New York audiences will have an opportunity to sample some of the talent from this May’s RE/Mixed Media Festival, at a free simulcast of a Lawrence Lessig talk at Harvard, sponsored by the Open Video Alliance.

Immediately following the talk and Q&A, LOFI will present three (very) short video remixes by Elisa Kreisinger, Jonathan McIntosh, and Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung.  The evening will conclude with a DJ set by c-tor, accompanied by live visuals by VJ Dan Winckler.

The event, scheduled to begin at 6PM, is free and will be held at:

The Open Planning Project
148 Lafayette Street, Penthouse
NYC

We hope to see you there!

RE/Mixed Media Festival 2010 is pleased to announce the addition of Toxic Pop*-  one of NYC’s best known purveyors of underground cultural events in NYC since 2003 – to their roster of festival sponsors.  Toxic Pop has generously donated $500 to be awarded to one artists who submits the best video remix to the festival, as voted by a to-be-determined panel of experts.  All filmmakers, remixers, and video mashup artists are eligible, and the winner will be selected on the night of the festival.  Only artists who submit their video to the festival via the website or mail are eligible – established remixers invited by the festival curators will not be eligible unless they also submit additional work for consideration by sending different work along with a submission form and the requisite $10 submission fee.

*Toxic Pop is a NYC based production and promotion company, best known for the 6-year publication of their weekly newsletter.  Since 2003, Toxic Pop has been dedicated to promoting underground art in New York, and has produced a number of music, theater, and burlesque events at venues such as Bowery Poetry Club, The Cutting Room, The Delancey, Collective Unconscious and Surf Reality.

All of us at lo-fi lounge are thrilled to announce that the RE/Mixed Media 2010 Festival will be held on Sunday, May 30th at Galapagos Art Space in Dumbo, Brooklyn NYC.   Located in a century-old horse stable on Brooklyn’s waterfront, Galapagos is a 10,000 square foot space – beautifully renovated with a state-of-the-art lighting, video and sound equipment, a huge stage, with a balcony and multi-levels (with bars on each one) to house all the events we have planned for the fest.

All the incredible talent we have lined up, as well as a schedule of the day’s events will be announced over the coming weeks.  Expect curated mashup/video film screenings, DJs/dancing, an exhibit/silent auction of remixed visual art, live video remixing, a remixed fashion show, panel discussions, sponsor tables, a “roots room” displaying mashups throughout the history of art, and of course the main event -> the screening of the selected entrants of our mashup/remixed film and video festival.

Hope you all are as excited as we are!  Stay tuned for more info!

This Tuesday 1/19 8PM at Brooklyn Bowl:

COPYRIGHT CRIMINALS Broadcast Premiere and DVD Release Party!

Special appearances by EL-P, ECLECTIC METHOD, MR. LEN and DJ SPOOKY.
Doors open at 8PM. Followed by the PBS Broadcast Premiere at 10PM.

COPYRIGHT CRIMINALS examines the creative and commercial value of musical sampling, including the related debates over artistic expression, copyright law, and (of course) money.
Featuring AESOP ROCK, GEORGE CLINTON, CHUCK D, DE LA SOUL, MIX MASTER MIKE.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Due to a number of concurrent circumstances (but mostly to allow more time to notoriously procrastinative artists), we are extending the deadline of the RE/Mixed Media Festival 2010 until March 31st, 2010. This date change is for submissions only – we are still planning the festival for late May 2010 and we should be notifying selected artists no later than mid-April of this year.

Keep checking back (or better yet, subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed) to keep updated on festival news.

We’re really excited! Hope you guys are too!!

Reminder: World’s Fair Use Day is tomorrow!  If anyone wants to take the bus down to DC with me tomorrow and talk about copyright law for 5 hours…let me know!

http://bit.ly/6LUtoe

Due to a number of inquiries, we have updated the festival guidelines to clarify the point that you may submit work that is remixed from your own original material, i.e. it does not have to be a remix of the work of others.

Also, we have updated the guidelines to specify that, because work used in the festival must be freely distributable, this means that your work may be remixed by other artists chosen for the festival, and shown as part of the event.

The updated guidelines can be found on the home page, and the terms and conditions page.

QuestionCopyright.org, the online clearinghouse for new ideas about copyright, today threw their official support behind Re/Mixed Media Festival 2010, specifically noting the fact that we are soliciting “freely distributable works” for inclusion in the festival.  From their blog post:

It’s great that the festival is ensuring that the works they show be freely useable by others — remix artists, of all people, understand the importance of this. And as the Sita Distribution Project is showing, being pro-sharing can actually help the artists economically.

Thanks to Karl Fogel for cooperating with us in helping forge this partnership.

Bas Jan Ader

Several weeks ago, during a Sunday at MOMA, my legs started to hurt – a (probably) psycho-somatic condition I have gotten every time I’ve been to a museum since childhood.  I was seeing the “In & Out of Amsterdam” exhibition and in an effort to sit and chill for a few minutes, I wandered into a dark little room…a black box with a silent film running…. a five-minute piece, on a loop, of venetian blinds opening and closing.  The room was empty so I sat alone in the dark and meditated on the repetition and the play between the black of the room and the light of the film.

As I sat there, my thoughts began to play, as they do when allowed, and I pretended I was in my own place, my own little theater where people could come and sit in a dark room, maybe on the floor like I was, and watch other people’s five-minute films.  The art stars in NYC have a tradition of treating the open mic as holy, as a place where risks can be taken… in other words, a place where art happens.

Where do filmmakers or, more specifically, emergent artists who are just beginning to play with the tools and technologies of visual performance…. where do they have to go that is the equivalent of the open mic?   I think the 60’s had more ‘art-holes’ for film than we do now, that was also a time when artists were starting to play with new toys – movie camera prices dropped exponentially after WWII – and a new kind of creativity exploded.   Today, most digital experiments are presented on virtual destinations like YouTube and Flickr, and the ritual of public performance is slowly disappearing.   I thought, “wow, maybe this place, this little black box in my head, is a space where we can do both: where we can bring our art out into the world, and present it in front of living people, without the fear of failure.”  This was how it started.

[incidentally, the venetian blind film was a piece called Louverdrape by Bas Jan Ader, the Dutch artist who was lost at sea in 1975 while attempting to cross the Atlantic on a 13-foot boat.  The name of my first theater company was Ikaros.  I'll let you do the research and/or the math, and connect your own metaphysical dots.]

A week later, my I had my good friends Bruce, Emilie, Amy and Mike over to dinner at my place in Bushwick. Somewhere between tofu loaf and rounds of red wine I told them this story, and threw out the idea that “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if there were a store-front, an art hole open mic for film, the way there is for performance.  Where artists who are out there making this stuff, maybe only because they’re artists and want to make it (gasp), can come and have a beer and throw their 10 minutes of weirdness up on the wall for a crowd of people who are there because they love it too?”  We all agreed that would be just rad.  I’d had the phrase “lo-fi” in my head all week – Stacey from the Music & Talent dept at work had used it to refer to Flip cam video during our Monday meeting. And “lounge,” well, that’s the most comforting word in the English language… plus I love alliteration. “lo-fi lounge” just made sense and was just rad with everyone else as well.  There was our name.

Then it was all about what can we do now?  One of the distinctions of digital art paired with network technology is the potential for artistic collaboration on a scale that has never existed before.  Artists all over the world are borrowing remix and mashup techniques from the music world and applying them to visual art. Remixing has a long and honored tradition in the art world, i.e. borrowing an idea, image, sound, color… from one thing and using it’s intrinsic qualities PLUS its semiotic meaning and using it as an element in a totally new work.  This is, to some degree, how all things are created.   Today, however, copyright laws have been modified in favor of protecting corporate interests and whereas at the turn of the 20th century a copyright term lasted 28 years, today it can last up to 120.  This – along with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1996 – has tightened restriction on the appropriation of works to the point where nothing is free to be borrowed, built upon, parodied, or pondered.   There is still a concept of “fair use,” but the threat of corporate litigation is, in effect, using the market to censor,  just as the DMCA is requiring technology itself to censor.

So for our first event, we settled on the “Re/Mixed Media Festival“, and are aiming for Spring, 2010.    The concept is simple, it’s a festival of short (under 10 minute) works by emerging artists who are using the mashup/remix technique to make their films.  It’s a way of putting ourselves out into the neighborhood, to get to know other artists (both local and non-local), and to make a clear statement about our views that creativity and innovation need to be acknowledged when laws are written, that copyright law is in serious need of reform, and that art wants to be free to play.