Festival Submission Deadline Extended to March 31!

The RE/Mixed Media Festival celebrates remix as a legitimate, responsible form of visual art by bringing together filmmakers, video remixers and mashup artists to display their works publicly.  The festival will be held in Brooklyn, NY on Sunday May 30, 2010 at Galapagos Art Space in Dumbo.

We are currently soliciting films from lo-fi artists that utilize remix/mashup techniques, and that are under 10 minutes in length. You may remix the work of others (see guidelines below) or your own original work.

Additionally, your film should comply with the following guidelines:

1. Remix does not mean stealing someone else’s work and claiming it as your own, but using it to create a work that is substantially different from the appropriated work, even if it depends heavily on it.
2. The materials used in the remix should be either owned by the artist, granted permission from use from the creator, licensed under a creative commons license which allows such use, in the public domain, or fall within the parameters of the Fair Use doctrine of U.S. Copyright Law.
3. Attribution for works used will be given where required.
4. To be considered for the festival, submitted works must be freely redistributable, except as limited by source material restrictions.  This means that other artists in the festival may remix your submission after entries are chosen and the resulting work may be used in the festival.

That being said, read the complete rules, terms and conditions. Then,

Submissions will be accepted from Nov 1, 2009 – Mar 31, 2010

Submission fee: $10.00
Deadline: March 31, 2010.

About RE/Mixed Media 2010

In the past decade, digital hardware and software has allowed artists and consumers access to media-creating tools previously only available to professionals.   The result has been not only an explosion of user-generated media, but an explosion of creativity as well. Artists began applying remixing and mashup techniques borrowed from the music world, to digital video and film, creating new works of art using elements from other sources.

The art of remixing is now considered acceptable after being practiced for three decades in music, while artists remixing appropriated video and film are subject to lawsuits. We believe it’s time that the same legitimacy granted to music be granted to the visual arts as well.

The doctrine of fair use in U.S. copyright law allows copyrighted works to be used for “purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research”.  We believe this should apply to any appropriation that uses the original in order to create something new, provided it doesn’t mitigate the potential market or value of the original work.   Since the 18^th century, copyright laws allowed for these kinds of use. Today, software manufacturers and ISPs can circumvent this legal provision by building copy restriction mechanisms into the hardware itself, preventing artists from creatively remixing video, sound, words and images, even when the resulting works might fall under fair use.  The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1996 codified these types of restrictions, criminalizing the production of technology that circumvents measures that control access to copyrighted material.

Public domain laws have suffered similar setbacks.  Before 1964, copyright extended for a term of 28 years, today a copyright can last as long as 120 years and since 2008, the law gives the copyright holder the “exclusive right” to create derivative works.  This means that cultural phenomena such as Pop Art, which relied on reframing cultural icons, couldn’t emerge today without being sued into obscurity, nor would we have the works of Mozart, Shakespeare, or Thomas Edison.

The Festival aims to challenge the current laws by bringing public awareness to media mixing as a legitimate practice, while at the same time remaining within their boundaries of the law.  We are soliciting artists who remix responsibly. This does not mean claiming someone else’s work as your own, it means recognizing that every artist contributes to the global cultural library and works can and should be built upon, modified, and repurposed with the goal of bringing a new work of art into the world.