Our guest - Craig Baldwin, a San Francisco based filmmaker and a curator of The other Cinema (http://www.othercinema.com/) will present a specially abridged 16mm print of "Sonic Outlaws' and his personal collection of the several short tapes each bearing on the relevant issues-- collage, copyright, fair-use, culture-jammimng, and tactical media-interventions.

Sonic Outlaws 16mm, 70mn abridged, 1991

"Sonic Outlaws, a fragmented, gleefully anarchic documentary by Craig Baldwin, approaches this incident from several directions. Some of the film is about the legal nightmare that ensued from Negativland's little joke. In a highly publicized case, U2's label, Island Records, charged Negativland with copyright and trademark infringement for appropriating the letter U and the number 2, even though U2 had in turn borrowed its name from the Central Intelligence Agency. SST then dropped Negativland, suppressed the record and demanded that the group pay legal fees. Trying to remain solvent, Negativland sent out a barrage of letters and legal documents that are now collected in

"Fair Use", an exhaustive, weirdly fascinating scrapbook about the case.
Sonic Outlaws covers some of the same territory while also expanding upon the ideas behind Negativland's guerilla recording tactics. Guerilla is indeed the word, since these and other appropriation artists see themselves as engaged in real warfare, inundated by the commercial airwaves, infuriated by the propaganda content of much of what they hear and see, these artists strike back by rearranging contexts as irreverently as possible. Their technological capabilities are awesome enough to mean no sound or image is tamper-proof today." - Craig Baldwin

A San Franscisco based filmmaker Craig Baldwin is well known both as a filmmaker and a curator of The other Cinema (http://www.othercinema.com/sosframe.html ). His films have screened all over the world, including The Roxie (San Francisco), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Rotterdam, Deep Dish TV, Film Forum (New York), William Paterson College (New Jersey), Austin Film Society, London Filmmakers Co-op, Marin County Film Festival and Coolidge Corner Cinema in Boston. He received his Master of Arts from San Francisco State University.

His interest in the recontextualization of appropriated imagery led him to the theories of the Situationist International, and to various practices of mail art, 'zines, altered billboards, and other creative initiatives beyond the fringe of the traditional fine-arts curriculum.

"... I'm interested in black-comic social critique, and also in graphic montage, rhythm, and acceleration; but above it all, I'm interested in the mobilization and manipulation and manic play with old and new meanings, as "found" footage is recontextualized with newly-produced sound and imagery, documentary testimony and collateral text. This polymorphous collage-essay form represents an effort to create an audio-visual language that has the same metaphoric and punning qualities as spoken language; clusters of signifiers in provisional constructs cobbled together. The flotsam and jetsam of film culture can serve to stage a review of the carnival acts of history." - Craig Baldwin