Video as community activism in ethnomusicology

Stories:

• 1992 video course, and video in Egypt
• bought first camera - sony hi8 machine. Expensive. Tapes fragile, hard to backup.
• instructor: hi8 not "broadcast quality". Linear editing machines (e.g. Avid) were very expensive and degraded quality through copying.
• Egypt: fear of censure or even persecution - from either religious or state
• bought ordinary Egyptian bag to hide camera!
• didn't use it for several years, until documenting Yasin
• was highly unusual - most people made audio recordings with playback equipment (boomboxes)
• later became more common at lailas
• Yasin contracted with videographers to record and distribute his work, and later banned competitors
• Finally established his own company Ibn al-Fared and has issued 100s of DVD recordings
• Meanwhile everyone who had recorded with boomboxes now held up cell phones! (AZA, 200x)

Role of video in ethnomusicology/ethnography has changed drastically over the past two decades. Video is a powerful and flexible medium of great potential to transform.

Technological-economic factors have enabled broader role for video in ethnomusicology (whereas it was marginal now it's central) while greatly expanding its activist potential.

Theories:

Activism: transform knowledge (awareness:consciousness) / attitudes / practices[behaviors] / social-semantic networks [society-culture] in order to reduce global inequality [caused by untrammeled freedom], and guarantee minima ("human rights", including minimal freedoms). Human rights (from French LEF to UN Declaration provide general frame: need to address the GAP). Global Human Development: moving beyond techno-economic to address real injustices and inequalities, sub-minimal standards. Not "social justice" (tends to be quantified) but "human justice" (which frames things in human terms, qualitatively).

How? Adaptation (feedback loops: pos and neg) in production or cycle of collaborative production, drawing on music's emotional power to develop social-cultural power, to empower the marginalized. Ideas and media are very powerful!

• In the culture as a whole
• In the SN of PAR collaboration

Ultimately: inequality stems from system > LW. Need to reverse this: LW > system. Inequality results from a system that deploys people in very different ways. The system can never be eliminated, but it must be pushed back. Right wing fears big government; left wing fears big corporations - both oppose individual relationships because they want to mediate them all. It is not to champion the individual over the group, but rather the LW network over the system network. By linking radically different nodes in a human way (through PAR) one undermines the system that wants to keep the separated.

Global or World music means: music that transcends boundaries, and which causes boundaries to be transcended, thus reducing inequality.

Video: techno/economic advances

• Cost of software/equipment has decreased
• Quality has increased
• Size has decreased
• Digital video enables infinite copies, infinite editing
• Non-linear editing enables a more improvisational process, adaptation to audience
• Normalization via proliferation in the field
• Rapid dissemination from online platforms
• Possibility of editing using vast tagged databases of archival recordings, popular or specialized (youtube to Evia) - especially strong in music

Key

• Video projects are complex and benefit from collaborations - what is key is to maintain equality, or to empower the disempowered. Make the project a microcosm of the aim.
• PAR collaboration - egalitarian, for (a) ethics, (b) pragmatics. Inclusively crosses all possible lines: academia/non, center/margins, 1st/3rd worlds, wealth/poverty, insider/outsider... The PAR process should itself embody the very values the video project is projecting: to overcome inequalities, guarantee minima.
• The PAR network and cycle is key agent of transformative power, but also becomes object of that power, as it is empowered.
• Move beyond ordinary paradigms of boundary crossing (that still respect the boundaries) to neutralize them. [Global > international].
• Collaborative video that empowers and transforms through connections
• Double agenda: Local transformation and Global transformation
• Musical video for affective power developed through feedback (a single video, or in a PAR cycle)
• Always available, even if low-fi: goal of activism is not hi-fi, which has been used to exclude (diy movement)
• Respectful but not deferential. Esp: Necessity to resist academic norms (conventional formats and rewarded types), which tend to neuter critical edge
• Molten video: never need take on a final form. Continual improvisation.
• Critical video: unflinching - does not avert gaze: Image is so powerful.
• Moves beyond academia and its deference to conventions as product-orientation, in favor of a continually disruptive, subversive action-orientation
• Process is as important as product in the PAR cycle
• Rapid process: shooting/assembling/editing/disseminating
• Remains difficult:
  • Accessing conventional media distribution channels
  • Assessment and evaluation of impact

Examples of PAR collaborative, critical networks that transcend

• SNAR: network of academics and artists.
  • Opened to SAMR and FB group.
  • Use of YouTube archive as curated by FB group
  • crossing academic/non-academic social boundaries
  • pushing academics to do things that are not normally sanctioned (low-fi archive-based editing/collaging)
• Liberians: network linking radically different positions. Empowerment of the marginalized
  • Buduburam project and Shadow
  • Sanitation
  • My role primarily as idea person, post-production
  • Perfect opportunity to empower the local - as Liberians, as artists.
  • More ethical, pragmatic.

Ethnomusicological video becomes activist with the expansion of goals (socially and ideationally transformative, beyond "knowledge accumulation"), roles (inclusive, beyond trained ethnomusicologists), and habits of academic production (collaborative and egalitarian, beyond the solitary and hierarchical habits of most humanists).

MUSIC as subject or gateway to such Transformative, Inclusive, Collaborative Video:

PAR method: define a community of interest, then strive for openness and collaboration within it.

Result: emergence of new social/semantic networks of connection and awareness

1. Goals: video is used to effect substantive CHANGE
   1. ... materially, on the "local" ground of video representation
   2. ... in awareness about it, locally and globally
2. Roles: video production reaches out to include more people...
   1. ... non-academic artists and intellectuals
   2. ... on the ground of video representation
3. Habits of academic production: work becomes more collaborative and (can become) more egalitarian, thus effecting a collective change in consciousness, locally and beyond, and connecting the two.

PAR -> forging new social networks. The video process is as important as the product. "Molten" video in digital form.

Exx: of Transformative, Inclusive, Collaborative Video

• Shadow video: aim to raise awareness (e.g. Banff)
• Sanitation video & documentary
• SNAR video: connect likeminded activists among ethnomusicologists and artists

Examples:

Shadow and music in the Buduburam Liberian refugee camp of Ghana https://vimeo.com/20009721

Sanitation with titles http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmCk4WHPfSU&feature=youtu.be

Sanitation documentary http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eDal4NaYbw&feature=youtu.be

Songs of the new Arab revolutions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u4v7R9yF0o&feature=youtu.be

Marjorie Doyle - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNU-UQj22w0&feature=youtu.be