User:Marie Wocher/Annotation Preespauseplay/

The film Presspauseplay by David Dworsky and Victor Köhler is a film about hope and fear and digital culture. The documentary addresses the question how the digital revolution of the last years has changed culture. Does democratised culture mean better art, film, music and literature. Is it cultural democracy or mediocrity? The film doesn't only want to show the negative aspects of the technical revolution but also its positive facets. The opinion of The opinion of the interviewed differs from Seth Groth, the author of Unleashing the Idea Virus who posted the ebook online and got more than 3 Million downloads, who says, the industry is dead, there is no better time to be an artist. To Andrew Keen, a Web 2.0 critic, who says that the idea that everybody can be an artist, produces that much mediocrity, that the talented ones will go down.

above others, Seth Godin, Robyn, Moby, David Weinberger, Sean Parker (Napster) get a chance to speak. The film is a combination of statements of aforementioned and a documentary about Olafur Arnalds, a musician from island whose music suspense between classical and electronic music, and got famous through the internet. He is accompanied by a film team on his way from Island to Manchester where he is playing with the orchestra.

In The beginning of the documentary, Moby says: »Only 30 years ago, people didn't make things. People would go to see photographies (in an art gallery), buy records. There were professional artists and now, everybody is a photographer, everybody is a filmmaker, everybody is a writer, everybody is a writer, everybody is a musician.« The democratisation in art only has been possible because of the technical revolution. hardware became affordable and software became understandable for everyone. What happens is that everyone try to write a book, make music or buy a camcorder to record stuff, throwing it on youtube. It is no longer defined who is an artist and who is not, who is the expert, who the amateur. More people do more art than ever before, because they want to create work. Brenda Walker sees this as an incredibly time for artists, because there is no cap on creativity. The technological advances has given the artist an open door to creating as much as their capacity will allow. There a many platforms that allow to express ourselves, but this also makes it harder to break through all of the noise, »A young Fassbänder, or a young Wenders, a young Hitchkock a young Scorsese, they wouldn't make it in the business because the would have get lost in the ocean of garbage. « Andrew Keen

Another aspect, the film shows, is, that Technology always comes first, than the artist comes along experiment. Most of the time technology has been invented for another reason, and the artist changes its function, plays around, create art. Moby in the end draws the grey goo scenario, saying that the Culture might be come to the same principle. When everyone is a musician, eventually the world is covered by mediocrity.