Posts Tagged ‘ media

RTÉ: The Unsaid

On Sunday last (21/10/10) the Irish government announced the IMF / ECB bailout plans. This was already the word on the street for the previous week and the Taoiseach, Brian Cowen had, on more than one occasion, vehemently denied any plans for an IMF bailout. Yet again, more lies. The IMF brigade were apparently just here on a friendly visit over the previous days and were shacked up in the swanky Merrion Hotel, conveniently located a spitting distance from the back door of government buildings. But the charade couldn’t be kept up for too long.

I was watching the news develop online via Twitter when it was announced a press conference would take place after 8pm with some news from the government. It’s unusual of course for our politicians to work on a Sunday, so this it would seem was the admission of what the IMF were really here for (as if we didn’t know).

I switched on the television and flicked around to see what was being said. BBC and Sky News were covering the story for an hour previous and people wondered on Twitter if RTÉ was going to announce that they would be covering it.

RTÉ broadcast the government’s press conference at 8.30pm after Fair City. The News Flash cut the live broadcast at 8.50pm before it was over when the journalist Vincent Browne dealt some tough questions to An Taoiseach and went back to the studio for some “analysis”. I had to switch to the BBC to catch the remainder of the conference.

License fee; €160
Remit; public service broadcasting

I, like many, complained. What I got from RTÉ was a stock response.. My email correspondence with them is attached below in full (pdf format)

complaint to RTÉ – November 2010

…. I’m still waiting for a reply but won’t be holding my breath.

On Monday night I made a little remix garnered from some of the material I harvested over the previous 48 hours.
Et voila…

Mercy buckets RTÉ

ps: as you won’t find an archive of this conference on the RTÉ website, I’ve linked it below from some puclic service minded Youtuber

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHcw5xYSaAE

Remix and the Rouelles of Media Production

Since the beginning of the year I have been part of an online seminar ‘Remix Theory and Praxis’ established by Owen Gallagher of Total Recut discussing the merits of ‘Remix Culture’. Through meetings over Skype and email, Mette Birk, Eli Horwatt, Martin Leduc, Eduardo Navas, Tara Zepell, Owen & myself discussed relevant academic texts and ideas which relate to the subject as well as sharing examples demonstrating the rise of remix as the tools of production became affordable to the wider public outside of the media industry. This has led to an explosion of creativity which has filtered back into the media itself with the discovery of new techniques of storytelling brought about by wider experimentation.

[image above links to the work]

One of the things we set out to do as a group was to create a remixed text whereby we all wrote a bit about our ideas of remix culture and put it up and mixed it together in a wiki to form part of the Networked Book project (a networked book about networked art). It not exactly a Brion Gysin / William S. Burroughs cut-up approach, but it is interesting to see a multi-authored piece of text come together cohesively. The result is a piece which which is challenging to our perception of creative culture and highlights the problems with copyright in a world so consumed by mass media. It is only natural for people to use these media sources as reference points in studies of modern culture or as a language in itself to tell new and unique stories. This text analysing these perspectives is now available on the site and is organic in form in that it can be further remixed and expanded upon within the text itself and discussed in comments alongside.

The group will be taking part in show and tell panel and screening sessions “Theory of Remix” in this year’s Open Video Conference (October 1st & 2nd) in New York City. I was to be participating in this but I could not secure funding to travel and could not afford to go otherwise. I had thought about crowd-funding my trip, but at that stage it would have been too late to get it organised properly and I didn’t want to dilute my plans for crowd-funding something else (which I will announce soon). It’s a pity I can’t be there as it’s something I was really looking forward to being a part of and to meeting those in the group whom I haven’t yet met in person. There’s a swarm of interesting offerings at this years conference including “EFF vs Burning Man”, “When YouTube Killed the Hitler Meme”, “Building Solutions for Human Rights Video” as well as sessions on HTML5 video, open journalism and lot’s of other open source inspired goodness as well as a great selection of speakers. Check out the schedule of the site fro more info. Most of OVC will be streamed live, so I will be able to attend virtually. Now to finish off that mega remix I have been dragging out way too long!

WIKILEAKS vs The Pentagon – Rap News

Che-che-check this out!

Here’s a great informative piece of infotainment, talking about net neutrality and all..