We will be posting all the video of our panels on the web, and some of our partners such as Bittorrent have also offered to help us distribute this. We are also considering some ways that we can make our video programs available. I know there was tremendous interest in having those available for people to peruse and view. We will at minimum have links to the work up on the web site once we get that sorted, but we are also considering other modes of distribution, including taking the show on the road in some form. If you have any ideas of interest along these lines I would welcome an email or a comment here. I thought our committee, curators, panelists, and workshop leaders did a spectacular job, and the vibe I got from everyone who attended made me believe that others felt the same. I would welcome any and all feedback over email, here on the blog, or on our web forum. We’d particularly be interested in aggregating any blog posts, photos, etc. that you may have created in association with this event.

A special thank you goes to Daniel Liss of kicktothehead, who’s mantra “Shut Up and Make Something” was the title for Ryanne’s program, and became a kind of inspirational tag line for our event.

Deep grateful-ness goes to Charlene Boehne and Mariko Oda who provided the leadership on all the organizational dimensions of the event, with the help of program coordinator Sarah Scott. Our video editor Erik Saks, with the help of Gabriel Peters-Lazarro and Francois Maurin, our web creator Rebecca Malamud, and the IML staff with the help of Jennifer Kekumu were more than wonderful and amazing in producing and running this event — even to the extent that I was able to actually enjoy the event and spend time connecting with people. No small achievement! You can see the full list of staff, supporters, and special friends at our web site.

Angela starts out, appropriately, by showing a toe-tapping video about revver. Notes that Revver shares revenue. Revver focused on producing web shows from the start.

Dean — nonprofit developer with open source platform — Miro, supported by foundations. About 3500 channels — like a combo of a DVR and RSS. Small team of moderators filters out porn and outright copyright violations. “As tv moves on, it can be in a closed fashion, or it can be as open as possible. We have blip.tv, revver, youtube, yahoo — you can add websites as guides. We’re trying to create an open ecosystem that makes patchwork quilt of video on the Internet available through easy interface. You can search and subscribe to, for example, George Bush mashups.” Check it out at getmiro.com.

Marc Davis — I’ve been waiting 20 years for 2008, in which production of video is a daily thing around the planet, in which people create as well as consume. Revolution now happening is that the device you carry with you all the time. Put platforms in place that captures in place that what happens when you make media — place, time, descriptions. Thousands of people are uploading — 63,000 geotagged photos in LA. Tagmaps: Web 2.0 meets DIY Completely automated collective construction of what matters in the world and sharing it. Making it possible for all of us to tell the story of the world together. Building and making accessible collective archive of human activity, and doing it at the point your device is making the media and sharing it with the rest of the planet.

Joi Ito — no single platform. Innovation happens at the edge and startups. Yahoo is a great platform. A lot of people break the law not because they want to, but because they don’t know what is freely available and usable and what is not. Automating access to usable material is essential. Right now it is difficult to attribute Creative Commons licensed material — it ought to be uploaded from your camera phone (building on Marc Davis). Norms are important — although you are allowed to do something, legally, it might be nice to add attribution. While it’s OK to do political satire, maybe it’s not nice to show people in a demeaning way. The normative stuff — what is OK to do, and in what country what is OK –is something we need to have a conversation about.

Dean — both important and inevitable that there be multiple platforms. We are working on ways for people to advertise over their RSS feeds. We don’t think it should be required of everyone, but adding the option is important.

The conference panels on Friday and the panel-style workshops on Sunday will be streamed live at:
http://iml.usc.edu/diy/stream. Quicktime needed.

On Friday, there will also be a Second Life feed:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/IML/60/128/52 starting at 9:30AM (SLT)

We have set up a web forum for the event for logistical information, organizing bird of a feather meetings, feedback, followups, and just general discussion. You can find it here: http://iml.usc.edu/diy/

We will have an irc channel set up on site for the backchannel lovers among you. #video247 at freenode.net.

Or if you prefer Twitter, hashtag #video247. You can post here if you want to connect with other 24/7 Twitterers: http://iml.usc.edu/diy/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4

The tag we will be using for this event is “video247.” Please use this for your blogs, video, and photos that you upload so it is easy to find and aggregate. And please post any content you have created about the event to the forum so others can find out about it — blogs, vlogs, photos! http://iml.usc.edu/diy/viewforum.php?f=7

Over a year of planning and organizing has resulted in what I think is a fabulous program. Big thanks goes to our curators who have put together the video programs, and our panel organizers. Special thanks to Charlene, Mariko, and Becky and Chris for all their work in getting the web and PR materials together. It is super exciting to finally be able to officially announce the event and start to welcome attendees.

Spaces will fill up quickly for the academic program and the workshops. The hands-on workshops, where you can get practical tips on DIY video making and distribution have a very limited number of slots, so please register early if you are interested in those.

The video screenings are all free and open to the public, so for those, you just need to show up at the event.

This event has really shaped up to be something well beyond my wildest expectations. It has been hugely challenging but rewarding to coordinate a very diverse group of curators, speakers, workshop leaders, and industry participants to get together for this. It’s very important to us that word gets out to a wide range of people who have a stake in DIY, Internet and viral video, so please help us spread the word. This is meant to be an occasion for people to have conversations across the boundaries that usually separate different creative communities, technology developers, policy makers, and academics.

Registration information is here.

We still have some work to do in finalizing parts of the program and the site but it definitely feels good to have the new web site up!

-Fred Seibert, founder of channelfrederator.com
-Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab from acceptable.tv
-Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine from askaninja.com
-Jon Phillips from creativecommons.org

Tickets on sale now.

Schedule of Events and Screenings

More about Pixelodeon

Pixelodeon is an annual independent video festival recognizing innovation, inspiration, and community in global online video. This is our inaugural year! Over 300 videos, four keynote speakers, two dozen curators, and several hundred people interested in independent media will get together in one weekend to celebrate the diversity and talent of online video content. If you want to see what’s happening online and meet the people who are making it happen, this is the place to be.

European cathedral builders in the Americas left blank spaces around the specified iconography of the churches’ facades, and encouraged native craftsmen to fill it in with references to their own culture, such as this cherub with a feather headdress and tropical fruit:

In regard to mobile telephones, the covers and attachments that people in many parts of the world use to personalize their phones are an example of technological baroque infiltration:

This boatman creolizes his appropriation of the mobile phone, which he rents out to passengers, by building a traditional phone booth on his boat:

Another example of creolization that Bar discussed was the use of Internet kiosks by small farmers and agricultural commodity traders in Africa to set up accounts and arrange for current market prices to be sent to their phones as SMS messages:

In a paper to be presented in Buenos Aires next week at “Seminario sobre Desarrollo Económico, Desarrollo Social y Comunicaciones Móviles en América Latina,”, Bar and his co-authors Pisani and Weber say this of cannibalistic appropriation and their observations of this mode in the field:

This third form of appropriation is the most extreme in the sense that it corresponds to practices where the user chooses to engage in direct conflict with the suppliers of the technology (or at least with the power relation as embodied in the technology.) Cannibalism includes modifications of the device that place the user in direct opposition with the providers’ business model, destruction of the device. Their goal is to destroy, subvert, defeat the device or service as offered. They represent a direct and explicit confrontation with the provider. We should acknowledge from the start that we found fewer examples for this last appropriation mode than we did for the two previous ones. This was to be expected since these kinds of practices have obviously not been encouraged by those in control of the technology. Yet, we do identify a number of examples that fit here.

In a first category are cases where users hack the technology itself in ways that are meant to defeat the provider’s control and come in direct conflict with the provider’s interests.

Examples include the installation of applications that would deprive the carrier of revenues. On the milder side, an illustration of that kind of cannibalism can be found in the current tussle over the conditions under which end users might be able to install skype on mobile devices, thus appropriating the hardware for a purpose diametrically antagonistic to the purposes of the carrier (Anderson, 2007). Increasingly more antagonistic cannibalism practices include phone unlocking (to defeat the contractual restrictions associated to device subsidies), and phone cloning (to redirect all charges to another, unsuspected device). One of the more extreme is the rebuilding of cellphones into detonators that let terrorists trigger explosions from a distance with a simple phone call.

“In recent years, mobile phone penetration has increased dramatically throughout Latin America,” Bar noted, adding, “But rising penetration numbers only tell part of the story. To fully grasp the social, economic and political impact of mobile telephony, we need to understand appropriation: the process through which mobile phone users go beyond mere adoption to make the technology their own and to embed it within their social, economic, and political practices. The appropriation process fundamentally is a negotiation about power and control over the configuration of the technology, its uses, and the distribution of its benefits. Within the Latin American context, today’s negotiation surrounding mobile technological appropriation echoes earlier creative tensions about the appropriation of cultural objects, people, and ideas from abroad.”

Before introducing his research on mobile phone practices in Brazil, Bar noted that the arrival of Bishop Sardinha from Portugal in 1556 could be seen as the founding event of Brazilian culture as an appropriative culture — Sardinha was shipwrecked on the Brazilian coast. The locals, impressed with the Bishop’s power, appropriated it by eating him. In 1928, Bar added, the Manifesto Antrofago claimed that these cannibals were the real founders of Brazil, calling upon Brazilians to appropriate from many cultures to grow their own.

In the 1960s, Caetano Veloso and Gilbert Gil led the tropicalismo movement, a globally appropriative cultural and political wave that was repressed by subsequent regimes, but resprouted in the 21st century when Gil, now Brazil’s Minister of Culture, founded the Cultura Viva movement of taking from abroad, remixing, adding Brazilian flavors, and making something new — a cultural stance that is powerfully augmented by DIY media production and distribution tools.

With this context in mind, Bar talked about the ways “innovation becomes embedded over a technology evolution cycle” that begins with adoption, moves to appropriation, which in turn leads to a reconfiguration of the technology. For example, the economically poorest users of mobile phones in Africa succeeded in creating a kind of mobile funds transfer system that large corporations in Asia and Scandinavia had been struggling to do. Because the most affordable way to use a mobile phone in Africa is to buy prepaid minutes, users have figured out that they can send each other the recharge codes they receive for prepaid minutes, substituting for small amounts of cash. If your recipient doesn’t own a phone, you can send it to a local public telephone service in which an entrepreneur rents out minutes on a mobile phone, and the entrepreneur will pay your friend. The re-appropriation/reconfiguration part of the innovation cycle began when mobile operators set up systems like Sambaza and Wizzit.

(To be continued…)

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