Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

Passing this along …

In Media Res is envisioned as an experiment in just one sort of collaborative, multi-modal scholarship that MediaCommons will aim to foster. Its primary goal is to provide a forum for more immediate critical engagement with media in a manner closer to how we typically experience mediated texts.

Each day, a different media scholar will present a 30-second to 3-minute clip accompanied by a 300-350-word impressionistic response. The goal is to promote an online dialogue amongst media scholars and the public about contemporary media scholarship through clips chosen for either their typicality or a-typicality in demonstrating narrative strategies, genre formulations, aesthetic choices, representational practices, institutional approaches, fan engagements, etc.

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

• Monday, January 14, 2008 – Francesca Coppa (Muhlenberg College) presents: “Pressure” – a metavid by the California Crew
• Tuesday, January 15, 2008 – Tisha Turk (University of Minnesota, Morris) presents: “Not Only Human” – an X-Files vid by Killa and Laura Shapiro
• Wednesday, January 16, 2008 – Jacqueline Kjono (independent scholar) presents: “A Day in the Life” – a Dead Zone vid by Shalott and Speranza
• Thursday, January 17, 2008 – Louisa Stein (San Diego State University) presents: “Bricks” – a Supernatural vid by Luminosity
• Friday, January 18, 2008 – Kristina Busse (independent scholar) presents: “Us” – a multivid by Lim

In Media Res Fannish Vidders-themed week

My friends and I came upon this site and I thought it was particularly (yet kind of far-fetched-ly) pertinent to this class. It’s tvcarnage.com, but some of their highlight clips can be found on youtube. I thought it was interesting to look at in regard to this class because it’s a mashup. It takes stuff you’re familiar and unfamiliar with and creates something new. It reminded me of Jenkins’ description of the fan as a producer. While these are decidedly ironic, I think they are valuable to at least look at. What’s perhaps more interesting to us is the use of new spaces (alternative publics) like youtube and the fact that it is so easy to mash up both known and unknown footage to create new narratives for all to see. To me, it’s like a digital video zine that can reach billions of people. These videos parse different pieces from different people’s lives and stick them together in this meta text of pop and sub culture references. While people have been doing mashup in music for a while (think of sampling), it’s recently become much more huge with artists that exclusively do mashup work (like Girl Talk or The Hood Internet). Why is it that mashup is becoming such an important part of pop culture? I guess you could argue that this is happening everywhere (Pullman taking from Paradise Lost as well as Biblical elements… isn’t that a mashup?), but I feel that it has never been as overt as it is now. The creation of hypermedia meta texts (oh man so many intertextual spaces!) is a new phenomenon, related to many things, obviously the creation of the Internet and other fast forms of communication and tied to that globalization and transnational flows of information. What do you all think about mashup as a metatext/fabric in an intertextual space?

by the way, the photo is of Cyndi Lauper and Dizzee Rascal, taken from the Hood Internet website, where they did a mashup of the songs “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” (Lauper) and “Fix Up, Look Sharp” (Dizzee Rascal) into a song entitled “Girls Just Want to Fix Up.”