“Prelinger Archives” (Used 6 times)

The Free Music Archive and Prelinger Archives recently mixed their parts together and produced 122 strange and beautiful remix children. Though everyone's a winner when we contribute new and interesting works to the commons, some of our video remixes were especially full of winning.

JUDGE'S CHOICE WINNER: How Do You Say Goodnight by Carlo Patrão

When two open digital libraries fall in love... this happens.

For our on-going video remix contest, the Free Music Archive and Prelinger Archives asked you to show us what video mashups of our collections would look like. From Betty Bop dancing the Charleston to modern jazz, to 1906 San Francisco set to dubstep... our remix children are deeply disturbing, abstract, violent, beautiful, and often half-naked.

We dare you now to find a comfortable chair in a dark room and watch all 122 entries. If you see one you like, log into the website, and click the thumbs up. You can vote for multiple videos, but only once. All voting will wrap up by 5pm ET on Monday, November 25th. The winner of the popular vote will take home an iPad.

So journey on, little monkeys! Vote now, and help natural selection determine the fittest.

To help those recovering from Hurricane Sandy damage, the deadline for our Remix Contest with the Prelinger Archives has been extended to Sunday, November 11th at 11:59PM ET. The contest challenges producers to explore the possibilities of open digital libraries by using them to create a picture of The Past Re-imagined As The Future. You can even win an iThing!

Those of you with power can enjoy the incredible submissions we've already received on our contest portal, check out Jason's Hurricane Sandy mix, and get your tickets to our public screening and keynote on November 29.

NEW CONTEST TIMELINE

Nov 11: Submissions Deadline
Nov 12: Judging and Public Voting Begins
Nov 25: End of the Public Voting
Nov 29: Winners Announced online and in a public screening at NYC's Anthology Film Archives

Vicki Bennett has been making audio and visual collage since 1991, when the internet was a fetus and you probably didn't own a computer. She creates her work with the nom de plume People Like Us. It's a moniker that speaks to the role of the collective and popular culture in her work, and a need to belong. Using collage as her medium, she creates audio recordings, films and radio shows that mix and manipulate original sources from both experimental and popular media. Her work has been shown at Tate Modern, The Barbican, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Centre, Maxxi in Rome and Sonar, and she's hosted the WFMU radio program Do or DIY since 2003.

Plus, she's a judge for our Past Re-Imagined As the Future remix contest. In our Q&A, Bennett shares that she's hoping to see works that are engaging and transformative. As you comb through the materials in the Prelinger Archives, she reminds us that these videos aren't just about the past, but also about the present, the future, and something timeless.

What first drew you to the practice of AV collage art?

This contest is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

As you prepare your entries for our Past Re-Imagined As the Future remix contest, we thought you could use some tips.

We asked moving image archivist, filmmaker and contest judge Rick Prelinger to share his thoughts on what makes for an incredible remix. Is it lots of looping and repeating footage? Machine gun single frame montages? Prelinger suggests that there's new ground to broken as you sculpt your new Creative Commons masterpieces. In our interview, Prelinger explains how ephemera can help us avoid the trap of presentism, his new interest in collecting home movies, and more about the history/future of the Prelinger Archives.

Why preserve ephemera? How have you grown to understand its historical and cultural significance?

Nothing gives a better sense of ordinary peoples' experience in the past than evidence drawn from daily life. And most of this material wasn't meant to survive -- we have it only by lucky accident. Ephemeral material, like the kinds of films in our archives, is permeated with a strong sense of time and place. It shows how people interacted, worked, presented themselves and partied, and it's also filled with evidence of past persuasions -- how we were told to behave, study, work, and believe.

I also like ephemeral material because it's extremely vivid and accessible. It's a seductive gateway to the many histories that combine and recombine in America, and more than that, it gets people thinking in historical terms. It's one way to avoid the trap of presentism -- the idea that life was, and always will be, as it is now. It also helps us realize that we're not living in a time unlike any other. Much of what we're going through now as a society has already happened in other contexts.