Video Scratching

Video Scratching is a video editing technique where an artist cuts up video from various sources and edits them togething into a rythmic sequence, sometimes adding a beat and instrumentals to the audio.

Years ago I had a VHS tape of a group called Emergency Broadcast Netowork (EBN) who pretty much pioneered the art of video scratching. I don’t know what happened to that tape, but luckily nearly all the videos are available on YouTube.

They gained the most notoriety for a video they did of George Bush Senior performing the Queen song We Will Rock You.

One of my favorites is this track, titled Get Down.

A recent favorite video scratch of mine is Aaron Valdez’s Big Screen Version:

A YouTube user by the name of Rx2008 has been posting some wonderful, fresh video scratches. Here are a few:

GW Bush covers REM’s End of the World:

Tony Blair covers The Clash’s Should I Stay or Should I Go:

Bush and friends cover John Lennon’s Imagine:

Culture Jamming on the Internet- Part I

The origin of the term ‘culture jamming’ is credited to the band Negativeland, but the philosphy and aims of culture jamming go back (at least) to the 1960s with the pranks of Abbie Hoffman, Joey Skaggs and others.

Wikipedia lists the aims of culture jamming:

• To create a contrast between corporate or mass media images and the realities or perceived negative side of the corporation or media. This is done symbolically, with the “detournement” of pop iconography.
• To renew civic engagement and social connectedness through shared radical ideas.
• To reawaken a sense of wonder and fascination about one’s surrounding environment, inspired by the frequent intentional ambiguity of a specific culture jamming technique, which stimulates personal interpretation and independent thinking.

An excerpt from Negativeland’s radio broadcast, Over the Edge, sheds more light on what is meant by culture jamming:

“The cultural jammer works his secret in public, the skillfully reworked billboard with new lettering painted in the same style that the original has, turning strategic corporate elements back on themselves in a manner which is itself, invisible, directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy in the context of a thoughtful reaction. The studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large, his tools are paid for by others, an art with real risk. You people still painting out there – all you crazy stonecutters: Would you go to jail for your art? Well?!”

For part I I’m going to focus on some of the more well known culture jammers on the internet.