Transformative Works and Cultures, special issues: Fan/Remix Video, No. 9 (March 15, 2012) Special issue 1 Julie Levin Russo & Francesca Coppa, Fan/remix video (a remix) Theory Paul Booth, Mashup as temporal amalgam: Time, taste, and textuality Tisha Turk & Joshua Johnson, Toward an ecology of vidding Virginia Kuhn, The rhetoric of remix Kim Middleton, Remix video and the crisis of the humanities Praxis Sarah Fiona Winters, Vidding and the perversity of critical pleasure: Sex, violence, and voyeurism in "Closer" and "On the Prowl" Agnese Vellar, Spreading the cult body on YouTube: A case study of "Telephone" derivative videos Kathleen Amy Williams, Fake and fan film trailers as incarnations of audience anticipation and desire Symposium Martin Leduc, The two-source illusion: How vidding practices changed Jonathan McIntosh’s political remix videos Zephra Doerr, Abridged series and fandom remix culture Forrest Phillips, The Star Wars franchise, fan edits, and Lucasfilm Interview Counteragent, Documenting the vidders: A conversation with Bradcpu Brett Boessen, Interview with Eric Faden and Nina Paley Desiree D'Alessandro, Diran Lyons, Desiree D'Alessandro and Diran Lyons bear arms: Weapons of mass transformation Multimedia Alexandra Juhasz, Fred rant Elisa Kreisinger, Queer video remix and LGBTQ online communities Ian Roberts, Genesis of the digital anime music video scene, 1990–2001 Jonathan McIntosh, A history of subversive remix video before YouTube: Thirty political video mashups made between World War II and 2005 Review Lindsay Giggey, "Television and new media: Must-click TV," by Jennifer Gillan Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), ISSN 1941-2258, is an online-only Gold Open Access publication of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works. TWC is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Download date: March 15, 2017. For citation, please refer to the most recent version of articles at TWC. Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 9 (2012) Editorial Fan/remix video (a remix) Julie Levin Russo Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, United States Francesca Coppa Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, United States [0.1] Abstract—Editorial for Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9 (September 15, 2012). [0.2] Keywords—Anime music video; Appropriation; Fan production; Fan trailers; Mashup; Political remix video; Vidding Russo, Julie Levin, and Francesca Coppa. 2012. "Fan/Remix Video (A Remix)." In "Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0431. [1.1] Remix, even moving image remix, is hardly a new phenomenon. Indeed, the buzzword has gathered such momentum in cultural discourse that it begins to seem retrospectively that everything is a remix (http://everythingisaremix.info). Copying and overpainting in the Renaissance (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2105928,00.html); the ascendance of pop art; Bach's "Goldberg Variations"; the analog techniques of early hip­hop turntablists (http://thomson.co.uk/blog/wp­ content/uploads/infographic/interactive­music­map/index.html); the repertoire of folklore; surrealist films of the 1930s—as these varied examples indicate, remix as a trope converges with our idea of creative production itself. At least, this is a common refrain among advocates of copyright reform, who have argued that culture always builds on the past (figure 1). Figure 1. Screen shot from "RIP: A Remix Manifesto," by Brett Gaylor (2009) (http://ripremix.com/). [View larger image.] Joseph Cornell - Rose Hobart (1936) Video 1. "Rose Hobart" by Joseph Cornell (1936) (http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2001/cteq/hobart/). [1.2] Remix thus perhaps embodies our more pervasive sense of a postmodern repudiation of artistic principles like originality, authenticity, or aura, to the degree that it can characterize our audiovisual culture as a whole. Nonetheless, as a practice that extends beyond music subcultures, the term is most closely associated with the historical specificities of our contemporary moment at the level of technology, powerful personal computers, consumer digital media devices, and Web 2.0. Remix video in particular has only recently blossomed into a widespread popular phenomenon. Vidding, political remix, DIY media, trailer mashups, tribute videos, memes, machinima, fan films—we are in the midst of an explosion in vernacular creativity that appropriates, celebrates, critiques, and transforms commercial entertainment. Technological innovations and Internet platforms support a developing ecology of video remix forms with unprecedented reach, richness, and cultural influence. At the same time, the value and legitimacy of this popular production is hotly contested on the basis of artistic merit, traditional literacies, and intellectual property. [1.3] In this special issue, we zoom in on questions foregrounded by the proliferation and mainstreaming of remix video over the past decade. Not coincidentally, this summer will mark the 10th anniversary of VividCon (http://vividcon.com), a convention founded at a time when the fan vidding community was weathering the transition to digital editing and an associated influx of new devotees. It would have been difficult then to anticipate the scale of this transformation, both in the prevalence of fan music videos (which are now a YouTube staple) and in their new interchanges with a vast ecology of remix practice. As mashup video genres increasingly coexist, cross­ pollinate, and collide online, emerging scholarly canons and debates on these distinct traditions can become similarly intersectional and mobile. We aim to bring diverse critical engagements to this conjuncture by fostering connections between scholars and fans across disciplines and subcultures. 2. Remix culture [2.1] It's hard to believe we're only 7 years out from YouTube's early days in the spring of 2005 (http://infographiclabs.com/infographic/history­of­online­video/). While this Web startup was far from the first or last venture in Internet video, its pioneering features (including encoding, streaming, and embedding) and critical mass of users (facilitated by social components) rapidly positioned it as the destination for video online. With YouTube, the capacity of digital technologies to popularize all links in the video chain—production, distribution, appropriation—came to fruition. It's already hard to imagine our culture without ubiquitous access to audiovisual content from across the amateur­professional spectrum and the ensuing predilection to share, modify, and spread it. In less than a decade, video has become a media vernacular in unprecedented ways. As an example, consider both the content and the form of video responses to Jean Burgess's 2008 essay "'All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong to Us'? Viral Video, YouTube and the Dynamics of Participatory Culture" by students in the course Studies in Digital Culture at De Motfort University (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL690C70E82197ECC2). Video Responce to Jean Burgess' Essay.avi Video 2. "Video Summary of Jean Burgess' Essay…" by Jess Wager (2011). [2.2] It's important to remember that remix and participatory media are not synonymous with the digital. Appropriation has been a hallmark of 20th­century art practice, customarily dated back to Duchamp's readymades (http://kiki­miserychic.livejournal.com/192417.html). And a succession of innovations in more affordable and mobile recording technologies from 16mm film (1930s) to the Portapak video camera (1970s) have supported visions of independent grassroots media production. Digital media, however, represents a qualitative change in the possibilities and implications of popular video making. According to Lev Manovich's axiomatic textbook The Language of New Media, the two fundamental principles of computerization are numerical representation and modularity (2002, 27– 31). It follows that audiovisual content is today subject to quantification and algorithmic manipulation based on the decomposition and recomposition of its discrete units. What we now understand as media on any screen is essentially premixed by the processes of digitization into modular elements (the smallest of which are 0s and 1s), underpinning the explosion of what we have come to think of as remix culture. Figure 2. "Outline of Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media," created by Carlton (2008). [2.3] In this present­day context, Eduardo Navas (2010) defines remix culture as "a global activity consisting of the creative and efficient exchange of information made possible by digital technologies…[and] supported by the practice of cut/copy and paste." In this more precise definition, remix, which originated as a term in hip­hop and disco subcultures, is based on sampling: taking excerpts of one or more existing works and recombining them into a new work. Before computerization, various forms of remix relied on specific technical practices dependent on distinct media. The digitization of media allows remix to function as a generalized principle of cultural production. Although software interfaces may vary, "cut/copy and paste"—a corollary of "numerical representation and modularity"—is now an intuitive operation to anyone who has used Microsoft Word or cropped a profile pic. For the purposes of this special issue, we consider remix video to include not only reedits of appropriated footage but other styles with a clear transformative logic. This might encompass