IP/Gender Symposium; Imagine Fund
Apr. 9th, 2009 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tishaturkI haven't had time to blog in a while because I've been so busy actually working on projects! But ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
deathisyourart nudged me for an update on my presentation for the IP/Gender Symposium (April 23-24), which I am in fact in the middle of working on. Hence, an update.
I sent a draft of the presentation to my panel moderator, Francesca Coppa, on Monday. It is very much a draft at this point! But I think I've more or less got a frame for the argument, which is:
Assuming that the proposed DMCA exemption request is granted (EFF has posted the full request as a .pdf); the section on remix video starts on p. 13), we may start seeing legal tests of the fair use doctrine as it relates to vids. For most of us who watch or make vids, it's intuitively obvious that vids should be considered fair use, but how do we make that case to people who aren't already inclined to agree with us?
I'm not a lawyer--really, really not a lawyer--and so I can't answer this question from a legal point of view. But from a literary scholar's point of view, the legal question is at least in part a question of how we see texts in relation to other texts: what is a vid's relationship to the source(s) from which it's made? One possible relationship is parody, and parody is a pretty well-tested fair use category. But most vids, I think we can agree, are not parodies--certainly not in the sense that the once-ubiquitous Brokeback trailer remixes were usually parodies. Plenty of remix videos are parodies, and yay for them, but that's not, for the most part, the fannish cup of tea. Another relationship is quotation for the purpose of commentary or argument; this is the category of fair use that enables reviewers and academics to quote from a literary (or for that matter scholarly) text for the purpose of engaging with it analytically. Here I think we're getting closer to vids; as I've said before, I think there's a case to be made that, as Coppa has argued, "a vid is a visual essay that stages an argument." We might think of a vid as a series of quotations, with the argument or commentary arising from the juxtaposition of the quotations rather than from a textual frame around the quotations (such as we get with reviews or literary criticism).
But here's the thing: some vids are very clearly arguments--deliberate, analytical arguments--and other vids aren't. We can make a case for all vids as arguments, but we don't necessarily intuitively respond to them as arguments, and that's a distinction that I think is worth preserving. Vids are wonderfully various; some vids (including many of my personal favorites) are meant to provoke primarily emotional or aesthetic rather than intellectual responses. And so, although it's possible to claim that all vids should be under the "argument" umbrella (and I am not averse to doing so if the situation demands it!), what I want to do is present a way of thinking about why vids are fundamentally transformative even when they are not obviously making arguments.
Here's where we get into my first main point, which is that narrative theory, specifically narrative film theory, gives us a way of showing how vids, by their very nature, transform source texts. [Large chunks of this part of the presentation are copied almost verbatim from this post about narrative; the most important observation is the one I get into here, where I note that the elements of non-verbal narration of visual texts--the "angles, duration, and sequencing" of shots, plus the soundtrack--are exactly what vidders alter when they vid.]
The second main point I want to make is that vids are not simply abridgements of the show, even if many of us have vids that we think of as "the good parts edition" of a particular show (especially shows with which we have, uh, ambivalent relationships). To abridge something is to make it shorter without losing anything important; abridgements are supposed to be substitutes for the original. We can argue about whether, for example, an abridged audiobook actually works as a substitute for the original, but that’s the intent.
Vids typically aren't meant to substitute for the show. Vids are usually designed to be read against the backdrop of the movies and TV shows on which they’re based; in some cases, they're also meant to make viewers want to see source with which they were unfamiliar before. As we watch the vid, we are on some level measuring what we see against what we already know from the source--or against our sense of what we'd be getting out of the vid if we did know the source. And here's where I start cribbing from the narrative post again, talking about how decoding vids is a matter of negotiating interacting narratives.
If I have time to show an example, the one I want to show isriver_boat's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Abridged)," precisely, title notwithstanding, because it is so patently not an abridgement--for me, that's where a huge part of the humor comes in: watching the vid is emphatically not the same as watching the show (3 minutes vs. 144 episodes, hello), and indeed much of the effect of the vid relies on knowing the difference between the two.
And... that's it so far. I don't really have an exit strategy for the presentation yet. Must work on that.
As long as I'm posting, I have some other updates:
And I think that's it! I'm going to try to resume more regular posting this month, and I will certainly be posting about the IP/Gender Symposium, either while I'm there (there could be liveblogging! ...actually, no, there couldn't--I can't multitask well enough for that) or afterwards.
It occurs to me that I never did post anything from the article manuscript I submitted to Film & Film Culture, the one focusing on "Vogue" and "Ring Them Bells." I'm not going to post the whole thing, but I'm willing to post excerpts if anyone's interested. Or, er, I think I'm willing; I haven't actually re-read that piece since I submitted it. So let's say I'm conditionally willing, the condition being that I have to be able to read the first three pages without wanting to bang my head against a wall.
deathisyourart nudged me for an update on my presentation for the IP/Gender Symposium (April 23-24), which I am in fact in the middle of working on. Hence, an update.I sent a draft of the presentation to my panel moderator, Francesca Coppa, on Monday. It is very much a draft at this point! But I think I've more or less got a frame for the argument, which is:
Assuming that the proposed DMCA exemption request is granted (EFF has posted the full request as a .pdf); the section on remix video starts on p. 13), we may start seeing legal tests of the fair use doctrine as it relates to vids. For most of us who watch or make vids, it's intuitively obvious that vids should be considered fair use, but how do we make that case to people who aren't already inclined to agree with us?
I'm not a lawyer--really, really not a lawyer--and so I can't answer this question from a legal point of view. But from a literary scholar's point of view, the legal question is at least in part a question of how we see texts in relation to other texts: what is a vid's relationship to the source(s) from which it's made? One possible relationship is parody, and parody is a pretty well-tested fair use category. But most vids, I think we can agree, are not parodies--certainly not in the sense that the once-ubiquitous Brokeback trailer remixes were usually parodies. Plenty of remix videos are parodies, and yay for them, but that's not, for the most part, the fannish cup of tea. Another relationship is quotation for the purpose of commentary or argument; this is the category of fair use that enables reviewers and academics to quote from a literary (or for that matter scholarly) text for the purpose of engaging with it analytically. Here I think we're getting closer to vids; as I've said before, I think there's a case to be made that, as Coppa has argued, "a vid is a visual essay that stages an argument." We might think of a vid as a series of quotations, with the argument or commentary arising from the juxtaposition of the quotations rather than from a textual frame around the quotations (such as we get with reviews or literary criticism).
But here's the thing: some vids are very clearly arguments--deliberate, analytical arguments--and other vids aren't. We can make a case for all vids as arguments, but we don't necessarily intuitively respond to them as arguments, and that's a distinction that I think is worth preserving. Vids are wonderfully various; some vids (including many of my personal favorites) are meant to provoke primarily emotional or aesthetic rather than intellectual responses. And so, although it's possible to claim that all vids should be under the "argument" umbrella (and I am not averse to doing so if the situation demands it!), what I want to do is present a way of thinking about why vids are fundamentally transformative even when they are not obviously making arguments.
Here's where we get into my first main point, which is that narrative theory, specifically narrative film theory, gives us a way of showing how vids, by their very nature, transform source texts. [Large chunks of this part of the presentation are copied almost verbatim from this post about narrative; the most important observation is the one I get into here, where I note that the elements of non-verbal narration of visual texts--the "angles, duration, and sequencing" of shots, plus the soundtrack--are exactly what vidders alter when they vid.]
The second main point I want to make is that vids are not simply abridgements of the show, even if many of us have vids that we think of as "the good parts edition" of a particular show (especially shows with which we have, uh, ambivalent relationships). To abridge something is to make it shorter without losing anything important; abridgements are supposed to be substitutes for the original. We can argue about whether, for example, an abridged audiobook actually works as a substitute for the original, but that’s the intent.
Vids typically aren't meant to substitute for the show. Vids are usually designed to be read against the backdrop of the movies and TV shows on which they’re based; in some cases, they're also meant to make viewers want to see source with which they were unfamiliar before. As we watch the vid, we are on some level measuring what we see against what we already know from the source--or against our sense of what we'd be getting out of the vid if we did know the source. And here's where I start cribbing from the narrative post again, talking about how decoding vids is a matter of negotiating interacting narratives.
If I have time to show an example, the one I want to show is
river_boat's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Abridged)," precisely, title notwithstanding, because it is so patently not an abridgement--for me, that's where a huge part of the humor comes in: watching the vid is emphatically not the same as watching the show (3 minutes vs. 144 episodes, hello), and indeed much of the effect of the vid relies on knowing the difference between the two.And... that's it so far. I don't really have an exit strategy for the presentation yet. Must work on that.
As long as I'm posting, I have some other updates:
- I got the Imagine Fund grant! This means I have $3,000 to spend on books. Pretty cool. (That's midwestern understatement, for those of you who aren't from around here.)
- I've applied for a couple more grants: an Educational Development Program grant that would get me a bit of summer salary for developing an intermediate-level writing class focusing on participatory culture, and an international travel grant that would offset some of the costs of traveling to Switzerland this summer. I mean, I'm going to Switzerland anyway--the chance to collaborate on this metalepsis anthology is not to be missed--but even a short trip ain't cheap, and though I love many things about my job, the salary is not such that I have loads of spare cash lying about for casual jaunts to Europe. More's the pity.
- I've got two more conference proposals due in the next month. One is a proposal for the Conference on College Composition and Communication (4Cs), whose theme this year, as cereta pointed out this morning, is "remix." The other is for the biannual conference of the Reception Study Society, which I've never attended but which looks like it might be interesting.
And I think that's it! I'm going to try to resume more regular posting this month, and I will certainly be posting about the IP/Gender Symposium, either while I'm there (there could be liveblogging! ...actually, no, there couldn't--I can't multitask well enough for that) or afterwards.
It occurs to me that I never did post anything from the article manuscript I submitted to Film & Film Culture, the one focusing on "Vogue" and "Ring Them Bells." I'm not going to post the whole thing, but I'm willing to post excerpts if anyone's interested. Or, er, I think I'm willing; I haven't actually re-read that piece since I submitted it. So let's say I'm conditionally willing, the condition being that I have to be able to read the first three pages without wanting to bang my head against a wall.
