Release The Stars

Zurich airport
Originally uploaded by amsterboy

Today has been a good day. After having a second brilliant session with the design students in Zürich, I made my way to the airport with the new Rufus Wainwright CD in my iPod. Sunny streets and his flirtatiously clever voice in my head was just the ultimate start for the weekend. And just to make my sister jealous I need to mention the perfectly salty crispy bretzel at the railway station.

By the way the Zürich airport is quite an experience. I would dare to name it as the most impressive airport I have seen. The share amount of empty space, the size of the airport compared to the size of the city (only like 300.000 inhabitants) and the fact that the airport is completely spotless all support an image of a city quite comfortable with its prosperity.

In our second session today with the students we focused on self-representation, migration and contextualisation. We compared for instance presenting a video on one's own MySpace site and on YouTube which is much less contextualised. The longest discussion was on "the story" behind a video of a teenager girl shaking her ass in her bedroom to 50 Cent's openly sexist song Candy Shop. The group slightly divided between those who did not see a reason to worry and those seeing signs of a lack of parental control.

After watching a lot of oneminutes, hip hop videos and parkour videos we dived into the question whether there are differences in the visual languages based on the teenagers ethnicity or nationality. My own gut feeling is that the differences are much more on subjects and in the tone of communication but the visual structure follows relatively unified paths.

I also got a question on why we do not indicate on theoneminutesjr website whether the maker is for instance an asylum seeker or an orphan or belonging to a cultural minority in a country. My answer was that we give the context of youth but after that it is up to the young maker to decide which particles of their identity their wish to highlight in their video. I have lobbied and will keep on lobbying for strategies where young people - whether or not with an immigrant background - are allowed to choose the communities they wish to attach to.

It's a completely other world out there

50 Cent
Originally uploaded by weirdoldhattie

Sun is shining here in Zürich where I am for a lecture I gave this morning at the University of Zürich on visual languages and strategies of young Europeans. I flew here yesterday from London where my colleague and I met potential partners for next year's video festival in Amsterdam. We also took some time for ourselves and went to see a new musical called Wicked. It was fun, have to give you that. Just listen to the clips on the site. And I bought the new album from Rufus Wainwright which is just fab.

London was hitting record-high temperatures which both showed the city and its beauty at its best but also showed how little oxygen and how many people there are on that spot. Heathrow especially was horrendous with the air-conditioning not working properly and with the stinking carpets all over. The change to the slick Zürich airport (huge but empty) was dramatic.

But about the lecture. My main points were that the generational difference in media consumption and production is underestimated and that there are much more possibilities than risks in the current change. I also said that entertainment and popular culture offers great possibilities for political engagement which I sensed caused some people to raise their eyebrows.

I think the message went down well when I spiced it with funny comments from baby-boomers "But I mean when do you find the time to watch all these videos") and teenagers "Come on, don't give me that bullshit" and strong visual material from theoneminutesjr. I have spent the afternoon now compiling stuff from YouTube for a playlist I will use in our session tomorrow morning.

Preparing the lecture has been a good exercise. It made me realise that I actually can consider myself an expert on this subject and that I know what I am talking about.