Talking Back to TV

First, a quick bit of bureacracy: I'm now cross-posting to DreamWidth (same username), so if you're reading primarily on DreamWidth these days, feel free to add me to your DW circle and I'll happily reciprocate.

And now, the main business of this post.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to give a presentation about my current research to the UMM campus community as part of our Thursday Afternoon Faculty Seminar (TAFS) series, and it reminded me how lucky I am to be at a school with such terrific students and such supportive colleagues. Quite a number of students showed up; it was wonderful to look out at the audience and see Caitlin, Josh, Katrina, Meaghan, Sophie, and Taryn, and a few students I didn't even know! And so many of my colleagues came as well, not just from English and Communication, Media, & Rhetoric, but from Anthropology, Art History, Biology, Computer Science, French, from media services, from the library.

And I got to talk to all of these people about vids!

( more about the presentation under the cut )

( outline of the presentation )

Possibly my favorite part was after the presentation was over. A colleague and partner who are fans themselves (which I hadn't known!) came up to tell me that they appreciated hearing fans presented more positively than we often are (I should hope so! This is my own life I'm talking about here!), and to ask whether I'd seen "Women's Work" (why yes, yes I have). Another colleague came up to tell me about her experience making slide shows ("with strobe lights!") in the women's center at her college in the '70s. A student and I chatted about her interest in anime and manga (and I had to admit that my knowledge is almost all second-hand, although I did put my minimal familiarity with AMVs at her disposal). And this morning I got an email from a colleague in Computer Science telling me about Kolmogorov complexity and mulling over the ways in which it's related to what I'm writing about. Interdisciplinarity FTW!

The presentation was recorded and will at some point be available as a podcast; I'll provide a link once it's up. I admit I'm a little nervous about linking to it; as I said to someone after the presentation, nobody close-reads like fans do, and I'm fairly sure that anyone scrutinizing the presentation will find hundreds of things I could have explained more clearly, vids I should have mentioned and didn't, and so on. I just have to keep reminding myself that this presentation, like so much of my academic work, wasn't really for fans (though I was grateful to have fans there in the audience!). As fans, we do an excellent job of explaining ourselves to ourselves in ways that make sense to us; we don't need academics to explain us. But academics frequently don't know much about fandom at all, let alone the complexity and intelligence of fannish endeavor, or the ways in which understanding fannish endeavor might help us better understand things outside fandom, and that's the kind of work that I'm attempting to do in my current projects.

And speaking of current projects, I should be posting excerpts from or possibly .pdfs of forthcoming articles sometime next week. I'll be posting under lock, but am happy to give access to anyone who's interested.

If you want to hear the presentations from the IP/Gender Symposium--including, but not limited to, mine--they're all available as podcasts. For more information about speakers and topics, including which speakers are on which panels, check the schedule. (I'm the third speaker of the first panel.)

Last night I spent a couple of hours watching and talking about vids with one of my senior colleagues who watches no TV and very few movies, listens to very little contemporary popular music, and generally doesn't engage much with pop culture. The goal was not to convert her to vidwatching--that was something of a non-starter, as you might imagine--but to familiarize her with what I do when I watch and write about vids; she suggested the session herself because she wants to be able to speak knowledgeably and effectively about my work when my tenure case is reviewed next year, which was an exceptionally kind overture for her to make, especially given her lack of personal interest in all things pop cultural, let alone fannish.

We watched sockkpuppett's "Vogue" and sisabet's "Ring Them Bells," since she's read my article manuscript about them, and then flummery's "Haunted."

Afterwards she turned to me and said "So most vids are based on movies and TV shows that are science fictional or feature lots of violence? Are there any happy vids?"

And while I could truthfully say that yes, there are happy vids and that no, not all vid source is science fictional or violent, I have to admit that I couldn't come up with a lot of examples. (In my defense, I was working off the VividCon DVDs, and the VividCon Premieres vidshows are famously heavy on the angst and light on the light-hearted.) I did show her tv_elf's "I Walk the Line" (because, hey, penguins!) and destina's "To Touch the Face of God" (because I had forgotten the explosion in the middle--oops), which are both lovely, though very different. We talked about why vidders (and fans more generally) gravitate towards the kinds of shows that we do, and also about how what vidders do is constrained by what's on TV, and how this affects, for example, the kinds of stories vidders can tell about women. I referenced geekturnedvamp's terrific "Relationships Between Women" vidshow... and am realizing as I type this that I should have showed my colleague fan_eunice's "Whatever It Takes," which I am now adding to my mental list of "intro vids for non-fans."

But now that I'm thinking about it, I would really like a better answer to the original question. So: what are your favorite vids that don't feature violence? I'll take recs of vids made from source that doesn't emphasize that kind of conflict or vids in which the vidder somehow worked around the guns and blood. 'Shipper vid recs are welcome, and in fact I could think of a fair number of 'ship vids that don't feature violence (and a fair number that do--oh, Buffy), but I find that 'ship vids tend to be fairly context dependent and also not particularly interesting to people not already invested in the relationship, so I'm primarily looking for other kinds of vids--though really, everything is fair game.

All thoughts welcome!

This blog is mostly for nattering on about research-related topics, but in this case... well, there's a connection, as you'll see.

I opened the campus paper this morning to read the annual Valentine's Day LoveLines feature, and found this:

Tisha
You really are my biggest fan, and your students appreciate it. <3
Joss Whedon

Best. LoveLine. Ever. It's like they know me!

Maybe I'll let my seminar watch "Out of Gas" in class after all. ♥

I've been working on this new vid-related research agenda for just about six months now, so I think it's time to pause and take stock of what I've gotten done in that time.

( grant proposals )

( conference proposals )

( paper proposals )

( other )

All of which is to say: I've been busy, and wow, I am tired. But some good things are already happening, and I hope for more to come. Thanks to everybody who's already helped nudge my thinking through e-mail conversations and comments on posts; it's much appreciated.

I'm starting to think about the paper I'm writing for Film and Film Culture--no actual reading or writing yet, just some back-burner pondering. This post is sort of a warm-up for beginning that paper; I want to try to articulate a few general thoughts about TV and movie vids. I'm particularly interested in the reasons that vidders make (and viewers watch) TV and movie vids, and in the conditions that govern viewer responses to them.

( TV and movie vids )

( context & accessibility )

( Vogue )

Looking back over this post, it occurs to me that the real distinction might not be between TV and movie vids but between vids for source texts that have extensive and elaborated fannish activity and source texts that have smaller or less active fandoms (which also allows for change over time as shows gain fans or go off the air and the popularity of a particular movie explodes and then wanes)--a distinction that maps only partially and incompletely onto the TV/movie difference.

I should mention, too, that I know I'm oversimplifying by categorizing possible audiences into "fannish vidwatchers" and "nonfannish viewers." There are plenty of fans who just don't get vids, and plenty of others who come to like them eventually but take a while to get there; and there are people who aren't involved in media fandom but who know quite a bit about other aspects of remix culture; and there are people who aren't in fandom but whom we might describe as proto-fannish: they may not know much about fandom, but they're savvy readers of media texts, and when shown vids (especially vids for shows they like) they grasp the concept and understand the appeal pretty quickly. So we've actually got... not so much a continuum as a graph where X = fannish tendencies and Y = interest in DIY video, and individual people may be anywhere on that grid.

Which makes me think about Jason Mittell's thoughts on "Vogue" and Scooby Road, which I haven't engaged at all in this post. Mittell claims that Scooby Road is a better introduction to vidding than "Vogue" for someone who's an "outsider," who isn't, to use a phrase he borrows from Luminosity, a "contextual fan," but in fact his post suggests that Scooby Road works for him precisely because it enables him to position himself as an insider and to be a contextual fan: he knows Buffy, he loves Abbey Road, he's found a vid that celebrates things he's already inclined to celebrate. And that speaks, I think, to the way that fandom is a matter not just of seeing in similar (or at least related) ways, but of wanting similar (or at least related) things. Mittell dismisses most of the vids on Kristina Busse's list of recommended vids, saying that they left him "underwhelmed," which is fair; I've been underwhelmed by plenty of vids, and I love vids, plus, while I think most of the vids Busse recommends are terrific (at least the ones I've seen), I have reservations about some of them as intro material for non-fans. But I think that it's a little disingenuous to suggest that Scooby Road is necessarily a better introduction to vidding than "Vogue" (or many of the other vids on Busse's list); it was better for Mittell, it might have been better for me had I not already been sold on vids, but that's hardly a definitive sample. As a counter-example, I think of a proto-fannish colleague of mine who would, I suspect, find Scooby Road profoundly boring because she isn't interested in Buffy and isn't a Beatles fan, but who took to sockkpuppett's Highlander vid "Ability to Swing" like a duck to water because she is 100% on board with the premise that Duncan's hotness should be celebrated.

Which brings us back, once again, to the balance of context and content.

In the comments to my previous post on narrative, cryptoxin raised some really thoughtful questions which prompted me to start clarifying my thinking on a couple of points. I'm reproducing the questions and (slightly edited and expanded versions of) my answers here for my own reference.

( Are you saying here that all vids are narratives -- or at least can be read/viewed as narratives -- from a narrative theory perspective? )

( If not all vids count or function as narratology-style narratives, what would constitute a non-narrative vid in narratological terms? Or are vids necessarily entwined with narrative, even when they're not, in fannish vidding genre terms, narrative vids? )

( And for that matter, would all of the songs that vidders use also be considered narratives, or only certain kinds of songs with lyrics that tell or imply a story? )

I recently applied for, and received, a $1500 grant to launch a new research project related to vids and vidding. The money's for books, and I'm having a great time purchasing all sorts of texts that I've been wanting to read for a while now: books on fan studies and new media and cultural studies, but also on narrative and composition and literacy studies.

And I'm in the process of applying for a single-semester leave--a paid leave in which I'd take a semester off from teaching in order to write and do research. (I'll need at least two months just to read all the books I'm ordering!) It'll be a while before I know the results, but I live in hope.

( So why this LJ? )

I'm writing within as well as about the fannish community--but I will also ultimately be writing for an academic community. When I do write about vids and vidding for an academic audience, my goal is not to come in and carve up fandom and its creative practices with the power tools of academic analysis. I'm guided by a couple of examples that I might as well explain here.

( bell hooks )

( James Gee )

And what am I actually writing about? Here's an overview:

I'm interested in vids in three academic capacities: as a teacher and scholar of writing, as a rhetorical theorist, and as a narrative theorist. I'm fascinated by vidding partly because of the ways it is both like and unlike writing, and especially unlike the school-writing that composition scholars often study. Vidding is something that vidders do voluntarily, and on which they often expend quite extraordinary amounts of time and thought, and in this sense, despite being amateurs, vidders are much more like professional writers than like student writers. A vid is "a visual essay that stages an argument," as Francesca Coppa puts it, but it's also a very specific kind of narrative, a narrative that responds to and transforms other narratives. One of the many things I love about vids is that they're both of those things at the same time, which is a possibility that most theories either of rhetoric or of narrative fail to account for.

I'm also interested in the vidding community's collective insightfulness about making and watching vids; many vidders write extensively about vidding, either in posts of their own or in comments to other people's posts. There has been quite a lot of homegrown theorizing (about the creative process, about genre, about audience) that I think has the potential to illuminate academic conversations about the processes of composing and revising, about giving and responding to feedback on works-in-progress, about developing the authority needed to enter an academic conversation--or, in this case, to talk back to TV.

I'm interested in using academic theories to illuminate aspects of vidding, but, like Gee, I'm also interested in the relationship the other way around: What can scholars in narratology and rhetoric and composition learn from the processes and strategies of vidders? How do vids and vidders complicate existing theories?

I think that's it for now; I'll write more about my specific areas of interest in future posts.