Artist: Jeff Crouse (Eyebeam Senior Fellow): Interactive narrative, software development
Workshop: Students will work in familiar and new social media platforms, with an eye towards activist interventions, finding humor, and craze making.
Critical Frameworks: Communication, audience development, narrative
Resources: Potentially…Carnivore, Reamweaver, Tor, TheyRule, Fundrace, Cory Archangel, Evan Roth, Ze Frank, Facebook and/or MySpace, Twitter, etc.
Videos we watched:
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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Blog post by Fernando and Caroline:
Jeff teaching about the internet
On July 13th, we watched a video by Lawrence Lessig, he started off by telling us three stories of the creation of the internet. One of them was about Tim Burners Lee, he approached the U.S. government and said that the newly invented ‘sound machines’ were going to ruin our vocal cords. Tim Burners Lee said that with these machines distributing music and sound there would be no need for people to use there vocal cords to sing and talk in public gatherings and that humans would evolve without their vocal chords and we would also loose their passion and wouldn’t be able to communicate in a creative way with one another. What Burners Lee feared was that with machines distributing simple to complex human tasks for us we would loose our passion, creativity, and would eventually evolve without it. Fortunately, Tim Burners Lee was wrong. Lawrence Lessig showed us that the internet would actually accomplish the opposite of what Tim Burners Lee thought. With the internet being a simple and creative tool to express your passions anyone and everyone can do it. An example of this would be people taking already created content and remixing it to something new, so taking something old and recreating on to it. This is portrayed in AMVs (Anime Music Videos) and art work concepts being re-used/re-created for non-commercial purposes.
Students working on their videos
After we learned about the history of the internet and net neutrality, Jeff gave us a project to work on. For the rest of that day, we worked on remixing, combining and re-creating videos and audio tracks; to further prove Lawrence Lessig’s point, that people using the internet are actually contributing and redistributing culture to the world.
Digital Day Camp '09 