Sonic Outlaws

Starring:Chris Grigg, Lloyd Dunn, Paul Neff, David 'Weatherman' Wills, John Oswald, Mark Hosler, Don Joyce, Richard Lyons (III), Doug Kahn, Alan Korn, Josh Pearson
Director: Craig Baldwin
Studio: Other Cinema
Product Type: DVD

Description

Within days after the release of Negativland's clever parody of U2 and Casey Kasem, recording industry giant Island Records descended upon the band with a battery of lawyers intent on erasing the piece from the history of rock music. Craig "Tribulation 99" Baldwin follows this and other intellectual property controversies across the contemporary arts scene. Playful and ironic, his cut-and-paste collage-essay surveys the prospects for an "electronic folk culture" in the midst of an increasingly commodified corporate media landscape.

Customer Reviews:

Pictoral Record of the Letter 2 and the Numeral U!.......2007-04-01

This little movie explores the art of "Found Sound" plagarism and re-manipulation. It portrays those who'se mission is to capture the plastic cultural icons and refashion them into new monsters to awaken people and make them think.

The acme of this art is of course, Negativland! The way they do it brings on a smile because it is so amusing! Yet your smile will transform into a smirk, and your gut-felt laugh will transform into feeling like a horse kicked you in the gut. It dawns on you: that all the commercial jingles heard throughout your life have made you into the media's obediant robot, buying thousands of $1.00 a bottle sugar-waters and smoking yourself to death for the profit of others!

But beware: If you have the guts to protest, you are a heretic to this new religion of mass consumerism. And if you have the guts to "bite back" like Negativland does, be prepared to have the powers-that-be rain lawyers on you!

Watch as Negativland battles Corporate Music and their spokesman, Casey Kasum. See my favorite Clorox Cowboy-The Weatherman-scan cellular telephone calls! His excuse: "The airwaves suppossed to be free and here it is!"

See John Oswald create "Plunderphonics" and splice together media sound bites to the delight of the members of Negativland. And witness the Barbie Liberation Front exchange the electronic voiceboxes of Barbies and G.I.Joes!

ANd especially, see how YOU have been manipulated by Corporate America.

Recombinant plagiarism as cultural critique.......2006-09-04

"When the mass media are controlled by the few, that makes media piracy a form of criticism." Craig Baldwin's subversive dada-cumentary explores the gray area that is intellectual property. It comes down to distribution. We live in a media environment of one-way corporate information bombardment, a media barrage. Capitalism plus art equals ownership, commoditization, consumption, hot and cold running culture. Some folks aren't happy with being passive consumer-receivers and instead seek to jam, subvert, slice and dice this monoculture, seeing plagiarism as an industrial process, recombining and retransmitting new memes to contaminate the corporate mainstreams. Collage, musique concrete, sampling, dada, cut-up, mash-up, xeroxing, 'zines, photomontage, Situationism, detournment, plunderphonics, culture jamming change the media flow into a two-way thing and bring the overwrought phrase "interactive media" to life. "Everyone has access to capturing devices now, audio, video, all sorts of things where you can, at home, as an individual, grab culture out of the airwaves and do what you want with it...that gives us a folk culture where things evolve by stealing from other things." Negativland, Adbusters, the Copyright Violation Squad, Emergency Broadcast Network, the Tape-Beatles, the Barbie Liberation Organization are revealed to be televisionaries, media archeologists who sift through the detritus of postmodern consumer culture in order to hold up an anthropologically strange mirror, interrupt the ceaseless flow of propaganda, and jar some sense back into our numbed and dumbed lives. Their medium is our masseur. "One of the prices of being out there in the public is being rearranged and reorganized." Rude people yank back the curtain and show us that the letter U and the numeral 2 cannot be copyrighted. "In modern terms, appropriation is often about culture jamming: capturing the corporately controlled subjects of the one-way media barrage, reorganizing them to be a comment on themselves, and spitting them back into the barrage for cultural consideration. Our very process of cultural evolution is now so straitjacketed by opportunistic claims of ownership that it amounts to censorship." If all artists borrow and the best artists steal, then what becomes of art when all ideas are proprietary? Are you pro-bono or pro-paganda? Check out this film---maybe you too will realize that a billboard is your canvas and not just their advert.

Beyond Sonic.......2005-09-04

If you found this DVD film based on any kind of artist or genre search, congratulations! Go ahead and buy it. Most of these groups are somewhat well represented in the audio world but given these are self proclaimed 'culture jammers' who are dealing with multimedia as part of their art, then the 'picture' is more complete in this presentation. The director himself is obviously 'cut' from the same subversive cloth and, without disrupting the narrative of narrative disrupted, massages the medium appropriate to the subject being discussed. Highly recommended for fans and the curious/adventurous alike.

DVD:

DVD

DVD

DVD

Hard Cash

Family Guy, Vol. 2: Season 3

Killers/The Killers [Special Edition] [2 Discs] [1947] (REGI

DVD: Needful Things

32 Songs From Ireland - Irish Musical Journey