I grew up glued to the TV, particularly American cartoons funded by toy manufacturers to flog their products, and playing a lot of video games that didn’t do me any harm. However, cinema was, and will always be, my first love.

Our local cinema was the mythical ABC Muirend Cinema. Designed by William Bereseford Inglis in 1933, the building exterior replicated a Spanish style hacienda while inside the auditorium had lots of Flamenco style motifs, such as balconies, amber lanterns and images of matadors painted on tiles dotted along the stairwells. Looking back as I write this, Muirend Cinema seems a bizarre prophecy of my future; I studied Spanish at Glasgow University and somehow I’ve ended up working for Glasgow Film Theatre as Learning Projects Coordinator for Young People. The range of the films it offered were the standard box office fare but I relished them all regardless. My seminal movie moments included watching Jurassic Park on the opening weekend, my mum convincing the box office grump that I was old enough to watch The Man Without A Face and stuffing my face with the cheaper sweets bought next door in Safeways to the bombast of Independence Day.

Sadly like a lot of old cinemas in Glasgow, ABC Muirend shut down in 2001 due to shrinking audiences that preferred the industrial comfort of a multiplex and the cost of maintaining a building that was well past its prime. Each time I pass it, I can’t help feel a wave of sadness for an important community relic that now functions as luxury apartments for a select few. My memories of Muirend remain but families in the Southside of Glasgow have to travel elsewhere these days for their cinematic outings.

Hopefully some of these families come to the GFT for our free Take 2 family screenings which screen every Saturday morning. I try to programme a range of films that appeal to a wide audience while sneaking in a few classic and foreign gems, like The Boy From Mercury, Mr Hulot’s Holiday and The Belles of St. Trinian’s. Unfortunately a lack of distribution of foreign titles for children and availability of prints makes screening non-Hollywood films a lot harder than it should be.

Although 41% of 15-24 year olds visit the cinema once a month* and are exposed to moving images on a daily basis, young people are often the least catered to by art house cinemas. More often than not, they tend to select films that appeal to older audiences with their youth remit left solely to ‘parent and baby’ screenings. Consequently, children and young adults miss out on the wealth of different contemporary perspectives offered by world cinema and so remain quite happy to settle for whatever is showing at their local Cineworld.

This isn’t helped by the fact that moving image education still struggles to be implemented across schools in the UK. Despite repeated efforts, teachers cite a lack of resources and adequate training to properly implement film into the classroom. As a result, DVDs can often become a babysitter for pupils rather than a key part of their cultural development and awareness. It remains to be seen whether the ambitions of 21st Century Literacy, a consortium set up by the UK Film Council and Film Education among others, can be achieved.

In response to these issues, GFT Learning set up the Glasgow Youth Film Festival to offer young people a chance to help devise, promote and run their own film festival. Programmed by a worryingly cool bunch of teenagers, GYFF aims to reach out to young Glaswegians through their love of movies while supporting their talents and aspirations. This year almost 7,000 young people attended GYFF events; it was such a refreshing sight to see so many young faces in our cinemas. (Previously, members of our Youth Group told me that they felt unwelcome by older GFT patrons who thought they’d only talk throughout the film.) The response we had was overwhelming and encouraging enough to safely say that there’s a youth audience in Glasgow interested in films from around the globe.

Over the next few years for GYFF, I hope to increase the opportunities for young people to talk to people who work in the moving image industries – not just directors or actors but writers, graphic designers, animators and editors who all make a living from their passion for film, TV and video games. Like the rest of the arts, the film industry remains horribly white and middle class, in spite of the occasional tokenistic scheme for individuals from underrepresented backgrounds. Anyone who aspires to work in this industry is expected to intern for free or live off small bursaries. I had to do this for almost 2 years and I doubt that it will change anytime soon, no matter how legally grey internships appear.

There’s more to young movie fans than a lucrative demographic to market blockbusters to. Exhibitors, distributors, not to mention teachers, should encourage young people to look at moving image in a reflective and creative way rather than be passive observers that we often assume them to be. Thankfully youth film festivals such as GYFF, Discovery and Future Film, alongside the exciting developments promised by 8 1/2 Foundation, demonstrate the growing commitment to future generations of cinemagoers. With the falling costs of HD technology and the increasing ease of distributing films online, I’m hopeful that all young people will continue to be inspired by the flickering images around them – from the glow of a TV, the hum of a projector or even the hypnotic whirl of your mum’s dirty washing.

*According to UK Film Council’s 2009 Statistics Handbook

Images of ABC Muirend taken from Scottish Cinemas site

Mash-ups have been common in turntable culture since the early days of hip-hop in the 1970s. Peer-to-peer filesharing combined with open source audio and video mixing software accelerated rise of mash-up culture from the late ‘ 90s, spawning a whole new generation of DJs and VJs. In computing, mashware can combine code from open source sites, or embed and combine elements of sites that will benefit from the traffic directed their way, but they have to tread carefully if they want to avoid copyright infringments. For mash-up ecologies to function, whether for business or pleasure, they require a much more libertarian attitude towards intellectual property. Copyright has to give way to copyleft to enable mash-ups to realise their full potential. Access to the bazaar of knowledge is essential. Mash-up culture might, therefore, be our window into a future creative commons, one that promises us more freedom but which only offers a model of what that future might feel like.

Ambience, in its association with ‘background noise’ or ‘room temperature’, is most readily associated with the captivating immersive atmosphere of the bazaar and with the lack of ‘perspective’ it offers us. In order to get a clear picture of things, one free of static, such ambience is the snow that needs to be identified and discounted, an interloper to be calibrated out of the experiment. It is in this sense that Paul Virilio rallies against “soronity” and its “prosecution of silence”. For Virilio, silence is voiceless in today’s carnival culture of mash-ups, babble and chatter. This creates an impossible bind in which mutism signifies only consent to the omnipresent clamour of the souk. The choice to remain thoughtfully silent has been taken away by the increasing volume of noise, a buzz amplifed by a recently newly unleashed market of long-tailed aficionados.

The shockwave of repercussion that this participatory folksonomy has generated is tsunami-like. It promises to overshadow our established ideas about cultural canonisation, the social production of taste. Everyone wants their voice to be heard, and everyone now has a way of making it this happen. There is certainly truth in the observation that people, spaces and things can longer be considered mute in the way that Virillo seems to imagine they may once have been; everything is vacuumed into the semantic web of interference that denies autonomy. Soronity is a black hole, the louder it gets the more attractive its magnetism; it has no respite.

User-oriented design is concerned with this kind of transubstantiation, with the object as Host. Such designs have interpretive flexibility that proprietorial design attempts to withhold; they are resources to be cracked, taken-apart, reassembled, resurrected, cooked, remixed, recycled – the full knowledge of a new life is at our fingertips. Of course, we don’t need transformation design to award us this license, albeit that it might show us the way. The cult of the amateur enthusiast – Charles Leadbeater’s pro-am, had tended to trailblaze this process of design deregulation. In electronics, circuit bending has been going on as long as there have been circuits. Making playful new connections between circuits allows different, unexpected results opening up closed devices to different possibilities.

Does jamming leave any space for ‘professional’ auteurist art and design practice? If we are always in the middle, how might we slow down and gain some perspective from which to re-articulate and redirect the world we inhabit? Are mash-ups part of this problem? Can clarity ever come in the form of more noise? Virilio is unambiguous in his condemnation of this static. But this is to leave us with no possibility for that there might be different degrees of participation, gradations of volume, or different qualities of timbre, tone and pitch. Perhaps it’s only the concept of silence that can be prosecuted by soronity since true silence does not exist – we cannot eliminate or hide from resonance and reverberations. The conch shell will always pick up the faintest whisper from the ambient air that surrounds us. Cultural static may be loud or soft, diagetic or non-diagetic. It can come from beyond, but it can just as easily come from within. Cultural static may be dampened, re-directed or re-mixed, but it cannot be muted.

An awareness of or attention to ambience is one of the things that might provide us with a measure of perspective. An ambient approach to cultural practice is one that is lateral and always in the process of establishing its relation to its context. It is an approach that can filter through sanctioned transmissions to provide audiences with a few brief moments of clarity.

The jump-cuts of a mash-up, can be a way of making sense of the cacophony of objects, images, sounds and data – mixing them to procure different interpretations or inflating the rhetoric of the sources to the point of absurdity. Equally Virilio’s mutism – slow, calming, minimalist breaks in the media flow, refusals to signify – might facilitate moments of reflection. Minimalism and mash-ups are never silent, both have timbre, texture and volume. Mutism and soronity may appear to be at opposite ends of the dial, but, its important to note, that they occupy the same dial. There are no limits in either direction. Like Winston Smith’s TV, there’s no off switch.

The formalist problems that modernists wrangled with in abstraction – binary compositional issues of figure/ground, foreground/background, signal/noise, looking/seeing – are no longer seen as solvable problems when we think about them in this way. They are a form of self-diagnosis. A more holistic spectral analysis leads to an acceptance, rightly or wrongly, of in medias res, that the form is the field. If we accept that the primacy of the plateau, we need to figure out how and when to turn the dial, of which fader to push in which direction. If all of culture occupies the same terrain and is thus a form of tangential interference – what makes some of it ambient is its tactical lateralness, its bespoke stealth, its unpredicability. This, then, is a question of performance.

The field is played like an instrument. Unique timbre, assonance and dissonance, are produced by different agents jamming and drifting with the field. In ambient music this field-play is associated with quietness, gentleness, irregular repeating structures, limited parameters, layered textures, decorativeness and spatiality. Ambient music is characterised by its middle-ness, it appears to be part of a continuum of sound. The tactics or effects ambient engages with may be reproducible, but the timbre, the texture is unique. Just as the performance of a score will produce different results each time, so the re-performance of a jam will produce a different effect.

Find out more about Neil Mulholland & Tayto et Tayto here.

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Mix-Blog: A bit like a mix-tape but with blogs instead. Read more from the series here.