Originality, transformation, repetition
Mar. 28th, 2013 03:16 pmI spent yesterday morning looking through the sixteen (!) pages of outtakes from Toward an Ecology of Vidding" and trying to figure out how many of those paragraphs/sentences/fragments deserve an attempt to incorporate them into the book. (Verdict: not many. Currently feeling extra-grateful for beta readers who insist on coherence and concision.)
I did, though, have some notes on Louisa Stein & Kristina Busse’s "Limit Play: Fan Authorship between Source Text, Intertext, and Context," a really smart essay that has what I think are some terrific insights about fannish celebrations of repetition:
( quotes, thoughts, and Calvin & Hobbes under the cut )
I did, though, have some notes on Louisa Stein & Kristina Busse’s "Limit Play: Fan Authorship between Source Text, Intertext, and Context," a really smart essay that has what I think are some terrific insights about fannish celebrations of repetition:
( quotes, thoughts, and Calvin & Hobbes under the cut )
I'll be doing a livecast Google hangout this afternoon, a conversation about the DMCA sponsored by the Daily Dot and the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture.
Rebecca Tushnet and I will be talking about our roles in the fight for the recent DMCA exemption for vidders and other remix video artists; you can read more about us and the other panelists at the Daily Dot.
You can watch the livecast at the Daily Dot or at NAMAC.
To comment or ask questions via Twitter, use the hashtags #InterActs #DMCA, or direct questions to @InterActsOnline.
After the conversation, the Daily Dot and NAMAC will post summaries of the broadcast and/or embed the videos on their respective websites, so if you miss the livecast (apparently some people have to be at work on a Wednesday afternoon—imagine that), you can catch up later.
Rebecca Tushnet and I will be talking about our roles in the fight for the recent DMCA exemption for vidders and other remix video artists; you can read more about us and the other panelists at the Daily Dot.
You can watch the livecast at the Daily Dot or at NAMAC.
To comment or ask questions via Twitter, use the hashtags #InterActs #DMCA, or direct questions to @InterActsOnline.
After the conversation, the Daily Dot and NAMAC will post summaries of the broadcast and/or embed the videos on their respective websites, so if you miss the livecast (apparently some people have to be at work on a Wednesday afternoon—imagine that), you can catch up later.
Defining vids, defining source
Mar. 14th, 2013 05:59 pmOne of the nicest thing about the guest lecture I did earlier this week was that, because the students in the audience had been studying vids and vidding for a couple of weeks already, I didn't have to go through the basics of What Is A Vid?, the way I usually have to do at conference presentations and even research presentations on my own campus. Such a relief!
When I asked the students in the audience what a vid is, a hand shot up immediately: "It's a visual essay that stages an argument!" Another student added that it's not just a visual essay; music matters too. So, yes, we might say a multimedia essay that stages an argument. And from there I went on to poke at the definition from another direction: for whom is the argument staged? how is it staged? Answering those questions is, for me, where things start to get really interesting.
One of the exciting things about working on vids right now is that we have this solid working definition that Coppa articulates in the essay linked above, but we also have lots of room—and lots of reasons—to expand and negotiate and explore that definition, which is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. A multimedia essay that stages an argument: What does that definition leave out? What kinds of vids, what kind of fannish activity through vidding, does it leave out?
The definition (and especially the subsequent claim about vids being "akin to arts criticism") implies, I think, that the argument is about the film or television show from which the video clips are taken. This is pretty clearly true the vast majority of the time, but it's not true all the time, right? To take just one example: To say that "I Swear" is an argument about Smallville may not be inaccurate, exactly, but it is certainly, er, incomplete. And if a vid received with as much joyful shrieking as "I Swear" isn't covered by that definition, then the definition needs further refining. Vids like "Anything For Love" and other meta-vids clearly make arguments, but, again, they're not just arguments about the source of the clips.
Looking back at that last paragraph and the words I chose for it, I find myself asking: What is it that we're talking about when we talk about source? What does that language do for us, and what can't it do? When vidders talk about source, it typically means the thing that's ripped or downloaded and then clipped and edited to make a vid. But what would it mean—artistically, legally—to think of the source of vids (some vids? all vids?) being vidders themselves or fandom itself, the way that the source of a painting is the painter's ideas and vision? What happens if we think of and talk about shows/films as tools or materials, like words or paint or the fabric that gets cut up for quilts?
Maybe this is just semantics. But I think about what a difference it makes to some of my students, when they're working on research papers, to stop thinking of secondary materials as sources and start thinking of their own questions as the sources of the paper, and I'm not so sure.
When I asked the students in the audience what a vid is, a hand shot up immediately: "It's a visual essay that stages an argument!" Another student added that it's not just a visual essay; music matters too. So, yes, we might say a multimedia essay that stages an argument. And from there I went on to poke at the definition from another direction: for whom is the argument staged? how is it staged? Answering those questions is, for me, where things start to get really interesting.
One of the exciting things about working on vids right now is that we have this solid working definition that Coppa articulates in the essay linked above, but we also have lots of room—and lots of reasons—to expand and negotiate and explore that definition, which is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. A multimedia essay that stages an argument: What does that definition leave out? What kinds of vids, what kind of fannish activity through vidding, does it leave out?
The definition (and especially the subsequent claim about vids being "akin to arts criticism") implies, I think, that the argument is about the film or television show from which the video clips are taken. This is pretty clearly true the vast majority of the time, but it's not true all the time, right? To take just one example: To say that "I Swear" is an argument about Smallville may not be inaccurate, exactly, but it is certainly, er, incomplete. And if a vid received with as much joyful shrieking as "I Swear" isn't covered by that definition, then the definition needs further refining. Vids like "Anything For Love" and other meta-vids clearly make arguments, but, again, they're not just arguments about the source of the clips.
Looking back at that last paragraph and the words I chose for it, I find myself asking: What is it that we're talking about when we talk about source? What does that language do for us, and what can't it do? When vidders talk about source, it typically means the thing that's ripped or downloaded and then clipped and edited to make a vid. But what would it mean—artistically, legally—to think of the source of vids (some vids? all vids?) being vidders themselves or fandom itself, the way that the source of a painting is the painter's ideas and vision? What happens if we think of and talk about shows/films as tools or materials, like words or paint or the fabric that gets cut up for quilts?
Maybe this is just semantics. But I think about what a difference it makes to some of my students, when they're working on research papers, to stop thinking of secondary materials as sources and start thinking of their own questions as the sources of the paper, and I'm not so sure.
I just read Rebecca Tushnet's "Judges as Bad Reviewers: Fair Use and Epistemological Humility," a fascinating and highly readable analysis of the ways in which copyright fair use cases turn on judges' willingness to acknowledge that texts can be interpreted in many ways; Tushnet uses vids as case studies. (Full disclosure: I'm cited in it! That is never not going to be exciting.)
Given last week's post on best vs. favorites, I was particularly struck by this bit, which is about the importance of explaining criteria for judgment:
Tushnet goes on to explain the main problem with current practice:
What I found especially interesting was her analysis of a specific case (Blanch v. Koons) in which appropriation artist Jeff Koons' use of a copy of a fashion photograph was found to be fair use: the court deferred to Koons' own account of his reasons for using the photo—and by "[s]hifting to a particular expert, the artist himself, the court left the structure of expertise intact." As Tushnet explains,
Not surprisingly, that passage also made me think of the DMCA hearings, where my primary value was not my academic credentials (except indirectly, insofar as the nature of my employment allows me to be cheerfully matter-of-fact about my fan activities) and certainly not my legal expertise (of which I have exactly none) but my willingness and ability to speak as an artist expressing intention: "This is what I need and this is why I need it." That kind of performance is always weird for me because I am hyper-aware of all the ways in which I can't speak for all fans or all fan video artists or even all vidders; I can only speak as one member of those larger groups.
Tushnet's article shows, I think, why we need both to encourage fans who can do that kind of speaking to do it (because many fans, for any of a variety of reasons, are not in that position) and to change the cultures—legal and otherwise—that value artistic expertise/authority at the expense of interpretive multiplicity.
I mean, that's a huge part of the point of fandom, right? Do all the readings! Make all the meanings! Explore every possible option in as many ways as possible! One of the many reasons that vids and vidding appeal to me is precisely that they're not one person's art project; rather, they're embedded in a whole ecosystem of overlapping and intersecting and sometimes contradictory projects and goals and ideals and interests. That's what makes it fun.
Given last week's post on best vs. favorites, I was particularly struck by this bit, which is about the importance of explaining criteria for judgment:
[W]hen it comes to literary judgments, the bad reviewer is the one who insists that a work has only one meaning, and announces the bottom line as if it were an absolute. A good reviewer explains the sources of her judgment, making room for other interpretations, which may be one reason that a well-written negative review can be extremely helpful to someone deciding to go ahead and buy the book anyway.
Tushnet goes on to explain the main problem with current practice:
Unfortunately, copyright fair use cases rarely acknowledge multiplicity of meaning. Instead, even a defendant-favorable fair use case tends to fix one meaning to the plaintiff’s work and another meaning or purpose to the defendant’s work, and then declare them different enough that the defendant’s use is transformative and therefore fair.
What I found especially interesting was her analysis of a specific case (Blanch v. Koons) in which appropriation artist Jeff Koons' use of a copy of a fashion photograph was found to be fair use: the court deferred to Koons' own account of his reasons for using the photo—and by "[s]hifting to a particular expert, the artist himself, the court left the structure of expertise intact." As Tushnet explains,
fair use was determined not on the basis of potential audiences’ understandings of new meanings from the accused work, but on the ability of the artist to express his intentions.... Thus, rather than accepting that multiple meanings and interpretations can coexist, the court picked a side in a contest about true meaning, not unlike a ruling in a contracts case.
Not surprisingly, that passage also made me think of the DMCA hearings, where my primary value was not my academic credentials (except indirectly, insofar as the nature of my employment allows me to be cheerfully matter-of-fact about my fan activities) and certainly not my legal expertise (of which I have exactly none) but my willingness and ability to speak as an artist expressing intention: "This is what I need and this is why I need it." That kind of performance is always weird for me because I am hyper-aware of all the ways in which I can't speak for all fans or all fan video artists or even all vidders; I can only speak as one member of those larger groups.
Tushnet's article shows, I think, why we need both to encourage fans who can do that kind of speaking to do it (because many fans, for any of a variety of reasons, are not in that position) and to change the cultures—legal and otherwise—that value artistic expertise/authority at the expense of interpretive multiplicity.
I mean, that's a huge part of the point of fandom, right? Do all the readings! Make all the meanings! Explore every possible option in as many ways as possible! One of the many reasons that vids and vidding appeal to me is precisely that they're not one person's art project; rather, they're embedded in a whole ecosystem of overlapping and intersecting and sometimes contradictory projects and goals and ideals and interests. That's what makes it fun.
Fandom: best vs. favorite
Mar. 4th, 2013 06:42 pmI haven't been posting here, even though I've been in research mode lately, because I've been trying to channel my writing energy into other projects. But I'm starting to accumulate lots of little ideas that I don't know whether or how to incorporate into those projects, so I'm going to start stashing them here and hope that typing them out helps me figure out what to do with them.
I'm doing this partly because I'm inspired/frustrated by the newly retooled Fanhackers—what used to be TWC's Symposium blog: inspired because I love seeing these quotes and snippets of conversation showing up in my RSS feed, frustrated because the site is built on Tumblr and, god, don't even get me started on Tumblr; the short version is that I love it for a lot of things but I hate it for conversation. I mean, I know it's possible to have conversations via Tumblr—plenty of people do—but the site is not built for that, doesn't facilitate it, and I have lost whatever inclination I might once have had to fight my way through the structural and visual obstacles. My reaction to Fanhackers is much like![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
elf's: "I'm enjoying; I'm not figuring out what else to do with it." Bring on the quotes and the animated gifsets, is what I'm saying.
Anyway! What I'm writing about today is something I've been thinking about since the annual "Best of" lists started circulating in December, and it is this:
One of the things I love about fandom is that fandom, for the most part, operates not on a "these are the best things" model (where the criteria for "best" are typically undefined yet implied to be shared by all right-thinking people) but on a "these are my favorite things" model, which can be frustrating but is also wonderfully democratic. There are exceptions, of course, like The Fourth Wall and Driver Picks The Music and plenty of other award sites—though it's worth noting that those sites are often much more clear about criteria for judgment than non-fannish critics and awards are. But mostly fandom runs not on awards but on recs and (increasingly?) on content searching. Recs may take the form of simple recirculation—reblogs on Tumblr, for example, though even there some fans manage to squeeze a remarkable amount of information about the reasons for their reblog into the tags—but many are quite thoughtful and explicit about why the reccer liked what she liked; I saw this in many of the Festivds rec posts from January. Fandom does not, for the most part, assume that what "best" means is a) self-evident or b) shared by everyone, though it does generally assume that if one person likes it then somewhere out there is someone else who will like it too. (That's Yuletide and Festivids in a nutshell, right?)
What I appreciate about this culture of favorites, with all the reccing and tagging and reblogging that it entails, is that fandom encourages us to think about what we like, to articulate what we like, and in some cases to organize remarkable metadata structures around what we like—I'm thinking, for example, of the various kink meme (and other prompt meme) bookmark lists on pinboard and delicious, such as the![[livejournal.com profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sherlockbbc_fic pinboard archive where one can sort by very specific combinations of tags in order to filter content. (Some of the trope overlap possibilities are amazing, for values of "amazing" that range from "yes of course omg" to "hilarious" to "I don't know how this exists but I love it.")
I don't want to be inappropriately utopian here. One of the reasons that the FAQs for these memes are so careful to define and forbid kinkshaming is that it does happen; "your kink [or pairing, characterization, genre preference, etc.] is not my kink and that's okay" is not as universally observed as we might hope. But there is a sense that this attitude ought to be the way that one approaches fandom, that we are, collectively, trying not just to make space for but to faciliate, to make visible and accessible, a wide range of desires and preferences along a variety of vectors: sexual, narrative, aesthetic. Which is very cool.
As a side note, the behind-the-scenes work that goes into reccing, reblogging, running awards sites, administering prompt memes, tagging for meme archives, etc., is why I get so frustrated with definitions of "fan work" that focus primarily on writing fic and making vids and ignore or handwave all the other kinds of work that make my daily fannish experience what it is. Fandom runs on the engine of production, but a lot of what we produce is information, architecture, access, not just artifacts.
I'm doing this partly because I'm inspired/frustrated by the newly retooled Fanhackers—what used to be TWC's Symposium blog: inspired because I love seeing these quotes and snippets of conversation showing up in my RSS feed, frustrated because the site is built on Tumblr and, god, don't even get me started on Tumblr; the short version is that I love it for a lot of things but I hate it for conversation. I mean, I know it's possible to have conversations via Tumblr—plenty of people do—but the site is not built for that, doesn't facilitate it, and I have lost whatever inclination I might once have had to fight my way through the structural and visual obstacles. My reaction to Fanhackers is much like
elf's: "I'm enjoying; I'm not figuring out what else to do with it." Bring on the quotes and the animated gifsets, is what I'm saying.Anyway! What I'm writing about today is something I've been thinking about since the annual "Best of" lists started circulating in December, and it is this:
One of the things I love about fandom is that fandom, for the most part, operates not on a "these are the best things" model (where the criteria for "best" are typically undefined yet implied to be shared by all right-thinking people) but on a "these are my favorite things" model, which can be frustrating but is also wonderfully democratic. There are exceptions, of course, like The Fourth Wall and Driver Picks The Music and plenty of other award sites—though it's worth noting that those sites are often much more clear about criteria for judgment than non-fannish critics and awards are. But mostly fandom runs not on awards but on recs and (increasingly?) on content searching. Recs may take the form of simple recirculation—reblogs on Tumblr, for example, though even there some fans manage to squeeze a remarkable amount of information about the reasons for their reblog into the tags—but many are quite thoughtful and explicit about why the reccer liked what she liked; I saw this in many of the Festivds rec posts from January. Fandom does not, for the most part, assume that what "best" means is a) self-evident or b) shared by everyone, though it does generally assume that if one person likes it then somewhere out there is someone else who will like it too. (That's Yuletide and Festivids in a nutshell, right?)
What I appreciate about this culture of favorites, with all the reccing and tagging and reblogging that it entails, is that fandom encourages us to think about what we like, to articulate what we like, and in some cases to organize remarkable metadata structures around what we like—I'm thinking, for example, of the various kink meme (and other prompt meme) bookmark lists on pinboard and delicious, such as the
sherlockbbc_fic pinboard archive where one can sort by very specific combinations of tags in order to filter content. (Some of the trope overlap possibilities are amazing, for values of "amazing" that range from "yes of course omg" to "hilarious" to "I don't know how this exists but I love it.")I don't want to be inappropriately utopian here. One of the reasons that the FAQs for these memes are so careful to define and forbid kinkshaming is that it does happen; "your kink [or pairing, characterization, genre preference, etc.] is not my kink and that's okay" is not as universally observed as we might hope. But there is a sense that this attitude ought to be the way that one approaches fandom, that we are, collectively, trying not just to make space for but to faciliate, to make visible and accessible, a wide range of desires and preferences along a variety of vectors: sexual, narrative, aesthetic. Which is very cool.
As a side note, the behind-the-scenes work that goes into reccing, reblogging, running awards sites, administering prompt memes, tagging for meme archives, etc., is why I get so frustrated with definitions of "fan work" that focus primarily on writing fic and making vids and ignore or handwave all the other kinds of work that make my daily fannish experience what it is. Fandom runs on the engine of production, but a lot of what we produce is information, architecture, access, not just artifacts.
DMCA: We did it again!
Oct. 26th, 2012 02:05 pmThe U.S. Register of Copyrights has recommended that the noncommercial remix exemption from last time around be a) renewed, and b) expanded to include online services (iTunes, Amazon Unbox, etc). Rebecca Tushnet has posted about it here, and giandujakiss has a very helpful step-by-step breakdown of the context for the decision.
I am really excited to have been part of this process, and really grateful to everyone who got involved -- the OTW and EFF legal teams, obviously, especially Rebecca Tushnet and Francesca Coppa, whose testimony was so persuasive, and all the many vidders and other remix artists who submitted comments and suggested vids to discuss and let us talk about their work and cite their posts. This was a group effort in the best possible way.
Not all the exemption requests were as successful as ours; I'm especially disappointed that HD/Blu-Ray content isn't covered. But we have a couple of years to get ready to re-fight that fight. In the meantime, I'm pretty damn happy about what we accomplished.
All of this excitement reminds me that I never did post my account of the testimony Q&A session in which one of the industry lawyers attempted to mansplain video capture and frame size to me. Maybe I will do that this weekend, since now I can do it with a smug smile rather than gritted teeth of fury. Because WE WON.
giandujakiss has a very helpful step-by-step breakdown of the context for the decision.I am really excited to have been part of this process, and really grateful to everyone who got involved -- the OTW and EFF legal teams, obviously, especially Rebecca Tushnet and Francesca Coppa, whose testimony was so persuasive, and all the many vidders and other remix artists who submitted comments and suggested vids to discuss and let us talk about their work and cite their posts. This was a group effort in the best possible way.
Not all the exemption requests were as successful as ours; I'm especially disappointed that HD/Blu-Ray content isn't covered. But we have a couple of years to get ready to re-fight that fight. In the meantime, I'm pretty damn happy about what we accomplished.
All of this excitement reminds me that I never did post my account of the testimony Q&A session in which one of the industry lawyers attempted to mansplain video capture and frame size to me. Maybe I will do that this weekend, since now I can do it with a smug smile rather than gritted teeth of fury. Because WE WON.
After my last post, I realized belatedly that I've never officially mentioned the book project I'm working on, though a few of you have kindly listened to me go on (and on and on) about it offline and/or in private.
The short version is that I am working on a book proposal for the University of Iowa Press, which is starting a new fan studies series. An editor at the press contacted me a while back and asked if I'd like to write a book for them, to which I said "...um, okay," because while I hadn't given much thought to writing a book about vids (my last book-length project was my PhD dissertation, which primarily inspires thoughts of oh god never again no way), I am not so stupid that I'd say no to that question when somebody from an actual university press comes asking.
I hasten to add that the book is not a done deal: There's no contract, I haven't even turned in the proposal yet, etc. But I am, to my own surprise, actually excited about the prospect. Or at least more excited than terrified. Most days. *facepalm*
( more under the cut )
So that is what I've been thinking about for the past week, partly just because I think it's interesting but also because I think it's something that might be useful in fan studies even outside the relatively small circle of people who are interested in vids specifically.
The short version is that I am working on a book proposal for the University of Iowa Press, which is starting a new fan studies series. An editor at the press contacted me a while back and asked if I'd like to write a book for them, to which I said "...um, okay," because while I hadn't given much thought to writing a book about vids (my last book-length project was my PhD dissertation, which primarily inspires thoughts of oh god never again no way), I am not so stupid that I'd say no to that question when somebody from an actual university press comes asking.
I hasten to add that the book is not a done deal: There's no contract, I haven't even turned in the proposal yet, etc. But I am, to my own surprise, actually excited about the prospect. Or at least more excited than terrified. Most days. *facepalm*
( more under the cut )
So that is what I've been thinking about for the past week, partly just because I think it's interesting but also because I think it's something that might be useful in fan studies even outside the relatively small circle of people who are interested in vids specifically.
I really should have seen this coming.
Sep. 25th, 2012 10:35 pmYou guys, I have too many thoughts about vids. Way, way too many thoughts about vids.
Like, too many to fit in one book.
*facepalm*
(Why yes, I did always identify with Willow, why do you ask?)
Like, too many to fit in one book.
*facepalm*
(Why yes, I did always identify with Willow, why do you ask?)
DMAC: tools, processes, expectations
Jun. 7th, 2012 04:47 pmI'm currently in Columbus, Ohio for DMAC: Ohio State University's Digital Media and Composition Institute. I'm very glad to be here; I'm finding the instructors helpful, my fellow attendees delightful, and the readings very thought-provoking. But one of our first hands-on projects frustrated me immensely.
Here's what happened: We were assigned a few small projects centering on recording and editing a literacy narrative to submit to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives. (I'll be writing more about the DALN; I would love to see fannish folks contributing narratives about our particular print and media and multimodal literacies, not least because I would love to curate a collection of those narratives. But that's a story for another post!)
We recorded our narratives with some nifty little cameras that can be converted to audio-only; the sound quality wasn't great, but in fairness my partner and I were recording outside, so the wind noise we got was our fault entirely. I mean, I missed using my own equipment, but I could deal with that.
Then we started editing the audio we'd recorded, first to tidy up our narratives and then to use snippets of them to create a PSA for the DALN. ( This is where I started to get cranky. )
Since that early assignment we've had several more assignments, more lab time, more software instruction, and more (though not nearly enough!) discussion of our readings (the curious among you can check out the schedule). I'm hoping to write more about DMAC, but this post has already been delayed long enough by that whole DMCA thing, so I'm going to finish it and go out for Italian food with some of my compatriots and hope my brain is in better shape tomorrow.
Here's what happened: We were assigned a few small projects centering on recording and editing a literacy narrative to submit to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives. (I'll be writing more about the DALN; I would love to see fannish folks contributing narratives about our particular print and media and multimodal literacies, not least because I would love to curate a collection of those narratives. But that's a story for another post!)
We recorded our narratives with some nifty little cameras that can be converted to audio-only; the sound quality wasn't great, but in fairness my partner and I were recording outside, so the wind noise we got was our fault entirely. I mean, I missed using my own equipment, but I could deal with that.
Then we started editing the audio we'd recorded, first to tidy up our narratives and then to use snippets of them to create a PSA for the DALN. ( This is where I started to get cranky. )
Since that early assignment we've had several more assignments, more lab time, more software instruction, and more (though not nearly enough!) discussion of our readings (the curious among you can check out the schedule). I'm hoping to write more about DMAC, but this post has already been delayed long enough by that whole DMCA thing, so I'm going to finish it and go out for Italian food with some of my compatriots and hope my brain is in better shape tomorrow.
DMCA testimony from June 4, 2012
Jun. 6th, 2012 09:51 amOn Monday, June 4, I testified in this year's hearings about exemptions to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Rebecca Tushnet is doing her usual comprehensive write-ups of panels and has already posted her notes from our panel. What I'm posting here are my own notes from which I spoke; as usual, I sort of riffed as I went, so the official transcript, when published, will be slightly different. I've also added, in [brackets], a few comments, elaborations, and clarifications.
I introduced myself and explained my Official Credentials, and then I began...
There were a few moments from the Q&A about which I hope to post in the next day or so, because they were this amazing blend of offensive and hilarious—the short version is that one of the industry lawyers attempted to mansplain video capture and frame size to me and I got to actually say the sentence "Well, the problem with that is that it's not true." But more on that anon.
I introduced myself and explained my Official Credentials, and then I began...
I’m also a vidder myself, and that’s the perspective from which I’ll be speaking today. Professor Tushnet and Professor Coppa have spoken about the legal and cultural aspects of remix video; I’m going to talk about aesthetic and technical concerns.
There are two main points that I want to make: 1) Vidders need high quality source for both rhetorical and aesthetic reasons. 2) The screencapture solution posed at the May 11 Tech Day hearings doesn’t work.
( more about these arguments under the cut! )
There were a few moments from the Q&A about which I hope to post in the next day or so, because they were this amazing blend of offensive and hilarious—the short version is that one of the industry lawyers attempted to mansplain video capture and frame size to me and I got to actually say the sentence "Well, the problem with that is that it's not true." But more on that anon.
Issue no. 9 of Transformative Works and Cultures came out yesterday; it's focused on Fan/Remix Video, and it looks amazing—I am really, really looking forward to reading the whole thing. It includes an essay I wrote with Joshua Johnson, a former student of mine, called "Toward an ecology of vidding." I'm really proud of this essay, and I'm hoping it will form part of the basis for a longer project, so I'm already thinking about how to revise and expand it. If you read it and have thoughts about it, I'd love to hear them; you can post comments at TWC, comment here, send me an email, whatever. All feedback is welcome: points you liked, points you disagreed with, points that need expansion or clarification, things we missed, anything!
As I was re-reading the essay for the final proofreading, I thought of something that was really important to me (I can't speak for Josh here) while we were working on it, but which was a little too meta to easily integrate into the essay itself, so I thought I'd write about it here instead.
One of the things I wanted to do in this essay was to write about a typical vid rather than an unusual vid.
( More about this under the cut )
I suspect that sometimes we downplay 'ship vids because we're worried that other academics won't take those vids seriously, or maybe even because we ourselves are nervous about discussing explicitly romantic vids in an academic context, but as a feminist I worry about this tendency. Saying or implying that 'ship vids aren't serious or aren't worthy of study, or are worthy only if they have some other historical or analytical significance, seems to me to be a profoundly problematic thing to do, so I'm hoping to counter this tendency more explicitly in my upcoming work.
...long post is long, but my point is that I had a blast writing aboutlamardeuse's vid, and I really appreciate her permission to do it, and I want to write more about the kinds of vids that I first fell in love with.
As I was re-reading the essay for the final proofreading, I thought of something that was really important to me (I can't speak for Josh here) while we were working on it, but which was a little too meta to easily integrate into the essay itself, so I thought I'd write about it here instead.
One of the things I wanted to do in this essay was to write about a typical vid rather than an unusual vid.
( More about this under the cut )
I suspect that sometimes we downplay 'ship vids because we're worried that other academics won't take those vids seriously, or maybe even because we ourselves are nervous about discussing explicitly romantic vids in an academic context, but as a feminist I worry about this tendency. Saying or implying that 'ship vids aren't serious or aren't worthy of study, or are worthy only if they have some other historical or analytical significance, seems to me to be a profoundly problematic thing to do, so I'm hoping to counter this tendency more explicitly in my upcoming work.
...long post is long, but my point is that I had a blast writing about
lamardeuse's vid, and I really appreciate her permission to do it, and I want to write more about the kinds of vids that I first fell in love with.Vidders: help renew the DMCA exemption!
Feb. 7th, 2012 08:31 pmVidders and vidwatchers! If you want to help renew the DMCA exemption we won in 2010, now's your chance: submit your comments in support of the exemption proposal by February 10th, 5pm Eastern Time.
You can send comments to OTW's Legal or Vidding committees, or you can send them directly to the Copyright office. If you're submitting directly, be sure to note class “7B” if your comments focus on decrypting DVDs or class “7C” if your comments focus on decrypting legally streamed or downloaded video where the video is not available on DVD. Or you can comment on this post and I'll make sure the comments get where they need to go!
Questions you might want to address (answer as many or as few as you have time for):
In case you don't know the background on this:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) have put together a DMCA exemption proposal asking the Copyright Office to declare that breaking the encryption on DVDs in order to use video clips in primarily noncommercial videos does not violate the DMCA.
We won a similar exemption in 2010, but it will expire if not renewed. Plus, now we're asking for a new exemption for breaking the encryption on video from online download or streaming services (like Amazon Unbox) that’s not available on DVD.
Please signal-boost if you can!
You can send comments to OTW's Legal or Vidding committees, or you can send them directly to the Copyright office. If you're submitting directly, be sure to note class “7B” if your comments focus on decrypting DVDs or class “7C” if your comments focus on decrypting legally streamed or downloaded video where the video is not available on DVD. Or you can comment on this post and I'll make sure the comments get where they need to go!
Questions you might want to address (answer as many or as few as you have time for):
1. Why are you interested in making sure video remixing isn’t chilled by legal threats?
2. Why do you make videos? What message or statement do your videos convey? What audience do you want to reach? Or, if you're not a vidder: Why do you watch vids? What's valuable about them for you?
3. Why do you use sources that require decryption (such as DVDs, Amazon Unbox, etc.)?
4. How important is it that the video clips vidders use are high quality?
5. How important to you is getting timely video clips of current events?
6. Is there anything else you want to tell the Copyright Office?
In case you don't know the background on this:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) have put together a DMCA exemption proposal asking the Copyright Office to declare that breaking the encryption on DVDs in order to use video clips in primarily noncommercial videos does not violate the DMCA.
We won a similar exemption in 2010, but it will expire if not renewed. Plus, now we're asking for a new exemption for breaking the encryption on video from online download or streaming services (like Amazon Unbox) that’s not available on DVD.
Please signal-boost if you can!
signal-boosting: DMCA exemption proposal
Nov. 17th, 2011 08:01 pmThe OTW Legal and Vidding Committees are preparing to propose a renewal of the DMCA exemption we won last time around--the one that makes it okay for vidders to rip DVDs--and we need input from vidders, AMV makers, and other fan video artists.
(For some background on the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the exemption, and the Motion Picture Association of America's absurd proposal about how vidders should get digital files without ripping DVDs, I recommend this short clip, featuring audio and video from the 2009 exemption hearings.)
From the original post at the OTW blog:
We've already gotten some terrific responses--some blunt, some eloquent, all smart and valuable--and we would love more! I'm working on a formal statement that will be submitted along with the exemption, and the fan responses I've seen have a) inspired me and b) reminded me of some issues I might otherwise have neglected to mention, so, in addition to contacting the Vidding Committee, feel free to comment to this post if there's a point you'd like made or an issue you'd like raised.
(For some background on the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the exemption, and the Motion Picture Association of America's absurd proposal about how vidders should get digital files without ripping DVDs, I recommend this short clip, featuring audio and video from the 2009 exemption hearings.)
From the original post at the OTW blog:
If you vid or make other forms of fan video by ripping DVDs or Blueray discs; if you rip footage from a streaming service like Hulu, iTunes Streaming, or Amazon Unbox, please get in touch! You don't have to use your real name: Depending on your choice, we can describe you using your pseudonym or as "a vidder" or "a fan filmmaker." We are trying to compile stories of how fans work and what they need to make their fanworks.
We are seeking your own words about:
(1) Why vidding is a transformative and creative act;
(2) Why you need to circumvent (rip) DVDs or other sources such as Blu-Ray, Amazon Unbox, Hulu, or YouTube--we are particularly interested in cases where you were only able to find a copy of the source at one of the online services because the source wasn't available on DVD;
(3) Whether you've tried screen capture software and how it worked for you;
(4) Whether you could make use of the "alternative" proposed by the MPAA, which is that you set up a separate camera to record your screen as it plays the source;
(5) Why high-quality source is important to you, whether your reasons are technical or aesthetic or something else;
(6) Anything else you think we ought to know as we work with the EFF to put together our request!
So please contact Francesca Coppa directly (fcoppa at transformativeworks dot org) or use the Vidding committee webform.
We've already gotten some terrific responses--some blunt, some eloquent, all smart and valuable--and we would love more! I'm working on a formal statement that will be submitted along with the exemption, and the fan responses I've seen have a) inspired me and b) reminded me of some issues I might otherwise have neglected to mention, so, in addition to contacting the Vidding Committee, feel free to comment to this post if there's a point you'd like made or an issue you'd like raised.
For reasons related to teaching rather than research, I'm re-reading James Paul Gee's essay "The New Literacy Studies and the 'Social Turn'," which I have not read in many years, and in which I have just come across the following paragraph:
It will, I suspect, surprise nobody to learn that I wrote "Vidding!" in the margin.
Sociohistorical psychology, following Vygotsky and later Bakhtin, has argued that the human mind is "furnished" through a process of "internalizing" or "appropriating" images, patterns, and words from the social activities in which one has participated. Further, thinking is not "private," but almost always mediated by "cultural tools," that is, artifacts, symbols, tools, technologies, and forms of language that have been historically and culturally shaped to carry out certain functions and carry certain meanings (cultural tools have certain "affordances," though people can transform them through using them in new settings).
It will, I suspect, surprise nobody to learn that I wrote "Vidding!" in the margin.
New projects and old struggles
Jun. 7th, 2011 09:41 pmI am currently working on a new project on vids and vidding. My co-author and I have been talking and brainstorming and batting ideas back and forth, and we've gotten great feedback from the peer reviewers at Transformative Works and Cultures, and now we've reached the point where I have to sit down with the draft and all our notes and actually rewrite the thing into something that makes sense, has a clear argument, and so on.
The version that we turned in originally was around 7,500 words long, and the reviewers suggested streamlining it down to about 6,000 words, which we thought was an excellent plan. Of course, we also had quite a few gaps we needed to fill in. So over the past month we've made notes about what could be cut or condensed, but we've also generated some new material, and when I put it all together into one document this evening, the total is about 10,300 words.
*facepalm*
I have written enough by now to know that this is how I rewrite, like it or not: I add, add, add, add, add until the thing has blown up like a balloon (a word balloon! of death!), and then I print it all out and go through it X-ing out all the words, sentences, paragraphs and occasionally entire sections that are unnecessary, repetitive, or just plain wrong. Once that's done, I start being able to see the real shape of the thing, and that helps me decide what other pieces need to be deleted or condensed. And after enough whittling away, plus two or three rounds of reorganizing, I end up with something that might actually be worth reading. It just takes a while.
I'm a little afraid to dive back into the compiled draft tomorrow, because wow, that thing is a hot mess right now. But I'm also excited, because there are some ideas in there that I really do think are useful, and I look forward to excavating them and polishing them up and sharing them.
The version that we turned in originally was around 7,500 words long, and the reviewers suggested streamlining it down to about 6,000 words, which we thought was an excellent plan. Of course, we also had quite a few gaps we needed to fill in. So over the past month we've made notes about what could be cut or condensed, but we've also generated some new material, and when I put it all together into one document this evening, the total is about 10,300 words.
*facepalm*
I have written enough by now to know that this is how I rewrite, like it or not: I add, add, add, add, add until the thing has blown up like a balloon (a word balloon! of death!), and then I print it all out and go through it X-ing out all the words, sentences, paragraphs and occasionally entire sections that are unnecessary, repetitive, or just plain wrong. Once that's done, I start being able to see the real shape of the thing, and that helps me decide what other pieces need to be deleted or condensed. And after enough whittling away, plus two or three rounds of reorganizing, I end up with something that might actually be worth reading. It just takes a while.
I'm a little afraid to dive back into the compiled draft tomorrow, because wow, that thing is a hot mess right now. But I'm also excited, because there are some ideas in there that I really do think are useful, and I look forward to excavating them and polishing them up and sharing them.
Last week, I received my contributor's copy of Metalepsis in Popular Culture, which includes a chapter I wrote on metalepsis in vids (and fan fiction, though I have to admit that the section on fic was not part of my original idea; it was suggested by the editors because they figured more people would be familiar with fic than with vids). I knew that the book would be quite expensive, especially in the US (it's an academic hardcover from a European press), so I made sure that the copyright transfer agreement allows me to distribute the essay online as long as I cite the original publication information (which is hardly a hardship, since the publication information is one of my very favorite things about the essay: I have a chapter in a book published by De Gruyter! this is really exciting!).
So here it is:
Metalepsis in Fan Vids and Fan Fiction. In Metalepsis in Popular Culture. Ed. Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011. 83-103.
In some ways, this essay is less accessible than my previous essay about vids; that one was relatively general, while this one is part of a very specific academic conversation about metalepsis and narrative theory. On the other hand, I think most fans will recognize the concept of metalepsis pretty quickly, even if the terminology is not immediately familiar. (For those who are curious about the terminology, I wrote a bit about metalepsis back when I first proposed the chapter.) And I think--I hope, anyway!--that the essay's account oflaurashapiro and lithiumchic's "I Put You There" makes sense even without knowing all the ins and outs of the narrative theory elements.
In other news, I am continuing to work on several other essays on vids, including one that I just came up with a couple of weeks ago while at the Computers & Writing conference. I was talking with a couple of the people who'd attended my presentation, explaining the various vid-related academic projects I'm working on, and it occurred to me that while I've made some complicated arguments about vids in relation to film studies, rhetoric, narrative theory, copyright law, and composition studies, I haven't really written anything that lays out the fundamentals of how I think vids work and why I think they should be interesting to the academic audiences with whom I'm usually communicating.
Duh.
I mean, I know why I haven't written that essay yet: I jumped into writing about vids because of two specific calls for papers that got me started thinking about vids in very particular ways. But I did have a moment of *facepalm* when I realized that I'd been going about things a bit backwards. I've got all these ideas and assumptions about how vids work which I talk about when I present on vids but which I haven't actually written down anywhere. I should write them down! And as I do, I need to be careful to convey how many of the ideas have been worked out and codified within the vidding community more generally; it's important to me that non-fannish academics understand the extent to which fans are self-theorizing.
So that very basic essay--not a history of vidding, but an explanation of how meaning gets created when making and watching vids and why this meaning-making is interesting from an academic point of view--is now on my to-do list for the summer.
I am finding that writing about vids is very much like vidding: just when I think I've gotten the queue under control, there are more ideas. And, just as with vidding, more ideas is a prospect simultaneously exciting and exhausting.
So here it is:
Metalepsis in Fan Vids and Fan Fiction. In Metalepsis in Popular Culture. Ed. Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011. 83-103.In some ways, this essay is less accessible than my previous essay about vids; that one was relatively general, while this one is part of a very specific academic conversation about metalepsis and narrative theory. On the other hand, I think most fans will recognize the concept of metalepsis pretty quickly, even if the terminology is not immediately familiar. (For those who are curious about the terminology, I wrote a bit about metalepsis back when I first proposed the chapter.) And I think--I hope, anyway!--that the essay's account of
laurashapiro and lithiumchic's "I Put You There" makes sense even without knowing all the ins and outs of the narrative theory elements.In other news, I am continuing to work on several other essays on vids, including one that I just came up with a couple of weeks ago while at the Computers & Writing conference. I was talking with a couple of the people who'd attended my presentation, explaining the various vid-related academic projects I'm working on, and it occurred to me that while I've made some complicated arguments about vids in relation to film studies, rhetoric, narrative theory, copyright law, and composition studies, I haven't really written anything that lays out the fundamentals of how I think vids work and why I think they should be interesting to the academic audiences with whom I'm usually communicating.
Duh.
I mean, I know why I haven't written that essay yet: I jumped into writing about vids because of two specific calls for papers that got me started thinking about vids in very particular ways. But I did have a moment of *facepalm* when I realized that I'd been going about things a bit backwards. I've got all these ideas and assumptions about how vids work which I talk about when I present on vids but which I haven't actually written down anywhere. I should write them down! And as I do, I need to be careful to convey how many of the ideas have been worked out and codified within the vidding community more generally; it's important to me that non-fannish academics understand the extent to which fans are self-theorizing.
So that very basic essay--not a history of vidding, but an explanation of how meaning gets created when making and watching vids and why this meaning-making is interesting from an academic point of view--is now on my to-do list for the summer.
I am finding that writing about vids is very much like vidding: just when I think I've gotten the queue under control, there are more ideas. And, just as with vidding, more ideas is a prospect simultaneously exciting and exhausting.
Computers & Writing conference 2011
Mar. 8th, 2011 08:03 amI spent a couple of months this winter working on a research project that predates my work on vids and vidding: an academic essay that I wrote quite some time ago is finally going to be published this year, and I've been revising it to get it ready to go. I mention this only because the reviewers' comments made me see that some of the things I've been thinking about vids apply to other literary forms more specifically than I'd previously realized. So my extensive revisions to the article included the incorporation of some language that I've developed for talking about vids, and the editor was pleased with the changes. \o/
But in recent weeks I've been thinking and writing about vids again: working on an article to submit to the Transformative Works and Culture special issue on remix video, prepping for a couple of conference presentations this spring.
The exciting news there (and the reason for the title of this post) is that the Computers & Writing conference proposal reviewers responded to my proposal for a standard stand-at-the-front-of-the-room-and-talk presentation by saying "Vidding looks really interesting! And complicated! And we think you need to do a 75-minute mini-workshop on it rather than just a 15-minute talk, so you can explain the history and show more vids and lead a discussion of vids' pedagogical potential."
As a native midwesterner who has, however unwillingly, absorbed certain gendered behavioral norms, my immediate impulse was to say "Oh, gosh, are you sure? Really? Me?" Fortunately, I overcame this impulse (with the help of my fannish impulses, which were shouting YES SHARE THE SHINY FUN THINGS WITH OTHER PEOPLE WHO MIGHT LIKE THEM) and said "I would be thrilled to run a mini-workshop on vidding! Thank you!" Because, let's face it, vidding is awesome and more people should know that.
Having 75 minutes to work with means, among other things, that 1) I can show more than one vid, and 2) I can show longer vids. I love Star Trek Dance Floor, but I've shown it at conferences so often simply because it's short. Of course, I am now in danger of paralysis induced by the sheer vastness of options available to me, but I think I'm up to the challenge of narrowing my options. I may ask for help, though. :D
But in recent weeks I've been thinking and writing about vids again: working on an article to submit to the Transformative Works and Culture special issue on remix video, prepping for a couple of conference presentations this spring.
The exciting news there (and the reason for the title of this post) is that the Computers & Writing conference proposal reviewers responded to my proposal for a standard stand-at-the-front-of-the-room-and-talk presentation by saying "Vidding looks really interesting! And complicated! And we think you need to do a 75-minute mini-workshop on it rather than just a 15-minute talk, so you can explain the history and show more vids and lead a discussion of vids' pedagogical potential."
As a native midwesterner who has, however unwillingly, absorbed certain gendered behavioral norms, my immediate impulse was to say "Oh, gosh, are you sure? Really? Me?" Fortunately, I overcame this impulse (with the help of my fannish impulses, which were shouting YES SHARE THE SHINY FUN THINGS WITH OTHER PEOPLE WHO MIGHT LIKE THEM) and said "I would be thrilled to run a mini-workshop on vidding! Thank you!" Because, let's face it, vidding is awesome and more people should know that.
Having 75 minutes to work with means, among other things, that 1) I can show more than one vid, and 2) I can show longer vids. I love Star Trek Dance Floor, but I've shown it at conferences so often simply because it's short. Of course, I am now in danger of paralysis induced by the sheer vastness of options available to me, but I think I'm up to the challenge of narrowing my options. I may ask for help, though. :D
OTW membership and Open Access Week
Oct. 22nd, 2010 04:32 pmI've spent most of the last couple of months wrapping up some older research projects that predate my work on vids (although one of them, I think, has ended up being much stronger as a result of my work on vids!). But there are two important things going on this week that I had to make time to post about.
First: OTW membership and donation drive! I am ridiculously excited about some of the new donation premiums, especially the tote bag, but mostly I am excited about the chance to contribute to the amazing work that the OTW is doing -- or, rather, that the OTW is enabling fans to do for ourselves by providing an organizational structure that helps us pool our energy and expertise, teach each other new skills, provide stable homes for the fanworks we produce and share, and much more. And, of course, donating means membership, and membership means the chance to vote in the upcoming board elections.
A second matching donation challenge has just been posted, so it's the perfect time to donate!
Second: Open Access Week! My own commitment to open access began with fandom and has grown through my work on the staff of Transformative Works and Cultures, the OTW's online open-access academic journal. Karen Hellekson, one of TWC's co-editors, has written eloquently about the importance of open access and online publication; like her, I'm proud to be part of a journal and a movement that are changing the way academics share ideas.
In that spirit, I'm making available .pdfs of my first article on vids, published last spring:
"Your Own Imagination": Vidding And Vidwatching As Collaborative Interpretation. Film & Film Culture 5 (2010): 88-110. [AKA the one about "Vogue" and "Ring Them Bells."] This is the article as it appears in print; unfortunately, some of the formatting came out a bit wonky and I confess I find the two-column format difficult to read because of the odd spacing, but it is what it is.
I've got another article in an anthology that should be coming out soon, which I'll share as soon as I've got the final version in hand!
First: OTW membership and donation drive! I am ridiculously excited about some of the new donation premiums, especially the tote bag, but mostly I am excited about the chance to contribute to the amazing work that the OTW is doing -- or, rather, that the OTW is enabling fans to do for ourselves by providing an organizational structure that helps us pool our energy and expertise, teach each other new skills, provide stable homes for the fanworks we produce and share, and much more. And, of course, donating means membership, and membership means the chance to vote in the upcoming board elections.
A second matching donation challenge has just been posted, so it's the perfect time to donate!
Second: Open Access Week! My own commitment to open access began with fandom and has grown through my work on the staff of Transformative Works and Cultures, the OTW's online open-access academic journal. Karen Hellekson, one of TWC's co-editors, has written eloquently about the importance of open access and online publication; like her, I'm proud to be part of a journal and a movement that are changing the way academics share ideas.
In that spirit, I'm making available .pdfs of my first article on vids, published last spring:
"Your Own Imagination": Vidding And Vidwatching As Collaborative Interpretation. Film & Film Culture 5 (2010): 88-110. [AKA the one about "Vogue" and "Ring Them Bells."] This is the article as it appears in print; unfortunately, some of the formatting came out a bit wonky and I confess I find the two-column format difficult to read because of the odd spacing, but it is what it is.
I've got another article in an anthology that should be coming out soon, which I'll share as soon as I've got the final version in hand!
Song choice: vids that own their songs
Jul. 29th, 2010 10:35 amQuick note on VividCon: I am still figuring out the best way to find mutually agreeable interview times, but I should be emailing people about that today or tomorrow. (VividCon! Yay!)
And now the real point of this post: Let's talk about vids that own their songs.
Song choice is one of those perennial discussion topics for vidders and vidwatchers (and also the subject of one of my favorite sequences in OTW's documentary series on vidding, where a bunch of fans are asked what makes a good vid and "song choice" is the first response from something like half a dozen people). It's a topic I find fascinating, because a vidder's or viewer's sense of what constitutes a good--or perfect--song choice is profoundly subjective, and so there are song choices about which people strongly disagree, but there are also song choices that produce pretty broad consensus about their awesomeness or appropriateness.
nestra made a post several years back about the difference between good song choice and genius song choice, and sherrold made a comment to that post that has stuck with me ever since, in which she said of astolat's "Uninvited": "I can't hear the song without seeing the vid in my mind's eye."
That comment, for me, captures exactly what it means for a vid to own a song--a phrase that made immediate sense to me the first time I saw people using it. Owning a song is a separate category, at least for me, from good or perfect or genius song choice, and I've been trying to work out what I think the difference is. There are plenty of vids where I think the song choice is terrific or inspired, but I can still think of the song separately from the vid. For a while my working theory was that the distinction has to do with how I first heard the song: if I knew the song before I saw the vid, or had pre-existing associations with the song, the vid was less likely to own that song. But then I remembered "Haunted,"flummery's Odyssey 5 vid (which frankly owns EVERYTHING EVER, not just that song); I knew the song before I saw their vid, and in fact I'd already seen a pretty good vid set to that song, but once I saw their version? That was it for me. Whenever I hear that song--when it comes up on shuffle or whatever--I think of their vid. I hear "I will always miss you," and I see the earth blowing up. Similarly, gwyn and feochadn's Charlie Jade vid "I Remember" is set to an R.E.M. song I knew and loved for well over a decade before they vidded it, but once I saw the vid I realized that the song was always about trying to communicate across collapsing universes and I just wasn't smart enough to see it yet. These examples demonstrate that, for me, songs I didn't already know may have an advantage over songs I'm familiar with, but unfamiliarity can't be the full explanation.
But I don't know whether my experience is representative or not! So tell me: Do some vids own songs for you? What's the difference between great song choice and a vid that owns a song? What's it like to listen to a song that's owned by a vid? Do you see specific clips from the vid in your head, or does it just make you think about the characters and the show?
And now the real point of this post: Let's talk about vids that own their songs.
Song choice is one of those perennial discussion topics for vidders and vidwatchers (and also the subject of one of my favorite sequences in OTW's documentary series on vidding, where a bunch of fans are asked what makes a good vid and "song choice" is the first response from something like half a dozen people). It's a topic I find fascinating, because a vidder's or viewer's sense of what constitutes a good--or perfect--song choice is profoundly subjective, and so there are song choices about which people strongly disagree, but there are also song choices that produce pretty broad consensus about their awesomeness or appropriateness.
nestra made a post several years back about the difference between good song choice and genius song choice, and sherrold made a comment to that post that has stuck with me ever since, in which she said of astolat's "Uninvited": "I can't hear the song without seeing the vid in my mind's eye." That comment, for me, captures exactly what it means for a vid to own a song--a phrase that made immediate sense to me the first time I saw people using it. Owning a song is a separate category, at least for me, from good or perfect or genius song choice, and I've been trying to work out what I think the difference is. There are plenty of vids where I think the song choice is terrific or inspired, but I can still think of the song separately from the vid. For a while my working theory was that the distinction has to do with how I first heard the song: if I knew the song before I saw the vid, or had pre-existing associations with the song, the vid was less likely to own that song. But then I remembered "Haunted,"
flummery's Odyssey 5 vid (which frankly owns EVERYTHING EVER, not just that song); I knew the song before I saw their vid, and in fact I'd already seen a pretty good vid set to that song, but once I saw their version? That was it for me. Whenever I hear that song--when it comes up on shuffle or whatever--I think of their vid. I hear "I will always miss you," and I see the earth blowing up. Similarly, gwyn and feochadn's Charlie Jade vid "I Remember" is set to an R.E.M. song I knew and loved for well over a decade before they vidded it, but once I saw the vid I realized that the song was always about trying to communicate across collapsing universes and I just wasn't smart enough to see it yet. These examples demonstrate that, for me, songs I didn't already know may have an advantage over songs I'm familiar with, but unfamiliarity can't be the full explanation.But I don't know whether my experience is representative or not! So tell me: Do some vids own songs for you? What's the difference between great song choice and a vid that owns a song? What's it like to listen to a song that's owned by a vid? Do you see specific clips from the vid in your head, or does it just make you think about the characters and the show?
