Kontextmaschine

15th October 2015

Video reblogged from muck crops with 17,887 notes

ipissedinyourmountaindew:
mikerugnetta:
kenyatta:
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crungus:
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ebilflindas:
tapehook:
Emergency Broadcast Network came out with this in 1993, over 10 years before Youtube was founded. They’re the forebearers of Youtube poop. Still holds up too.
this was made 22 YEARS AGO.
holy shit
oldtube poop
this has the structure and most of the standard joke formats of a modern 2015 youtube poop i’m completely blown away
I consider EBN one of the great influences in my life and have been fortunate to know a couple of it’s members Joshua (a tiny bit) and Greg (a lot.) Joshua is a brilliant video editor and Greg frikkin wrote frikkin After Effects (the greatest post production software of all time, imo.)
Really good YouTube Poop is hard to make. Making videos like EBN did in the early to mid-90′s was nearly impossible. This is because the tools for transforming video digitally were primitive, the machines costly (an Avid or Media 100 NLE cost upwards of $50,000 to build and thousands more to maintain) and hard to access (the only people who owned them were broadcasters, post production studios, and the like.) The source media itself had shitloads of copyright on it which has no practical meaning now but meant quite a bit way back when.
The 1990s were an age of tightly controlled analog mass media outlets and in it, EBN’s work was subversive for both its politics and its disregard of intellectual property rights. EBN wasn’t commercially viable (the legal sampling war had just begun) and it wasn’t pop (even though it was danceable in that 90′s techno rave sort of way) which meant that their work never traveled far beyond its most immediate social networks of media, art, and technology. EBN was signed to the indie TVT Records imprint but they considered themselves, primarily, live-remix performance artists who occasionally “recorded” albums (TVT distributed licensed versions of EBN’s work on CDs, VHS tapes, and 3.5″ floppies.) This combination of factors made it nearly impossible to experience the bulk of their work.
That isn’t to say that they weren’t extremely influential. If you ever saw or heard about the remixed visuals of U2′s groundbreaking ZOOTV tour, then you’ve seen the work of EBN. The group was also commissioned by MTV to make a half hour special about their work with U2 (back when it seemed like everyone watched MTV) and they even made a bunch of visual idents for the network. This exposed millions of people to the EBN remix aesthetic, rhythm, and structure even if they didn’t know where it came from. (Of course, that aesthetic had it’s own immediate roots in the work of The Bomb Squad and Public Enemy but that is a post for another day.)
So while it’s unfortunate that more YTP creators aren’t conscious of their Emergency Broadcast Network ancestry, considering the time and circumstance under which EBN existed, it’s totally understandable and it’s great that people have even discovered it at all.
Watch (and listen) to their work here. We Will Rock You, Psychoactive Drugs, and Get Down are some of my favs.
This is all amazing but of great personal importance: I loved Zoo TV–The Television Program and whenever I bring it up no one ever knows what I’m talking about. To the point where I was starting to get convinced I made it up / hallucinated it. I had no idea it was an EBN project! This is very exciting and validating for me.
What the fuck one of the guys from EBN made after effects???
boobtube poop