NOTES: Origins and Context | See Also
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Origins of this content
This texteo mixes (or creates a montage with) three elements: the ideas and images of transatlantic black and queer theorist and filmmaker Isaac Julien, my writing describing lessons I learned from LFYT 2007, and two videos in their own dialogue. In my blog post "On Slogans" I write: "I ask you to think of the following slogans—penned by committed artists from long-past revolutions, times, and places, and then followed by my own slogan responses—as a call to arms for how we might better muster today's technology to contribute to an ongoing project of improving the possibilities for presentation, interpretation, and abstract social evaluation, human interaction, perception, and epistemology, through media praxis."
Contextualization
"Isaac Julien has been involved with forging a new language around black representation, both as filmmaker and cultural critic. His exemplary body of work is informed by critical thinking around representation while not being solely theory driven."[cit]

"Kobena Mercer is a cultural worker/critic whose varied work on the politics of representation in African diasporic visual arts has inaugurated an important line of inquiry into post-identitarian cultural politics."[cit]

Diana Fuss writes that essentialism: "is most commonly understood as a belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the 'whatness' of a given entity ... Importantly, essentialism is typically defined in opposition to difference."[cit]

"To non-critical readers, texts provide facts. Readers gain knowledge by memorizing the statements within a text. To the critical reader, any single text provides but one portrayal of the facts, one individual's "take" on the subject matter. Critical readers thus recognize not only what a text says, but also how that text portrays the subject matter. They recognize the various ways in which each and every text is the unique creation of a unique author."[cit]

One of my ten founding terms for this project is participant: What is the role and who gets to be a viewer, a critic, or a participant in media culture? Then, what is the role of their emotion and identification?
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More videos related to the content of this page
"Winds of Change" by Clint Smith
HAITI: Every Drop Counts
CRITICAL READING IN QUESTION

"What is in question is not the expression of some lost origin or some uncontaminated essence in black film-language but the adoption of a critical voice that promotes consciousness of the collision of cultures and histories that constitute our very conditions of existence."– Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer

Online media should promote critical reading practices as well as liberated voices drawing the connections between conditions, including media practices, that are necessary to engender creative democracy. YouTube promotes empty and endless collisions isolated from culture, history, context, author, or intention. Collision without consciousness.