George Seibold

For my video remix, I wanted to make a remix of various news clips to, in a broad sense, highlight the fixation that news media has on violence and spectacle. I wanted to use a variety of clips that depicted fights and other notable broadcast media events in order to depict how the news is seen, consciously or otherwise, as for entertainment rather than education. I focused on mostly violent news media events to underscore both how violence draws in viewers and how violence as a spectacle is dangerous for a society.

I used clips from news coverage of the Charlottesville riot and the famous skinhead brawl on Geraldo Rivera’s talk show, an on-air fight between people debating Syrian politics, as well as a BBC timeline of conflict in the Middle East. Additionally, I took footage from one of the Max Headroom TV takeover incidents. The TV pirate did not necessarily fit in with the rest of the clips I chose, but I decided to use some of the footage because the visual of the man in the Headroom mask with the wavy background looks really jarring and captured the kind of unnerving quality I was going for. Additionally, the takeover somewhat represents my theme of TV as a spectacle, because whoever decided to pirate the TV signal likely did so just to stir up some chaos. While I do not have an explicit reason for using all of these in the way that I did (as I feel that these kinds of things are more interesting when they have more than just one interpretation), my thought process in using these clips involved taking news coverage of events that gained a lot of notoriety that also involved violence in order to create a sort of pastiche of views of and violence. I also chose to use stock news template footage I found on YouTube to punctuate the violent news events with seemingly “normal” news bits. This both represents how normalized this violence has become in the contemporary world and how, when tragic things are packaged and delivered in the same way as and alongside with normal things, tragedies seem easier to take.

As for the audio, I took a pre-existing mashup of Alex Jones clips and the song “Blood Creepin” by the experimental music duo Death Grips (called “Info Creepin,” uploaded to YouTube by user EATshitanddrinkbleac) and remixed it to make it more cacophonous and confusing. I used techniques such as reversing certain parts, changing the pitch, and layering Jones’ shouts in order to make it less of a song and more confusing and off-putting. I did not intend for it to be a song—partly because I had some issues with iMovie that I didn’t know how to deal with and partly because it made sense to me as having audio that sounds musically adjacent but not necessarily an intentional composition, in order to parallel how news media is mostly news-adjacent and not actually intended to educate. My vision for this was to take a figure in the media that almost perfectly embodies news as spectacle, Alex Jones, and edit some of his soundbites to display the complete breakdown of information in favor of incoherent rage. The song “Blood Creepin” did not factor much into my vision for this video remix, but the hurried, disjoint beat lends itself well to the kind of anxiety-inducing feeling I am trying to convey.

While I did not have a target audience in mind when I made this remix, I feel that the people it would most appeal to are those that already have issues with news media. I can’t think of anyone who’s mind would be changed by my video remix, but I can maybe see it as being played for a few laughs by people who like making fun of Alex Jones or Fox News. What challenged me most about this remix was finding clips that accurately communicated the message I was trying to convey. I sort of felt like those sculptors that saw their finished product first and shaved away the “excess” stone, except for me instead of stone there was countless hours of news media footage on the internet. That being said, my vision for the project was shaped in a large part by the kinds of things that I found on my scavenging through YouTube. I had started out with the idea to critique news media, and the rest took off from there as I looked for material to digitally mutilate.