How a Video Artist Made Don Draper a Gay Rights Mouthpiece

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Elisa Kreisinger, aka Pop Culture Pirate, produces feminist video mashups of popular television shows.

Image: Elisa Kreisinger

By Rebecca Hiscott2014-02-07 15:02:32 UTC

In Elisa Kreisinger's imagination, Mad Men's Don Draper and Roger Sterling are lovers. Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw embraces her sapphic tendencies. Even Ann Romney is a beacon of feminist enlightenment.

Kreisinger's kingdom is the Internet, where fair use law allows her to subvert the television characters and tropes that viewers know intimately. As Pop Culture Pirate , her video remixes create an alternate universe in which Carrie Bradshaw is a gay feminist warrior and Jay-Z's 10-minute art house opus "Picasso Baby" syncs perfectly with Taylor Swift's "22."

"People like to see their identity represented in the stuff they find online," Kreisinger says. "That's what remix does — it puts disparate things together in a way they can identify with."

After a six-month residency at New York's Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, in partnership with digital rights organization Public Knowledge, Kreisinger has unveiled "Fair Use(r)," an exhibit that explores fair use law and documents her efforts to protect her art from takedown notices on YouTube.

The exhibit opened at Eyebeam as part of its 2014 Annual Showcase Jan. 16, and moves to Kianga Ellis Projects Feb. 7.

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Kreisinger graduated from a small women's college with a degree in gender studies and communications. Rather than continue on to grad school, she cast about for a way to merge the pricey diploma with her artistic aspirations. Her first attempt was a series of esoteric, and mostly ignored, video essays on critical theory posted to YouTube.

"I'm sure they were terrible," she says. "I realized that in order to gain a following, in order to make someone want to watch your videos, you have to use a common language."

Pop culture, she realized, could be the sugar coating on the bitter pill of feminist theory.

As Pop Culture Pirate, Kreisinger began to shape the TV shows she loved ("and loved to hate") into queer and feminist narratives that were "super subversive — the TV shows that I wanted to watch." Mad Men's token chauvinists became gay lovers, Sex and the City's winsome, man-chasing protagonist fell in love with a woman (Big's one-time wife Natasha, in case you were curious), and the Real Housewives experienced miraculous moments of feminist clarity.

The technical aspects of a show have to lend themselves to remixing as much as their message, Kreisinger explains. "There has to be enough material to take out of context and re-imagine. With Sex and the City, there were six seasons, one-hour-long episodes, and it had a voiceover — which, as an editor, is gold. Mad Men is very dialogue-driven and there are lots of pregnant pauses to take advantage of, to re-imagine and edit.

"I've been trying to remix Girls for a year," she adds. "It's really hard. There aren't as many pregnant pauses; everything moves a little bit faster."

At the "Fair Use(r)" exhibit, Kreisinger's Mad Men video remix is displayed alongside an oil painting that depicts the precise frame that was flagged as a copyright violation.

But creating subversive video art is only one facet of Pop Culture Pirate. Kreisinger's second objective, which has strengthened considerably over time, is to make appropriation artists more aware of the freedoms that fair use law affords them — and to make everyone aware that those freedoms are in jeopardy.

Despite the moniker, what Kreisinger does isn't actually piracy. Under fair use law, artists are permitted to repurpose excerpts of copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder, so long as that material is being used for commentary, criticism or parody. Kresinger's remixes are essentially a more artful version of what news aggregation sites do every day: taking material created or published elsewhere and spinning it into a new product.

Copyright holders — movie studios, record labels and television networks — are, however, committed to combatting actual digital pirates, and video art like Kreisinger's is often caught in the crossfire.

To police for copyright infringement, YouTube employs an automated Content ID system. As new content is uploaded, the system compares those videos against its database of millions of copyrighted clips. If a user's video matches up with copyrighted content, he or she is notified of the violation. However, YouTube's safeguards cannot distinguish between an illegal clip that posts a Mad Men episode in its entirety and a legal one that remixes parts of the show to create an alternate narrative.

On her blog, Kreisinger compares Content ID to a tuna net: it catches the fish it wants to catch, but it ensnares dolphins, too.

"When Content ID finds a match, the copyright holder has three options," Kreisinger claims. "They can block [a video], they can track it or they can choose to monetize it. They can choose how they want to deal with your content, regardless of whether it constitutes fair use. They're assuming that you're guilty even if they're in violation of your rights."

Elisa Kreisinger, 1:18 Iconic TV, 2014. Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches and YouTube copyright notice.

Image: courtesy of Elisa Kreisinger

"Fair Use(r)" documents Kreisinger's experience in battling her own copyright violation notices. The installation features three of her videos — "Picasso Baby I'm Feeling 22," "QueerMen: Don Loves Roger" and "Mad Men: Set Me Free" — each of which have been flagged multiple times for copyright infringement. Each video is accompanied by an oil painting of the exact frame that was identified as a violation.

"In the months and years since I made the videos, I spent more time trying to protect the legality of my work than I had actually making it," she says. "As an artist, it's really frustrating to never be able leave a project behind and constantly have to re-upload it and make sure it sticks."

In order to dispute a copyright claim on YouTube, Kreisinger explains, users are directed to a link gives them a chance to demonstrate how the video constitutes fair use.

"It is intimidating," she says. "The language encourages you to find a lawyer. For someone who's online in their apartment without a ton of legal literature around them — which I'm pretty sure is everyone — it's scary."

Some users would rather take the hit than expend more energy defending their work, and some would rather censor their work all together than deal with a copyright scuffle.

So what do artists do when their work is repeatedly caught in YouTube's net? In Kreisinger's case, they move to Vimeo. But that's not much of a solution, she says. "YouTube is a larger engine, and art and artists need to be there. Art has to be in this public, discursive space where people can find it and see it, where there's comments and discussion. If we're relegated to this ghetto on Vimeo, it doesn't have the same effect."

Internet piracy laws make appropriation art infinitely more complicated; imagine if Marcel Duchamp had been slapped with a lawsuit for turning the Mona Lisa into one of his famous readymades. Kreisinger hopes that "Fair Use(r)" will help demystify the law and empower artists to take advantage of it.

"If you don't use a right, you lose it," she says.

Pop Culture Pirate is proof that everything digital is also political — even a mashup that turns the women of Mad Men into a Supremes cover band.

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Topics: art, blogging, Entertainment, mashups, piracy, Politics, pop culture, Video, Videos, Vimeo, YouTube