Negativland Kicks Out the Culture Jams

Negativland Kicks Out the Culture Jams With Favorite Things
[Scott Thill, Wired]
It's a short ride from copyfight infamy to mashup immortality.
Take audiovisual collagists and merry pranksters Negativland, who in 1991 famously sampled U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and mashed it with radio host Casey Kasem's rants about the band, long before YouTube was a bright idea in Chad Hurley's head.
The resulting high-profile legal fight resonates at a time when a song sharer gets hammered with a $222,000 fine and record execs claim that ripping a song amounts to theft.
Negativland, comprised of Mark Hosler, Don Joyce, Tim Maloney and others, is capitalizing on the copyright chaos and confusion, stealing a song snippet here, borrowing a video bit there, while calling "intellectual property" an invalid concept and steadfastly refusing to get any samples "cleared" for use by their copyright owners.
On Nov. 20, these old-school copyfighters will release a career-spanning DVD/CD called Our Favorite Things that features revised collages of previous Negativland works assembled with the help of 18 indie filmmakers.
The group gladly handed the revisionist reins to others for the retrospective, giving outside directors and even a cappella Detroit doo-wop outfit 180 Gs a chance to freak Negativland's product.
In other words: Culture jammers, jam thyselves...
MORE @ WIRED.COM
Labels: copyfight, mashup, morphizm, negativland, pioneer, technoculture, wired










































































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