Aram Sinnreich succinctly astonished those who attended the DIY Media seminar at the Annenberg Center for Communication on March 22. The two mandalic powerpoint slides above were fractal crystallizations of his thesis in progress. In a little more than fifteen minutes, Sinnreich deployed an array of theoretical and empirical tools in pursuit of an issue first posed by Plato when he claimed “Musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State, and ought to be prohibited….When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.” (On the same slide, Sinnreich quoted The Lord Mayor from Yellow Submarine right below Plato: “The Meanies captured everything that maketh music.”)

Sinnreich is a graduate fellow and the co-founder and managing partner of Radar Research, a Los Angeles-based media and technology consultancy. He is also a Doctoral Fellow and Lecturer at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication. His thesis involves extensive interviews; analysis of that material is still in progress. The theoretical foundation Sinnreich swiftly sketched, however, added more dimensions to what we’ve heard from Henry Jenkins and others about a culture in which everyone has the tools to create music and other cultural content, and access to the Web as a global distribution medium. What does it mean, in terms of power, institutions, regulation, resistance, that people can sample, remix and distribute bits peer to peer? Sinnreich uses Plato’s ancient claim as a lens for looking at the sites of regulation and resistance to contemporary changes in music. And Sinnreich switched to other lenses, from cognitive psychology to social network analysis to show how “levels of meaning emerge from levels of meaning. We are all filters for cultural information,” and our biological, psychological, social systems change the meaning of cultural products like music when we experience them. Music, in this context, Sinnreich claims, is “cognitive-affective capital.”

Again looking back in order to look forward, Sinnreich mentioned the “Follies of 1830,” when Hector Berlioz claimed Beethoven to be a genius, while most others dismissed romanticism. By the time Berlioz wrote his memoirs, his view of Beethoven was prevalent. And around that time, according to Simmreich, “the modern framework, based on six binaries” came to dominate thinking about cultural production:

Art versus craft (one is high and rare, the other vulgar and common), artist versus audience (the one gifted creator and the many who can only listen), the original (of great value) versus the copy (of little value), performance versus composition, figure versus ground, material versus tools (”and associated concepts such as genius, uniqueness, aura, intellectual property, etc.”) constitute the modern framework These binaries that are widely understood are concrete examples of what Sinnreich is getting at when he says “the ontological framework supports and is supported by social institutions.”

“But sometimes, social or environmental change can undermine a framework’s foundations. Enter configurability, ” emergently. “For the first time, communication is instantaneous, global, multisenory, archival, hackable, editable, networked, interoperable, and customizable.” Configurability is more than remix culture, which is only an early manifestation of a larger change, “not continuous with traditional practices, not limited to media and communication, not simply democratizing production or increasing consumer choice.” Like Berlioz, who perceived the musical cosmos in a new way because of Beethoven, and his generation of musicians who came to dominate European musical culture, Sinnreich points out that “today’s generations are steeped in configurable cultural practices.”

“Was Plato right? Yes.” But exactly how, in what way, and how much? That’s where the empirical research in progress comes in. Sinnreich’s research, comprising more than 60 hours of interviews with sample-based musicians, music industry executives, and intellectual property attorneys is probing the dimensions of these changes by asking each of these actors where they draw the line between the old binaries and whether these binaries even exist any more.

Are much bigger changes afoot, beyond the conflicts over file-sharing and sampling? Sinnreich joins Taplin, Richmond, and Rheingold in pointing out how today’s weak signals might foreshadow broader change.

For those of you who have been hanging around this blog and the Annenberg Center at USC, you probably know that a group of us have been working on planning a festival of DIY video. This has been in the works ever since we finished the Networked Publics event last spring, and we are finally at the point where it is starting to take shape and we’d like to officially announce that it is happening.

We are calling the event “24/7: A DIY Video Summit” and it will take place in Los Angeles on February 8-10, 2008. (Thanks to Anne Bray for the coming up with the name!) The goal of the event is to showcase and celebrate the very best in DIY, amateur, and non-commercial Internet video. We will be looking across a wide variety of existing video communities and genres, including independent video, political remix, machinima, anime music videos, live action vidding, youth media, video blogging, grassroots/amateur news and documentary. In addition to the screening of video works, we will also hold workshops and have an academic program.

Our motivation for planning this event is to bring together the wide variety of communities that have a stake in the evolution of Internet video. We are at a pivotal moment where we are seeing an explosion of new forms of video expression online that is disrupting existing models for media communication. Technology infrastructures, legal standards, and creative genres are very much up for grabs. We want to convene an event which will foster conversations across different creative communities, technology developers and service providers, academics, and policy makers. Our goal is to serve the interests of the broader Internet video community, but more specifically to support the public interest and noncommercial video production that is happening at a grassroots level.

The amount of interest and enthusiasm that I’ve received from people in the creative, academic, and industry communities has been overwhelming. Clearly this is an idea who’s time has come, and I am super excited to be working on this together with a fabulous team of organizers and curators. I’ll be co-chairing the event together with Adrienne Russell, and working with the conference committee and advisors which includes Steve Anderson, Wally Baer, Anne Bray, Charlene Boehne, Mariko Oda, Howard Rheingold, Aram Sinnreich, and Jennifer Urban, We have a group of rockstar video creators for this year’s inaugural curatorial committee: Mindy Faber (youth media), Ryanne Hodson (vlogging), Paul Marino (machinima), Jonathan McIntosh (political remix), Tim Park (AMVs) Eric Saks (arts/independent video), Laura Shapiro (vidding), Jon Stout (documentary).

The official conference site is still under construction, but is here. We have also launched a live journal community to discuss related topics. Over the next year, we will be working on curating our video program, setting up a “challenge” for soliciting new video works, finding industry partners and sponsors, and planning workshops and an academic program. We’ll continue to use this blog to post updates on how things are going with the planning.

A big thank you goes to the Annenberg Center which has provided the seed funding for this event and the current seminar series, and supported the Network Publics event last year which was the precursor to this current effort.

We welcome feedback and suggestions from the diverse communities involved in DIY and Internet video as we move forward with the planning for this event.

At today’s ACC DIY seminar Jon Taplin compellingly outlined how DIY ethics and technologies are part of the driving force behind California’s bold move away from the broken federal system and toward a decentralized state-based system.

In “The Bear Flag Revolution; California’s Experiment in the New Federalism” he writes:

I believe that this coming age of reform will bring about a positive transformation of American society as we grapple with the meaning of “the end of scarcity”.The old guard of the defense and extraction Industrialists who have done so well with two of their own running the country (Bush-Oil; Cheney-Defense contracts) will work extremely hard to hold on to power and they have a commanding old style media megaphone run by interested parties to put out their story (the war is going well, the economy is great, etc.). But the Industrialist model of Big Media is failing in the age of the Internet and so the voices of digital democracy will be heard. The task is to redefine the notion of national security and purpose around two basic principles. The first is that in the networked society, U.S. influence will flow from our global economic and cultural power as opposed to our military power. The second is that as the sources of leadership innovation and change in this new world come from decentralized, networked, bottom-up forces of the Digitalists, the American political structure will have to adapt to a devolutionary notion of power. States and Cities will become the important sources of leadership and the Federal Government will start shrinking.

You can read the whole paper here and view the slides from his talk here.