ANEMICodeCINEMA by Andy Deck - Media Player Haters Unite :: ANEMICodeCINEMA is a free interpretation of privatized data streams, digital encryption and encoding mired in secrecy and exclusivity. It’s a premonition of future histories lost in translation. Already video and audio are often unusable and scrambled for people who do not use the dominant operating system. As time passes and data encryption secrets are forgotten, this fractured experience of today’s audio and video may become the norm rather than the exception. In the rush to secure and control digital media protocols, corporate influence has done as much to prevent communication as to enable it. This imperious coercion often goes unnoticed. But today’s encoded and encrypted media will not fall simply into the public domain. ANEMICodeCINEMA offers a glimpse of the media protocol power struggle. Paradoxically, incompatible digital video decoders can produce artifacts that are fascinating as well as frustrating: an aesthetic of dysfunction.

Video artifacts seen in ANEMICodeCINEMA were taken from encrypted DVD and Windows Media video sources (including Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema) and decoded using free, open source software. This work is dedicated to the authors of patent-free audiovisual protocols and software.

After years of waiting for Macromedia / Adobe to release Linux-compatible versions of its Flash player, it appears the trouble with codecs will resume with Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin. Although promoted as “cross-platform,” there is no mention of support for Linux or other free, open source operating systems. Such privately controlled and patented codecs and protocols coerce content developers to exclude audiences.