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Cultural Farming* website was originally launched in 2004 (3rd iteration Feb. 2009). It continues to grow daily and offers hundreds of hours of media content for discussion. Simply put, Cultural Farming is a wide-ranging record of my personal and intellectual walkabout from industrial media-horticulturalist, to nomadic remix-hunter-gatherer, to radical home-vidi-gardener:

my+story+history = mystory (mystery).

In fancier terms: Cultural Farming is media (remix) appropriation as

(auto) ethnography, (surreal) performance, and (critical) documentation.

* While some may argue that Cultural Farming is for mature audiences only,

I argue the opposite, particularly since most all content was remixed using actual video ripped directly from North American basic broadcast television. These projects do not further problematize censorship/citizenship issues, indeed they may be small solutions to them. And, if your objection is copyright, I suggest you read this: Fair Use or This.

Cultural Farming is a FREE-access, NO-advertising, NO-copyright site.

It is for folks who think best when words are mixed amongst the pictures.

It is for farmers who most appreciate the simple fruit of their own hard labor.

It is for citizens who understand that full and free access to the spectrum

is both a right and a privilege.

...so when you’re done looking around here, go plant your own media content.

Cultural Farming is a collection of media ethnography websites

intended as on-going, public, experimental research. Their purpose

is not only to illustrate possibilities for citizen empowerment in a

mediated world, but importantly to foment media discourse. My medium

- TV/video with its images - communicates meanings; but what meanings are communicated? And how might we respond through media to those communicating to us? Let’s tell stories with their content.

Cultural Farming is a metaphor for an action event.... it signifies gathering media seeds; planting for personal media empowerment; growing critical media cognition for a participatory democracy. Indeed, our world is an unhealthy garden of endlessly-streaming manufactured images; too much is cultivated inhumanely and unfit for human consumption. And so, harvesting new proficiencies in tele-visual literacy is vital sustenance. Help weed-out mediamonger manipulation by critically re-negotiating TV’s languages and techniques. Harvest diverse forms of critical media discourse to enrich social fecundity.

You too can be a Cultural Farmer. More media must be made by citizens, for citizens, about citizens. Cultural Farming - as ‘victory garden’ - is simply another step in civic responsibility by cultivating nutritional media methods for survival in a mediated world. Grow your own, because your brain eats what your eyes see...