Negativland

NEGATIVLAND: OUR FAVORITE THINGS Plus BONUS CD: 180-D'Gs TO THE FUTURE by the 180-Gs
OUR FAVORITE THINGS is a new DVD/CD project from reigning Kulture Kut-up Kings Negativland, co-released by Seeland MediaMedia and San Francisco's Other Cinema DVD. It is NTSC, region 0, and is playable worldwide.
Twenty-seven years of the group's "greatest hits" have become all-new moving pictures in this amazing, years-in-the-making package. Created with 18 other filmmakers from all over the USA (and one a capella group from Detroit), OUR FAVORITE THINGS is a collaborative project that takes Negativland's sound explorations into the world of film and video. What emerges is a darkly cracked look at 21st century America, juxtaposing paranoia, torture, control, power, guns, fear, suicide, cola wars, mental illness, and intellectual property issues with the lighter side of dopey advertising, cartoon characters, cleaning products and Jesus.
The OUR FAVORITE THINGS DVD includes over 60 minutes of never-before-seen bonus material, and, for those who would rather shut their eyes tight and just listen, it also comes with a full-length CD which isn't by Negativland at all: "180 D’Gs TO THE FUTURE!" by the Gospel R & B Doo-Wop group, The 180-Gs. You'll be all ears as this talented posse from inner Detroit sings out heavenly cover versions of Negativland's best (and least) known cut-up collage work from throughout their career, making for one of the strangest recordings you have ever heard.
OUR FAVORITE THINGS is an epic career-spanning project from Negativland, "sure to please their old fans," sez Dr. Wick Milton, D.D.S., of our Appropriation Assessment Department. And yet this DVD, released in cooperation with San Francisco’s Other Cinema DVD, also provides an expansively overdue introduction to Negativland's work for new audiences who have not yet discovered them.
Includes newly minted video versions of Time Zones • Christianity Is Stupid • No Business • Gimme The Mermaid • Greatest Taste Around • Over The Hiccups • U2 • Guns • Yellow, Black And Rectangular • Aluminum or Glass • Favorite Things • Taste In Mind • Truth In Advertising • Humanitarian Effort • Drink It Up • Freedom's Waiting • Why Is This Commercial? • No Business • and more
A BIG 10-8 PLACE
Back in print ...
with BONUS DVD of NO OTHER POSSIBILITY
(1983/1989)
Here it is, the re-issue of Negativland's long out-of-print 1983 release, “A BIG 10-8 PLACE,” now with less fancy packaging than ever before. But it does comes packaged with a 60-minute bonus DVD of Negativland's first foray into video, NO OTHER POSSIBILITY, featuring material shot before, during, and a few years after “A BIG 10-8 PLACE" was released. This recording, Negativland's third-ever release, was their first-ever concept album, taking the listener on a surreal journey through the high and low points of their home turf in Northern California's Contra Costa County. Three years in the making, and with ten-thousand-million-billion analog tape splices, this uniquely insane tornado of fast-edits and painstakingly assembled sounds and ideas remains a hands down favorite amongst Negfans, despite our overflowing warehouses full of all the Negativland recordings released since then...
About Negativland
Since 1980, the 4 or 5 or 6 Floptops known as Negativland have been creating records, CDs, video, fine art, books, radio and live performance using appropriated sound, image and text. Mixing original materials and original music with things taken from corporately owned mass culture and the world around them, Negativland re-arranges these found bits and pieces to make them say and suggest things that they never intended to. In doing this kind of cultural archaeology and "culture jamming" (a term they coined way back in 1984), Negativland have been sued twice for copyright infringement.
Over the years Negativland's "illegal" collage and appropriation based audio and visual works have touched on many things - pranks, media hoaxes, advertising, media literacy, the evolving art of collage, the bizarre banality of suburban existence, creative anti-corporate activism in a media saturated multi-national world, file sharing, intellectual property issues, wacky surrealism, evolving notions of art and ownership and law in a digital age, and artistic and humorous observations of mass media and mass culture.
While it is true that, after being sued, Negativland became more publicly involved in advocating significant reforms of our nation's copyright laws, Negativland are artists first and activists second. All of their art and media interventions have intended to pose both serious and silly questions about the nature of sound, media, control, ownership, propaganda and perception. Their work is now referenced and taught in many college courses in the US, has been written about in over 30 books (including NO LOGO by Naomi Klein, MEDIA VIRUS by Douglas Rushkoff, and various biographies of the band U2), cited in legal journals, and they often lecture about their work here and in Europe.
Since 1981, Negativland and an evolving cast of characters have operated “Over The Edge,” a weekly radio show on KPFA FM in Berkeley, California. “Over The Edge” continues to broadcast three hours of live, found sound mixing every Thursday at midnight, West Coast time, with online access. In 1995 they released a 270 page book with 72 minute CD entitled "FAIR USE: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2." This book documented their infamous four-year long legal battle over their 1991 release of an audio piece entitled "U2". They were the subjects of Craig Baldwin's 1995 feature documentary SONIC OUTLAWS and created the soundtrack and sound design for Harold Boihem's 1997 documentary film THE AD AND THE EGO, an excellent in-depth look into the hidden agendas of the corporate ad world and the ways that we are affected by advertising. In 2004 Negativland worked with Creative Commons to write the Creative Commons Sampling License, an alternative to existing copyrights that is now in widespread use by many artists, writers, musicians, film makers, and websites. In 2005, they released the elaborately packaged NO BUSINESS (with CD, 15,000 word essay, and custom made whoopie cushion), and debuted "Negativlandland" - a large visual art show of over 80 piece's of their "fine art" works, video, and home-made electronic devices, at New York City's Gigantic Art Space. That exhibit continues to travel and appear around the country. More recently Negativland have been touring a new performance piece called “Its’ All In Your Head FM”, a two-hour-long audio cut-up mix about monotheism, the supernatural God concept, and the all-important role played by the human brain in our beliefs. Christianity and Islam are the featured religions, as Negativland asks it’s audience to contemplate some complex, serious, ridiculous, and challenging ideas about human belief in a show best described as “documentary collage.”
Negativland is interested in unusual noises and images (especially ones that are found close at hand), unusual ways to restructure such things and combine them with their own music and art, and mass media transmissions which have become sources and subjects for much of their work. Negativland covets insightful humor and wackiness from anywhere, low-tech approaches whenever possible, and vital social targets of any kind. Foregoing ideological preaching, but interested in side effects, Negativland is like a subliminal cultural sampling service concerned with making art about everything we aren't supposed to notice.
Negativland's website is www.negativland.com