Ethnography TV Canada media critical theory news Holland Wilde production montage Surrealism
Cultural Farming’s website was originally launched in 2004 (3rd iteration Feb. 2009). It is part media silo-and-distillery, part experimental video construction lab, part pedagogic mechanism for civic response, and part critical playground. Its longitudinal vantages plus a sense of urgency and purpose to better examine the potencies of TV/media production practice combine to make Cultural Farming a unique repository. It literally grows daily and offers hundreds of hours of media content for discussion. In other words, 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, to a kind of self-sufficient mediaturg-pamphleteer. It is my specific response to glaring gaps within the generalizations of existing media critique.
my+story+history = mystory (mystery).
Or, in fancier terms: Cultural Farming is media appropriation and remix as auto ethnographic surrealism, 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 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 metaphor for an action event.... it signifies gathering TV/media seeds, planting for personal media empowerment, growing critical media cognition for a participatory democracy. 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. Weed-out mediamonger manipulation by critically renegotiating TV’s grammars. Help harvest diverse forms of critical media discourse to enrich social fecundity and intelligibility.
You too should be a Cultural Farmer. Indeed, different, critical kinds of media must now be made by citizens, for citizens, in forms of civic response to today’s reckless TV/media production practices. Cultural Farming -- as ‘victory garden’-- is simply another step in this responsibility by cultivating nutritional methods for survival in a mediated world. Simply put: Produce your own healthy ecology
by redeeming everyday junk-food-media... because our brains eat what our bodies consume.
advertising aggregation animals anthropology audio aurality automobiles A/V blackness body bricolage camera capitalism cartoons celebrity childhood children citizen journalism communication contextualization copyright design deviance digital reality earth ecology editing editorial education embodiment erotic ethics ethnography evangelism fear feminism fetish fiction food gaming guns heredity images identity information journalism kino language laughter liminality mediamonger millitary money music narcissism nature news obscene observation oil panopticon parody persuasion philosophy phones photo-journalism politics pornography production promotion queer racism reality reflexivity remix religion revisualization seduction self-esteem surrealism scopophilia screens security self-representation social media sports subliminal surveillance technique television typage violence virtual war weather
An American, living
in Canada, now spending his life experimenting with new forms of critical media ethnography.
PeepTV.ca
It is one thing to farm using cultural practices. It is quite another attempting to critically farm culture itself.
When considering media, Cultural Farming is a metaphor for an action event.
It signifies gathering TV/media seeds, planting for personal media empowerment, growing critical media cognition for a participatory democracy.
Our world is an unhealthy garden of unending manufactured images. Too much is cultivated inhumanely and unfit for human consumption.
Harvesting new proficiencies in tele-visual literacy is vital to healthy global sustenance.
Help weed-out mediamonger manipulation by critically renegotiating TV’s grammars, practices and techniques.
Help harvest diverse forms of critical media discourse to enrich social fecundity and intelligibility.
Be a Cultural Farmer.
All TV/media content communicates messages, but less understood
are how media production practices equally communicate. Cultural
Farming is a collection of television ethnography websites built upon
simple, camera-less, techniques of appropriation and remix. These
projects are my on-going performances of public mediaturgy. Each is
a critical examination of common media practice and presentation
...because it matters how we produce and perform our communication,
...because production is always the first step in media meaning-making.
The purpose here is to provoke possibilities for critical response in a mediated world and most importantly to foment deeper public discourse about how media-makers tell our socio-cultural stories to us. In short, common TV/media practices can only tell certain kinds of stories and only in certain kinds of ways. This is a massive communicational dilemma in a multi-dimensional-media-world. And so, how we respond through our media to those communicating to us can help to inform all media production. Let’s respond to “media” by critically refunctioning its language and technique. Let’s retell media’s unreflexive stories back to their makers and challenge their anonymous cultural production.
2004 - 2011
