It's important to us that Media Fetish: The Vidshow! be not only a fleeting local event, but a permanent virtual installation that the community can share. To that end, I have much belatedly transcribed excerpts of our remarks on the vids to post here. The full playlist is in the original entry; cut are a handful of vids where our observations are already more or less documented online, as well as familiar background information. Apologies for the abridgements, and for the sustained inelegance that comes of translating our extemporaneous performance to text. We were having a great time!

~ Julie Levin Russo and Francesca Coppa

( on with the show! )

I had a fantastic time at Swarthmore and was enthusiastically received! Nonetheless, it's decidedly a first draft of this presentation; please be gentle.

production notes
- my first time using slideshare.net, which is amazing -- you can page through (or download) the powerpoint, or hit play to watch with my synced voice
- audio recorded on the fly on my macbook's internal mic; sorry about the fluctuations
- because of the difficulty of attribution and permissions, not to mention the barely adequate sound quality, the excellent and extensive comments/questions from the audience are edited out
- I should soon be adding an alternate videotaped version of the lecture to this post
eta: extended video edition, which DOES include discussion
@ SCMS, my talk was a highly excerpted version of the BSG chapter already posted here; I'd be happy to provide you with that 10-page text if you're interested.

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 going to try to video as many of my lectures as possible (next semester), and post them @ http://julie.blip.tv (feed: julie_bliptv)

here's the first! a slightly different version of one I prepared last year. eta: a later version.

Click To Play

no illustrations, because it was shorter. links still here.

materials also still the same:

assigned essays:
• Jenkins, Henry. "Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching." Television: The Critical View (5th ed.). Horace Newcomb. NY: Oxford UP, 1994.
• Jones, Sara Gwenllian. "Starring Lucy Lawless?" Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. Vol. 14, No. 1 (April 2000).

TV episode:
Xena: Warrior Princess, "Déjà Vu All Over Again" (S.04)

(I did not choose these)

*

( notes )

lecture notes for MC23: Intro to Digital Media
professor = Wendy Chun
TA = me

audio recording: one / two / three

readings:
• Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.
• tsenft, "Autobiography, Reflexivity, Solidarity," in Camgirls: Webcams, LiveJournals and the Personal as Political in the Age of the Global Brand (forthcoming).
• sophia_helix, "three years, three months, and 1,188 entries later" [07.24.04].

( such as they are )