think demux

Luke sent me a very informative link from Boing Boing yesterday. If you’re not in the habit of making video, you can skip this post.

I won’t pretend that Fair Use is riveting. But it’s something you need to understand if you want to sample material that isn’t your own.

This piece is available in full here and the Centre for Social Media has a lot more to help you get your head around Creative Commons law and Fair Use.

Why does any of this concern me? Well, it affects my VJing work, for one. I’ve not yet met a VJ who doesn’t use a single sample in their set. Neither have I met a VJ who’s entirely comfortable about their legal footing in doing so.

But a VJ should aspire to sample less and less as they develop. There’s a lot of insight in the book and DVD by D-Fuse and Michael Faulkner on this subject.

And whatever you’re doing, whether it’s original or sampled, it should be transformative. That’s the whole point.

I think reading up on Fair Use is an effective way to quality control your work and ensure you stand out from the YouTube mash-ups. I’d recommend it.

Not a question I expect to be asking myself on a Sunday night.

But browsing the freezer of your nearest cornershop tends to leave you with a basketful of questions. Or, at worst, spectacularly poor answers.

This San Marco pizza presented the answer to a question I never dreamt I’d ask. What is analogue cheese?

“Deep pan pizza topped with analogue cheese, reformed ham, mushrooms and mozzarella cheese.”

You can add another question to that list. Who are San Marco pizza? They were offloaded by Heinz in 2003 and picked up by Northern Foods sometime after that. The rest is mystery.

But Google analogue cheese and you get a quick, cheery answer:

“Cutting your costs, building your profits”? That sounds a bit like industry salespeak now, doesn’t it…

Delightfully, it is. Not only do companies seem bound to state analogue cheese as an ingredient on their packaging, but muppets are running their online shop.

The manufacturer might want to “emulate cheese” and “imagine the savings!”, but the consumer will do a little sick in the back of their mouth at the sight of this thinly-stretched masquerading imposter.

And it’s top of the SEO pops for the term ‘analogue cheese’.

A victory for online transparency?

Or does it just beg another question - what is digital cheese?

More Bad Language: Dogs Down the Sh*tter; P*ssed Kids Film Drivers; Give Chihuahuas A Little F*cking Respect.

You can’t take pictures at Spitalfields, a funfair or a Disneyland car park.

You’re on shaky ground if you want to take pictures of children. (Though some are still doing it spectacularly.)

Should I have taken this picture?

I didn’t use a flash - no flash photography on the Underground. Just a straight, clear shot of another solitary person.

But I didn’t ask his permission.

And neither did the CCTV camera up high on his shoulder. Nor did it ask my permission on the way down the escalator.

Still, I could feasibly have been swept off on the grounds of “acting suspiciously and taking pictures“, and I wouldn’t be writing this now. They’re would be CCTV footage if it went to court, and a new government policy to back it up.

What does all this say about us? How does it affect the way we see each other?

There were suspiciously few dogs on the so-called “Isle of Dogs” last weekend. And I only hope to dear God my camera read this wrong.

Must have blinked and missed a word. Either way, there are absent pieces in this sordid puzzle.

Meanwhile downtown, a White Horse has gone missing. He left this eloquent note to explain his absence:

Phew. No need to fear animal disposal this time. “Kick up the arse” sounds horsey enough to me, too. It can’t be some shadow-written sham.

Two valuable lessons in animal conversation.

1. You’ve got to watch which words you miss out. Or you’ll be misread between the lines.

2. It’s usually best to be clear and direct. Especially if you’ve got nothing to hide and something relevant to say.

Previously: talking to chihuahuas. Seriously: Chris Wilson’s Human Talk. Sincerely: responses to bad, automated humanspeak. 

Are you talking to me? But I don’t even have a car.

I might have been on a speeding bus once, but that can’t have been in London. Frankly, I think your assumptions are questionable.

Furthermore, the images on your poster suggest that if I get caught speeding, it would be as if a kid were taking footage. Does the court of law recognise such amateurish evidence?

When I took pictures as a primary school kid they were normally of my friends or the TV screen to see if the photo came out like it looked on the TV screen. For the record, it didn’t. But I’m digressing.

Can I counter-accuse you of badvertising? It would be a shame to do so. Because M&C Saatchi’s TV spot for this campaign is pretty good and it’s a serious issue we’re talking about.

What do you think? I reckon the earlier poster with the steering wheel worked, but this one’s got a bit confused.

Put yourself on the paws of a chihuahua. The Mexican jibes are probably bad enough. But even when you’re not faced with xenophobes, punks talk down to you all day. Why can’t these oversized thugs learn some manners? Let’s go back to school: how to communicate with animals.

Lesson 1: Look an animal in the eye. Talk to that animal on their level. Stop being so condescending.

This is a smart piece of work by Belgian agency 10 (via Ads of the World). If we can make the effort to talk to feet on a level, animals deserve more grace.

Lesson 2: Speak to them in their language. You expect a Venezuelan to understand Russian? A footballer to “get” Tolstoy? Alan Shearer to develop a fashion vocabulary?

This was a lovely pick by Chris Wilson (I haven’t met or spoken to Chris yet, and I hope this in itself isn’t bad etiquette). He puts it well. People don’t like to be barked at.

Neither do animals. Well, I guess dogs do, when they’re in a bark mood. But they might be more up for a grrr.

Unless you look that chihuahua right in its beady eye, you’ll never know. 

Two scraps of bin magic on the way home from work today. First up, Will Self’s new novel gets the contextual marketing treatment. People (should) put cigarette butts in bins. This is a bin. The novel is called The Butt. Straightforward enough. Did this get Bloomsbury’s blessing? I don’t know. But as this is a bin on the corner of Brick Lane it’s sure to recycle hot air into conversation and back again. Hipsters can still casually toss their fag ends to the gutter, safe in the knowledge that even though they’ve seen an ad for a novel, there’s no threat they’ll ever have to read one.

Which leads me to wonder, who’s the real star here? Every Sunday, art students and Bohemian nomads hawk bric-a-brac on Brick Lane. There are some literary left-overs on offer, but they’re sold more as material to be mashed up in mixed media pieces than something to read. We’re looking at trash fetishism. Which is exactly what I saw just down the road. 

The Keep Britain Tidy logo gets a remixing. Again, I don’t know who’s responsible - but the conscientious litter dispenser is the star. So, confusingly, is the rubbish itself (you might have to look at the enlarged photo to see what I’m talking about). Are we all heroes in the vast daily consumption of packaged products and the disposal of said packaging?

Well, here’s the London rub. In most built-up areas, there aren’t many bins. Sometimes there aren’t any at all. Bins were the silent victims of terrorism. People put bombs in bins, so the government got rid of them. Leaving us often with nowhere to get rid of our rubbish.

Now the bin star is once again rising, we should take the example of Scotland. I was living in Edinburgh when the smoke ban came in during 2006. The City of Edinburgh did some pretty uncompromising advertising under the banner of ”Aye Butt. Nae Butt“, backed up by a bottom-line: smokers who chucked their butts would be fined.

Public information threats haven’t worked on people who still smoke. But Edinburgh gave something more than a threat. They added silver stub-trays to the tops of most bins.

They gave smokers a design solution, and genuinely made the bin the star. However you perceived the threat, there was absolutely no reason to take the risk. Law-abiding had been made a no-brainer and you’d be worse than a labotomised hipster to eschew it. (And no, “ironic” is not an excuse).

London just needs to take another good, long stare at its most important constellation.