The video remix space

The ‘video remix space’ (VRS) explores the creative and educational potential, challenges, limitations and benefits of repurposing open online video content. The VRS is a proposed project only no funding to date.

The VRS aims to create a new accessible creative educational community for artists, teachers and students of all levels and across a range of disciplines. Participants from professional to novice will learn as part of a community how to create, share and repurpose online video content into new experimental ‘found footage’ narratives.

The VRS project will use bespoke search tools and a simplified editing platform to access quality open video archives. The project aims to raise awareness of the contemporary debate, obstacles and barriers surrounding rich media reuse specifically between content producers and consumers.

Through workshops and cross college collaboration the VRS will explore existing methods of arts and pedagogic practices which exploit the creation of new meanings through the appropriation and reworking of existing content, ideas, materials and processes. The VRS project will evaluate how this tradition can support and encourage debate around the development of artists and academics digital literacies through rich media use and reuse within the context of the current debates around open educational resource and open educational practice. 

About the event or artistic work – work to deepen knowledge and reflect the creative process, drawing as appropriate on newly captured and archived audiovisual materials

Authorship as selection: The VRS project will work with staff and students from across two institutions to produce short films and learning resources from remixed audiovisual content: University of the Arts London and University of Brighton. Through a series of workshops and online collaborations VRS participants will contribute as much random ‘original’ and ‘found’ video content to the VRS archive as possible and ensure that it is licensed appropriately (using Creative Commons or similar). The groups will then use the VRS archives as a primary edit source to edit and create various audiovisual pieces which must include 90% of found footage from the VRS archives.

The project will be closely aligned to current University of the Arts London projects and build on past and current initiatives in art, design and media open arts practices and UK OER practices. The VRS project will explore the following key areas: art, design and media digital literacies, online collaborative cross college editing communities, cultural change, open arts practices and open educational resources.

The project will explore all aspects of IPR, different licensing and data management by starting from a position of total freedom to explore the reuse of each others digital video footage in small communities. By examining what it means to find quality source materials and to reuse those materials we will reflect this ‘unique environment to the real world’ challenges of video and rich media collaboration and reuse. 

There is currently no middle ground to facilitate openly licensed video content communities. The project would address how artists and practitioners can create open practice communities by adopting social media tools and practices to help improve and encourage better rich media open educational and creative arts practice.

Appropriate use of tagging and metadata capture/creation. Owners can add descriptive data and metadata, and tag content.

It is anticipated that it will conform to the standards already implemented as part of the ALTO (UAL) as well as those generally associated with learning resource repositories as well, plus the W3C accessibility standards. We will seek advice from The Space project team regarding the appropriate standards for our context as the project develops.

The academic institutions as creators of the IPR will continue to own them and shall choose the content they wish to release under Creative Commons Licences, they will have already committed to this in pre-project discussion. As these licences are in perpetuity the content will be available for permanent use. Any 3rd party content will be identified separately with individual licence terms or linked to separately as appropriate.

The project will investigate the implementation of a shared project policy in relation to the use of Creative Commons (CC) Licences

Key challenges for the rich media reuse community are identifying and locating the most useful and usable open content. Random Google searches will sometimes get you what you want but the content will be more than likely high risk and non-reusable in an OER sense. Finding OER rich media reusable ‘gems’ in this granular landscape is difficult and moreover, standalone pieces of media content are difficult to assess in regards to reuse, remixing this content.

We hope to achieve:

• The establishment of a new creative video reuse community;

• An overall sense of inclusion, agency and support amongst the participants within this new community;

• The development of new online video reuse tools and resources;

• New perspectives, tools and resources to create and inform the open educational resource movement;

• The successful delivery of participant involved online and face-to-face workshops;

• Feedback and debate around issues of how we best identify and evaluate the most effective and efficient ways of using and repurposing rich media ‘open’ content;

• The creation of a core cluster of open practitioners who are interested in developing a rich media remix OER and open standards and practices network;

• A raised awareness of Digital Literacies and approaches to online video practice and online collaboration within a number of different academic disciplines;
   
• Creative experimentation around the issues of reuse;
   
• An influence upon future issues regarding licensing and collaboration;
   
• The Highlighting of the relationships between current OER and open educational practice across a diversity of subject areas;

The examination of the effective use of source files and edit notes in relation to producing better editable, safe (appropriately licensed) and useful content.