Talking With TV

I've spent the semester on a research fellowship at the University of Minnesota's Institute for Advanced Study. Fellows meet weekly for lunchtime presentations of our work in progress. My presentation was today; I was supposed to be talking about the role of music in vids (which is the topic I've been researching this semester as a break from the book). Except I didn't actually get very far, because people had so many basic questions about vidding and fandom -- really good questions, but still. I had an hour and fifteen minutes, and I still got through only half of the material that I wanted to, most of which was the inevitable "here's what vids are and why they matter" introductory material and not the new stuff I've been thinking about.

So I am hoping to use this blog to post snippets of the actual research and thinking over the next few weeks.

I did, at least, get to show some vids -- not a full-fledged vidshow or anything, but a small selection rather than just a single vid (which is what I usually have to do when I'm presenting). It was really important to me that this group get to see more of a variety of subjects and styles and genres, even though of course it's still only a tiny fraction of the range of things vids are and do.

Here's what I showed:

sloanesomething, “Star Trek Dance Floor” (Star Trek)
violace, “King and Lionheart” (Pacific Rim)
kass, “Becoming Brothers” (Friday Night Lights)
laurashapiro, “Hurricane” (Farscape and Battlestar Galactica)
bradcpu, “Moonlight” (Sleepy Hollow)

I report with great pleasure that, after the presentation, a total of five people told me that now they really want to see Pacific Rim, Sleepy Hollow, and/or Friday Night Lights. Well done, vidders!

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 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.