Transformative Works and Cultures, special issues: Fan/Remix

Video, No. 9 (March 15, 2012)

Special issue 1

Julie Levin Russo & Francesca Coppa, Fan/remix video (a remix)

Theory

Paul Booth, Mashup as temporal amalgam: Time, taste, and textuality

Tisha Turk & Joshua Johnson, Toward an ecology of vidding

Virginia Kuhn, The rhetoric of remix

Kim Middleton, Remix video and the crisis of the humanities

Praxis

Sarah Fiona Winters, Vidding and the perversity of critical pleasure: Sex, violence, and voyeurism in

"Closer" and "On the Prowl"

Agnese Vel ar, Spreading the cult body on YouTube: A case study of "Telephone" derivative videos

Kathleen Amy Wil iams, Fake and fan film trailers as incarnations of audience anticipation and desire

Symposium

Martin Leduc, The two-source il usion: How vidding practices changed Jonathan McIntosh’s political

remix videos

Zephra Doerr, Abridged series and fandom remix culture

Forrest Phil ips, The Star Wars franchise, fan edits, and Lucasfilm

Interview

Counteragent, Documenting the vidders: A conversation with Bradcpu

Brett Boessen, Interview with Eric Faden and Nina Paley

Desiree D'Alessandro, Diran Lyons, Desiree D'Alessandro and Diran Lyons bear arms: Weapons of

mass transformation

Multimedia

Alexandra Juhasz, Fred rant

Elisa Kreisinger, Queer video remix and LGBTQ online communities

Ian Roberts, Genesis of the digital anime music video scene, 1990–2001

Jonathan McIntosh, A history of subversive remix video before YouTube: Thirty political video mashups

made between World War II and 2005

Review

Lindsay Giggey, "Television and new media: Must-click TV," by Jennifer Gil an

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), ISSN 1941-2258, is an online-only Gold Open Access publication of the nonprofit

Organization for Transformative Works. TWC is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0

Unported License. Download date: March 15, 2017. For citation, please refer to the most recent version of articles at TWC.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9 (2012)

Editorial

Fan/remix video (a remix)

Julie Levin Russo

Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, United States

Francesca Coppa

Muhlenberg Col ege, Al entown, Pennsylvania, United States

[0.1] Abstract— Editorial for Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9 (September 15, 2012).

[0.2] Keywords— Anime music video; Appropriation; Fan production; Fan trailers; Mashup; Political remix video;

Vidding

Russo, Julie Levin, and Francesca Coppa. 2012. "Fan/Remix Video (A Remix)." In "Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9.

doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0431.

[1.1] Remix, even moving image remix, is hardly a new phenomenon. Indeed, the buzzword has gathered such momentum in cultural discourse that it begins to seem retrospectively that everything is a remix (http://everythingisaremix.info). Copying and overpainting in the Renaissance (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2105928,00.html); the ascendance of pop art; Bach's "Goldberg

Variations"; the analog techniques of early hiphop turntablists (http://thomson.co.uk/blog/wp

content/uploads/infographic/interactivemusicmap/index.html); the repertoire of folklore; surrealist films of the

1930s—as these varied examples indicate, remix as a trope converges with our idea of creative production itself. At least, this is a common refrain among advocates of copyright reform, who have argued that culture always builds on the past (figure 1).

Figure 1. Screen shot from "RIP: A Remix Manifesto," by Brett Gaylor (2009) (http://ripremix.com/). [View larger

image.]

Joseph Cornell - Rose Hobart (1936)

Video 1. "Rose Hobart" by Joseph Cornell (1936) (http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2001/cteq/hobart/ ).

[1.2] Remix thus perhaps embodies our more pervasive sense of a postmodern repudiation of artistic principles like originality, authenticity, or aura, to the degree that it can characterize our audiovisual culture as a whole.

Nonetheless, as a practice that extends beyond music subcultures, the term is most closely associated with the historical specificities of our contemporary moment at the level of technology, powerful personal computers, consumer digital media devices, and Web 2.0. Remix video in particular has only recently blossomed into a widespread popular phenomenon. Vidding, political remix, DIY media, trailer mashups, tribute videos, memes, machinima, fan films—we are in the midst of an explosion in vernacular creativity that appropriates, celebrates, critiques, and transforms commercial entertainment. Technological innovations and Internet platforms support a developing ecology of video remix forms with unprecedented reach, richness, and cultural influence. At the same time, the value and legitimacy of this popular production is hotly contested on the basis of artistic merit, traditional literacies, and intellectual property.

[1.3] In this special issue, we zoom in on questions foregrounded by the proliferation and mainstreaming of remix video over the past decade. Not coincidentally, this summer will mark the 10th anniversary of VividCon (http://vividcon.com), a convention founded at a time when the fan vidding community was weathering the

transition to digital editing and an associated influx of new devotees. It would have been difficult then to anticipate the scale of this transformation, both in the prevalence of fan music videos (which are now a YouTube staple) and in their new interchanges with a vast ecology of remix practice. As mashup video genres increasingly coexist, crosspollinate, and collide online, emerging scholarly canons and debates on these distinct traditions can become similarly intersectional and mobile. We aim to bring diverse critical engagements to this conjuncture by fostering connections between scholars and fans across disciplines and subcultures.

2. Remix culture

[2.1] It's hard to believe we're only 7 years out from YouTube's early days in the spring of 2005

(http://infographiclabs.com/infographic/historyofonlinevideo/). While this Web startup was far from the first or last venture in Internet video, its pioneering features (including encoding, streaming, and embedding) and critical mass of users (facilitated by social components) rapidly positioned it as the destination for video online. With YouTube, the capacity of digital technologies to popularize all links in the video chain—production, distribution, appropriation—came to fruition. It's already hard to imagine our culture without ubiquitous access to audiovisual content from across the amateurprofessional spectrum and the ensuing predilection to share, modify, and spread it.

In less than a decade, video has become a media vernacular in unprecedented ways. As an example, consider both the content and the form of video responses to Jean Burgess's 2008 essay "'All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong to Us'? Viral Video, YouTube and the Dynamics of Participatory Culture" by students in the course Studies in Digital Culture at De Motfort University (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL690C70E82197ECC2).

Video Responce to Jean Burgess' Essay.avi

Video 2. "Video Summary of Jean Burgess' Essay…" by Jess Wager (2011).

[2.2] It's important to remember that remix and participatory media are not synonymous with the digital.

Appropriation has been a hallmark of 20thcentury art practice, customarily dated back to Duchamp's readymades (http://kikimiserychic.livejournal.com/192417.html). And a succession of innovations in more affordable and mobile recording technologies from 16mm film (1930s) to the Portapak video camera (1970s) have supported visions of independent grassroots media production. Digital media, however, represents a qualitative change in the possibilities and implications of popular video making. According to Lev Manovich's axiomatic textbook The Language of New Media, the two fundamental principles of computerization are numerical representation and modularity (2002, 27–

31). It follows that audiovisual content is today subject to quantification and algorithmic manipulation based on the decomposition and recomposition of its discrete units. What we now understand as media on any screen is essentially premixed by the processes of digitization into modular elements (the smallest of which are 0s and 1s), underpinning the explosion of what we have come to think of as remix culture.

Figure 2. "Outline of Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media," created by Carlton (2008).

[2.3] In this presentday context, Eduardo Navas (2010) defines remix culture as "a global activity consisting of the creative and efficient exchange of information made possible by digital technologies…[and] supported by the practice of cut/copy and paste." In this more precise definition, remix, which originated as a term in hiphop and disco subcultures, is based on sampling: taking excerpts of one or more existing works and recombining them into a new work. Before computerization, various forms of remix relied on specific technical practices dependent on distinct media. The digitization of media allows remix to function as a generalized principle of cultural production. Although software interfaces may vary, "cut/copy and paste"—a corollary of "numerical representation and modularity"—is now an intuitive operation to anyone who has used Microsoft Word or cropped a profile pic. For the purposes of this special issue, we consider remix video to include not only reedits of appropriated footage but other styles with a clear transformative logic. This might encompass Internet memes, machinima videos that use recorded game play, and liveaction parodies, remakes, or fan films. Navas emphasizes that "a rearrangement of something already

recognizable" is fundamental to remix as a "metalevel" genre. We believe this point supports adopting a conceptual rather than purely technical definition.

Video 3. "Remix Culture: The Early Years," from the Center for Social Media (2008).

[2.4] Thus, we can understand remix culture as an intersection of technological developments and creative tendencies that catalyzed a tipping point in our mediascape. The threshold of storage, processing capacity, and bandwidth we crossed in the 2000s, exemplified by the YouTube era of virtually infinite video, has catapulted remix into mainstream consciousness. The ensuing aesthetic, ideological, and legal questions have been taken up in

venues from Businessweek (http://www.businessweek.com/technology/thewarbetweencopyrightandremix

culture12122011.html) to The Colbert Report (http://www.colbertnation.com/thecolbertreport

videos/216595/january212009/stephensremixchallenge). The appearance of university courses on remix tied to

faculty research interests in digital and participatory culture—including our own offerings: Copy This Class at

Stanford University (spring 2011) (http://edu.jlr.org/pg/groups/29998/remixcopythisclass/) and Writing About Remix at Muhlenberg College (fall 2011 and 2012) (http://writingaboutremix.mirocommunity.org/)—is another

testament to the currency of this configuration (table 1).

Table 1. Overview of selected remix courses

Course

Description

"This semester the focus is on remix culture: the ways in

which artists, writers and creators of all kinds of cultural

artifacts today borrow, appropriate and remix content

created by other people. We'll be interpreting works where

Remix Culture (fall 2009), Jill Walker Rettberg,

this happens, we'll read about cultural and legal

University of Bergen (http://jilltxt.net/?p=2418)

implications of remixing, study historical examples of earlier

cultural appropriation (we are far from the first remixers)

and think about the theoretical and practical implications of

a culture where the original genius is no longer the

dominant cultural myth."

"Where do we draw the line between sampling and

stealing? What does it mean to call a urinal a work of art?

This course explores the tension between artistic

Open Source Culture (every year), Mark Tribe, Brown

appropriation and intellectual property law, and considers

University

recent efforts to use open source software as a model for

(https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/mcm1700n) cultural production. We will trace a history of open source culture from Cubist collage and the Readymades of Marcel

Duchamp through Pop art and found footage film to Hip

Hop and movie trailer mashups."

Digital Media and Participatory Culture (fall 2010),

"In the second half of the semester, we will focus on how

Melanie E. S. Kohnen, Georgia Tech

we use digital media to participate in culture. Our focus

(http://lcc.gatech.edu/~mkohnen3/index_tp_syllabus_ here will be on remixing, mashups, digital video

participatoryculture.html)

production, and other forms of transforming existing media

texts. We will also consider how copyright regulations

impact remix cultures."

"Writing, in our highly mediated culture, is remixing.

Complementing this mode of writing are lowtech, lowcost,

Writing, Research, and Technology (2009–2010), Bill

userfriendly technologies, such as the Flip Video Camera

Wolff, Rowan University

and YouTube. This installation of student videos will

(http://netvibes.com/wolffcw2010online) challenge viewers to rethink traditional concepts so often

fixed in meaning: text, research, writing, and composition,

among others."

"With the spread of digital technologies, remix has come to

Remix Culture (winter 2012), Louisa Stein, Middlebury the forefront as a major form of artistic work and of cultural College

and political commentary. We will examine how digital

(http://lstein.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/remix

technologies shape transformative creativity. Drawing on

cultureawintertermexperience/)

the work of theorists such as DJ Spooky and Lawrence

Lessig, we will consider the creative and legal ramifications

of remix logics" [description from course catalog].

[2.5] We hope that this special issue, alongside other recent journal publications and several new or forthcoming books on remix culture (Appendix D), will contribute to a growing scholarly discourse on our contemporary conjuncture of digital media, online communities, and grassroots creativity.

[2.6] Beyond spurring academic and journalistic interest, however, the technocultural innovations that have escalated remix have intensified and transformed creative communities and practices themselves. As an allencompassing video portal, YouTube has brought subcultures into contact and encouraged aesthetic, conceptual, and personal connections between creative communities that were relatively isolated and distinct in the era before social media. The 24/7 DIY Video Summit (http://video247.org) in 2008 was an event exemplary of these new

formations and a watershed in forging alliances among academics, artists, activists, legal advocates, technologists, and enthusiasts across the online video spectrum. In particular, 24/7 DIY placed fan vids, anime music videos, and machinima as pop cultural remix styles in dialogue with political and artistic remixes and independent video. This thoughtful curation initiated fresh conversations about popular remix as a legitimate artistic practice and about the evolving relationships between traditions and genres in the memetic context of the Internet.

[2.7] Such an inclusive lens is important for supporting coalitions and affinities given the technical and legal challenges facing remix video today. While we are witnessing a sea change in typical attitudes and activities around appropriation and intellectual property, both old and new media industries are actively resisting these changes to ideas and systems of ownership. Hosting streaming video online still requires significant resources and expense, which has been an obstacle to the development of a communitysupported, nonprofit platform. As a result, creators must choose among several corporate portals to distribute their projects. (The two exceptions we're aware of, The

Internet Archive [http://archive.org] and Critical Commons [http://criticalcommons.org], are appreciated but less

userfriendly options.) Under pressure from Hollywood, most Web video companies disavow all copyrighted material, with little recourse for transformative works. Although YouTube has been the milieu for much of the vibrant creativity of video remix, it also has the most highly developed infrastructure for preemptively and indiscriminately blocking content flagged by automated filters. Paradoxically, the same scale and diversity that make YouTube the primary destination for watching, mashing, and spreading video have led the site to prioritize professional and commercial interests, leaving it a poor archive for remixes (Juhasz 2011).

Video 4. "Hitler, as 'Downfall' producer, orders a DMCA takedown" by Brad Templeton (2009) (http://ideas.4brad.com/hitlertriesdmcatakedown).

[2.8] Fan vidders, as a relatively cohesive and organized community, adopted the site Imeem en masse in 2007 for

video hosting because it had attractive policies and social features (http://fanlore.org/wiki/Imeem). However, in

2009, the company announced a sudden decision to remove all usergenerated content, stranding vidders with no centralized home. Today, streaming vids are scattered across several imperfect platforms (including Blip.tv, Vimeo, Viddler, and Vidders.net [built on Ning]), and the group relies on external posts at personal Web sites, blogs/journals, or the textbased Archive of Our Own (a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[OTW]) for archival functions. This is only one example of the demand for advocacy to preserve and protect remix subcultures and their creative works. Initiatives that support the rights of remixers like fans include the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "No Downtime for Free Speech" campaign (http://eff.org/issues/ipandfreespeech), the

Center for Social Media's fair use resources (http://centerforsocialmedia.org/fairuse), and the Participatory Culture

Foundation, which develops free and open video technologies (http://pculture.org). OTW, the sponsor of this journal,

has collaborated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org) on successfully petitioning the US

Copyright Office for a DMCA exemption for noncommercial remix (http://transformativeworks.org/projects/legal).

This special issue aims to extend alliances across the practices and perspectives of distinct remix communities because these connections are vital to safeguarding remix as a widely accessible creative practice.

3. Multimedia

[3.1] Transformative Works and Cultures and the OTW have particular ties to the largely female and feminist traditions of media fandom, including fan vidding. The journal and the organization have also been at the forefront of efforts to build affiliations among contiguous or compatible forms of fan production, activism, and scholarship.

Vidding, which customarily involves editing clips from TV or movies to the soundtrack of a song in order to

"comment on or analyze a set of preexisting visuals, to stage a reading, or occasionally to use the footage to tell new stories" (Coppa 2008, ¶1.1), has been practiced in fan communities since the 1970s. In the more recent era of Internet video, vidders have found points of aesthetic and subcultural intersection with other strands of fandom (e.g., anime music video), with memes and other appropriations of mass media (e.g., spoof movie trailers), and with the critical commitment of political remix. Our topic for this special issue on Fan/Remix Video deliberately highlights the distinctiveness and hybridization of fan vidding and other remix genres. Styling it with a slash alludes to the convention in media fandom of marking erotic or romantic couples in this fashion, as in the paradigmatic Kirk/Spock pairing. Thus, our title suggests that fan video and remix video are engaged in an ongoing relationship, a networked narrative of which this special issue may be one component. We would thus like to present, as part of our introduction, a vid that articulates this episode in the tale we are collectively telling. Video sources are drawn from the citations in this issue, the oeuvre of authors in this issue, and from 24/7 DIY screenings in 2008.

Oh Internet (A Vidding/Remix Romance)

Video 5. "Oh Internet (A Vidding/Remix Romance)," by Julie Levin Russo (2012) (see Appendix B). Video audio source, "'Oh, Internet'—A Love Song" by Harto (Hannah Hart) and Creator&Distractor (2012) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mafimBTMTmY ); video effects source based on "How to Datamosh," by datamosher (Bob Weisz) (2010) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYf3EWMuHH0 ).

4. Contents of this special issue

[4.1] This introduction has integrated various scholarly and multimedia sources through the modalities of remix, culminating in the original video component in video 5 above. As such, it can exist only online, where the capacities of the Web (as deployed by the developers of the opensource software the journal uses, OJS

[http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/473], and TWC's layout team) support hyperlinks and media embedding. To further mobilize

both the topic and the form of this special issue, we feature a substantial section of curated video exhibits documenting remix practices including queer video remix, anime music video, and political remix video. Both Ian Roberts's "Genesis of the Digital Anime Music Video Scene" and Jonathan McIntosh's "A History of Subversive Remix Video" focus particularly on establishing the predigital, preYouTube history of remix. McIntosh's extensive collection starts in 1941, with Charles A. Ridley's parody of Hitler and the Nazis, and ends in 2005, the year of YouTube's creation, with a remix reflective of our own political climate: Jackie Sollum's "Planet of the Arabs." Similarly, Ian Roberts chronicles the evolution of AMVs from 1990 to 2003, focusing on the development of both technological practices and aesthetic standards within emerging anime music video communities. In her exhibition, "Queer Video Remix and LGBTQ Online Communities," Elisa Kreisinger considers remix itself as a queer act that "challenges, questions, or provokes," and her collection of videos encourages the viewer to "gaze through a queer lens, identify with queer(ed) characters, and be sympathetic to their struggles." Like these three online exhibits, our fourth multimedia piece, Alexandra Juhasz's "Fred Rant," takes advantage of the new potentialities of digital scholarship even as it demonstrates a critical approach to more utopian models of (aca)fandom and participatory culture. Juhasz argues that the cruelty and shallowness of many of the amateur videos responding to famed vlogger Fred suggests that not all participation is empowering and not all speech is edifying. Her video essay, constructed in the same immersive, multimodal online platform as her video book, Learning from YouTube, takes us through the juvenile work of Fred's fans and then asks us to ponder: "But did they learn anything, grow, become artists or citizens?"

[4.2] Scaffolding the debates that play out across these multimedia pieces, the essays in the Theory section step back from particular works to articulate broader implications of readwrite video culture in thoughtprovoking ways.

In "Mashup as Temporal Amalgam," Paul Booth considers how remixes frequently mash together two time frames;

moreover, often an older work is juxtaposed with a newer one, and reinterpreted or reinvigorated by the connection.

Booth therefore argues that remixing alters the value of various cultural products by altering their place and time in the social world; one may need to know yesterday's movie to understand today's remix. Tisha Turk and Joshua Johnson claim that scholars of remix typically paint vidders as articulate consumers rather than as producers in their own right—that is, as artists who have their own enthusiastic audiences and are working within a collective art world of shared meanings and collaboratively developed tastes. Influenced by composition studies, "Toward an Ecology of Vidding" recharacterizes the vidding community as a vast and complex ecosystem of creative and interpretive activity in which a vid is a statement as well as a response. Like Turk and Johnson, Virginia Kuhn insists that remix is an active discursive act rather than a responsive or secondary work. In "The Rhetoric of Remix," Kuhn argues against definitions of remix that implicitly valorize an original author or text and discusses several fan vids and remixes that would benefit from a more robust understanding of remix as speech. The Theory section closes with a provocative essay from Kim Middleton, whose essay remixes two contemporary academic topics: the crisis of the humanities and the rise of the remix. Like any good mashup, Middleton's juxtaposition gets us to see both sides differently; in "Remix Video and the Crisis of the Humanities," she suggests that the skills and values of the humanities—close reading, critical thinking, the interrogation of authorial and authoritative voices, and the ability to produce new interpretations—are amply manifested in remix culture.

[4.3] The Praxis essays in this issue offer indepth discussions of videos that demonstrate remix's potential as a sophisticated critical and artistic response. In "Vidding and the Perversity of Critical Pleasure: Sex, Violence, and Voyeurism in 'Closer' and 'On the Prowl," Sarah Fiona Winters argues that these metacritical fan vids examine the pleasures of media fandom and its practices while reinscribing those same pleasures for the spectator, constructing complex texts that seduce even as they question and subvert expectations. Agnese Vellar analyzes Lady Gaga's mastery of Web 2.0 and the unparalleled spreadability of her image and brand in "Spreading the Cult Body on YouTube: A Case Study of "Telephone" Derivative Videos." By positioning herself as both a user and a producer of audiovisual media and social media, Gaga legitimizes and participates in the fertile creative fan culture that surrounds her. Last, Kathleen Williams explores "Fake and Fan Film Trailers as Incarnations of Audience Anticipation and Desire," showing that these trailers are akin to architectural desire lines, creating trace versions of stories that may never exist or express anticipation of particular film events or interpretations.

A Hard Day's

Clates

Remix

http://youtube.com/watch?v=KIWsMKZt3Eg

Night of the

(trailer)

Living Dead

(2006)

Coin Operated

counteragent

Vid (meta)

http://counteragent.livejournal.com/107870.html

Boy (2011)

Destiny Calling

counteragent

Vid (meta)

http://counteragent.livejournal.com/14447.html

(2008)

She Blinded Me

Vid

With Science

counteragent

(charmax

http://counteragent.livejournal.com/48951.html

(2009)

tribute)

Still Alive

counteragent

Vid (meta)

http://counteragent.livejournal.com/42225.html

(2008)

Live Action

Fan film

Code Monkey

Derrick Stolee

(meme)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=aqTaqVi9J8k

(2007)

Open Video

Conference

Desiree

Remix

2010 (Step

D'Alessandro

(political)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=uFRNOEHm2Y8

Brothers Remix)

(2010)

Chevron Lie

Diran Lyons

Remix

http://youtube.com/watch?v=mk_1ez8zc2Q

Detector (2012)

(political)

Harry Potter vs

Darth Vader

Diran Lyons

Remix

http://youtube.com/watch?v=AcI5vZEGBSI

(Project 12,

(political)

7/12) (2011)

Matriarchs of

Death (Project

Diran Lyons

Remix

http://youtube.com/watch?v=1tO1_OkhK4A

12, 4/12)

(political)

(2011)

Telephone vs

Music

Enter Sandman

DJs from Mars

mashup

http://youtube.com/watch?v=xLou17VlY

(2010)

Right Now

Someone Is

Doki Doki

AMV

http://animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?

Reading This

Productions

(meme)

v=3684

Title (2001)

Captivity (2008)

Elisa Kreisinger

Remix

http://youtube.com/watch?v=F7EfhumL4yo

(political)

Sex and the

Elisa Kreisinger

Remix

http://elisakreisinger.wordpress.com/video/queercarrieproject/

Remix (2009)

(political)

A Fair(y) Use

Eric Faden

Remix

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/documentaryfilmprogram/film/a

Tale (2007)

(political)

fairyusetale

Barbie and the

Remix

Diamond Castle

gaberine

(political)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=DTVIiT2HdAw

Recut (2010)

Buffy vs

Jonathan

Remix

http://rebelliouspixels.com/2009/buffyvsedwardtwilight

Edward:

McIntosh

(political)

remixed

Twilight

Remixed (2009)

Right Wing

Jonathan

Remix

http://rebelliouspixels.com/2010/rightwingradioduckdonald

Radio Duck

McIntosh

(political)

discoversglennbeck

(2010)

Too Many Dicks

Jonathan

Remix

http://rebelliouspixels.com/2011/toomanydicksonthedaily

on The Daily

McIntosh

(political)

show

Show (2011)

Wouldn't It Be

Laura Shapiro

Vid (multi)

http://blip.tv/laurashapiro/wouldntitbenice2312538

Nice (2002)

I Put You There

Laura Shapiro

Vid (meta)

http://blip.tv/laurashapiro/iputyouthere2321427

(2006)

and Lithiumdoll

The Grey Video

Laurent

Music

(2004)

Fauchere and

mashup

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3zJqihkLcGc

Antoine Tinguely

Us (2007)

lim

Vid (meta)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=_yxHKgQyGx0

Vogue (2008)

Luminosity

Vid ( 300)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=2_NrUD1iqME

Virgin O'Riley

Mark Vidler

Music

http://youtube.com/watch?v=EiDmsaDT9Q

(2010)

mashup

WoW Code

Mike Booth

Machinima

http://youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA

Monkey (2006)

(meme)

The Shining

Neochosen

Remix

http://youtube.com/watch?v=KmkVWuP_sO0

Recut (2006)

(trailer)

Trailer for Toy

Story 3:

ScreenRant

Remix

http://youtube.com/watch?v=jHJwgA54Gqk

Inception

(trailer)

(2010)

Walking on the

Seah and Margie

Vid (meta)

http://flummery.org

Ground (2005)

Code Monkey

Studio Hybrid

AMV

http://youtube.com/watch?v=5W_wd9Qf0IE

AMV (2007)

(meme)

Closer (2003)

T. Jonesy and

Vid (K/S)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3uxTpyCdriY

Killa

The Glass

thingswithwings

Vid (multi)

http://thingswithwings.dreamwidth.org/30715.html

(2008)

Sims2 Code

thumbmaster021

Machinima

http://youtube.com/watch?v=qIJ1bWqXn3U

Monkey (2007)

(meme)

Ten Things I

Hate about the

Vayabobo

Remix

http://youtube.com/watch?v=u1kqqMXWEFs

Commandments

(trailer)

(2006)

8. Appendix C: Online resources

Resource

URL

Fair Use Remix Institute

http://remixinstitute.net

[re]mix:studies.org

http://remixstudies.org

Political Remix Video blog

http://www.politicalremixvideo.com

Total Recut (video remix gallery

http://www.totalrecut.com

and community)

hitRECord (remix and

collaborationbased media

http://hitrecord.org

production)

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use

http://centerforsocialmedia.org/fairuse/relatedmaterials/codes/codebest

for Online Video

practicesfairuseonlinevideo

EFF's "Test Suite" of Fair Use

http://www.eff.org/pages/UGCtestsuite

Video Examples

MIT Tech TV appropriation series

http://techtv.mit.edu/tags/1507appropriation/videos

In Media Res Vidding Theme Week

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/theme

week/2008/05/fannishviddersthemedweekjanuary28february12008

OTW's Fan Video and Multimedia

http://transformativeworks.org/projects/multimedia

initiative

OTW's comprehensive fan video

http://transformativeworks.org/projects/fanvideobibliographies

bibliography

9. Appendix D: Further reading

Beebe, Roger, and Jason Middleton, eds. 2007. Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Boon, Marcus. 2010. In Praise of Copying. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Burgess, Jean, and Joshua Green. 2009. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. New York: Polity.

Busse, Kristina, ed. 2009. "In Focus: Fandom and Feminism." Cinema Journal 48 (4): 104–36.

http://www.cmstudies.org/?InFocus_48_4.

Coppa, Francesca, Rebecca Tushnet, Kristina Busse, and Alexis Lothian. 2011. "In Practice: Vidding." Camera Obscura 26 (2): 123–46.

Critical Art Ensemble. 1995. "Utopian Plagiarism, Hypertextuality, and Electronic Cultural Production." In Critical Issues in Electronic Media, edited by Simon Penny, 105–18. New York: SUNY Press.

http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/000786print.html.

Horwatt, Eli. 2010. "A Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing: Contemporary Found Footage Practice on the Internet."

Scope 17. http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/cultborr/chapter.php?id=8.

Itō, Mizuko. 2010. "The Rewards of Noncommercial Production: Distinctions and Status in the Anime Music Video Scene." First Monday 15, no. 5.

http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2968/2528.

Jenkins, Henry. 2006. "How to Watch a FanVid." Confessions of an AcaFan, September 18.

http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/09/how_to_watch_a_fanvid.html.

Jenkins, Henry, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf, and Joshua Green. 2009. "If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Part One): Media Viruses and Memes." Confessions of an AcaFan, February 11.

http://henryjenkins.org/2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html.

Lessig, Lawrence. 2008. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin Press.

http://www.archive.org/details/LawrenceLessigRemix.

Lethem, Jonathan. 2007. "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism." Harpers.

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387.

Lovink, Geert, and Sabine Niederer, eds. 2008. Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.

Lovink, Geert, and Rachel Somers Miles, eds. 2011. Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images beyond YouTube.

Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.

Lowood, Henry, ed. 2011. "The Machinima Issue." Journal of Visual Culture 10 (1).

http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/10/1.toc.

Lowood, Henry, and Michael Nitsche. 2011. The Machinima Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

McLeod, Kembrew, and Peter DiCola. 2011. Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

McLeod, Kembrew, and Rudolf Kuenzli. 2011. Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Miller, Paul D. (DJ Spooky), ed. 2008. Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, edited by Paul D. Miller.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Milstein, Dana. "Case Study: Anime Music Videos." In Music, Sound and Multimedia: From the Live to the Virtual, 29–47. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

Sinnreich, Aram. 2010 . Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Smith, Iain Robert, ed. 2009. Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation. Scope. Nottingham: Nottingham University Press.

Snickars, Pelle, and Patrick Vonderau, eds. 2009. The YouTube Reader. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden.

SonvillaWeiss, Stefan. 2010. Mashup Cultures. New York: Springer.

Tofts, Darren, and Christian McCrea, eds. 2009. Remix issue. Fibreculture, no. 15.

http://fifteen.fibreculturejournal.org.

Tryon, Chuck. 2009. "Hollywood Remixed: Movie Trailer Mashups, FiveSecond Movies, and Film Culture." In Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence, 149–73. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Turk, Tisha. 2010. "'Your Own Imagination': Vidding and Vidwatching as Collaborative Interpretation." Film and Film Culture, no. 5: 88–111.

Tushnet, Rebecca. 2010. "Hybrid Vigor: Mashups, Cyborgs, and Other Necessary Monsters." I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy 6 (1): 1–12.

10. Works cited

Burgess, Jean. 2008. "'All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong to Us'? Viral Video, YouTube and the Dynamics of Participatory Culture." In Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, edited by Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer, 101–9. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.

Coppa, Francesca. 2008. "Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 1. doi:10.3983/twc.2008.0044.

Juhasz, Alexandra. 2011. "YouTube at Five: What's It to You?" In Learning from YouTube. Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press. http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/learningfromyoutube/texteo.php?composite=198&tour=13.

Manovich, Lev. 2002. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Navas, Eduardo. 2010. "Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture." In Mashup Cultures, edited by

Stefan SonvillaWeiss, 157–77. New York: Springer. http://remixtheory.net/?p=444.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9 (2012)

Theory

Mashup as temporal amalgam: Time, taste, and textuality

Paul J. Booth

DePaul University, Chicago, Il inois, United States

[0.1] Abstract— The mashup video is examined as a specific textual component of

remix culture. Mashup videos represent one particular type of remix and require an

intricate base of knowledge to understand and appreciate the complex reworking of

textuality engendered by the form. The mashup video becomes a key symbol of the

engaged 21stcentury media creator because it speaks to a medialiterate and active

audience. If we are to particulate in a fully autonomous media environment as scholars

and as practitioners of participatory media, then it behooves us to speak not just to the

salience of the mashup through a particular methodology, but also with a Media Studies

2.0 knowledge base. The temporal fluidity of the mashup video is explored as it relates

to the concept of social and cultural taste. Analyses of the mashup videos "Virgin

O'Riley" (Mark Vidler), "Vogue" (Luminosity), and "The Grey Video" (Fauchere and Tinguely) show how mashup videos remix new genres of cultural activity.

[0.2] Keywords— Danger Mouse; Luminosity; Remix; Temporality; Video; Vidler

Booth, Paul J. 2012. "Mashup as Temporal Amalgam: Time, Taste, and Textuality." In

"Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0297.

1. Introduction

[1.1] In his essay for Remix Theory, Lev Manovich (2007) calls our current epoch a

"remix culture," following on from the postmodern culture of the 1980s (Lessig 2008).

Unlike the pastiche commonly encountered in postmodernism content (Jameson 1991),

today's remix culture features content that has been recycled, changed, adjusted, and

solicited from other artists. Originality stems less from the ability to create than it does

the ability to use (note 1). Call it what you will, Manovich says—sampling, appropriation,

quoting, or remixing—it all amounts to the same thing: new aesthetics, based on

remixing existing content, engender a new appreciation for older texts.

[1.2] I want to focus on one particular aspect of remix culture, the mashup video, as a

site of remarkable cultural confluence. I will show that the power of the mashup video to

enact social change stems from the way it juxtaposes two different time frames. Although

commonly conceived of as a cultural artifact, the mashup can also be articulated in a

more general way: as a metaphor for larger cultural changes that envelop remix

aesthetics, fan practices, convergence culture, and transmediation (Booth 2010). In

concrete form, the mashup takes data from two or more different inputs and mixes them

together in such a way as to create a unique, third form without loss to the meaning of the originals. For example, the video "Trailer for Toy Story 3: Inception" (ScreenRant 2010) represents a mashup of the video from the trailer for the film Toy Story 3 (2010) with the audio from the trailer for Inception (2010). On the textual level, the video and the audio reference wildly different texts, but the mashup works as an art form because

the viewer must recognize each element as well as what happens when they are mixed

(we must be familiar with both Toy Story and Inception to understand the joke; for example, that when the Toy Story elephant sneezes fluff, there is a direct analogue to the awardwinning special effects of Inception). Yet there is a larger social significance here as well. The mashup of Toy Story 3 and Inception highlights ideological similarities between the two texts that can be read in many ways: for example, connecting the

notion of dreaming with children's imagination and play; articulating a link between star

Leonardo DiCaprio and the plastic Ken doll; or focusing on the way the toys fall asleep as

related to the notion of inception in the film. Multiple interpretations exist, and we as

viewers must be knowledgeable about both sources, as well as the convergence of them,

in order to make sense of the final product.

Trailer for 'Toy Story 3: Inception'

Video 1. "Trailer for Toy Story 3: Inception," posted by ScreenRant (2010).

[1.3] This notion of media convergence has been taken up by Henry Jenkins (2006) in

Convergence Culture, but I contend that a mashup is qualitatively different than a convergence of media practices. For Jenkins, a convergence culture emerges when media

content flows across "multiple media platforms," when media audiences will "go almost anywhere in search of the kind of media experiences they want," and when "multiple media systems coexist and where media content flows fluidly across them" (282). Thus, a converged media text exists as dispersed across the transmediated environment. In

contrast, the mashup exists as a single text with multiple meanings. The convergence

highlighted by Jenkins finds a home in situ with mashups. A similar focus on the creation

of alternate meanings and readings of media objects has been examined as part of fan

of alternate meanings and readings of media objects has been examined as part of fan studies through the examination of amateur production.

[1.4] I want to argue, therefore, that an analysis of mashup videos as entities can

reveal an aspect of the very contemporary cultural processes that led to the creation of

those videos. In this way, my argument is based on the work of William Merrin (2009),

who argues that the discipline of media studies has reached a turning point in its focus

and methodology, a change led by the digital articulation of media users who

demonstrate mastery over their media environment. Prompted by a transformation in our

"social, political, cultural, and economic worlds…media studies has to transform itself to understand this environment" (22). To understand new media texts, outlets, and

audiences, we need to revise our basic methods of analysis.

[1.5] To that end, I examine how the mashup revises traditional notions of time and

taste. Specifically, I use the work of Pierre Bourdieu to examine how mashups

demonstrate different tastes of their audience amalgamated through temporal

juxtaposition within the video text. For Bourdieu, the value of a particular work is

mutable, and depends not so much on the makeup of the artist or of the creator but

rather on the interest and knowledge of the audience. A work that previously may have

been thought valueless in a culture ruled by aristocrats may become revalued when

discussed by or in a larger population. Bourdieu's theories of taste have been usefully

appropriated by Jenkins (1992) to look at the place of popular texts in fan cultures (16–

19). Bourdieu's theories represented a turnabout from previous conceptions of how value

was earned in society, many of which depended on a sense of history with media objects.

The older something was, the more valued it became. As Bourdieu (1984) describes,

"Legitimate manners owe their value to the fact that they manifest the rarest conditions of acquisition…to possess things from the past…is to master time" (71).

[1.6] If taste and time are linked in traditional theories of taste, this relationship is

complicated by the complex play of temporality in the mashup video. There are many

cultural aspects of the mashup that deserve, and indeed have had, scholarly attention,

including notions of authorship, copyright (Grobelny 2008), politics and social action

(HowardSpink 2004), and identity (Booth 2010). But the temporal interstitiality of the

mashup, existing between two different time frames, has been little examined. Of interest

to those studying remix culture, Bourdieu's discussion of taste offers a useful mode for

investigating the temporal power of the mashup as a cultural activity. In sum, the

process of viewing a mashup video is one of active and, importantly, constant

construction. As John Shiga (2007) notes, this discussion of the activity of the mashup

can be usefully integrated with taste: "subcultural developments can be understood in

terms of the circulation of cultural, economic, and social capital" through time (96). That is, mashups exist both as objects with subcultural value and as activities that help

construct that subculture. Indeed, the fact that mashups are based in a highly localized

sense of temporal discontinuity is perhaps the most crucial factor for understanding the

roles time and taste play in mashup textuality, as temporality can be usefully understood

roles time and taste play in mashup textuality, as temporality can be usefully understood as a component of an audience's tastes.

[1.7] If Media Studies 2.0 (Merrin 2009) asks us to refine our study beyond broadcast

models, then examining the aesthetics of contemporary content becomes crucial for

furthering our understanding of today's remix culture. In the following analysis, I

examine three exemplar mashup videos as emblematic of this time/taste amalgam. "The

Grey Video," "Virgin O'Riley," and "Vogue" all use the inherent temporal flux of the mashup to make statements about sexuality as a theme. I note this theme both to create

a sense of topical unity among my texts and to compare the social significance of

disparate mashup texts. Ultimately, through these analyses, I arrive at a remix

understanding of how taste and temporality filter through the text of the mashup video.

2. Time is of the essence: Temporality as a key component of

mashup

[2.1] If we take Manovich at his word and mark a shift from the postmodern to the

remix, then the issue of how we perceive time and contemporary temporal structure

becomes paramount. We can see this issue represented in the way the mashup video

plays with time within its text. Specifically, I examine how Laurent Fauchere and Antoine

Tinguely's (2006) "The Grey Video" (video 2) illustrates a remix culture's view of temporal complexity as a critique of two different time periods' different views of

sexuality and fandom (see also Reid and Patel, with Calloway and Dukes 2007). Itself a

fan creation, taken from the song "Encore" on DJ Danger Mouse's The Grey Album remix, the video highlights the temporal discontinuities present within the song. Famously, DJ

Danger Mouse mashed up an a cappella version of JayZ's The Black Album with tracks, beats, and samples from the Beatles' selftitled album, usually called The White Album.

The resulting The Grey Album was prominently featured in the mid2000s as a

quintessential mashup album, and it faced its share of notoriety because of various

lawsuits and acts of civil disobedience (note 2). Using both appropriated texts as the

source material, Danger Mouse mixed the two albums together to make a unique sound.

Both JayZ and the Beatles were instantly recognizable within the mix, but the sound

itself was an amalgam of the two. The video similarly merges JayZ with the Beatles and

uses the images of the artists to focus on the sonic and aesthetic similarities between

them. We watch the "The Grey Video" and hear both the original Beatles' and JayZ's music, and we see their images as an amalgam. It is a holy trinity of textuality.

The Grey Video

Video 2. "The Grey Video," by Laurent Fauchere and Antoine Tinguely (2006).

[2.2] "The Grey Video" expounds on the temporal juxtaposition of the song, and in doing so, it references and critiques the sexualization of fandom of two time periods.

Clips from the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night (1964) are interspersed with JayZ in concert.

Already temporal confusion occurs: the music of the Beatles comes from their 1968

album The Beatles, but the video is taken from the 1964 film. Other temporal

juxtapositions become apparent as the video progresses. For example, as the Beatles

begin their song, portrayed as an appearance on a television program with their producer

behind the scenes watching them on monitors, there is a momentary jump in the

soundtrack and JayZ appears on the monitor, timed to coincide with his first vocals. Fans

of both artists are prominently displayed, screaming orgasmically at the Beatles and

dancing sexually to JayZ. The discrepancy between two time frames—the Beatles in the

1960s and JayZ in the early 2000s—finds resolution in the video as the vocals begin to

match the video.

[2.3] As JayZ starts to sing the lyrics to "Encore," the video opens up a third temporal discrepancy. Behind the Beatles, playing on stage, a large sign displays his lyrics in

lights: "Can I get an encore / Do you want more…" Mashed up on screen, the Beatles'

music (represented visually) encounters JayZ's lyrics (represented textually). "The Grey Video" highlights such breaks with classic temporality throughout the text: at times, John Lennon puts down his guitar and pops and locks, Ringo uses his drum kit as a turntable

to mix tracks, Paul and George are replaced by two hiphop dancers, and dancers from

the 21st century are placed at the Beatles' concert.

[2.4] Even the audience gets into the act. Because part of the text of the video is taken

from A Hard Day's Night, the concert footage features hundreds of screaming girls; at the height of Beatlemania, the audience of young female fans could become hysterically

height of Beatlemania, the audience of young female fans could become hysterically

sexual (Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs 1992). At the 1:15 mark of the video, for example,

when JayZ sings "One last time / I need y'all to roar," the footage shifts from the screaming 1960s fangirls to a 2000s young hiphop dancing girl, complete with barelythere shirt and obvious cleavage (figure 1). The linkage between the hysterically sexual screaming of the 1960s and the sexuality of the 2000s is made clear through the textual

fragmentation.

Figure 1. "The Grey Video," contemporary dancing fan. [View larger image.]

[2.5] Ultimately, if we can claim any meaning from "The Grey Video" as a remix video, it is because it exists as a mashup of two distinct sounds, two distinct artists, and two

distinct time frames. The video becomes meaningful because of, not despite, the distinct

temporal fragmentation. The references between the sexuality surrounding the Beatles

and the sexuality surrounding JayZ seem different when juxtaposed with each other, but

when mashed up into one video, the contrast becomes clear. Namely, whereas the fans

of the Beatles seem to target their sexual energy toward the Beatles themselves, the fan

of JayZ becomes a target of sexualization by the viewer of the video. Of course, because

both fan types, 1960s fangirl and 2000s dancer, come from their respective time periods,

the viewer is thus invited to see the shift in sexual focus as an aspect of the text itself.

Sexualized frenzy becomes part of the text of a musical act, regardless of time period,

artist demographics, or musical genre. But through this juxtaposition, a clear critique of a modern tobelookedatness emerges from the sexualization of the 2000s fan when

compared to the idolization of the 1960s fan.

[2.6] One might be tempted to view this video through a postmodern lens—after all, it

mixes high and popular culture, it blurs the line between art and commerce, and it in

many ways elides its placement within a historical continuity. As Jameson argues, the

postmodern subject "has lost its capacity…to organize its past and future into coherent experience"; in other words, the postmodern citizen resides in an everchanging now that moves and flows with little reference to the past or the future (25). Indeed, Jean

Baudrillard (1983) has argued that all time condenses on the present, becoming little

more than "the absolute proximity, the total instantaneity of things" (133). As I have previously argued (2011), the result of this postmodern pessimism is that "there is no sense of the 'past' or 'future' but rather an instantaneous and vacuous sense of the

sense of the 'past' or 'future' but rather an instantaneous and vacuous sense of the

'present'" (6).

[2.7] But what of viewing the video as a component of remix culture? If postmodern

culture saw such dire consequences for temporal flux, what, if anything, has changed

with the advent of remixability and the modularization of media (Manovich 2005)? The

mashup does not fracture a sense of history or historicity into nothingness but rather

relies inherently on viewer knowledge of specific temporalities to create a definite sense

of history. By inscribing a "new" video with temporal characteristics from different time periods, mashups reinforce historical and temporal boundaries, relying on the audience to

create meaning. The meaning of "The Grey Video" emerges through knowledge of two

distinct time frames.

3. Time for a taste: Bourdieu and temporality

[3.1] As a specific aspect of temporality, Fauchere and Tinguely's "The Grey Video" also relies on inherent assumptions about the taste of its audience. Traditionally, taste rests

on a linear sense of temporality, not the multifaceted system demonstrated by mashup

videos. But in a remix culture, it is only through a redefinition of that marker of value

that we can see mashup videos as components of a larger media environment. Mark

Vidler's (2010) mashup video "Virgin O'Riley" becomes a meaningful exploration of taste in a remix culture, through its symbolical linkage of the related notions of sexuality and

violence (video 3).

Go Home Productions "Virgin O'Riley"

Video 3. "Virgin O'Riley," by Mark Vidler (2010).

[3.2] Vidler, a mainstay on the remix scene, has a history of remixing classic rock songs

with more lighthearted pop music, as well as creating complex remix videos as

appropriations of both (see, for example, his "Carpenter's Wonderwall" and "Ray of Gob"). As with the fannish art of vidding, Vidler uses the mashup to underscore a salient

Gob"). As with the fannish art of vidding, Vidler uses the mashup to underscore a salient yet sublimated meaning that emerges from his source texts. Two temporalities exist

simultaneously in this video: the work of the Who (specifically, using clips from their

concerts and the film Quadrophenia [1979]) and the music and lyrics of Madonna's "Like a Virgin." Vidler's mashup song "Virgin O'Riley" fuses Madonna with the Who seamlessly, creating a synthesis of 1960s rock and 1980s popsynth. But what is perhaps most

salient about this mashup video is not just how the layers of images and music create a

new sound (a mashup object), but also how they create an active reading of two different

cultural tastes (a mashup of practice): the violence of the Who and the sexuality of

Madonna become salient only because the audience of the mashup is continually in the

process of juxtaposing these disparate tastes.

[3.3] The issue of taste is never far from the activity of deconstructing Vidler's "Virgin O'Riley." Specifically, as the song opens on the video, the recognizable chords of "Baba O'Riley" trilling on the keyboards, images of the Who appear on the screen superimposed on each other. At the 1:05 marker, text reading "Who's next" floats on the screen, surrounded by clouds, as if to signal the coming synthesis of Madonna's face onto what

had been the Who's video. The two groups dissolve in and out of each other, confusing

not only the temporal placement of the text but also the taste level of the audience.

[3.4] Madonna and the Who have different fan bases: one can be a fan of both, but in

the grand scheme of musical stylings, one can't get much farther apart than the grand

rock aesthetics of the Who and the playful dance pop of early Madonna. Each artist

appeals to a different group of people: people separated by generation, by social class,

by musical history. I say this not to place either group on a hierarchy of value but to note that both groups fit into a particular social order, a habitus of their own, which helps

determine (and is determined by) the social sphere of those who listen to them.

[3.5] Vidler's video synthesizes these spheres in a sophisticated amalgamation that

inherently relies on our social understanding of both values. Watching Pete Townsend

(1:17–1:34) pounding his tambourine to the beat of Madonna's seductive "I made it

through the wilderness / Somehow I made it through" is incongruous, to say the least.

Yet at a certain level, it simply works: we read Madonna's lyrics as a comment on the

Who, just as we start to see the Who as a pop act as well.

[3.6] Vidler then shifts his video remix technique to emphasize a connection between

the two groups, positioning Madonna on the left side of the screen and Quadrophenia's young protagonist, Jimmy, on the right. She sings "I didn't know how lost I was until I found you," mirroring the look in Jimmy's eyes (1:39). One could almost picture the two of them hooking up, perhaps in a romantic comedy. The connection is made through both

the music and the video text, linking the two pieces through a network of meaning. A

repetition of a mob breaking a shopwindow (1:53–2:00) echoes with Madonna's leadin

to the chorus, creating a dramatic overlay of violence (from the Who's rock song) and

sexuality (from Madonna's pop song). The chorus begins and the image shifts to

sexuality (from Madonna's pop song). The chorus begins and the image shifts to Madonna, sexily attired in her wedding dress and seductively caressing a bedsheet. A

dramatic tension highlights the mashup of rock and pop sensibilities, creating a decided

connection between taste and image.

[3.7] The connection between rock violence and pop sexuality continues, thematically

linking Townsend's aggression with Madonna's sensuality. The buildup to the chorus after

the bridge (2:53) features a repeated booming, as if of a cannon firing, with the text "The Who" flying on beat onto the screen numerous times. To the sound of heavy drum beats,

Townsend's famous guitardestroying antics take over the screen, as clips of him

throwing his ax and breaking amps, strings, and necks contrast with Madonna's repeated

lyric that she is "like a virgin." As the video continues, the drums kick in and Townsend's dramatic strumming mirrors the chorus Madonna sings. The contrast could not be clearer:

the violence of the Who matches and equals the sexuality of Madonna.

[3.8] It doesn't take too much extrapolation, then, to see the different taste levels of

the two pieces of music mashed up. The rock sensibilities of the Who, seemingly at odds

with the popsynth dance music of Madonna, find a home when juxtaposed within the

viewer's linkage of sex and violence. The mashup here doesn't just link two different time

frames; rather, it takes the activity of the audience to intertextually reference deeper

meanings of the texts to construct a mashup in all its complexity. Bourdieu offers one

particular reading of taste as a marker of social history that, in a way, helps elucidate the separate meanings of both Madonna and the Who. But to see the mashup meaning, the

remix value, of these two pieces requires a more complicated view that integrates the

temporality and the varied taste of remix.

[3.9] In a traditional postmodern sense, taste has always had a temporal quality, as

Bourdieu (1984) describes:

[3.10] The objects endowed with the greatest distinctive power are those

which most clearly attest the quality of the appropriation, and therefore the

quality of their owner, because their possession requires time and capacities

which, requiring a long investment in time…cannot be acquired in haste or by

proxy, and which therefore appear as the surest indications of the quality of the

person. (281)

[3.11] But rather than being dependent on a historical presence, this version of value

and taste is based on, as Williams (1976) describes, "a particular way of life" (80).

Although the question of temporality is never far from Bourdieu's mind, it is also rarely

directly articulated in his model of taste. In Bourdieu's philosophy, time becomes a way of understanding the development of larger aesthetic and philosophical temperaments, not a

key element of taste in and of itself. Although some attempt has been made to connect

Bourdieu with a tradition of historical sociology, time is a constant for Bourdieu, serving larger ends without affecting issues of taste (see Steinmetz 2011). His work sees time

larger ends without affecting issues of taste (see Steinmetz 2011). His work sees time not just as an external object, but also as an activity that structures and is structured by our construction of taste just as much as taste is constructed by time. "Virgin O'Riley"

works because the viewer must reconcile the aesthetics of the Who and Madonna; but in

doing so, the viewer also links violence with sexuality, creating an amalgam of tastes that reflects back on the original artists.

4. Fandom and mashup culture

[4.1] After looking at "The Grey Video" and "Virgin O'Riley," we can construct a more fleshedout analysis of Manovich's (2007) remix culture. By focusing on the mashup

video, however, I imply that there is more to the remix than just "samples which come

from already existing databases of culture" (5). Rather, if we look at remixes as decidedly pointed activities rather than just as objects or collections of samples, then we can form a more robust understanding of the cultural value of contemporary remix theory.

[4.2] Conceptualized as objects, mashups can be seen across the diverse fields of

popular music and software programming (Manovich 2007). For years in the music scene,

contemporary artists have been using samples of other artists' work to reference within

their own music. One trend in mashup culture has seen the complete remix of songs from

other musicians to create something new and unique: The musician Girl Talk, a prime

example, mixes hundreds of samples from other people's works to make a fresh sound

that references but also subverts the meaning of the original work. In software studies, a

mashup is similar, in that it refers to any software that uses or remixes data from two or

more sources to create a new service: for example, Earth Album mixes the software for

Google Maps with the software from Flickr and YouTube, so users can log on to Google

Maps and view images and videos that have been tagged from these locations

(Brinkmann 2007). Manovich (2008) has shown how "most major Web 2.0 companies—

Amazon, eBay, Flickr, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and YouTube—make available their

programming interfaces and some of their data to encourage others to create new

applications using this data" (39). Amber Davisson (2011) argues that Google Maps

mashups played an important role in the 2008 presidential election, leading to a larger

cultural innovation in our understanding of the role of civic engagement.

[4.3] Although mashups can thus be seen as objects, they also can be interpreted

usefully as a combination of specific and deliberate activities across a range of cultural

responses. Video mashups have become integral to the contemporary media

environment, and have become fixtures of discussion about Web 2.0 media (Tryon 2009,

158). Indeed, Chuck Tryon illustrates the crucial role that mashups have played, not only

in the legal fields of copyright, authorship, and fair use rules, but also in political

campaigns. Mashup videos that remix political content and advertising function as "satire, commenting on current events rather than remaining content to focus on genre

conventions" (Tryon 2009, 167). These political mashups often take audio material from

conventions" (Tryon 2009, 167). These political mashups often take audio material from one source and mash it up with content from another, as in David Morgasen's 2008 video

"Obama and McCain—Dance Off!" (video 4). In this video, audio from fake speeches and interviews made by Obama and McCain are mashed up with images of their faces

superimposed on dancers' bodies. The 2008 election between Obama and McCain

impersonators becomes fodder for a danceoff, in which both candidates compete to see

who has the slickest moves. Morgasen effectively satirizes the spectacle of the 2008

presidential election with this juxtaposition, calling into question our delineation of

entertainment and news through the mashup.

Obama and McCain - Dance Off!

Video 4. "Obama McCain Dance Off," by Morgasen (2008).

[4.4] If the mashup represents a larger cultural imperative, then it makes sense for us

to examine those spots in culture that suture this meaning together. Fan studies is a

natural place to start, as fans represent the sort of creator/audience that holds a spotlight up to our culture. We've seen how mashups create new modes of temporality and new

understandings of taste; in a practical sense, then, where can we see the effects of this

remix culture? What would a Media Studies 2.0 analysis look like? How can we turn the

lens of fan studies onto traditional media theories?

[4.5] One such examination could take place in genre theory. Although different

mashup videos utilize different strategies for textual creation, in many instances the text of the online video actually serves to mash up popular generic conventions. Remixing to

change the genre of a particular work is a practical application of the de Certeauan notion of tactical reading, where alternate readings become externalized (de Certeau 1984, 37).

One popular mashup video, "A Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead" (video 5), features a remix of the Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night with a slew of zombie movies to depict the Beatles being chased by the undead (Clates 2006). In this video, the mixture of genres

leads to a cultural critique of popular fandom: the orgasmically screaming girls, earlier seen in "The Grey Video," here parallel the zombification of popular culture. Another example is the mashup "Ten Things I Hate about the Commandments" (video 6), a mix of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) and the genre of high school comedy

(Vayabobo 2006). Here, the mashup doesn't mix two texts but rather mashes up a text

and a genre to create a new reading of the Moses story as a parable for high school

cliquishness.

A Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead

Video 5. "A Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead," posted by Clates (2006).

10 Things I Hate About Commandments

Video 6. "Ten Things I Hate about the Commandments," posted by Vayabobo (2006).

[4.6] Fan studies has articulated this externalization of tactical reading, seeing it applied in fan fiction (Jenkins 1992), consumerism (Hills 2002), gaming (Crawford and Rutter

2007), and social networks (Booth 2010), among others. For example, one fan of the

original Star Wars trilogy, Mike J. Nichols, upset at the presence of JarJar Binks in the

first prequel, loaded the footage of 1999's Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

onto his computer and "edited the entire movie, eliminated story redundancy and cut

some extraneous…scenes" (Shulgan 2002, 67). Other fans distributed his new film, titled The Phantom Edit, over the Internet. Remixing the Star Wars movie allowed Nichols not only the creative input to change the film, but also the ability to create a new film

entirely. Nichols's Phantom Edit sits in the middle of Manovich's remix culture, putting the creation of cultural products in the hands of amateurs, of users, of audience members,

and of fans.

[4.7] The nowfamous "Vogue" video from Luminosity (2008) also serves as an

exemplar of this new understanding of remix culture (video 7). "Vogue" has been

described before in terms of its gender politics (Cupitt 2008; Turk 2010), links to fandom

(Jenkins 2007), and relation to copyright (Tushnet 2010). In the popular press,

Luminosity has also become relatively well known as a fan, thanks in part to her profile in New York Magazine (Hill 2007). The reason for her celebrity is not hard to fathom. For

"Vogue," Luminosity selected scenes from Zach Snyder's film 300 (2006) and then digitally reedited them to synch with the 1990 Madonna song "Vogue." Luminosity first calls into question the generic positioning of both the two external texts, referencing a

fluid understanding of sexuality (see Cupitt 2008). But by linking the very hetero

maleness of 300 with the queer politics of Madonna's song, Luminosity highlights how the blending of two tastes can critique traditional assumptions about sexual politics (Turk

2010).

Vogue - 300

Vogue - 300

Video 7. "Vogue," by Luminosity (2008).

[4.8] What scholarly attention has been paid to Luminosity, however, has not discussed

the mashup of temporality and taste within her video remixes. There is a complexity at

the heart of "Vogue," one articulated by the interaction not just of the two texts at its core, but also in the interaction between the past and future. The misogyny of 300 is easy to dismiss, given the "historical" nature of the drama—one can imagine a student's retort that "that's the way it was in ancient Greece." Luminosity's juxtaposition of a 1990s gendered sensibility, however, reveals the underlying heteronormativity of 300 and articulates a mashup retort.

[4.9] Like her "Like a Virgin," Madonna's "Vogue" fits into the dance pop category of music with its catchy hooks, heavily bassed drumbeat, and vapid lyrics. As is common to

most dance music, there is an underlying theme of posture: "Don't just stand there, let's get to it / Strike a pose, there's nothing to it." As he stands there, literally with nothing to him, King Leonidas follows Madonna's command by actively striking a pose. Using the

generic power of the dance pop genre of music, Luminosity challenges and ultimately

undermines the genre of 300. The temporal mix here—threefold, as the action depicted in the 2006 film takes place in 480 BCE but is set to music from 1990—hearkens to a more

nuanced reading of the spectacle of the film. The actionadventure movie retells the story

of the Battle of Thermopylae. Told in a kinetic style that relishes the spectacle, however, the movie skips over much of the historical basis for the battle (the unification of Greece against the invading Persians, the sociopolitical strife amongst the Athenians and

Spartans) and instead focuses on the blood and carnage of the battle, as well as the oiled

abs of the Spartan army. In 300, the warriors who conquer the Persians in this film adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel look like perfect masculine specimens. Their

muscles ripple and undulate in the film, while their scantily clad loins hide only enough to prevent an NC17 rating. In Luminosity's video "Vogue," however, we see these Spartan warriors in a new light. Set to the tune of Madonna's song, these warriors are more than

warriors in a new light. Set to the tune of Madonna's song, these warriors are more than

sparring machines: they represent the essence of beauty and fitness when they dance to

the nondiegetic beat. 300 thus exemplifies the generic spirit of the actionadventure movie, which in general thematically links to a highly visual spectacle and barely veiled

patriarchal, hegemonic ideology.

[4.10] By juxtaposing the two genres, Luminosity parodies the original genre of both

texts. "Vogue" calls for a sexually charged playfulness, while 300 argues masculinity and action. As we listen to the song, we hear the lyric "strike a pose" again just as we see the image of the evil Persian king Xerxes step from his carriage with his hands outstretched,

striking a pose himself (figure 2).

Figure 2. "Vogue," Xerxes striking a pose. [View larger image .]

[4.11] Though this juxtaposition, Luminosity highlights the instability of traditional

genre analysis in a digital environment, and the focus of the video becomes less textual

and more cultural. By this I mean that the video focuses on the larger meaning behind

our cultural construction of gender via the mashup of a hypersexualized film with a

hypersexualized musical performer. "Vogue" offers a selfconscious emphasis on

sexuality: the triptych at the beginning features an undulating woman with breasts

heaving in slow motion (figure 3). Shots later in the video mark the violent masculine

sexuality of the Spartan soldiers; rippling abs match decapitating swords ("Look around,"

Madonna sings at 1:03, as a head spins off its neck). By both connecting the gender

characteristics of the source texts and playing each off the other, Luminosity presents a

dual reading of gender that highlights not only the way our cultural taste has changed (in

a Bourdieuan sense) but also how the multimix of temporalities (1990s mashed up with

2000s mashed up with a fictionalized 480 BCE) coheres and offers a solid critique of the

mediation of misogyny.

different temporalities within the mashup becomes a vehicle through which multiple critiques could take place: the juxtapositions of times can highlight issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, body image, capitalism, and so on. What's important to take away

from this is that remix culture enables, rather than inhibits, the production of meaning

through temporal fluidity.

[5.2] In postmodernism, the perception of time as a unifying or overlaying structure on

our life has become less meaningful. To turn a Lyotardian phrase, the concept of time

itself is a metanarrative, one that shapes a person's relationship to his or her

environment (Lyotard 1979). And postmodern culture is defined by a loss of

metanarratives. It's not that there's a new type of temporality in the world, but rather

that, as postmodern theorists might argue, our understanding and cultural response to

the issues of temporality has shifted. Unlike this temporally uncertain view of culture,

however, remix culture highlights a stability within our sense of temporality, manifested

through the temporal juxtapositions seen within mashup videos. The mashup ushers in a

new moment in Media Studies 2.0, reinterpreting the discourse within contemporary

cultural theory.

[5.3] Postmodernism, that most pessimistic of cultural theories, suggests that

individuals are losing control of their own lives. With a lack of historical knowledge or

desire to learn history, everyday people become lost in the flow of time. Remix culture

indicates a different shift: the flow of time is complicated, but by being able to construct meaning from and through it, individuals take control over their own lives. As we become

more reliant on technology, we begin to find our cultural identity stemming more from

that technology and less from content. And when we do it ourselves, we become active

participants in our own media construction. Taking a lesson from Bourdieu, we can

instructively see our contemporary culture as an amalgam of different tastes, different

temporalities, and different genres, all productively synthesized into a larger cultural

metaphor. Remix doesn't stop at the object, but rather becomes a cultural activity,

performed at all stages of cultural investigation, that has an immediate and profound

effect on the individual. It's through the symbolism of a network of temporality that the

mashup can foster meaningful discourse, and unlike the dire warnings postulated by

postmodern prognosticators, our sense of time and history is still intact. The breaks in

temporality seen by these postmodern theorists resurface in remix culture as concrete

manifestations of historical stability.

[5.4] The mashup as a cultural object offers moments of exquisite joy: who among us

hasn't enjoyed sharing a clip on Facebook or marveling at a fan's unique interpretation of

a text? But when viewed as something larger than a text, when viewed as a moment of

cultural rupture, the mashup video can take on a significance beyond a simple

juxtaposition of image and music. By juxtaposing different audiences' tastes, the mashup

also symbolizes the coming together of different viewpoints and ideas. To mash up is to

invite cooperation: when different tastes mingle, new ideas form and vast differences can

be bridged. In an already fractious culture, we need more cooperation. We need more

be bridged. In an already fractious culture, we need more cooperation. We need more dialogue. We need more mashups.

6. Acknowledgments

[6.1] Portions of this essay were previously presented at the 2011 Cultural Studies

Association conference in Chicago, IL. I am indebted to June Deery, whose comments and

feedback on an early version of the essay were invaluable.

7. Notes

1. Obviously, there is a great deal of slippage between terms here—using can be seen as a form of creation as well.

2. Grey Tuesday, held on February 24, 2004, was an online act of electronic civil disobedience, when numerous Web sites hosted The Grey Album for free download, in

protest of EMI's attempt to limit access to the album (see Rimmer 2007).

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9 (2012)

Theory

Toward an ecology of vidding

Tisha Turk

University of Minnesota, Morris, Minnesota, United States

Joshua Johnson

West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia, United States

[0.1] Abstract— Despite the fan studies emphasis on participatory culture, much of the current work on vids (and in fan studies broadly) treats fans more as readers

than as producers. To help us examine the relationships between fannish reading

practices and fannish creative processes, we turn to composition studies and Marilyn

Cooper's concept of an ecology of writing. We argue for an ecological model of

vidding, an approach that enables us to explore the collaborative nature of vidding

without erasing individual authorship; to investigate the relationships not only

between vids and media texts but also between vidders and their audiences; and to

treat fan conversations both as responses to mass media and as sites for the

generation and circulation of interpretive conventions that guide both the creation

and reception of vids.

[0.2] Keywords— Audience; Collaboration; Composition studies; Context; Hawaii

Five0; Participatory culture; Vids

Turk, Tisha and Joshua Johnson. 2012. "Toward an Ecology of Vidding." In

"Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0326.

1. Introduction

[1.1] One of the central points of interest within fan studies has been the idea that

media fans were among the earliest spectators to shift from passively consuming or

even actively reading media texts to creating works of their own that extend or

comment on those texts. As Henry Jenkins explains in Textual Poachers (1992),

"Fandom blurs any clearcut distinction between media producer and media spectator,

since any spectator may potentially participate in the creation of new artworks" (246–

47). Fans were thus early adopters of the practices that characterize participatory

culture. For many scholars, fans are interesting precisely because of these

participatory and creative practices.

[1.2] Yet even as we celebrate fans' propensity to make things, scholars have often paid more attention to fans as spectators than to fans as producers. Kristina Busse

and Karen Hellekson observe that in the decade or so following Textual Poachers,

"most essays in fan fiction studies focused on fanfic as an interpretive gesture, thus using fan fiction to gain further insight into a particular source text" (2006, 20)—an approach that foregrounds fan reading and downplays fan writing. We can see a

similar tendency in recent work on vids: Francesca Coppa's history of the development

of vidding, for example, argues that vids function as media criticism—"thousands of

vids have been made analyzing popular source texts" (2008, ¶1.4)—and specifically as

responses to the "representational tensions" (¶2.20) at the heart of Star Trek and still present in many subsequent shows. Coppa does represent fans as creators—her essay

is an indispensable account of the inventiveness, hard work, and technical skill that

early vidding required—but her emphasis is ultimately on vids as fans' reactions to

media texts.

[1.3] Given that many academics working in fan studies have backgrounds in media

studies and/or literary studies, this attention to the relationships either among texts or

between texts and their readers or spectators is not surprising. But that attention,

while valuable in its own right, tends to obscure the fact that while fan creators are

audiences, they also have audiences. A vid is, as Coppa has explained, "a visual essay that stages an argument" (2008, ¶1.1), but for whom, exactly, is the argument

staged, and what is the role that that audience plays in the argument's construction

and reception?

[1.4] In this essay, we begin to theorize the vidding equivalent of what Marilyn

Cooper (1986) calls the ecology of writing, a concept from composition studies that

allows us to examine vidding and vidwatching as activities "through which a person is

continually engaged with a variety of socially constituted systems" (367). In order to continue Coppa's project of studying "broad continuities in vidding practice" (2008,

¶1.5), we must look at the roles fannish audiences play in shaping that practice: the

social and rhetorical contexts for both the production and reception of vids, the

constraints and possibilities generated by fannish conventions of interpretation.

Creation does not happen in a vacuum; a vid is an individual's (or small group's)

argument about a text, but it is informed by, and interpreted in terms of, other fans'

ideas about that text, and those arguments and ideas are worked out within the

multiple overlapping discourse communities that constitute fandom. Although a

complete application of this ecological model is beyond the scope of the present essay,

we do examine selected fan discussions of the TV series Hawaii Five0 (2010–present) to show how these discussions, in addition to being a form of fannish activity in their

own right, establish what counts as evidence for a particular fannish interpretation and

thus enable vidders to make effective rhetorical choices, as lamardeuse does in her vid

"Something's Gotta Give.". Such discussions are therefore a key part—though only one part—of the ecology of vidding.

2. Fandom as ecology

[2.1] Cooper's ecological model of writing is grounded in the assumption that

"language and texts are not simply the means by which individuals discover and

communicate information, but are essentially social activities, dependent on social

structures and processes not only in their interpretive but also in their constructive

phases" (366). The term ecology "encompasses much more than the individual writer and her immediate context"; it allows us to explore "how writers interact to form systems" and to consider how "all the characteristics of any individual writer or piece of writing both determine and are determined by the characteristics of all the other

writers and writings in the systems" (368). The term also registers the inevitability of change: "An important characteristic of ecological systems is that they are inherently dynamic; though their structures and contents can be specified at a given moment, in

real time they are constantly changing" (368). The concept as Cooper describes it

overlaps in significant ways—including, of course, the metaphor for which it's named—

with the idea of media ecology developed by Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, and

Walter Ong (see Strate 2004); because we are primarily interested in the implications

of an ecological model for the study of composing (rather than, for example, the more literary concept of intertextuality), our usage follows Cooper's.

[2.2] At the time Cooper's article was published, composition studies needed the

concept of ecology as a corrective to the field's narrow focus on the cognitive

processes of individual writers; Cooper's work was part of a massive and lasting shift

toward thinking of writing as a fundamentally social process. Fan studies in the

present historical moment needs the concept as a different kind of corrective: We need

more discussions of the social or collaborative nature of fandom that don't erase

individual creators by collapsing collaboration into mass authorship, as Paul Booth

does when he insists that "the 'author' of a blog fan fiction is not a fan, per se, but rather a fandom" (2010, 6). As Alexis Lothian points out, vids are too often "perceived as an undifferentiated feature of the online 'public' domain" (2009, 131). Such erasure of fan authorship, with its troubling gendered implications, is a real danger in a culture

that tends to regard YouTube videos as a genre rather than as individual authored

works, and it has been a real feature of academic work that, Deborah Kaplan

observes, "elides the texts in favor of the community" (2006, 135). At the same time, however, many analyses of individual fan works privilege individual authorship: They

address collaborative meaning making only at the point of reception, not as a

condition of production. Thinking of fandom as an ecology will, we hope, encourage

scholars to articulate how fandom's "individual voices, creative works, philosophies, resistances, and cultures" (Cupitt 2008, ¶4.4) not only coexist but interact.

[2.3] The ecology metaphor helps us to think of fandom as a system (or series of

systems) within which all fans participate in various ways: as readers, writers, vidders,

vid watchers, posters, commenters, lurkers, essayists, artists, icon makers,

recommenders, coders, compilers of images and links, users and maintainers of

archives and other fannish infrastructures, and so on. An ecological model thus offers

an alternative to the theoretical models of fandom that, as Matt Hills has shown, define

fans solely as producers and so "attempt to extend 'production' to all fans" (2002, 30).

Further, it provides a framework for thinking about the ways in which, as Kristina

Busse has argued, "people as well as stories become central to fannish interaction" in LiveJournalbased fandom (2006, 214). It gives us a way of describing relationships

among fans that is simultaneously broader and more precise than the concept of

community, which, as James Paul Gee observes, "carries a rather romantic

connotation which it should not have"

(http://henryjenkins.org/2011/03/how_learners_can_be_on_top_of_1.html). Because it directs our attention to real social contexts—contexts that are, as Cooper (1986)

points out, not unique or idiosyncratic but connected with other situations (367)—it

encourages us to observe the relationship of vidders and other fannish producers to

their audiences, to consider the ways in which those audiences are not abstract

rhetorical constructs but real people with whom vidders may interact and communicate

in a variety of capacities.

[2.4] Much has been written about the conversational and communal nature of

fandom in general (Hellekson and Busse 2006). Busse and Hellekson (2006), for

example, explain that they are less interested in the psychology of individual fans (a

trend seen in the work of Matt Hills and Cornel Sandvoss) than in "the collective

nature of fandom, its internal communications, and the relationship between fans that

arises out of a joint interest in a particular text" (23). While we share this interest, we prefer the term collaborative, which implies individuals working together for a common purpose, to collective, which suggests an undifferentiated group, and we resist Busse and Hellekson's insistence on "the ultimate erasure of a single author" (6).

Nevertheless, we take our cue from them and from scholars such as Rebecca Black

(2008), whose analysis of the composing practices of three specific fan fiction authors

locates those practices within larger fields of literacy. Like them, we aim to discuss fan

works as "part collaboration and part response to not only the source text, but also the cultural context within and outside the fannish community in which it is produced"

(Busse and Hellekson 2006, 7).

[2.5] While the collective nature of fandom has been much discussed, considerably less has been written about the social nature of vidding. Jenkins notes that vids "focus on those aspects of the narrative that the community wants to explore" (1992, 249);

Coppa calls vidding "a form of collaborative critical thinking" (2008, ¶5.1); Tisha Turk describes making and watching vids as processes of "collaborative interpretation"

(2010, 89). But to date, research on vids has done relatively little to illuminate how

that collaboration works or how those conversations happen. Indeed, we may talk

most about this collaboration when it fails to happen—when, as Jenkins (2006) and

Julie Levin Russo (2009) discuss, a vid is removed from its "interpretive landscape"

(Russo 2009, 126) and misunderstood by a nonfannish audience unprepared to make

sense of it. Many readings of vids therefore focus on what a viewer must know in order

to understand a particular vid. In her analysis of Counteragent's "Destiny Calling," for example, Cupitt establishes that the vid is "a snapshot of the fannish zeitgeist of that moment" (¶3.9) and it "requires a large body of contextual knowledge" in order to be fully understood (¶3.10). Similarly, Katharina Freund's examination of "Still Alive,"

also by Counteragent, emphasizes that "the viewer must be extremely familiar with

Supernatural, vidding, and online fandom in order to separate all these shots and their

contexts" (2010, ¶4.1) and the vid "will always be meant for a very specific audience at a very specific time in this fandom's history" (¶5.1).

[2.6] Our argument is intended to amplify and extend these ideas. Cupitt's and

Freund's discussions of context, and especially their shared emphasis on historical

context, focus on the reception of vids; we wish to suggest the value of also looking at

the fannish ecology as a condition for the production of vids. What can a vidder

anticipate about how an audience will make sense of her vid? What can she assume,

or how can she learn, about the significance her audience will ascribe to particular

clips? We are interested not only in the knowledge fans must have in order to interpret

a vid, but also in how fans acquire and share that knowledge, because vidders make

creative and aesthetic decisions based in part on the readings and interpretations in

circulation within a fandom. Busse and Hellekson's model of fan creations as works in

progress, in which the work ultimately shifts from creators to readers, can thus be

understood as having an earlier phase, which Busse and Hellekson imply but do not

articulate: the collaborative work of sharing interpretations that precedes and enables

the composing of a particular text. In an ecological model, context is not something

that simply exists; it's something that the participants in the ecological system create

through their various fannish activities and, importantly, the textual traces of those

activities.

3. Interpretive conventions

[3.1] One element of this ecological system is the set of interpretive conventions that guide the creation and reception of texts. As Cooper reminds us, these conventions

"are not present in the text; rather, they are part of the mental equipment of writers and readers, and only by examining this mental equipment can we explain how writers

and readers communicate" (365). In fandom, these conventions are generated,

contested, updated, and circulated through the discussion and analysis of media texts

and the creation and consumption of fan works (see Kaplan 2006, 135–36). As we've

seen, such conventions are important for vid watchers (Jenkins 2006, Russo 2009,

Cupitt 2008, Freund 2010), but they are as least as important for vidders, because

vidders who want their vids to be understood must work with—which is not to say

blindly conform to—at least some of these conventions. As Peter Rabinowitz observes,

"There are no brute facts preventing an author from writing a religious parable in

which a cross represented Judaism, but it would not communicate successfully" (1987,

24). Vidders, like authors, must negotiate the interpretive conventions present in their

ecologies.

[3.2] Some of these interpretive conventions are grounded in fannish responses to

individual shows and movies, in specific arguments and discussions about how

characters, relationships, and story lines ought to be interpreted. Others have to do

with patterns across media texts: When fans read certain interactions in, say, Hawaii

Five0 as indicating that the two main characters (both male) are romantically or

sexually interested in each other, they draw not only on the interactions of those two

characters but also on similar interactions between characters in Star Trek, The

Professionals, Starsky and Hutch, Highlander, The Sentinel, Due South, Stargate: SG1, Stargate: Atlantis, and so on. Still other conventions, such as ways of signaling which character's point of view is being expressed, are specific to vids as a genre. Our

analysis in this essay will focus primarily on the first of these three sets of

conventions: those having to do with how established fannish readings are used by

both vidders and vid watchers to generate a great deal of meaning out of small

collections of short clips.

[3.3] Vids require audiences to process many different kinds of information, including

the visual content of clips (what's happening in the frame), the context of clips (what's

going on in the original source), and the juxtaposition of clips within the vid (why one

clip precedes or follows another). The meaning of purely visual content is generally

accessible to a casual fan or even a nonfan: when characters argue or smile, when

they punch or kiss each other, the significance is usually clear, and additional

interpretive guidance is usually provided by the lyrics against which the visuals are

set, the tone of the music, and the mood or message of the song as a whole (see

Coppa 2008, ¶1.1). Understanding the contextual meaning of clips, as Cupitt and

Freund suggest, requires considerable familiarity with the source. And making sense of

the juxtaposition of clips requires viewers to recognize whether a particular sequence

of clips is intended as a narrative, a plot summary, a comparison, a representation of

cause and effect, an establishing of mood or theme, or any of the other functions the

sequence might serve within the vid.

[3.4] Most vids include both clips whose significance is primarily visual and clips

whose significance is primarily contextual; exact proportions vary depending on the

nature of the vid and the goals of the vidder. The Clucking Belles' "A Fannish

Taxonomy of Hotness," for example, relies almost entirely on visual information rather than context because, as Coppa explains, the vid "isn't about people; it's about tropes"

(2009, 108). Rowena's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Abridged)," by contrast, is made up almost entirely of clips that encapsulate events and even whole story lines from Buffy

in order to produce the effect of covering all seven seasons in under three and a half

minutes.

[3.5] Of course, visual and contextual meaning are not mutually exclusive; many

clips convey visual information even to a casual viewer and call up for fans specific conversations, interactions, emotions, relationship developments, or plot points. To

illustrate, we provide two examples of clips frequently used in vids for their respective

fandoms.

[3.6] First, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer vids, Buffy's dive into bluewhite light is a striking visual regardless of whether one knows the significance of the shot in the

original show.

Figure 1. Image from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 5.22 "The Gift" (2001). [View larger

image.]

[3.7] In context, this image carries considerable emotional as well as visual weight:

Buffy is jumping to her death to save her sister and the world.

shorter. And the relative brevity of clips means a viewer's process of making meaning must happen so quickly as to be nearly unconscious.

[3.13] What we wish to emphasize is that, in most cases, this meaningmaking is not

purely individual; rather, it involves a certain amount of collaboration and consensus.

Recognition of context requires familiarity with the source, and familiarity requires

repetition. That repetition may take the form of an individual fan rewatching entire

episodes or specific scenes (see Coppa 2009 on the pleasures of the VCR), but it can

also be communal or collaborative: for many fans, it includes reading and/or posting

episode recaps, fan fiction, or informal analyses. All of these interpretive acts help not

merely to define fan readings of a text but to establish particular onscreen actions

and conversations as evidence for those readings. Repetition is thus one of the key

ecological processes by which a group of fans comes to some consensus about which

moments and visuals are critical to their reading of the show (note 2). This consensus is likely to influence a vidder's choices about how best to arrange her narrative or

present her argument to that interpretive community.

4. Case study: "Something's Gotta Give"

[4.1] A complete discussion of the ecology within which lamardeuse's "Something's

Gotta Give" was created, distributed, and viewed would need to consider the

relationship of vid, vidder, and audience not only to fannish discussions of Hawaii Five0 but also to the other shows the fans have watched, the fan fiction they have read and written, the other vids they have watched and made, the reception histories of

those stories and vids, the growing body of fan discussions of vidding practices and

aesthetics—all the social and discursive systems within which the fans and the vid are

situated.

[4.2] Because such a discussion is not possible within the constraints of this essay,

we will instead focus on a small subset of these topics. First, we briefly address some

of the interpretive conventions, both general and fannish, that lamardeuse invokes by

including clips that require no particular contextual knowledge. Second, we identify

selected clips from the vid that require or reward contextual knowledge; we examine

representative fannish discussions of those moments in order to highlight the shared

repetition those discussions enact and the associations that they create between

dialogue and visuals as evidence for a particular fannish reading. Third, we analyze an

instance in which lamardeuse uses largely undiscussed clips, effectively

decontextualizing those clips in the service of her own narrative and reminding us that

fannish consensus informs but cannot determine a vidder's decisions about how best

to communicate with her intended audience.

[4.3] Our examination of fannish discussions of Hawaii Five0 draws primarily on posts and comments on the LiveJournal and Dreamwidth sites (note 3). These sites are major locations for fannish discussion in general, and because they are sites to

which the vidder herself posts and on which she publicizes her vids, they are central to

the ecology within which this particular vid was produced and received. Posts to

LiveJournal and Dreamwidth may be either short or quite long and can include text,

images, and embedded video; comments range from single short sentences to several

long paragraphs. In these posts and comments, we can see fans compiling evidence

for their readings of the show. This work is collective: consensus emerges as

individuals identify particular scenes as significant and other fans ratify that

significance (with varying levels of universality and enthusiasm) in their comments,

echo it in posts of their own, and reiterate it in various ways, including the creation

and use of user icons.

[4.4] In the case of "Something's Gotta Give," the vidder's own LiveJournal is an especially important part of the fannish ecology. Because of her geographical location,

lamardeuse usually sees episodes of Hawaii Five0 several hours before most other

viewers. Immediately after a new episode airs in her time zone, she posts reactions

and spoilers in her journal. For many fans, especially those who enjoy getting a sneak

peek at new episodes, these posts are ground zero for an explosion of fannish

excitement. In addition to these preview posts, lamardeuse posts detailed recaps of

most episodes, usually featuring dozens of screen caps; these recaps, too, are quite

popular, typically generating more than 40 comment threads between the LiveJournal

and Dreamwidth posts. As a result, lamardeuse's audience for her vids includes a

significant number of people with whom she regularly communicates about Hawaii

Five0; she can be fairly confident her intended viewers will not only share her general perspective on the show's characters, but also recognize certain visuals as strong

textual support for the pairing featured in "Something's Gotta Give."

[4.5] The microblogging platform Tumblr is another increasingly important locus for

the expression of fannish enthusiasm. Tumblr posts are typically quite short—a single

image, animation, quotation, comment, or short video clip—and the proportion of

images to text is much higher than on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth; uptake is usually

signaled through "liking" and reblogging rather than commenting. Because post dates are sometimes relative ("3 weeks ago") rather than absolute, it can be more difficult on Tumblr than on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth to track responses to specific episodes

after the fact. But when followed in real time, blogs such as

http://fuckyeahhawaiifive0.tumblr.com/, which accepts submissions of content from all over Tumblr, offer venues for fans to recirculate key images and scenes and thus

establish their interpretive value.

bottles together, shake hands. And lamardeuse maintains the tension between these

two aspects of the relationship all the way through the vid's final clips.

[4.9] But for fans of a show, much of the pleasure of watching a vid lies in supplying

more meaning than the visual information alone conveys. At the end of the first verse

(0:31), for example, Danny gestures dismissively at Steve and walks away while Steve

lifts his hand and furrows his brow inquiringly.

Figure 3. Danny walks away from Steve. Hawaii Five0, 1.09 "Po'ipu" (2010). [View

larger image.]

[4.10] The visual conveys information on its own: a disagreement of some kind,

Danny irritated for a reason he doesn't want to explain. But fans of the Steve/Danny

pairing have established this scene as important because Danny's irritation has to do

with Steve's interactions with an old buddy from the Navy and can be read as jealousy

—a reading that the show's dialogue supports. In her recap of the episode, lamardeuse

(2010f) quotes the dialogue from this clip:

[4.11] Steve: Are you jealous?

Danny: No.

Steve: That's jealousy!

Danny: (storming off in a huff) NO!

[4.12] What's important here is not just that the vidder perceives this theme and

moment as meaningful (and includes multiple screen caps from the scene in her

episode recap), but that other fans share this perception. In a response to

lamardeuse's preview post (2010e) on the episode, gottalovev sums up the reaction of

Steve/Danny fans when she remarks that "seriously. the jealousy, it could be seen

from SPACE." Nearly a third of the commenters on the episode discussion posts for the

LiveJournal SteveDannoSlash and Hawaii50Slash communities mention the jealousy

as well: as alicebluegown16 comments, "I mutter to myself, 'Jeez, Danno. Jealous

more into the dialogue than is actually said and because this line and Danny's response make explicit the characters' fondness for each other; as such, it produced

considerable fannish excitement when the episode first aired. In her initial reaction

post about this episode—the one posted hours before most of her fellow fans had even

seen the episode—lamardeuse quotes this line and then comments: "THAT IS THE

ACTUAL LINE. I AM NOT SHITTING YOU. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. OH MY FUCKING

GOD. DYINGGGG HERE" (2010a). (In keeping with the tone and excitement level of

this post and lamardeuse's preview posts in general, many of the comments also

feature caps lock and multiple exclamation points.) The somewhat calmer followup

post (2010b), a fuller recap of the episode, features five screen caps from this scene:

one of Steve gesturing, two of Danny responding and then smiling, and two of Steve

beaming at Danny—a reinscription that helps ensure fans will be able to identify the

scene even without dialogue. "I HAVE PLAYED THIS FIFTY TIMES NOW AND I STILL

CANNOT BELIEVE IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED," lamardeuse notes, and her commenters

agree: "I totally had to rewind several moments multiple times because, WOW!"

(ionaonie); "And then that final Steve&Danny scene that I had to rewatch 2 or 7

times" (giddygeek). And leupagus and her commenters concur: "I can't even tell you how many times [we] watched that scene, but it was a lot, and it got better EVERY

TIME" (leupagus 2010); "And that look Steve gave Danny at the end, over the 'term of endearment' line? I rewatched that like, 5 times, I'm sure" (and_ed in leupagus 2010).

[4.20] It's no stretch, then, to suggest that fans of the pairing would recognize this

scene, know it well, and find it an appropriate emotional climax to this section of the

vid; many fans clearly rewatched the clip, and even those who didn't are likely to have

reencountered it in episode reviews on LiveJournal or Dreamwidth or screen caps on

Tumblr. This willingness to rewatch key scenes and the resulting ability to recognize

even small snippets of those scenes in vids is an essential part of the fannish ecology

within which vidders work.

[4.21] But in addition to drawing on context that fans already know, lamardeuse also

recontextualizes certain clips by combining them in ways that deemphasize their

connection to the original episode plots and contribute to her own narrative of

antagonists moving toward romantic partnership. We see this recontextualizing most

clearly at the instrumental bridge (1:38–2:01). The bridge, as we've seen, concludes

with clips from the contextually important conversation about terms of endearment. It

opens, however, with scenes of action rather than conversation; what matters here is

not which bad guys Steve and Danny are fighting but the fact that the two of them are

functioning effectively as partners. These clips set the tone for the rest of the bridge:

beating up bad guys together, walking side by side, working as a team. The fight

scene that yields a relatively long sequence of clips in the vid (1:44–1:48) doesn't rate

even a single screen cap in lamardeuse's recap of the episode; for fans focused on the

Steve/Danny pairing, it's a scene that's not particularly interesting on its own. But in the context of the vid, lamardeuse makes it interesting: the shots mean something

different in the vid than they do in the episode. These clips are dictated not by what

the audience already knows or remembers about this relationship but by the needs of

the vidder's narrative. "Something's Gotta Give" is not a haphazard collection of greatest hits clips; in lamardeuse's selection of song, her use of that song to structure

the vid, and her strategic juxtaposition of relatively undiscussed clips at the song's

instrumental bridge, we see the choices of an individual artist.

5. Conclusion

[5.1] Scholars within fan studies have generally maintained, with varying degrees of

insistence, that fan texts are collaborative, but our understanding of the mechanics of

fan collaboration, especially in vidding, is still incomplete. An ecological model of

composition lets us have it both ways; it encourages us to pay attention to both the

individual and social aspects of authorship and, perhaps more importantly, to the

interactions between them. Studying the ecology within which vidders produce,

including the generic and showspecific interpretive conventions that guide audience

perception and thus vidder creation, allows us to think in new ways about vidders'

creative processes and the rhetorical work that goes into vidding.

[5.2] Developing an ecology of vidding can also begin to strengthen our

understanding of the roles of audiences outside fandom. Contemporary composition

scholars such as Erin Karper (2009) and Traci Zimmerman (2009) have already begun

the project of reimagining audiences, but their work tends to reify the distance

between composer and audience that they are attempting to reduce. A model of an

audience who is active in and even integral to the composing processes of online

authors would begin to alleviate this problem. As a field of inquiry, composition studies

has much to offer the study of online fandom, but we suspect that it also has much to

learn.

6. Acknowledgments

[6.1] We are deeply grateful to lamardeuse for her gracious permission to discuss

her vid; to the many fans cited here for permission to quote from their posts and

comments; to Cate for the vid recommendation, the whirlwind introduction to Hawaii

Five0 fandom, and the indispensable list of links; and to Laura Shapiro for invaluable conversations about vidding and audience.

7. Notes

1. For an example of a vid that makes exceptionally effective use of audience

familiarity with this clip, see gwyneth's "Polaroid Millenium" (2005).

2. For more on the value of repetition, see Coppa (2006).

3. Neither of us was familiar with Hawaii Five0 or its fandom when we began this essay. We chose to write about a Hawaii Five0 vid precisely so that we would have to rely on existing fan discussions of the source in order to understand the vid.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9 (2012)

Theory

The rhetoric of remix

Virginia Kuhn

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, United States

[0.1] Abstract— The affordances of digital technologies increase the available

semiotic resources through which one may speak. In this context, video remix

becomes a rich avenue for communication and expression in ways that have

heretofore been the province of big media. Yet recent attempts to categorize remix

are limiting, mainly as a result of their reliance on the visual arts and cinema theory

as the gauge by which remix is measured. A more valuable view of remix is as a

digital argument that works across the registers of sound, text, and image to make

claims and provides evidence to support those claims. After exploring the roots of

contemporary notions of orality, literacy, narrative and rhetoric, I turn to examples

of marginalized, disparate artifacts that are already in danger of neglect in the

burgeoning history of remix. In examining these pieces in terms of remix theory to

date, a more expansive view is warranted. An approach based on digital argument is

capable of accounting for the rhetorical strategies of the formal elements of remixes

while still attending to the specificity of the discourse communities from which they

arise. This effort intervenes in current conversations and sparks enhancement of its

concepts to shape the mediascape.

[0.2] Keywords— Digital argument; Fan vid; Fair use

Kuhn, Virginia. 2012. "The Rhetoric of Remix." In "Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and

Cultures, no. 9. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0358.

1. Introduction

[1.1] Although the practice of recontextualizing found footage—previously recorded

sound and image—long predates YouTube's 2005 birth, the sheer volume of video

available online today is staggering. Hosting sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Revver,

Viddler, and Blip.tv not only serve as vehicles for dissemination, but also offer

unprecedented access to the raw materials for remixing. Paired with widespread

editing tools, video remix has become an important form of communication and

expression heretofore confined to the printed word alone, and as the semiotic field

grows increasingly complex, so does the need for critical attention. Although recent

attempts to define and categorize video remix are elucidating in some respects,

ultimately, they prove limiting, and this is due in part to their nearly exclusive reliance on cinematic, rather than rhetorical, theory. These methods give rise to genres based

on cinema, a medium that until recently remained a broadcast vehicle, a onetomany endeavor, rather than a dialogic one.

[1.2] The invention of the camera made cinema possible, but the evolution of

recording technologies fostered the widespread ability to speak with images. Similarly,

the invention of the alphabet made written texts possible, while innovations in writing

technologies led to the widespread ability to write with words. And although it is

commonplace to name the Gutenberg press as a touchstone in print literacy, that

invention permitted creation of texts for mass consumption. The pencil is a far more

important technology for the advancement of largescale print literacy because it

allowed individuals to construct writing (see Baron 1999).

[1.3] I explore the limitations of current formulations of remix, particularly those

based in the visual arts, and argue for a rhetorical approach that can help illuminate

the various registers of sound, image, and words, as well as the interplay of all three,

which are available to the digital remixer. An important aspect of this rhetorical inquiry

is that it does not cling to the dominance of narrative that infuses literature studies,

which, like most cinematic theory, asserts the primacy of an originary text and

valorizes the single author. Further, I suggest that a rhetorical approach can

ameliorate some of the problems associated with applying generic conventions that

separate fact from fiction and literature from argument. Examining other largescale

shifts in communication and expression, I expose the roots of these dichotomies and

argue for a breakdown of the boundaries between them to foster the transformative

potential of this emergent discursive space. Therefore, rather than framing a totalizing

or definitive theory of remix, I propose a method for examining it as a digital

argument, suggesting a fuller sense of the word argument than is commonly used.

Rather than seeing argument as merely polemical in nature (e.g. two people arguing),

I use the term to indicate a claim for which evidence is provided, that also retains a

dialogic or conversational nature. This usage bears some resemblance to conceptions

of academic writing, which is often seen as an argument that contributes to a larger

conversation, but it also draws from a broader notion of pathos, logos, and ethos than

that which has been reified in the age of print literacy.

[1.4] The literacy of print culture is shifting, and following Walter Ong (1982), many

scholars suggest that we are in a time of secondary orality because the affordances of

the digital carry some of the immediacy and sonic features of the oral, as well as some

of the abstraction and permanence of the written. The line between speech and writing

blurs in this environment, as does the boundary between discourse and argument. In

other words, conversation, which is typically ephemeral, is stabilized in digital space

and embodied in its attendant artifacts. However, insofar as verbal language is not the

only available semiotic resource, I affiliate my stance with that of John Berger, whose

seminal 1972 BBC television series and later book, Ways of Seeing, insists that the advent of recording technologies, like color photography, transformed the art of the

past into a language of images (note 1). "What matters now," Berger contends, "is who uses that language for what purpose" (1972, 5).

[1.5] I define remix as a digital utterance expressed across the registers of the

verbal, the aural, and the visual. The affordances of the digital create a broader range

of available semiotic resources through which one may speak; thus, remix is a form of

digital argument that is crucial to the functioning of a vital public sphere. Competent

control of the available semiotic resources is key to digital fluency (aka media literacy), and although this control begins in discursive analysis of remix, it requires a

concomitant practice to be fully actualized. Therefore, the focus of critical attention to

remix is best served by analyzing the registers it uses and by using a flexible theory

that does not reify it by linking it to conventional genres.

[1.6] Remix scholarship to date invokes the visual arts and some poststructuralist

theory, but it is largely rooted in cinema studies and establishes categories based on

that approach. Scholars point to remix's roots in the Soviet montage approach

associated with Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Lev Kuleshov, as well as the

avantgarde collage work of French artists and filmmakers such as JeanLuc Godard

(see Wees 1993, Arthur 1999, Horwatt 2010, Navas n.d.). Both montage and collage

are important rhetorical strategies, but these analyses center almost exclusively on

visuals to the exclusion of sound and the interplay between the two; they also consign

remix to the realm of art rather than to the domain of speech, and in so doing,

privilege certain artifacts while devaluing others. This view also reinforces the

professional/amateur binary and elides consideration of community, for although art

engages in an implicit conversation with other art, culture, or both, speech absolutely

depends on a shared lexicon and the intent to communicate.

[1.7] In his 2011 book, Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of

the Past, Steve Anderson notes the ways that the discussion of image appropriation, particularly that which enlists the buzzwords of postmodernism, remains bogged down

by speculations about appropriation's consequences for authorship, originality, and

authenticity at the expense of analyzing the rhetorical strategy of found footage use,

which would be "more productively viewed as a speech act in its own right" (72).

Citing William Wees's dismissal of "postmodern appropriation" as using random

images, Anderson argues that even those artifacts that seem unsophisticated are

actually worthy of critical attention because "one cannot select an image to be reused without creating a historiographical argument" (70). If remix deploys an existing

lexicon of images, then it also relies on a verbal lexicon, and its relative criticality

ought to be gauged according to its participation in a discourse community. However,

to the extent that remix uses any vocabulary, it clearly also holds the potential to transform the discourse, particularly with the addition of textual effects, sound effects,

and layering that digital technologies allow. However, this transformative potential is

stymied in many ways if we create taxonomies that are based on existing genres.

[1.8] For instance, in Recycled Images, one of the few books focused on found

footage, William Wees (1993) provides categories that seem promising because they

offer a way of grouping different types of found footage use (table 1). Yet these

categories are also limited because they fail to account for work that deploys more

than one strategy—the avantgarde documentary films of Trinh Minhha, for instance,

or fan song vids. Moreover, the relationship of documentary to reality (as its

signification) implies that certain filmic practices are not mediated. Yet film stock

choices, colortiming processes, and the acts of framing shots and editing footage are

all ideologically imbued endeavors (note 2).

Table 1. Chart of types of found footage use.*

Methodology Signification Exemplary Genre Aesthetic Bias

Compilation

Reality

Documentary film

Realism

Collage

Image

Avantgarde film

Modernism

Appropriation

Simulacrum

Music video

Postmodernism

*Based on Wees (1993).

[1.9] Certainly, the scope and nature of video remix is worth documenting for many

reasons: to contextualize practices of contemporary culture, to chronicle artifacts that

tend toward the ephemeral and are thus in danger of being forgotten, and to foster

critical awareness of the potential for semiotic manipulation in a highly mediated

world. However, such taxonomies also carry risks: they have the potential to exclude

individuals, groups, and practices from history, and they threaten reification of a form

that implicitly questions generic conventions and grand narratives. In doing so, they

also foreclose possibilities, particularly when seen through the lens of preexisting

genres and conventions, which carry their own cultural baggage. Finally, these

taxonomies often perpetuate the unequal power structures that exist in contemporary

culture.

[1.10] A case in point: I was introduced to fan studies by way of its explicitly activist

efforts—those that intervene in issues surrounding fair use and copyright to ensure

freedom of speech and a thriving public sphere. Thus, although I am not widely

conversant in the discourse of fan studies, engaging with its practices has been

important in crystalizing my thinking and forcing me to confront certain assumptions

about the nature of digital texts. I find the fannish approach attractive because it comes from a place of making. To make, one must pull texts apart, treating them as

distinct registers but also as contributing metonymically to the whole. At the same

time, however, I see no way of adequately accounting for fannish texts through the

lens of current remix theory.

2. Remix as discourse

[2.1] What does it mean to read video remix as a speech act, and how does this view

provide a more nuanced account of digital artifacts of all stripes while still respecting

the discrete communities from which these texts arise? What is to be gained by

viewing remix as discursive, as an argument that is assembled by units of meaning

that, when stitched together, become a larger statement? Moreover, whose interests

might be served by this endeavor? At a basic level, viewing remix as a digital speech

act would rid of us terms like appropriation and recycling, which suggest the primacy of an original author or text. This view resists the hierarchies that champion big media

and make fannish efforts a secondclass mode of discourse, the realm of the

amateurish and the trivial. Indeed, language cannot be language unless it is both

understood and used among its members. This approach can also open up a space for

considering artifacts that defy easy categorization and, as such, are left out of the

burgeoning canon. There are, however, some obstacles that prevent us from seeing

remix as discourse, and I believe that they are encoded in the values and assumptions

of a printliterate culture. Investigating the origins of printbased literacy and the roots of current conceptions of discourse can expose these obstructions.

[2.2] The concept of secondary orality advanced in Walter Ong's (1982) work is

premised on his chronicling of the progression of oral culture to literate culture and,

finally, to current secondary or residual orality that combines characteristics of each.

In looking at Ong's list of features that characterize orality, we can see many overlaps

with remix: "additive rather than subordinative; aggregative rather than analytic;

redundant or 'copious'; conservative or traditionalist; close to the human lifeworld;

agonistically toned; empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced;

homeostatic; situational rather than abstract" (37–49). However, Ong's work has far

more to offer to digital scholarship. In particular, his analysis of Homer and Plato can

help reveal the roots of current epistemological boundaries between genres considered

to be factual and those seen as fictive.

[2.3] The collectively authored and formulaic nature of Homeric epic poetry is old

news; it is key to Janet Murray's (1997) notion of cyberdrama, for instance. However,

the link between Homer and current conceptions of collaboratively authored narrative

(or digital storytelling, as it is increasingly being referred to) is more tenuous than has

been acknowledged. Milman Parry's research on Homeric extant texts in the 1930s dashed the prevailing view of Homer as a genius who singlehandedly constructed

masterpieces such as the Illiad and the Odyssey, although his work was not expanded on until about 30 years later, when Albert Lord extended Parry's research on Homer to

consider its implications for performance and literature, and Eric Havelock, Ong's

frequent collaborator, used it to explore speech and literacy. The difference in

approach leads to differing conclusions about the boundaries between literature and

rhetoric. Parry's careful analysis of the Odyssey and the Iliad revealed them to be highly formulaic, and as Ong explains, "The meaning of the Greek term 'rhapsodize,'

rhapsoidein, 'to stitch song together,' became ominous: Homer stitched together

prefabricated parts. Instead of a creator, you had an assemblyline worker" (1982,

22). Immediately we can see that the current connotation of rhapsody is far more

romantic and poetic than its original meaning; indeed, this view of rhapsody evokes

sewing and its analogy to film editing as well as to remix (as clips are stitched

together), none of which have traditionally been seen as particularly creative

endeavors. From a discursive view, however, these prefabricated parts are necessary

when one must transmit knowledge orally; it must be repeated to be remembered and

passed on to others, so formulaic thought was "essential for wisdom and effective

administration" (Ong 1982, 24). In this light, Homeric epic was not the province of

entertainment but of governance. These prefabricated parts also change slightly with

each retelling over the centuries, and so the Iliad and the Odyssey, when analyzed, are shown to be a patchwork of "early and late Aeolic and Ionic peculiarities" (23) whose forms were reified during the centuries after the invention of the Greek

alphabet as they were written down. It would be misguided to see Homeric poetry as

consonant with the current conception of literature, which is framed as distinct from

rhetoric. In Homeric times, these distinctions did not exist. It would be equally

misguided to view this collective authorship as the sort of crowdsourced democratic

practice many of us hope to attain in digital space; the changes to the Odyssey and the Iliad took place over centuries, as is evidenced by their blend of alphabetic

conventions, and these blended wordings were not accomplished by people using

language, as idioms are, but by the few who had the means to write: poets and scribes

working for the ruling classes. In this sense, it was a broadcast medium: it could not

be interrogated, only consumed.

[2.4] Similarly, Plato is widely known for having banished the poets from his ideal

Republic as well as for having condemned writing. Scholars cite passages from Plato's

Republic in the former case, and the Phaedrus and the Seventh Letter in the latter. For instance, in Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray (1997) posits Plato's attack on

Homer as merely one instantiation of the perennial fear of "every powerful new

representational technology," noting that "we hear versions of the same terror in the biblical injunction against worshipping graven images; in the Homeric depiction of the

alluring Sirens' songs, drawing sailors to their death; and in Plato's banishing of the poet from his republic" (18). Citing Parry and Lord, she goes on to argue: "A stirring narrative in any medium can be experienced as a virtual reality because our brains are

programmed to tune into stories with an intensity that can obliterate the world around

us. This siren power of narrative is what made Plato distrust the poets as a threat to

the Republic" (98). For Murray, then, Plato was simply terrified by narrative and its

immersive quality. This allows her to champion cyberdrama as merely an extension of

older forms of literature and a universal human need for stories. However, even as

current readings of ancient texts are destined to be somewhat anachronistic, certain

facts are difficult to dispute. One such fact is that far from being a new form of

representation, the oral structure of the Homeric epic was a centuriesold form by the

time of Plato. As Ong's work reveals, it was actually the tropes of orality that, after the invention of the alphabet, no longer functioned as noetic (that is, being of the thought

world, or of intelligence); instead, they called attention to themselves as mediated and

dogmatic. Indeed, once these epics were written down, they essentially became

obsolete. Their forms and attendant iconography, so useful for oral delivery, seem

rudimentary and jingoistic when the repetition no longer served.

[2.5] In this light, Plato's derision of Homer was actually a denunciation of the

outdated and counterproductive structures of knowledge transmission characterized by

oral epics because their mythos blocked, rather than encouraged, the acquisition of

real knowledge. The grievance was not intrinsically about narrative but rather an

indictment of an inferior and ineffective example of the exteriorization of knowledge in

a form that is static. Indeed, for Plato, wisdom came via a dialogic process, not from

simply absorbing a text whose veracity could not be subjected to interrogation. This

view is strengthened by looking at Plato's notorious attack on writing, which needs

qualification, particularly because it was done in writing—and, some would argue,

often poetically at that.

[2.6] Plato's 30plus dialogues did not faithfully represent an actual conversation but

were instead used as epistemological and pedagogical guides, using the voice of

Plato's teacher, Socrates. The Phaedrus, one of most prominent of the Socratic

dialogues, is presented as the script of a conversation between Socrates and his

frequent interlocutor, Phaedrus, while walking through the countryside on the outskirts

of Athens. It is clearly dramatized, with characters named, although there is no

narrator to intrude on or mediate the conversation. Phaedrus has just attended a

speech on the nature of love, which sparks a conversation about knowledge, learning,

and wisdom. When the talk turns to writing, Socrates notes, "I cannot help feeling,

Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting: for the creations of the painter

have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question, they preserve a solemn

silence" (Jowatt 2006, 27812). As we see from this passage, the complaint is less

about writing per se and more about the incomplete nature of the representation, compounded by the inability to speak back to a text, to be an interlocutor. One must

simply accept what the text says without the veracity achieved by understanding the

process by which it came to be, and without the ability to gauge the credibility of the

author. For Plato, this process was most important because real wisdom was deeper

than its exteriorization in speech, writing, or images. In other words, the shortcomings

of any form of representation can be mitigated by the ability to question, interact, and

evaluate utterances. If these texts could be conversational, there is little reason to

conclude that Plato would not also view them as pedagogical. Indeed, Plato himself

wrote a great deal, and perhaps the naming of interlocutors in his dialogues was an

early form of citation. Further, the analogy to painting is interesting, not least because

visual texts have remained nondialogic until recently. Today, however, the remixer

becomes an interlocutor in the digital conversation, one who can question the formal

boundaries of a printliterate culture and one whose efforts often expose the process

of creation.

3. Digital argument

[3.1] My point is not to valorize Socratic dialogues, for they are both formulaic (often

relying on syllogism) and arise out of an uneven, classbased society. Rather, given

the extent to which Platonic and Aristotelian concepts infuse current Western culture,

their examination proves vital for understanding how that process occurred and how

the concepts varied in their translation over time. Plato's student Aristotle taxonomized

argument; the traces of that effort are with us today, particularly in academic

discourse, with its thesisdriven prose. However, modern conceptions of argument

tend to elide Aristotelian notions of the pathos (emotion) and ethos (credibility) that

join logos (logic) to form an argument.

[3.2] Nearly all academic writing marshals the rational but ignores the affective.

Sophistic rhetoric, by contrast, has enjoyed a resurgence in rhetorical theory,

particularly since the culture wars of the late 20th century, and this work challenges

the logocentrism of academic argument, complicating notions of objectivity and

valorizing pathos and ethos (Vitanza 1994; Jarrett 1998). Even as current notions of

argument may seem limiting, and even as the hierarchical structures that characterize

most forms of written argument do not translate perfectly to the layered texts of

remix, in my view, digital argument remains the best way to characterize this work.

My use of the term digital argument is partly strategic; argument is key to academic efforts, and as such, the term holds resonance for the scholarly community. Remix can

be a scholarly pursuit: it cites, synthesizes, and juxtaposes its sources. Argument also

contains connotations of the dialogic quality of communication that is not anchored to

either speech or writing, and so digital argument can extend its features to writing

with sound and image in addition to words. It is the embodiment of a speech act.

Further, although in common parlance the word argument connotes something like

polemics, there are many forms of argument; the term is not limiting, and it can help

break down the boundaries between fact and fiction. A poem can be an argument, as

can a narrative, each deploying different rhetorical strategies. Moreover, viewing remix

as digital argument can intervene in issues of copyright and fair use, particularly if we

posit its use of source material as citation—a form of evidence necessary to make

one's point.

[3.3] However, the use of words to investigate the extratextual registers of remix is

inadequate, so we ought to tread carefully and lightly. To escape some of the pitfalls of

mapping current notions of argument onto digital space, a form of the Toulmin method

for analyzing practical argument is a productive apparatus for reading remix, one

expansive enough for explanatory purposes but open enough to permit further nuance.

Stephen Toulmin (1958) created this model because he thought that absolutist or

theoretical models of argument were difficult to actually apply. Toulmin's model

includes several elements: claim, grounds, warrant, backing, rebuttal, and qualifiers. I

offer a modified version of the model and suggest that a remix can be seen as

including a claim or multiple claims, supported by evidence. This is not strictly a formal

method, because knowledge of a specific discourse community serves to assess the

efficacy of the evidence. The ethos of the remix can be evaluated in those terms.

Reading remix as digital argument has the potential to call formal boundaries into

question, interrogating current generic conventions and notions about what is factual

and what is fictive, recognizing that all such work is mediated. Indeed, the term media evokes quasilegal terms like mediation, the purpose of which is to bring two sides together. The mediascape overflows with both claims and evidence that may be

deployed in ways that have not often been brought together.

[3.4] In attempting to actuate this theory of remix as digital argument, I explore

three artifacts that defy analysis using current media studies–based remix theory.

Although they seem disparate, they are all uniformly compelling discursive pieces

worth considering. My hope is that this analysis might make room for voices too often

silenced, even as it expands the digital vocabulary from which remix might draw,

which may, in turn, help to level the discursive playing field. I see this is as an initial foray that could be built upon with more sophistication and nuance as the conversation

proceeds.

[3.5] Francesca Coppa (2008) documented the history of fan culture with regard to

the specific televisual texts of Star Trek and Quantum Leap, arguing that older fan endeavors gave rise to current vidding practices and aesthetics. Vidding, she explains,

"is a form of grassroots filmmaking in which clips from television shows and movies

are set to music" such that the images are read through the interpretive lens of the song (¶1.1). Coppa recounts a misreading of a song vid by entertainment reporter

Jake Coyle, in which Star Trek images centering on the character of Spock are remixed to the soundtrack of Nine Inch Nails's song "Closer." Grouping this piece with a "best of" list of fanmade music videos, Coyle discusses the genre as revisualized music

video—one in which images are used to illustrate the music—failing to appreciate this

piece as an act of media criticism rather than music criticism (¶1.3). Coppa's analysis

reveals the conflicted nature of the character of Spock, a role that began as female in

the pilot, as well as the ways in which the "Closer" vid represents an older strategy deployed by scientifically savvy female fans to reconcile fragmented depictions of

women in the show. Spock, she contends, "is a kind of visual marker, a scar indicating a series of conflicts meaningful to the scientifically minded, technologically oriented

women likely to become vidders, especially in the early years of vidding" (¶2.15).

Closer (Fan Video)

Video 1. "Closer," fan vid by T. Jonsey and Killa (2003).

[3.6] Reading "Closer" as a digital argument, one can say that the soundtrack also functions as evidence toward the visual claim that Coppa's analysis reveals. This Nine

Inch Nails song is a perfect lens through which these vidders read Spock, whose

character, Coppa demonstrates, ultimately embodies the conflict between opposing

gendered depictions of the desiring body and the rational mind. In other words, the

song provides strong support to the claim made by the images. The lyrics are sexually

explicit, but they also speak to conflicted identity. Trent Reznor sings, "I want to fuck you like an animal," but also "I want to feel you from the inside," suggesting if not role reversal, then certainly affinity. This sentiment is furthered with the lines, "Help me;

you make me perfect, / Help me become somebody else" and "My whole existence is

flawed." The complication of male subjectivity (and the compilation of gender

characteristics generally thought to be at odds with standard gendered meanings) becomes the backdrop for the Star Trek images that depict a similarly conflicted

Spock, who is shown both fighting and desiring Captain Kirk. It is also noteworthy that

Reznor is both a political and digital activist, rendering the vidders' association all the more compelling.

[3.7] Reading the rhetorical strategies of "Closer" as issuing from both its visual and aural registers does not violate Coppa's analysis, nor does it defile the piece's status as song vid; rather, it can provide further context without resorting to the simple lumping

of the piece into the category of music video, as Coyle did. Indeed, as Coppa showed,

and as Henry Jenkins earlier noted, "Fan artists insist that their works bear little or no direct relationship to MTV's commercial music videos" (Jenkins 1992, 232). We thus

might more productively compare "Closer" to a 1965 remix by Santiago Alvarez, the Cuban found footage filmmaker who supported Castro's regime. Alvarez's "Now!" culls news footage of US race riots cut together in time to music and orchestrated to the

eponymous song by Lena Horne, the remarkable performer who was a vociferous civil

rights activist and who was blacklisted by Hollywood because of it. The song "Now!" is itself a remix. Horne sings it to the tune of the Hebrew folk song "Hava Nagila," but she changes the lyrics to stage a scathing commentary on US race relations; the lyrics

suggest the founding fathers would disavow their legacy. Because this song was

banned in the United States, Alvarez strengthens his indictment of the government

whose constant critique of oppressive regimes is accompanied by the suppression of

the voices and bodies of its own citizens for the crime of being black.

Now! (1965)

Video 2. "Now!" by Santiago Alvarez (1965).

[3.8] "Now!" opens with stills of Martin Luther King Jr. in a meeting with Lyndon Johnson. These dissolve into footage taken from the point of view of policemen in riot

gear as they rush the streets to break up a protest. After several more clips from their point of view, and as the song moves into the line "We want action now," we see what sort of action is occurring: stills show police brutalizing black protestors who are

always pictured as unmoving bodies, either lying injured on the ground or simply

immobilizing themselves in the mode of peaceful protest. One does not fight or resist,

but merely fails to act and goes limp. Interspersed in this footage are stills of the Ku

Klux Klan, a Nazi gathering, and Abraham Lincoln's statue. The images of victimization

eventually give way to views of the protesters' strength as their joined hands and

determined faces are highlighted. The 5minute piece ends with the word "NOW" being typed by gunshots, the bullets piercing holes to construct the dotted letters. Although

this piece may seem heavyhanded in today's sophisticated media climate, its subject

is more important than ever. The power differentials of society are hugely disparate,

and access to and control of the field of representation is a crucial mechanism for any

type of liberatory potential.

[3.9] Like "Closer," "Now!" uses both the song and the visuals as evidence to support the claim about the hypocrisy of the US political system in general and President

Lyndon B. Johnson in particular. This film joins the ranks of Alvarez's other such

efforts; indeed, Alvarez frequently featured Johnson, whose administration Alvarez

implicates in the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Robert

Kennedy. Alvarez's remixes were not constrained by filmic conventions of length:

consider the 18minute LBJ (1968), the 38minute Hanoi, Tuesday 13th (1968), or the 25minute 79 Springs (1969). Moreover, he considered himself a news pamphleteer,

and not a filmmaker (Malcolm 1999). Alvarez's discourse community includes Octavio

Getino and Fernando E. Solanas, founding members of Third Cinema (aka Third World

Cinema), a group whose found footage filmmaking was motivated by both economic

and ideological concerns. They remixed footage to decry colonialism in Latin America

and to resist dominant Hollywood genres. They also published tracts about their work,

adding nuance to their practice; these include "Towards a Third Cinema" (1969) by Getino and Solanas, and "The Aesthetics of Hunger" (1969) by Glauber Rocha.

[3.10] "Now!" and "Closer" share formal properties: they are similar in terms of length and technique, and they both use images culled from a larger archive. Likewise,

they are both grassroots efforts, and they offer resistance to dominant narratives. The

two pieces are further linked by their inability to fit definitively into any of the

categories erected by current remix theory. Eli Horwatt (2010) argues that there are

two dominant modes of digital remixing: political remixes and trailer remixes. Digital

remix deserves its own taxonomy, he continues, but because taxonomies risk

oversimplification, he has purposefully extended the two approaches to found footage

use that Paul Arthur (1999) identified: surrealist estrangement, which Horwatt links to

trailer remixes, and Soviet reediting, which he links to political remixes. Although the

strategies Horwatt names are valuable, the limitations of this taxonomy are apparent when looking at vidding, which seems to fall into neither category. Further, the

discussion of political remix is weakened by its reliance on the discourse of art, which

leads Horwatt to make assertions such as this one: "As works of art, political remixes can be critiqued for their parroting of hegemonic visual discourses in mainstream

media, rather than adopting less authoritarian modes of speaking back to the media"

(7). This statement begs several questions: Should political discourse be gauged by

the standards of art? What are those standards, aside from being "less authoritarian"

than mainstream media? Is this a question of aesthetics? Might differing rhetorical

situations call for differing levels of "parroting"? Finally, what does it mean to parrot a discourse when working in a preexisting vocabulary of images? These are politically

charged and value laden questions worth asking, but they are difficult to frame when

art is the only referent.

[3.11] However, Horwatt's discussion of particular strategies of remix is valuable.

After noting that Soviet reeditors are distinguished by the fact that their

"transformations occur clandestinely," he considers other work in this vein, asserting that "these works of détournement are marked by the artist's desire to camouflage

their transformations, almost as if to insinuate them back into the mediascape as

authentic and original works" (2010, 7). This description sounds very much like

fannish efforts, because vidders work with original texts but create new possibilities.

Indeed, "Closer" might be seen as using the strategy of identity correction that

Horwatt assigns to political remixes (quoting Jonathan McIntosh;

http://www.rebelliouspixels.com/), but to get there, we have to stretch and blend his two categories. Moreover, the affective level remains a source of concern for many

scholars, and fannish work, given its presumed admiration for its source text, can be

easily misconstrued as being apolitical and/or pandering at first glance. Indeed,

Horwatt cites Hal Foster's castigation of appropriation art that reveals a "festishism of the spectacle," before adding that that such work can fall prey to "an unwitting passion for the materials appropriated" (2). But anyone who has ever edited video clips would

likely attest to the fact that one must have passion for the footage; editing demands

extensive playing and replaying of clips. Whether this passion issues from a fannish

impulse or is one born of righteous indignation (or both) matters little. To argue, one

must take a stand, not be disinterested. Further, the very notion that a remix intent on

being overtly political should somehow lack passion seems untenable. Perhaps the

issue is one of critical distance; emotions are traditionally seen as opposed to logic and

reason, and thus having passion seems to interrupt intentionality and criticality (which

may be why Horwatt calls it "unwitting"). However, this is also a holdover from a printliterate world in which the myth of objectivity reigns. It is all logos, with no pathos or ethos.

[3.12] Where would "Closer" fit into a taxonomy that consists of either political remix or trailer remix? Certainly the more grassroots form is the trailer remix, for which

Horwatt creates the subcategories of trailer mashup and trailer recut, noting that they

are "easily the most popular form of digital remixing" (2010, 8). Although I have my doubts about this claim, his notion that trailer remixes not only comment on individual

films, but also parody the whole media marketing machine is an important one, though

it seems mired in the view that cinema is superior to television's serial texts. His larger discussion gestures toward a more expansive view of the trailer remix: If we imagine a

trailer as analogous to an abstract or a summary of a film or a television series, we

can see how "Closer," with its scenes pulled from the larger archive of the Star Trek original series, might function this way. In the final analysis, however, although

Horwatt makes many incisive and valuable points, especially about rhetorical

strategies deployed by remixers, the overall value of a taxonomy based exclusively on

cinema is limited.

4. Digital argument plus voice-over

[4.1] Insofar as I want to draw comparisons between conventions of written

argument and filmic ones, it remains difficult to use words to investigate sound and

image, occupying as they do differing registers of meaning making. There are multiple

and overlapping claims made by the various components of remix that are difficult to

discuss in text. This obstacle is compounded by a lack of available tools that make it

particularly cumbersome because digital platforms tend to be media friendly or text

friendly, but seldom both (note 3). That said, there is also cultural baggage to these comparisons, particularly in academic circles: the registers of image and sound are

seen as the exclusive province of the expressive and the creative, while words are

viewed as the optimum vehicle for critical engagement. This is the main source of

struggle in current discussions of remix, and it is certainly one that I find myself

continually working through, attempting to escape my own inability to understand the

relative complexity of these extralinguistic registers and to articulate them in words.

[4.2] Rick Altman argued that sound has been neglected in film theory, maintaining

that "the complexity of the cinema experience derives from [its] ability to serve as the intersection of a variety of discourses," and that even as these discourses share the

same space, they "commonly hide one another," and it is therefore only through

repeated viewings that a film will reveal bits of each individual discourse (1992, 10).

Although these repeated viewings are now accomplished with unprecedented ease,

sound continues to be elided in many discussions of remix (note 4). However, sound,

already crucial to cinema and television, increases its importance in remix because it

often provides the glue that holds disparate clips together. Both "Closer" and "Now!"

demonstrate this well; the songs provide a type of coherence to the images. Indeed, it

seems no accident that one of the pioneers of film editing spent several years as a sound editor. Dede Allen, who was the first editor to receive a single editing credit on a

Hollywood production, broke new ground with the practice of extending the soundtrack

from one scene into the image track of the next (Block 2010), a practice that has since

become widespread. Whether by musical score or by voiceover, the extended track

knits the narrative action together. An extension of this practice characterizes my next

example of remix.

[4.3] In Queer Carrie, Elisa Kreisinger exploits the voiceover narration of the show, Sex and the City (1998–2004). By pairing it with segments from disparate episodes,

she creates a counternarrative in which the four lead characters, finding

heteronormative expectations for their lives untenable, come out of the closet.

Working exclusively with evidence from the series, with no additional sound or images

added, Kreisinger manages a nearly seamless story—one that is, in her words, queer

positive. To completely transform a narrative this way lies at the very heart of remix

as a resistant and subversive practice, one that intervenes in the Hollywood machine

and complicates the very form of big media construction.

Sex and the Remix (Queering Sex and the City) Season 1

Video 3. "Sex and the Remix (Queering Sex and the City) Season 1," by Elisa Kreisinger (2009).

[4.4] My initial reaction to this piece was one of ambivalence, however. I saw it as

more queer negative than queer positive because it is only after these women have

failed relationships with men that they choose women. Carrie and crew are not

choosing to be with women because they love women, but because they do not love

men. This fact only reinforces dominant structures of gender inequity: women are

inferior, and heterosexuality prevails. I felt conflicted about this reaction, so I

discussed it with Kreisinger. She suggested that I look more closely at the first clip of

the Queer Carrie sequence, during which Carrie finds validation for her work from another woman. Indeed, after a repeated viewing, I came to appreciate and admire

the way that Queer Carrie transforms a meeting with a romantic rival into an event

that sparks an affair with another woman—one who is equally accomplished, who

respects her work, and who notices her appearance. What more could one want in a

partner? The feat is even more impressive because in the original scene, Carrie

arranges the meeting under false pretenses. She feigns a book project to meet with an

editor who is the exwife of Mr. Big, Carrie's aptly nicknamed boyfriend, so she can

assess her competition. She is driven by a sense of inadequacy because Big has

resisted commitment for years, a fact that Carrie has attributed to his not being the

marrying kind, only to find out that he was indeed married before. In the source

material, the type of dysfunctional competitiveness bred by contemporary US culture

that encourages women to battle each other for that big prize—the man—is writ large.

[4.5] This is precisely Kreisinger's point. As she notes in the introduction to the

project, "The original show appropriated the language of radical feminist politics only to retell old patriarchal fairy tales," and it is exactly this facet of the show that Queer Carrie subverts. Moreover, as the introduction continues, "while it may have taken 6

years to complain about men, by minute 2 of the remix they've done something about

it" (http://elisakreisinger.wordpress.com/projects/queercarrieproject/). Rather than

simply complain, Queer Carrie's characters take responsibility for their own sexuality, as well as their lives, just as Kreisinger takes control of the protagonist's sound and

images, "bending them to her will" (Coppa 2008, ¶2.19). I have never been a fan of Sex and the City, but I am certainly a fan of Queer Carrie.

[4.6] My initial reaction—and it really was a reaction, rather than a sustained analysis

based on textual evidence—was flawed because it failed to attend to the formal

elements of the remix. My reading relied on the indexical relationship of the remix to

life, rather than seeing Queer Carrie as making a statement within the confines of

originary show, Sex and the City. Key to this latter reading is a view of the registers of sound and image, and the dominance of the former over the latter. The claim is made

in the oral register, and the images provide supporting evidence as they illustrate the

voiceover. As with "Closer" and "Now!," this reading would be difficult to enact using available remix taxonomies, although when considered as digital argument, the claim

and evidence are far more apparent.

[4.7] One last effort at taxonomy holds more promise. Eduardo Navas (n.d.) defines

remix culture as the "global activity consisting of the creative and efficient exchange of information made possible by digital technologies that is supported by the practice of

cut/copy and paste." He identifies three types of remix: extended, selective, and

reflexive. Although copy and paste are not the only activities used by remixers who

layer sound and images and who play with volume and opacity, this approach is attractive in its emphasis on human activity (for example, rhetorical strategy), rather

than on the tools themselves or on established genres.

[4.8] Navas associates these three types largely with those found in sampled music,

although he also links them to the practices of avantgarde (visual) artists. Although

he does not distinguish between video remix and sonic remix, and even as his

definition is a bit thin (the equivalent would be to refer to essays as those texts

constructed by use of keystrokes), his discussion of the reflexive remix is interesting.

He applies the concept of the reflexive remix to networked sites formed by

communities such as Wikipedia and YouTube, and he extends them to suggest a

mixing of the modular components of Web 2.0 technologies. Although that portion is

not yet fully realized in his work, the reflexive remix could prove a productive avenue

for thinking about all three of the examples discussed here because it can account for

the social commentary contained in each. Navas explains that the reflexive remix uses

the aesthetic of 1970s music sampling "where the remixed version challenges the aura

of the original and claims autonomy even when it carries the original's name." Reading

"Closer," "Now!," and Queer Carrie as reflexive remixes, we might say that Spock, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Carrie are rewritten and bestowed with identities that

challenge their original essences, even as they claim its name. Ultimately, however,

such reflexivity is foundational to all remix, so the better question becomes: How is

this particular remix reflexive, and what is to be learned from its rhetorical strategies?

These are questions that remix as digital argument can produce.

[4.9] Examining the formal aspects of Queer Carrie, for instance, becomes a valuable lesson in media literacy. Understanding the way its structure exploits the show's

narration is a skill that seems sorely needed in today's highly mediated world. It is the

same structure so often used in news coverage and in documentary film. These "real"

shows have adopted the high production values, engineered drama, and story arcs of

entertainment, even as series like Sex and the City include the journalistic trope of the voiceover (unsurprisingly, in the show, Carrie is a newspaper columnist). This pairing

of voiceover with found footage is a common practice in both broadcast news and

documentary film, where stock footage is used to illustrate the narration. With the

recent rise of big box office documentary, there has been a concomitant public debate

and alarm about the form and its potential to propagate false information. Reading

remix as digital argument reveals the constructed nature of all such forms, whether

fictive or factual, and trains one to read all mediated texts critically and skeptically.

Citing the intense furor over films such as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 (2004),

Amber Day (2011) argues, "While most media consumers have some understanding

that all media messages are constructed, it would seem they many people are not

convinced of their neighbor's ability to understand this" (103). Although we all think

we are savvy about media and its impacts, it takes sustained effort to understand its complexities. Being forced to confront the rhetorical choices of media production in a

structural way is one of the best ways of fostering necessary critical engagement.

5. Conclusion

[5.1] There are many benefits to viewing remix as digital argument. First, the net

effect of remix theory to date is the reinforcement of the amateur/professional binary,

which on the one hand distinguishes fannish remix from political remix video, and on

the other hand sees it as a purely artistic endeavor. This trivializes the amateur and

valorizes the professional while it emphasizes individuals over discourse communities.

Second, although I do not mean to suggest that there is a single correct reading of any

text, a rhetorically valid reading becomes valuable on many levels and contributes to

media literacy. If we read remix as digital argument, we could more productively link

fan vids to other resistant practices that question the grand narratives of our time—the

reified genres that dictate our ways of knowing. By reading them as arguments with

claims and evidence, we are better equipped to gauge the veracity of the information

presented by all media, particularly that which purports to gives us information, such

as broadcast news and documentary film.

[5.2] Today's mediascape both reflects and reinforces our socioeconomically uneven

world; by reading remix as a digital speech act rather than consigning it to a

preexisting genre, we can help prevent digital discursive space from fostering the type

of binaries that inhere in current generic conventions. Language is power. Progressive

writing scholars have long argued that in a world characterized by social, cultural, and

political disparity, one where language and dialects help keep class distinctions in

place, there is no politically neutral use of Standard Written English, just as there is no way to select an image for remixing without implicating oneself in an ideological

apparatus. But alphabetic writing practices were formed gradually, unlike the practices

and norms adopted by those making digital arguments. With remix, we have a chance

to change semiotic privilege by shaping the emerging discursive field to one that more

readily reflects an equitable pluralistic culture.

[5.3] As Gunther Kress (1999) argues, in times of sweeping technological change,

critique is not a prime academic activity; critique is still necessary, but scholars must

do more than simply act as critics. They must actively engage in shaping and

transforming culture. When one rips, edits, and renders video, one is transformed into

a speaker of that discourse who can intervene and contest its truth claims. The

practice of remix can be transformative, yet the theory and history of remix is still the

stuff of written texts. Thus, careful attention to the way we name and theorize it is

crucial, for these acts also shape the digital discursive field and dictate whose stories

get told and who is authorized to speak. Therefore, before we reify a genre such as remix, where the discursive terrain has not yet hardened, it is useful to dissolve the

formal boundaries between fact and fiction and read remix as a digital argument, the

components of which exist in the same discursive space and occupy the same field of

representation.

[5.4] One of the most interesting aspects of remix is its tendency to subvert the

dominant discursive field and its reified genres: Hollywood film, broadcast television,

documentary, journalism, ethnography. Remix lays bare the constructed nature of the

original and often calls attention to its own construction. This holds true for genres

that endeavor to represent reality as well as those that make no such claims. The

boundaries between fact and fiction, problematic since Homer and Plato's time, break

down yet further in digital media. Our readings of them must do so as well.

6. Notes

1. Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972) is a distillation of the Frankfurt School and Walter Benjamin's work in particular. It is also a remix, as Berger adds in footage from Man

with a Movie Camera over which a voice reads Dziga Vertov's manifesto, that Berger

notes was written several years earlier. In a transmedia move before its time, Ways of

Seeing was then released as a book, but it was not printed in traditional fashion. There are five essays in total, and of the five, two comprise visuals only. The textual chapters

that wrap these two visual essays use both word and image. The main font is boldface,

with emphasized words and phrases in nonbold type, thus visually signaling the

argument contained within. In addition, based on a critique of the BBC series by an art

historian, Berger (1972) adds the critic's rebuttal in the book before refuting it, a move

that presages blogs and their opportunities for commentary.

2. A good example of this ideology is revealed by Trinh Minhha when she explains

that films shot in Africa are typically color timed on the blue side of the chart, a

convention that is appropriate for lightskinned people but that makes African people's

skin color a "dull charcoal black" (1992, 120).

3. Emerging platforms like Popcorn JS (http://popcornjs.org/) mitigate this tendency

to some extent, as one can see the various source materials pop up inside frames as

they are deployed in the main narrative. I find this popping fairly obtrusive, though,

and prefer applications such as Scalar (http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/), which allows all

assets to be placed in the same frame as the main text.

4. Horwatt (2010) briefly explores the practice of overdubbing, but only to discuss the

importing of one soundtrack onto another video track, with little discussion of the

nuance made possible by sophisticated sound mixing and editing.

7. Works cited

Altman, Rick. 1992. Sound Theory, Sound Practice. New York: Routledge.

Anderson, Steve. 2011. Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of

the Past. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press.

Arthur, Paul. 1999. "The Status of Found Footage." Spectator 20 (1): 57–69.

Baron, Dennis. 1999. "From Pencils to Pixels." In Passion, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies, edited by Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher, 15–33. Logan: Utah Valley State Press.

Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin.

Block, Melissa. 2010. "The Legacy of Film Editor Dede Allen." National Public Radio.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126115019.

Coppa, Francesca. 2008. "Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 1. doi:10.3983/twc.2008.0044.

Day, Amber. 2011. Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate.

Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Horwatt, Eli. 2010. "A Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing: Contemporary Found

Footage Practice on the Internet." Scope, no. 21.

http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/cultborr/chapter.php?id=8.

Jarrett, Susan. 1998. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured.

Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture.

New York: Routledge.

Kress, Gunther. 1999. "English at the Crossroads: Rethinking Curricula of

Communication in the Context of a Turn to the Visual." In Passion, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies, edited by Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher, 66–88. Logan: Utah Valley State Press.

Malcolm, Derek. 1999. "Santiago Alvarez: LBJ." Guardian, June 17.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/1999/jun/17/derekmalcolmscenturyoffilm.derekmalcolm.

Minhha, Trinh. 1992. Framer Framed. New York: Routledge.

Murray, Janet. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Navas, Eduardo. n.d. "Remix Defined." Remix Theory. http://remixtheory.net/?

page_id=3.

Ong, Walter. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London:

Routledge.

Plato. The Phaedrus. 2006. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Gloucestershire, UK: Echo Library.

Toulmin, Stephen. 1958. The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Vitanza, Victor, ed. 1994. Writing Histories of Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Wees, William. 1993. Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films.

New York: Anthology Film Archives.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9 (2012)

Theory

Remix video and the crisis of the humanities

Kim Middleton

Col ege of Saint Rose, Albany, New York, United States

[0.1] Abstract— The discourses of crisis in the humanities is juxtaposed with an

analysis of remix video practices to suggest that the cognitive and cultural

engagement feared lost in the former appear with frequency and enthusiasm in the

latter. Whether humanists focus on the deleterious effects of the digital or celebrate

the digital humanities but resist a turn to computation, their anxieties turn to the

disappearance of textual analysis, aesthetics, critique, and selfreflection. Remix

video, as exemplified by mashups, trailer remixes, and vids, depends on these same

competencies for the creation and circulation of its works. Remix video is not the

answer to the crises of the humanities; rather, the recognition of a common set of

practices, skills, and values underpinning scholars and video practitioners' work

provides the basis for a coalitional approach: identification of shared opportunities to

promote and engage potential participants in the modes of thinking and production

that contend with complex cultural ideas.

[0.2] Keywords— Digital humanities; Fan vid

Middleton, Kim. 2012. "Remix Video and the Crisis of the Humanities." In

"Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0349.

1. Introduction

[1.1] On October 2, 2010, remix artist and pop culture hacker Jonathan McIntosh

released his video "Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck in Right Wing Radio Duck." The

video uses 50 clips of classic Disney cartoons in conjunction with audio segments of

Glenn Beck's radio programs to tell a story about the political and ideological

vulnerability of the American unemployed during the economic downturn. Circulated

via social media such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as more mainstream outlets

such as AlJazeera.net, Roger Ebert's column, and the Washington Post, McIntosh's

remix video garnered well over a million views and has been translated into six

languages. In an interview with the New York Times, McIntosh describes the time and laborintensive process required to create the piece: "It took me about 3 months in

total to complete this project. The first two months I spent collecting, reviewing and

transcribing clips—usually a couple [of] hours a day. This last month I spent

intensively storyboarding, scripting and editing the footage and audio clips—usually

for about 8 hours a day" (Roettgers 2010). This kind of comprehensive media analysis project, and its reception, were not foreign to McIntosh; a year earlier, his "Buffy vs.

Edward" piece went viral as well, spanning Buffy and Twilight fandoms alike as it

ignited a conversation about popular media and gender. Pitting footage of the feminist

vampire slayer against the stalker tendencies of the vampire heartthrob, McIntosh

sought to push critique of Edward Cullen past the academic boundaries that seemed to

contain it (Ohanesian 2010). In an LA Weekly interview, McIntosh notes his debt to

cultural critic bell hooks for her methods of popular culture critique, explaining: "I'm not standing up and doing an academic analysis necessarily, but I am using the same

pop culture world to frame those ideas" (Ohanesian 2010).

[1.2] Five days after McIntosh's New York Times interview, distinguished literary

scholar and columnist Stanley Fish declared real of one of academe's worst fears: "The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives" (2010). Fish's contention was a reaction to an announcement from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany, stating

that economic shortfalls had forced them to cut academic programs in French,

Russian, Italian, classics, and theater. Outcry from faculty members, news

organizations, and scholarly associations was swift. Rosemary Feal, the executive

director of the Modern Language Association, appealed to the deputy commissioner of

the state's education department, predicting the intellectual competencies that would

go missing with the programs' removal:

[1.3] Languages are the repository of past and present cultures…The study

of language plays a part in developing cognition, sharpening analytical

abilities, and understanding sameness and differences of the human race;

without indepth study of languages, literatures and cultures, and the liberal

arts, institutions of higher learning should only call themselves technical or

professional schools. (Feal 2010)

[1.4] For Feal and many others, Albany's cuts signal the loss of entire landscapes of

thought from the topography of a college education. Her appeal focuses on the impact

of foreign language learning, but it quickly includes the study of literatures and

cultures as endemic to the development of analysis and understanding. Without

significant input from humanities disciplines like modern languages, she argues, the

institution defaults on its responsibility to develop both cognitive and cultural skills in its graduates. Professors at SUNY Albany echoed Feal's emphasis on the crucial

cognitive abilities that would be lost: "The humanities are critiqueal knowledge rooted in the 'other'—other organizations of social relations, other modes of thinking, other

forms of behavior, other values and ethics of work" (Ebert and Zavarzadeh 2010).

[1.5] Temporal contiguity provides a convenient connection between the phenomena

of remix video and one of the more immediate and material strands of the crisis of the

humanities, but I'd also like to suggest there is a more significant thread that links these together. McIntosh is an avatar of sorts for a significant body of remix video

practitioners who use the medium to engender conversations about the texts of our

day. While McIntosh's videos are far more technically sophisticated than most of the

millions of remix videos available online, he shares certain core competencies with

even beginner remixers: thorough knowledge of primary source materials; close

attention to their contextual nuances and the opportunities to revise those contexts to

make new meanings; analysis of the original and the newly created work; and an

attention to how that new work will circulate in and across multiple subcultures,

fandoms, and audiences. In short, McIntosh's pieces, as well as his metacommentary

about them, speak directly to the shared anxieties of cognitive and cultural loss of

those who describe the present as a moment of crisis for the humanities.

[1.6] My purpose here is to stage a kind of mashup between the analyses of remix

video and those of the crisis of the humanities (note 1). Like any good remix, each of the texts considered here should comment on the other. Why should humanities

scholars be interested in remix video? Equally importantly, why should remix video

practitioners be interested in categorizing their work as humanistic endeavor? In what

follows, I document the discourses of loss and anxiety in the crisis of the humanities—

the constitutive cognitive and cultural endeavors its proponents fear are disappearing

—and juxtapose these with the formative practices, protocols, and historical

developments that subtend remix video's creation and circulation. My aim is to reveal

symmetries between the two that may motivate a reciprocal reevaluation of shared

intellectual and cultural engagement, and to suggest that these contain the potential

for coalition in the service of defending and promoting shared values.

2. Humanities crises in the digital age

[2.1] There's no question that the institutional place and popular evaluation of the

humanities is in question at present. For many scholars, academics, and citizens, the

exigencies of the digital age—shifts in dominant media, industry, economies, and so on

—are most responsible for the shakeup. While the focus on digital effect may vary,

the anxiety is the same: the decline of thinking and its attendant processes, and the

obliteration of cultural knowledge and critique. Occupying a spectrum of rhetorical

positions from rational to hyperbolic, defenders of the humanities prescribe the

continued societal necessity of their values and methodologies. Fish, Feal, and their

compatriots, for instance, attend to the significant institutional and material losses

suffered by academic departments and American culture at large. Their arguments,

however, can unintentionally instantiate the apocalyptic beliefs that see program cuts

as one more sign of a kind of humanistic suicide—the imminent death of thinking—in

the rise of technology. A spate of New York Times articles (e.g., "Hooked on Gadgets

and Paying a Mental Price," June 6, 2010; "Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction,"

November 21, 2010) joins an inflammatory cover story by Nicholas Carr in the

July/August 2008 issue of the Atlantic: "Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the

Internet Is Doing to our Brains." In The Dumbest Generation (2008), Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, makes his case for an entire generation's

willful evacuation of its humanities heritage: "The fonts of knowledge are everywhere, but the rising generation is camped in the desert, passing stories, pictures, tunes, and

texts back and forth, living off the thrill of peer attention. Meanwhile, their intellects

refuse the cultural and civic inheritance that has made us what we are up to now"

(10). In this pronouncement, Bauerlein draws heavily on the implications of the NEA

study that documents declines in time devoted to reading, quality of engagement, and

reports of enjoyment. Extrapolating from that data, he goes on to blame the epistemic

shift in young people's leisure activities for the perceived cultural crisis: they refuse to acknowledge and revere core humanities values and, by extension, to engage their

intellects (note 2). In so doing, he frames the fears of one particular, vocal discursive community: the death of the humanities—its distinctive thought processes, its

participatory ethic, its cultural trajectory—comes at the hands of forthcoming

generations who substitute digital interactions for brainbuilding engagement with the

printed word.

[2.2] Bauerlein and his ilk are not alone in their cultural panic. Lest we think the

narrative of crisis belongs solely to the scions of language and literature, it should be

noted that the documentation of dehumanizing tendencies of digital media is an equal

opportunity activity. In his 2010 bestselling book You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier critiques some of the fundamental utopian claims about new media. Lanier draws on

his own experiences as a computer programmer and pioneer of virtual reality to ask

salient questions about the promotion of mob mentality and the unseen limits that

software operations sets for cognition. But his concerns stem from a foundational

belief in the haecceity of the human individual, an individual whose nature is

threatened by the technologies at hand: "The new designs on the verge of being

locked in, the web 2.0 designs, actively demand that people define themselves

downward. It's one thing to launch a limited conception of music or time…It is another

to do that with the very idea of what it is to be a person" (19). In a similar vein, MIT

professor and psychologist Sherry Turkle details years of study devoted to the

transformation of human experience via digital technologies in her 2011 book Alone

Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other. Her

conclusion urges readers to choose better futures for themselves than those

determined by the "human experiment" to which we've acceded by interacting with

machines that "denigrate and deny privacy, seductive simulations that propose

themselves as places to live" (296). Thinkers like Lanier and Turkle spend less time

attending to the decline of the humanities per se (à la Fish, Feal, and Bauerlein) than

to the human, but their concerns share both tone and priority with the others. They worry that we are on the brink of losing that which makes us fundamentally human:

the particular ways we think in order to understand ourselves, our potential, and our

relationships to others. Interactions with and through digital technologies change our

predilections and desires, both as individuals and as a culture. For the sake of clarity,

we might differentiate the crisis of the human from that of the humanities, yet in many

ways, the two tread the same rhetorical ground of loss and decline.

[2.3] The varying discourses of crisis around humanistic ideals, then, share both

rhetorical stance and prophecies of an anemic cultural future, regardless of how deeply

the authors themselves are entwined with the very technologies they critique.

Surprisingly, this same ethos extends into the emerging field of digital humanities, a

discipline that ostensibly works to identify and study the developing relationship

between humanities inquiry and new forms of analysis made possible by technological

innovation. While not a universal concern throughout the field, the potential for their

methodological approaches to be overtaken by a logic endemic to technology occupies

a growing number of digital humanists and mirrors a tension that was seemingly

present from the origin of the discipline itself. Histories of digital humanities by both

Matthew Kirschenbaum (2010) and Patrik Svensson (2010), whose disciplinary

vantage points include the prestigious University of Maryland's MITH and Umeå

University's HUMLab, respectively, point to the 2004 arrival of Blackwell's A

Companion to Digital Humanities as a paradigmatic, terminological moment for the

field. Kirschenbaum (2010) relays this anecdote about the title from the edition's

editor John Unsworth: "Ray [Siemens] wanted 'A Companion to Humanities

Computing' as that was the term commonly used at that point; the editorial and

marketing folks at Blackwell wanted 'Companion to Digitized Humanities.' I suggested

'Companion to Digital Humanities' to shift the emphasis away from simple digitization"

(3). Throughout Kirschenbaum's and Svensson's histories, they emphasize the implicit

theme suggested by Unsworth's narrative: as scholars researched in the intersection

between humanities disciplines and computers, they endeavored to move beyond an

anemic view that represents digital humanities as a field devoted solely to print texts

made digital and/or assessed via digital technologies, and to move toward the

recognition of a panoply of methodologies, approaches, and analyses of digital objects,

and the accompanying social/cultural protocols that comprise a wider expression of

humanistic thought and study.

[2.4] While this desire, as Kirschenbaum and Svensson suggest, is present from the

inception of the field, discourse in and around digital humanities at this moment

resonates with the tension between digitization/computing and other forms of study.

Anxieties echo from scholars in English, media studies, and composition, and even in

computational and digital media. They argue that their work, which by all denotative

rights falls easily within the boundaries of digital humanities (in no small part because it emphasizes the role of cognitive processes and cultural critique), gets elided by the

dominant assumptions about the field, which skew toward a narrowed view of

computational methodologies. There's good reason for these concerns; largescale

computing projects take up a good deal of the scholarly and growing public imaginary

of digital humanities research. In a 2010 New York Times article titled "Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities' Riches," journalist Patricia Cohen begins her multipage

feature by noting the 20thcentury attachments to concepts like formalism and

postcolonialism, which only serve to set up her predominant point: "The next big idea

in language, history and the arts? Data." Cohen highlights a shift away from inquiry

informed by theory to one driven by technological methods. The article goes on to

interview a series of scholars asking "new questions" with respect to data sets that were heretofore too large to study comprehensively: tens of thousands of letters by

Enlightenment thinkers, for instance, or a tapestry hundreds of feet long. As the first

article in a series entitled "Humanities 2.0," Cohen gives a public face not just to the digital humanities, but to the future of humanities research in general, as one

dependent on, but rarely about, computing. Political and philosophical inquiry, it

seems, are artifacts of an earlier episteme, and there's no mention of the ways in

which these methodologies might themselves be applied to this emphasis on data as

an approach.

[2.5] In the article, Cohen interviews Brett Bobley, the director of the National

Endowment for the Humanities's Office of Digital Humanities. Bobley explains the

"digital humanities umbrella" to Cohen as one that contains a "wide range of activities," but his examples (online preservation, digital mapping) support her

definition of humanities being equal to data. This mirrors the emphasis that scholars

find when they seek governmental funding at the ODH Web site, which prominently

features the "Digging into Data Challenge" and the "Humanities High Performance Computing" grants. To be fair, the site also features startup grants, whose broader

criteria could embrace a project less dependent on technological tools. But when the

NEH describes the office's raison d'être thus: "NEH's Office of Digital Humanities

(ODH) takes a leadership role in helping the humanities embrace and use the

technology created by the digital revolution"

(http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/divisions/DigitalHumanities/WhatWeDo.html), it's

difficult to see the place for Unsworth's call to "shift the emphasis away from…

digitization" (note 3).

[2.6] In opposition to, and bewilderment about, this contracting depiction of digital

humanities scholarship, writers and researchers offer a wideranging series of

counterexamples, impassioned arguments, and occasional manifestos. In his postscript

to a 2011 issue of Culture Machine titled "The Digital Humanities: Beyond Computing,"

Gary Hall asks: "Do the humanities really need to draw quite so heavily on computer science to develop a sense of their identity and role in an era of digital media

technology? Along with a computational turn in the humanities, might we not also

benefit from more of a humanities turn in our understanding of the computational and

the digital?" (2011, 2). Hall posits a reciprocal relationship between the priorities and methodologies of computer science and humanities research here, and he goes on to

imagine the ways in which a reconceptualization of digital humanities might allow each

to productively identify the blind spots of the other. Composition scholar Alex Reid

(2011) takes a less conciliatory position. He frames his commentary with a description

of the kerfuffle over paper rejections from the 2011 Digital Humanities Conference—

ironically themed "Big Tent Digital Humanities"—and argues for the developments in and of the field that seem to fall outside the parameters imagined by the conference

organizers, most notably those that analyze the quotidian digital technologies that

"transform human experience on a global scale." He rails against a definition of digital humanities that privileges the creation of tools to analyze reams of obscure erudition

from the past. His critique centers primarily on parsing the consequences of an

overemphasis on computation that, he argues, elides crucial attention to the study of

massive ontological and epistemological shifts in human experience—traditionally,

some foundational philosophical arenas for humanities inquiry—and he gestures at the

necessity for research that explains, assesses, and represents the implications of these

global changes. Reid's impassioned comparison details the losses of a digital

humanities definition cut too finely, substituting anger and derision for anxiety over

the potential for humanistic loss.

[2.7] Reid's concerns parallel those of media studies scholar Alexis Lothian (2011),

who poses a number of questions that address the politics of exclusion in the

development of the digital humanities. Citing the digital humanities' emphasis on

coding, Lothian wonders (among other important concerns), "Why do only some

activities count as properly digital or properly humanities?" As she identifies a series of aspects that have begun to shape the boundaries of the field, Lothian reminds readers

that the threat of a computational bias in digital humanities is not only that of a limited set of subjects to study, but also a limited set of scholars to study them. If digital

humanists, as she notes above, can only be considered such when they acquire and

deploy a certain set of computerbased skills, then what people, and with them, what

foci, does the field itself lose? In the summary of a digital humanities conference

session on diversity, Lothian's post reminds her readers of the need to attend to

difference and otherness in the construction of disciplines and methodologies, whereas

rigidly defined requisite experiences, literacies, and skill sets have a tendency to

unintentionally shape homogenous and selfperpetuating systems. Among these,

Lothian cautions, are the checkered history, applications, and blind spots of the term

humanism itself. Her metacognitive analysis recollects the ways that selfawareness

and critique are deeply embedded in much humanistic inquiry—a reminder of an important disciplinary contribution that Hall, Reid, Lothian, and others hope to retain in

the definition of digital humanities.

[2.8] As an emerging field, then, digital humanities is constituted and renegotiated

through hotly contested priorities, boundaries, and working members. What should the

digital humanities study? How should it study? And who should count as a digital

humanist? What is to be gained as these questions are answered definitively, and what

could be lost? For many, there is a deep concern that the field will become, in

Unsworth's term, "simple digitization," and in so doing elide or even forfeit its perceived charge to address the experiences of living in the digital age, existence vis

àvis digital technologies, and deep reflection on their implications. Digital humanities,

many argue, is in danger of losing the characteristic patterns of thought that are

fundamental to the necessary analysis and critique of culture at large. These concerns

echo the broader panics in the humanities at large: how will the cognitive approaches

endemic to humanistic inquiry survive? Without them, what will become of our values

and of our ability to think, analyze, critique, and assess as we move forward into a

digital future? "The crisis of the humanities," often denoted in the singular, is actually articulated in an array of keys. Despite some significant differences in these accounts,

however, the permutations of crisis point to a unified sense of potential loss and

imagination of a future without recourse to the informed criticism, whether scholarly,

social, or cultural, necessary for a fully functional society.

3. Remix and the humanities

[3.1] In Chuck Tryon's 2009 book Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media

Convergence, he declares that we've entered an age of digital cinema, one marked by the complicated and intersecting actions and reactions tied to making, consuming, and

critiquing film (4). As opposed to a film culture driven by studios and critics—the

model of a previous age—Tryon charts the ways that participatory culture shifts the

experience of film for filmmakers and audiences, professionals and amateurs alike. In

his analysis of this shift from analog to digital, and the cognitive and cultural changes

that accompany it, Tryon notes that remix video registers paradigmatic elements of

the practices and protocols of the new era. Here, he describes the complexity of

tracking the implications of this single thread of digital cinematic participation:

[3.2] This chapter seeks to trace out the practices of intertextuality

deployed in video remixes and delineate the ways in which these textual

strategies can simultaneously be used to "talk back" critically to Hollywood

marketing discourse while also embracing many of the remixed films and

television shows. In addition, the trailers, even without the additions of

original content, can become direct expressions of a semiotic solidarity with others who share similar cultural tastes and values. At the same time, these

seemingly unruly texts also become part of a larger marketing chain, in

which audiences become involved in the very processes of production for the

studios themselves. (154)

[3.3] Tryon's careful analysis of the protocols and tendencies of remix, mashup, and

response videos charts important skills and interactions that inhere within the digital

cinema's networks and audiences: critique of, and simultaneous appreciation for,

mainstream texts; the production and maintenance of symbolic and aesthetic solidarity

with others; and the management of a seemingly inevitable complicity with studio

priorities. As such, it provides an overview of the ways that remix culture models a

profound engagement with contemporary media. Digital technologies for viewing,

commenting, editing, and disseminating function as necessary tools, while the users'

deep knowledge of the social protocols that accompany each condition their success.

To consume, critique, discuss, produce, circulate, subvert, or comply with corporate

control—each of these, and sometimes all at once, comprise remix video's contribution

to the practice of living with and through the digital. In its history of practice, remix

culture interrogates the transformation of human experience through a sophisticated

approach to the texts that project our cultural desires, assumptions, and expectations.

Access to digital technologies—whether via LiveJournal, iMovie, or YouTube—allows

fans and amateurs to express and share their analysis of, and investment in, canonical

texts. In other words, if Tryon's analysis holds true, then remix video functions as a

particularly popular and powerful engagement with cognitive and cultural work that

parallels the formative humanities/digital humanities agenda.

[3.4] Tryon is one of many scholars who argue that remix video methodologies

exemplify a sophisticated approach to the cultural/social/personal impacts of digital

technologies. In a 2009 Flow TV article, Louisa Stein outlines the cognitive processes brought to bear in fan vids, noting the array of complex film editing techniques vidders

use, both to remind viewers of the original contexts of footage and simultaneously to

shift those contexts. They craft new relationships and meanings among video and

audio clips with reference to the archive of affects of various communities of viewers.

The most skillful of remix artists, then, create a delicate equilibrium between the poles

of "constraint and creativity" (Stein 2009).

[3.5] Stein's article condenses the results of decades of study on the practices of fan

video. Even the most pedestrian remix depends on a host of composition skills. First

and foremost, remix depends on an extensive knowledge of canonical texts. Francesca

Coppa (2009) describes vidders' relationship to their source texts as obsessive, a

comprehensive practice of viewing and making meaning so as to review and remake

meaning in their works. Cornel Sandvoss (2007) describes this as the constitutive relationship for fans, noting that fans (and literary critics!) exist "in a state of constant audienceship in which we consume mediated and fragmented texts and reconstitute

textual boundaries in the act of reading in an intertextual field" (31). Fan video, then, is grounded in a practice of reading and rereading in the service of image juxtaposition

that maintains some trace of the original while it simultaneously suggests new themes

and subtexts (Jenkins 1992). At the same time, with her mention of "shot alignments,"

Stein implicitly gestures at vidders', and by extension remixers', knowledge of, and

ability to replicate, the formal and genre elements of film that are appropriated and

deployed to shift the meaning of the original text (Tryon 2009; Horwatt 2009;

Middleton 2010). In short, those who remix are, in many ways, the quintessential

readers of the digital age: focused and willing to repeatedly return to their source

material while simultaneously attending to the affective and structural aspects of the

multiple media—video, audio, text—that they engage and reference.

[3.6] More central to Stein's discussion and the history of vidder practices, however,

are the ways that vidders attend to the conventions, expectations, and desires of their

communities. As Karen Hellekson (2009) writes in her description of fandom's gift

culture, "To engage is to click, read, comment, write, make up a song and sing it; to

hotlink, to create a video, to be invited to move on, to come over here or go over

there—to become part of a larger metatext, the offputting jargon and the unspoken

rules meaning that only this group of that people can negotiate the terrain" (114). The social protocols that govern participation in communities where fan vids are exchanged

can, as Hellekson points out, appear byzantine to outsiders. Yet while it may represent

the most extreme example, fan vid cultures typify the specificity of responsibilities,

knowledge, and practices that mark the circulation of remix video across a variety of

audiences. Participation in these communities requires careful attention to the

expectations of one's peers, and to the ability to imagine new retorts and audiences

for the remix. As an aspect of digital cinema, then, remix video is not only a text

produced by an author literate in a number of cognitive competencies. It is also a text

that acquires meanings through its manifold social systems of circulation, and its

cultures and subcultures, composed of knowledgeable community members who know

what do with it, and how to respond in a myriad of ways that add new layers of

context to the video.

[3.7] One of the most pervasive thematics both embedded in remix video and

accumulated throughout its circulation is the state of its own critical pleasures visàvis the authority of the medium from which its source material springs. In Cultural

Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, Eli Horwatt (2009) observes

that early political remix video "demonstrates a deep suspicion of media itself—

specifically the authoritative voice of journalism and the persuasive techniques of

advertising" (80). To illustrate his point, he cites as an example Jonathan McIntosh's use of a Kodak commercial to draw attention to the contrast between corporate

advertisements and Iraq war coverage. In a different key, Kristina Busse's (2008)

reading of Lim's fan vid "Us" describes the vidder's representations of fandom's own engagement with its texts, the intervention of copyright claims, and a critique of the

outsider academics who stare at fans. Some of the most wellcirculated remixes and

vids, then, undertake the responsibility of metacognition. Implicitly or explicitly,

complex remixes reflect on and assess the habits, beliefs, and values of communities

of practice, and at the same time encode questions/critiques of the media that

engender the form itself. If, in its most accomplished works, remix manages to encode

both selfreflection and media critique, then it echoes Lothian's desire for disciplinary

selfassessment as the digital humanities go forward. Who gets to remix? What kinds

of remixes count? At the same time, this metacognitive dyad asymptotically

approaches a form of intellectual engagement suggested by cultural studies scholar

Douglas Kellner in 2002. In an attempt to return the critical impetus of Frankfurt

School politics to cultural studies, Kellner constructs a threepart analytic that requires attention to the production and political economy of the text, close textual analysis,

and audience reception (19). Grounded in textual analysis, remix video often exercises

its potential to address the production exigencies of its texts (present even in the

ubiquitous disclaimer to ownership and copyright) as well as direct appeals to its

audience. In short, the form and community protocols of remix engender a model of

intellectual engagement as critique, even as the works circulate as pleasurable and

entertaining artifacts.

[3.8] The cognitive and cultural practices marked above—reading, rereading,

analyzing, critiquing, recontextualizing, reflecting—are not, obviously, deployed with

reference to a classical canon of intellectual history. At the same time, we do have

evidence of a culture founded on a form of digital reading; a consistent attention to

aesthetic organization and social values; and critical faculties exercised in the

production and circulation, and metaanalysis of, remix practices and sources. As

modes of thinking about texts, remix practices quite clearly represent competencies

endemic to humanities discourse, and ubiquitous in the parlance of its crisis and loss.

Moreover, scholarly work on vids and remix genres shows the ways in which the most

sophisticated compositions may already be developing forms of reflexive, selfconscious engagement that resemble ideational structures of critical and intellectual work.

4. Conclusion

[4.1] In Alan Liu's 2011 MLA conference paper, he describes the formation and

mission of an advocacy group, 4Humanities, inspired by the draconian budget cuts to

higher education in the United Kingdom. Like Fish (2010) and Feal (2010), Liu (2011) approaches the crisis in the humanities by way of the significant economic threat to its

institutional future; likewise, he focuses on the nowendangered indispensable

content: a flexible and continued discussion of the human, and by extension the

humane. In the face of the high stakes of humanities decline, Liu notes that

4Humanities singles out the digital humanities, attributing to the field "special

potential and responsibility to assist humanities advocacy." Arguing that the field is uniquely qualified to reposition the significance of humanistic values with reference to

contemporary technologies, he goes on to suggest that in order for the digital

humanities to assume the responsibility he describes, it must find a way to activate its

legacy of cultural criticism and devise effective means of assisting humanities to

communicate in "the new arena of networked and social public knowledge"—a milieu, he notes, in which the academic monograph critical to traditional humanities

conversation is both alien and ineffective. Liu's 4Humanities call to arms suggests a

classic coalitional model wherein two aligned bodies seek to promote and defend

shared territory, bringing to bear their respective strengths and targeting their

respective audiences. The "potential and responsibility" Liu assigns to the digital humanities, then, is one that addresses many of the material and abstract elements of

anxiety and loss in the crisis in the humanities, but one that also insists on a

manifestation of digital culture that is in alignment with, not in opposition to, core

humanities values and priorities.

[4.2] Liu (2011) makes two important moves: first, he takes seriously much of the

rhetoric of crisis and loss; and second, he proposes one (implicitly, among many)

means of counteracting that crisis. His approach pragmatically acknowledges the

cachet and relevance of digital humanities, but insists it cannot hope to intervene on

behalf of threatened humanities values and programs without drawing on the key

processes and priorities (e.g., cultural criticism) that have thus far been absent from

its own development. The suggestion, it seems, is the possibility of two fields

reciprocally acknowledging inheritance and relevance to advocate for a shared

concern. This possibility—a certain manifestation of coalition and reciprocity—is one I'd

like to suggest could bridge the gap between the discourses of crisis in the humanities

and remix video.

[4.3] To be trained both in the humanities and the consumption and production of

remix video is to occupy a position that is, as described above, an exercise in

balancing "constraint and creativity." Humanities and remix are not immediately

obvious bedfellows; to care deeply about the longevity and evolution of one does not

necessitate the same investment in the other. Both legitimate and paranoiac visions of

the humanities in crisis share a commitment to a set of cognitive practices and

approaches that subtend crucial cultural formations, habits, and values that both

contend are fundamental to the way we understand ourselves, our actions, and our possible futures. The juxtaposition of the discourses of crisis in the humanities with

that of remix and fan video is not to suggest that vernacular remix is the bright and

shining answer to the anxiety of loss surrounding humanities inquiry or its attendant

echo of loss in the digital humanities—remix culture will not save The Iliad. Nor am I suggesting that humanities/digital humanities scholars pillage remix video for new

research forms or content, or that remix practitioners and/or vidders should claim

academic status, even assuming that they'd want to; significant material differences

separate humanities scholars from remix video practitioners, academic enclaves (yes,

and even acafans!) from vidder fandoms. In short, it's exceedingly simple to identify

the constraints that catalog all of the very real and abiding differences between work

in the humanities and remix. It may well be worth the creative effort, however, to

recognize a common set of practices, skills, and values that underpin a spectrum of

enthusiastic, sophisticated efforts in these two fields and begin to imagine activities

and texts that provide shared opportunities to promote and engage potential

participants in the modes of thinking that bring us pleasure and frame the ideas and

processes that matter to us, as a collective investment in the creation of an amenable

cultural future.

5. Notes

1. Throughout, I use remix video as a broad umbrella category under which a variety of genres, practices, and participants fall. This is not to ignore the fundamental and

material differences between communities as varied as YouTube audiences for trailer

remixes or feminist vidder collectives; there are of course significant questions

concerning gender, legitimacy, and power that need to be taken into account. For the

purpose of highlighting the commonalities with humanities discourse, however, I hope

to identify skills and priorities that are, at the very least, implicitly shared in the act of remixing video for an audience.

2. N. Katherine Hayles recently provided a thoughtful and complex reevaluation of this

data in the service of the development of new methodologies of analytical reading in

"How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine" (2010).

3. While some scholars seek to complicate this divide—see, for example, David Berry's

"The Computational Turn: Thinking about the Digital Humanities" (2011)—a significant portion of the informal, formal, and popular discourse remains attentive to the divide

and its perceived consequences.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9 (2012)

Praxis

Vidding and the perversity of critical pleasure: Sex, violence, and

voyeurism in "Closer" and "On the Prowl"

Sarah Fiona Winters

Nipissing University, North Bay, Ontario, Canada

[0.1] Abstract— Analysis of two fan vids ("Closer" by Killa and T. Jonesy, and "On the Prowl" by Sisabet and Sweetestdrain) in the context of theories of vidding

reveals that vids have a unique ability to combine analytic detachment and

pleasurable investment. I analyze these two vids through Roland Barthes's

provocative suggestion that reading criticism demands from the reader a perverse

voyeurism of the critic's pleasure in the text to argue that they are examples of the

ways in which many vids function as pleasurable criticism that invites viewers of

such vids to enter voyeuristically into that pleasure. Both vids use tropes of sexual

violence to characterize not only the mass media they respond to, but also the

nature of fandom and of transformative fan readings. "On the Prowl" criticizes and celebrates the fan through constructing different audiences for a series of selfportraits; "Closer" does the same thing by constructing Spock as a portrait of the fan. The narratives of sadism and rape constructed by the vids both disturb and

seduce the viewer, thus forming perverse texts that that problematize pleasure

while simultaneously reinscribing it.

[0.2] Keywords— Fan vid; Roland Barthes

Winters, Sarah Fiona. 2012. "Vidding and the Perversity of Critical Pleasure: Sex,

Violence, and Voyeurism in 'Closer' and 'On the Prowl.'" In "Fan/Remix Video,"

edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative

Works and Cultures, no. 9. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0292.

1. Introduction

[1.1] "Where is our line?" the makers of "On the Prowl" ask viewers in their vid summary. The pronoun our is ambiguous, inviting the viewer both to analyze the two

vidders from a critical distance and to collapse that distance by turning the question on

herself. The vid's destabilization and shifting of the lines between sex and violence,

voyeurism and sadism, perversity and pathology work also to foreground the unstable

lines in fandom between reading and writing, consumption and production, the

deconstruction and reinscription of pleasure. This instability of textual pleasure is the

central subject of Roland Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text, in which he asks, "How can we take pleasure in a reported pleasure…How can we read criticism?" (1975, 17).

Barthes could not have known that one answer to his question arose the same year

that he asked it, in Kandy Fong's first Star Trek slide show. Five years later, she made

"Both Sides Now" (Fanlore 2011), a work that indicates in its very title the two sides of fannish viewing that many fan vids inscribe: the critical analysis of pleasure in a fan

text and the simultaneous reinscription of that pleasure. Indeed, Barthes's own answer

to his question describes perfectly the relationship between the vidding fan and the fan

of vids, the latter of whom takes the position of the "I" in his scheme:

[1.2] Only one way: since I am here a seconddegree reader, I must shift

my position: instead of agreeing to be the confidant of this critical pleasure—

a sure way to miss it—I can make myself its voyeur: I observe clandestinely

the pleasure of others, I enter perversion; the commentary then becomes in

my eyes a text, a fiction, a fissured envelope. The writer's perversity (his

pleasure in writing is without function), the doubled, the trebled, the infinite

perversity of the critic and of his reader. (1975, 17)

[1.3] The viewer of fan vids (the reader) makes herself the voyeur of the critical

pleasure experienced by the vidder (the critic). She or he enters into the vidder's

pleasure, forming what Barthes characterizes as a "trebled" perversity ( perversity in this context defined both as the erotic pleasure taken in anything other than

potentially procreative heterosexual intercourse, and therefore, metaphorically, as

pleasure " without function"): the perversity of the fan text (the source), the perversity of the fan work (the vid), and the perversity of the fan (the viewer of source and vid)

(note 1).

[1.4] The Pleasure of the Text is very much about writing, about the language of

written texts. To apply its ideas to fan vids rather than fan fiction, I turn to the

deliberate ambiguity of Barthes's diction in passages such as the following: "What

pleasure wants is the site of a loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss" (1975, 7). Barthes is writing here about the literary text, but the words cut and dissolve do suggest the filmic. Although Armine Mortimer argues that "dissolve…has a Lacanian meaning, not a cinematic one," she

nevertheless admits that in Barthes, "everything is significant, including ambiguities"

(1989, 29). Chad Bennett seizes upon the ambiguity in this passage to argue that

Barthes provides "a distinctly cinematic vocabulary for the erotically charged moment"

(2010, 30) in his analysis of the representation of fandom (specifically queer fandom)

in Velvet Goldmine (1998). But to read Barthes as providing a cinematic vocabulary in this way is to read Barthes against himself since Barthes distrusted the cinematic,

"arguing that the cinematic signifier is by nature always 'smooth,' whatever the

rhetoric of shot and montage, and that the acute joys of fragmentation are impossible

because the viewer is obliged to receive and read a continuum of images" (Williams

1998, 47). Indeed, Barthes claims in "The Third Meaning" that the film still is more

truly filmic than the film from which it comes because its "obtuse meaning" (1970, 56)

"disturbs" critical metalanguage (61). But vids employ neither the continuum nor the still, but, in a linguistic paradox that would surely have delighted Barthes, the moving still, the continuous fragment, and even while they form a critical metalanguage, they do so through an excess of pleasure, thus reinscribing pleasure ("the acute joys of

fragmentation") into the critique of pleasure, and disturbing that critique.

[1.5] In order to avoid becoming lost among the proliferating pleasures of The

Pleasure of the Text, I do not attempt to distinguish in Barthesian terms between vids of pleasure and vids of bliss ( jouissance), although I think such a distinction could be made and the results of such an attempt would be fascinating. I use the words text

and work in their fandom meanings ( text is the massmedia source; work is the fan fiction or fan vid that responds to the source) and not their Barthesian meanings.

[1.6] My argument that Barthes's concept of reading as critical voyeurism provides

an exciting and pleasurable way to theorize the reading of fan vids forms part of what

Kristina Busse calls "one of the most important shifts in fan studies," the movement away from a quasiethnographic focus on fan communities to close readings of the

texts those communities produce: "Recent scholarship on media fandom in particular

has attempted to take into account the evergrowing diversity of fans and fan works,

often focusing on a particular fandom or even a single fan work. In fact, legitimizing

fan works as objects of study in their own right rather than merely products of an

interesting subculture, may be one of the most important shifts in fan studies" (2009, 105).

[1.7] In this essay I analyze not fandom, but the ways in which two fan works

characterize fandom, and the type of investment they invite viewers to make in both

the fan text and the fan work. Theorists of vidding have repeatedly made the point

that vids blend criticism and pleasure. Francesca Coppa's claim that "a vid is a visual essay that stages an argument" (2008, ¶1.1) points to the critical function of

transformative fandom (note 2). Cathy Cupitt's statement that "a songvid can be a feminist discourse in addition to an ode to male beauty, or an expression of joy as well

as a snapshot of a subculture's politics; that a story can be critique, erotica, and/or

history; and that one person can simultaneously be an author, academic, filmmaker,

and fan" (2008, ¶3.11) suggests that pleasure is inseparable from that critical

function. Tisha Turk argues that while many vids are "literary/cultural critiques," a vid

like Luminosity's "Vogue" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNRjzUB7Afo) also invites the viewer to "adopt the female gaze, to reimagine the bodies before her as

objects displayed for her pleasure, to claim the privilege of looking" (Turk 2010, 101).

Kristina Busse (2010) pays tribute to vids as a "merging of love and inquiry, affect and analysis, celebration and criticism." In my close reading of the two vids through the

figure of Barthes's perverse "seconddegree reader," the voyeur, I focus on how this merging is achieved.

[1.8] "Closer" and "On the Prowl" both brilliantly demonstrate how vids simultaneously critique cultural perversity, reinscribe that perversity, and invite the

viewer to enjoy the pleasure of both the critique and the reinscription in the way

suggested by Barthes. "Closer" by T. Jonesy and Killa is a Star Trek vid that was premiered at a Star Trek convention, Shore Leave, in 2004

(http://fanlore.org/wiki/Closer_%28Star_Trek_vid%29). It was posted to YouTube

without the vidders' consent by eetstomoch on August 1, 2006, and alexanderadb on

September 8, 2006. The vid's title is taken from the song that forms its soundtrack,

"Closer" by Nine Inch Nails (1994). "On the Prowl" by Sisabet and Sweetestdrain is a multifandom vid premiered in August 2010 at VividCon (an annual vidding convention

held in Chicago since 2002). Sisabet posted it to both LiveJournal and YouTube on

August 10, 2010. Sweetestdrain posted an entry on "The Making of 'On the Prowl'" to LiveJournal on August 12, listing the 63 sources used in the vid. The 2003 song that

gives the vid its title is by the underground artist Lydia Lunch. I analyze these two vids

in particular because although both construct the viewer as a Barthesian perverse

voyeur, "Closer" does so primarily when ripped from its particular fannish context, while "On the Prowl" does so primarily when embedded within its particular fannish context. As a result, "Closer" implies what "On the Prowl" foregrounds and makes explicit: While "Closer" hints at a perverse and voyeuristic side to fandom, "On the Prowl" screams about it.

2. "Closer"

Vid 1. "Closer."

[2.1] The portrait "Closer" paints of fandom anticipates in many ways the argument of "On the Prowl," but unlike the later vid, it is a portrait more clearly seen when the vid is viewed outside its original fannish context. "Closer"

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PwpcUawjK0&feature=fvsr) is based on an episode from the original series of Star Trek, "Amok Time" that tells the story of pon farr, the Vulcan mating imperative. In the episode, Spock must return to his home

planet in time for this ritual or he will die. The vid begins with the question "what if they hadn't made it to Vulcan in time?" and knowledge of the episode is essential to

understanding the narrative the vid constructs as the answer to the question. That

answer, that Spock would rape Kirk, takes place in a sequence lasting from 2:25 to

3:00. Only knowledge that Spock is suffering from pon farr allows the viewer to

identify both men as victims of a lack of control. The vid was made for those with such

knowledge: It was first shown at a Star Trek convention.

[2.2] But it was not made for all fans of Star Trek: "Closer" is a slash vid. Slash, the romantic or sexual pairing of two samesex characters who are not canonically a

couple, began with Kirk/Spock stories; much K/S slash uses pon farr both for plot and characterization. Moreover, the vidders' intent in "Closer" was to react to a trend in K/S that used pon farr to cause Spock to become not Kirk's lover but his rapist, and then go on to make Kirk respond by easily forgiving Spock and even romanticizing the

rape (T. Jonesy, pers. comm.). Knowledge of this context allows the viewer to read the

last sequence of "Closer" as the argument of the vid: From 3:01 to 3:24, Spock

grimaces with pain and remorse and leaves the Enterprise, while Kirk stumbles about the ship wounded, traumatized, and alone. Neither the characters nor their

relationship recover from the rape. Ironically, "Closer," which creates meaning by ripping images out of context, loses this meaning when ripped out of its own context

and placed on YouTube without the consent of its makers. The vid creates pleasure

rather than distress at the narrative; that is, it becomes pleasure without the ethical

and political function of challenging the romanticizing of rape—in Barthesian terms, it

allows for the infinite perversity of the viewer.

[2.3] In "Closer," the vidders take on the avatar of Spock in order to enact violence upon the fictional body of Kirk. The fan is visually one step removed from the violence,

but the lyrics of the song invite her to enter the perversity of Spock. For while those

lyrics work for Spock's relationship to Kirk, they also serve as a commentary on the

fan's relationship with the fan text. (Indeed, "Closer" vids can be found now in almost every fandom.) The first four lines of the song speak to the erotic relationship between

fan and text: The singer desires to "violate," "desecrate," "penetrate," and

"complicate," all of which the vidders do to the footage. What Spock wants to do to Kirk, the vid wants to do to Star Trek. Slash vids in particular desire to "violate" and

"desecrate" the cultural norms of heterosexual masculinity constructed in fan texts by

manipulating images of the male actors into montages of desire. But this desire transcends slash and gender; it stems from the critical impulse to "penetrate" the subtext of canon and "complicate" the superficial text.

[2.4] "Closer" tells a story of the fannish experience of taking control of the text while simultaneously feeling in thrall to that text. In many pon farr rape stories, Spock is characterized as not morally guilty of rape because he does not consent to it with

his conscious self; he is out of control and as helpless as Kirk in avoiding the rape. The

entry on rapefic at Fanlore contextualizes this trend, or trope: "Many of the first K/S

stories used pon farr to begin their relationship, often leading to a variant of rapefic where one partner doesn't want to hurt the other, but is driven to by his own alien metabolism." Fans often joke about helplessness in the face of overwhelming desire to

do creative violence to the fan text (violence of course is metaphorical; texts are not

persons and cannot be hurt or damaged), and indeed, vidders use the construction vid

farr to refer to creative obsession. Spock stands in for the fan who forces canonical characters to submit to her desires and to the vidder who rips, cuts, and slashes

footage out of its context to create a new text of pleasure for the viewer to enter into.

[2.5] The technical brilliance of "Closer" coupled with the dance beat of the song seduces the viewer into pleasure; the aesthetic overwhelms the ethic, transforming

Spock's desire from violence to eros. Barthes's famous passage on intermittence in

textual pleasure works even better for the visual pleasure of "Closer":

[2.6] Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In

perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no "erogenous

zones" (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis

has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing

between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges

(the opennecked shirt, the glove and the sleeve): it is this flash which itself

seduces; or rather: the staging of an appearanceasdisappearance. (1975,

10)

[2.7] "Closer" creates its eros through gaping and intermittence, through the flashing of images. It begins with some almost hidden images of the pon farr ritual on Vulcan, at 0.06, 0.07, and 0.09. These images flash by so quickly that the casual viewer of the

vid is likely to miss them on first viewing. However, the fetishist, the lover of detail,

sees them in the flashes. Here is the canonical story of the episode, flashing out in tiny

glimpses between two edges of the credits for the vid, sepiatoned writing on black

background. This effect of intermittence never ceases: The quick cutting combined

with the flashes of light and dark, the vertical lines, the blurring of focus, and the

encroaching darkness at the edges of some shots, all to the dance beat of the song,

create a Barthesian erotic. And the seductive flash is literalized and foregrounded in

the three flashes of pornography at 0:49, 1:28, and 2:18–20. Here both the flash and what it contains are sexual; form embodies content. "Closer" also turns violence erotic by editing its rape sequence to music without sung lyrics (2:30–3:01). Not all viewers

of the vid will react to this sequence identically, but it seems likely the dance beat

gives pleasure to many bodies in chairs in front of computer terminals watching the

rape play out, even those bodies belonging to viewers who position themselves as

ethically and politically opposed to sexual violence. As Barthes puts it, "the pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not

have the same ideas I do" (1975, 17).

[2.8] Moreover, this sequence begins with Spock breaking his bounds and then,

tellingly, pushing Nurse Chapel aside as he sets off in search of Kirk (2:28–2:30).

Chapel is played by Majel Barrett, who, in the pilot episode of Star Trek, had played the role of Number One, only to be replaced by Leonard Nimoy as Spock. Francesca

Coppa (2008) argues that vidders are drawn to Spock partly as a reaction to this

textual history:

[2.9] Mr. Spock is a ghost, the shadow of a missing woman. This visual

substitution of the alien man for the rational woman is at the heart of much

of the art produced in response to Star Trek, though it is among the leastdiscussed aspects of the show. Mr. Spock has been read in many ways…but the original Spock shape in the Star Trek canon is female. Spock is a kind of

visual marker, a scar indicating a series of conflicts meaningful to the

scientifically minded, technologically oriented women likely to become

vidders, especially in the early years of vidding. (¶2.15)

[2.10] Majel Barrett was relegated to the two minor roles of nurse and the voice of

the ship's computer, and Coppa's reading of these two roles invites a Barthesian

analysis of the moment in "Closer" when Spock pushes Chapel out of the way:

[2.11] In these two guises—Nurse Chapel and the Enterprise computer—

the displaced character of Number One serves as the model for two

archetypical fan positions: the woman who embodies visible desire, and the

disembodied but allcontrolling voice. The former is often presented as a

negative fan stereotype: the groupie, the stalker, the shrieking

Beatlemaniac, the "Mary Sue" who dreams herself into the story, the girl

with the embarrassing public crush on a movie star. The latter, I would

argue, is the voice of the vidder: the woman behind the camera, slide

projector, VCR, or computer, the technological woman who controls the

machine. The disembodied voice is also the voice of the slash writer (who

writes about bodies not her own) or the omniscient and controlling fan artist

who takes control of the protagonists' images and bends them to her will.

But most fan works seek to unite the analytical mind and the desiring body

in order to create a total female subjectivity. (¶2.19)

[2.12] Spock rejects Barrett as fan (Nurse Chapel) in the rape sequence, and of

course the only voice heard in the vid is the male one of Trent Reznor. While the

vidders may have sought pleasure with function—that is, to make an argument

attacking the romanticization of rape in fandom—the vid, ripped from its context,

seduces the viewer into pleasure without function, into perversity, into reinscribing the same pleasure in sexual violence that it critiques: The vidders embody themselves as

Spock, not Chapel. In Coppa's words, the vid "unite[s] the analytical mind and the

desiring body" (as does the song in the juxtaposition of "You get me closer to God"

with "I wanna fuck you like an animal") but this union is achieved by the body of the analytical Spock pushing aside the woman who wants to stop the violence, and (in the

rape sequence that follows) the pleasurable music pushing away the language of

criticism. The male textual pleasure in sexual violence overcomes the female critical

resistance to it. The viewer of the vid, then, becomes voyeur, entering the perversion

of culture.

[2.13] Neither fandom in general nor vidding in particular can be reduced to

Barthesian practices of pleasure for pleasure's sake, because fandom embodies and

embraces conflicting ways of experiencing mass media culture. For example,

Transformative Works and Cultures' forthcoming issue on "Transformative Works and Fan Activism" includes in its call for papers a request for "discussions of how fiction and fantasy can captivate us on an emotional level, providing a narrative structure

that can motivate us to seek change in the real world." But "Closer" demonstrates how the ripping of images from their context, whether that context is the original source or

the original fannish community, may result in perversity, whether the sexual

perversity of slash (pleasure without procreation) or the ethical/political perversity of

pleasure in sexual violence (pleasure without "seek[ing] change in the real world").

3. "On the Prowl"

Multifandom - On the Prowl

Vid 2. "On the Prowl."

[3.1] "On the Prowl" makes explicit what "Closer" leaves implicit: it is a selfportrait of fandom in general and the vidders in particular, and it deliberately reinscribes the

cultural pleasure in sexual violence that it exposes. As noted above, "On the Prowl"

can be found on the Web in two different contexts: Sisabet's LiveJournal

(http://sisabet.livejournal.com/400014.html) and YouTube

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M392_kRIxjA). The YouTube version has no

description available and the variant title, "prowlweb1," is cryptic, leaving viewers without context or guidance in understanding what they are seeing. Sisabet's journal,

by contrast, introduces the vid with the words "New Vid! VVC Challenge: Self Portrait."

Clearly the LiveJournal audience is expected to know that VVC stands for VividCon and

that the 2010 VividCon included a selfportrait challenge; that is, this audience is

constructed as a knowledgeable one. Only when the vid is viewed embedded in its

fannish context, then, is the viewer invited to read what she sees as a selfportrait.

The casual YouTube viewer may read the vid as a portrait of mass media rather than

as a portrait of the fan.

[3.2] The first of the 161 comments in response to the vid on Sisabet's page (as of

November 16, 2010), however, indicates a disagreement over the exact meaning of

"selfportrait": "Yikes! I am very disturbed (and I mean that in all ways). Can't exactly say you're wrong" (Gianduja Kiss), to which Sisabet responds, "Hey, is it possible to be wrong in a self portrait?" Clearly Gianduja Kiss understands the term selfportrait as referring to fandom—on her own LiveJournal page

(http://giandujakiss.livejournal.com/1094550.html), she says of the vid that it is

"another look at fandom"—while Sisabet responds with a perhaps disingenuous

implication that the selfportrait applies only to the two makers of the vid. This

disagreement highlights the complexity of the vid: Much of the meaning of "On the Prowl" lies in its construction of multiple selves being portrayed and the different

perverse pleasures available to those selves.

[3.3] The first and smallest group of selves portrayed in this selfportrait are the two

people who made the vid, Sisabet and Sweetestdrain. In her post on the making of the

vid, Sweetestdrain insists upon the emotional and visceral reactions she and Sisabet

had to the clips they used: "There isn't a single source used in the vid that doesn't

come from a 'this really gets/got to me' place for either or both of us. It's a selfportrait for sure, and we found a surprising amount of overlap in the things that made us go '…yeah, that's going in the vid,' even if one of us wasn't previously familiar with

the clips in question" (August 12, 2010).

[3.4] Of course, since this vid is a collaboration, the selfportrait is a selvesportrait, and as such is perhaps more open to multiple selves seeing their own reflection in it

than a singleauthored vid would be. Like the two vidders, many viewers may find "a

surprising amount of overlap" between the vidders and themselves. Nevertheless,

Sisabet responds to some of the feedback on the vid by restricting the selves being

portrayed to two: When Wemblee compliments "On the Prowl" by commenting, "I'm not sure if I agree with your thesis—basically, we live in a patriarchy, and they're

fictional dudes, so, when it comes to morality, I'm not bothered about 'the line'—but I

think this is fantastically done," Sisabet responds,

[3.5] Thank you so much! As far as agreeing with our thesis—I don't know

if that is even what we are attempting to do. I mean, I am FASCINATED by

all the differing readings the vid is getting and kinda love how everyone

brings their own interpretation but at the end of the day it is a self portrait.

We went in search of our line. What that line is and what it means is kinda

open to interpretation I am sure.

[3.6] Whereas many viewers experience the vid as a mirror of themselves, Sisabet

argues that it is a mirror of the vidders only, and primarily a window for other viewers

into the fannish experience of herself and Sweetestdrain.

[3.7] Yet Sisabet later repudiates the intentional fallacy of "I suspect authorial intent does not matter, at least not in the model I use," thus accepting her audience's

widening of the concept of selfportrait to include more than two selves. I argue that

the second smallest group of viewers for whom "On the Prowl" is a selfportrait

consists of vidders, and read this way, "On the Prowl" paints the portrait of the vidder as sadist. If Lydia Lunch stands in for the vidder in particular, and not just the fan in

general, the lyrics of the song point to the vidding practice of cutting scenes of male

suffering out of context to erotic effect. (For example, scores of Harry Potter vids take

the scene of Harry suffering a nightmare at the beginning of Goblet of Fire [2005] and place it in a context that suggests he is experiencing an orgasm from masturbation or

fellatio; many of the same vids do likewise with the scene of Draco writhing

theatrically in pain from Buckbeak's attack in Prisoner of Azkhaban [2004].) "On the Prowl" takes this vidding trope and twists it so that the men's expressions of pain

remain as pain, so that the characters' suffering is not transformed into the characters'

enjoyment, but allows instead for the viewer's enjoyment. In so doing, it makes the

point that most vids that decontextualize male pain do so in order to celebrate and

enjoy it, that most vids cut male bodies for pleasure.

[3.8] The vidder as sadist complements Francesca Coppa's figure of the vidder as

fetishist: " Vidding, as an art form made through editing, also complicates the familiar symbolic characterization of women sewing and men cutting. Vidding women cut,

slicing visual texts into pieces before putting them together again, fetishizing not only

body parts and visual tropes, but the frame, the filmic moment, that they pull out of

otherwise coherent wholes" (2009, 107). The fetishist is one of four types of readers of pleasure that Barthes proposes in The Pleasure of the Text, the others being the

obsessive, the paranoiac, and the hysteric. While this typology could provide a

fascinating point of entry into mapping out the different pleasures of fandom,

Barthes's characterization of the fetishist as the reader who "would be matched with

the dividedup text, the singling out of quotations, formulae, turns of phrase, with the

pleasure of the word" (1975, 63) lines up perfectly if "word" is replaced by "image"

with Coppa's vidder. "On the Prowl," however, suggests that vidders cut not only

visual texts but the bodies inside those texts, that they divide not only texts but the

men in those texts, that they are not just fetishists, but sadists.

[3.9] The third group of viewers for whom "On the Prowl" is a selfportrait constitutes the largest knowledgeable group of readers for the vid: fandom. The juxtaposition of

lyrics and images challenge any fan to accept or reject the vid's characterization of

what she does as a viewer and reader of source texts and what fandom as a whole

does to canon. For example, the first line of the song, "I was thinking about picking up some young boys," characterizes fandom as privileging the female subject's gaze at

the male object, an assertion most certainly open to debate. Less controversially, the

first lyric after the repeated "on the prowl" is "and then I wanted more." The very existence of fandom is predicated on this desire, although the lyric here contains a

fascinating ambiguity; Sheenagh Pugh quotes an unnamed fan fiction writer as

theorizing that "people wrote fanfic because they wanted either 'more of' their source material or 'more from' it" (2005, 19). This distinction between "more of" and "more from" is blurred in "On the Prowl," where a literal reading of the escalating images suggests the fan watches television and film because she wants more of the suffering that source texts give her, but a metaphorical reading implies that the reason she

reads or writes fan fiction, or makes or views fan vids, is that she wants more from—

she wants something the text did not give her.

[3.10] "And then I wanted more" is matched in "On the Prowl" with the images that escalate from the relatively benign removal of Hercules's shirt, leaving him bare

chested (0:28–0:29), to men being struck by lightning, men fighting each other with

fists, men stripping off their clothes and ripping off their skin, and a branding,

culminating in a final sequence of extreme torture scenes (3:07–3:22). The vid invites

us to read these images simultaneously literally and figuratively: Both fan texts and

fan works abound with scenes of literal violence where men are stripped, beaten up,

wounded, and tortured; but fan works also metaphorically do this to characters

whether or not they are physically harmed. The removal of clothing in the vid points to

the fan's desire to see the real, "naked" character; the lightning that then strikes the naked bodies could symbolize the attempt of the transformative fan to "illuminate" the character's obscurities and darkness; the breaking of skin could figure the desire of

the fan to get under the character's skin; the brand on the skin is the mark she leaves

there, maybe changing that character for other fans watching or reading him in canon.

The ending of the third verse of the song makes the commentary on transformative

fandom even clearer. The singer declares that in her encounter with the "young boy,"

she "twist[s] the edge just enough to almost / Hurt, to almost hurt," and her motivation for doing so is essentially analytic: "Just testing…oh… / See what he's made of." The images that accompany these lines are of torture and violence until the line

"See what he's made of," where the vid gives the viewer four closeups of a tear

falling from a male eye (2:33–35). The popularity of angst as a genre in fan works

stems partly from its dual function in constructing both an emotionally affecting story

and an analytical piece of literary criticism: Putting a character through pain and

suffering is one way to examine exactly what he is made of in terms of emotion as well

as of blood and guts; it reveals the emotional and vulnerable dimension to that

character that canon insists on hiding or denying. In their analytical function, fan

works (to paraphrase Wordsworth) torture to dissect (note 3).

[3.11] "On the Prowl" also confronts the prominence of the hurt/comfort (or h/c) genre in mass media fandom's transformative works. This genre involves one

character being hurt and another character comforting her or (far more often) him. A

fan watching "On the Prowl" might well expect all the hurt to be followed by comfort at perhaps the halfway point but is confronted with its persistent absence, as several

comments in response to the vid point out:

[3.12] It definitely resonates with the slightly disturbing parts of my

fandom preferences too. (I like fictional torture and hurt without comfort…).

(Ratcreature)

[3.13] OMG. This is absolutely amazing! Somehow seeing it all visual is so much more unsettling than reading hours of h/c (or just hurt!). (Cathexys)

[3.14] I felt this was hurt without comfort, but not necessary without care

or love—the connotation for me being that we love to hurt the characters we

love. (Kat_lair)

[3.15] I am not so much an h/c fan in fandom, except when the emphasis

is on the "c," because if I love a character I generally feel that they're

getting enough hurt in canon. As in many of these clips. Which doesn't mean

I turn away from the screen, and in a way I feel I'm right there with Marion

at the end, because that's kind of why I want the comfort fix from fandom—

because it doesn't often come in canon. (Innocentsmith)

[3.16] For the full emotional payoff I desire I need great big dollops of C

with my H, so as much as this is a turn on, it leaves me with this kind of

empty ache that I have to imagine away with fantasies of all the pretty

tortured men being tenderly cared for. (Mswyrr)

[3.17] Anne Kustritz, in her work on BDSM (bondage, discipline/dominance,

submission/sadism, masochism) narratives in fan fiction, argues that "even in its most brief, sexually oriented forms, fan fiction BDSM occurs between characters

individuated by richly detailed psychological and interpersonal backstories and who

exist within a particular cultural and historical context, not between blank social types

in a privileged space outside law and society" (2008, ¶2.7). This contextual richness

may be true of fiction, and of singlesource vids, or even many multifandom vids, but

the cramming of 63 sources into the 3 minutes and 38 seconds of "On the Prowl"

violently rips context away from image, and the aurally present but visually absent

torturer (the fan as Lydia Lunch) does occupy a truly privileged space outside the

frame. Until the final clip in which she appears as Marian, we never see her face;

unlike the characters in Kustritz's characterization of BDSM fan fiction, she is perverse

in that she does not direct her pleasures to any kind of social relationship, to any

cultural or historical end, to any function. Moreover, her visual absence for most of the

vid allows her to occupy simultaneously the position of two readers: the vidder as

sadistic viewer of fan texts, and the vid watcher as voyeur of the vidder's sadistic

pleasure.

[3.18] However, as Innocentsmith's comment indicates, the vid does close with a

brief moment of comfort: Marian Ravenwood from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of

the Lost Ark (1981) kissing a wounded Indy. The 3second clip (3:23 to 3:26) shows

Marian kissing Indy's face to the last words of the song, "momentary fix," thus

transferring the meaning of "fix" from the realm of addiction to the realm of comfort.

In the film from which the clip is taken, the scene between the two lasts about two

and half minutes: Marian enters the ship's cabin wearing a silk nightgown loaned to

her by the captain; Indy calls it "lovely"; she moves to one side of the cheval glass to see if it is indeed lovely while he inspects his wounds on the other side; she cannot

see herself through the condensation on the glass and, not knowing that he is on the

other side of mirror, she spins it on its frame, hitting him in the face and causing him

to howl in agony (figure 1). Marian then moves to his side of the mirror and attempts

to dress his wounds, until he tells her that he does not need a nurse, that he wants

her to go away, and that she is hurting him in her efforts to comfort him. When she

snaps, "Well godammit, Indy, where doesn't it hurt?," he offers her first his elbow, then his forehead, then the corner of his eye, and finally his mouth, all of which she

kisses. "On the Prowl" captures the third of these kisses, the one on the corner of his eye. As the only woman in "On the Prowl" (apart from a couple of crowd shots),

Marian represents the fan who watches fictional men get hurt in fan texts in order to

watch them be comforted, or the vidder or writer who actually hurts them in fan works

in order to then comfort them. (Marian works beautifully as a representation of this

second type of fan: in her first encounter with Indy in the film, she punches him in the

jaw.) But clearly her comfort is superficial and her kisses are more foreplay than

medicine because she is not kissing any of the parts of Indiana Jones that actually

hurt. Moreover, Karen Allen plays the scene with manic glee rather than solicitous

tenderness; she seems more aroused and energized than disturbed by his pain. The

viewers of "On the Prowl" are invited to fill the space left by the absence of comfort with sadism, with pleasure in the hurt.

Figure 1. Marian hits Indy with the mirror in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). [View larger image .]

[3.19] By ending their vid with this clip, Sisabet and Sweetestdrain conflate

narcissism and sadism; just as Marian does in the film, they use a mirror of

themselves to hurt men, and they do so in order to both criticize and celebrate the fan

as sadist. Cornel Sandvoss argues that fans are drawn to fan texts because they see

themselves reflected there: "The relationship between fans and their objects of

fandom is based on fans' selfreflective reading and hence narcissistic pleasure, as

fans are fascinated by extensions of themselves, which they do not recognize as such"

(2005, 121). Sandvoss's characterization of the fan here matches Barthes's type of the

hysteric reader, one of his four types of readers of pleasure, the one who "takes the text for ready money, who joins in the bottomless, truthless comedy of language, who is no longer the subject of any critical scrutiny and throws himself across the text (which is quite different from projecting himself into it)" (63). Sisabet and

Sweetestdrain, by contrast, do subject themselves to critical scrutiny and do project

themselves into their vid through Marian; they are closer to the fetishists of Barthes's

typology than his hysterics. If they are narcissists, taking pleasure in their own

cruelty, they are critical narcissists, taking pleasure in their own selfcriticism.

Sandvoss's reduction of fans to one reading type glosses over the variety of reading

approaches and dismisses the sophisticated critical intelligence of fandom, as well as

overlooking the popularity and long history of selfreflexive meta in fan works: Fans do recognize themselves, and they both question and affirm what they see.

[3.20] "On the Prowl" therefore appears to argue that one of fandom's characteristic modes of reading and viewing is sadistic. But the trope of BDSM in fandom as

delineated by Kustritz invites us to consider the fan as masochist as well as sadist, and

to align masochism with Barthes's treatment of Desire, sadism with his treatment of

Pleasure. Gianduja Kiss's 2006 vid to Elvis Presley's "A Little Less Conversation"

constructs fan texts as sadistically torturing fans in an ambiguously pleasurable,

ambiguously consensual relationship (vid 3).

Vid 3. "A Little Less Conversation."

[3.21] While every fan of a television series has probably wondered why he or she continues to put him or herself through the pain of betrayal by inconsistent

characterization and confused storytelling in later seasons of the very show that

caught his or her interest in its early seasons, the masochism of "A Little Less

Conversation" is specifically sexual. The vid edits scenes in which couples from

different television series interact: The couples are all work partners and feature men

and women, men and men, and women and women in moments of flirtation, bonding,

and conflict set to Elvis's growl of sexual frustration. These relationships were either

never consummated in canon or took a long and torturous time to get there, and the

vid pays tribute to the disappointment and exasperation not only of some of the

characters (Mulder and Scully are shown in scenes of flirtation followed by scenes of

frustration), but also of the fans who invest in both the canonically possible (read:

heterosexual) and canonically impossible (read: homosexual) pairings. Fans, the vid

suggests, are masochistic in their desire to watch a couple with chemistry interact

every week without ever kissing each other. "Satisfy me!" the fan demands along with the characters in the vid in several sequences where one of the characters joins Elvis

in becoming a figure for the fan's desires: Spock thumping his computer as a fan

might wish to do to her television (1:56–1:58); Mulder lying naked in bed pointing his

remote at the television (2:09–2:10); Bayliss from Homicide: Life on the Street

(1993–99) smashing the interrogation room window as a fan wants to break the

television screen (3:05–3:08). The last 20 seconds or so of the vid allow the viewer to

indulge in a wishfulfillment fantasy by presenting couples getting dressed, drinking

together and looking satisfied and postcoital, but the vid ends with an audio reminder

of the frustrations of the fannish experience:

[3.22] Remington Steele: I think someone's shooting at us!

Laura: Why?

Remington Steele: Because we're kissing! Someone always shoots at us

when we're kissing!

[3.23] This exchange works brilliantly as an end to the vid because shooting here

carries the second meaning in the context of the vid of shooting television footage with

a camera. Because this exchange is audio only, the vid suggests that couples in fan

texts do most of their kissing (and other erotic activities) in the dark spaces between

and after episodes, seen only in the imagination of the fan who quite possibly has her

eyes shut at the time. The fans who write and read fantasies of fulfillment are in fact

interrupted in their pleasurable viewing of the characters kissing by the weekly episode

that contains those characters shot only in the acts of arguing or flirting. Surely the

only fannish pleasure to be had here, the vid suggests, is masochistic. In both "On the Prowl" and "A Little Less Conversation," the characters in the vid suffer (albeit in far

different ways), but in the latter, the fan suffers with them—a suffering that is, of course, enjoyable.

[3.24] The differences between these two vids align with Barthes's distinction

between Pleasure and Desire as well as Kustritz's distinction between characters who

"are blank social types" and those who "exist within a particular cultural and historical context." Barthes argues that hedonism is repressed by Western philosophy, that

Pleasure is "continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favour of strong, noble

values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc," (1975, 57). These are the values

that characterize the narratives of mass media fan texts, the "richly detailed

psychological and interpersonal backstories" of characters in fan fiction BDSM, and the barriers to sexual fulfillment in "A Little Less Conversation." The narratives that block Pleasure give rise to, in Barthes's words, Pleasure's "victorious rival," Desire. "We are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure" (1975, 57), he claims, arguing

that even "socalled 'erotic' books…represent not so much the erotic scene as the

expectation of it, the preparation of it, its ascent; that is what makes them 'exciting';

and when the scene occurs, naturally there is disappointment, deflation. In other

words, these are books of Desire, not Pleasure" (1975, 58). The inclusion of

Moonlighting (1985–89) (infamous for losing viewers once the characters

consummated their relationship) in "A Little Less Conversation" suggests Barthes's commentary on "erotic" books illuminates also the excitement of mass media texts

and the nature of much fannish involvement: masochistic Desire, not Pleasure. "On

the Prowl" breaks this pattern and cuts mass media texts into the representation of

the erotic scene, rather than the preparation for it, into Pleasure, not Desire.

[3.25] The secondlargest group of viewers for whom "On the Prowl" might be a selfportrait is of women consumers of mass media, an audience constructed and portrayed not through the images, but through the song. Any song with the pronoun

"I" gives a vid its point of view; in this case, the pronoun is sung by a female voice, and is the first word of the song, in the line "I was thinking about picking up some

young boys." The song tells the story of the "I" bringing a man (we are not told his age) back to her apartment and having her way with him. The official video for the

song on YouTube (Lunch 2008) shows a dressedup Lydia Lunch wandering city streets

at night. She does not pick anyone up, but she certainly does a lot of looking. Thus the

vid can be read as a selfportrait of women in general: The juxtaposition of the song

with the footage suggests that it is women who want to see these images of tortured

men on screen, although of course it is predominantly men (writers, directors,

producers, film and television executives) who give it to them. Some viewers read the

vid, therefore, as primarily a comment on power relationships between genders.

Themadpoker, for example, comments, "[It] says something about my own double

standards since I'm pretty sure my line would've been drawn a whole lot earlier if the

genders on this vid were switched," to which Amonitrate replies, "This! Great point that I hadn't immediately considered when watching this, but it's entirely true. I think

it says a lot about the amount of violence we just expect dudes to take and get over,

that we would never accept for ourselves." TrinityClare responds, "Oh my god, even imagining a vid with this much gore and the genders switched is making me sick to my stomach. I did not know that about myself, wow" (note 4). These viewers do not read

this vid as necessarily empowering women or as feminist in its aims or effects, and

they worry about the possibility of reductive readings of power relations in the

straightforward gender swap.

[3.26] Their concerns about the strategies of power available to women echo current

theories about fandom. In their introduction to Fandom: Identities and Communities in

a Mediated World (2007), Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington

identify three waves of fandom studies: the first, associated with the work of Michel de

Certeau, John Fiske, and Henry Jenkins, read fandom as consisting of disempowered

communities that used strategies of transformative reading to fight back against

hegemonic ideologies. The second emphasized not resistance but replication in

fandom, analyzing the "replication of social and cultural hierarchies within fan and

subcultures…rather than seeing fandom as a tool of empowerment they suggest that

the interpretive communities of fandom (as well as individual acts of fan consumption)

are embedded in the existing economic, social and cultural status quo" (2007, 6). The

third studies fandom "no longer only as an object of study in and for itself…[but] as

part of the fabric of our everyday lives…a takenforgranted aspect of modern

communication of consumption in a mediated world" (9). The commentary surrounding

"On the Prowl" includes what can be read as a selfreflexive secondwave reading of female fandom problematizing a firstwave reading as potentially naive and ethically

suspect (although perhaps emotionally gratifying): replicating acts of violent

domination, these viewers suggest, may not be the best strategy to resist them. Yet

these viewers still take pleasure from the vid, and in so doing, they enter perversity.

[3.27] The final and largest group of selves being portrayed in "On the Prowl" is everyone who watches mainstream, commercially successful American (and British)

film and television, of any gender, age, race, class, sexual orientation, and level of

fannish investment. In its function as a portrait of all viewers, the vid doubles as

criticism of its source material because it suggests that mass media gives us

something we all want: the eroticization of male suffering. Arguably, the unusually

high number of sources in the vid, 63, invites viewers to read it as a vid about the

sources rather than one about fandom. Indeed, many of the comments on Sisabet's

page construct the vid as an argument about the source material:

[3.28] This vid is amaaaazing, and to get meta, it is really interesting to

me that so many people in the comments are so disturbed that they are

responding to this kind of eroticized violence and finding it sexy. Because if

anything, this vid felt to me like an essay about how deliberately sexual, and

also completely ubiquitous and standardized, these scenes of male torture

porn really are. They're in so many action/fantasy stories! They have such

standard formulas! (Scalesandfins)

[3.29] Viewers who read the vid this way might—and do—turn to another vid by

Sisabet, "Women's Work," cocreated with Luminosity and premiered at the 2007

VividCon (http://sockkpuppett.livejournal.com/442093.html). A selection of

Supernatural clips to the song "Violet" by Hole (1995), "Women's Work" argues that the show is predicated on violence against its (disposable) female characters.

Vid 4. "Women's Work."

[3.30] Responses to "On the Prowl" on Sisabet's journal

(http://sisabet.livejournal.com/365275.html) that refer to "Women's Work" include

this conversation between three viewers:

[3.31] Something that really strikes me about this is how Sisabet was also

involved in "Women's Work," the utterly upsetting and ragemaking attack

on eroticized violence against women on SPN [ Supernatural]. And while I

still believe the reverse is more *rare* in media, it's definitely something we

also consume (and create), sometimes gleefully, and worth exploring in the

same way. So with that background I think this vid is especially interesting.

Is this just as bad/disturbing? Can you hate one and justify the other? Or is

our violent objectification of men "earned" in an equalopportunity way?

(Nicole_anell)

[3.32] Ethically, I don't think you can justify it. But emotionally, I find it hard to feel guilty. Also, I think you have to consider that most eroticized

violence against women is targeted at men. I'm pretty sure the reverse can't

be said about fictional violence between men (after all, it's probably most

prevalent in genres like action). The fact that women get off on it seems to

be more accidental. This vid is so awesome that I want to write cultural

studies essays about its subject. (Bagheera_san)

[3.33] We live in a world where…violence by women against men is

comparatively rare. So I do tend to think that media portraying sexualized

violence against women is more offensive, because it's perpetuating an

existing oppression, whereas media containing sexualized violence against

men is less offensive because it's a reversal of the dominant paradigm. That

said, it also makes me think that if we lived in a matriarchal society instead

of a patriarchal one, women would be just as likely to abuse their power as

men are. (Rustyhalo)

[3.34] When Rustyhalo refers to the patriarchal society we live in and the media

that portrays and contains sexualized violence, she is reading the "self" in "selfportrait" to mean the culture that produces and consumes the texts used in the vid rather than the one that produced the vid. When Nicole_anell suggests that viewers in

that culture both consume and create sexualized violence against men "gleefully" and Bagheera_san separates those viewers' ethical responsibilities from their emotional

responses, they suggest that Barthesian perversity is just as much a part of the

reading practices of culture in general as it is of fandom in particular.

[3.35] As a commentary on its source material, "On the Prowl" shares significant similarities with "A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness (Hot Hot Hot!)" by the Clucking

Belles (http://vidders.net/video/multiafannishtaxonomyof). Francesca Coppa

analyzes this vid as a commentary on both "how some women watch television"

(2009, 107) and on television itself:

[3.36] The vid builds to a narrative and sexual climax. The end of the song

features a frenzied call and response ("How you feeling? "Hot, hot, hot!")

while we see a montage of characters hung in chains and whipped—a pure

erotic spectacle of beaten and bruised men…In each individual storyline, the

moment of beating is one of intense drama, but taken together—when the

viewer can't help but realize how many mainstream television shows and

movies regularly features scenes that look a lot like bondage and domination

—the inherent kinkiness of plain old broadcast television becomes evident.

(2009, 109)

[3.37] "Taxonomy" submits men to torture for a few seconds only, from 3:20 to 3:31; in "On the Prowl" the fullon torture starts at 1:26 and continues—with some interludes for fistfights and flirtations with suicide—until 3:22. If "Taxonomy" makes this point about mainstream television, "On the Prowl," with its much longer sequence of "beaten and bruised men," hammers it home.

[3.38] "On the Prowl" examines the perversity of sadism both in the source (mass media) and in its transformative viewers (producers and consumers of fan fiction and

fan vids). But this examination is both critical and pleasurable; it invites the viewer to

look with a critical eye and a voyeur's eye. As Counteragent writes, this conflation is in

itself troubling: "I'm not sure what it says about me that I'm really looking forward to watching it again. I'm hoping it means that 'I like meta and respect this vid a lot' vs.

'I'm fascinated and attracted by male suffering' but I think that fact that I'm not

entirely sure is the whole damn point." The line between critical respect and erotic

attraction has been blurred.

4. Conclusion

[4.1] Barthes's privileging of the perverse pleasures inherent in critical reading and

reading of criticism open him up to being characterized as, in Jonathan Culler's words,

"the sensitive, selfindulgent man of letters, who writes about his own interests and

pleasures without in any way challenging fundamental ways of thinking. Strategic and

radical in certain ways, Barthes's hedonism repeatedly exposes him to charges of

complacency" (2002, 84). This portrait is one fandom also paints of itself: The

commentary on "On the Prowl" consists of fans questioning themselves and their own pleasure in the vid, querying whether it is strategic, radical, or complacent to take

pleasure in, as Rustyhalo puts it, a "reversal of the dominant paradigm" of sexualized violence. Of course, many vidders and their viewers simply do not care, but the

vidding communities to which the vidders of "Closer" and "On the Prowl" belong tend to present themselves as left wing and feminist, concerned with challenging and

transforming those social structures that enable and eroticize sexual violence. Graham

Allen writes of Barthes's challenge to political discourse in words that also apply to

Killa, T. Jonesy, Sisabet, Sweetestdrain, and their viewers:

[4.2] The body of the writing subject is that, according to Barthes, which

seems most scandalous to both bourgeois and petitbourgeois culture (with

its ideas of perversity and sexual deviance) and Marxistinspired leftwing

discourses (with their ban on the personal, the sentimental, that which is

pleasurable). Conservative and leftwing discourses seem to conspire

together to ban the writing subject from indulging in the pleasures and

perversities of the body. (2003, 101)

[4.3] While conservative discourses might attack the pleasures fandom takes in reinscribing the pleasure in the sex represented in mass media, leftwing fandom

worries at its own pleasure in reinscribing the pleasure in violence. Yet the tools and vocabulary of transformative fandom are those of violence: Vids rip characters and

images from television and film out of context and out of the control of those who

made them, and they do this not only to critique and analyze but to create pleasure.

[4.4] Vids are arguments, but arguments that effect an excess of pleasure in the

viewer. "On the Prowl" and "Closer" both invite a critical detachment and a pleasurable gaze; they can be read as both critiques and celebrations of the perverse intersections

between sex and violence in mass media and in transformative fandom. In casting the

relationship between mass media and the viewing and reading public on the one hand,

and fan vids and the viewers of fan vids on the other, as perversely conflating critical

distance and voyeuristic investment, they illustrate Barthes's contention that the only

way to take pleasure in a reported pleasure, the only way to enjoy criticism, the only

way to get "closer" and have "more" is to enter perversion.

5. Acknowledgments

[5.1] My thanks go to Killa and T. Jonesy, Sisabet and Sweetestdrain, and Gianduja

Kiss for permission to write about their work. I am particularly grateful to T. Jonesy for

her help in understanding the authorial intent behind "Closer."

6. Notes

1. When Barthes writes "I" in the passage above, he also means "you"—that is, the

reader who is engaging with The Pleasure of the Text. He invites that reader to

become a voyeur of his, Barthes's, pleasure in reading. The vidder, in my argument,

therefore occupies the same position as the writer of, and the viewer of the vid the

same position as the reader of, The Pleasure of the Text.

2. This reading of vids as arguments can also be found in fandom meta; for example,

Here's Luck points to the prevalence of coexisting genres within the same vid: "In

thinking about different vid structures, I've noted three broad types, separable but not

mutually exclusive: the narrative, the lyric, and the argument." She goes on to define the lyric mode as "a sustained evocation or exploration of mood, images, emotions, or

possibly character" (http://heresluck.livejournal.com/99138.html).

3. "Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; / Our meddling intellect / Misshapes the

beauteous forms of things:— / We murder to dissect" (1798, 25–28).

4. A fascinating experiment along these lines is listening to "Women's Work" and "On

the Prowl" with switched soundtracks. Watching men suffer to the song "Violet" works rather better (at least for me) than watching women suffer to the song "On the Prowl."

7. Works cited

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Barthes, Roland. 1970. "The Third Meaning: Research Notes of Some Eisenstein Stills."

In Image, Music, Text, 52–68. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang.

Barthes, Roland. 1975. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang.

Bennett, Chad. 2010. "Flaming the Fans: Shame and the Aesthetics of Queer Fandom

in Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine. " Cinema Journal 49 (2): 18–40.

Busse, Kristina. 2009. Introduction to "In Focus: Fandom and Feminism: Gender and

the Politics of Fan Production." Cinema Journal 48 (4): 104–7.

Busse, Kristina. 2010. "Affective Aesthetics." TWC Symposium, November 23.

http://symposium.transformativeworks.org/2010/11/affectiveaesthetics/.

Coppa, Francesca. 2008. "Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 1. doi:10.3983/twc.2008.0044.

Coppa, Francesca. 2009. "A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness." Cinema Journal 48 (4): 106–14.

Cupitt, Cathy. 2008. "Nothing but Net: When Cultures Collide." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 1. doi:10.3983/twc.2008.0055.

Fanlore. 2011. "Kandy Fong." Fanlore, August 4. http://fanlore.org/wiki/Kandy_Fong.

Gray, Jonathan, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, eds. 2007. Fandom:

Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. New York: New York University Press.

Kustritz, Anne. 2008. "Painful Pleasures: Sacrifice, Consent, and the Resignification of BDSM Symbolism in The Story of O and The Story of Obi." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 1. doi:10.3983/twc.2008.0031.

Lunch, Lydia. 2008. "BLOWUP Feat. LYDIA LUNCH 'On the Prowl.'" YouTube,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ujlGTUYH2Q.

Mortimer, Armine Kotin. 1989. The Gentlest Law: Roland Barthes's "The Pleasure of the Text." New York: Peter Lang.

Pugh, Sheenagh. 2005. The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context.

Bridgend, Wales: Seren.

Raiders of the Lost Ark. 1981. Dir. Stephen Spielberg. DVD. Paramount, 2003.

Sandvoss, Cornel. 2005. Fans: the Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge, MA: Polity

Press.

Turk, Tisha. 2010. "Your Own Imagination: Vidding and Vidwatching as Collaborative

Interpretation." Film and Film Culture 5:88–110.

Williams, James S. 1998. "At the Reader's Discretion: On Barthes and Cinema."

Paragraph 21 (1): 45–56.

Wordsworth, William. 1798. "The Tables Turned." Representative Poetry Online.

http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/2373.html.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9 (2012)

Praxis

Spreading the cult body on YouTube: A case study of "Telephone"

derivative videos

Agnese Vel ar

Università di Torino, Turin, Italy

[0.1] Abstract— This case study of spreadability analyzes the Lady Gaga music video

"Telephone," which has been appropriated and reworked by YouTube users sharing

derivative works online. What properties of the music video stimulate user

appropriation? What hybrid audiovisual forms are emerging from its reworking by

users? In order to answer these questions, between January and August 2010, I

conducted participant observation on Lady Gaga's official social network profiles and

collected 70 "Telephone" derivative videos on YouTube. I identified three main

categories of video creativity: (1) music (which includes covers, "me singing" videos, music mashups, and choreography); (2) parody (in which YouTube users and

comedians humorously imitate Gaga, creating spoofs); and (3) fashion (in which

makeup artists and amateurs appropriate the star's image to create makeup and hair

tutorials). "Telephone" has become spreadable because it integrates dance music and choreography, costume changes, cinematic references, and product placements that

work as textual hooks meaningful to different target markets: live music, dance,

chick, and postmodern cinematic cultures. In particular, Gaga is a cult body that

explicitly incorporates previous cinematic and pop music icons. Users are stimulated

to reenact Gaga's cult body online. On YouTube, spreadability is thus strictly related

to the appropriation of cult bodies. Fans, comedians, independent musicians,

fashionistas, and pop stars construct their own cult bodies by deliberately borrowing

characteristics from previous media icons and reenacting them in online videos in

order to fulfill their expressive and professional needs.

[0.2] Keywords— Derivative works; Lady Gaga; Spreadable media

Vellar, Agnese. 2012. "Spreading the Cult Body on YouTube: A Case Study of

'Telephone' Derivative Videos." In "Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9.

doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0313.

1. From viral video to spreadability

[1.1] New participatory forms of audiovisual production are emerging on Web 2.0.

Cultural industries design media brands in order to create emotional relationships

between brands and consumers. This marketing technique has been termed "affective

economics" (Jenkins 2006). With the aim of constructing a loyal audience of

emotionally engaged fans who are active in the promotion of the brand, media

producers create contents that seek to be both cultural attractors and activators.

Cultural attractors stimulate the aggregation of people with similar interests and tastes, while cultural activators prompt audiences to do something related to the brand itself

(e.g., produce a video or organize a promotional campaign). In this way, companies

give consumers both something to talk about and also the cultural references that

enable consumers to talk through their contents. When consumers are emotionally

involved, they appropriate and recreate the professionally produced contents; they

share the reworked material and comment upon the brand online. They thus become

brand evangelists working as grassroots marketers. Hence, whereas the entertainment

industries used to react to fan appropriation with prohibitionist strategies, today they

exploit work by fans for promotional purposes, their aim being to create "grassroots

marketing campaigns" (Russell et al. 2008, 62).

[1.2] The grassroots marketing technique is enhanced by the structure of social

network sites (SNSs) (boyd and Ellison 2007) and by the nature of digital information.

In digital public spaces, information is persistent, searchable, replicable, and scalable

(boyd 2008). Word of mouth can enable multimedia contents such as videos to acquire

huge visibility and thus go viral. Viral videos have been exploited by companies as

marketing devices because they serve as lowcost promotional campaigns aimed at

attracting consumers to a specific branded site. The assumption behind viral marketing

is that advertisers and media producers shape a message that will be replicated

through online channels. However, "viral" metaphors do not account for how fans

appropriate and rework media. For this reason, Jenkins et al. (2009) have proposed a

model of spreadability to describe an openended participation process that maps the

flow of content through SNSs. From this perspective, users are active consumers who

produce derivative works specific to their own social and cultural contexts.

[1.3] I describe the spreadability of the Lady Gaga music video "Telephone" (2010).

"Telephone" was produced and distributed by Interscope Records in order to promote the second single on The Fame Monster (2009), Gaga's first EP. Gaga is the best

example of a music star who exploits opportunities for audiovisual spreadability on Web

2.0 to construct affective economics. New York Entertainment puts it thus: "As Madonna and Michael Jackson were to MTV, Lady Gaga is to YouTube: the killer app"

(http://nymag.com/arts/popmusic/features/65725/). In fact, Gaga has an emotionally

engaged and active audience because of her strategic production of multimedia content

published on SNSs. In order to understand how Gaga works as both a cultural attractor

and cultural activator, between January and August 2010, I conducted participant

observation on Gaga's official profiles in Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (Vellar 2010).

Gaga's digital profile works as a cultural attractor because it aggregates fans around a

celebrity persona. However, understanding how media products work as cultural

activators requires more detailed analysis of the characteristics of media texts. What

properties of a music video stimulate user appropriation? What hybrid audiovisual

forms are emerging from reworking by users? In order to answer these questions, I analyzed the "Telephone" primary text and categorized 70 "Telephone" derivative videos posted on YouTube. I chose to conduct a case study of "Telephone" because of its popularity on YouTube and its many derivative videos. In fact, on July 3, 2011, the

official "Telephone" video became the 39th most watched video on YouTube, with

113,932,286 viewings (http://www.youtube.com/charts/videos_views?t=a&p=1). The analysis of the primary text and the categorization of derivative videos enabled me to

identify the textual elements that make a video more likely to spread, which I

interpreted by applying the concept of a media cult.

Lady Gaga - Telephone ft. Beyoncé

Video 1. Lady Gaga—Telephone ft. Beyoncé (2010).

[1.4] Spreadable videos are multimedia productions that fulfill their viewers'

communicative and creative needs and stimulate those viewers to redistribute and recreate the primary text. Although marketers believe that they are able to encode a message that will spread by word of mouth with no modification, texts are culturally

adapted in different contexts to satisfy different needs. The members of a social group

appropriate and share elements that are meaningful for their culture. Successful videos

have textual hooks that users select for repetition and that become part of the cultural

repertoire of YouTube (Burgess 2008). As Burgess states, textual hooks cannot be

identified in advance. However, I suggest that the concept of a media cult can aid

analysis of spreadable video because it enables us to focus on the characteristics that

stimulate a text's appropriation by users.

[1.5] The notion of a media cult was first proposed by Eco (1986) in order to describe

cult movies like Casablanca (1942, dir. Michael Curtiz). Eco argues that a cultural product becomes a cult object if it provides a "completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the fan's private

sectarian world" (198). Casablanca became a cult object because it was full of

sectarian world" (198). Casablanca became a cult object because it was full of

"intertextual frames," stereotyped situations derived from previous textual traditions that were easily recognizable to cinema fans. Intertextuality is a characteristic of

postmodern movies such as Bananas (1971, dir. Woody Allen) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, dir. Steven Spielberg). Fans of postmodern movies gain pleasure from

exercising their intercinematic (i.e., related to other movies), intermedia (i.e., related

to other media, such as books and advertisements), and extracinematic (i.e., related to

movie production and gossip) expertise. The concept of the media cult has been

thoroughly explored by Hills (2002), who identifies two kinds of media cults, cult texts

and cult bodies, both of which depend on characteristics of the text and on the value

that derives from its appropriation by fans. Hills stresses that although it is not possible to classify the qualities and attributes of media cults, it is possible to describe some

family resemblances, which are characteristics of the texts and bodies that predispose

fans to cult devotion. In the case of cult texts, which are fictional products, the family

resemblances are auteurism (which establishes authors and stars as quality brands),

endlessly deferred narrative (which enhances speculation and recreation), and

hyperdiegesis (a vast and detailed narrative space). Cult bodies are media figures who

embody previously subcultural codes well suited to being reenacted. A star is thus a

cult body that consciously borrows characteristics from previous media icons and

stimulates appropriation by fans, working as a focal point for the organization of

consumptionbased identities. This means that cult bodies simultaneously empower the

identity that they represent and construct it as a target market.

[1.6] The notions of cult texts and cult bodies must be adapted to the contemporary

context, where the relationship between fans and cultural products is evolving in the

Web 2.0 environment. In preInternet fandom, but also during the early days of the

Internet, when nearly all online material was text based, fan groups were located at

specific sites such as conventions and, online, on newsgroups and mailing lists, and

fans constructed closed communities with strong identities. Web 2.0 offers new,

networked spaces for social interaction and content sharing. Owing to the adoption of

SNSs by fans, online groups are evolving from closed communities to a networked

collectivism (Baym 2007). Although fans still build communities in closed environments,

they also interact in SNSs like YouTube. In SNSs the search function connects

disconnected groups, and contexts collapse as a consequence (boyd 2008). In the case

of media consumers, this means that many different fan cultures interact in the same

digital environment. The networked nature of SNSs thus promotes spreadability.

However, to be spreadable, videos must incorporate textual hooks that are meaningful

for different social groups. To gain attention on Web 2.0, media brands must produce

cult objects that appeal to different media cultures simultaneously.

[1.7] The Gaga media brand incorporates the cultural codes of different cultures to

[1.7] The Gaga media brand incorporates the cultural codes of different cultures to fulfill the needs of different target markets (as an attractor) and stimulate appropriation by fans (as an activator). In what follows I illustrate how Gaga constructs her celebrity

persona as a cult body and how "Telephone" has been designed as a cult text. I then describe how YouTube users appropriate Gaga's cult body to create another level of

performativity in the form of derivative videos, and how the derivative videos

contribute to the emergence of audiovisual genres with roots in different media

cultures.

2. Gaga's cult body as a cultural attractor and activator

[2.1] Celebrities are a means of advancing transnational branding (Turner 2006).

Since the 20th century, cultural industries have constructed cinematic and TV stars

with the aim of promoting cultural products and creating a loyal audience for a media

genre. Stardom research shows that the construction of a star depends on the dialogue

between the public persona and the private person (Austin and Barker 2003). This

dialogue is evolving in the contemporary mediascape because of the mass adoption of

SNSs by fans. In Web 2.0, celebrities use SNSs to perform their inner selves in a public

arena and thus establish an emotional connection with their fans (Nunn and Biressi

2010). TV stars created by national talent shows may achieve international fame

because their TV performances are spreadable through SNSs. For example, Susan

Boyle's performance on the TV show Britain's Got Talent was discussed on Twitter and Facebook, and the video became the fifth most watched video on YouTube. Enli states

that, by means of SNSs, Internet users transformed an ordinary woman into a global

music star, and that the rapid spread of the Boyle video demonstrates the power of

"collective intelligence" (2009, 489). However, when dealing with the role of users in the spreading process, we must go beyond the notion of collective intelligence. By

focusing on the practice of video sharing that gives stars such huge visibility, we miss

the process of appropriation and recreation, thus misconceiving the nature of virality.

In order to gain a better understanding of the role of users in spreading, I have

analyzed the Gaga media brand as a cult body appropriated and reperformed by

different media cultures. In fact, Gaga incorporates previous cult bodies so as to appeal

to pop music and gay culture. Moreover, she has produced "Telephone" as a cult text that appeals to a culture related to postfeminism and the postmodern cinema. Finally,

she uses SNS profiles as extensions of her own cult body, which seeks to be both a

cultural attractor and activator.

[2.2] Gaga is a pop star who exemplifies the recording industry's strategy of

constructing music brands around a celebrity persona so as to engage Web 2.0

audiences (Vellar 2010). She takes her name from the Queen hit "Radio Ga Ga" and

constructs her visual image and her music production by borrowing from stars such as

Madonna and David Bowie. She thus incorporates the subcultural codes of both pop

Madonna and David Bowie. She thus incorporates the subcultural codes of both pop

culture and gay culture. Furthermore, in order to become a gay icon, she performed

her first concerts in gay bars and has publicized her commitment to LGBT rights.

[2.3] It is possible to identify in Gaga's creative products the family resemblances

that characterize cult texts. The House of Gaga, the creative team that helps Gaga

create her performances and musical products, generates an aura of auteurism around

the Gaga persona. Furthermore, a hyperdiegetic endless deferred narrative has been

created with her music and audiovisual texts. In fact, Gaga's creative production is an

ongoing metacommentary on stardom itself, as indicated by the title of her debut

album, The Fame. Her music videos are parodies of stardom as well. In particular,

"Paparazzi" and "Telephone" are short films that incorporate a song and are constructed with a neverending narrative. In "Paparazzi," Gaga is a rich star who kills her boyfriend because he has sold her to paparazzi. At its end Gaga is arrested, and at

the beginning of "Telephone" she is in jail. "Telephone" is the story of her jailbreak with a travel companion, the pop star Beyoncé. The video finishes with the promise that the

story is to be continued.

[2.4] "Telephone" incorporates numerous intertextual references taken from Gaga's previous works and cinematic history. It is therefore a postmodern cult text, expressing

intertextual and intermedia awareness. In fact, Gaga and Beyoncé are new versions of

the female couple in Thelma & Louise (1991, dir. Ridley Scott) (figure 1), and they drive another cult icon of pop cinema: the Pussy Wagon, Uma Thurman's car in the

feature film Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003, dir. Quentin Tarantino) (figure 2). Those movies are examples of the chick flick, a movie genre targeting postfeminist women (Ferris and

Young 2008). Chick flicks advocate girl power and blend hyperfemininity and

hypermasculinity, thus appealing to a new generation of women who view femininity,

sexuality, and girly goods such as designer clothes and trendy accessories as

empowering. By integrating cinematic references and mimicking the cult body of

postfeminism heroines, "Telephone" seeks to attract both members of chick culture and fans of postmodern cinema, who gain pleasure from decoding cinematic references.

Figure 1. Gaga and Beyoncé during the jailbreak as Thelma and Louise. [View larger

image.]

Figure 2. The Pussy Wagon. [View larger image.]

[2.5] "Telephone" incorporates numerous dance numbers with multiple costumes.

Costumes have always played an important role in constructing a star's image: they

become the supreme marker of the star's identity and at the same time allow

audiences to connect with the star by appropriating the costume (Moseley 2005).

Gaga's identity is marked by rapid costume changes. For example, in "Telephone" she reinterprets, through clothing, not only cinematic characters but also American icons

such as the flag (figure 3) and stereotypical figures such as the waitress (figure 4).

Costume changes enable Gaga to incorporate previous cultural codes drawn from

powerful female figures and merge them with music culture during her public

appearances and dance numbers.

Figure 3. American flag costuming. [View larger image.]

Figure 4. Waitress costuming. [View larger image .]

[2.6] "Telephone" can thus be located within a postfeminist discourse where the

gendered body and consumerism converge. Like chick flicks, "Telephone" incorporates product placement in order to capitalize on the fashion industry. Numerous brands

product placement in order to capitalize on the fashion industry. Numerous brands

(e.g., Diet Coke, Polaroid, LG) are part of the video's narrative. Moreover, the Pussy

Wagon key ring is for sale as "Telephone" merchandise (figure 5). Product placement and merchandising are ways to create additional revenue streams. In "Telephone,"

however, product placement is taken to a grotesque extreme (Christian 2010) because

the boundaries between gendered identity, pop art, and commodity culture are blurred.

In fact, consumer goods like Diet Coke cans (figure 6) are not employed in a directly

promotional way but are "odd extensions" of Gaga's body (Nasilowski 2010). By

objectifying herself, therefore, Gaga enacts gender through excess and irony, merging

pop music with a postfeminist discourse.

Figure 5. The Pussy Wagon key ring—merchandise. [View larger image.]

Figure 6. Diet Coke product placement. [View larger image.]

[2.7] The selfobjectification process is extended in SNSs. In fact, celebrity profiles

become " the commodity of Web 2.0" (Beer 2008, 235) because a celebrity's online persona is exploited to simulate a bidirectional relationship with fans. In the case of

Gaga, a blood relationship is metaphorically established: on Twitter, she calls herself a

"mother monster" and refers to her fans as "little monsters." The perceived immediacy of Twitter, which fulfills users' voyeuristic desires, enables it to generate a real star

(Muntean and Petersen 2009). Via Twitter, Gaga performs herself as a whole online

persona (private and public, celebrity and fan) and gives fans backstage access to her

production. Lady Gaga tweets about her family, her celebrity colleagues (whom she

presents both as friends and as idols), and her work as a musician, commenting upon

her creative process:

[2.8] so happy, my family suprised me in montreal. In bed with my

[2.8] so happy, my family suprised me in montreal. In bed with my

gorgeous sister. With our matching haircuts! :)

[2.9] Saw beyonce live, from the stage. She's an amazing performer, and a

beautiful person, inside and out…love a strong ass woman.xx;

[2.10] just woke up, headache and the stink of jameson. ahh but the lyrics

on the bedside. it was all worth it

[2.11] Gaga also uses Twitter to directly and indirectly publicize her work and to

thank her fans for their support:

[2.12] "Telephone" is coming I promise! Still editing. I want it to be perfect.

The Haus has dubbed her a "masterpiece."

[2.13] "Telephone" made history today little monsters! Thank you for all

your support of the video, you are the future, you are the kings and queens

[2.14] Since Twitter doesn't allow users to directly share pictures, Gaga uses the

related service TwitPic. She shares pictures that depict her in private situations to give

fans access to the backstage of her life and to her body. In particular, she posted a

photo of a tattoo on her arm celebrating her fans. The terms "little monsters" and

"mother monster" and the exposure of her body to fans have helped her maintain a

strong relationship with SNSs users, as demonstrated by the 5,728 comments that the

tattoo picture received:

[2.15] youre the best mother alive <3 i am so proud to be a little monster

<3;

[2.16] OMG GaGa mumma monster! You are so fucking commited to us,

you give us soo…much love and we xan't help but give it back!

[2.17] Finally, Gaga uses audiovisual communication to engage with her fans on

YouTube. She uploads secondary content to her ladygagaofficial channel

(http://www.youtube.com/user/ladygagaofficial). In the BN video series "Transmission Gagavision," she introduces herself to fans and publishes private moments in her life.

She also records messages for her fans in a video log, a distinctive communicative form

on YouTube. For example, when she became the most followed celebrity on Twitter,

she posted to YouTube a video in which she portrayed herself as the queen of Twitter.

An Inaugural Message from Tween Gaga

Video 2. An Inaugural Message from Tween Gaga (2010).

[2.18] Gaga's cult body thus functions as a cultural attractor because it is the focal

point for the organization of consumptionbased identities such as music, gay,

postmodern, and postfeminist cultures. However, Gaga's SNS profiles are also intended

to be cultural activators. For example, she invited fans to submit their own videos to be

reedited and played during her world tour, "The Monster Ball." Internet users also appropriate her videos when they have not been explicitly requested to, creating

derivative works. Those grassroots and spontaneous visual productions are

appropriated by Gaga, who publishes them in her official profiles, thus giving fans

positive feedback and stimulating them to work as grassroots marketers. For example,

Gaga used Twitter to thank two fans who had created the derivative video "Sodado,

How to," calling them "GENIUS little fashion monsters."

Lady GaGa Telephone make-up inspired look with soda cans up-do

Video 3. Lady GaGa "Telephone" makeup inspired look (2010).

3. Spreadability on YouTube: A typology of "Telephone"

derivative videos

[3.1] Gaga's cult body works as a cultural attractor for music and gay culture, while

her music videos create a parodic metacommentary on stardom with the aim of

appealing to fans of both postmodern cinema and chick culture. Furthermore, she

extends her cult body in digital space by using SNSs to maintain an ongoing

relationship with her fans and stimulate them to recreate her cult body so that it

becomes spreadable. However, by analyzing "Telephone" derivative videos, it is

possible to gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics of spreadability that surround

Gaga's audiovisual productions. To this end, I used snowball sampling to collect 70

YouTube videos derivative of "Telephone." Starting with a search on YouTube using the keyword "telephone," I identified unofficial productions, and I followed "related videos"

links until I had constructed a sufficiently large data set, stopping when I realized that

further sampling would not add more genres. On inspecting the 70 videos, I identified

three main categories of video creativity: (1) music, (2) parody, and (3) fashion. In

each of these categories it was possible to classify videos along a continuum from

amateur to professional. I thus identified audiovisual genres specific to four different

media cultures that are related to different characteristics of the primary text (figure

7). "Telephone" is a music video of a dance song, and for this reason it prompts both music covers and mashups tied to live music and dance cultures. The dance numbers

performed by Gaga and Beyoncé, wearing a variety of costumes, stimulate users to

mimic the cult body in the form of both choreography and fashion tutorials (on makeup

and hair), merging dance and chick cultures. Finally, cinematic references and product

placements are appropriated by YouTube users, who gain pleasure not just from

identifying intermedia references but also from creating parodies of pop cult objects. In

identifying intermedia references but also from creating parodies of pop cult objects. In

the following paragraphs, I will discuss the three categories of video creativity and the

five genres that are related to them. I will start with the music category, in which I've

identified three different genres: (1) covers, (2) video and music mashups, and (3)

choreography. Then I will describe the categories of fashion and parody and their

related genres, (4) fashion tutorial and (5) spoof.

Figure 7. A typology of "Telephone" derivative videos.

[3.2] Music is the first major category of video creativity that I will discuss. A common

genre in the music category is the cover (which may be a cappella, acoustic,

instrumental, or a live medley), which is labeled "me singing" if it is created by a fan.

Like the "girl talk" YouTube genre (Burns 2009), "me singing" videos feature a young woman singing directly to the camera in the intimacy of her home. As Burgess (2008)

states, personal music performances are occasions for play and peer learning. Through

them, users demonstrate their skills, gain attention, and receive tips and tricks.

Professional musicians cover the songs because they hope to create fame on Web 2.0

and then sell their songs on iTunes. Independent musicians, such as The Pomplamoose

(http://www.youtube.com/user/PomplamooseMusic) and The Shures

(http://www.youtube.com/user/theshures), produce both original albums and covers of

pop hits. By covering a hit like "Telephone," they exploit the searchable property of SNSs: when fans search for the Gaga video, they also find the cover version, thus

discovering the work of independent musicians. YouTube is therefore a space in which

amateurs can play and learn, but at the same time, it is a promotional channel for

musicians.

Lady Gaga ft Beyonce - "Telephone" - COVER

Lady Gaga ft Beyonce - "Telephone" - COVER

Video 4. Lady Gaga ft Beyonce—Telephone—COVER (2009).

Lady Gaga Telephone

Video 5. Lady Gaga Telephone (2010).

[3.3] The second genre in the music category is mashups: music videos created by

combining the song with video clips or static images. Mashups have a long tradition in

the history of participatory cultures. Since the 1970s, fans have appropriated footage

from TV broadcasts and reedited it to music. While professionally produced music

videos are created to promote songs, fan music videos such as vids (or "songvids") (Jenkins 1992; Coppa 2008; Stein 2010) and anime music videos (AMVs) (Ito 2010;

Roberts 2012) are noncommercial derivative works created by amateurs to analyze the

primary text, tell new stories, or celebrate popular culture. Vidding is a form of

resistant and underground narrative art with a dramatic structure that emerged in

resistant and underground narrative art with a dramatic structure that emerged in media fandom (Jenkins 1992, 223–49). During the 1970s, female fans appropriated

Star Trek footage to create vids that engage with gender representation (Coppa 2008).

With the emergence of Web 2.0, fans still participate in niche peer groups that share a

subcultural identity and resist the mainstream. At the same time, however, vids have

become more visible, thanks to video sharing platforms like YouTube (Ito 2010).

Hence, on Web 2.0, subcultural communities such as Vidders (http://vidders.net/) and

AnimeMusicVideos (animemusicvideos.org), where amateur producers share fan music

videos, coexist with platforms like YouTube, on which other genres of mashup, such as

political remixes and created trailers, are posted (Horwatt 2009). Political remixing

originated even before the culture jamming of the 1990s. Activists create remixes to

address numerous issues, including identity, power, and consumerism (McIntosh

2012). Conversely, trailer remixes are edited to transform the genre of a movie. By

merging cultural elements from diverse sources, they create surprising juxtapositions

with humorous results. Mashups derived from "Telephone" can be interpreted as a

further genre: that of the music mashup.

[3.4] "Telephone" mashups have been created by sampling music and mashing up

images, but without the intent to construct a narrative structure. The origin of music

mashing can be located in the dance, techno, and hiphop cultures characterized by the

practice of quoting music. In dance culture, DJs are conceived of as music stars

because even if they are not authentic and original creators of music, they create a live

experience by reproducing earlier musical works (Thornton 1996). The practice of

quoting music developed in the mid1980s, when personal computers made it possible

to record remix performances and to create techno albums using audio samples

(Marontate 2005). The advent of the Internet enabled the emergence of a techno chain

(Hayward 1995): musicians producing techno music distributed their albums online,

inviting fans to download, remix, and rework their music with the aim of including the

reworkings in the next release. Mashup emerged as a legitimate genre around 2000,

when the practice first took hold in European clubs and then received mainstream

attention in the United States. It thus migrated from underground subculture to popular

culture, both online and off (Burns 2009). Finally, with YouTube, the techno chain and

the practice of DJing have combined with audiovisual culture. Professional DJs create

video mashups merging music and video from different sources. For example,

"Telephone" has been appropriated by TheMarsAttax

(http://www.youtube.com/user/TheMarsAttax) and merged with Metallica's song "Enter

Sandman" to create a video mashup.

Lady Gaga ft. Beyoncè Vs. Metallica "Telephone vs. Enter Sandm...

Lady Gaga ft. Beyoncè Vs. Metallica "Telephone vs. Enter Sandm...

Video 6. Gaga ft. Beyoncé Vs. Metallica—"Telephone Vs. Enter Sandman" (2010).

[3.5] There are also amateur mashups on YouTube that fulfill expressive or pragmatic

needs. Fans create videos that combine the original soundtrack with static images and

post them on their profiles in order to express their passion for a music star or genre.

Some mashups have subtitles in languages other than English, making them more

accessible to transnational audiences. Finally, there are street team mashups. Street

teams are a guerrilla marketing technique that emerged during the 1990s as a

grassroots promotional activity. Fans take pictures of themselves while they distribute

flyers in city streets to promote artists (Vellar 2010). They then mash up these pictures

with the "Telephone" soundtrack to demonstrate their commitment to the artists.

Lady Gaga feat Beyonce-Telephone Traduzione in Italia...

Video 7. Lady Gaga feat. Beyonce—Telephone Italian Translation (2010).

Video 7. Lady Gaga feat. Beyonce—Telephone Italian Translation (2010).

Lady Gaga Street Team Day Emilia Romagna

Video 8. Lady Gaga Street Team Day (2010).

[3.6] The third genre in the music category is choreography. Web 2.0 has redefined

the practice of dance culture not just in relation to DJ auteur performances but also in

relation to the dancing crowd. In dance culture, dance music is consumed collectively

within the public space of the club (Thornton 1996). The dance space on Web 2.0 is

multisited. In fact, fans and dance professionals reenact "Telephone" choreography both in the digital environment of YouTube and in multiple offline spaces such as

private houses, gyms, and public squares. Professional choreographers like Camillo*

Lauricella (http://www.youtube.com/user/FYD86) and Dejan Tubic

(http://www.youtube.com/user/idejance) use "Telephone" choreography to teach gym

classes or to exhibit their dancing abilities. Gaga fans organize music flash mobs in

public squares. Flash mobbing is a grassroots practice that has been popular since

2003. A flash mob is a gathering of strangers who perform a collective action in a

public space and then disperse into the crowd (Nicholson 2005; Schepers 2009). Gaga

fans video record flash mobs so that they can share the events on SNSs and document

their participation. One example is the "Official Gaga Flash Mob Madrid Telephone & Bad Romance" (video 9), which was organized by Spanish fans as a way of asking Lady

Gaga to add a tour date in Madrid. In the music category, therefore, I include genres

related to live music (covers) and dance culture (music and video mashups and

choreography).

Of cial Lady Gaga Flashmob Madrid Telephone & Bad ...

Of cial Lady Gaga Flashmob Madrid Telephone & Bad ...

Video 9. Official Gaga Flash Mob Madrid Telephone & Bad Romance (2010).

[3.7] Parody is the second major category of video creativity. Parody is an extremely

popular expressive form in YouTube and Web 2.0 cultures (Burgess and Green 2009).

Lamerichs (2008) claims that parody is a metafictional device that incorporates familiar

elements of a media text and then shows its construction, surprising the reader with

ironic effects. By imitating certain conventions, parody reaffirms them. Indeed, because

it creates awareness of a cultural repertoire, it guarantees cultural continuity.

Furthermore, as Jenkins et al. (2009) state, humor allows the members of a group to

affirm their taste and to define insiders and outsiders. The cinematic references and

product placements in "Telephone" are metafictional devices that incorporate familiar elements of pop culture. They are easily recognizable by YouTube users, who

appropriate them to produce spoofs, humorous parodies of pop culture objects such as

music stars, movies, and TV programs. Comedians like Barely Political

(http://www.youtube.com/user/barelypolitical) have become YouTube stars thanks to the success of their spoofs. YouTube users demonstrate their membership in YouTube

culture by identifying pop cults and spoofing them. "Telephone" stimulates the creation of spoofs because of its many intermedia references, which function as textual hooks.

Also, the telephone, which appears in different forms in "Telephone," works as a textual hook because it is easily appropriatable. In fact, it has been repeated in many videos,

becoming part of the cultural repertoire of YouTube—as exemplified by Peter Coffin's

(http://www.youtube.com/user/petercoffin) music parody "Bananaphone (Telephone

Spoof/Parody)." This video is interesting because it hybridizes a cover with a parody, and because it has become a spreadable video itself. In fact, it has generated

derivative videos such as the Dq231 (http://www.youtube.com/user/cpDq231) "Club

Penguin Music Video," which is a mix of Peter Coffin's soundtrack and a selfproduced

Penguin Music Video," which is a mix of Peter Coffin's soundtrack and a selfproduced video.

[3.8] Fashion is the last category of my taxonomy. The costume changes that

characterize "Telephone" stimulate female YouTube users to create makeup and hair tutorials that can be related to chick culture. The fashion tutorial genre is emerging on

YouTube for two reasons: the number of women on the Internet is growing, and

YouTube's audiovisual format enables the self to be dynamically performed, as makeup

tutorials require. Amateurs create tutorials as places to demonstrate and learn a

practice that is typically female. Professional makeup artists, however, demonstrate the

use of beauty products in order to promote them and become sponsors of beauty

brands. Makeup tutorials thus include product placement—a business model typical of

chick flicks and music videos like "Telephone."

[3.9] Fashion is therefore an emergent online culture that integrates the traditional

dynamics of online participatory culture. First, as in hacker culture (Castells 2001) and

fan music culture (Baym and Robert 2009), the digital platform is a space in which to

play, learn, and grow professionally. The YouTube makeup artist Michelle Phan

(http://www.youtube.com/user/MichellePhan) underlines the ongoing learning process and the interconnected relationship between YouTube stars and users thus: "A good

Guru is not just a teacher, but also a student…I don't know everything, but I am willing

to learn." Second, makeup artists apply the same strategy as cover groups: they recreate popular products in order to connect with users on a common ground, which in this case is the Gaga cult body. Finally, it is possible to identify in this category a

hybridization of cultures and genres. For example, the makeup artist Elessa

(http://www.youtube.com/user/pursebuzz) has created the "Telephone Makeup Tutorial" in partnership with another makeup artist, Koren, by mimicking the structure and humorous style of "Telephone." In fact, the makeup tutorial is integrated into a broader narrative video in which Elessa and Koren reenact Gaga and Beyoncé

mimicking, in turn, Thelma and Louise.

Video 11. Gaga Telephone Makeup Tutorial Featuring Beyonce (2010).

[3.10] A broad range of hybrid forms of audiovisual production is emerging on

YouTube. This is because if a video is to become spreadable, it must attract different

cultures and stimulate different kinds of appropriation. I have separated the categories

of music, parody, and fashion for analytical reasons. However, just as "Telephone"

merges narrative forms with music video and integrates references to different media

cultures, so its derivative videos hybridize different genres with the aim of engaging

different social groups, as exemplified by Elessa's parodic makeup tutorial.

4. Spreading cult bodies on YouTube

[4.1] "Telephone" is a spreadable text that passed through different social groups because it was designed as a cult text intended to perform multiple functions and

incorporate the aesthetics of multiple target markets. "Telephone" is a dance song that stimulates users to dance and to create covers and mashups. The costume changes and

choreographed dance numbers in the video stimulate both reperformance of the

choreography and recreation of Gaga fashion. Cinematic references and product

placements are appropriated by comedians to mock the consumerism and pop culture

that Gaga embodies. The properties of "Telephone" that make it more likely to spread are thus dance music, choreographic numbers, costume changes, and cinematic

references. These textual hooks are meaningful to different social groups: live music,

dance, chick, and postmodern cinematic cultures.

[4.2] By appropriating and recreating "Telephone," YouTube users fulfill their

expressive and professional needs. At the same time, they work as grassroots

marketers promoting the Gaga brand. Thus professional producers, independent stars,

and YouTube amateurs benefit from spreadability. "Telephone" has become part of the YouTube cultural repertoire because users recreate a professionally produced text.

YouTube cultural repertoire because users recreate a professionally produced text.

Even a YouTube user who is not a fan of Gaga or pop music cannot ignore Gaga's

existence, because amateur and professional productions constantly cite her celebrity

persona. However, independent artists also benefit from spreadability. By repeating

textual hooks from "Telephone," independent musicians, comedians, and makeup

artists create derivative works that enable them to reach broader audiences.

[4.3] However, users do not simply replicate "Telephone"; they adapt it by creating new audiovisual genres. By merging codes and aesthetics from the cultural repertoires

of different social groups, YouTube users innovate audiovisual languages and canons

and, at the same time, construct their own fame. In this way, makeup artists and

independent musicians become YouTube celebrities and monetize their work through

product placements or YouTube partnerships set up to share advertising revenues

(Burns 2009). Finally, amateur producers have opportunities to communicate with likeminded people, learn, and gain visibility. By sharing amateur derivative videos, YouTube users express their passion for "Telephone," receive feedback, and learn by doing. Such users emerge on YouTube through the same process of peer education and

professionalization that has always characterized the participatory culture of the

Internet, and that has been exemplified by maledominated social groups such as free

software programmers (Castells 2001) and members of Wikipedia (Glott, Schmidt, and

Ghosh 2010). The features of YouTube culture that differ from the previous digital

culture are users' relationships with the body and with gendered identities. As

Nakamura states (2008), a maleoriented cyberculture emerged on the textbased

Internet that interpreted the online identity as disembodied. In the new millennium,

video sharing platforms enable a broader and no longer maledominated population to

share multimedia material. New genres, such as covers, dance videos, and fashion

tutorials, are emerging. These genres express the embodied nature of digital identities

and make postfeminism, live music, and dance cultures visible online.

[4.4] On YouTube, therefore, spreadability is strictly related to the appropriation of

cult bodies embedded in digital video. Amateur, independent producers and pop music

stars construct their own cult bodies by deliberately borrowing characteristics from

previous media icons and reenacting them in audiovisual productions distributed online.

Gaga has become the killer application of YouTube because she performs her celebrity

persona as a postfeminist and gayfriendly cult body that can be easily appropriated by

different social groups active on YouTube. However, this is always a contradictory

dynamic, for two main reasons. First, Gaga's cult body has been designed to both

empower postfeminist and gay identities and construct them as target markets.

Second, the Gaga persona stimulates appropriation by fans, while her Interscope

Records label—like all other major labels—punishes YouTube users who appropriate

copyrighted materials by demanding that YouTube delete their productions or their

copyrighted materials by demanding that YouTube delete their productions or their profiles.

[4.5] Spreadability is thus an openended but also highly contradictory quality. The

spreadability of "Telephone" exemplifies this contradiction: Gaga constructs her body by borrowing from previous celebrities, and YouTube users mimic her cult body with

both expressive and commercial intent. Gaga redistributes fans' performances in her

own digital profiles, thus exploiting her fans' own bodies. But the digital profiles—and

thus the identities—of her fans are in danger because YouTube has the right to remove

them for copyright infringement if fans share soundtracks without the permission of the

rightful owners. From this dynamic arises the following question: who are the rightful

owners of digital cult bodies? I have not set out to answer this complex question.

Instead, I would argue that the aim of spreadability studies is to highlight the

contradictions that both the general public and entertainment professionals face in the

contemporary environment. The public should be aware of the media industry's

strategies; at the same time, the entertainment industry should be shown the benefits

of fan appropriation, so that it will stop creating barriers to it. From a marketing point

of view, deleting a derivative video constitutes deciding not to spread a brand. From a

sociocultural point of view, however, it stunts the expressivity of different social groups and denies the existence of consumptionbased identities that embody the derivative

nature of Web 2.0 media cultures.

5. Acknowledgments

[5.1] I would like to thank Luciano Paccagnella and Nancy Baym for introducing me to

the pleasure and challenge of Internet research.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9 (2012)

Praxis

Fake and fan film trailers as incarnations of audience anticipation and

desire

Kathleen Amy Wil iams

University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

[0.1] Abstract— In the leadup to the release of some feature films, fake and fan

trailers are created by users and uploaded to YouTube and other Web sites. These

trailers demonstrate that users are literate not only in the form of the trailer itself,

but also in the Hollywood system and how it markets products to audiences.

Circulating in a networked environment online, these texts, which play with the form

of the trailer, perform and embody users' and fans' desire to see not just the feature

film but also the official trailer itself. I discuss these fake and fan trailers in relation to cinematic anticipation and describe how they navigate both spatial and temporal

bounds. Using the architectural concept of the desire line, I argue that spatial

frameworks can be usefully employed to consider how users navigate online spaces,

media, and concepts through the form of the trailer.

[0.2] Keywords— Film; Film advertising; Mashup

Williams, Kathleen Amy. 2012. "Fake and Fan Film Trailers as Incarnations of

Audience Anticipation and Desire." In "Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9.

doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0360.

1. Introduction

[1.1] Anticipation is key to our understanding of cinema. Film trailers embody (or

show our lack of) enthusiasm for the release of an upcoming feature film. The role of

the trailer was originally to draw audiences back into the theater to see another film,

thus providing a perpetual moviegoing audience (Kernan 2004; Johnston 2009). Buzz

follows films, and films follow hype; digital spaces and tools of dissemination such as

Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and blogs allow this anticipation to be a visible trace of a

network of audience anticipation. A trailer forms only part of the ways audiences

perform cinematic anticipation through consumption and production. But increasingly,

the trailer is used across multiple sites as an example of a film to share between

friends as an embodiment of enthusiasm and anticipation. The release of a cinematic

trailer by studios has also become an event; upon its release, a new trailer will be

shared through multiple spheres in a culture of anticipation. Audiences have allowed

the trailer to be an "early crossmedia text" (Johnston 2008, 145), negotiating the

trailer's existence into new media sites. Furthermore, fans and other viewers have negotiated original trailers into their own online spaces. The ease with which trailers

have shifted across different media sites demonstrates audiences' willingness to view

trailers, problematizing our understanding of the trailer as existing solely within

advertising discourses. The presence of the trailer online represents the ways that

audiences not only anticipate a film but also perform their desire to others. The trailers

I consider here—trailers created by users and shared online—reflect the importance of

trailers in the consumption and production of film. The fake and fan trailers I analyze

demonstrate the important role that a trailer plays in the temporality of a film's

promotional life and how fans and more casual consumers show, through the trailers

they create, a desire to see films in a mode of anticipation and excitement long after

they have been released.

[1.2] With this anticipation surrounding the release of a feature film, fake and fan

trailers play into cinematic discourses of release and hype. They allow creators and

consumers to perform their cinematic desire for a film, which may be focused on an

actor, a popular book from which the film was adapted, or a director, for example. In

some instances, the fake and fan trailers allow consumers and producers to bypass the

typical path of promotion by preempting an official trailer with their own. I discuss the

various ways in which fake and fan trailers, as performances of cinematic and digital

literacy, play with the notions of anticipation, promotion, and hype. Using two case

studies—fake trailers for The Social Network, (2010) and fan trailers for Twilight (2008)—I will present the ways in which trailers on YouTube and other online spaces

have formed networks of literacy and anticipation in the leadup to the release of a

feature film. Introducing the concept of the desire line, I will use spatial frameworks to

discuss the ways in which both individual and mass desire play out in online spaces

through the form of the trailer. The desire line will be used as a frame of reference to

show how the fan trailers for Twilight and the fake trailers for The Social Network bypass the typical path of film promotion and incite others, both spatially and

temporally, to create their own trailers.

2. Defining trailers

[2.1] There is a difference between cinematic anticipation and hype, and fake and

fan trailers are useful texts with which to analyze this difference. These trailers are

typically created by users to be uploaded to YouTube. They can mash up footage from

one or more sources to displace the narrative of a movie or to create a new movie that

will never exist, such as Brokeback to the Future, a mashup of Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Back to the Future (1985), or Scary Mary Poppins. They may also use original footage, shot by their creators in order to create a fake sequel to an existing

film or a parody of another film's advertising. They demonstrate a high degree of filmic

literacy and knowledge of both the source texts and the ways in which these texts are sold, as well as of the form of the trailer. Fake and fan trailers can be grouped into two

broad technical categories: recut trailers and originalfootage trailers.

[2.2] Recut trailers take source footage from one or more texts and recut it, either to

displace the film's original genre or to create a new film that will never exist. Their

name refers to the use of the word recut to describe the editing of cinematic texts. An example of a recut trailer is Neochosen's "The Shining Recut" (video 1). I will discuss recut trailers created in the leadup to the release of Twilight and its official trailer.

The Shining Recut

Video 1. "The Shining Recut," by Neochosen, 2006.

[2.3] Originalfootage trailers, on the other hand, are trailers that use footage that is

shot specifically for use in them. They typically parody an existing film or create a

spinoff or sequel. An example of an originalfootage trailer is "Minesweeper—The

Movie," a 2007 vid by CollegeHumor available on YouTube

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHY8NKj3RKs). I will discuss originalfootage trailers in relation to the release of The Social Network.

[2.4] Fake and fan trailers may each use both recut and original footage. Fake

trailers create a film that will never exist and often include footage shot specifically for the trailer. Fan trailers are made for actual movies, use original footage less often, and

evoke fan traditions of vidding. Such traditions often involve uncovering a slash story

line, giving a trailer a new soundtrack, or, as I will show, creating trailers for a film

before the official trailer has been disseminated to demonstrate the fans' anticipation

for the film.

3. Defining anticipation

3. Defining anticipation

[3.1] The concept of anticipation that I am employing here is not based on one

particular study but rather reflects the general use of the word: "I am looking forward to the film coming out; I can't wait for the film to come out." Anticipation is a concept that has not been studied in great detail in relation to cinematic desire and how

audiences crave and create texts. I use it in two ways: to refer to how an audience

looks forward to a film and actively engages with it prior to seeing it, and to refer to

how an audience can predict the content, style, or appearance of the film, and feel

familiar with it prior to having seen it. Both of these types of anticipation are present

in the case studies I discuss.

[3.2] Closely related to the concept of anticipation—and more strongly aligned with

cinema—is that of hype. Gray's study of hype for television shows focuses on the role

of the advertisement in creating desire for the show. He argues that "hype works best

by completely surrounding a text with ads, the goals being not only that as many

people as possible will hear about a text, but that they will hear about it from industrycreated hype" (2008, 33).

[3.3] Two ideas in this passage are important here. First, hype surrounds a text,

rather than inhabiting it or existing separately from it. Here, Gray evokes a networked

text that hype both takes from and feeds into in a type of feedback loop. Film trailers

could be said to relate to a feature film in the same way. Similarly, the unofficial

trailers I discuss here surround both the official trailer and the feature film or films

they evoke. Second, Gray proposes that the goal of hype and advertising is to allow as

many people as possible to hear about a text, while specifying that the hype comes

from industryrelated sources. The trailers I discuss here do not necessarily reflect

either industry intentions to build hype or fan practices. Fans, casual watchers, and

people who dislike a film are all able to interact with the hype for it through production

and consumption practices. They may simultaneously build hype for a film and deride

it, and build hype for a film while portraying another that cannot exist and cannot be

advertised but can be anticipated.

[3.4] Gray argues that "hype aims to be the first word on any text, so that it creates excitement, working to create frames through which we can make sense of the text

before even consuming it" (2008, 34). This is similar to arguments made by Burgin,

who claims that film promotion allows a film to "spill its contents into the stream of everyday life" (2004, 14), resulting in a potential viewer being familiar with a film

before having seen it. Similarly, Kernan outlines how film trailers can make viewers

"nostalgic" for a film that they have not yet seen (2004, 208). Nostalgia for a film that a viewer has not yet seen not only demonstrates familiarity with a film, but also

highlights how hype is traditionally understood as being created by studios in order to

build anticipation—the trailers allow the audience to enter the world of the film before

they consume the feature, allowing them both to look forward to the film and to

anticipate its contents. I use anticipation to demonstrate the ways in which audiences,

as producers, consumers, and sometimes fans, build, enact, and perform their interest

in a feature film or trailer.

4. Anticipation and the desire line

[4.1] A "desire line" or "desire path" is a path that deviates from the paved or prescribed path (Tiessen 2007). A desire line can be created for a number of reasons:

it may be more direct or more scenic, or it may even be arbitrary. The desire line is

determined as much by the individual as it is by mass desire; once one person creates

the path, other people are likely to take it, and the path is more likely to become an

obvious deviation in the landscape.

Figure 1. Desire line. Author's own, Sweden, 2010. [View larger image .]

[4.2] The desire line can be used as a framework to analyze the meaning, purpose,

and popularity of these trailers. If we take a paved path as a metaphor for the typical

path of promotion for a feature film, the desire line can be seen as the ways in which

users of the space between a feature, a cinema, and promotional texts wish to

perform and enact their desires. One of these ways can be the fake or fan trailer. In

this instance, sometimes there is no end product, no feature film that can be obtained

and consumed, as is the case with fake trailers. The end point of a fake trailer's desire

line is not to bypass or speed up the typical path of film promotion. Instead, as there is no actual film, fake trailers suggest films that can never exist. Their creators wish

only to revel in anticipation of what can never be obtained.

[4.3] According to Carl Myhill, the term desire line "originates from the field of urban planning and has been around for almost a hundred years." Myhill claims that desire

lines "are an ultimate expression of human desire or natural purpose" and have been used in urban planning. For example, official paths across New York's Central Park

were not laid down until individuals had been allowed to walk freely through it, and the

official paths followed their desire lines (2004, 293).

[4.4] Myhill discusses the role of desire lines in understanding potential in design.

Tiessen takes the concept of desire lines outside of the bounds of design or

architecture, and instead discusses how they "compel…us to follow particular

trajectories as we go about our everyday lives" (2007, ¶1). He argues,

[4.5] Conventionally desire lines are defined by architects and urban

planners as those trampleddown footpaths that deviate from official (i.e.

preplanned and paved) directional imperatives. These pathways of desire—

physically inscribed on the earth due to the passage of people—cut across

the fields of university campuses, they carve up the urban grid, they exceed

the boundaries of the sidewalk; in so doing desire lines express the excess

that premeditated constructions cannot foresee or contain. Frequently,

desire lines are regarded as "eyesores" by city planners—as "scars upon the landscape"; however, they can also be thought of as solutions to the

problem of how to efficiently and pleasurably respond to and navigate the

terrain that constitutes our sensorially mediated world. (2007, ¶1)

[4.6] The desire line is an important indication of not only efficiency and pleasure,

but also play. It indicates anticipation of a path's end point. The desire lines that

involve the spilling of people outside the bounds of the paved path to create scars on

the landscape are interesting because they also indicate the role that pleasure,

popularity, and use play in everyday environments and actions.

[4.7] Tiessen suggests that desire lines not only indicate human desire, or "merely a material expression of some aspect of the human imagination," but that they are

[4.8] the product of an earth—a natural environment—that desires us, an

earth that beckons to us and that offers to us new pathways and potential

circuits that expand the interconnected network—the interdependent

relationship—between us and itself. To trace a desire line, then, is to

respond to an invitation, to accept that a particular trajectory has been

revealed. (2007, ¶2)

[4.9] Thus, desire lines reflect the "give and take that already exists between people and their environment" (Tiessen 2007, ¶2). The unique positioning of individuals

between their potential as consumers of cinema and their potential as producers of

cinematic texts against the space of the cinema can be related to the give and take

between the individual and environment that Tiessen discusses. They give by engaging

with studioproduced hype and studioendorsed trailers, and they take by using those

elements to create new paths of desire. Trailers do not merely sell cinema to an

audience; they are also a space for audiences to enact and perform their desire and

anticipation for, and also their rejection of, cinematic modes of technology, narrative,

and star appeal. A desire line also is a performance of anticipation: an anticipation of

what is to come, and an anticipation of time and space, that come from familiarity with

environments.

[4.10] The spatial environment of the cinema and the cinematic is important to

consider here. Not only has the space of the cinema traditionally dictated our social

and technological understanding of the cinematic, but cinema itself has spilled outside

the walls of the theater and is an integral part of urban life. As film promotion is part

of the everyday, the cinematic is integrated with the city. As trailers and films moved

into the domestic sphere through VHS and television, they became part of our

understanding of home cinema. The entry of the trailer into online spaces, and thus its

availability for digital manipulation by amateurs, also points to the ways in which we

integrate the cinematic into new spaces. This integration is driven not only by

technology, but also by consumers and their desires. The typical path of film

promotion invites play and pleasure; the methods of dissemination of promotional

texts demonstrate and reflect use; and the technological capabilities that online spaces

and services provide invite play with modes of anticipation and promotion.

[4.11] The desire line indicates the alteration of our environments by usage and

desire. Just as a user who creates a trailer may bypass a paved path of promotion

dictated by the studio, so too can a desire line show us the ways that people use

space, where they congregate and where they deviate from the expected. The desire

line also indicates anticipation or imagination of the content of a space (in order to

create a shortcut, for example). We interact with the cinematic space by using a

similar imagination. Jonathan Gray argues, "We may in time resist this, by not 'judging the book by its cover' or not 'believing the hype,' but first the cover and the hype tell

us what to expect, fashion our excitement and/or apprehension, and begin to tell us

what a text is all about, calling for our identification with and interpretation of that text before we have even seemingly arrived at the text" (2008, 34).

[4.12] Gray's discussion of the way that promotional materials attempt to direct our meaningmaking processes can be related both to the trailer and to the concept of the

desire line. Gray suggests that we may resist the meanings proposed by promotional

materials, but the fake and fan trailers indicate that those meanings can be

appropriated, played with, and subverted. Just as, spatially, the desire line shows that

prescriptions of meaning and experience can be subverted, the trailers I discuss also

show subversion, even if it is slight. Studios wish to direct audiences' excitement, but

audiences are also capable of directing and marking their own desire and anticipation.

5. Analyzing networks of anticipation

[5.1] I next present two case studies through which to discuss the role of anticipation

in fake and fan trailers. I analyze the trailers' connection to the release of feature films and the space of the cinema in relation to the framework of the desire line and shifting

temporality. Furthermore, I draw upon modes of cinematic anticipation that

demonstrate how these trailers belong not just to fans, but also to antifans (those who

actively engage in derision of the text), nonfans, and casual consumers. By playing

with the genres of film promotion, the fake and fan trailers become performances of

knowledge of and intimacy with the Hollywood system. They also evidence a desire to

share this knowledge. Capitalizing on the ways in which people seek out trailers, their

makers use tags and YouTube's ability to suggest related videos to users to rapidly

create a network of knowledge and capital surrounding the original trailer (which itself

may not even have been released yet, as was the case with Twilight). Fake and fan

trailers thus promote what I call a network of literacy. YouTube's "related video"

function also creates an instant community; a line can be traced from one fake or fan

trailer to others, as well as to the films and trailers they evoke. Each fake or fan trailer is thus situated in the context of others, to which it is linked not only by the films they all invoke but also by the practices by which they are made: recutting or using original

footage.

6. Fidelity and temporality in Twilight fan trailers

[6.1] Once the cast of Twilight was announced, a number of users on YouTube

created trailers, on the basis of their knowledge of the book, that sought to mimic

what the eventual official trailer might look like. Collating and editing footage from

press spots, advertisements, and other films that the cast had appeared in, and so

forth, they employed features of the trailer form, such as nondiegetic sound and text,

in order to create an appropriate atmosphere for Twilight. Through these trailers, they attempted to embody how they viewed the Twilight narrative world, and fans of that

world were able to exhibit their knowledge of it in their shared enjoyment of the

trailers. Makers of the trailers used music, title text, and other elements to situate the world of Twilight within a mode of anticipation. Their anticipation can be seen both in their looking forward to the release of the official trailer and the film itself and in their confidence, based on their intimate knowledge of the books, about what the trailer

would look like. However, the producers of these fan trailers weren't striving for

fidelity to the eventual feature film itself. They were concerned with performing their

anticipation for it, and with being able to anticipate Twilight in cinematic form after anticipating it through the Twilight books.

FAN MADE Twilight Trailer

Video 2. "Fan Made Twilight Trailer," Linzellovestwilight, 2007.

[6.2] Like many fan texts, these trailers were ways their creators performed their

status as fans to the community of fans, who would discover the fan trailers as their

own anticipation for the feature film spurred them to search for the official trailer.

These trailers also provided a space for commentary among fans, showing how

anticipation gathers momentum when shared among likeminded people.

[6.3] Kernan argues that

[6.4] as nostalgic texts that paradoxically appeal to audiences' idealized

memories of films they haven't seen yet, [trailers] attract audiences not only

to themselves (as attractions), nor even only to the attractions within the

individual films they promote, but to an ever renewed and renewable desire

for cinematic attraction per se. Like magnets, they attract (or occasionally,

repel) in an attempt to draw bodies to a center, assembling their assumed

audiences in a suspended state of presenttense readiness for a future that

is always deferred. (2004, 208)

[6.5] The fan trailers for Twilight demonstrate that audiences have memories of films they have not yet seen, and that these memories are attractions in themselves.

Kernan's proposal that trailers draw bodies to a center with a "readiness for a future that is always deferred" does not appear to be as true of fan Twilight trailers as it is of other recut trailers that create a film that will never exist. However, Twilight and other feature films for which fan trailers are made do not and cannot exist as the fan trailers

present them.

[6.6] The success of some trailers that build or work with anticipation is dependent

on the temporal bounds of the way the trailer is watched: as a route between a point

A and a point B in a path. The paradoxical nature of this anticipation ensures that

much of the cultural capital of the Twilight fan trailers is short lived; once the real trailer is released, the fan trailers become antiquated and criticized, although they

continue to exist, archived on YouTube. They no longer fit on the typical film

promotion path because they no longer promote a forthcoming film, and fans can now

compare them both to the official trailer and to the feature film itself. Once the official trailer and the film have been released, comments on fan trailers created earlier tend

to deride the lack of knowledge and skills exhibited by their creators. The makers of

these trailers often annotate their videos to show that they are aware that their

creations are not faithful to the end product but are prescribed and encoded in a

particular mode of anticipation. These trailers rely upon certain temporal conditions in

order to make meaning for some fans or even for casual viewers.

Figure 2. Annotation on Twilight movie trailer, singingupagain, 2008. [View larger

image.]

[6.7] Categorization of uploaded videos is encouraged by YouTube's architecture, and

properly categorizing a video increases its likelihood of attracting viewers. Twilight

fans tagged their videos in a variety of ways, hoping to reach their intended audience

but also to provide caveats to their viewers, encouraging them to encode the video

within a specific temporal boundary. Video titles tended not to use the word fan;

instead, most titles signaled a concern with fidelity by calling the video a " Twilight trailer." Most commonly, the video's description, and sometimes its annotations,

alerted the viewer that the video was fan made. For some of these trailers, such a

note was unnecessary at the time of their release because there was no official trailer.

These annotations and descriptions have been added in response to critiques of the inaccuracy of the videos, such as the following comment left in 2010 on a Twilight fan trailer from 2008:

[6.8] Uhh…I hate to rain on your parade, but it sucks! I mean, wtf is going

on?!?!?! Nothing is even remotely like the movies, the actors don't look

alike, etc, etc, etc—I could go on FOREVER!

[6.9] This comment is symptomatic of comments I have observed on Twilight fan

trailers since 2009. They function both as critiques of the techniques used by the

creator and as insults to their fannishness; by pointing out inaccuracies, the

commenters assert themselves as more intimate with the text, and thus more capable

of being a fan. People who are familiar with the practices of fan trailers and fan vids

generally leave comments complimenting or debating creative choices in the video

(generally in an amicable way), or discussing the types of software used to recut and

splice the source footage.

[6.10] The Twilight trailers often formed part of a competition started by a YouTube user. These competitions embody the oneupmanship that is often visible in fan

trailers. They are similar to the circumstances that generate a desire line, where one

person taking a path can incite others to do the same, creating a scar on the

landscape as a result of use and desire. While running a competition is an obvious call

to arms, summoning other users, as a fan community, to create texts, the spatial

elements of YouTube also allow others who are not part of that community to be

involved in this type of creativity. Using the metaphor of the desire line, we can say

that these consumers follow the path created by others, deviating from the paved or

promoted path, and engage in the modes of play and deviation as others have before

them. While following that path, the creators of trailers reference the original path but

exist on a different one, engaging with each other in a shared narrative and temporal

space.

[6.11] The competitiveness of these trailers also indicates the media literacy involved

in their creation and dissemination; knowing who the cast members are is integral to

understanding the trailers, and the comments on them become a place where users

can share information about actors who have been cast and debate their merits, offer

alternative casting suggestions, and describe how they pictured the Twilight characters while reading the books. Such conversations, then, not only are about fidelity but also

acknowledge the differences in aesthetic interpretation among fans, while still

subjecting those interpretations to taste judgments.

7. Social networks, speed, and literacy

[7.1] In 2010, a trailer appeared for the widely anticipated "Facebook movie," written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher, which chronicled the life of Facebook

creator Mark Zuckerberg. Its teasers (shorter versions of trailers that often use only a

small amount of footage—if any—from the feature) and trailers presented very

different versions of what The Social Network would look like and be about; the

teasers did not include liveaction footage and presented The Social Network as a film embedded in Facebook's architecture and history, whereas the trailer introduced live

action, depicting the film as a sprawling epic retelling one man's rise to success.

Social Network - In Theaters 10/1/2010

Video 3. "Social Network—In Theaters 10/1/2010," Sony Pictures, 2010.

The Social Network Of cial Trailer -In theatres Oct 1 2010

Video 4. "The Social Network Official Trailer—In Theaters Oct 1 2010," Sony Pictures, 2010.

[7.2] In the trailer, a choral version of Radiohead's "Creep" accompanies scenes of high tension in boardrooms and bedrooms, and text that will become easily identifiable

appears on the screen: "You don't get to 300 million friends…without making a few

enemies." Before the release of the feature film, many originalfootage fake trailers

were made and distributed through YouTube as well as some commercial sites, and

some recut trailers appeared on YouTube. In this section I discuss the speed of the

dissemination of the Social Network trailers, and the ways in which they exhibited and played with notions of online literacy and knowledge of online environments.

Furthermore, the Social Network trailers sought to parody a film that had not yet been released and to demonstrate familiarity with not only the story line but also the

stylistic elements of the film. The Social Network was being anticipated, in both

meanings of the word. Unlike the fan trailers for Twilight, these trailers were created by people who appeared to be skeptical about the content of the film as well as the

way it was being sold to its potential audiences.

[7.3] The fake Social Network trailers, some of which used original footage and some of which recut existing footage, sought to use the stylistic elements of the official

Social Network trailer and apply its narrative to other Web sites and services, such as Twitter, YouTube, 4chan, Ping, eBay, and MySpace, as well as to "Facebook the Movie"

itself. They differed in the types of humor that they were seeking to convey. For

instance, one posited the introduction of Facebook's "poke" and "like" functions into ordinary offline situations. More commonly, however, the fake trailers sought to

create a narrative and mythology for the Web site of their choice based on its

architecture and, more importantly, its use. This emphasis reflects the change from

the teasers, which presented The Social Network as a film about Facebook, to the

trailer, which presented it as a film about Facebook's creator and the intensity of his

life. Popular moments in a Web site's history became dramatic turning points in these

new imagined films. The trailers were performances of Internet literacy and reflections

on Internet culture, historicizing popular Web sites and placing them within the

mythologizing that was evident in the Social Network trailer.

Twitter Movie Trailer: Rated Awesome #2

Video 5. "Twitter Movie Trailer: Rated Awesome #2," Indymogul, 2010.

[7.4] The Social Network trailers demonstrate the perplexing temporal position that trailers and other items in networked environments, such as memes, enjoy within a

network. The Social Network trailers were historicized almost instantaneously, with comments on Twitter, technology sites, blogs, and traditional news outlets charting

their spread. This occurred before there were a large number of these trailers (there

were far more for Inception and Twilight), and yet it was reported as a phenomenon that had exploded overnight. Such hyperbole perhaps signals more about the authors'

attitudes toward Internetbased fads, for which a movie about a site on the Internet is

an easy scapegoat. The commentary, particularly from traditional news outlets and

technology sites, was generalized, exaggerated, and brief. Rather than reflecting on

the reasons why these trailers might be so quick in appearing, it tended to attribute

their spread to a "community" (Wee 2010), to "the good people of the Internet"

(Abrams 2010), to "comedians" and "pranksters" (The List 2010), or even to "the Internet" itself (ValentinoDeVries 2010). There is a sense in these articles that the trailers had been orchestrated and planned, rather than being made by individuals who

fed each other's creativity. The interest in the trailers, as opposed to other recut or fan creations, can be seen as privileging originally shot trailers over those that recut

existing footage. Reporters deemed the trailers "hilarious," creative, and clever (Abrams 2010; McCarthy 2010), and credited them with feeding the "hype" for The Social Network (Wee 2010; McCarthy 2010). This raises questions about how

authorship is understood in the creation and circulation of fake trailers. The disparity

between news articles' description of the authors of these texts as a community, or as

the Internet itself, and individual authors' and small groups signing their own work

with a username reflects the difficulty of defining the trailers and suggests that they

exist beyond the notions of author and text, and exist more comfortably when understood as a network.

Youtube Movie - The Video Website ('Social Network' Parody) - Fa...

Video 6. "Youtube Movie—The Video Website ('Social Network' Parody)—Facebook,"

PrussianSunsets, 2010.

[7.5] These reports showed a lack of understanding of both the temporal unfolding of

the trailers and their quantity. In the Wall Street Journal, Jennifer ValentinoDeVries wrote about the "evolution" of these trailers while naming only two ( The Video Website and Twitter), yet she claimed that "the possibilities are endless—as long as they keep using that awesome choral version of Radiohead's 'Creep'" (2010). On Penn Olson, a technology site, Willis Wee claimed 2 days later that these trailers constituted a

"boom" while also only listing the same two (2010). Eight days after that, Drew Grant, a journalist for Crushable, implored the end of the trailers to come soon ("But can we just call it quits now?") while linking to five parodies of the Social Network trailer (2010). Within days of the first fake trailer's appearance, most articles discussing

them put forward the "best" examples, often only listing two or three. This selectivity indicates that the authors expected the trailers to spread and multiply on YouTube,

together with the hype that surrounded them. Just as the trailers give "free publicity"

to The Social Network (Wee 2010), so too do articles anticipating a "boom" of trailers appearing so rapidly "we can hardly keep track" (Huffington Post 2010) create

publicity and viewers for trailers, which in turn are likely to encourage others to create

their own.

[7.6] The speed at which the Social Network trailers appeared and were discussed is fitting for a film about online culture. The story's manipulation into an epic by the

film's screenwriter and director was destined to be met with cynicism, particularly as

the film's promotional discourse altered so greatly in the leadup to the film's release.

Referred to simultaneously as both the "Facebook movie" and the movie about the life of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, the film appeared to also historicize something

that was currently happening; this attempt to both be nostalgic for the present and

anticipate the past demonstrates the complex temporality behind the trailer.

[7.7] Considered within the framework of the desire line, the Social Network trailers blazed a path away from that of the official trailer and teasers. However, unlike that

marked out by the Twilight trailers, this path did intersect with the official path at several points, responding to the change in the film's marketing between the teasers

and the trailer. The creators of the fake trailers took elements of the official trailer and applied them to different online spaces, suggesting that Zuckerberg's story was

universal where the official trailer attempted to sell it as exceptional. The Social

Network trailers that applied the template of the film's story, as told in the trailer, to the story of other Web sites drew audiences' attention to other online spaces.

[7.8] Comparing the Social Network trailers with the Twilight trailers, we can see two very different types of competitiveness and improvement at play. The Social Network

trailers that imagined a similar movie about another Web service, such as Twitter or

YouTube, were limited in the scope of their paths; there are only so many Web sites

that can be used in such a story line for comic effect. The comedy in them was created

by the absurdity of the idea of a film about such Web sites. The Twilight trailers, however, were made to enact and perform fannishness for a text, and to allow their

makers to share with other fans how they pictured the world of Twilight. The two sets of trailers perform two different types of literacy. The Social Network trailers were concerned with demonstrating literacy in film and intimate knowledge of the official

trailer, as well as knowledge of online culture and the history of popular Web sites,

and the ability to create humor. The Twilight trailers, by comparison, were concerned with performing insider knowledge about the casting of the upcoming feature,

knowledge of the books, and knowledge of previous films that the cast members had

appeared in, as well as demonstrating technical capabilities to other fans. In both

cases, we see anticipation played out both in the expectation of the upcoming film and

in playing with the notions of cinematic desire and anticipation for a feature film. While

the fan trailers for Twilight demonstrate anticipation among fans who obviously want to consume the film itself, in the fake trailers for The Social Network, we can see anticipation for the film but also, increasingly, anticipation for the spread of memes.

The official trailers for The Social Network were themselves anticipated, in that they were looked forward to and expected, and this reflects the importance of the trailer to

our understanding of cinematic desire and anticipation.

[7.9] Tryon argues that "instead of anticipating upcoming films, most fake trailers

mock the rhetoric of anticipation using the clichés commonly associated with movie

trailers and advertisements" (2009, 161). While I've argued that the fake and fan trailers for The Social Network and Twilight do exhibit anticipation for the release of the feature films they correspond to, those for The Social Network in particular rely upon mocking trailer rhetoric—that is, mocking the ways that a story is sold to an

audience. Fake trailers, however, can also show anticipation, even if that anticipation

is played with. By differentiating anticipation from hype as something that comes from

audiences (rather than, like hype, from studios) and is encouraged by spatiality and

temporality, we can see anticipation at play in these trailers, whether they mock or

demonstrate only deep adoration.

8. Conclusion

[8.1] There are many different ways in which anticipation can be performed and

enacted and embodied. I have considered how anticipation relates to both temporality

and space and have argued that anticipation should be considered when discussing

how audiences interact with filmic texts, rather than how studios create hype. This

anticipation need not be focused only on a film that can be released in cinemas; it can

also be directed toward a fake film that is created by the trailer. This creation of

anticipation is different from the creation of hype by studios (for example, by releasing

a new DVD edition of an older film) and demonstrates audiences' desire to see the film

not only in new spaces, but in new narratives and temporal bounds as well. Although

trailers are often thought of as advertising an end product, these trailers function

beyond the realm of the advertisement and instead suggest that the trailer lasts

beyond the release of the feature, not only as an artifact but as a cultural object that

can be integrated into new spaces and as a form in which to enact desires for future

texts.

9. Works cited

Abrams, Simon. 2010. "Which Is the Best 'The Social Network' Trailer Parody?"

Moviefone Blog: Cinematical, August 17.

http://blog.moviefone.com/2010/08/17/whichisthebestthesocialnetworktrailer

parody/.

Burgin, Victor. 2004. The Remembered Film. London: Reaktion.

Grant, Drew. 2010."Enough with 'Social Network' Parodies: Here's the Best 5."

Crushable, August 23. http://crushable.com/entertainment/enoughwithsocial

networkparodiesheresthebest5/.

Gray, Jonathan. 2008. "Television Previews and the Meaning of Hype." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11 (1): 33–49. doi:10.1177/1367877907086391.

Gray, Jonathan. 2010. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media

Paratexts. New York: New York University Press.

Huffington Post. 2010. "'The Twit Network' Trailer Is Latest in 'The Social Network'

Parodies." Huffington Post, August 13.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/13/thetwitnetworktrailer_n_681444.html.

Johnston, Keith M. 2008. "'The Coolest Way to Watch Movie Trailers in the World':

Trailers in the Digital Age." Convergence 14 (2): 145–60.

doi:10.1177/1354856507087946.

Johnston, Keith M. 2009. Coming Soon: A Technological History of the Film Trailer.

Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Kernan, Lisa. 2004. Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers. Austin:

University of Texas Press.

The List. 2010. "6 Best Spoofs of 'The Social Network' Trailer." The Week, October 4.

http://theweek.com/article/index/207736/6bestspoofsofthesocialnetworktrailer.

McCarthy, Caroline. 2010. "'Social Network' Trailer Inspires Parody, Hype." CNET

News, July 16. http://news.cnet.com/830113577_32001080236.html.

Myhill, Carl. 2004. "Commercial Success by Looking for Desire Lines." In 6th Asia Pacific ComputerHuman Interaction Conference, APCHI 2004, Rotorua: Proceedings,

edited by Masood Masoodian, Steve Jones, and Bill Rogers, 293–304. Berlin: Springer.

Tiessen, Matthew. 2007. "Accepting Invitations: Desire Lines as Earthly Offerings."

Rhizomes 15. http://www.rhizomes.net/issue15/tiessen.html.

Tryon, Chuck. 2009. Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence.

New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

ValentinoDeVries, Jennifer. 2010. "The Evolution of 'Social Network' Trailer Parodies."

Digits, Wall Street Journal, August 13. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/08/13/the

evolutionofsocialnetworktrailerparodies.

Wee, Willis. 2010. "The Social Network Parodies Boom." PennOlson: The Asian Tech

Catalogue, August 15. http://www.pennolson.com/2010/08/15/thesocialnetwork

parodies.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9 (2012)

Symposium

The two-source illusion: How vidding practices changed Jonathan

McIntosh's political remix videos

Martin Leduc

Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

[0.1] Abstract— In an interview with Henry Jenkins, Jonathan McIntosh named

fannish vidding as a key influence on two of his more recent video remixes. I took a

more detailed look at precisely how these two videos intertwine vidding practices

with those of political remix video (PRV), and to what effect.

[0.2] Keywords— Buffy vs Edward; Culture jamming; Donald Duck Meets Glenn

Beck; Mashup; Remix

Leduc, Martin. 2012. "The TwoSource Illusion: How Vidding Practices Changed

Jonathan McIntosh's Political Remix Videos." In "Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and

Cultures, no. 9. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0379.

1. Introduction

[1.1] In an interview with Henry Jenkins, Jonathan McIntosh named fannish vidding

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidding) as a key influence on two of his more recent

video remixes: "Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=RZwM3GvaTRM) and "Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck"

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfuwNU0jsk0) (McIntosh 2010). And I think it's worth looking in more detail at precisely how these two videos intertwine vidding

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidding) practices with those of political remix video

(http://www.politicalremixvideo.com/whatispoliticalremix) (PRV), and to what

effect.

[1.2] By combining a vidder's eye for narrative and characterization with the critical

media pairings typical of PRVs, McIntosh achieves an effect that I'm describing here as

a twosource illusion. He mines choice bits from the noisy barrage of commercial

media and sculpts them into a pair of evocative fictive worlds that can be critically

weighed against each other. This twosource illusion demonstrates for PRVs what

scholars like Francesca Coppa have long noted about vids: that affective and critical

relationships with mass media do not have to cancel each other out, but can in fact be leveraged in each other's favor.

2. Critical pairings

[2.1] McIntosh operates principally within the formal traditions of political remix

video—a term in fact coined by McIntosh himself, but that fits into a history that long

predates his work (McIntosh provides a history of PRV in this issue of Transformative

Works and Cultures). Eli Horwatt (2009) has written in detail about a number of the traditions of politicized appropriation art that have come to inform today's PRVs. He

traces the practice back to Soviet Union propagandists of the early 20th century, who

reedited Hollywood films to transmit communist ideology. Through the Situationists of

the 1960s and the culture jammers of the 1980s, Horwatt eventually reaches the

performance groups Negativland and Emergency Broadcast Network (EBN), whose

work in the 1990s popularized a set of remix approaches that McIntosh took up

himself and that still characterize PRVs today.

[2.2] Many of Horwatt's examples share a particular formal technique that is

common to PRVs: they organize their subject matter into sets of two. Horwatt's own

focus is on "incendiary juxtapositions of popculture and the military industrial

complex" (2009, 79), with examples that include EBN's 1991 mix of gulf war footage

with overproduced corporate entertainment (http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=v_KAkENkfqg), and McIntosh's 2003 juxtaposition of Kodak commercials with

images of Iraqi victims of the second gulf war (http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=jFesRfyFrrY).

[2.3] These sorts of critical pairings can involve other types of footage, creating

opportunities to highlight the media's ties to forms of systemic power besides the

militaryindustrial complex. Bryan Boyce's "Special Report"

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t382xJWGwvs) skewers media fearmongering by

remixing television news with the overblown horror dialogue of '50s B movies (Horwatt

2009, 79). Elisa Kreisinger confronts the patriarchy of the culture industry with a

remix that mashes, in her words, "corporate medias over sexualized depiction of

women with a trailer for the misogynistic horror flick, 'Captivity'"

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7EfhumL4yo).

Special Report

Video 1. "Special Report" by Bryan Boyce (1999).

[2.4] All of these remixes have this in common: each juxtaposes two different media

sources in a way that condemns them both. Hollywood spectacle is paired with

imperialism and patriarchy; hyperconsumerism is linked with wars of aggression; forprofit news reporting is implicated in sensationalist and alienating propaganda. By pairing the media representations, the remixer highlights their collusion in the project

of domination, and both sources are damned as "the repressive fictions of corporate

media's Magic Kingdom," as culturejamming theorist Mark Dery put it in 1993 (11).

[2.5] These critical pairings characterized McIntosh's earlier work: 2003's "War on

Terror Sports" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj1MHXBWq2A) sets the US

occupation of Iraq to the audio track of a football commercial. Another 2003 video

mixes George W. Bush's military aggression with a Burger King advertisement

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ic3yEfx93M) (as a voiceover narrator describes

Bush as a man who "fights for something more," the remix cuts to a pair of sizzling hamburger patties). McIntosh's later remixes still feature critical juxtapositions ( Buffy the Vampire Slayer paired with Twilight, Disney cartoons paired with Glenn Beck). But these remixes no longer completely condemn both their sources. Instead, they engage

in a more intricate form of criticism by drawing on the formal strategies of vidding.

3. The vidder's eye

[3.1] I'd like to focus on two practices that McIntosh borrows from vidders in his later

PRVs: narrative and characterization. Narrative is rare in PRVs, which often imitate

montageoriented forms like commercials, music videos, or channel surfing. All of the

PRVs I mentioned above do so, except "Buffy vs Edward" and "Donald Duck Meets

Glenn Beck." Henry Jenkins offers a useful description of how this sort of pastiche differs from vidding practices:

[3.2] If MTV is a postmodern art of pastiche that isolates images from their

original context(s) and unmoors them from their previous associations, fan

video is an art of quotation that anchors its images to a referent, either

drawn from the fans' metatextual understanding of the series characters

and their universe…or assigned them within the construction of a new

narrative. (1992, 234)

[3.3] One great recent example of such a reworked narrative is Laura Shapiro's 2010

vid "Hurricane," which Anita Sarkeesian tidily describes in a recent blog post (2011):

"Hurricane combines source material from the reimagined Battlestar Galactica and the cult hit Farscape, to create an alternative universe in which Kara 'Starbuck' Thrace and Aeryn Sun, both fighter pilots on their respective shows, meet in an intergalactic bar"

(video 2). If you watch this vid, notice how its two characters are made to interact

with each other by means of carefully edited cutaways. This is one of the techniques

I'm referring to when I talk about a vidder's deployment of characterization.

Video 2. "Hurricane," by Laura Shapiro (2010).

[3.4] By characterization, I mean that salient realist concept that still fuels so much

prose fiction, poetry, cinema, and other art: aesthetic conventions that relate "people's attitudes and actions to the customs and climate from which they spring" (Gardner

1991, 47).

[3.5] Characterization in vids often requires the vidder to mine countless hours of footage in order to isolate brief moments of emotion or interaction that can then be

hacked to either celebrate or modify a favorite character (Coppa 2008). Two popular

vids by Killa and T. Jonesy offer a good indication of the extent to which characters

can be hacked through the practice of fannish remix. Working with the same

characters—Kirk and Spock—Killa and T. Jonesy have produced both "When I'm 64"

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDyguTDEkyw), a disarmingly sweet and goofy portrait of the two characters' longstanding love, and the widely discussed "Closer"

(http://www.blip.tv/file/2289542), described by the Organization for Transformative Works as "a Star Trek vid that eroticizes violent encounters between the characters

Kirk and Spock…It is a disquieting vid for many fans, but it is meant to be" (OTW,

n.d.).

[3.6] Characterization, especially that which portrays characters with the kind of

sympathy we see in vidding, is also rare in PRVs, perhaps because of the genre's

descent from traditions of appropriation (like culture jamming) that take an

antagonistic stance toward their source material. Indeed, when McIntosh (2010)

himself mentions that, unlike vidders, political remixers "often have a relationship of ridicule or animosity to their source," he touches on a tension between fans and

culture jammers that has come up before.

[3.7] In a response to Mark Dery's 1993 article on culture jamming, Jenkins (n.d.)

offers one description of how their attitudes toward the media have distinguished fans

from jammers:

[3.8] Unlike the other jammers he discusses, however, fans do not see

television content as "ugly, dull and boring" or necessarily see themselves as

acting in opposition to dominant media institutions. Fans would strongly

disagree with Mark Crispin Miller, who Dery quotes sympathetically as

explaining, "TV has no spontaneous defenders, because there is almost

nothing in it to defend."

[3.9] But perhaps Jenkins has drawn the line a little too thickly between jammers

and fans. Why can't we preserve the project of disrupting TV's injustices while keeping

the parts of it that we love, even if Dery's article offers little help with doing so? In her discussion of several of the women who pioneered vidding practices, Francesca Coppa

reminds us that visceral affect and critical analysis not only can coexist, but can work

together in tandem: "While vidders make an infinite variety of arguments about the

television shows and films they love—theorizing about characters, fleshing out

relationships, emphasizing homoerotics, picking apart nuances of plot and theme—

these arguments frequently articulate alternative perspectives, particularly in terms of

gender and sexuality" (2008, ¶5.1). It is this sort of interplay between affect and criticism that we see in "Buffy vs Edward" and "Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck."

4. The two-source illusion

[4.1] Immersed in the traditions of PRV, McIntosh has only been able to borrow from

vidding in very broad terms. Coppa (2010) has named poetry as the artistic form that

best resembles vidding's narrative style—vids navigate the tensions and connections

between lyrics, images, and shared fandoms to engage in a range of meaning making

that covers both the narrative and the lyrical. In "Buffy vs Edward" and "Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck," McIntosh employs a comparatively prosaic means of building his

narrative: the closest structural equivalent for both remixes is the narrative short film,

complete with a threeact plot that reaches a climax. McIntosh is not the only remixer

to take a "shortfilmish" approach to his PRVs (see, for example, Elisa Kreisinger's Queer Carrie series)

(http://elisakreisinger.wordpress.com/projects/queercarrieproject), but the remixes do

deviate from the typically montageoriented formats of many PRVs.

[4.2] "Buffy vs Edward" lifts the character Edward Cullen out of his role as the lead vampire in the Twilight films and drops him into the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Edward targets the show's title character, Buffy Summers, as a potential love interest, using the same brand of domineering courtship tactics that work so well for

him within the Twilight franchise. While a vid (http://fanlore.org/wiki/Vid) might build such an alternative narrative by selecting a new song for the music track and using its

lyrics to comment on the remixed video footage (Coppa 2008), McIntosh's "Buffy vs

Edward" relies mainly on edits to the sources' dialogue. Through various manipulations of the audio and video of his sources, McIntosh builds new scenes where Buffy and

Edward speak directly to each other and respond to each other's actions.

[4.3] Within this remixed narrative, Buffy consistently shuts Edward down, and as his

harassment escalates, the consequences he suffers get more harsh. The narrative

increasingly unveils and condemns the sexism that is celebrated without question

within the commercial novels and films of the Twilight franchise, and McIntosh further

leverages his criticism by hacking his characters so that Edward's behavior receives

the scorn it deserves.

[4.4] By hacking together selected bits of footage from Twilight, the first film of the series, McIntosh changes Edward Cullen from a smoldering, sparkly antihero into a

selfobsessed stalker who's prone to throwing tantrums. Buffy Summers reacts to him

with disdain and dwindling patience, assertively rebuking his every selfindulgence.

McIntosh sculpts these performances out of countless media fragments, which include

not only suitable clips of dialogue, but also brief clips of rolled eyes, glares, furrowed brows, and other reaction shots. This method recalls the same laborintensive studies

that many fannish vidders make of their own favorite characters (Jenkins 1992, 228).

In fact, McIntosh (2009) turned to fanwritten transcripts to help him find some of the

clips he needed. Within the remix, we're encouraged to cheer Buffy on as she deftly

repels Edward's bullshit, and this sympathetic portrayal leverages McIntosh's critique

of the Twilight franchise. As McIntosh (2009) puts it, "the audience is not supposed to go 'Oh, see how TV is stupid?' They're supposed to go 'Oh, see how Buffy was

awesome!'"

[4.5] But in trying to remix a limited palette of extant footage into a 6minute short

film that prioritizes narrative and character, McIntosh does encounter certain

obstacles. In filmmaking terms, these obstacles could be described as continuity

errors: unexplained changes in wardrobe, hairstyles, lighting, and so on. It is here that

the "critical pairing" conventions of PRV can provide an organizing principle for all the disparate pieces of video.

[4.6] As I mentioned above, "Buffy vs Edward" employs the familiar PRV technique of juxtaposing two different media texts. From the straightforward dualism of the title to

the contrasting color schemes of each character's footage (orange hues for Buffy, blue

ones for Edward), the remix repeatedly prompts us to compare one source to the

other.

[4.7] But it is, of course, an illusion that McIntosh is only mixing two sources. In

addition to using footage from Twilight, "Buffy vs Edward" includes footage from 36

different episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a bit of a Harry Potter movie.

Rigorously interweaving PRV and vidding strategies, McIntosh takes countless

disjointed fragments of footage and gathers them into two separate and cohesive

piles. Weighing these two constructions against each other offers us new ways to

analyze the characters, tropes, and politics of the original sources.

[4.8] "Buffy vs Edward" has been discussed in relation to the vidding subgenre of

constructed reality (http://fanlore.org/wiki/Constructed_reality)—vids that edit footage

to create a new fictional reality by tweaking locations and characters, or changing plot

details, or blending multiple fandoms, or remixing in some other way. But perhaps

McIntosh's remix can be better understood as a constructed pair of realities that build

the footage into a pair of cohesive fictive worlds that can be compared and contrasted.

While vids like Shapiro's "Hurricane" make meaning by expertly blending disparate footage into a single alternate universe, "Buffy vs Edward" repeatedly signals its juxtaposition of two separate universes.

[4.9] The twosource illusion we find in "Buffy vs Edward" recalls vidding's frequently

"complex interrelation between love and critique, aesthetic distance and affect" (Busse 2010). The remix's PRVstyle critical pairing gives us a sense of cohesion firm enough

for us to believe in the hacked performances of the narrative, and the fact that it is

structured like a short film intensifies its criticism. Affect is deployed in the service of analysis, while analytical constructions help us generate affect. And while this

intermingling is quite robust in "Buffy vs Edward," it becomes even more so with

"Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck."

[4.10] The 8minute "Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck" remix is more technically

ambitious than its predecessor, combining clips from over 50 Disney films with

countless Glenn Beck audio snippets. It also employs a firmer method of delineating

each side of its critical pairing: all the remix's visuals are from Disney, while Glenn

Beck intrudes on Donald's world only by means of audio. Most noteworthy, however, is

the increased complexity with which the two media texts interact in a shifting

relationship of sympathy and criticism.

[4.11] Again following the model of narrative short film, McIntosh casts Donald Duck

as an angerprone, laidoff worker who falls for the paranoid racism of media

personality and Tea Party hero Glenn Beck. The remix gives a sympathetic account of

the kind of socioeconomic turmoil that can make Beck's poison seem palatable.

[4.12] To a certain extent, the characterization in this remix operates similarly to

that of "Buffy vs Edward"—our sympathy for Donald functions to undercut Glenn

Beck's phony populism. What is different is that despite being the remix's protagonist,

Donald is not spared criticism when he deserves it. This development can be attributed

more or less directly to McIntosh's further exchanges with vidding after he completed

"Buffy vs Edward." That remix prompted some interesting discussions within fan

communities, which included feedback from fan scholar Kristina Busse (2010): "As

much as I appreciate Jonathan's remix, Buffy vs Edward, I have discussed with him

the way he appropriates one text nearly uncritically to make fun of the other." Busse

points out that love of the source material is a crucial component of vidding, but she

adds that many vidders reach "beyond [that love] and analyze, interpret, and criticize"

their "fannish objects."

[4.13] McIntosh (2010) himself has recently agreed that vidding's longstanding

interchanges between love and critique offer a subtle way of engaging with the

problematic sources of different fandoms, and now we see this principle at play in his

characterization of Donald. If Buffy escapes criticism in McIntosh's remix, Donald Duck

certainly does not.

[4.14] While Donald's economic frustration is portrayed sympathetically, no sympathy is extended to his racist reaction to Glenn Beck's rhetoric. As Beck's hateful

monologues reach a fever pitch, Donald's resulting paranoia is illustrated with some of

Disney's most shameful portrayals of racist stereotypes.

[4.15] By shifting in this way between sympathy and criticism, McIntosh's critique

takes on more significance. The popular appeal of Disney's iconic artwork and

characters contrasts with Glenn Beck's cynical populist facade. And when we see

Disney's racist visuals working in concert with Beck's rants, both sources are

implicated in the same system of white privilege. This remix goes beyond merely

targeting Glenn Beck, focusing instead on his role within broader systems of

domination. The remix acknowledges the legitimate grievances of Tea Party

sympathizers (Rothschild 2010) while condemning the movement's white supremacist

politics (Wise 2010). It paints a detailed picture of the media's role in turning social

and economic devastation to oppressive purposes.

5. Conclusion

[5.1] Coppa points out that vidders have long been comfortable with combining

affect and analysis: "Most fan works seek to unite the analytical mind and the desiring body in order to create a total female subjectivity" (2008, ¶2.19). By adapting the

vidder's analytical and affective eye for narrative and characterization, McIntosh has

built on the critical pairings typical of PRVs, expanding them into pairs of pop culture

worlds that can be compared and contrasted. This interplay between celebratory and

oppositional aesthetics reminds us that there are some priorities shared between those

remixers who aim to disrupt the mass media and those who actively engage with that

same media within a community of fans: each of these practices emerges from the

impulse to draw from the media that pervades our lives and turn it to suit our own

purposes.

[5.2] As the crosspollination between different remixing traditions continues and the

resulting aesthetic resources grow more robust, we may find that remix can offer a

means not only of responding to the commercial media industry, but of replacing it.

5. Works cited

Busse, Kristina. 2010. "Affective Aesthetics." TWC Symposium, November 23.

http://symposium.transformativeworks.org/2010/11/affectiveaesthetics/.

Coppa, Francesca. 2008. "Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish

Vidding." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 1. doi:10.3983/twc.2008.0044.

Coppa, Francesca. 2010. "DIY Media 2010: Fan Vids (Part One)." Confessions of an AcaFan, November 24.

http://henryjenkins.org/2010/11/diy_media_2010_fan_vids.html.

Dery, Mark. 1993. "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of

Signs." Open Magazine Pamphlet Series 25. http://markdery.com/?page_id=154.

Gardner, John. 1991. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. New York: Vintage.

Horwatt, Eli. 2009. "A Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing: Contemporary Found

Footage Practice on the Internet." In Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, edited by Iain Robert Smith, 76–91. A Scope ebook, published by Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies.

http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/cultborr/Cultural_Borrowings_Final.pdf.

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture.

New York: Routledge.

Jenkins, Henry. n.d. "Interactive Audiences? The 'Collective Intelligence' of Media

Fans." http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/collective%20intelligence.html.

McIntosh, Jonathan. 2009. "Total Recut Interviews Jonathan McIntosh about Buffy vs

Edward." Total Recut, December 24. http://www.totalrecut.com/permalink.php?

perma_id=265.

McIntosh, Jonathan. 2010. "DIY Video 2010: Political Remix (Part Three)." Interview by Henry Jenkins. Confessions of an AcaFan, November 17.

http://henryjenkins.org/2010/11/diy_video_2010_political_remix_1.html.

Organization for Transformative Works [OTW]. n.d. "Test Suite of Fair Use Vids."

http://transformativeworks.org/projects/vidtestsuite.

Rothschild, Matthew. 2010. "Chomsky's Nightmare: Is Fascism Coming to America?"

Progressive 74 (6): 14–21. http://www.progressive.org/rothschild0610.html.

Sarkeesian, Anita. 2011. "Hurricane: A Femslash Vid." Political Remix Video, May 11.

http://www.politicalremixvideo.com/2011/05/11/hurricaneafemslashvid/.

Wise, Tim. 2010. "New Report on Tea Party Movement: Racist, Christian Supremacist

Ties Documented." October 20. http://www.timwise.org/2010/10/newreportontea

partymovementracistchristiansupremacisttiesdocumented/.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9 (2012)

Symposium

Abridged series and fandom remix culture

Zephra C. Doerr

Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, United States

[0.1] Abstract— The "abridged series" is one of the more recent genres to come out of the fan culture of anime fan subs. An abridged series is a form of fan parody in

which some of the peculiarities of fan subs are mixed with the more general

conventions of Internet parodies to produce a shortened version of an anime series

with edited video and original dubbedin dialogue. The abridged series is not just a

form of fan translation or a humorous recap of an existing work; rather, because

they are engaged in significant textual criticism, construction of independent

narratives, and interaction with greater fan communities, they should be considered

a unique creative genre of transformative work.

[0.2] Keywords— Anime; Fan vid; YuGiOh: The Abridged Series; Parody

Doerr, Zephra C. 2012. "Abridged Series and Fandom Remix Culture." In

"Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0396.

1. Introduction

[1.1] Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, fans of Japanese animation in countries

without a significant import market, including the United States, began creating what

are now known as fan subs—amateur translations superimposed as subtitles on anime

episodes, using imported or pirated raw video and home editing equipment. These fan

subs were not considered by the creators to be a commercial venture but instead were

circulated personally between fans through mail, at anime conventions, and by

screening them at local anime clubs. As the anime medium increased in popularity

outside of the Japanese market, and as fans had greater access to Japanese cultural

products and their audience through the Internet in the late 1990s and 2000s, this

kind of work expanded to include major fan sub sites hosting dozens or hundreds of

translated anime and liveaction drama series, scanlations of Japanese print comics

and fancreated comics, and recapping and screen capping blogs that mix humorous or

critical summaries of series with still images (Jenkins 2006).

[1.2] One of the more recent genres to come out of this fan culture is the anime

abridged series. An abridged series is a form of fan parody in which some of the

peculiarities of fan subs, such as loose or inaccurate translations, onscreen glosses, and translator commentary (Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez 2006), are mixed with

the more general conventions of Internet parodies to produce a shortened version of

an anime series with edited video and original dubbedin dialogue. First appearing in

2006 with the series YuGiOh: The Abridged Series by online creator LittleKuriboh, in subsequent years, the genre has proliferated, with a number of highprofile creators

and dozens of popular series. The abridged series is not just a form of fan translation

or a humorous recap of an existing work; rather, because they are engaged in

significant textual criticism, construction of independent narratives, and interaction

with greater fan communities, they should be considered a unique creative genre of

transformative work.

2. Narrative criticism for creative reinterpretation

Video 1. YuGiOh: The Abridged Series, episode 7, "Cliffhanger," by LittleKuriboh, August 2006.

[2.1] Most series use a number of different parody techniques to actively engage

with and reinterpret their source material. Abridged series tend to draw their source

from two overlapping groups of shows: series that have a significant Western fan

base, usually as a result of having been dubbed for international television, and series

that rely heavily on the genre conventions of children's fantasy and action stories,

sometimes to the detriment of narrative quality. As a result, the humor of these

parodies often derives from a critical reading of the source material, highlighting the

plot holes and stylistic quirks, the irrational behavior of secondary characters, and the failures of inworld logic that the creators notice in the original shows. Looking at the

video above, the seventh episode of YuGiOh: The Abridged Series, we see multiple examples of this kind of critical humor even within a brief 4minute clip. The opening

sequence satirizes the overdramatic previousepisode recaps by framing them as an

American soap opera. At 1:10, Yugi Muto's incredulous question, "Are you trying to tell me that Kaiba came back from the dead just to play a card game with me?," pokes fun

at the entire premise of the anime series, which is that all matters of life and death

can be resolved by playing a trading card game, while Kaiba's question at 2:00, "How

the hell did I climb up the side of a cliff while holding a briefcase?," highlights a visual plot hole in the episode. At 2.59, LittleKuriboh pauses the narrative so that he can

reshow several clips with the original dialogue to demonstrate the overuse of a gag

line.

[2.2] The characters are even given a metaknowledge of their own status as

narrative objects, making them free to push on the fourth wall in a way impossible for

their original incarnations. When Kaiba describes his own actions at 1:55 as a way of

redeeming himself in the eyes of his fans, he is certainly describing the authorial

narrative purpose of the cutaway scene, but this is not something the character

himself is meant to be aware of. Often in an abridged series, the characters and the

parody creator team up as an allied force, working against the perceived failures of the

show's writers and producers. These parodies rarely passively accept the canonical

material and its authors; although the creators are generally affectionate to their

sources, they treat it as something that can be teased, prodded at, and taken apart as

needed.

[2.3] Aside from this kind of pointed critique, abridged series also provide space for

creative reinterpretation of the source material. Rather than trying to reproduce a

direct pointforpoint abbreviation of the original shows, many abridged series creators

opt for a looser adaption in which repurposed footage illustrates an alternative

narrative arc.

[2.4] The pilot episode of the Death Note: Abridged series by Team Dattebayo, for

example, presents us with the character of Light Yagami ( Death Note: Abridged,

episode 1, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zrJuXVSsA). In the original anime,

Light comes into the possession of a notebook that allows him to kill people, and he

decides to begin mass executing criminals. In this abridged series, Light is determined

to become the most popular anime character in the world by killing off the characters

of other series, beginning with a character in Dragonball Z. Subsequent episodes

expand on this plot, splicing in death scenes from other shows and news broadcasts

about character deaths and programs being canceled. This is not a oneoff joke by the

creators, but a substantive plot arc developed over multiple episodes of the series, in which the motivations and actions of numerous characters and the structure of the

fictional world are altered and called into question.

Video 2. YuGiOh: The Abridged Series, episode 50, "Joey Wheeler Ace Attorney," by LittleKuriboh, October 2010.

[2.5] YuGiOh: The Abridged Series has for the most part stuck to the major plot

arcs and conflicts of the original series. After it was removed several times from

YouTube for copyright violations, however, the series rewrote several episodes into an

encounter with a mysterious organization revealed to be the media company 4Kids

Entertainment—the company responsible for the Englishlanguage dubs of YuGiOh.

What had been simply a filler arc in the original series becomes instead a scathing

critique of the company, culminating in episode 50 with an eloquent defense of fair use

and the value of fan works. The creator repurposes a courtroom scene from the anime

to allow him to put the series itself on trial, using the characters to justify their own

existence by arguing that the abridged series is produced out of a love of the original

work. This has resulted in a much larger fan base for the show. By refuting the claims

of copyright infringement with an inuniverse video, the creator establishes the

abridged series as a truly transformative work, drawing on the canon source but able

to enter into an independent dialogue with it.

3. Alternate character interpretation

[3.1] This element of reinterpretation is obviously not limited to the plot. Abridged series often also play with canon characterization in a number of different ways.

Character traits from the original show may be comically exaggerated—the Yu Yu

Hakusho Abridged Series by Lanipator, for example, takes the canonically dimwitted

tough guy Kuwabara and makes him so stupid he doesn't recognize what a book is.

Oneoff jokes may undergo memetic mutation and develop a life of their own. In video

1 above, a secondary character introduces himself with the phrase, "Attention duelists, my hair has abducted this small child." This recurrent line started in an earlier episode as a brief gag and was popular enough with the fans of the series that it became his

defining character note, reappearing as late in the series as episode 50, long after the

character himself had disappeared from the original anime. More popular jokes may be

adopted by fans to use for macros (humorous images with captions posted in online

discussions) and even commercialized; the Web site hosting YuGiOh: The Abridged

Series includes a store in which fans can buy buttons, posters, and Tshirts imprinted with their favorite lines from the series.

[3.2] Creators may also choose to discard canon characterization and construct their

own versions. They may build off fanpopular readings of the characters, take existing

character details and subtext in a new direction, or just arbitrarily assign humorous

character traits. In many series, this takes the form of a queer reimagining of

character relationships. For example, in episode 14 of Death Note: Abridged, the two protagonists of the series, Light and L, get into a fistfight while handcuffed together.

The abridged series takes a scene that already contains a significant amount of

homoerotic subtext in the original show and gives it a new context by having already

established in earlier episodes an ambiguous sexuality and mutual acknowledged

interest for both characters ( Death Note: The Abridged Series, episode 14,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeE6QnMazTs). Homoerotic moments are

frequently called out and mocked in Yu Yu Hakusho Abridged Series, such as a dream sequence in which two of the male characters kiss for plot purposes. In YuGiOh: The

Abridged Series, the explicitly romantic relationship between the villains Bakura and Marik is frequently referenced, and nearly all of the main characters have had at least

one moment of expressing interest in the same sex. Although it is often treated as

nothing more than a joke, this queer reading of the character interactions does

represent a radical reinterpretation of the source material.

[3.3] These alternative character interpretations can be quite popular with the fan

base. LittleKuriboh's version of the villain Marik in YuGiOh: The Abridged Series,

although radically different from his canon characterization, caught on well enough

that LittleKuriboh produced several spinoffs with him, including villainous sitcom

parodies, musical episodes, and a parody of the Let's Play genre of YouTube video

game commentaries in which Marik plays the game Vampire: The Masquerade. At this

point, Marik of YuGiOh: The Abridged Series can be said to have an existence separate from his canon character, with his own character traits and a unique fan

base. As abridged series and their characters gain popularity in this way, they begin to

push the boundaries between derivative series and creative works. For many series,

fan participation and requests are significantly influential in the direction the creators

take their parodies and side materials, and a number of the most popular series have

come to be treated as independent creative products, with their own fan communities

and reremixes.

4. Abridged series and the fan community

Video 3. "Literal Pants" music video, by LittleKuriboh and Kirbopher, 2010.

[4.1] YuGiOh: The Abridged Series is one of the better examples of an abridged

series being accepted as a fictional universe in its own right by its fan base. To

illustrate some of the various implications of this idea, I use video 3, a fanmade music

video featuring the Abridged Series version of the YuGiOh character Marik. To start, it should be noted that this video is a recursive remix, combining several genres of fan

works at once. It is presented in the title as a literal music video, a YouTubepopularized genre in which a singer describes what is literally happening in a music video to the tune of the original song. The song that this is a literalization of, however, is not an original song itself, but a LittleKuriboh parody of the Lady Gaga song "Bad

Romance" titled "Leather Pants." And, of course, the characters are not the original canon characters, but fananimated versions of fanon characters from a parody series.

Some of the visual humor in "Literal Pants," and the original parody it is based on, draws from canon events from the original show, but just as much of it is selfreferential, based on mocking the fanon characterization of Marik, shoutouts to other creators, and callbacks to jokes and events from the abridged series. While the original

abridged series is made for an audience made up of fans of YuGiOh, this and the

numerous similar music parodies LittleKuriboh has produced are made for an audience

who are fans of YuGiOh: The Abridged Series; they are engaging in it as a nominally original fandom.

[4.2] This identification of YuGiOh: The Abridged Series as a creative work can also be seen in a more negative way in the creator's interactions with the larger anime fan

community. The series frequently draws on this community as a source for their

humor, making jokes about rabid, boyobsessed fangirls, anime fans, and the

prevalence of fan fiction about the characters. In episode 40, for instance, one

character describes a location as one where "spirits of the damned roam freely and

every second is like living in a wideawake nightmare"; another character responds

that this sounds like an anime convention ( YuGiOh: The Abridged Series, episode 40,

http://yugiohabridged.com/pageep40). Although many of the jokes directed toward

the fan base are fond and even at times selfdeprecating, there is often a subtext of

scorn and derision for their obsessions and actions, and this pattern of fanbased jokes

is carried out through many other popular series. This can come across as more than a

little disingenuous because it is the interplay between the creator, the source material,

and the fans that enables them to engage with the original series on this level.

However, it is also a way for the creators to distance themselves from the audience as

fans, creating the implication that there is something fundamentally different between

works like fan fiction or anime music videos and their work. The separation between

abridged series and other fancreated works suggests that the creators, as well as the

fan base, are thinking of them as a creative genre in their own right.

5. Conclusion

[5.1] Anime abridged series are a frequent target for media corporations. YuGiOh:

The Abridged Series is on the fourth iteration of its YouTube account, and at one point changed its title to YuGiOh: The Cancelled Series to reflect the difficulty of keeping the episodes online. As derivative works, abridged series occupy the murky legal

ground of fair use, with the copyright holders challenging them as illegal infringement

and the creators arguing that they constitute allowable parody. In this work, I have

outlined some of the major components of an abridged series—humor as textual

criticism, radical rewriting of story and character, and a direct creative engagement

with the fan base. These qualities support two conclusions: first, that abridged series

are indeed truly transformative works in their approach to their source, and second, that they can be recognized as a unique genre of creative fan work in their own right.

6. Works cited

Díaz Cintas, Jorge, and Pablo Muñoz Sánchez. 2006. "Fansubs: Audiovisual Translation

in an Amateur Environment." Journal of Specialised Translation 6:37–52.

Jenkins, Henry. 2006. "When Piracy Becomes Promotion: How Unauthorized Copying

Made Japanese Animation Profitable in the United States." Reason, December.

http://reason.com/archives/2006/11/17/whenpiracybecomespromotion.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9 (2012)

Symposium

The Star Wars franchise, fan edits, and Lucasfilm

Forrest Phil ips

University of California, Santa Cruz, California, United States

[0.1] Abstract— Fan edits assert that fan authority is on par with that of a work's original creator; this authority is generated not only through the argument, but through the structure of the text itself. Fan edits adhere to classical filmmaking techniques, creating coherent plots and editing for continuity. These recut texts are emblematic of current ownership debates; they are the read/write culture brought to fandom. The Star Wars series of films are among the most

frequently recut texts and are my focus here.

[0.2] Keywords— Fan edit; Fan studies; George Lucas; Textual poaching

Phillips, Forrest. 2012. "The Star Wars Franchise, Fan Edits, and Lucasfilm." In "Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0385.

1. Introduction

[1.1] We love our fans…But if in fact someone is using our characters to create a story

unto itself, that's not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about

celebrating the story the way it is.

—Jim Ward, former vice president of marketing at Lucasfilm

[1.2] Contrary to Jim Ward's statement, there is a long history of fans using video to comment on their favorite texts (Coppa 2008). One example of this is the fan edit, a work in which a fan takes an original text, such as a film, and recuts it to create a new text with a new meaning.

Competing edits are passed around within fandoms, where they act as arguments about the

original text. Fan edits assert that fan authority is on par with that of a work's original creator;

this authority is generated not only through the argument, but through the structure of the text itself. Fan edits adhere to classical filmmaking techniques, creating coherent plots and editing for continuity. These recut texts are emblematic of current ownership debates. They are the

read/write culture brought to fandom (Lessig 2004, 37). The Star Wars series of films are among the most frequently recut texts and are my focus here.

2. Examining fan edits

[2.1] Fan edits are created by fans who take an original work and then use filmmaking

techniques to "reclaim" it. Narrative and reappropration are important to fan edits and vids, but there are some critical differences (Middleton 2010, 121, 126). Fan vids frequently focus on character studies, or they draw out the emotional or internal lives of characters. Fan edits, on the other hand, are only interested in drawing out emotion to the degree that it supports the

narrative (Jenkins 2006, 159–60; Gray 2010, 144). Fan vids are assembled by arranging clips

narrative (Jenkins 2006, 159–60; Gray 2010, 144). Fan vids are assembled by arranging clips from a work to music, while fan edits tend to use the work in its entirety, with clips removed, added, or rearranged according to the editor's preference. Their use of classical Hollywood techniques and the inclusion of the near entirety of the original work assert the fan editor's authority as akin to that of an auteur. The assertion of parity comes from the fact that fan editors perceive their texts as "director's cuts," but made by fans. Fans' right to make these edits has its origins in Michel de Certeau's notion of textual poaching (Kapell 2006, 13; Mason 2009, 86;

Jenkins 1992, 24, 34). De Certeau equated the relationship between a work and its audience with that of roaming nomads taking what they need: "Far from being writers…readers are travelers;

they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves" (2002, 174). Textual poaching is thus framed as being inherently in conflict with content owners. Poaching is typically used as a way to queer a text, but fans can also use it to claim ownership. Henry Jenkins argues this point:

[2.2] The ideology of fandom involves both a commitment to some degree of

conformity to the original program materials as well as a perceived right to evaluate the

legitimacy of any use of those materials, either by textual producers or by textual

consumers…Such a relationship obligates fans to preserve a certain degree of fidelity to

program materials, even as they seem to rework them towards their own ends. (2000,

486)

[2.3] Jenkins thus describes the way fan editors adhere to the plotlines of original works while altering them to fit their own interpretations. Jenkins highlights the fact that poaching is a way for fans to take a mass culture product and retool it into a personally significant text (2000, 472) .

[2.4] Fan edits exist between the two poles occupied by vidding and fan films. Vids focus on characters' internal lives and are typically gendered as a feminine form of fan production (Jenkins 2006, 159; Gray 2010, 144). Fan films affirm the existing narrative and are typically gendered as masculine (Derecho 2008, 215). Fan edits are gendered as neutral in that they recontextualize a source by editing it but typically reaffirm the broad strokes of the foundational narrative. In the Star Wars fan edit oeuvre, Luke Skywalker always destroys the Death Star, but the way he does so can change. Fan films and edits are often (at least overtly) apolitical, while the most heralded fan vids articulate a strong political perspective. For example, Luminosity's fan vid "Women's Work" critiques Supernatural's misogynistic depiction of women as only being villains, victims, or

vixens (http://blip.tv/luminosity/womenswork2317110). Fan edits and vids only use existing material, while fan films create new content. Fan films do not challenge the established hierarchy.

This is why Lucasfilm hosts its own Fan Film Festival, providing the fan films an official home;

such official forums do not exist for vids and fan edits (Jenkins 2006, 135). In fact, works that expand on the Star Wars universe are explicitly forbidden by Lucasfilm (Jenkins 2006, 159; Gray 2010, 165).

3. The Phantom Edit

[3.1] The first prominent Star Wars fan edit was The Phantom Edit, which circulated around Hollywood on videotape in 2001 (Kraus 2001). It is a typical Star Wars fan edit in that it was

presented as an attempt to turn cinematic lead into gold (note 1). The Phantom Editor, aka Mike Nichols, has said that his intent was to turn Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)

Nichols, has said that his intent was to turn Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) into a stronger film by bringing it in line with the filmmaking philosophy that George Lucas espoused while making the original Star Wars trilogy (Fausset 2002; Kraus 2001; Wortham

2008).

Video 1. "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Edit (Commentary Track)," by The Phantom Editor (2011).

[3.2] The main element that Nichols sought to adopt was an emphasis on story over special

effects (Plinkett 2009b). As an example, Nichols completely cut the sequence where QuiGon, Obi

Wan, and Jar Jar pilot a "bongo" through the core of the planet Naboo (Kapell 2006, 254; Rafferty and Snierson 2001). Additionally, he trimmed as much of Jar Jar's antics as possible and trimmed Anakin Skywalker's dialogue to transform his character from a young boy who stumbles through every crisis into a quiet prodigy (Kapell 2006, 254; Kraus 2001). What's fascinating about this positioning is that Nichols attempted to edit a film directed by George Lucas to make it adhere to the style of a film directed by George Lucas. This frames fan poaching of texts as akin to

restoration, and Nichols presents himself as the equivalent of a young Lucas. His edit is more than a humble fan's revision of a disappointing product. It is the one true successor to Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983). This implies that Lucas is now unfit to shepherd the Star Wars franchise, and thus the fans must take control. This fan approach is a common one: fan poachers are often moved by a desire to protect a franchise from its creator (Jenkins 2000, 472).

It also stands in opposition to many vids and other forms of fan creation, which embrace their marginality to enable greater creativity (Tushnet 2007, 67).

[3.3] The elements cut in The Phantom Edit are the ones most directly targeted toward children.

As Jonathan Gray put it, fancreated paratexts work as "highlighters and underliners," which suggest a specific path through a text (2010, 154). The Phantom Edit thus supports

interpretations of the film that deemphasize the importance of childish elements such as Jar Jar Binks. This reflects a broader critique that the prequels in general, and specifically The Phantom Menace, are too juvenile (Geraghty 2009, 114; Mason 2009, 86). This criticism's claim of legitimacy stems in part from the fact that Lucasfilm made a deal with Hasbro to produce toys based on the prequels (Bowen 2005, 12). The prequels' defenders use this as evidence that those who bash them simply failed to view the films through the eyes of children (Gray 2010, 184).

These disagreements have led to the creation of two distinct camps: the gushers, who defend

These disagreements have led to the creation of two distinct camps: the gushers, who defend Lucas's recent work, and the bashers, who are critical of it (Brooker 2002, 97; Johnson 2007, 290).

[3.4] This discourse is worth mentioning for two reasons. First, The Phantom Edit represents one of these competing truths and acted as a clarion call to the bashers (Brooker 2002, 92). Second, it helped establish the niche of antiprequel fan creation. The very fans who sang its praises also promoted Red Letter Media. Of course, there is division even within the basher community.

Plinkett, author of a YouTube review of The Phantom Menace, and others villainize Lucas, while The Phantom Edit's opening crawl characterizes it as a friendly disagreement. Nichols apologizes if his edit offends Lucas, while Plinkett curses at him (Plinkett 2009a). Fandoms write their own hegemonic histories, as this debate with the Star Wars fandom indicates (Johnson 2007, 287).

The Phantom Edit's place within the fan community will be largely determined by which of these truths becomes the consensus.

4. The auteur strikes back

[4.1] The main barrier preventing these fan edits from reaching an audience beyond fan

communities is their legal ambiguity. The production of fan edits requires the circumvention of copy protection, which is illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (Landy and

Mastrobattista 2008, 28). Additionally, the distribution of a fan edit is by necessity also a distribution of significant portions of the original film, which is also illegal. Fan editors attempt to skirt this latter issue by insisting on two golden rules (Fanedits.com 2011). First, a fan edit should only be downloaded by someone who owns a retail copy of the original film. This rule goes

unenforced and appears to be an attempt to avoid having content taken down by the MPAA, as

happened in December 2008 (Young 2008). Second, a fan edit must be nonprofit. This latter point arose in part because Lucasfilm Ltd. has made it clear that they're ready, willing, and able to sue anyone who tries to make a profit on a fan edit (Zalewski 2002). George Lucas himself has even indicated that these edits are only problematic if they intend to generate revenue: "Everybody wants to be a filmmaker. Part of what I was hoping for with making movies in the first place was to inspire people to be creative. The Phantom Edit was fine as long as they didn't start selling it"

(Balkin 2004, 8). Yet Lucasfilm contradicted this statement when they sent Nichols a veiled threat about The Phantom Edit, even though Nichols never sold a single copy:

[4.2] When we first heard about the [reedits], we realized that these were fans having

some fun with "Star Wars," which we've never had a problem with. But over the last 10

days, this thing has grown and taken on a life of its own—as things sometimes do when

associated with "Star Wars."…And, when we started hearing about massive duplication and distribution, we realized then that we had to be very clear that duplication and

distribution of our materials is an infringement. And so we just kind of want to put

everybody on notice that that is indeed the case. (Kraus 2001)

[4.3] Lucasfilm is primarily motivated by a desire to enforce its storytelling primacy, as indicated by Jim Ward's insistence that "fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is" (Jenkins 2006, 153). While fans are used to the existence of "rival truths" about a media property, Lucasfilm claims the authority to determine Star Wars's single valid truth (Johnson 2007, 287). This

explains why fan editors work together in a spirit of collaboration while Lucasfilm stands in opposition to certain types of fan activity. This is a predictable response from a company formed

opposition to certain types of fan activity. This is a predictable response from a company formed in 1971, when storytelling was a oneway street and creators had little patience for poaching (Lessig 2004, 37; "Lucasfilm Ltd." 2011). This idea is further enforced by their long history of aggressive copyright defense, which includes lawsuits inspired by a wide range of fan activities such as fan production of erotic Star Wars material and a prop maker who worked on Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) and went on to sell unauthorized replicas of storm trooper helmets (Jenkins 2006, 155; NPR 2011). These legal defenses are based on the same idea of the auteur's primacy that animates their opposition to fan edits. Lucasfilm may produce and sell replicas of storm trooper helmets (Entertainment Earth 2011). Fans may not. Lucasfilm may

produce edited versions of the films. Fans may not. There is no room for fan restoration here. The Phantom Edit is one of the few fan edits to garner mainstream attention. No other fan edit, whether for a Star Wars film or for another franchise, has even come close. The Phantom Edit was featured in the Los Angeles Times and reviewed by the Chicago Tribune (Fausset 2002;

Wilmington 2001). Even though he eventually clamped down on it when its exposure rivaled that of The Phantom Menace, George Lucas was reportedly delighted by it (BBC News 2001).

[4.4] The philosophy behind the new Bluray version of The Phantom Menace and The Phantom Edit is the same. Lucas has returned to his film just as a fan editor would. The largest difference between the two is the environment in which they were produced. The Bluray Phantom Menace is not the theatrical film. The puppet Yoda featured in the film has been replaced by the CGI Yoda from Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002) and Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005) (0neWayStudios 2011). Effects have been changed, and many shots have had their composition altered (DVD News 2011). If anything, these changes are far more extensive than those in The Phantom Edit, which relies solely on editing to tweak the source and create a new text. Lucas's auteur status and control of production gave his edit broader public exposure and claimed greater legitimacy, even though Lucas's edit has less in common with the theatrical cut than Nichols's: Lucas altered almost every shot, while Nichols only cut 18 minutes (Rafferty and Snierson 2001).

5. Conclusion

[5.1] In contrast to fan vids, which use music video techniques, and fan films, which work with independently created and produced content, fan edits are unique in fan production: they are the only form that uses classic Hollywood techniques to alter a Hollywood product for fan purposes—

that is, they are the only kind of fan video production that uses the methods of content producers to subvert those very producers. Fan edits are often met with an unease and hostility that arise from a belief that only the auteur and auteurauthorized sources have the right to create recuts, as exemplified by The Phantom Edit. It remains to be seen whether this hostility will persist or whether fan edits are part of a surge in fan production that will reshape the mass media

landscape.

4. Note

1. However, not all Star Wars fan edits are based on the prequels. Adywan (2011) edited the 2004 DVD release of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) to update the special effects and make the film more consistent with the prequels. Some fan edits focus on alteration rather than restoration, such as The War of the Stars, which is an attempt to turn Star Wars into a grindhouse

restoration, such as The War of the Stars, which is an attempt to turn Star Wars into a grindhouse film (The Man Behind the Mask 2011).

7. Works cited

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http://fanedit.org/517/.

Balkin, Jack M. 2004. "Digital Speech and Democratic Culture: A Theory of Freedom of Expression for the Information Society." Faculty Scholarship Series, Paper 240.

http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/240.

BBC News. 2001. "Mystery of Star Wars Phantom Edit." BBC News, June 7.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/1375742.stm.

Bowen, Jonathan L. 2005. Anticipation: The Real Life Story of "Star Wars, Episode I—The Phantom Menace." New York: IUniverse.

Brooker, Will. 2002. Using the Force: Creativity, Community, and "Star Wars" Fans. New York: Continuum.

Coppa, Francesca. 2008. "Women, Star Trek, and the early development of fannish vidding."

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de Certeau, Michel. 2002. The Practice of Everyday Life. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Derecho, Abigail T. 2008. "Illegitimate Media: Race, Gender and Censorship in Digital Remix Culture." PhD diss., Northwestern University.

DVD News. 2011. "Star Wars: The Changes." DVD News, September 16.

http://www.dvdactive.com/editorial/articles/starwarsthechangespartfour.html.

Entertainment Earth. 2011. "Star Wars Stormtrooper Collector Helmet—Rubies—Star Wars—

Costumes at Entertainment Earth." Entertainment Earth.

http://www.entertainmentearth.com/prodinfo.asp?number=RU65005.

Fanedits.com. 2011. "Frequently Asked Questions." Fanedits.com. http://originaltrilogy.com/fan

edits/faneditfaqs.cfm#distribution.

Fausset, Richard. 2002. "A Phantom Menace?" Los Angeles Times, June 1.

http://articles.latimes.com/2002/jun/01/entertainment/etfausset1.

Geraghty, Lincoln. 2009. American Science Fiction Film and Television. London: Berg.

Gray, Jonathan. 2010. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press.

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge.

Jenkins, Henry. 2000. "Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching." In

Television: The Critical View, edited by Horace Newcomb, 470–94. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Johnson, Derek. 2007. "Fantagonism." In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 285–300. New York: New York University Press.

Kapell, Matthew W., and John S. Lawrence. 2006. Finding the Force of the Star Wars Franchise: Fans, Merchandise, and Critics. New York: Peter Lang.

Kraus, Daniel. 2001. "'The Phantom Edit'— Star Wars." Salon.com, November 5.

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q=cache:eAjHm_vIM9gJ:www.salon.com/2001/11/05/phantom_edit/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us.

Landy, Gene K., and Amy J. Mastrobattista. 2008. The IT/Digital Legal Companion: A

Comprehensive Business Guide to Software, Internet, and IP Law. Amsterdam: Syngress/Elsevier.

Lessig, Lawrence. 2004. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin.

Lessig, Lawrence. 2005. "Creatives Face a Closed Net." Financial Times, December 28.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/d55dfe5277d211da96700000779e2340.html.

"Lucasfilm Ltd.: Private Company Information." Bloomberg.com, July 26.

http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=902479.

The Man Behind the Mask. 2010. "The War of the Stars: A New Hope Grindhoused." FanEdit.org.

http://fanedit.org/8392/.

Mason, Matt. 2009. The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism. New York: Free Press.

Middleton, Kim. 2010. "Alternate Universes on Video." In Writing and the Digital Generation: Essays on New Media Rhetoric, edited by Heather Urbanski, 117–31. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

NPR. 2011. "Stormtrooper Helmet Maker Wins Legal Battle." NPR, July 28.

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0newaystudios. 2011. "The CGI Yoda for the Star Wars Release on Bluray (The Phantom

Menace)." YouTube, August 30. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KH1GOFUCHk.

Plinkett. 2009a. "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review (Part 4 of 7)." YouTube, December 10.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOlG4T1S2lU.

Plinkett. 2009b. "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review (Part 6 of 7)." YouTube, December 11.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORWPCCzSgu0.

Rafferty, Brian M., and Dan Snierson. 2001. "Missing Binks." EW.com, June 25.

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http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,131754,00.html.

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Wilmington, Michael. 2001. " Star Wars Phantom Edit: Good, Not Better than the Original."

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18/features/0106180230_1_starwarslukeskywalkerjarjarbinks.

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Zalewski, Daniel. 2002. "Thinking These Thoughts Is Prohibited." New York Times, January 6.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/06/books/thinkingthesethoughtsisprohibited.html?src=pm.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9 (2012)

Interview

Documenting the vidders: A conversation with Bradcpu

Counteragent

[0.1] Abstract— Interview with Bradcpu, conducted by Counteragent.

[0.2] Keywords— Fan community; Fan vid; Mashup

Counteragent. 2012. "Documenting the Vidders: A Conversation with Bradcpu." In

"Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0423.

1. Introduction

[1.1] Bradcpu is a vidder and a vid community moderator. He was a cojudge of the

Friendly Neighborhood Video Awards, a tournamentstyle vid contest with explicitly

articulated aesthetic and technical rules, and he currently cojudges The Fourth Wall

video awards. He is a moderator of the Vid Commentary community, dedicated to

analysis and critical commentary. Brad is also the director of the Vidder Profiles, a

series of short documentary films by and about vidders. Each profile features "excerpts from the vidder's work from throughout the years along with an interview with the

vidder about his or her style, approach, and general thoughts on vidding" (Vidder

Profile series intro post, http://vidcommentary.livejournal.com/3658.html). The series

was founded in 2009, and as of this writing, nine vidders have been profiled so far.

You can find out more about the series by checking out Fanlore's page on the Vidder

Profiles (http://fanlore.org/wiki/Vidder_Profile).

[1.2] This interview was conducted by Counteragent, a vidder particularly known for

her meta vids—that is, vids about vidding or about the fan community itself. Her vid

"Destiny Calling" celebrates the 35year history of media vidding fandom, and her Supernatural vid "Still Alive," about the show and its fandom, was the subject of Katherina Freund's essay, "'I'm glad we got burned, think of all the things we learned': Fandom Conflict and Context in Counteragent's 'Still Alive,'" which appeared in

Transformative Works and Culture' s fourth issue (doi:10.3983/twc.2010.0187). This interview was conducted online and edited for clarity.

2. The Vidder Profiles

[2.1] Q: What made you want to make the Vidder Profiles?

[2.2] BC: A few years ago, a gift community was created on LJ for kiki_miserychic's birthday. I wanted to show her how much I admired her work but didn't have a lot of

time to dedicate to a vid project. So I just slapped together a very very basic "top 5

favorite moments from your vids," with a cheesy #5–#1 countdown between them. I

regretted that when all of the gifts were revealed and I saw what other people had

made. For instance, Charmax made her amazing "Unnatural Selection" vid for it.

[2.3] Over the next few days, I started thinking about how I could revise and expand

my idea, maybe even with the vidder commenting on the moments in question and

how they came about. Around that time, I saw an early version of dragonchic's "Break

Teen Spirit in Four Minutes" Club Vivid vid for "Wanted," and it included one of the most memorable segments I've ever seen in a vid. So I asked dragonchic about that

segment, then eventually asked her if she'd be willing to put her thoughts down on

audio. The project expanded until it covered many of her recent vids and her thoughts

about vidding.

[2.4] I really enjoyed doing it, and thought "Hey, I could sucker other people into

doing this and gain even more knowledge! Muahahahaah!" Except without the laugh…

For all you know. No one can prove anything.

[2.5] I showed dragonchic's nowfinished profile to other people—kiki_miserychic and

Charmax first—and they said they'd be willing to do the same thing. Within a few

months, I had a halfdozen interviews and a folder filled with vidders' catalogues.

[2.6] Q: They are so complex! And yet seem totally effortless. In brief, what's your process for making them? Do you start with questions and then pick vids to illustrate

their answers, like vidding to a song source?

[2.7] BC: I take more or less the same approach I do when writing a story for a

newspaper or magazine: I gather the facts, then look for patterns and metaphors and

start and end points, and try to put it all together in a way that tells a story.

[2.8] So, first, I watch all of the vidder's available work. Then I come up with

questions based on things I've seen about their work that I find uniquely appealing.

Once the responses come back, I try to choose clips that illustrate the vidder's point,

or that sync with emotional tone of the sentiment or comment.

[2.9] In other words, the comments dictate the clip choices, not the other way

around.

[2.10] Q: One of the things I love so much about the vidder profiles is that the subjects come off as quite selfactualized. You actually almost believe their claims that they've found a balance between public reception of their work and internal fulfillment.

Were you trying to bring that out?

[2.11] BC: I think inside each of us is the person we want to be. I think there's a little bit of perfection in all of us. Especially these people. I like highlighting that

because these people really do feel like heroes to me, each in his or her own way, and

I want to show why.

[2.12] Q: In a few words, what are your favorite moments in each profile? I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours!

[2.13] BC: Oh god, really? I mean…it's basically a matter of picking my favorite

moment from my favorite vids. I'm usually just relieved if the vidder doesn't get

offended by how I've used the clips.

[2.14] As far as my influence, and how they're recontextualized within the profile, I

guess in general I'm pretty happy with how most of the profiles begin and end. I try to

start them with a thesis statement, and end them with a sort of summation. In that

way, the beginning of Mister Anderson's profile is maybe my favorite. But I kind of like

all of the openings, to be honest.

Vidder Pro le: Mister Anderson

Video 1. Mister Anderson's profile, from the Vidder Profiles by Bradcpu (2010).

[2.15] Q: I think you did a great job with the thesis and conclusion statements! I like the beginning of each as well; I particularly loved that you chose a picture to represent

some of the vidders—very metaviddy. You also make some wonderful analytical

connections. For example, in Mister Anderson's voiceover, he contrasts being an

editor for pay and an editor for love, and you visually pair that comment with Iron Man's Tony Stark discovering he had few, if any, limits to his power. Or the way you

juxtapose Charmax's wry surprise at finding herself a champion of female

characters/femmeslash ("[is it] odd to think strong minded women are awesome[?]") with Alias's Sydney stroking the wall with her [riding] crop.

Vidder Pro le

Video 2. Charmax's profile, from the Vidder Profiles by Bradcpu (2009).

3. Vidding for fun and profit

[3.1] Q: You're a professional editor in real life, right? How did you get into vidding for fun, not profit?

[3.2] BC: Well, the vidding came first, and that led to the professional editing.

[3.3] It started for me the same way that I suspect it has for many other vidders:

hearing music and seeing clips from TV shows in my head, lining up with the music

and lyrics of the song.

[3.4] Back when Angel season 1 was airing, I remember watching the scene in the

episode "Five By Five" in which Faith is dancing and fighting, and picturing that scene mixed with shots from her whole character arc to that song. The idea kept gnawing at

me, and at one point I thought about looking into the cost of mixing equipment (the

kind that was used at TV stations at the time) in order to make it. But the years went

by, and it faded a bit.

[3.5] In 2007, an online friend who, like me, was into writing Firefly fan fiction, suggested I give vidding a try. I had never even heard of vidding, much less seen a

vid. She sent me software and instructions, and I literally followed her stepbystep email for how to make a clip and place it in Windows Movie Maker, in order to make my first vid. Yeah, I made about 10 more in the next two months. This is your brain on vid

farr.

[3.6] I think I was three vids in before I ever watched a vid by someone else. I got a

lot less awful after doing so. Imagine that.

[3.7] Q: Imagine that, indeed! I always tell new vidders to watch more vids than

they think they need to. Trust me, guys, you need to. We all do.

4. Two meta vids: "Hard Sun" (with Laura Shapiro) and

"CITIHALL*"

[4.1] Q: Let's compare and contrast your vids "Hard Sun" (2009, Firefly, made with Laura Shapiro) and "CITIHALL*" (2010, Futurama). I think that together they paint a fantastically nuanced view of geek culture (and of vidding culture specifically, but I

think it's larger than that). Am I way off?

[4.2] BC: It wasn't what I set out to do, but I hope you're right. Can you be right, please? 'Cause that sounds awesome and I want to be that. All I know is what I set

out to do with each.

[4.3] With "Hard Sun," I wanted to express what Firefly and fandom—specifically, Firefly fandom—mean to me. It's something shared. Painful, yes, but in the end it's something that unites us.

Video 3. "Hard Sun," Firefly fan vid, by Bradcpu and Laura Shapiro (2009).

[4.4] Q: Painful because Firefly only lasted one season? Because what I got from that vid was joyous obsession and a sense of a strong community. Which sums up the

happy sides of fandom, to me. I also got, "You can totally use original footage in a vid, especially a metavid," which was obviously eyeopening to me as a vidder. (I used

original footage in my most recent vid, "Coin Operated Boy" [2011, Supernatural. ])

[4.5] BC: It's quite flattering that it influenced you in that way! I never set out to influence anyone, so hearing something like that is…quite surreal.

[4.6] Yes, I've always found Firefly a bit bittersweet because, despite all of the joy surrounding the show and the fandom, it only lasted a halfseason (plus a glorious but

quite downbeat movie) and that Firefly—the one the fans all fell in love with—is never coming back. Not the way it was. So in a sense it's like celebrating a memory. When

friends tell me they're about to watch Firefly for the first time, I always feel a mixture of envy and sympathy.

[4.7] "CITIHALL*" was, um, a bit different. I set out to make a celebratory "FU" to Fox, after the syndicated ratings basically forced them to bring Futurama back to the air several years after it had been canceled. At the same time, I thought it would be

fun to show what it would be like if the inmates ran the prison of network television.

(And sometimes I feel like they do, for better or worse. Everyone does indeed love

Hypnotoad.) ["Everybody Loves Hypnotoad" is a television show within Futurama; the show's entire focus is the Hypnotoad, a toad with large, oscillating eyes who keeps

viewers, well, hypnotized.]

[4.8] Q: Are the inmates the fans or the "real" producers? I think you're saying it's both? When I saw the vid, I definitely saw the heroes as fans who've suddenly gained

creative control. So to me it was a celebration of fans' power (getting the show back

on the air), but a reminder about the potential limits of faninfluenced media.

Sometimes the stories fans most want to hear are not the most dramatically

generative ones. (We tend to clamor for reconciliation a lot, for one.)

[4.9] You can watch "CITIHALL*" and say, "Haha, good thing we fans aren't in charge," and yet the very quality of the vid itself is its own counterargument. It's

funny, it's pointed, it works on at least three different levels, and it's a sublime

example of remix culture (a lot of people I saw it with couldn't believe the song hadn't

been written for the vid). So what does separate the best fan producers from the real, anointed producers? Not talent, as far as I can tell.

[4.10] So if "Hard Sun" is about the shared sourcelove and the community it

creates, "CITIHALL*" gently lampoons fans' endless armchair quarterbacking while

proving that sometimes the armchair quarterbacks are pretty awesome.

Futurama - CITIHALL

Video 4. "CITIHALL*," Futurama fan vid, by Bradcpu (2010).

[4.11] BC: Remixers are pretty awesome, aren't they? While making "CITIHALL*," I remember certain other shows being renewed over cries of "NOOOooooOOOO!" from

the shows' hardcore viewers—fan bases that had been propping up (and, some would

say, having an influence on the canon) for years. I was somewhat baffled, both by the

renewals and the reactions. Then those fan bases immediately went gaga once again

over the shows once they returned to the air.

[4.12] I definitely do not claim to understand The TV Powers That Be or fandom.

Sometimes they seem difficult to separate. Sure is fun to vid, though!

5. Criteria for recommending, analyzing, and judging fan vids

[5.1] Q: Not only do many of your best known vids have a heavy metaanalysis

component ("Hard Sun," "CITIHALL*"), but you also tend to recommend vids heavy on community/social critique (e.g., Luminosity, "She's So Heavy," 2005, Buffy The Vampire Slayer; Sisabet and Sweetestdrain, "On the Prowl," 2010, multi; Jarrow,

"Tandemonium," 2010, Battlestar Galactica). You're a sophisticated evaluator of the vidding community, having previously cojudged the Friendly Neighborhood Video

Awards, currently judging at The Fourth Wall, and directing these vidder profiles. What

do you enjoy about the analytical power of vids, and what are their limitations?

[5.2] BC: I think meta vids are arguments, or statements, and like all such things, they invite agreement and disagreement (or confusion, if they're poorly made). And

because they focus on subject matter and source material and people about which

most of us are very very passionate, they invite very strong agreement and

disagreement.

[5.3] That's why I think meta vids that make their points in an especially effective, impactful way are among the most admirable of all fannish creations. They can be

evocative and uniquely powerful. But using beloved images and actors and shows to

make a statement to/about the audience can also be a risky thing. It can be easy for

vids like that to come across as the vidder having warped the beloved images in order

to use them in a selfish and insulting way.

[5.4] I've watched a metavid before and felt angry and hurt because I felt the vidder

took the images out of context specifically to make them seem socially reprehensible,

while ignoring the clips within the same scenes that ruin the argument. Then I quietly

listened to everyone react with "Wow, that show and everyone involved with it is the

devil!" (Paraphrasing, but you get the idea. I hope.) I honestly hope no one has ever

felt that way about one of my vids.

[5.5] Q: Yeah, ditto for mine but I strongly suspect that is not the case. It's hard to know where to draw that line of condemnation, though. I essentially think it's an

emotional choice, not a logical one. One person's shitstirringattentionwhoring vid

may be another's desperate, personal cry. There are a number of vids I don't agree

with (and thus don't like) even if I think they've made legitimate points well. (Which is

not to say all vids are created equal. Some are definitely more cogent.)

[5.6] Vidding is a blunt instrument for all its complexity. Every vidder is guilty of cutting clips that ignore their context or the fluctuations in canon that may negate

them. In essence, that is what all vids do—they say, "this is the way I want you to see this source."

[5.7] The hypothesis one starts out with has to be very, very simple to be effective,

especially in a meta vid, where you are expecting the audience to parse the meta and

original meanings for each clip at the same time. So a vid pointing out that sexual

engagement without specific consent in Dollhouse is rape ("It Depends On What You Pay," by Gianduja Kiss, 2009, Dollhouse) isn't going to showcase complex character arcs or even original authorial intent. It can't, not if it's going to make any sense.

[5.8] BC: I agree, and the vid you used as an example does that extremely well. I

agree, as well, about the fact that the reaction to vids (particularly meta vids) can be a

very personal thing.

[5.9] One of the reasons I love vidding so much is because of the escapism it offers

me. I've worked in a newsroom for the last 15 years, always on deadline, and

constantly immersed in realworld current events, social strife, and tragedies. Vidding

gives me both an escape from that and a different kind of creative outlet. Because of

that, I usually tend to gravitate more toward scifi and steer clear of more gritty, real

world shows and fandoms. Even TV or movie versions of realworld gore or crime actually make me physically ill.

[5.10] When doing meta vids, I try to focus on things that unite us as fans—shared

experiences and common bonds. As a viewer, I often have a negative reaction to vids

that manipulate these shows in order to make a critical statement about the show, the

fandom, or realworld society as a whole—mainly because I see these shows, and

vidding itself, as my escape from such things. I prefer less Fox News in my vidding.

Those kinds of personal reactions to vids can be very strong, and can vary so much

from person to person. That's something over which the vidder has little control, and

that's probably the biggest limitation I've run across in the medium.

[5.11] But I don't think the vidder should be able to control such personal reactions.

All that matters is that the vidder creates what he or she wants to create, and does it

with a very wellmade vid. That's what the vidder has control over: the clarity, skill,

and flair with which the statement is made.

[5.12] Q: Yeah, agreed. The only thing you can do is make the best, most coherent

piece you can. And if your piece has negative aspects, you have to search your own

soul and make sure you think it's something that needs saying, that it's not just a bid

for attention.

[5.13] Your point about escapism is interesting. For me, the nuclear fusion that

powers fandom is and always will be squee: our enthusiasm and joy. Without squee,

we are shriveled harpies. But I don't think that escapism and metaanalysis are

opposites. They can exist in the same vid, and certainly within the same vidder's

oeuvre. My favorite vidders make all kinds of vids, from the

"OMG*THIS*SHIP*IZ*CUUUUTE" vid to the "Huh, let's take a look at the fannish practice of XYZ again, shall we?" vid.

6. A male vidder in a female vidding culture

[6.1] Q: Liveaction media vidding on LiveJournal has a femalecentric history and

mostly female participants. Is it weird being a dude here?

[6.2] BC: I feel weird pretty much everywhere. So, status quo.

[6.3] The gender divide is definitely something that's not easy to miss. I'm drawn to

vid mostly female characters and 'ships, and the opposite is true for most of the

people I've run across in vidding. Feminism and m/m slash are more popular topics

among my vidder friends than TV shows or fandom itself. I certainly don't see any of

that as a bad thing (!), it's just hard to miss the fact that I'm very clearly a minority in the community.

[6.4] There have been times when I've been in a group of vidders and they've made

some angry, sweeping generalizations about men, specifically about men my age and

my race and my sexuality, apparently without realizing I was even there. I suppose

that's a compliment, now that I think about it, but at the time I just felt rather alone.

Those situations have been the (very rare) exceptions, though. Through vidding, I've

met some of the best friends of my life. And I've never felt as though I belong

somewhere as much as I do here.

[6.5] Q: Aw! Well, this weirdo is glad you're here. And I do believe you've just

summed up why we love the community even more than we love the sources that

inspire it. As a sidenote, I find the online aspect of the community very freeing

because it comes without a lot of the baggage of inperson interactions. I'm glad I got

the chance to know the attendees of Vividcon through their work first and vice versa. I

don't want to have to worry if this vid makes my ass look fat, you know?

[6.6] BC: Well said! It really changes everything when you get to know someone first through their work. It's like seeing their soul before you see their face.

[6.7] Q: Final question: You can only do one for the rest of your life: make vids or watch other people's vids. What do you choose?

[6.8] BC: I've gotta vid.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9 (2012)

Interview

Interview with Eric Faden and Nina Paley

Brett Boessen

Austin Col ege, Sherman, Texas, United States

[0.1] Abstract— Interview with Eric Faden and Nina Paley, conducted by Brett

Boessen.

[0.2] Keywords— Copyright; Digital Millennium Copyright Act; Fair use

Boessen, Brett. 2012. "Interview with Eric Faden and Nina Paley." In "Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue,

Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0388.

1. Introduction

[1.1] Cultural production in the 21st century is a process deeply intertwined with

questions of ownership and control. If an artist wants to create an intellectual work

today, she must contend with the intricacies of copyright and fair use, attending to the

often finely grained details of copyright law.

[1.2] In the United States, these laws have seen some shifts in the past decade, but

for the most part, they remain linked to much older cultural discourses shaped at a

time when the physical forms of creative works were far less malleable than they are

today. In the 1970s, when the Copyright Act (http://copyright.gov/title17/) was

enacted, forms of media and art such as the filmstrip and the printed book dominated

the cultural landscape. At that time, it likely seemed unnecessary to make more

specific allowances for transformations of existing works into new forms than the brief

fair use clause that the act provided.

[1.3] However, in the intervening years, much has changed. The technological tools

for transforming existing works have not only multiplied and increased in complexity,

but they have also been effectively democratized because of their often significantly

reduced cost and nearubiquitous networked availability. Publishers and editors may

no longer stand as primary gatekeepers to most creative works; increasingly, works

are assessed in the public sphere through online databases like YouTube, and creators

are making more works than ever before. Many such works rely heavily on the public

domain, fair use, and the rich cultural soil of previous works for their efficacy and quality.

[1.4] Yet the old laws remain, often causing social friction as new kinds of uses of

existing material come into conflict with increasingly outdated modes of control. New

laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi

bin/query/z?c105:H.R.2281.ENR:) only complicate matters. Instead of having one law

to cover creative work, the DMCA effectively increased that count to two, one covering

analog media and another covering digital. Further complicating matters are the

actions of the Librarian of Congress, who has asserted some of his authority in

granting limited exemptions to certain groups of creators, such as documentary

filmmakers and film and media students. However, all of these changes have only

increased the complexity of the system for artists who just want to make something

compelling—who just want to make art.

[1.5] It is in this context that Eric Faden and Nina Paley have been working for years,

and it is that context that shaped my March 2011 interview with them.

[1.6] Paley, an independent artist, released Sita Sings the Blues

(http://sitasingstheblues.com/) in 2008, only to have the copyright holders of many of

the songs by Annette Hanshaw that she had used in the film threaten legal action if

they were not paid for their use (even though Hanshaw's recordings are from the

1920s). Paley has since spoken about and created works that address these issues,

including a series called Minute Memes, short video pieces for the Web focused on

copyrightrelated themes such as "Copying Is Not Theft."

Copying Is Not Theft - Of cial Version

Video 1. "Copying Is Not Theft," by Nina Paley (2010).

[1.7] Faden, a member of the Bucknell film/media studies faculty, created "A Fair(y) Use Tale" in response to the broader context in which such legal wrangling has taken

place, essentially giving visual and aural life to an essay on copyright and fair use by

stitching together hundreds of clips from Disney animated films. (Disney is a

notoriously litigious copyright owner.)

A Fair(y) Use Tale

Video 2. "A Fair(y) Use Tale" by Eric Faden (2007).

[1.8] Because both of them have been so closely connected to the legal and ethical

questions related to copying, fair use, and transformative works, I wanted to give

them the opportunity to talk about their experiences for Transformative Works and

Cultures. This is the result.

2. Video interview

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9 (2012)

Interview

Desiree D'Alessandro and Diran Lyons bear arms: Weapons of mass

transformation

Desiree D'Alessandro

Tampa, Florida, United States

Diran Lyons

Clovis, California, United States

[0.1] Abstract— Interview with Diran Lyons, conducted by Desiree D'Alessandro.

[0.2] Keywords— Art; Performance; Remix; Review; Video

D'Alessandro, Desiree, and Diran Lyons. 2012. "Desiree D'Alessandro and Diran

Lyons Bear Arms: Weapons of Mass Transformation [interview]." In "Fan/Remix

Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue,

Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0347.

1. Introduction

[1.1] Desiree D'Alessandro is an artist who recently earned her MFA degree as a

Regents Special Fellow at UC Santa Barbara. She has exhibited works nationally and

internationally at venues such as the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Brevard Art

Museum, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Tampa Museum of Art. Her video works

have screened at the 2011 European Media Art Festival in Germany, Chashama Film

Festival, Open Video Conference, RE/Mixed Media Festival, and the Victoria

Independent Film and Video Festival in Canada.

[1.2] Diran Lyons is an artist who works in different media, including video and

photography, painting and drawing, stationary and kinetic sculpture, indoor and

outdoor installation, and performance. His political remix videos have screened at Ars

Electronica, LA Shorts Festival, the Open Video Conference in New York, and the

Athens Video Festival, among other notable online venues like IMDb, where his "Jake

Gyllenhaal Challenges The Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize" (2010) was the first

political remix to reach #1 on the IMDb most popular short film ratings.

[1.3] This interview was conducted online in April 2011. Minor revisions, including

video embedding, hyperlinking, and formatting, were processed in postproduction.

2. Interview

[2.1] Desiree D'Alessandro: Hello, Diran. I'm excited to ask you some questions

about your work. I know your emphasis and focus have evolved over the years since

we first met in Tampa, Florida, in 2005. I understand you are currently a political

remix video (PRV) practitioner; however this hasn't always been the case. What were

your artistic pursuits before engaging remix?

[2.2] Diran Lyons: I studied sculpture and painting at California State University, Fresno, as an undergraduate in the late 1990s. I started making video art toward the

end of my time there and became completely enamored of the medium in general by

the time I graduated in 2000. I then went on to earn an MFA in new genres at UC

Santa Barbara in 2004, putting video to use in interdisciplinary multimedia

installations. Currently, I make a lot of remix work, but it wouldn't be accurate to

exclusively distinguish myself as a political remix video artist. I've consistently

maintained an open art practice, refusing to commit to any single method of working.

Ideas can find form in many different ways. When creative people actively seek out

the most powerful physical manifestations of concepts they hold to be important,

unplanned and exciting discoveries often take place. This is particularly the case when

allowing an idea to flow along logical or even illogical trajectories.

[2.3] DD: It is interesting that you took up remix in your postacademic experience.

When I was enrolled at UC Santa Barbara, I met institutional resistance in engaging

the remix genre as part of my academic studies.

[2.4] DL: That's right! Weren't you issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act violation through the institution's DMCA agent?

[2.5] DD: Yes, I was issued a firsttime DMCA offense for acquiring and utilizing the footage necessary to generate fair use remix works. While I had to get more creative

in the way I gathered source materials, it didn't stop me from remixing. I made two

remixes in direct response to their reprimands, utilizing footage from the 2008 film

Step Brothers. The first was "WHAT?! DMCA Violation." It juxtaposed screenshots of the Internet ban placed on my computer with a humorously defiant scene from the

film. The remix screened at the Experiments in Cinema 6.3 festival in New Mexico and

the Basement Media Festival in Boston.

WHAT?! DMCA Violation (Step Brothers Remix)

Video 1. "WHAT?! DMCA Violation (Step Brothers Remix)," by Desiree D'Alessandro (2010).

[2.6] The other video was an Open Video Conference (OVC) trailer that advocated

fair use over DMCA enforcement. I screened it at the conclusion of the lecture I

presented in 2010, "UC + DMCA"

(http://appropriationalliance.blogspot.com/2010/10/universityofcalifornia

dmca.html). You also contributed to the OVC by coauthoring a paper with Byron

Russell on theory related to remix.

Open Video Conference 2010 (Step Brothers Remix)

Video 2. "Open Video Conference 2010 (Step Brothers Remix)," by Desiree D'Alessandro (2010).

[2.7] DL: Yes, a video document of the presentation is available

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FzxvjgE7M), as well as a transcript

(http://appropriationalliance.blogspot.com/2010/09/itscriticalethicalfoundationsfor.html). Byron Russell and I "polyfurcated" the paper into a few different but overlapping issues. Byron succinctly articulated why critical remix (as opposed to

political remix or media stylo) would be a more apt descriptor for the field. I

encourage everyone to consult his arguments on that specific subject as well as his

assertions regarding free speech and fair use in the 21st century.

[2.8] For my part, I fortified an ethical foundation for remix video, addressing my

commentary to individuals I've encountered on both the left and right of the political

spectrum who disrespect the PRV genre because, say they, it peddles in intentional

obfuscation and deception. One of my favorite contemporary graffiti artists, Tes One

(http://www.facebook.com/tes.one), made precisely such claims when we got into it about one of my videos on his Facebook wall (figure 1).

Figure 1. Screenshot of Tes One's remarks on Facebook regarding the PRV "Obama Likes Spending," by Diran Lyons (2011). [View larger image.]

[2.9] Generally, all remix utilizes what one could call a creative lie, which means at

base that the editor cleverly recalibrates clips ripped from context to form a sum that

posits a truth proposition. I also described the Creative Lie in an essay entitled

"Political Remix Video/The Rupture of Context/Neoconservative Agenda→Black Widow

Spiders" (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_25boyd_JDmI/TLaY2w

rvEI/AAAAAAAABXQ/N_4d3a7W7_s/s1600/Diran+Lyons+Political+Remix+Video+1.jpg)

and during a radio interview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYV6wT6xsUg), using Nietzschean aesthetic theory to demonstrate that the viewer isn't actually

deceived by such works.

[2.10] For example, no one thinks that Obama and Jake Gyllenhaal actually sat down

to debate war and foreign policy, but my editing strategy contrives the illusion of them

doing so, which further makes it possible to present the video's punch line shared by many who have opposed the various wars against the Middle East. As such, remix

videos don't come across as documentaries or factual, but ostensibly as artistic

creations that rebuke the powers and present deeper truths. In any case, when

pondered thoroughly, the argument that these works are deceptive (and therefore

unethical) isn't very convincing. That's the crux of my contribution to the OVC paper.

[2.11] DD: It is interesting how you're incorporating academic theory with the genre of remix, which isn't something I've frequently seen advocated in communities often

emphasizing the raw DIY approach. I appreciate that you're not abandoning, but

rather applying, your formal academic training to the practice. How exactly did you get

involved with remix and begin to hybridize these praxes?

[2.12] DL: When I first encountered the PRV community in 2007, I saw the form as a

new branch or offshoot for my creative practice, as a way to conjoin my love of video

and the topical politics that my work often engaged with other media. I further saw an

attractive egalitarian element that remix shares with drawing, one in which the

primacy of 'the idea' is emphasized: projects created with either medium cannot be

resolved by throwing money at obstacles that arise during the creative process (as we

see routinely with high budgeted films or ambitious spatial projects, for example). I

really liked that aspect.

[2.13] Moreover, remix was and remains a way for an artist to speak directly to

powerful individuals or institutions, although imbuing the work with mystery and

subtlety is concurrently important. A hint of ambiguity can help raise questions that

get overlooked in the case of more didactic work. Finally, I was seduced by the

potential for a more farreaching conversation via an online platform, beyond the art

galleries and screening venues with which I'd already been familiar. Given that I hold

the most critical role of art to be creating brush fires of political discourse, it was very exciting to happen upon the PRV community online.

[2.14] DD: Given this interest in topical politics, what was your first remix and what compelled you to make it?

[2.15] DL: My first political remix was "George W. Bush Battles Jesus Christ" (2007) (http://www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi866386457/). I made it in 2007 in response to

USC's call for entry to their 24/7: a DIY Video Summit, which featured a PRV program

curated by Jonathan McIntosh in early 2008. (As a point of historical fact, it was not

screened at the event.) With that remix, I juxtaposed various aggressive, prowar

statements by Bush after 9/11 visàvis the pacifistic appeals of Christ as represented

in Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth (1977). Through the montage, my ambition was to problematize and undermine Bush's claims to devout Christian faith, claims he

successfully used to woo the Bible belt and Christian vote in the runup to the 2000

general election.

[2.16] DD: Do you feel the remix was successful in message conveyance?

[2.17] DL: Well, many viewers found the piece incapable of achieving such objectives with any sort of axiomatic leverage, for a remix of this nature intrinsically minimizes

the theologicopolitical difficulties surrounding Christ's teachings in ways that are not

present in the argumentation of historical and contemporary critical writing on the

subject. Writers may use whatever words they choose to support a rigorously argued

scriptural position, but remix artists finds themselves constrained by the footage and

commentaries available in extant film/video works. Yet amid the PRV medium's

limitations in presenting a holistic discerning of the biblical text, I saw the overarching value of the remix in the selfreflexive questions it generated about the nature of

remix video itself—that is, whether the genre can itself be philosophically rigorous or

whether it stands as the catalyzing object of subsequent philosophical and political

thinking. I came away leaning toward the latter.

[2.18] DD: You have produced a considerable oeuvre of work since that time. What

are some of your favorites and why?

[2.19] DL: "Jeremiah Wright Painting a Picture of US Aggression" (2008)

(http://www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi1773995289/) is my favorite. Wright truncates

the issues surrounding the events he describes, but his vehement tirade coupled with

the images I chose to illustrate it elicits an emotional response and makes the brutality

of US military intervention palpable. Jonathan McIntosh screened the video at Ars

Electronica 2008 as part of the New Cultural Economy symposium.

[2.20] "Jake Gyllenhaal Challenges The Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize" screened at Los Angeles Shorts Film Festival in Hollywood, the Athens Video Art Festival 2010, and

the RE/Mixed Media Fest in Brooklyn, among other venues. It was the first PRV ever to

reach #1 on the IMDb most popular ratings for shorts. As an example of

transformative storytelling, it directly takes poignant shots at Obama's duplicitous and

malleable stance on war within the context of accepting the world's most prestigious

peace prize. I felt the narrative dealt selfreflexively with the video medium itself in

ways that aren't present in other works, as issues of time, identity, and nonlinearity

are at the forefront of the video, which comes out of my interest in Deleuzean film

theory.

Jake Gyllenhaal Challenges the Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize

Video 3. "Jake Gyllenhaal Challenges The Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize," by Diran Lyons (2010).

[2.21] The two Chevron remixes I made toward the end of 2010—"Tapping Human

Energy (Chevron Commercial Remix)" and "Chevron Lie Detector (2012 Remix)"—are also special to me because the identity correction of Chevron's PR campaigns reminds

people of the wars the oil company so often pressures the Pentagon to start, the

current conflict in Libya representing the most recent example.

Tapping Human Energy (Chevron Commercial Remix)

Video 4. "Tapping Human Energy (Chevron Commercial Remix)," by Diran Lyons (2012).

Chevron Lie Detector (2012 Remix)

Video 5. "Chevron Lie Detector (2012 Remix)," by Diran Lyons (2012).

[2.22] DD: Yes, I remember first encountering your interest in dismantling oil

company propaganda when we were invited to present at UCSB's Interdisciplinary

Humanities Center Conference, Oil + Water: The Case of Santa Barbara and Southern

California (http://appropriationalliance.blogspot.com/2010/09/screeningdiscussion

oilwaterremixes.html), held in 2010. At that time, I was promoting one of my first

remixes on the theme of water conservation, which—when coupled with your oil

remixes—completed the twopart conference theme. "World Water Shortage vs. Golf

Course Consumption" has since received broad public attention with screenings at the

2010 RE/Mixed Media Festival in New York, Rogue Remix Festival in Fresno, PRV

screenings at Gallery 25, and the ONE exhibit with the Arc Gallery and IMAX Dome

Theater. The work has also been reviewed on Political Remix Video

(http://politicalremixvideo.com/), a forum maintained by Jonathan McIntosh, who you've mentioned, and also Elisa Kreisinger, Martin Leduc, and Anita Sarkeesian.

World Water Shortage vs. Golf Course Consumption HD

Video 6. "World Water Shortage vs. Golf Course Consumption," by Desiree D'Alessandro (2010).

[2.23] DL: Right. Elisa and Anita engage in remixes that are critical of traditional, rigid gender formulations. Your latest remix and current research operate on similar

terms.

[2.24] DD: Yes. My remix "Woman Warrior Exposed (Sigourney Weaver Remix)"

explores how Sigourney Weaver is represented as a female power icon in pop culture,

though several roles from her filmography epitomize Laura Mulvey's notion of the male

gaze, whereby Weaver is objectified and sexualized in the character personas she

portrays. I utilized juxtapositions of the iconic horror narrator John Newland to draw

public attention to the discord between Weaver's selective recollection and her actual

cinematic record. The illusion that is presented through Weaver's testimony is

dissolved in an illuminating montage that highlights her career of conflicting character

personas. It received positive reception at the New York Chashama Film Festival and

at the international 2011 European Media Art Festival premier.

Woman Warrior Exposed (Sigourney Weaver Remix) - THE VIEW U...

Video 7. "Woman Warrior Exposed (Sigourney Weaver Remix)," by Desiree D'Alessandro (2010).

[2.25] I have since decided to get out from behind the computer and fight my battles

in the real world rather than via digital technologies. I took up boxing as a recreational

practice to lose weight and have found significant results. The psychological changes

that have accompanied the physiological ones are remarkable, and my perspective on

my artistic practice has transformed as well. This has lead to my current and recent

MFA thesis research, which entails examining the form and physicality of boxing as a

physical workout, a contest, a spectacle, or the opportunity for visual and cognitive

mapping. Examples of these efforts are on my Web site (http://desiree

dalessandro.com/), blog (http://dalessandroart.blogspot.com/), and YouTube channel

(http://www.youtube.com/user/libragoddess04).

[2.26] DL: And being a woman seriously aiming to participate in a maledominated

sport, I think it's great that you're effectively delving headfirst into these

contemporary issues by coupling gender and athlete demographics.

[2.27] DD: Thanks! What about you? Your current remix endeavor is Project 12.

What is it and how did it come about?

[2.28] DL: At the end of 2010, I retired my LYONSPOTTER YouTube channel

(http://www.youtube.com/user/LYONSPOTTER) and launched Project 12 as a series of

videos on a new channel, DiranLyons (http://www.youtube.com/user/DiranLyons).

Incidentally, LYONSPOTTER started as a collaborative space with Matthew Potter to

host our featurelength film Goodbye Victoria (2009). However, the channel later

transitioned into my own personal space exclusively for remix, and the Goodbye

Victoria material went elsewhere (http://www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi3277455897/).

I've named this new channel DiranLyons, but Project 12 has taken on more of a film production model where I directed the videos and collaborated with different script

cowriters, among them Stephen Mears, Vruden Jakov, and you, Desiree D'Alessandro.

Remix is so big on the concept of sharing that it seemed fitting to have the new

project intrinsically incorporate sharing into its scope.

[2.29] DD: A clever ambition because remix is inherently collective, both in terms of fabrication and reception. I think in many ways that beta testing with someone is a

form of collaboration.

[2.30] DL: Absolutely. The script cowriters and I conceptualized the videos, and I

then set out to edit them, because I enjoy editing and the creative problem solving

that goes into finalizing a piece. The project overall addressed several different topical

issues as they arose, posing disparate inquiries as they came to mind during the year.

For instance, the first video in the series considered the question, "What if a remix

attempted to communicate something about our culture and the world at large,

without using any words or statements?" Would it be effective, and to what extent? I

had a solo art exhibit (http://lyonspotter.blogspot.com/2011/01/post14solo

exhibitionofpetroleum.html) open on January 6, 2011, mere days before the Project

12 launch, so I was fresh out of artwork as the first post date approached on January

12 (I post on the 12th day of each month). I edited the first video, "The Dream Is

Collapsing (Project 12, 1/12)," in 8 hours on January 11 to address the

aforementioned conceptual framework.

The Dream Is Collapsing (Project 12, 1/12)

Video 8. "The Dream Is Collapsing (Project 12, 1/12)," by Diran Lyons (2011).

[2.31] The March video considered whether a strong remix could be made by

meditating merely on a single word with "Obama Likes Spending (Project 12, 3/12)."

Similarly, all the Project 12 videos proceeded with an algorithmic framework, much like Sol LeWitt, Charles Gaines, and other conceptual fine artists approach conceptual

art. A system always guided the production so that the artist's subjectivity in the

creative process would not run roughshod over everything else.

OBAMA LIKES SPENDING (Project 12, 3/12)

Video 9. "Obama Likes Spending (Project 12, 3/12)," by Diran Lyons (2011).

[2.32] DD: Well, Diran, I've enjoyed discovering how our varying remix praxes

continue to corroborate and contribute to the remix field. Thanks for collaborating with

me on this interview, and I look forward to seeing more of your work!

[2.33] DL: Yes, and I look forward to seeing how your work continues to develop as

well. Thank you very much.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9 (2012)

Multimedia

Fred rant

Alexandra Juhasz

Pitzer Col ege, Claremont, California, United States

[0.1] Keywords— Antifan; Fan; Parody; Youth media; YouTube

Juhasz, Alexandra. 2012. "Fred Rant." In "Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no.

9. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0295.

1. Introduction

[1.1] I was introduced to Fred (http://www.youtube.com/show?p=VUGSB_LmlNA) in 2008 when I was asked to write a commentary about his wildly successful video

oeuvre for Teacher's College Record (http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?

ContentID=15367), "the voice of scholarship in education." As a stately YouTube

expert, a verifiable adult, and a scholar, it seemed my duty to interpret for confused

educators this teen performer's insanely popular video performance as a lying,

screeching 6yearold (he is one of the most subscribed YouTubers in the site's short

history). I would be a reasoned voice of scholarship in the face of his juvenile squeals.

I humbly accepted the challenge. After all, our work as media scholars is to give

clarity, reason, and structure to the often unruly objects we study, to make meaning

in the wilds of popular culture.

[1.2] As I continued to study Fred, I looked outward to the fan videos of his huge

body of followers—kids like him—in hopes that they could better instruct me about

what still seemed like the questionable value of his work. In what was to become just

one eerie and reflexive parallel in this noisy fun house of a project, I found that his

fans were also attempting to make meaning of his often nonsensical videos, and that

their work, mirroring his, was mostly pointless and absurd (and still shrill). Therefore,

so was mine, even though I had seriously accepted the charge to be a voice of

reasoned, seasoned scholarship in education. Given my training, why did I find myself

so often stumped (and repulsed, bored, or enervated) in my interpretive work? What

were these speedy, screeching children saying?

[1.3] A common practice within fan studies, particularly the brand that celebrates the utopia of participatory culture, seems to be to coddle and celebrate the work of

nascent artists and citizens, but after watching hundreds of Fred fans' videos and tens

of Fred's, I found that this huge body of work rarely exhibits anything like empowering

possibilities. Sure, I could stretch my interpretive chops to find them, but why do so,

given that failures, meanness, and poor imitation are the most common, and popular,

forms for these newly minted participants, our sacrosanct children? Why honor

cruelty? Why commemorate the paltry?

[1.4] I am aware that my tone is also shrill, and I will end (or begin) by explaining

why. First, biting (or better yet, failed) nastiness is the lingua franca of the videos I

consider here. To discuss Fred's fans on their terms is to succumb to a logic of being

mean to your friends as a form of supplication. Fred is surprisingly sweet in

comparison. But more importantly, I think it is necessary to look to the common

practices of quotidian YouTube culture (and its fans, and its students of fans) and try

to name how this culture is failing us, to learn from the failures of children and

scholars (starting with my own).

[1.5] I came to YouTube as an advocate, practitioner, and scholar of activist media.

People like me have long believed that when regular people were afforded access to

the production and dissemination of media, there would be a revolution. How wrong

we were! Like many adherents of fan studies, I was drawn to the valuable and

enabling culture made by people outside of dominant systems of power. My academic

work was often conducted in the guise of interpreter and advocate: naming,

promoting, and sharing the alternative practices of outsiders. But here I am compelled

to do something different; to speak shrilly and thus harshly to the new forms of

peoplemade media that I currently find, as well as to my own enduring needs and

values. Citizens need good cops and bad cops, and kids develop best in relation to

mothering across the loving spectrum.

2. YouTour

http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/learningfromyoutube/routes.php?youtour=24

YouTour. Hotlink to Fred Rant YouTour.

[2.1] This piece is written into the same architecture as my video book, Learning

from YouTube, recently published by MIT Press

(http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12596). You can enter the interface below, then click on the red "Continue Fred Rant for TWC" link on the bottom left of your screen to take this special YouTour. Make sure to pull down the

Origins and Context (http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/learningfromyoutube/texteo.php?

composite=217) and See Also menus provided. There you will find more background

on Fred, his videos and his fans', and other approaches to this body of work.

[2.2] I recently (and with much time and labor) developed this agile, multimodal

writing platform for online media studies with the team at Vectors

(http://www.vectorsjournal.org/) and with Craig Dietrich (http://www.craigdietrich.com/) as collaborator. When I was asked to contribute to TWC's special issue on fan remix, I was pained to imagine not moving quickly,

efficiently, even speedily between text and video, fans' voices and mine, YouTube and

academia in this extension of my YouTube studies. Furthermore, an advantage of the

video book is that it could expand to encompass new (and related) projects, and that

any new writing could link to what was already nestled happily online.

[2.3] I thank TWC's editors for allowing me to continue my experiments in YouTube

writing, and I await readers' responses

(http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/learningfromyoutube/texteo.php?composite=247).

You may respond in the comments here or in the form of your own texteos within the

video book; simply make use of the Voice pulldown menu to write your feedback

(http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/learningfromyoutube/texteo.php?composite=248).

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9 (2012)

Multimedia

Queer video remix and LGBTQ online communities

Elisa Kreisinger

New York, New York, United States

[0.1] Keywords— Fan video; Homoeroticism; Sexuality; Transformation

Kreisinger, Elisa. 2012. "Queer Video Remix and LGBTQ Online Communities." In

"Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0395.

1. Introduction

[1.1] Appropriation has always played a key role in the survival of queer

communities and nowhere is this more prevalent than in online spaces. New media

tools and technologies enable creators to deconstruct appropriated pop culture texts

and experiment directly with mainstream images of gender and sexuality, recreating

more diverse and affirming narratives of representation. These once underground

experiments have now spread throughout the Web and have the to power to radically

change the way we think of and picture sexual identity. As queer remix works find

more mainstream audiences, however, they are increasingly vulnerable to incomplete

readings, uninformed by the discursive community from which they arise. Additionally,

as the entertainment industry begins to add queer characters to mainstream texts, the

available subtext that remix works depend on is threatened.

[1.2] Video remix is a DIY form of grassroots media production wherein creators

appropriate mass media texts, reediting them to form new pieces of media intended

for public viewing on video sharing sites like YouTube. It should be noted that the

remix process itself can be considered a queer act. If queer act is defined as any act that challenges, questions, or provokes the normal, the acceptable, and the dominant,

then remixes' required rejection of the dominant and acceptable notions of copyright

challenges the author/reader and owner/user binaries on which these notions are

based. Remix demands that producers physically deconstruct copyright images,

identities, and narratives to create new and transformative works, displacing and thus

queering the binaries on which copyright, ownership, and authorship are based.

[1.3] For my purposes here, queer video remix is defined as a reediting of recognizable popular culture texts, without the permission of the copyright holder, to

comment on, critique, or deconstruct images of heteronormativity or to expand on an

existing, implied, or desired homoerotic subtext. Because of its transformative and

critical nature, the appropriation of copyrighted source material in queer video remix

falls under fair use.

[1.4] Remixing requires the use of pop culture clips both in and out of their original

context, a dynamic that sometimes occurs simultaneously, depending on the message.

As queer remixes find more mainstream audiences, this dynamic often alters their

reception and interpretation, making them increasingly vulnerable to misuse or

misreadings, uninformed by the discursive community from which they originally

arose. For example, the profusion of recut trailers for the popular film Brokeback

Mountain (2005) quickly brought a variety of freshly queered pop culture couples to our inboxes. Because of this remix meme, wider audiences became familiar with the

rearticulation of identity and the reframing of sexuality through subtextual readings.

However, these remixed relationships weren't all positive representations. Many of the

parodic videos were posted and shared in maledominated spaces such as YouTube

where queerness is a perceived threat to masculinity, male privilege, and

heteronormativity. As a result, many of the virally popular Brokeback remix trailers,

such as "Brokeback to the Future" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwuLxrv8jY), encouraged us to laugh at the oddball pairings of men, pushing gayness further into

the realm of Other while simultaneously reinforcing heternormativity—not exactly a

queerpositive message.

[1.5] The rewriting of sexuality seen today in online video emerges from a history of

struggles over queer representation in Hollywood. Allusions, signs, and symbols of

gayness once read between the lines of codeera movies were later reappropriated by

underground filmmaking communities. They were then recycled again in mainstream

movies and television shows, where they are still kept alive in the selfconscious

subtext of shows like Rizzoli & Isles (2010–11) and Supernatural (2005–present), presumably to appeal to explicitly lesbian and queer audiences.

[1.6] For content creators, the everpresent homoerotic subtext evident in body

language, nonverbal social cues, visual conventions, and narrative entanglements

between emotionally connected characters becomes valuable source material for the

abundance of queer video work. However, as popular subtext shows such as Glee

(2009–present) begin to give the audience what they want in terms of gay and

bisexual characters, the issue of available source material arises. For example, when

the close relationship between two female cheerleaders on Glee officially becomes a sexual romance, the quantity of available footage for fan appropriation greatly

decreases: there's no longer a female friendship rife with subtext to work from. As subtext moves away from being a culturally marginal practice for appealing to

underrepresented communities and toward being the foundation for explicitly gay or

bisexual characters, access to the necessary source and inspiration required for

remixing may become limited. Although queer visibility in mainstream media is a

positive outcome, I question whether the lack of available source footage will result in

a reduction in the number of queer variations on these texts. If history is any

indication, however, Hollywood simply commodifies depictions of queerness, often

creating limited and stereotyped characters. This effect will likely further encourage

remixers to create broader variations and more interesting interpretations of

queerness, expanding on any relevant main text—provided there is source footage to

make it happen.

[1.7] I intend the curated selection of videos that follows to be representative of the

queer remix community and not an exhaustive list. I include works that carry the most

potential for further or more nuanced subversive readings. Many of these queer

remixes require knowledge of a particular community, fandom, or pop culture text to

fully appreciate their complexity, but that context is increasingly separate from the

actual product as it circulates freely and publicly in video sharing space. The videos are

all queerpositive appropriations of popular culture that encourage viewers to gaze

through a queer lens, identify with queer(ed) characters, and be sympathetic to their

struggles. Each video offers a glimpse into the complexity of its creator's situation.

2. Videos

Video 1. "Barbie and The Diamond Castle Recut" (2010), by gaberine.

[2.1] Playing guitars on their beds, saving each other from the evil forest and

dancing hand in hand through the hills—this is not your usual fairy tale or your normal

Barbie adventure. Most fairy tales reinforce heteronormative gender roles in girls early

on, but this simple remix turns a Barbie fairy tale into a queer love story. Gaberine, a

41yearold YouTube user, made this recut trailer with her kids by taking scenes from

the 2008 Mattel movie Barbie and the Diamond Castle and recording a more

subversive voiceover. Now remixed, Barbie and her current girlfriend have to save

Barbie's exgirlfriend (they are still friends!) trapped in a castle. There is no Ken;

"these gay girls" only have each other.

Video 2. "Glen and Glenda" (2007), by Tom.

[2.2] Bugs Bunny spent a good portion of his career in drag; the iconic cartoon

character often dressed up in women's clothes to escape compromising situations and

evade his captors, and it always worked. When the narration from the cult classic film

Glen or Glenda (1953) is placed over a supercut of Bugs Bunny's drag appearances,

the rabbit's undercover survival strategy becomes a plea for gender and sexual

tolerance.

It's raining 300 men

Video 3. "It's Raining 300 Men" (2007), by suburbania.

[2.3] It's difficult to call the homoeroticism in the 2006 blockbuster fantasy action

film 300 subtext. Director Zack Snyder claims that featuring shirtless, tan, and

leatherclad muscle men was not intended to be homoerotic, especially because his

film was targeted to straight male audiences. But similar to other actiongenre films,

300 had a distinct appeal to gays, garnering media attention for its ability to cater to this bonus audience to boost sales. When paired with the Weather Girls' "It's Raining

Men," the film's testosteronefueled masculinity is mocked and subverted, illustrating how easily images of performative gender roles can be subverted through remix.

Video 4. "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" (released on Blip in 2009), by Laura Shapiro.

[2.4] The Beach Boys song evokes hope for the future, but the source footage in this

remix reminds us how rare it is to see loving samesex pairings in a positive light.

Usually queer characters are the problem with relationships—the evil lesbian or the

effeminate villain who threatens the male protagonist and his female love interest. But

in Laura Shapiro's vid, we anticipate a time when gay couples can be married, happy,

and even acknowledged and accepted in the media.

Come Around: A Multi-fandom tribute to Femslash

Video 6. "Come Around: MultiFandom Slash" (2010), by mfirefly10.

[2.6] The lesbian kiss has been so overutilized to leverage ratings that it's referred to

as the kiss of death, marking an obvious push for viewers and the possible demise for

a TV series. This queer remix puts intimacy back into the lesbian kiss, exploring the

emotional connection between two female characters, subverting any exploitative

intentions.

Gay Romance - Until that boy is mine

Video 7. "Gay Romance—Until that Boy Is Mine" (2009), by jbeautifultube.

[2.7] Tucked away in the gender binary, yet everpresent, is the equivalence

between female/male and maker/destroyer where the assumption is that women can

(and should) be nurturing, warm, and affectionate while men destroy each other.

Images of male intimacy are hard to find in mass media and popular narratives; that's

one of the reasons why this compilation of "favorite male affection scenes" cut to Lady Gaga's song is so popular. Incorporating international TV series and films, this

multifandom montage illustrates how we have become so inured to images of male

violence and savagery that the representation of male affection and tenderness seems

radical even to a queer eye. One can't help but notice, however, that despite the

international source material, the majority of queer characters featured are white.

http://www.masqueweb.net/cits_page.htm

Video 8. "Circle in the Sand" (2003), by Michaela Upton.

[2.8] Remixing requires the use of pop culture clips both in and out of their original

context, but when the original context is uncertain, remixing becomes a tool for

metaphysically deconstructing texts. Is the creator relying on the Xena: Warrior

Princess (1995–2001) subtext to queer the two female characters, or is she paying

homage to the existing and evident romance between the two Amazon women? In this

way, "Circle in the Sand" exemplifies the creator's connection to the text as well as the practice, utilizing remix as an extension of a larger online queer community. In Upton's

words, "[This is] the first 'Xena and Gabrielle as lovers' music video that I produced and the first time that I realized that I wasn't merely picking a nice song and throwing

a bunch of clips together. This was something that I cared about and was beginning to

discover that other people did too."

Swingers In Love Trailer Recut

Video 9. "Swingers in Love Recut" (2007), by SelfmadeMonkeys.

[2.9] Deemed one of the "sharpest maleoriented comedies of the 1990's" by TV

Guide, the original 1996 Swingers movie follows five 20something men as they cope with the mysteries of women and life in Hollywood. The queer remix subverts a male

friendship between two lead characters, played by Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau, into

a romance of loss and longing. When the former friends and current lovers break up,

Favreau is suddenly "lost in a world he [doesn't] understand"—that is,

heteronormative Hollywood. He attempts to court men and comes out of the closet,

but he continues to frequent straight bars to keep up appearances. Experimenting with

societal expectations, Favreau "decides to be someone else"—that is, "a man" (as defined by blue captions), meaning a straight man who upholds heteronormativity.

However, he soon realizes he's still in love with Vaughn.

[2.10] What makes this remix different from the thousands of other queer remixes of

mainstream bromances is the sensitivity we're encouraged to have for Favreau as he

tries to negotiate gender roles, masculinity, and societal expectations of men. The

video successfully invites the viewer to identify with Favreau's struggle as he tries to

fit into a world where heterosexuality and normative gender expression reign.

Find more videos like this on Vidders

Video 10. "One Girl Revolution" (2009) by AreFadedAway.

[2.11] "One Girl Revolution" offers a rendering of the male gaze appropriated and queered into a feminist comment on female exploitation in mainstream storylines. By

removing 155 female characters from their original contexts, this remix becomes an

antidote to the heroines' original conception and deployment as male fantasies. Here,

the vidder has carefully recontextualized the characters, placing them one after

another to celebrate the physical strength of women as subjects rather than objects.

Top Gun Recut

Video 11. "Top Gun Recut" (2006) by chuck13171.

[2.12] Viewed over 3 million times on YouTube, "Top Gun Recut" is one of the most popular examples of queer video remix. As main characters Maverick and Iceman

begin to fall for each other in this constructed reality, their sexual encounters and

romantic relationship mock the aggressively masculine and heteronormative fraternity

of fighter pilots explored in the original 1986 Hollywood hit Top Gun. Repeated phallic images are used to drive the point home: these guys want each other bad. Will the

homophobic world of the military condone their desire to be together, or will it

threaten their love forever?

International Day Of Femslash, I'm Your Man [multi-source]

Video 12. "I'm Your Man" (2008) by Charmax76.

[2.13] "I'm Your Man" uses 48 different visual sources, offering the viewer a full range of gendered media clichés meticulously organized and edited to successfully

mock the notion of essential gender identity. Repeated images of drag, crossdressing,

and stylized of butch/femme identities are used to parody our concept of binary

gender. The author packs an additional parodic punch by using the song "I'm Your

Man" covered by a female performer, Patricia O'Callaghan. This queer remix celebrates

the rare moments when marginalized or alternative genders and sexualities make it

into pop culture while critically questioning gender representation and the resulting

clichés in the mass media.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9 (2012)

Multimedia

Genesis of the digital anime music video scene, 1990–2001

Ian Roberts

AbsoluteDestiny, Oxford, United Kingdom

[0.1] Keywords— AMV; Japan

Roberts, Ian. 2012. "Genesis of the Digital Anime Music Video Scene, 1990–2001."

In "Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special

issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0365.

1. A brief history of AMVs

[1.1] The development of the anime music video (AMV) scene, as described here, is

centered around Western anime fandom and the music videos created by its fans

between the 1980s and the early 2000s. (The tradition of Japanesecreated fan videos

is an entirely separate tradition that would require its own article.) Western AMV

development during this period was dependent on a number of related developments:

(1) a growing demand for and access to anime in the West—that is, the availability of

anime and the way in which anime videosharing created an environment for the

creation and distribution of fan videos; (2) the development of anime fan communities

—how local anime clubs grew to convention communities and finally to AMV

communities; (3) the emergence of new technologies—including VCR, LaserDisc,

camcorders used for linear editing through analog capture, DVD capture devices, and

digital downloaded source for digital nonlinear editing; (4) the cultivation of expertise

—in particular, the mastery of professional editing techniques and their application to

AMVs by fans; and (5) the codification of AMV aesthetics—comprised not only of the

changing, maturing, and diversifying of genre and theme, but also a density and

diversity of visual technique.

[1.2] Some questions to consider when watching an anime music video include:

What is the subject of the video? What kind of message is being communicated about

that subject? What prior knowledge, if any, is required of the subject? How do editing

methods influence, guide or realize this message? Who is the potential audience

(personal, friends, convention, Internet)?

[1.3] Anime music videos, or AMVs as they are commonly known, have a history that goes back to the early days of anime fandom in the United States. In the 1970s and

1980s, the everyday TV, movie, and media fan knew little about anime. The

commercial market for anime was limited to Englishlanguage dubs shown alongside

Western cartoons. Battle of the Planets (aka Gforce, aka Gatchaman) and Speed Racer were watched but with little knowledge of their Japanese roots and no

knowledge of the diverse genres to be found in Japanese animation. For those few who

did know about anime, access was very difficult. Importing VHS tapes from Japan was

difficult, rare, and expensive, and English translations were nowhere to be found. The

dawn of consumer VCRs and consumer chroma keying technology changed all this,

and throughout the 1980s, anime fans would copy and distribute tapes to any fan who

would send them blank tapes, postage, and packaging. Fans formed local anime clubs

with lending libraries, and as soon as technology allowed (in the late 1980s and early

1990s), fans began to produce their own subtitled tapes (fan subs).

[1.4] The technology used for tape distribution was the same technology fans used to

make their own music videos, and in 1982 Jim Kaposztas created what we believe to

be the first fanmade anime music video in the West: an ironically violent Space

Battleship Yamato video set to "All You Need is Love" by the Beatles.

2. The analog era: From VCRs to the dawn of digital editing

[2.1] Early AMVs were often added to the end of fan sub tapes to fill in space that

could not fit an episode of a TV show. Many fans saw their first AMV this way, with "I could do that" being the cursed response of many a soontobe AMV creator.

Bobby 'C-ko' Beaver - Every Little Thing She Does...

Video 1. Bobby "Cko" Beaver, "Everything She Does Is Magic" (1993).

[2.2] Bobby "Cko" Beaver's "Everything She Does Is Magic" is the classic twoVCR

vid: simple idea, thoughtful execution. Cko's AMVs are among the most cherished of

the tape distro era. Sentimental works of this kind were fairly common during the VCR

editing years. The inclusion of the source movie's credits was quite popular in the

1980s and 1990s, partly for attribution and partly to advertise and promote a show or

movie to fellow anime fans who might not know about it. Fan videos have always been

a strong part of anime promotion in the West—the inclusion of videos on fan sub tapes

served to act as promos (traditional trailers would carry a burden of translation where

fanmade videos are often flattering and accessible).

[2.3] Trivia: You may notice that the brightness of this video fluctuates. This is a side

effect of MacroVision copy protection, an early antipiracy measure that later appeared

in a simpler digital form on DVDs.

Corn Pone Vids - Comfortably Numb

Video 2. Corn Pone Flicks, "Comfortably Numb" (1992).

[2.4] A group of Atlantabased anime fans made a vast contribution to anime fan

works in the 1980s and 1990s. Corn Pone Flicks produced fan parodies, reviews, fan

subs, and large number of fan vids. This is possibly the worst surviving copy of this

vid, but it's also the most prolific—a very lowresolution MOV file distributed in the mid

to late 1990s at the dawn of the digital anime era. There's another classic story here,

digging deeper into the psyche of Tetsuo from the groundbreaking movie Akira. The

English audio is from the original Streamline Video dub. For many anime fans (myself

included), this particular dub was their first real introduction to anime as something

distinct from Western cartoons.

You Know Who - Girls With Guns

Video 3. You Know Who, "Girls with Guns" (1990).

[2.5] A fan known only as You Know Who made a number of excellent AMVs in the

1990s with a significant focus on timing—especially internal motion. Jump cuts, while

not the easiest thing to do when armed with a flying erase head and a stopwatch,

were very much the norm in AMVs by this point, but internal motion (gun shots,

explosions, jumping) was often accidental. You Know Who uses internal motion and

timing to great effect in this spunky action AMV.

3. The 1990s convention scene

[3.1] As anime grew in the United States, the emergence of fan conventions also led

to AMVs becoming part of con programming. This began with AMV viewings in latenight slots or showings to fill dead space in convention video programming. As AMVs became more popular as a convention activity (since the difficulty of distribution

meant they were something you usually couldn't see at your local anime club), formal

AMV shows appeared. At first, AMV shows worked in simple terms—bring your VHS to

the con and we'll copy your AMV to a tape and show the tape. As participation grew

and the art form developed, the first AMV contests began.

[3.2] Contests were the catalyst that formalized many key AMV aesthetics. Late

1990s AMVs competed in comedy/fun, drama, and action categories, and techniques

and a visual language were formed and purposefully used in new AMVs to win awards.

[3.3] Anime and AMVs grew fast, thanks to the greater access to technology, and among these contests and changing technologies, the second wave of AMV makers

emerged.

Roxette Dangerous - Brad DeMoss AMV

Video 4. Brad Demoss, "Dangerous" (1992).

[3.4] "Dangerous" is an early 1990s comic convention video and one of many

multisource projects by Demoss in the twoVCR era. Demoss had a number of

collaborators on this and other VCR projects. Just as in vidding, the expense of the

equipment resulted in the formation of small groups who would make fan videos

together. "Dangerous" is interesting in a number of ways: this is a video about

animation of all kinds. This is effectively a celebratory show reel of everything this

group of fans love about animation. By the late 1990s, crossover between Western

and Japanese animation in fan vids would be almost unheard of unless it was a

deliberate parody—which is more a sign of anime fandom growing large enough to

stand on its own two feet than anime fans proactively disliking Western anime.

Lorraine Savage - My Euthanasia

Video 5. Lorraine Savage, "My Euthanasia" (1996).

[3.5] Unlike vidding, the AMV scene at this point was largely male. It is only since

2005 that female participation in AMV making has grown to match the number of male

AMV makers. That's not to say that women making AMVs is anything new—this

shocking but hilarious AMV from 1996 is as well regarded as any comic work from that

period.

Ranma - The Proclaimers 500 Miles

Video 6. Duane Johnson, "500 Miles" (1996).

[3.6] With fans watching the same shows and listening to the same songs, it was inevitable that several different videos would appear featuring the same idea. The

song "500 Miles" spawned a number of AMVs in the 1990s, and many of those were to this very character in Ranma 1/2—Ryoga has a terrible sense of direction, leading him on roundtheworld travels when he only needs to go next door. He also has an

unrequited love for Akane who, unknowingly, cruelly tortures his affections by keeping

him as a pet when he inevitably turns into a cute pig, which he does when he comes

into contact with cold water. Johnson's take on this idea is fondly remembered by

many AMV fans and represents a core AMV principle for videos of this era: Represent

an aspect of the show as it is felt by the fans. In a sense, this distillation of feeling is the most essential principle of all fan creations.

Duane Johnson - Project A-ko - Gotta Keep 'em S...

Video 7. Duane Johnson, "Gotta Keep Em Separated" (1996).

[3.7] The fun action video is a hugely prolific genre that has regularly crosspollinated with comedy since creators started making AMVs. Johnson follows the playful manner of the source movie here and keeps the action very tongueincheek,

managing to stay fun, humorous, and action packed. The importance of the contest

scene, however, unintentionally discouraged crossgenre works as the years went on,

since editors came to feel that crossgenre videos would not win against purely comic

or purely actionpacked competitors. Here again we see the impact of contests on the

development of AMV aesthetics.

Video 8. Duane Johnson, "Linger" (n.d.).

[3.8] In the early 1990s, straight romance videos like this were very common—

surprisingly so, considering the young men making the videos. This endofanera

romance video is a stellar example of the genre, but as the convention scene grew,

videos like this would not fare well in the drama categories when compared to more

somber drama videos. It is not until much later (around 2002), when

romance/sentimental emerged as a common fourth category at contests, that there

was a revival of videos like this one.

La Résistance AMV.mpg

Video 9. Lee "Lostboy" Thompson, "La Resistance" (1999).

[3.9] Another prolific AMV maker of the time, Thompson used a camcorder to create the transitions for his videos before he switched to digital. This video is also a strong

crowdpleaser: It is designed so that the audience eagerly anticipates each new singer

to see which of their favorite anime characters have been cast.

Anime - Crazy Ass Violence

Video 10. BigBigTruck, "Crazyass Violence" (1999).

[3.10] "Crazyass Violence" is a real gem of 1990s AMV making, featuring fun,

upbeat action. Using every anime she owns, BigBigTruck (aka EK) showed us all why

anime is straightup kickass. There is some very impressive action synchronization

evident here, with a superb feel for what is right for this joyous and campy rap hit. It

also handles the considerable length of the song very well, saving some of its best

moments for last.

Phantom Of The Opera - AMV by Kevin Cal...

by Soldiercide17

Video 11. Kevin Caldwell, "Phantom of the Opera" (1998).

[3.11] Incredibly, this tightly edited video was linearly edited using a LaserDisc

player and a VCR. Finesse cutting (such as the white and black frame flashes) was

likely achieved thanks to the ability to perfectly pause LaserDiscs and the ability to

insert single frames in the highend VCRs of the time. The technical aspects of the

video were only part of what impressed audiences; part of the effect is created by the

surprising anime choice ("Magnetic Rose" from the Memories shorts), which would have been largely unknown. Scifi opera house horror with a techno LloydWebber

soundtrack plus superb editing made this a real hit.

4. The dawn of digital editing

[4.1] By 1999, consumer video capture technology was becoming common, with

VCRbased editors switching over to video capture and a whole new crowd of editors

appearing as anime gained popularity. While the technology was revolutionary, the

change in participation was more evolutionary, with 1999 through 2001 showing a

rapid growth of the convention scene as more cons appeared around the country and

more editors submitted their videos to contests.

Offspring Come Out and Play Akira by Brad Dem...

Video 12. Brad Demoss, "Come out and Play" (1998).

[4.2] This AMV was made around 7 years after "Dangerous" and the difference is

very clear—much faster cutting, lots of technical flourishes (like the crowdpleasing lipsynch at the start), internal motion—everything you would expect in an upbeat action AMV from the late 1990s. For "Come out and Play," Demoss had upgraded from his

VCRs to an Amiga 3000. Amiga computers were fairly popular in the mid to late 1990s

thanks to the success of the Video Toaster card, which had very good chroma key (an

important technology if you wanted to create your own fan subs) and a number of

other helpful editing tricks. After the death of the Amiga, Brad and many other AMV

makers switched to an Apple Mac and Final Cut video editing software.

Arti cial Suns - Push It

Video 13. Artificial Suns, "Push It" (1999).

[4.3] Technology improved tremendously in the late 1990s, but alas, access to good

source footage did not. Anime was an expensive, expensive hobby. The anime End of

Evangelion had a famously long wait before a commercial English release. An AMV

maker either spent a lot of money on a LaserDisc player and imported the LaserDisc

version, or used a fan sub or someone's raw untranslated VHS copy. A lot of different

sources are visibly mixed here, including a very deliberate fan translation of Asuka's

famous "Kimochi warui" line.

Serial Experiments Lain - Layer 00 - Sleep Now

Video 14. Maboroshi Studio, "Sleep Now" (1999).

[4.4] With digital editing arrived the ability to add to the footage instead of simply appropriating it. In this excellent Serial Experiments Lain AMV, Joe Croasdaile of

Maboroshi Studio punctuated the themes in his video by adding his own text to the sea

of messages represented in the show coming from "the wired."

Kare Kano AMV Far and Away (Spoiler)

Video 15. Maboroshi Studio, "Far and Away" (2000).

[4.5] This video was a massive departure for AMVs at the time and would still be

seen as ambitious at conventions today. "Far and Away" is a long, instrumental AMV

narrating what was then a brandnew show ( His and Her Circumstances) that did not

have a huge following. The success of this AMV (and many found it immensely

enchanting) was in its storytelling and strong association of musical intricacies with

movement and feeling.

[4.6] By the end of the millennium, AMVs had grown from a minor hobby with a

handful of participants to a significant part of anime fan culture: AMVs at some

conventions were becoming as important as cosplay. The growth both of anime

fandom and of AMVs was immense—by the year 2000, many US anime conventions

were growing 50 percent a year, and AMV participation grew with them.

5. The rise of spectacle: Contests and innovation in the early

2000s

[5.1] The end of the VCR era saw the beginning of the digital era for anime fandom

in general and AMV making in particular. The allimportant anime conventions and the

annual AMV contests they would host became the focal point of AMV creative efforts.

Editors would make several videos and send them all to one or more contests to give them an audience, enjoy them on the big screen, and hopefully win an award or two.

[5.2] Then came Anime Expo 2000. Nobody could have known what a turning point

this particular contest at this particular con was at the time. The AMV scene had grown

to have big names and big (and mostly friendly) rivalries. In 1999, Kevin Caldwell had

won every category at Anime Expo (the biggest con in the country). In 2000, the

competition was fierce, and practically every bigname AMV creator was either

competing or in attendance. AMVs had become an established genre and, in response

to growing competition, were now increasingly technical. Overtly technical work in

AMVs, particularly in terms of special effects and composition, were the cause of many

arguments among creators. Then Caldwell's impressively composed video "Believe"

lost the drama category to the simpler, emotionally charged "Rhythm of the Heat."

Many believed, Caldwell included, that the effects in "Believe" were distracting and detrimental. It would be the last AMV Kevin Caldwell would make.

[5.3] The following AMVs illustrate the culture of AMV innovation at the anime cons

of the early 2000s.

Evangelion - Star Wars Episode 1 Parody

Video 16. Brad Demoss, "Episode 1" (2000).

[5.4] Playing perfectly to the crowd, this trailer parody (a common fannish practice)

relied on how heavily the Star Wars: Episode I teaser trailer had entered fannish

consciousness. Also parodied by South Park, the Star Wars: Episode I trailer was watched repeatedly in the leadup to the film's release, stirring the hype to

unsustainable levels. With some obvious and some clever matchmaking, this AMV was

tailored for convention success. Neon Genesis Evangelion was the big anime fandom of

the time, and while the AMV doesn't hold up especially well, it was a massive success when it premiered and for several years after. It became something of a recruiter

AMV, the kind of video that fans would show other fans to introduce them to AMVs and

the kind of fun they can bring.

Video 17. Brad Demoss, "Rhythm of the Heat" (2000).

[5.5] The influence of cinema trailers is clear here: the Ghibli credits at the start and

the fades to and from black are techniques that are borrowed from Hollywood.

Literalism is a common feature of Demoss's videos (all the way back to "Dangerous,"

in fact), and here it is somewhat at odds with the seriousness of the video.

Nonetheless the themes build very well here to make a strong dramatic AMV. What's

important here is what is missing—there is no lipsynch (of the lyrics). Lyrical lipsynch

is a tool of the AMV comedian—here Peter Gabriel's howls and cries are those of the

tortured animal spirits. The strongest moment in the video actually comes with the

longest cut—the powerful moment between San and Ashitaka that leads into the

bridge.

Senshi on springer - DDP

Video 18. Doki Doki, "Senshi on Springer" (2000).

[5.6] In "Sleep Now," Croasdaile added graphics to the video in a way that would preserve the aesthetic of the source and would appear, hopefully, seamless. Doki

Doki's AMVs, however, showed that (much like the comic lipsynch) deliberate, visible

techniques have comic potential. The annotations in this excellent example of early

AMV photoshopping do deliberate joke building. This level of manipulation was

unheard of until that point, but would within a few years become very commonplace in

AMVs and fan vids of all kinds.

Esca owne - Sweating Bullets ( Megadeth)

Video 19. Maboroshi Studios, "Sweating Bullets" (2000).

[5.7] This is a direct successor to the kind of character profile seen in "Comfortably Numb," this time with a lot of precise cutting and lipsynch to frame the song as a

villainous autobiography combined with the requisite number of flashy action

sequences suitable for this AMV genre.

AMV - It's A Sin - Villainous Destiny

Video 20. Vlad Pohnert, "Villainous Destiny" (2000).

[5.8] Bringing the old school up to date a little, Pohnert took a classic AMV character

comparison trope and spiced it up with some modern editing techniques. Thematically,

this AMV feels very 1990s but was still appropriate for the convention scene, where

AMVs did not need to be complex or pioneering but simply collected and curated the

shows AMV creators liked into a pleasing statement.

Caffeine Encomium

Video 21. Kevin Caldwell, "Caffeine Encomium" (2000).

[5.9] What's remarkable about "Caffeine Encomium" is not just the incredible

attention to timing, which was unparalleled at this time, but how much thought has

also been given to the overall structure of the video. This is a day in the life of the

hyperkinetic schoolgirl Sanachan—from dawn to dusk. During her day she has to

overcome all kinds of challenges as she goes to school, fights with bullies, pursues her

acting career, fends off wouldbe boyfriends, and is pestered by her eccentric mother.

This marriage of highprecision editing (with a lot of time manipulations in order to

repeat and loop motion to match the overture) with the macrolevel narrating is what

makes this AMV so successful.

Kevin Caldwell-Believe

Video 22. Kevin Caldwell, "Believe" (2000).

[5.10] Few would disagree that "Believe" was, at the time of its creation, the most technically ambitious AMV to grace the halls of an anime convention: the masking, the

composition, the lipsynch, the timing, the internal and external (effectsapplied)

motion. It was mesmerizing and divisive—were the effects too distracting? Was this

video really just effects for effects' sake? At the convention, this version of "Believe"

lost to "Rhythm of the Heat," but in the growing Internet AMV community, "Believe"

was hailed as a triumph.

[5.11] After the departure of Caldwell from the AMV scene, there was a growing

appreciation for his works, especially "Engel," "Caffeine Encomium," and "Believe," and for many years "Believe" was regarded as a work unsurpassed in technical excellence and among the best AMVs ever made—high praise, considering that 1999–2001 saw

the release of some truly excellent AMVs (by 2003, AMV fans were referring to these

years as a golden age, though I'm sure that term has been reapplied since).

Video Girl Ai AMV - The Fall (Lostboy)

Video 23. Lee "Lostboy" Thompson, "Video Girl AI: The Fall" (2001).

[5.12] Lostboy moved on from his camcorder days to digital editing and many subtle

effects were added. The use of masks to selectively fade out parts of a scene and a lot

of overlay use give this video its dreamlike "romance through the TV glass" feel. A keen eye will notice that he borrows some static from the show Lain at a few points: the static of an empty signal is an integral part of the loneliness theme. There are a lot

of elements in this (and other AMVs of the time) that are genuinely experimental.

Lee's addition of a vignette on the idyllic dream sections is borrowing a visual language

from film and TV and applying it to AMVs. This is an integral part of the

experimentation of these years—editors trying techniques to see if they were equally

useful for conveying meaning in their videos.

Rhythm Animation

Video 24. Lee "Lostboy" Thompson, "Rhythm Animation" (2001).

[5.13] "Rhythm Animation" takes the "every show on the shelf" AMV and expresses it through motion. Subtle digital editing techniques here are used to try to seamlessly

bring each different anime into the same fluid universe. Possibly the most important

theme in AMV making that emerged in these years is the creation and celebration of

spectacle. Here we have a celebration of the physicsdefying madcap high jinks of

anime with a few visual effects here and there to emphasize the motion. It's also the

kind of video that allows a crowd of anime fans to cheer when their favorite anime

shows up looking spectacular.

Vlad_G_Pohnert-Memories_Dance-Xvid.avi

Video 25. Vlad Pohnert, "Memories Dance" (2001).

[5.14] Pohnert was always techsavvy, and he has made his most successful works

in the age of digital editing. The use of Photoshop in this AMV (to frame by frame

composite different sources together) was considered cutting edge at the time. Again

we have a merging of sources, here emphasizing themes prevalent through the works

of Miyazaki. There is a deliberate framing device also: a photograph of a landscape

sparks memories of nature, flying, and adventure.

DREAMS OF RED ~ Aluminum Studios

Video 26. Aluminum Studios, "Dreams of Red" (2001).

[5.15] Will Millberry of Aluminum Studios was renowned for aesthetic

experimentation, and his work inspired many subsequent creators. His two Sailor

Moon videos, "Blue" and "Dreams of Red," rely heavily on visual effects to create juxtapositions explicating the facets of the characters while also experimenting with

musical cues matched to deliberate inserted effects such as lens flares, blurs,

transitions, and color manipulations.

Aokakesu Digital-Odorikuruu

Video 27. Aokoketsu Digital, "Odorikuruu" (2001).

[5.16] Another hit from the "edit together every anime I own" school of AMV making resulted in a massively popular dance video that would for years be considered the top

of its class. This is AMV spectacle in its purest form—a big, happy ensemble dance

performance from a hundred shows with eyepopping colors and effects every minute.

The rarity of some of the shows here (particularly Idol Defence Force Hummingbird)

and the list of sources used at the end of the video act somewhat as bragging rights,

but it's all in good fun.

Video 28. BigBigTruck, "Failed Experiments in Video Editing" (2001).

[5.17] EK made numerous attempts to create a Cowboy Bebop music video for Anime Weekend Atlanta 6. After a long line of failed experiments, she decided to make

a video about her failures. With sentiments shared by all AMV makers, this comedy

AMV has become iconic. It is among the earliest examples of AMV meta, a tradition

that would become more popular as the community grew and AMV making (and the

community surrounding it) became as important as the anime itself.

Tainted Donuts- Trigun meets Cowboy Bebop

Video 29. Eko, "Tainted Donuts" (2001).

[5.18] This massively successful AMV was not the first anime crossover, but at the

time, the use of rotoscoping and Photoshop to create a crossover narrative was

unique. It would later become a common feature in AMVs as editing tools such as After

Effects became the norm instead of the exception. "Senshi on Springer" put Sailor Moon on stage and "Memories Dance" combined Miyazaki films together, but the idea of taking two shows and making a coherent narrative out of the primary themes of

both was fresh. Here, the bounty hunters of Cowboy Bebop are trying to catch Vash

from Trigun, luring him with his favorite food. The song was chosen so that lyrics would not distract from the storytelling (unless you understand Japanese, in which

case there may be some dissonance).

Right Now - Van Halen AMV

Video 30. Doki Doki, "Right Now Someone Is Reading This Title" (2001).

[5.19] For many, the defining moment of Otakon 2001 was seeing this video win

best comedy. AMVs were no longer just about a character or a show or even a

subgenre of show: They had become a part of anime fandom, and this video is about

fannish experience.

6. This way to the future

[6.1] By 2001, the AMV scene was almost entirely digital. The convention scene had

become sufficiently large that creators began collaborating on large multieditor

projects for display at conventions. The DDR 3rd Mix Project, conceptualized by Brad

Demoss, was a landmark collaborative effort that would spawn three sequels and

many other projects of its kind.

[6.2] AMVs were commonly shared online, with AMV makers creating their own Web

sites or sharing their videos on the popular (if hard to find) Hawaii FTP server

(subsequently Waldo's server). The AMV mailing list on Yahoo! was at peak use, and

the forwardthinking Phade created AnimeMusicVideos.org

(http://AnimeMusicVideos.org) as a database for AMV makers to log their videos.

Many conventionscene AMV creators felt that the surge of participation from 1998 to

2001 was overwhelming, but the digital revolution had only just begun.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9 (2012)

Multimedia

A history of subversive remix video before YouTube: Thirty political

video mashups made between World War II and 2005

Jonathan McIntosh

San Francisco, California, United States

[0.1] Keywords— Fan vid; Film; Gender; Government; Media; News; Politics; Race;

Remix; Sexuality; TV; War

McIntosh, Jonathan. 2012. "A History of Subversive Remix Video before YouTube:

Thirty Political Video Mashups Made between World War II and 2005." In

"Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0371.

1. Introduction

[1.1] Filmmakers, fans, activists, artists, and media makers have been reediting

television, movies, and news media for critical and political purposes since almost the

very beginning of moving pictures. Over the past century, this subversive form of

populist remixing has been called many things, including appropriation art,

détournement, media jamming, found footage, avantgarde film, television hacking,

telejusting, political remix, scratch video, vidding, outsider art, antiart, and even

cultural terrorism.

[1.2] The politically oriented mashup video subgenre has its roots in the rich and

diverse history of leftleaning, often deeply antiauthoritarian, creative traditions. These transformative works, by their very nature, are suspicious of and challenge political,

corporate, media, and social power structures. They focus on a wide array of issues,

including race, gender, sexuality, and economics, in addition to more overtly political

topics of government, public policy, and warfare.

2. A very brief history

[2.1] The very first political remixes can be traced back to Russia during the 1920s,

when Soviet filmmakers like Esfir Shub began recutting American Hollywood films to

give them a sharper class commentary. In 1928, the leftist Popular Association of Film

Art in Berlin screened recut newsreel scenes "combined in such a manner that they suddenly lost their political innocence and assumed an inflammatory character."

German police shut down the screenings. A decade and a half later, during World War

II, Charles A. Ridley created (and gave away for free) the first viral political mashup by

reediting footage of Nazi soldiers to make them appear to dance and sing in time to

the tune "The Lambeth Walk."

[2.2] Throughout the 1970s, Situationist International artists like René Viénet

remixed Chinese propaganda films and kung fu movies to ridicule Mao and Stalin from

a leftwing, antiauthoritarian perspective. Around the same time, feminist artist Dana

Birnbaum released her influential 1978 video remix "Technology/Transformation:

Wonder Woman" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6xZOUXNyQg), and although it

falls into the highart category, the work did inspire many subsequent artists to work

with pop culture imagery.

[2.3] In the mid1970s, female media fan communities produced their own form of

critical remix: the art form now known as vidding. Following Kandy Fong's pioneering

1975 use of slide shows, groups of female fans began creating vids or fan vids by

remixing television and film footage to create works that spoke to female (and

sometimes to queer) audiences. Often these works were overtly or implicitly critical of

mainstream popular culture narratives.

[2.4] When VCR technology became more widely accessible in the early 1980s, a

group of politically minded UK artists calling themselves video scratchers appropriated

television footage to create biting critiques of pop culture media and Margaret

Thatcher's economic policies. Scratchers Sandra Goldbacher and Kim Flitcroft were

known for recutting television commercials and music videos to provide a feminist

critique. In the early 1990s, several USbased groups of media jammers like EBN and

Negativland responded to the televised footage of the first gulf war by creating

remixes of evening news broadcasts and TV ads. Underground filmmaker Craig

Baldwin documented many of these media jammers and the controversy surrounding

their work in his 1995 feature film Sonic Outlaws. That same year, multimedia artist and selfdescribed childhood cartoon fan Jesse Drew released his remixed

"Manifestoon" (http://www.archive.org/details/Manifestoon), combining dozens of

appropriated Golden Age Hollywood animations with the words of Karl Marx.

[2.5] The second Bush administration—followed by the second US war in Iraq—

provoked an explosion in subversive remix works, spurred on, in part, by cheaper and

better computerbased editing applications. Before YouTube and other largescale

video sharing services came into existence, political remixers relied on community

Web portals like the Guerrilla News Network (GNN) and Adbusters to find, share, and

discuss remix works, as it was often too expensive for individuals to host video.

3. What constitutes a subversive remix video?

[3.1] While political or subversive remix video as a transformative category is

obviously very broad, it is possible to pick out some shared characteristics to

determine if remix works fit into this subgenre. Five essential features are present in

all the included videos. (1) Works appropriate mass media audiovisual source material

without permission from copyright holders, and often rely on the US fair use doctrine

or UK fair dealing. (2) Works comment on, deconstruct, or challenge media narratives,

dominant myths, social norms, and traditional power structures—they can be either

sympathetic to or antagonistic to their pop culture sources, sometimes both at the

same time. (3) Works transform the original messages embedded in the source

material, as well as the source material itself. (4) Works are intended for general

audiences or doityourself (DIY) communities rather than elite, academic, or highart

audiences, and thus tend to use familiar mass media formats such as trailers,

television ads, music videos, and news segments as vehicles for the new message. (5)

Works are DIY productions and rely on grassroots distribution methods such as VHS

tape duplicating circles, underground screenings, and, eventually, selfhosted Web

sites. Many subversive video makers now put their work on YouTube, or similar sites,

since its launch in November 2005.

4. Thirty subversive remix videos created before YouTube

[4.1] The following is a representative collection of subversive video remixes made

between World War II and the launch of YouTube in November 2005; many of these

works may also fit into other remix video genres. A version of this playlist is also

available online via YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?

p=00D0543F493057D1).

Video 1. "The Lambeth Walk—Nazi Style" by Charles A. Ridley (1941).

[4.2] During World War II, Charles A. Ridley reedited footage of Hitler and Nazi

soldiers (taken from the propaganda film Triumph of the Will [1935]) to make it

appear as if they were marching and dancing to the popular tune "The Lambeth Walk."

He used that music because members of the Nazi party had referred to the song as

"Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping." The remixed short was distributed for free to Allied newsreel companies in the United States and United Kingdom, making it the

first viral remix video—created over 60 years before YouTube.

Video 2. Peking Duck Soup (excerpt) by René Viénet (1977).

[4.3] This is a short excerpt from the featurelength détournement documentary

Peking Duck Soup (also called Chinois, encore un effort pour être révolutionnaires) by French Situationist director René Viénet. The situationist cinématheque film

appropriates and repurposes 1970s TV ads, kung fu films, newsreels, and official

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda films to create a devastating antiMaoist

critique of the CCP, the Cultural Revolution, and Mao Tsetung himself. The fulllength

film can be seen via the UbuWeb avantgarde repository

(http://www.ubu.com/film/vienet_chinois.html).

Video 3. "Death Valley Days" (excerpt) by Gorilla Tapes (1984).

[4.4] This excerpt—entitled "Secret Love"—is part of a longer video called "Death Valley Days," created by the British scratch video group Gorilla Tapes in 1984. The full 20minute remix compilation consists of five parts and appropriates news footage, TV

shows, and Hollywood movies to reframe the relationship between conservative

politicians Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. In the early to mid1980s, scratch

videos would be seen in nightclub performances, at independent cinemas, and through

DIY distribution on VHS tapes. Some scratch video artists referred to their work as

antiart or even cultural terrorism.

Video 4. "Blue Monday" by the Duvet Brothers (1985).

[4.5] This remix video was created by the UK scratch video duo the Duvet Brothers

in 1985. It was created by combining recorded TV footage with the popular song "Blue

Monday" by the New Wave band New Order. The music video remix is constructed as a

comment on class inequality, privatization, and the economic polices of the Thatcher

government. Ironically, even though the UK video scratchers were largely outcasts

from the highart world in the 1980s, much of their work now resides in elite museum

collections. As a result, much of it is not available on the Internet.

Video 5. "Apocalypse Pooh" by Todd Graham (1987).

[4.6] This VCRmade remix from the late 1980s appropriates famous fictional

animals from Disney's animated version of Winnie the Pooh and recasts them as

characters in Francis Ford Coppola's gritty Vietnam War drama Apocalypse Now. In the new narrative, the beloved Hundred Acre Wood is transformed into a horrific war zone

in which Pooh, Piglet, and the rest of the gang struggle to keep their sanity. The

humorous and slightly disturbing juxtaposition was an underground viral hit at comic

book conventions, and bootlegged copies were passed around and traded on VHS

tape. Graham's work, which he called telejusting, differs in some respects from that of

later media jammers in that it requires viewers to at least know, if not be a fan of, the

original source material. Graham, unlike many political remixers, also managed to

create some sympathy for his telejusted cartoon characters.

Video 6. "The Reagans Speak Out on Drugs" by Cliff Roth (1988).

[4.7] This classic remix was made by Cliff Roth in 1988 with two VCRs. The footage,

taken from a 1988 antidrug address by both Ronald and Nancy Reagan, has been

reedited to suggest the inauguration of a prodrug campaign in the United States. This

humorous mashup attempts to undermine the US government's scare tactics and

serves as a poignant critique of the disastrous Reaganinitiated war on drugs that has

left hundreds of thousands of nonviolent offenders languishing in prisons all over the

United States.

Video 7. "Oh Boy" (excerpt) by Sterling Eidolan and the Odd Woman Out (ca. 1990).

[4.8] This fan vid uses footage from the 1980s scifi TV show Quantum Leap, created by Sterling Eidolan and the Odd Woman Out, who were members of a larger fan

collective called the California Crew. The remix plays off both the main character's

weekly catchphrase "Oh, boy!" and the famous Buddy Holly song. Through the use of two VCRs, the vidders remarkably manage to sync up the actor's lips to make it

appear as though he is mouthing those lyrics. Quantum Leap was a show that inspired a huge female fan base, and this vid celebrates female sexual desire at a time when

most television narratives catered to heterosexual male desire. Also, as Francesca

Coppa points out in "Women, Star Trek, and the Development of Fannish Vidding," the show's clichéd "bimbo of the week" narrative has been transformed here into one story

featuring scores of female characters (doi:10.3983/twc.2008.0044).

Video 8. "The Iraq Campaign 1991: A Television History" (excerpt) by Phil Patiris (1991).

[4.9] These culturejamming parody commercials for Exxon and GE are part of a 20minute remix film entitled "Iraq Campaign 1991," created by San Francisco–based media artist Phil Patiris. In response to the first gulf war, Patiris appropriated and

transformed network news footage, clips from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the movie Dune, as well as NFL sports coverage, to playfully critique the mediaindustrial complex. The full remixed film is available via YouTube

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg7_ouYmO6Q) and the Internet Archive.

Video 9. "Gulf War: Ground War" by Emergency Broadcast Network (1991).

[4.10] This is the second half of a twopart 20minute remix called "Gulf War: The

Ground War," created by the multimedia performance group Emergency Broadcast

Network (EBN). They created the remix in 1991 in response to the first gulf war. The

video transforms cable news broadcasts by cutting them to a beat, often having the

lyrics "sung" by newscasters or politicians through quick jumpcut editing techniques.

The VHS tape of this project, which contains a clip of George H. W. Bush singing

Queen's "We Will Rock You," became a underground viral hit distributed by EBN fans, who passed around bootleg copies. EBN's video remixing style was largely aggressive

and unsympathetic to pop culture media, and often implied that television audiences

had become victims of brainwashing or mind control. It was one of the first political

agitprop remixes, and in the two decades since, it has remained popular with both leftwing and rightwing political activists. Part 1, "Gulf War: The Air War," is also available via YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6OmnsbMci4).

Video 10. "Read My Lips" by A Thousand Points of Night (1992).

[4.11] This remix music video was built around George H. W. Bush's nowinfamous

"read my lips" sound bite from his 1988 presidential election campaign. The song was recorded by Don Was (of the band Was Not Was) under the pseudonym of A Thousand

Points of Night. The music video for the single later caused a media controversy when

it was shown on MTV during the Bush/Clinton/Perot threeway presidential election

showdown in 1992. The second half of this clip is a PBS discussion about the sinister

implications of remix video with Bill Moyers, Doug Bailey, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson.

Video 11. "And Now a Word from Our Sponsor" by Dangerous Squid (1994).

[4.12] Dangerous Squid (artist Bryan Boyce) was inspired to make this hilarious TV

advertising mashup by the classic early 1990s "Barbie Liberation Organization"

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMHMf9y27w) culturejamming project created

by ®TMark. The remix combines a TV commercial for the remotecontrolled Dancing

Barbie with one for the G.I. Joe Cobra Detonator to subvert the stereotypical gender

roles in the marketing of toys for boys and girls.

Video 12. "The Street Muppets N.W.A" (1994).

[4.13] This VCRmade remix was created by an unnamed student at Florida State

University in 1994 by combining footage from Sesame Street with the protest rap song

"Fuck the Police" from N.W.A's 1988 album Straight Outta Compton. The result is a humorous juxtaposition of the lovable, but now fed up, Kermit the Frog singing (in Ice

Cube's voice) lyrics highlighting the widespread police brutality against black urban

youth in the United States.

Video 13. "Detachable Penis" by Media Cannibals (1997).

[4.14] This VCRmade remix by the vidding crew Media Cannibals appropriates

footage from the late 1970s British TV show The Professionals and sets it to the song

"Detachable Penis" by the band King Missile. The vid reinterprets the lyrics to create a humorous commentary about the series' phallic imagery and emphasis on guns, and

the connection to mass media representations of masculinity. Viewer interpretations of

the vid's intent vary widely, from critique against gun violence on TV to a celebration

of that type of imagery.

Video 14. "The Greatest Taste Around" by Harold Boihem and Negativland (1997).

[4.15] This remix video was created by Harold Boihem for Negativland's critically

satirical single "The Greatest Taste Around" off their 1997 popular album Dispepsi. The video borrows from numerous CocaCola and Pepsi soft drink commercials, including

Max Headroom's famous 1980s Coke ads. This remix is collected with others from

Negativland on their 2007 DVD Our Favorite Things.

Video 15. "Special Report" by Bryan Boyce (1999).

[4.16] Remix artist Bryan Boyce combines appropriated footage from CNN, NBC,

CBS, and ABC news broadcasts with audio from classic 1950s scifi and horror movies

to make the anchors deliver a message of electronic hypnosis and impending doom.

The remix is made particularly convincing by a technique Boyce uses called stunt

mouths, in which he films someone lipsynching the dialog, then pastes the mouth

onto the face of a mass media figure. Boyce has created many political humorous

remixes over the years; "Election Collectibles" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=BshlSeJe3Ps) is another example, using both Al Gore and George W. Bush as Home

Shopping Channel hosts.

Video 16. "Close To You" by Tzikeh (1999).

[4.17] The practice of taking, expanding, and/or altering popular mass media

narratives to create new derivative works is a core part of creative fan cultures. Tzikeh

made "Close to You" by combining footage from The XFiles with love metaphors from the famous Carpenters song. While Tzikeh's remix is not overtly political, it is an

exercise in reading against the original source. The XFiles portrayed Fox Mulder as the tortured, pained, but ultimately lovable hero, with his skeptical sidekick, Dana Scully,

along for the ride to provide sexual tension. Tzikeh's vid transforms and mocks this

characterization of Mulder by using the song's lyrics to poke fun at him, along with

many of the show's larger tropes and clichés. The vid also functions as humorous

metacritique of the fandom itself by gently making fun of popular MulderScully

romance fan fiction.

Video 17. "Bless Your Car with Love" by PHO (2000).

[4.18] This mashup criticizes car culture in the United States by overlaying

automobile accident footage and car commercials with the soft repetition of a

seductive advertising voiceover saying "Bless your car with love." The remix was created by the "mass media manipulation" collective Paul Harvey Oswald or PHO

(http://vimeo.com/user157882), which was started in the mid1990s by Doug Connell

and Kevin Cronin, but also included a large number of rotating anonymous members.

Video 18. "John Ashcroft vs. the Aliens" by Davy Force (2001).

[4.19] Video remix artist Davy Force transforms a 2001 press conference by US

attorney general John Ashcroft on illegal immigration into a warning of alien invaders

from outer space. This remix can also be seen on the DVD Not 4 $ale released by

Other Cinema.

Video 19. "S11 Redux: (Channel) Surfing the Apocalypse" by GNN (2002).

[4.20] This ambitious remix video was directed by Steven Marshall and released by

the Guerrilla News Network (GNN) in 2002. It pulls from over 20 hours of television

footage recorded over a 1month period and across 13 networks to challenge the

messages emanating from mainstream media news networks about the US

government's war on terror.

Video 20. "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" by Laura Shapiro (2002).

[4.21] "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" is a meta slash vid made using a wide variety of TV and movie sources, and featuring some of the most famous slash and femslash pairings in

fan fiction. The vid was intended by vidder Laura Shapiro to be a plea for more gay

characters in mass media, as well as a celebration of the few existing onscreen gay

and lesbian relationships. After the release, it was also embraced by some fan

communities for its unintended message of advocating legal gay marriage. (The term

"slash" comes from the punctuation mark fans historically used to delineate samegender pairings in fan fiction works, such as Kirk/Spock—shortened to K/S.)

Video 21. "Cinderella+++" by Eileen Maxson (2002).

[4.22] In this video, a series of famous Disney characters find out that their lovers

aren't exactly the perfect idealized visions of deified manhood seen in the original

animated features. Artist Eileen Maxson placed audio clips from 90210, Dawson's

Creek, and Jack Nicholson in the film Carnal Knowledge to video clips of classic scenes from Disney's Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Lady and the Tramp, resulting in eyeopening juxtapositions that deromanticize the stereotypical genderbased fantasies ever present in Disney fairy tales.

Video 22. "Read My Lips: Endless Love" by Johan Söderberg (2003).

[4.23] Beginning in 2001, Swedish filmmaker Johan Söderberg began experimenting

with editing news footage to make it appear as though world leaders were singing pop

songs. The series, entitled "Read My Lips," uses song lyrics to provide hilarious yet biting critiques of politicians and their policies. In this example, George W. Bush and

Tony Blair lovingly sing the classic Diana Ross/Lionel Richie duet to comment on the

"special relationship" between the US and UK governments; of course, this relationship not only led Britain to follow the United States into the second Iraq war, but also

eventually led to Blair's ousting as prime minister. Johan still occasionally adds to his

remix collection; in 2011 he created a new duet between Libya's Muammar Gaddafi

and Italy's Silvio Berlusconi ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FZwf1XPpd8).

Video 23. "State of the Union...Not Good" by Edo Wilkins (2002).

[4.24] In 2002, Edo Wilkins recut George W. Bush's State of the Union address to

make the thenpresident appear to boast about committing acts of state terrorism.

Wilkins drove home his critique by intercutting this alternative speech with extended

clips of the United States Congress erupting into thunderous applause. Since Webbased video became a practical reality, State of the Union mashups have become something an annual tradition for media activists and remix artists. However, the first

State of the Union remix was created in 1997 by video artist Aaron Valdez, using two

VCRs, when he mashed up Bill Clinton's presidential address

(http://vimeo.com/2717623). Six years later, Valdez followed up with a remixed

sequel, using George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address

(http://vimeo.com/2717588). That same year, Cartel Communique and Chris Morris

used the 2003 address to create their popular remix "State of the Union:

Bushwhacked" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PAGb2O7lms).

Video 24. "The Lord of the Rings of Free Trade" by St01en collective (2002).

[4.25] In 2002, a group calling itself the St01en collective created this

reinterpretation of Peter Jackson's blockbuster motion picture version of J. R. R.

Tolkien's famous series The Lord of the Rings. The group creatively added subtitles over an extended trailer for the fantasy epic, transforming the archetypal struggle

between good and evil into a pointed commentary on corporate globalization, the

World Trade Organization, and free trade in the 21st century. The remix was originally

uploaded to Indymedia

(http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2002/12/22/15532811.php), both to provide a level of anonymity and to avoid potentially expensive video hosting costs.

Video 25. "Bush for Peace" by Jen Simmons and Sarah Christman (2003).

[4.26] George W. Bush's speech announcing his illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 has

been the subject of many remixes, but "Bush for Peace" is unique in that it reedits and reimagines the president as delivering an aggressively propeace message. In this

alternative version, Bush is made to admit the US military's historical role in state

terrorism, and he commits to dismantling the Pentagon to make the world a safer,

more peaceful place. In this way, the remix makes it possible to imagine the

impossible: what it would be like to have a sitting US president earnestly promoting a

genuinely nonviolent foreign policy.

Video 26. "The Adventures of Hercubush" by BangZoomTV (2003).

[4.27] A preYouTube viral Internet hit by the group BangZoomTV, consisting of Jim

Paul, Jay Martel, and Brian O'Connor, was created by dubbing new voices over

portions of classic Hercules epics from the 1960s to recast the characters as members

of the Bush administration. George W. Bush is reimagined as a halfgod, halfmortal,

halfTexan hero named Hercubush, who is engaged in an illadvised war for more body

oil that he can slather on his manly muscles.

Video 27. "Keeping America Scared" by Brennan Houlihan (2004).

[4.28] This example of the supercut mashup genre—a remixing style characterized by obsessively cutting together all similar words or phrases from a particular piece of

media—is used to illustrate the fearbased messaging strategy employed by GOP

politicians at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Houlihan reduced the

convention's primetime speeches to their core themes by editing together only the

specific words designed to trigger fear in the audience like "terror," "terrorist,"

"Saddam Hussein," and "September 11th."

Video 28. "Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps" by Killa (2005).

[4.29] This slash vid hints at a romantic relationship between Captain Kirk and first

officer Spock using footage from the 1960s television show Star Trek and the song

"Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps" by the band Cake. The Star Trek media franchise now

includes six television series and 12 feature films, all without even one openly gay or

lesbian main character. The Kirk/Spock relationship, however, has a long, vibrant, and

complex history in fan works. Killa's remix is a playful meta comment on and

celebration of that longstanding fan fiction tradition.

Video 29. "George Bush Don't Like Black People" by The Black Lantern (2005).

[4.30] This is one of two music video mashups illustrating the lyrics of the remix hiphop single "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People" by The Legendary K.O., which samples Kayne West's song "Gold Digger," which had sampled Ray Charles's

song "I Got a Woman." The title is based on Kayne West's spontaneous live television statements immediately after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf

Coast. The video is highly critical of the mainstream media and thenpresident George

W. Bush's slow and prejudiced response to the 2005 storm. The Black Lantern selfpublished the remix on his personal Web site a month before YouTube officially launched. The remix went viral in its first 48 hours, causing him to exceed his

bandwidth limit and forcing him to temporarily remove it. A few weeks later, another

mashup artist, Frank Lopez, released his own remixed video mashup

(http://www.archive.org/details/dontlikeblackpeople).

Video 30. "Planet of the Arabs" by Jackie Reem Salloum (2005).

[4.31] Artist and filmmaker Jackie Reem Salloum combined footage from scores of

movies and television programs to create her epic remix "Planet of the Arabs." The mashup is a movie trailer–like montage spectacle of Hollywood's relentless vilification

and dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims. Salloum was inspired by the book Reel Bad

Arabs by Jack Shaheen, which noted that out of nearly 1,000 films made between

1896 and 2000 with Arab and Muslim characters, only 12 were positive depictions, 52

were evenhanded, and the rest—900 or so—were negative. The project reveals the

systematic racism toward Arabs and Muslims propagated by American cinema.

Document Outline

Transformative Works and Cultures, special issues: Fan/Remix Video, No. 9 (March 15, 2012)

Special issue 1

Julie Levin Russo & Francesca Coppa, Fan/remix video (a remix)

Theory