In keeping with the networked structure of our collective brain, this post forks off from heyiya's Cylon meta and virtual vidshow (you can read my reviews of the older vids she picked in my previous BSG recs post). It's my rendering of an emergent BSG vidding meme that has been circulating between heyiya, beccatoria, kiki_miserychic and I, building on work already underway in the fandom at large. ( OUR VIDS )

( more techno-futuristic BSG vids )

( BSG female character studies )

The BSG vids I've enjoyed but not reviewed are in this playlist -- let me know if I've missed anything important (that's not hetshippy or boy-focused)?

Remember in April when I announced the first in a series of Battlestar Galactica season 4 crack vidlets? beccatoria and my Plan was to mashup each episode with audio from the Prelinger Archives of mid-century sponsored films, thereby creating our own archive that chronicles the season against the backdrop of our own cultural and technological history. Months later, the project is complete! Part one, at least, with the rest to come when BSG returns in 2009.

Length: 9:20 (10 parts, mostly under 60 seconds each)
Stream: youtube or imeem (embedded under the cut)
Download: 61MB AVI
Links: original posts @ beccatoria or @ thearchive2 / xposted @ vidding + bsg_crack

( watch it now )I'm absurdly proud of how these vids emerged as a collaborative artwork, and I think you can witness our skills improving as the series progresses.

For a more sober portrait of season 4.0 (or as a reference point for anyone who might be arriving at this post without a sense of what a more typical fanvid looks like), let me recommend beccatoria's Tricks (to Bruce Springseen's "Magic"). In addition to its elegant distillation of S4's key moments and themes, this vid is notable for contrasting them with a heartbreaking montage of earlier BSG scenes, and for an ingenious use of the final episode's final shot (interspersed throughout on the refrain). It's also technically dazzling, and could be taken as an exemplar of Windows Movie Maker vidding. WMM offers a very limited palette of capabilities, but Becka pushes them to their limits, perfecting the rhythm with extensive time toggles. I had the pleasure of doing some light beta duty on this.

Finally, one of the perks of selecting concepts for Tomorrow was having an excuse to plumb the depths of the remarkable Prelinger collection. Here's a sampling of the sort of deranged gems found therein. They may be of special interest to media studies professors, as many would make excellent teaching tools. FYI, the archive also includes myriad promotional/educational narrative films and musicals, which I skipped over.

( Top Ten Prelinger )

Other than the not insignificant Vidshow weekend (documentation delayed until... see below), I've been able to think of nothing since Friday except BSG's last season premiere. This is not hyperbole. Its magnificence does not bode well for my career or sanity; I'm now attempting to reorganize my life around the serious investment of time and energy that the show's endgame is apparently going to demand. I'm rusty at acute fannishness -- which means, for me, making stuff. And in the spirit of S3's vlog, said stuff is no longer always or even fanfic in the traditional sense. So now, for something a little different [SPOILERS for 4x01]:

( the metafic )

That was always Project A. Project B is just as compelling to me, but far too ambitious to have undertaken on my own. However, it turns out that beccatoria has some time and generosity of spirit on her hands. I could tell you a whole flaily tale about how we got connected, but the point is, Becka is one of the smartest and most talented fans I know who's nonetheless relatively indifferent to what I'll call the BSG "scene." Here's how it went down:

1. I gesticulated wildly in her direction about this cockamamie idea I've had about vidding to audio fragments sourced from the Prelinger Collection, a remarkable public domain archive of mid-century promotional and educational films.
2. At her invitation, I storyboarded a 30-second vid as an annotated list of time-stamped clips.
3. BECKA DID MAGIC. As editor and artist, she figured out how to transform my blind text into moving pictures with style and technique and rhythm. I think she enjoyed the puzzle of it? To illustrate her brilliance, here's a snippet of her commentary on the vidding process: "I've decided to go with a lot of long cross-fades in an attempt to get that 1950s vaseline-on-the-lens, shiny future, faux-perfect feel. That and the fact that it's got a slow *beat* with a lot of very fast *notes* and I'm working with more amorphous scene breaks is making it...interesting regarding timing." Keep in mind that she's doing this in WMM, you guys.
4. I sent back detailed notes on the first draft, which were just as much notes for myself since now I could SEE where my plan wasn't working, and she revised accordingly.
5. When we'd reached consensus, I did some cosmetic tweaking in iMovie designed credits -- and the long and the short of it is: we made a vidlet together!

The collaborative process was both breathtaking (marveling as my nebulous fantasy materialized in technicolor splendor) and terrifying (being responsible for an artwork that's not fully under my control). It has certainly taught me a TON, already, about vidding -- not the technical aspects, which are still far beyond me, but certainly the possibilities and limitations that come into play between the vision in one's head and the image that can appear onscreen. One of the limitations is that she's not really set up for shiny; you can [DL] but I actually think streaming is the more appropriate viewing experience in this case. Think of the lower quality as part of the archival conceit! NEW: now with MOAR SHINY! we're learning...
( the vidlet )
While it remains to be seen whether this is possible or advisable, the Plan is that these projects will continue in weekly episodic installments at thearchive2; watch there if you're interested, because I won't be constantly crossposting.

Finally, a quick heads up that the video version of my Swarthmore talk on vidding is posted! It's an extended edition that includes audience questions/comments.

Yeah, I'm pretty late to the party! If you want to know why, about a year ago, I suddenly realized what you all probably knew already and became obsessed with fanvids, my analysis of jarrow's "Save Yourself" in my dissertation might shed some light. So I've started keeping a vid-watching diary. The logic behind this is that, when I save a fic, it's easy enough to click through to it again and skim the text to remind myself of what it's about and why I loved it, whereas with vids, there's really no shorthand way to re-access them. While fanworksfinder is working well for me as an archive, it doesn't offer a means to share my reviews. So when counteragent declared the New-To-Me Vid Watching Challenge, it occurred to me that I could take this as an opportunity not only to pledge, but to do a dump of all my recent vidrecs.

My long-term OCD project is to cover Battlestar Galactica gen and all the BSG vids on imeem with some comprehensiveness, complete with my best-of-the-best playlist -- but that's still in the early stages. For the moment, I've been catching up on kbusse, jarrow272, and beerbad's recent recs posts. Of course, I never seem to be able to multitask, so I'm doing this in one massive blitz of ~50 vids. I got on an airplane yesterday with a stocked ipod and my Secretary swag notepad, and wrote pages and pages of comments out longhand while flying cross-country.

first, a fortnight's worth of vids that meet counteragent's criteria (new to me + I feedbacked [via my personal journal]), albeit late for the challenge and all in one day! I have a really difficult time commenting on posts that already have two or three or four pages of replies, is what I learned -- but I suppose that's why it's called a "challenge."

( challenge vids: BSG )

( challenge vids: miscellaneous )

( other reviews: multifandom )

( other reviews: BSG )

[more recs from the vid-watching blitz coming in part 2... sometime this month?]

I'm thrilled to announce the publication of Re/Producing Cult TV: The Battlestar Galactica Issue at the online journal FlowTV!

I am the Guest Associate Editor of this special issue, in collaboration with Guest Editor Lynne Joyrich. It includes seven essays (including pieces by me, theorynut, alistern, and _mesk), plus Lynne's illuminating introduction. Perhaps most exciting, though, is a full-length interview with Mary McDonnell (Laura Roslin), in text and audio form!

You'll see the issue on the journal's front page now, and there's also a table of contents. Please leave us comments and spread the word!

( list of essays + screenshot )

[another version of the abstract for the ongoing BSG project, submitted to SCMS]

Love is television's reproductive technology: yoking the libidinal economy of audiences to the financial economy of the entertainment industry, TV depends for its self-perpetuation on our desire for its endlessly multiplying texts. On the SciFi channel series Battlestar Galactica, love is likewise the cybernetic Cylons' reproductive technology, since they believe that only cross-species romance could produce Hera, the first Cylon-human hybrid baby and "the shape of things to come." Hybridity is "the shape of things to come" for broadcast media as well: it has become all but mandatory for popular TV series to appeal to viewers with exclusive online content, offering television intensified opportunities to proliferate its texts and its intercourse with fans. At the same time, these new media forms have encouraged unofficial fan activities to proliferate, amplifying tensions over property and labor within an increasingly unstable consumer/producer opposition.

This paper analyzes and contrasts an official fan filmmaking contest on the Battlestar Galactica website and fan music videos created in the context of online communities. Videomaker Toolkit exemplifies the industry's dance of permissiveness and containment, while fan works demonstrate that the text's open networks, like the Fleet's networked computers, are vulnerable to unorthodox technologies of love. I focus particularly on the queerness of Battlestar Galactica's alternative families (both on- and offscreen), which becomes increasingly notable as television learns that its offspring can be most fruitful when, like Hera, they're orphaned: disseminated outside their biologically, technologically, and patriarchally authorized families and adopted by their audiences.

BSG, Videomaker, and fanvids foreground the ways that both Cylons and fans are threatening because they're in networked communication with technology, and because their desires to be mediated dispute sanctioned boundaries and generate rogue progeny. It remains to be seen whether the constraints of sponsored initiatives like Videomaker, with their intrinsic compromises and contradictions, can adequately contain and channel these desires. I will argue that, even though fan activities (whether literally or metaphorically queer) are thoroughly implicated in television's consumer economy, there are aspects of their queer families that are unavailable to capitalist poaching.

Media in Transition 5 ~ TV 2.0: Remixing Battlestar Galactica

audio files:

Melanie E. S. Kohnen, Battlestar Galactica and the Reimagination of Contemporary American History
Sarah Toton, Reimagining Fan Culture: The Long Journey of Battlestar Galactica (check out what a splash she made!)
Anne Kustritz, Ownership and Desire: Fans' and Producers' Manipulation of Fictional Love Triangles
Julie Levin Russo, Labors of Love: Capitalizing on Fan Economies (also in video, below)

eta: versions of our talks have been published in FlowTV's Battlestar Galactica issue

I have audio from the Q&A as well (though it's a short-range mic so questions/comments from the audience are not always terribly audible), but I'm not posting it publicly because I didn't ask permission from the participants. Drop me a line if you were there and would like the file.

reports on this panel (as far as I know): Axel Bruns, Jason Mittell, Laura Boylan, Karen Hellekson, Derek Kompare


[labors of love]

[re-enactment]

(The video above is what I actually presented at the event. The text below is slightly different/longer.)
(eta: I adapted/expanded this essay for Media in Transition 5, and published it in FlowTV)

Hera Has Six Mommies (A Transmedia Love Story): Orphan Television and Lesbian Spectacles
(illustrations)

Being in a room with Mary McDonnell feels about as dazzlingly improbable to me as stepping into a sci-fi plot. This is to say, her presence here today is a perfectly vertiginous example of cult television's signature allure: the romance it mediates between a show and its audience. Programs like Battlestar Galactica promise fans that, if our devotion is strong enough, it can penetrate the dimensional barrier of the TV screen, allowing us to reach (sci-fi fashion) through the glass and bring our reality into contact with a parallel universe. Love is cult TV's reproductive technology, because it is only by inspiring our passion across this gap that it succeeds economically, spawns the serials, franchises and spinoffs that are its forms of self-perpetuation. On Battlestar Galactica, love is also the Cylons' reproductive technology, since they believe that only cross-species romance could produce Hera, the first Cylon-human hybrid baby and, I quote, "the shape of things to come." Cult TV is likewise "the shape of things to come," as television at large is increasingly embracing its strategies for generating fan desire: complex and fragmentary worlds that demand creative engagement to fill in their blanks; discontinuous storytelling that bridges time, space, and media formats. Television is learning that its offspring can be most fruitful when, like Hera, they're orphaned: disseminated outside their biologically, technologically, and patriarchally authorized families and adopted by their audiences.

( Read more... )

I'm inexpressibly lucky to have found a way to turn my obsessions into my work. What follows are my drafts of panel and paper abstracts about Battlestar Galactica for MiT @ MIT (feedback welcome -- I hope they take them).

TV 2.0: Remixing Battlestar Galactica (panel with _mesk, alistern, and theorynut)
The SciFi Channel’s critically acclaimed hit series Battlestar Galactica has been heralded as the rebirth of TV’s science fiction genre. As a reimagination of the short-lived late 70’s show of the same name, it has one foot in the historical tradition of cult television, but as an innovator in media convergence and diffusion through its extensive web and behind-the-scenes content, it is also at the vanguard of television’s futures. This panel takes the program as a case study for how television is evolving by remixing its texts, technological forms, and social contexts, and by opening these opportunities for collaborative engagement to its viewers as well. Topics include: how TV narrative reworks sociopolitical themes, and how this relationship changes with the times; how TV negotiates and mobilizes its own history and the longstanding investments of its fans; how TV increasingly recycles its material for transmedia channels, rendering its properties ever more promiscuous and communicable; and how TV solicits and relies on the libidinal labor of its fans, inciting dynamic and sometimes uneasy networks of participation.

Labors of Love: Capitalizing on Fan Economies
Television reproduces itself by yoking the libidinal economy of audiences to the financial economy of the entertainment industry. The debate about whether this ability to generate desire for knowledge, contact, and participation is a progressive ground for subcultural expression or an ideological engine of consumer capitalism is particularly vital today. In our contemporary climate of accelerated media change, it has become all but mandatory for popular TV series to appeal to viewers with extra-broadcast content, offering television new opportunities to intensify its intercourse with fans and the proliferation of its texts. At the same time, these new media forms have encouraged unofficial fan activities to proliferate, amplifying tensions over property and labor in an increasingly unstable consumer/producer opposition. Taking Battlestar Galactica as a case study, this paper explores the interrelationship between collaboration and reappropriation in TV production – as the show is recycled and diffused in a smorgasbord of official tie-ins like blogs, podcasts, webisodes, deleted scenes, interviews and trailers – and collaboration and reappropriation in fan production, which (further) explodes reliable boundaries and hierarchies. Overall, I will argue that attempts to harness and contain fans’ passion within the circuit of capitalism remain riven with productive pitfalls and contradictions.

ljconscript and I wrote an awesome BSG workshop proposal too, on the theme of reproduction (informal version :P) -- but I haven't gotten her permission to post it.

I have indeed been accepted to SCMS. actually this makes me kind of cranky because it's not at all a time of year when I should be traveling. oh, however did I get talked into sumbitting, against my better judgement? -- peer pressure, I think.

*

plus, not unrelatedly, a slight update of last year's very schematic outline of the Big D:

I. The Exploding Text (Grey's Anatomy?? or whatever else catches my fancy)
queer readings: instability of sexual/textual knowledge; RPF, celebrity and "privacy"

II. Labors of Love (Battlestar Galactica) [or some other clever name, if I take Labors of Love as the title of the whole project]
negotiations and disintegrations of of the consumer/producer opposition; economic and legal questions of private property + ownership; tensions of mass media vs. distributed media consumption, viral marketing; cylons: reproduction, archives

III. Desiring Justice (L&O:SVU)
lesbian subcultures; sex/identity as ground for political awareness action; question of visibility (http://afterellen.com); "real" people -- Oliska Hargeson; virtual identity/virtual sexuality of fans

that's three case studies, and I'm thinking of dividing each of them into three parallel sub-chapters: textual themes; politics of production; fan economies. plus there will be an intro and conclusion. (and if I decide to be sassy, metafic interludes.)

* attributed to leavethesky