As final project, our group took to experimenting with the merits of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s muscles, The Wanted’s unknowingly witty lyricism, and the world of meme culture that has exploded across the internet in the last couple of years. The final result of the project took shape in two forms: (1) a video (see below) that uses clips from the film original “Pumping Iron” and an audio mash-up of “Glad You Came” and Kanye West’s “Stronger” and (2) a blog incorporating Playing off of the source material’s assertions of masculinity, the video is meant to explore questions of copyright, vidding and the culture of remix.
The opening bit takes directly from the movie, a “steal” we considered essential to our recreation of Arnie’s character into a ‘cumming’-ecstatic beast. In pairing the “Glad You Came” song to these clips of Arnie, we meant to introduce a sexual connotation that related to the source material but deviated significantly from the song’s intention. In that sense, the work is purposefully referential to the culture of vidding that the course touched on. With respect to copyright law, we found our work to pass all tests: it is made for educational use, is significantly transformative in its combination of several audio and video sources for a whole that is a new invention and this work bears no effect on the potential market for any of the copyright source materials involved.
The second piece of the project translated into a meme-centric blog using the same catch phrase from the “Glad You Came” song. The Tumbr can be seen here. The blog drew from a number of image sources, most prominently Google image searches and our team’s more personal finds from friends’ Facebook pages. In each case, issues of fair use are relevant but we found the degree to which the GLAD YOU CAME meme-tagline could have transformative effect on the interpretation of these images. In all cases the (albeit crude) message implies a sexuality to which none of our subjects, with the exception of a couple of team submissions, have verbally consented. To be clear: the works were not meant to bully or attack the subjects: instead, to develop a meme that was significantly transformative of the original intentions of each picture manipulated by suggesting that the facial expressions were orgasm-based, not unlike our video tries to establish.
Yale Law Tech 