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Meta-CC

21/02/2006
Mark Hancock

We humans are very adept at processing relevant data from irrelevant noise. In a sea of white noise, we often believe that we hear our own names being uttered. In a crowd of people, we can recognize familiar faces even though we have only a few points of reference to go on. Our brains are great filters. So, it only follows that, of course, our machines too would be designed to be great “noise” filtering devices.

And when we’re connected to the Internet, we have another wash of white noise flooding over our consciousness. We have to sample and dismiss what is irrelevant to us. And we have a host of tools for this. RSS feeds, blog reading instead of the usual news channel, whose impartiality we have begun to doubt the validity of. Even our lists of favorites are a form of filtering.

META[CC] attempts to take this flood of data and rework it into a political commentary. Asking us to reconsider the information we have found ways to channel through such media streaming tools as RSS feeds.

To be a part of the META[CC] process/project the user selects key words and submits RSS feeds to its database. Using the keywords, it parses through the feeds and then creates sentences for its closed caption video channeling system. The video feeds are from live broadcasts of current news events. When the captions are overlaid on these, they take on a new meaning. META[CC]re-appropriates the news broadcast and reveals its meaning in relation to the news data it is a part of.

By combining strategies employed in web-based discussion forums, blogs, tele-text subtitling, on-demand video streaming, and search engines, the open captioning format employed by META[CC] will allow users to gain multiple perspectives and resources engaging current events.

By taking the feeds from blogs, META[CC] uses the discussions that are taking place in the blogosphere, and channels them alongside the “official” news coverage. By playing the traditional news sources against the very real and strengthening opinions of blog pundits, we begin to see the play off between the two. What’s being said on screen isn’t always what is appearing in the closed caption below it. There begins to be a play between the two and in very real ways, we begin to understand that some of what we have always believed to be the truth, as told by news broadcasts, is no more than media co-opted truth.

Of course, this isn’t to say that the blogosphere is alive with truthful and accurate reportage and impartial opinion makers. But one of the options that [url:http://meta-cc.net/]META[CC][/url] gives the user is to decide on what feeds go into the database and what the keywords for searching them are going to be. So it represents not just the opinions of the blogger but, the choices of the person who is making selections.

The Meta(cc) engine successfully debuted in response to the final 2004 presidential debate, Wednesday, Oct. 13th, at the Rodan a/v lounge in Chicago, IL, for the opening of Lumpen’s Select Media 3 Festival.

What it does could be described as a form of Situationist Internationale detournement, a reappropriating of content from its original context into a new meaning. Quoting from a Situationist Text of 1969,

The two fundamental laws of detournement are the loss of importance of each detourned autonomous element “which may go so far as to completely lose its original sense” and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect.

META[CC] takes the original texts and creates a new meaning for them. Positioning them as it does within the larger context of keywords, images and blogs within the database. But is it fair to describe the project within the context of a SI reading? Certainly the theoretical grounding of the SI is both political and social. As even a brief reading of the referenced text above would attest, the focus of detournement is artistic works. But the SI hoped to reinstate artistic practice as a means of giving back to the (dare I use the term) proletariat the use of art to free it from the tyranny of the Society of the Spectacle. META[CC] performs a similar slight of hand and manages to return opinion making and formulation of the information to people.

Of course, I’m summarizing much of the concepts of the SI within this brief essay. There’s so much more that can be written about this project, and that’s one of the clever things about META[CC]. Technologically, it is complex. For the user and viewer, it is straightforward. Making a difference to it is easy once you’ve registered. But once you follow the path of reasoning that it can open up, there’s a lot more to be explored.

Reference: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/315