Vidding and Vidwatching As Collaborative Interpretation Tisha Turk
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University of Minnesota Morris Digital Well University of Minnesota Morris Digital Well English Publications Faculty and Staff choS larship 2010 "Your Own Imagination": Vidding and Vidwatching as Collaborative Interpretation Tisha Turk Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.morris.umn.edu/eng_facpubs Part of the American Popular Culture Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, and the Film and Media Studies Commons Recommended Citation Definitive version available from Film & Film Culture 5 (2010). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty and Staff choS larship at University of Minnesota Morris Digital Well. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Publications by an authorized administrator of University of Minnesota Morris Digital Well. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “YOUR OWN IMAGINATION”: VIDDING AND VIDWATCHING AS COLLABORATIVE INTERPRETATION TISHA TURK For decades, scholars in the to archive, annotate, social sciences and literary, appropriate, and recirculate media and communication media content”3 and studies have demonstrated “audiences themselves that audiences are not frequently function as self- necessarily passive consumers conscious media producers of written and visual texts, and and critics.”4 that they can and do actively This essay focuses on a interpret, negotiate, and even particular genre of audience resist the variable meanings production: fan-made song encoded in those texts.1 videos, known within the Media fans were among the media fan community simply earliest spectators to shift as vids. In vids, footage from from merely reading actively television series or films is to creating texts of their own edited in conjunction with that extend or comment on carefully chosen music to the originals and constructing celebrate, interpret, critique, or communities organized subvert mass media narratives. around those creations. Fans A vid is, as Francesca Coppa were there-fore early adopters has put it, “a visual essay that of the practices that stages an argument,” but, characterize what has come to unlike academic essays or be called read/write culture2 written reviews, vids allow or participatory culture, a their creators—called culture in which “everyday vidders—to present people take advantage of new arguments in the same technologies that enable them medium as the original 88 source.5 Vidders thus position many years. Kandy Fong made themselves simultaneously as the first vid (a slideshow) in fans, filmmakers, and critics. 1975, and a relatively small Vids express what vidders find number of women, often important in the source working in groups and pooling narrative, which characters, resources, produced vids using relationships, stories and two VCRs throughout the subtexts they find most 1980s and 90s, and in some interesting and rewarding to cases well into the current examine. A vid represents a decade.6 Digital video editing close reading, and like any has made certain vidding close reading it is selective: procedures much easier and vidders can retain or subvert has enabled the use of shorter the original story, foreground clips and of digital effects a minor story element or ranging from adjusting colour character, excise the parts of and speed to masking the story that displease them, characters in and out of shots, or create a new story but the work of vidding and altogether. Vids are therefore vidwatching in the digital era opportunities to resist as well remains continuous with, if as reinscribe visual narratives. not always identical to, that of Because of the increasingly the VCR era. widespread availability both of In this essay, I argue that, in digital non-linear editing addition to being artefacts of software—nearly all new participatory culture, vids computers come with a basic represent critical engagements version of such software that both encode and demand already installed—and of collaborative interpretation. broadband internet access, Treating collaborative most vids in recent years have interpretation as a central fan been made on computers and activity allows us to distributed online. But vidding understand why growing did not begin with YouTube; numbers of fans identify it is a well-established practice themselves as fans of vids and that predates our current vidding as well as, or even conception of “new media” by instead of, specific television 89 series and films.7 As Henry are cultural narratives about Jenkins has argued, vids gender and sexuality, including “articulate […] what the fans the representation of gendered have in common: their shared bodies, roles, and choices. understandings, their mutual Although vidding is not interests, their collective inherently feminist, it does fantasies” and “focus on those offer the female spectator a aspects of the narrative that chance to talk back to media the community wants to representations of both male explore”.8 Increasingly, those and female bodies. It is shared understandings and impossible to offer a simple mutual interests transcend reason why this particular specific source material: form of participatory culture is vidders and vidwatchers are practiced so overwhelmingly fans of particular ways of by women while fan films— seeing, ways of reclaiming or perhaps the closest talking back to mass media. analogue—are typically made Vids like Luminosity’s by men; female fans create “Vogue” and sisabet’s “Ring vids about a variety of sources Them Bells,” discussed from a variety of perspectives hereafter, are not grounded in for a variety of purposes and shared understandings of a pleasures, and attempting to particular source—at least, not explain the phenomenon risks understandings worked out in homogenizing these fannish activity related differences. But, if as Julie specifically to that source. Levin Russo argues, “fans are While they might be said to appropriating the signifiers of “focus on the aspects of the mass culture in the service of narrative that the community their independent narrative wants to explore,” some of the and social needs”.9 We might narratives explored in these speculate that women are two vids are much larger than more likely than men to feel the specific films 300 (Zack that their narrative and social Snyder, 2006) and Kill Bill needs are not being met by Vols. 1 and 2 (Quentin that culture: television and Tarantino, 2003-2004); they film are not giving these 90 women enough of the stories they want, so they make those Vids are one way for women stories themselves. Vids, like to lay claim to a medium that fan fiction, can be a way of still makes little room for their simultaneously improving voices and desires. beloved but problematic This appropriation has been commercial texts and creating going on for decades, although new non-commercial texts the specifics of the practice expressly designed to fulfil a have changed over time. particular set of desires; they When Jenkins wrote Textual can also be a way of calling Poachers—for many years the attention to the elements that only published scholarship on need fixing, of registering fans and fandom to discuss anger or frustration. Vids vidding in detail—vids were show us something about an underground and highly what the vidder sees in a insular cultural phenomenon: particular media text, what she in order to watch vids, and liked about it, what she especially to get one’s own disliked, what she found copies of vids, one had to interesting or absurd. They tell know where to go and whom us something about the kinds to contact. Fans were most of stories that women want to likely to see vids for the first see, the stories that women time at a convention or in the will create out of what is home of a fellow fan who available to them. As Coppa already possessed vid notes, collections on tape; these tapes could typically be the advent of home obtained only at conventions filmmaking technology has or, occasionally, by writing to allowed women to look, the vidders to request that a judge, select, edit, and tape be sent by mail. Vids are manipulate images without still “narrowcast” rather than any of the physical or broadcast, but even social dangers historically narrowcast texts are now connected to the female widely available, if not widely gaze.10 announced, and fannish 91 infrastructures—including and production even existed, listservs, forums, and much less how to find those especially fan communities on communities. Now that those LiveJournal and other social communities are online, more networking sites—make them and more people do join not only available but easily fandom, or set up fannish accessible.11 It is now possible outposts of their own—and for a fan who discovers she many of these fans have begun likes vids to download dozens to watch vids and even to of them without ever having make them. Many—possibly any contact with the vidders. most—of these new vidders In this sense, though vids and vidwatchers are unfamiliar continue to operate in some of with the history of vids; they the ways of folk culture,12 and may have no idea, for though they are still example, that fans were profoundly non-commercial, making vids on two VCRs they are simultaneously taking decades before it was possible on shadings of mass culture, to make them on computers. something “produced at a Nevertheless, they have joined distance by strangers,” as the active audience that Richard Ohmann describes characterizes media fandom it.13 generally and the vidding These changes can be community in particular. attributed, in part, to the But if the Internet has enabled dramatic rise in the number of rapid and wide-ranging people participating in fannish circulation of artefacts of the activities. The explosion of vidding culture, the media fandom in the wake of interpretive assumptions, the Internet suggests that community norms, and there were always far more personal relationships around potential than actual which that culture has participants in the culture of developed cannot be so easily fandom; many protofans distributed.