and then offers you another chance to show what you know.  Of course, as a senior he won't be here next year.

I've got to find ways to get younger students involved in taking this risk, the rewards are great, and by grade 12 they'll be weathered veterans who can take a competitive run at the medal stand.  Nothing they do in class helps prepare them for the world they are about to walk out into more.

Media Arts Lab 2.0

Redesigning media arts to create, not consume

http://prezi.com/9ow8h2urx1va/dream-media-arts-lab/

The Macs in our media arts lab are getting old and plastic.  They can't push the high-def video coming out of our latest cameras, so it's time for a hardware upgrade, but it's not just about the hardware.

One of the biggest problems we face in our static, desktop centred lab with ordered rows of imacs are the bad habits students fall back into.  Because our lab is like every other lab in the school (factory like rows of desktops in Pink Floyd The Wallesque rows of conformity),  students do what they usually do in a computer lab; they zone out and become passive media consumers.  Passive TV viewing has evolved into passive computer use.

In a media arts class where they are supposed to be in a creative, active mind-space, this is an ongoing class management headache.  Battling the Facebook zombies and youtube droolers becomes an ongoing headache in the typical computer lab, especially with the weakest students who tend to be the most non-experimental and habitual in their technology use.

I've looked at this from a typical school IT/lab point of view, advocating for a mini-lab concept that emphasizes diversified, mobile technology, but this is the media-arts angle.

Many of the ideas are similar, but the idea of mobile, adaptable media tools also spurred the realization that students in front of an online desktop act much the way that students in front of a television do; they become passive, unquestioning media consumers.  In a media arts lab this is an ongoing crisis.

There is the culture of entertainment that most digital natives subscribe to.  Computers with internet access are toys to be used for entertainment.  Their habitual use of computers at home and throughout their school careers have only enforced these bad habits.  Unfortunately, those habits extend to most educators too.  From PD days where the presenter assumes that if you're on a computer you're not paying attention, to teachers booking labs to have a period off, computers aren't considered anything other than an entertaining distraction by just about everyone.

We then get them into media arts where they are creating large amounts of digital media, and most of them are trapped in their bad habits and social expectations of technology.  The fact that school related computer lab time is often unsupervised only adds to the problem.

Trying to break them out of that rut in a room with rows of desktops isn't working.  Time to free up the tech, and break the passivity.