Credit: Technology Review

In 2005, Michael Dale and Abram Stern, a pair of grad students in digital media arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz, decided it would be fun to make video remixes of speeches in the U.S. Congress. Their goals were artistic; Stern had notions, for example, of editing a Senate floor speech to remove everything but the pronouns. They would be following, loosely, in a tradition of video commentary that includes remixing speeches from the 2004 Republican National Convention to feature only the many utterances of terrorism or September the 11th by George and Laura Bush, Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani, and others. Aware that congressional proceedings are public--and that C-SPAN airs them freely--the pair went online to hunt for the raw material. But "the footage wasn't there," Dale recalls. While C-SPAN did offer archival material for a fee, he says, "if we wanted to pull together a few different clips of senators saying different things--there was no online repository for download."

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