Scratch Video
by Hart Snider (via artengine)
Scratch video marries hip hop-style audio sampling with guerrilla television-style video sampling. The results can range from the Emergency Broadcast Network's cut-up of a George Bush speech until he admitted "We Will Rock You" to an entire performance created by sampling one rented video and transforming it into synched music and visuals.
Looking for samples changes people's relationship with the media; watching TV with finger ready to press record heightens the level of interactivity. For an audience, watching a sample may trigger a memory or association. Recognizing specific content isn't necessary, because even a quick flash of an image can communicate a genre like investigative reporting or kung-fu movies.
Sampling violates the copyright companies own of images and sounds. The consolidation of entertainment companies is creating monopoly ownership of entertainment properties. One example is Sony, who are not only content producers (owning valuable properties in music, film and television), but also sells people the tools they are using to watch and listen to Sony content (such as VCRs or CD players). Sony even sells blank CDs, VHS tapes, and other blank recording media. Using only products bought from one company, consumers can infringe on properties owned by that same company, and break the law.
Gareth Branwyn addresses the issues of sampling in his book Jamming the Media: Appropriation. Recuperation. Plagiarism. Copying. Cutting. Pasting. Sampling. These could very well be the mantras of our age. The coupling of cheap, ubiquitous media technologies with the ability to sample the world around us has had a Promethean effect on our art, culture, and legal system. Sounds, images, text, and everything else have become stored bits of light that can be endlessly replicated, morphed, and mutated. This development has called into question old notions of properties, theft, place, and the ownership of ideas....
Is it theft, in the traditional sense of the word, when you're only peeling off a copy and not disturbing the original? Is it plagiarism when you use sounds, images and text from the mediascape as source material in your artwork? When does the original work dissolve into something that no longer maintains its originality?" (Branwyn 19-20)