Kim A. Brillante Knight, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Emerging Media and Communication University of Texas at Dallas
[email protected] | http://kimknight.com Published in the peer-reviewed journal, The Projector. Fall 2014. https://sites.google.com/site/projectorjournal/ “The Work of iamamiwhoami in the Age of Networked Transmission” On January 31, 2010, the science fiction author William Gibson hit send on a tweet1 that read, “that putative Lady GaGa Virus is as seriously Footage-y as anything I’ve seen on YouTube.” The “Lady GaGa Virus” turns out to have nothing at all to do with Lady GaGa. It is a series of online videos that are produced by a collective called iamamiwhoami that is led by Swedish singer Jonna Lee, who had a few pop records prior to this project. Despite no traceable connection to GaGa, the iamamiwhoami videos are, in fact, “seriously Footage-y.” The production and circulation strategies employed by iamamiwhoami bear an eerie resemblance to those of the anonymous online videos called “the footage” in Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition. Gibson’s fictional footage is a series of thirty-five video clips that are produced anonymously, released onto the internet, and spawn a devoted fan community. The quest to unveil the identity of the maker of the footage is the mystery that drives much of the plot of the novel. As with the fictional footage, the iamamiwhoami videos are produced and shared via unconventional means and are part of a larger viral structure that includes the media objects, discourse about them, remixes, and other elements of fan production.