Silvia’s poetic remix about the impact of gangs is complex and subtle - mixed to an instrumental of Dance with the Devil by Immortal TEchnique.

Ameenah and Aaisha’s video remixes source material from amateur videos and photographs documenting police brutality and aggression with Michael Jackson’s song Beat It.

This Political Remix Video is a critical, satirical and transformative work that constitutes a Fair Use in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107.

Monday was Collective Intelligence Day where we shared talents, skills and knowledge. At Open Youth Networks we believe that we can create a smarter learning environment, better remixes, and a more
equitable social space when many voices come together as one in collective dialogue and purpose.

Prisca started us out by showing us her wordpress site she is developing to help inform other youth about global issues. She also gave tips on how to get teens involved in social causes. Xavi played some amazing radio diaries produced by youth and talked about the power of youth radio. Xavi is a radio host of First Voices at Radio Arte in Pilsen. Then Keith talked about 9/11 and showed a video about conspiracy theories that the Republican administration was behind the attacks.

Aaisha and Ameenah dazzled us with their spoken word/a cappala performances and then taught us how to free write about why “cupcakes are the best.” You see, Jonathan has shared his passion for cupcakes with us and now cupcakes are like the FURI mascot!

Silvia has been blazing along at lightening speed on her remix on gangs and presented an edit that is well along after only learning how to use final cut that morning. Wow! Zane finished up with a screening of the Cloud Factory and OurMap of Environmental Justice. He talked about how social activism clubs at his own high school are much less effective than the work of community based youth organizing groups such as Little Village Environmental Justice Organization. Check out Daily Reflections to learn more about what FURI youth participants think about our collective intelligence.

After the workshop yesterday, Jonathan and I were talking on the way home about how much everyone’s ideas had evolved so much from their original remix concepts. We both noticed that the more the FURI youth worked intensely with source material and images, the more complex and critical their thinking was becoming. At first the tendency was to take on a song that had personal meaning and connection with the intent of illustrating that song in a literal way. Now everyone is pushing past those limits into deeper territory.

By the end of yesterday, the process of “thinking in remix” was resulting in a much more transformative approach to the material. Aaisha and Ameenah now are taking Michael Jackson’s song Beat It and altering its original intent to target police brutality. ElDevon is juxtaposing Diamonds on My Chain by Fabulous with images of violence resulting from diamond harvesting in Africa. The sheer act of doing political remix necessitates a more critical and analytical thought process. By transforming media to create new meanings, you have to really examine what the source material (the songs, the ads, the tv shows, the speeches) are communicating. And I think everyone of us is seeing what a huge responsibility (ethically, morally and legally) that really is.

Here is Silvia hard at work. She is adding layers of sound effects onto an instrumental soundtrack and then intersplicing short clips of documentary interviews about gangs to tell a more complicated story about gangs and their impact in her community.

Yesterday, Jonathan taught how to use a variety of open source and some not so open source tools for converting and capturing media off the internets, such as Media Converter, Zamzar and, everyone’s favorite, Audio Hijack. Jonathan also taught us how to understand Creative commons licenses and how to do attribution. We learned how to find high res images on Google, Wikipedia Commons and Flickr (through the Creative Commons.)

Learning all of these amazing apps and how to use them was unbelievably empowering and inspiring. We can wait to begin assembling our images into Final Cut today!

However, yesterday was also a sad day for us because our friend, (Deviant) Dan Marano had to high tail it back to Ann Arbor for knee rehab. We are so going to miss him.

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