MIT's Media in Transition 5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age

Creative Transformation: Chicks Talk Back

Karen Hellekson (moderator): gendered nature of the (fan) panels (audience is 90% women)
note: no Louisa Stein :(


Intense Intertextuality: Derivative Works in Context
Kristina Busse

Joshua Bell playing violin in a subway station (WSJ, out of context)
fan writing creates its own context that needs to be taken into account
highly intertextual, parts of ongoing conversations
proposing an approach that takes into account both the social and the artistic context
drawing on Jose Munoz on traces of performative events -- tied to a specific place/time/community
sheds light on critical anxieties
interplay between text and context!

3 interrelated aspects (not specific to fanfic, but fanfic tends to be more so)
- intertextuality
- performativity (ephemerality)
- intimacy

the Triptree incident -- first fanfic longlisted for a profic award
---> wank debate
multiple contexts necessary for understanding the story
ohnonicky community (Nick Stokes "organized flailing"), mpreg challenge that produced Arcana
traces may be all that's left when we look at an artifact later, not the totality of the fannish social engagement
LJ's interface provides varying degrees of ephemerality (very difficult to FIND old posts), conversations going on across multiple posts
fanfic caters to our innermost desires (sexual or otherwise), "down in the muck of the Id"
spawned the embarrassment among fans, "agreement to suspend shame"
outside the demands of the commercial marketplace, don't have to please a large audience
odd because our culture assigns higher value to works that appeal to a narrower audience
artistic value (outside value system) is not always the most important criteria
we should remember that!


Female Video Editors and the Literary Music Video
Francesca Coppa

escalation of a feminist grudge match with other theorists
obviously there are positives to the cross-pollination that comes with the mainstreaming of user-generated context
there's also a negative side to this pomo convergence -- risk that subcultural specificities will be lost
very probably lost along gender/color/class lines
initially functioned as an alternative
---> vidding (practiced primarily by women)
note that in early Hollywood editing was seen as female labor
most academic interest has been in trailers, parody, AMVs etc. that are predominately male
these genres are more accessible to the uninitiated, vids may also depend on knowledge of the source
vidders have very different approaches and values than the mass media source
b/c of copyright concerns (among others) vidders have also kept tight control over their works
now there's a dilemma of whether to stay in the closet and let this moment of transformation pass vidders by

history
- vidding was invented by Candy Phong (sp?) in 1975, from some Star Trek film (actual footage) that she got her hands on
started as a two-slideshow live editing performance set to music
OOH VIDEOTAPE of "Both Sides Now" -- Leonard Nimoy singing (intertextual)
emotional response for the most unemotional character (with Nimoy's voice!)
- invention of VCR (two-VCR technique, extremely arduous process -- doesn't that seem distinctively female!)
late 80's Quantum Leap VID "Oh Boy" -- Sam Beckett as object of desire (reversing the gendering of scopophila), BOW (bimbo of the week) as a positive phenomenon (identification between BOWs into the collective female audience)
old skool claim: vidding can all be traced back to Spock -- we've insufficiently theorized WHY
1. Trek fans were women scientists and engineers, not afraid of technology
2. distinctively filmic problem of Trek (and Spock in particular) that vidding attempts to solve
- Number One (first officer was supposed to be a ball-busting, unemotional, career woman), Spock fills precisely this role when Number One leaves (Spock also stands in for other marginalized identities -- "Both Sides Now"!)
---> Nurse Chapel and her crush on Spock, Majel Barret becomes the voice of the Enterprise itself, First Lady of Star Trek (Rodenberry's wife)
vidding is an attempt to heal that cinematic wound! uniting the disembodied voice with the desiring body


Fandom, Fair Use, and Technology: The Uneasy Relationship?
Rebecca Tushnet

Justice Suder quotes "no MAN but a blockhead ever wrote but for money" -- important to the foundation of copyright
made perfect sense at the beginning to link authorship, control, and money
there are other reasons to create! but it's very difficult to describe these legally
irreducible gap (of DESIRE!) (Matt Hills)
"low protectionists" are increasingly calling for alternatives to traditional copyright control
- payment, compulsory licensing -- works for copying, doesn't work well for transformative works
- creative commons (now defaults to attribution license, because that's what people want in terms of a right of authorship)
- exceptions for orphan works (when you have no idea who owns the copyright)
- developing a structure for credit (partial credit?)
1. problem is that credit is also blame, not all authors want the credit for transformative works (The Wind Done Gone, the court becomes a literary theorist -- legitimate because it's bringing out something that's IN the original! (SUBEXT!))
2. people who are entitled to credit also seem to be people who have other dimensions of social power (e.g. authors, directors, not actors, editors)

fandom is an economy of credit -- context matters
crediting gets even more complicated with vidding (hard to tell how much of the visual effects the vidder has produced)
we pay a lot of third parties to host our work -- so it's OK for the net corporations to make money off this???


Karen:
the author exists in the intersection between the creative realm and the economic realm, and this intersection is fraught
(has to do with gender/class/power)

QUESTION: fans are very hostile to sharing/appropriation/transformation of their work, taking up much more traditional notions of creativity

Nina: insider/outsider issue, intimacy = people are more invested in fanworks
Francesca disagrees: this is a holdover position that is obsolescing, often it's older fans who still have the idea that you can professionalize through fandom, can't have a hierarchy of love

MY QUESTION: the copyright closet and the slash closet run through these papers: what's the relationship between "queer" texts and queer desires

Rebecca: article "My Fair Ladies" -- the irony is that queer texts are in a much better position to make fair use claims -- question is whether that will reverse now that producers are willing to license everything (---> commodification of sexuality)
Nina: related to the issue of it becoming harder to slash canonically straight characters now that there ARE canonically gay characters
Nina: so frustrated by the ways fans embrace outside standards of status when, say, literary theorists dismissed them decades ago, so MODERNIST (fanhating; so how do we train fans to embrace their Id vortex, then?)

response: valuing not having comma splices doesn't make you a tool of the patriarchy

QUESTION: implications of extracting a fic from it's LJ/list community context and putting it on an archive page

Nina: with LJ we started getting a lot more crappy fic (live writing-performance, RPGs)

QUESTION: what about female AMV vidders? they do have a very different aesthetic tradition, but not necessarily masculine

Francesca: (answers with lots of smart AMV-specific stuff), much more permeability between fan and pro, cross-pollination is very interesting (live-action AMV vids!)

MY QUESTION: Nina and Francesca seem to be taking interestingly opposed positions (to paraphrase)
Nina: it's important to recognize and protect the subcultural contexts of this work (particularly communities of female desire)
Francesca: problem of erasure of female production from mainstream narratives of popular creativity because of these boundaries

Nina: we agree! we have to put it out there, but we have to put it out there with the acknowledgment and celebration of its context
Francesca: we do! trying to tell academics that they need to to do MORE WORK on these topics
Rebecca: in new media criticism, we're being told, precisely at the moment when these subcultural forms are maturing, that context doesn't matter because everything will now circulate and be appropriated freely
Francesca: "men have been doing this since 1996!" omg, yay for them. we need to write this down!

~~~

Mediating Sexuality

Feminism, Cynicism, and the Return of the Pinup
Nathan Scott Epley

1. Cheesecake Factories

mainstreaming of pornography ---> pinups have always been mainstream
were just temporarily suppressed by anti-porn feminism

some history: Gibson Girl, pinups in advertising

reappropriation by 3rd wave feminism
resurgence in skyy vodka ads, Camel
artification in coffee table books etc.
as kitch in jewelry/clothing/gifts
retro/lounge culture revivals, DIY production ---> alternaporn

2. Pinup Put-ons

Varla magazine: exemplifies a genre of neo-pinups that purport to challenge traditional notions of femininity
defining trait of 3rd wave feminism
Suicide Girls (ugh ugh ugh)
depends on an oppositional reading that privileged the fringes of historical pinups (masculinity in Vargas, artificiality/performativity in Bettie Page), recognizing them as camp
neo-pinups = drag
complex, ambivalent representation
misreading of Butler: I can put on whatever gender I want ----> commodification of gender
many neo-pinup sites fail to displace this commodification
their politics confront the limits of their consumption contexts

3. Having One's Cheesecake and Eating it Too

no political guarantees when it comes to ironic reappropriation (Sontag)
camp can be apolitical, entagled with the logic of the commodity
(this position is sounding a lot like the position of the FAN)
"it's OK for me to like it because I'm critical of it" -- "I know I'm being had, isn't it cool?!"
"whatever turns me on is OK because I'm not responsible for patriarchy"
consumption of irony itself


The Tragically Ludicrous and the Ludicrously Tragic: Appropriation and Creation in Queer Cinema
James Nadeau

history:
late 1970s: first documentaries
John Waters (birth of independent queer film)
1980s: Hollywood beings to attempt queer films (Personal Best)
The New Queer Cinema (Sundance 1992, Poison [male dominated])
late 1990s: birth of queer romantic comedy (Go Fish)
(All Over the Guy stars Kate from NCIS!)
appropriation: Ernest and Bertram short film got cease and desisted even though it could probably qualify as fair use (still on YouTube), Gay Propaganda (restagings of classical Hollywood scenes)


Anime Pleasure as a Playground of Sexuality, Power, and Resistance
Lien Fan Shen

(didn't pay attention)


An Ethnography of a Queer Culture of Media Production
Adam Fish

(he wasn't able to be here)