Mashup Image from Facebook (*Note the black bars through the eyes were my own addition)
“Mashups combine views, data, and logic from existing Web sites or applications to create novel applications that focus on situational and ephemeral problems.”
This statement from Maximilien, Ranabahu & Gomadam (2008: 32) in IEEE Internet Computing refers to an open and programmable Web 2.0 where programmers, designers and architects work in relation to one another to develop fluid data-mediation, process mediation and user interface customization solutions.
But there is another world of audio, video and even these visual mashups which proliferate on Facebook: collages which rework representations and expected meanings. With ‘Wilderness Downtown‘, the band Arcade Fire shows what can be done in an interactive digital mapping mashup. This notion of the mashup draws on 1960s US countercultural interventions of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman to rework politics and gain attention in the context of 60s mass media. Mashups were part of a tactic of political and media pranksterism.
Youth engaged in Social Networking Sites (SNS) are acutely aware of visible signs of age and grade of their peers. I entered as traveler in a foreign land, the land of high school youth aged 14 to 18. As part of a project on community building and neo-liberal economics in the Global North, I worked with high school students on a photography project picturing place, home and community in Fort McMurray Alberta Canada: ‘Where is Fort McMurray‘. Organizing the project and communicating through Facebook, the usual stuff came up: pictures of their cats, their friends and their family trips to typical vacation spots from this northern oil city. Then I came across the mashup above – a kind of calling card image – and stopped in my tracks. How did they make it? Where did it come from? Shock and awe to say the least.
Picnik.com offers web-browser based image editing (in fact Flickr.com has links throughout its own user interface that encourage image editing through this now popular website). ‘Of course’ it is so simple, as I tried to master software the ‘youth of today’ are employing. Judging from my own experience, if it isn’t borrowed, it is probably stolen or better yet, free! And it is free just head over to picnik.com I was told.
The questions for me are about communication and culture. What are image/text/design compositions like this conveying as attempt to shock and awe viewers, ‘friends’ on Facebook? One student suggested that, a program like picnik.com is used ‘to make images look better.’ Agreed, pushing the contrast or the saturation on most digital images will yield a more striking and/or clearly focused image. But this is something else entirely. These compositions have the look and flavor of youth culture from another land: wild colors and cartoon characters emphasizing cuteness with no regard for western compositional aesthetic guidelines. There may also be a betrayal of memory, and this may well be the case since others like Livingstone have noted in the academic literature that youth may actively engage in the process of ‘updating’ their profiles on a daily basis, erasing traces of the past. I also consider Bauman’s Liquid Arts towards the new and destined for disposal a poignant reminder.
Composition, like a piece of music or a painting, takes time. This current digital mode of crafting is no different as a means of work and labor for creation. Mashed-up communication are working in relation to one another as a new kind of dialogue and one that you or I may very well lack the literacy to comprehend. We may be able to analyze the artistic merit or the component pieces of the composition and even the spelling and grammar, but those elements cannot be read as a matter of finite course. Instead these seemingly disparate elements have been fused, remixed and mashed to create a new form of age and perhaps geo-socially specific dialogue.
These are ways of representing oneself to others and also ways of representing one’s world – in these examples, mashups are ways of representing towns and cities where one grew up as part of meaning-making coming to terms with them. In the process mashups, not new wave video, are establishing the next generations’ understanding of what cities are.
-Andriko Lozowy with Rob Shields