New essay in TWC Fan/Remix Video issue + some thoughts about typical vs. unusual vids
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.
Academics writing about vids tend to focus on vids that are special cases of one kind or another: vids that are the first or only vid to do a particular thing; vids that got unusual amounts of attention within or outside fandom; vids from relatively small subgenres, like meta vids or vids with unusually explicit analytical or political thesis statements; vids that use external footage or vidder-created footage. I love those kinds of vids myself, which is why I've written about vids like Luminosity's "Vogue" and Laura Shapiro and LithiumDoll's "I Put You There" and often show Sloane's "Star Trek Dance Floor" when I talk about vids at academic conferences.
These unusual vids are a really important part of who we are and what we do; my own fannish experience (and my VividCon) would be poorer without them. I love that over the last ten years we've created fannish venues that make a place for those vids, that we value them, that we discuss them. And I understand that in an era of DMCA exemption petitions and YouTube takedowns and fair use misinformation campaigns, we have to be strategic in how we talk about vids: those of us who are public advocates for vids, who argue for their value under our public, offline, and/or legal names, often focus on unusual vids because they can help people who are not familiar with vids learn to see vids as transformative works.
But I suspect that for most vid fans, those unusual vids are not what we most often watch and produce, and they're not how a lot of us got interested in vids. Personally, I started off watching (and, eventually, making) 'ship vids and character studies, and those are still some of my favorite vids; watching a really moving 'ship vid or really insightful character study is one of the most emotionally intense and satisfying experiences I can have in fandom.
If we focus only on the atypical vids, the outliers, the unusual cases, we end up distorting what vids and vidding and vidwatching are about; we end up being silent about some of the chief pleasures of fandom. Given how intent our culture is on erasing female pleasure in general, that silence strikes me as really unfortunate.
So when I went looking for a vid to use as a case study in "Toward an ecology of vidding," I had those issues in mind. I wanted us to write about a recent vid in a new, active, squeeful fandom that I was personally unfamiliar with (...and there's a lot I could say here about what happens when acafans write extensively about their own personal fannish interests, which I will save for another post), but mostly I wanted to write about the kind of vid that first drew me to vidwatching and ultimately to vidding.
"Something's Gotta Give" is that kind of vid. It's not an innovative or a groundbreaking vid, and I don't mean that as a criticism at all. It's a terrific vid, an enormously satisfying vid to watch;![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lamardeuse knew exactly what she wanted to do, and she did it beautifully, and in doing so she clearly made a lot of fans very happy. That is a huge part of what vidding is for—not the only part, certainly, but a really, really important part. If our theories of vidding can't account for this kind of vid, then our theories are incomplete.
I also, though this was a more minor consideration, wanted to write about a slash vid without discussing it as slash—I wanted, essentially, to normalize a slash vid by talking about it in terms of rhetorical and aesthetic choices, the same way I would with any other vid. I think acafans often do way too much over-explaining about slash—for me, at least, it always comes up when I talk about fandom at conferences—and we end up exoticizing slash and/or coming across as defensive, which... annoys me, especially when I find myself doing it. Slash is not a primary point of fannish identification for me, though I have watched and loved and even made slash vids, but I am queer, and I am kind of tired of representations of same-sex relationships and desires needing to be explained all the time. Which is why we never actually used the term "slash" in the essay (though it does come up in the names of some of the LJ communities we referenced, and it's there in the vid info in the Works Cited list).
Anyway. Like I said, I get that acafen need to be strategic about how we discuss vids, but I really hope that, as more people start doing this work, we'll write about a wider range of vid types in a wider range of fandoms. Academics like explicit argumentation, and we like finding vids that will be relatively easy for non-fannish academics to understand, and I think it's totally reasonable for those considerations to affect our choices about which vids to discuss. But, you know, I showed bluefairy1113's fabulous Kirk/Spock reboot vid "Must Be Dreaming" to a roomful of academics last spring, only some of whom were fannish, and they got it—like really, really got it; they got why it was smart, they got why it was interesting.
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.
Academics writing about vids tend to focus on vids that are special cases of one kind or another: vids that are the first or only vid to do a particular thing; vids that got unusual amounts of attention within or outside fandom; vids from relatively small subgenres, like meta vids or vids with unusually explicit analytical or political thesis statements; vids that use external footage or vidder-created footage. I love those kinds of vids myself, which is why I've written about vids like Luminosity's "Vogue" and Laura Shapiro and LithiumDoll's "I Put You There" and often show Sloane's "Star Trek Dance Floor" when I talk about vids at academic conferences.
These unusual vids are a really important part of who we are and what we do; my own fannish experience (and my VividCon) would be poorer without them. I love that over the last ten years we've created fannish venues that make a place for those vids, that we value them, that we discuss them. And I understand that in an era of DMCA exemption petitions and YouTube takedowns and fair use misinformation campaigns, we have to be strategic in how we talk about vids: those of us who are public advocates for vids, who argue for their value under our public, offline, and/or legal names, often focus on unusual vids because they can help people who are not familiar with vids learn to see vids as transformative works.
But I suspect that for most vid fans, those unusual vids are not what we most often watch and produce, and they're not how a lot of us got interested in vids. Personally, I started off watching (and, eventually, making) 'ship vids and character studies, and those are still some of my favorite vids; watching a really moving 'ship vid or really insightful character study is one of the most emotionally intense and satisfying experiences I can have in fandom.
If we focus only on the atypical vids, the outliers, the unusual cases, we end up distorting what vids and vidding and vidwatching are about; we end up being silent about some of the chief pleasures of fandom. Given how intent our culture is on erasing female pleasure in general, that silence strikes me as really unfortunate.
So when I went looking for a vid to use as a case study in "Toward an ecology of vidding," I had those issues in mind. I wanted us to write about a recent vid in a new, active, squeeful fandom that I was personally unfamiliar with (...and there's a lot I could say here about what happens when acafans write extensively about their own personal fannish interests, which I will save for another post), but mostly I wanted to write about the kind of vid that first drew me to vidwatching and ultimately to vidding.
"Something's Gotta Give" is that kind of vid. It's not an innovative or a groundbreaking vid, and I don't mean that as a criticism at all. It's a terrific vid, an enormously satisfying vid to watch;
lamardeuse knew exactly what she wanted to do, and she did it beautifully, and in doing so she clearly made a lot of fans very happy. That is a huge part of what vidding is for—not the only part, certainly, but a really, really important part. If our theories of vidding can't account for this kind of vid, then our theories are incomplete.I also, though this was a more minor consideration, wanted to write about a slash vid without discussing it as slash—I wanted, essentially, to normalize a slash vid by talking about it in terms of rhetorical and aesthetic choices, the same way I would with any other vid. I think acafans often do way too much over-explaining about slash—for me, at least, it always comes up when I talk about fandom at conferences—and we end up exoticizing slash and/or coming across as defensive, which... annoys me, especially when I find myself doing it. Slash is not a primary point of fannish identification for me, though I have watched and loved and even made slash vids, but I am queer, and I am kind of tired of representations of same-sex relationships and desires needing to be explained all the time. Which is why we never actually used the term "slash" in the essay (though it does come up in the names of some of the LJ communities we referenced, and it's there in the vid info in the Works Cited list).
Anyway. Like I said, I get that acafen need to be strategic about how we discuss vids, but I really hope that, as more people start doing this work, we'll write about a wider range of vid types in a wider range of fandoms. Academics like explicit argumentation, and we like finding vids that will be relatively easy for non-fannish academics to understand, and I think it's totally reasonable for those considerations to affect our choices about which vids to discuss. But, you know, I showed bluefairy1113's fabulous Kirk/Spock reboot vid "Must Be Dreaming" to a roomful of academics last spring, only some of whom were fannish, and they got it—like really, really got it; they got why it was smart, they got why it was interesting.
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.
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And also, I love your point about downplaying 'ship vids and why we should resist that. I'm guilty of that myself, I think, at least in terms of how I think about my own work in this space -- I love a good 'ship vid and yet when I think about what I want to bring to VVC, my first thought is, "Well, I don't have anything interesting or novel to say about the Doctor and his companions, so I can't vid Doctor Who" -- as though the kind of character-focused / relationship-focused / squee-focused vid that I love to watch (and love to make!) is somehow less valid or less valuable than the technically-fabulous, intellectually-intriguing kinds of things we sometimes see at that con.
Anyway. ♥!
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I spoke a little bit about canon last year at SCMS, and i think it fits right in with both your post and your essay itself :)
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The question of what kinds of vids play well at VVC and what kinds of vids we THINK will play well at VVC (which are not necessarily the same thing) is a really interesting one. VVC is certainly a very particular audience; because we're all fans of vids, and an unusually high percentage of the audience is very well versed in vids and vidding history outside their own personal fandoms, I think there are really good reasons for wanting to showcase work that might not have a large audience elsewhere (for any of a variety of reasons, including but not limited to extreme thinkiness). Seah and Margie's "Haunted" always comes to mind for me: almost nobody at VVC 2003 had seen Odyssey 5, and yet that vid was The Vid Of The Con. I probably wouldn't have watched it if I hadn't been at VVC, because hey, Not My Fandom -- but as soon as I saw it it became, and remains, one of my favorite vids.
The flip side of that is that unless they're vidding in the very biggest fandoms, vidders can't assume that the entire audience will know their show or be on board with their 'ship or otherwise be able to fill in the emotional blanks. I mean, I think the Premieres audience DOES sometimes do that, and I think 'ship vids can go over very well at VVC, whether recruiter vids or nostalgia vids; I remember a few years back, when
But I think 'ship vids, maybe more than any other kind of vid, are made with a very particular community of like-minded fellow fans in mind; they're usually made with the assumption that viewers will bring their own squee. These vids can certainly have persuasive elements -- "Let me show you all the evidence that these characters are So Married!" -- but it's not usually their primary purpose. So I think it can be a little frustrating to send a 'ship vid -- a vid built for squee -- to a place where the reactions may be more aesthetic (in ways that can feel clinical or judgmental) than emotional. Even if the reactions are generally positive, they may be a different kind of positive. Which can be awesome, if that's the kind of feedback one's been missing elsewhere, but can also be a little disconcerting.
...um. Clearly I haven't talked enough about vids lately. *facepalm*
In conclusion: Vids! VVC! ♥!
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I was thinking "because we are usually on the same wavelength about stuff" and you know it.
♥
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I think I may be more okay with certain kinds of canon construction than you are; I am perfectly comfortable saying that I think some vids are better than others, period, and I get really frustrated when scholars who are only minimally familiar with vidding treat mediocre vids as if they're terrific. (Henry Jenkins' discussion of "Come What May," in Convergence Culture, never fails to make me roll my eyes: no discussion of that vid is complete if it doesn't acknowledge the amount of eye-rolling, not to say derision, that the vid provoked within fandom.)
That said, one of the things I like about fandom is that it generally allows for multiple and flexible canons. I can read and enjoy fics because they're insightful, because they're hot, because they're hilarious, because they're thought-provoking, or for any combination of those reasons and a hundred more besides. One of the things I always found fascinating about fans' elaborate tagging systems on delicious is that they usually reflected this very wide range of reasons for reading and were designed to let the bookmarker (and her subscribers) identify and locate Fics For All Occasions.
Put another way, I think fandom allows us to think about canons in the sense of distinctive groups without necessarily locking us into hierarchical value judgments -- though of course fans do make individual judgments every time we decide which WIP to follow, which story to bookmark, whether to leave a gushing comment or click the Kudos button or not comment at all or hit the back button before the third paragraph because OMG my eyes my eyes.
Basically, I want to write about really good vids; I just want to insist (as I know you do too!) that there are really good vids across a wide range of types and styles. I don't want to limit myself to, as you say, the ones that "make fandom look more creative, more political, more subversive to outsiders."
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But the thing is, I've shown vids to people who I thought understood my arguments about vids and then watched as they turned away from the vid to talk to me while it was playing and I was like NO NO NO NO YOU'RE MISSING IT!--and it turns out not to be so OK to grab someone's face and turn them back to face the screen. :D But having seen intelligent people look away from a vid they've never seen while it's playing, it's made me realize that MOST people don't know how to watch a vid. And so for me, I've had to choose vids with more explicit arguments rather than less explicit arguments, and that's not necessarily for me about meta vs. ship: "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" is a romantic vid that's also an argument vid, for instance. And like, we just saw with GK and the DMCA that people who were prepared to grant that "It Depends On What You Pay" made an argument about rape, rape, raaaaaaaaape saw Der Kommissar as a bunch of promo clips!
So, um; in summary. tl;dr: canons are also teaching tools, and teaching= converting. :D
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I guess I see it like prose poetry. Give a high school kid their first prose poem and then ask them about it and they'll paraphrase it to tell you the plot. Tell them it's a poem and they'll read it again and have all kinds of things to say. Part of that is that they can go 'oh, ok. Poem... what tools do I have to help me appreciate poetry'.
There is precision in vidding. Finesse. If you aren't looking for it then you could be missing a large part of the message. First-timers watch vids superficially, like someone would watch a commercial music video or a musical montage in a movie but these are not the same media at all.
The reason vids speak largely to vidders is because they know what went into the creation of the vid, they can watch a vid and immediately start peeling away at the dense onion skin of communication - they start with song choice and the establishment of viewpoint, mood and themes. Knowing the source helps but film and tv is largely tropes that they know so source doesn't matter so much. They can pick out a pov and they can get enough context to just roll with it. They then pay attention to the cutting, its speed, the associations being suggested with each shot and each juxtaposition. They listen out for refrains in the song and how they change over time. They look at character reactions because they've know that each one has been selected out of hundreds, they know to look at movement because it creates another kind of connection, just like colour... just like everything. These clips don't just go together, they were placed, methodically. They know that 'I Put You There' means more than just re-appropriation of cannon. They know to listen for changes in the music to anticipate pov shifts or eureka moments where ideas are fully realised. They also know that they might not get it and that that's ok because sometimes you never will.
Watching vids for the first time isn't an spectacle - it's a test and there *will* be questions later. Perhaps your point is that expecting folks to read at the speed of vids isn't realistic and if they can enjoy a vid then perhaps somewhere down the line they will be able to understand why. I get that and I know everyone has to start somewhere but I worry about people making assumptions about this as being all there is to it. Access is right but when it comes to fan studies I guess I'm expecting people to make an effort to look closer not only at what the vid's existence means for digital participatory culture or what-have-you but also (and more distinctively?) at what the vid is actually doing and what understanding that may bring on its own merit and how that connects to what all these other vids (ALL these other vids) and what they are doing and saying.
One thing I can say for sure is that academic writing on vids has improved massively the last few years and it's clear that there's a lot more interesting stuff to come.
tl;dr Ian rambles a great deal and looks forward to more study of what makes everyday vids collectively different, individually significant and acknowledges that the interesting parts about vidding are not limited to fan works that can be easily connected to established cultural or political discourse.
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I actually clapped when you mentioned Tumblr, I kid you not. I cannot begin to articulate the sense of connection and understanding I get, as a vidder, looking at pages of short animated gifs. Sometimes fannish response is just that - I'm recalling sisabet's SPN vid with the double hug that she abandoned once she vidded that part because that's where she wanted to get to.
That vids bring those together into something more or different or surprising or comforting...
I really like vids. I should make more of them.
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And in fact, I think that one of the reasons the academic writing is getting better is because we've made that start: we don't have to start every essay with "So, what IS a vid?" You can move the discourse ON A BIT now that we're writing for an audience -even a non fan audience--who has SEEN more than one vid.
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I'm genuinely looking forward to a year of academia where we don't actually *have* to talk about A Fair(y) Use Tale anymore. That's going to be awesome.
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Tumblr is something I'm going to have to look at much more closely going forward. I really had only the most basic grasp of Tumblr at the time when we were drafting this essay, and I know it shows; the essay would be better if we'd had time to track some of the major users and key tags, or even just track the circulation of a few key .gif sets, but there just wasn't time, especially given that any discussion of Tumblr was going to have to be fairly limited in terms of word count. But I totally agree that those .gif sets really resonate with vidding -- both the sets that simply take a moment out of time and say "Let's dwell on this for a while, shall we?" and the sets that add fan-created text to supply new dialogue and thus recontextualize, parody, or otherwise comment on scenes.
Vids are awesome. We both need to make more of them. ...though, wait, didn't you just make like seventeen Festivids? Including that adorable one of Maru that I could actually show to my mother, not that I would?
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This, this, a million times this. I do most of my academic presentations on vids using PowerPoint slides, mostly because it's easy to swap stuff out from presentation to presentation, but one of the slides that almost never changes is the one where I try to get people to think about the literacy skills involved in understanding a vid: The visuals on the screen, what they mean in context, why those and not others, why this order and these juxtapositions; the music, all the emotional information that comes with it; the lyrics; all those things in relation to each other and what they add up to; that big picture in relation to the show itself and whether the vid is celebrating, interpreting, critiquing, refocusing, or rewriting the source... The more I think about it, the more I'm fascinated by the prospect of unpacking exactly what we do and how we learn (both cognitively and socially) to do it.
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But part of the reason I think we need to write about a wider range of vids is that when I look at the kinds of vids that YOU first understood... those are not at all the vids that *I* first understood. (And, actually, I'm laughing a little because this explains some things about the differences in our vid tastes even now.) I love a vid with a clear thesis statement, but those were not actually my gateway drugs.
It's not that I'm looking for us (collectively) to write about different stuff instead, just MORE stuff, you know? And, as you said to Ian elsewhere in the thread, I think we're finally getting to the point where we can do that, because we don't have to begin at the beginning every single time; we're building up enough of a body of work that we can cite the key stuff for people who need to catch up, but our own essays can actually do more BUILDING on that stuff because we don't have to spend half the essay recapitulating it.
Which is one of the reasons I am so freaking grateful that the TWC special issue exists in the first place: so much stuff in one place, and because it's TWC people can actually READ it. \o/