Posts Tagged subculture
New media and old institutions: 2
Posted by Alexis Lothian in fandom, media on February 7, 2009
I’ve written about vidding quite a lot on this blog. It’s an artform that is getting steadily more attention: as one facet of the web’s enabling of grassroots, amateur filmmaking, as part of the long history of women’s work with media, as a valuable kind of media literacy. Last weekend, I made a pilgrimage to Riverside to attend the opening of an exhibition that features what is, as far as I know, the first vid to be exhibited in an art gallery.
The vid is Us by Lim (link goes to Kristina Busse’s In Media Res curation), a profound and multifaceted and deep and beautiful piece with which I have a very intimate affective relationship.
I have a short essay coming out in Cinema Journal’s In Focus section that talks about the way the vid comments on piracy and intellectual property in ways that address their significance beyond the (important) legal arguments for fair use by highlighting the artistic and cultural work of media ‘theft’. I love the vid not only for that but for the critique it embeds of academic work on fan cultures, like the work I have done, crystallized in the image of Henry Jenkins as Regina Spektor sings “the tourists come and stare at us”. That critique is not, in my interpretation (which has been strengthened through email conversations with Lim) an expression of hostility, merely an acknowledgment of the power dynamics brought into being by relative institutional status, and economic/cultural privilege.
So what about the power dynamics that come into play when this vid, which speaks to and from a particular subcultural context but has been distributed and discussed well beyond it, is shown to a new kind of public in an art gallery?
I bought the catalogue for the exhibition, which is a beautifully designed little book. The images from Us and the other artworks are shiny and stunning. As you would expect, each artist has a bio, detailing their training and achievements. Lim’s places her outside the professional art world, making it clear that she doesn’t produce work with this audience in mind; it is followed by an essay on the “Anthropology of YouTube” by Michael Wesch. It’s an excellent essay, which explains the work online video does very well. Although it doesn’t go into any depth on the particular activity of vidding, I think it provides a good introductory context.
However, anthropology is a word that makes me nervous; it hints at colonial dynamics, power held by the looker-on and explainer of a strange culture as it is denied to the members of that culture themselves. I know that those aspects of anthropology have been intensely critiqued; but I think it’s worth thinking about the discomfort anyway. As Julie Levin Russo reminded me when I talked about this with her, the problem with anthropological discourse here is precisely the critique that Lim makes of academic fan studies in her vid. Some artists are in the gallery and in the catalogue because it is part of their professional lives, because it will bring them material benefits; some are invited there from other contexts and have to be anthropologically explained. The relationship to explanation, to academic criticism, to exposure won’t and can’t be the same.
I would hazard a guess that, although vidding as a subcultural practice is pretty marginal, there are a lot more people out there who are familiar with YouTube culture than with the art world. But it’s hard to imagine an anthropology that would go the other way. That was what I wanted as I wandered through the exhibit, though: I wanted to record the conversations people might have been having in front of the vid, wanted to hear what interpretations it elicited in a setting so divorced from the ones where I had encountered it. It’s those conversations that are at the heart of what it means to show this work there, as far as I am concerned, and I miss the inbuilt archive for commentary–and impromptu anthropology–that YouTube, imeem and other online video-sharing platforms contain.
New media and old institutions: 1
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on February 2, 2009
I attended a couple of events this week that set me thinking about the complex swirl of issues around digital identity and community, art and academia and their institutions, and how the possibilities online tools and cultures make available translate (and fail to translate) between different forms, different agendas.
First was The Future of Mediated Scholarship, part of a workshop series the Institute for Multimedia Literacy is running for USC graduate students. The talks included USC Associate Vice Provost Susan Metros presenting the Horizon report predicting technological futures (a very science-fictional experience), Mark Marino giving tips for online research tools, and Elizabeth Losh on online pedagogical spaces. Losh wrote a blog entry about the event which makes a grad student at USC sound like a wonderfully exciting thing to be, while also detailing the important questions she raised in her talk.
However, I mainly wanted to write about Kathleen Fitzpatrick‘s talk on the future of scholarly publishing, which kept me frantically typing notes (and the occasional twitter update) throughout.
Fitzpatrick, who’s one of the founders of the ever fabulous Media Commons, talked about the obsolescence of the current scholarly publishing model and the range of things that “obsolescence” means. She summarized her first book‘s argument that frantic declarations about the death of the book tend to mean primarily that a literary elite is afraid its privileged form will no longer be the centre of cultural relevance, then moved on to the conditions of publication of that book to explore the ‘crisis in scholarly publishing’ that means scholars’ first tenure-securing books struggle to find publishers. The book as a form may continue to live, paper being rather more durable than outdated operating systems et cetera; but the academic monograph as a profitable entity is verifiably dead. However, as it is required by the institutional structures of academe, it lives on–it is undead.
Zombie metaphors make any academic talk better. Fitzpatrick moved on from hers to talk about how scholarly publishing has to change to become more alive than (un)dead. Quoting my notes:
Until scholars believe publishing on the web is as valuable as print and until they believe their institutions also believe it, few will risk their careers. Social, intellectual and institutional change are necessary. The ways we research, write, peer review, have to change. The system of peer review is part of what is broken in the current system of scholarly publishing. It is a disciplinary technology that creates the conditions of possibility for the academic institution: the disciplined are gradually given the technology to discipline others. In print, it serves primarily a gatekeeping role, excluding some realms of discourse from the realm of the thinkable. In the digital, scarcity is over: anyone can publish anything, we face an extraordinary plenitude. Digital humanities needs to develop not a means of applying peer review to create artificial scarcity but rather to find a means of coping with abundance, of working within a living system of scholarly publication.
I’ll resist reproducing the rest of the talk in order to think about what a “living system of scholarly publication” might mean, what it already means. In this talk, and in other conversations about new mediations for scholarly dissemination, there’s talk of how blind peer review could be replaced: metrics? Open public comments? Something else? Open source scholarship published publically online is, by definition, open to enter into different living economies of publication, to be read in unexpected ways, just as books are; but books (and peer reviewed journal publications) aren’t validated based on the status they hold in multiple intersecting subcultural publics. For practical institutional reasons, I’m sure no open peer review system would be either; yet in the living systems of publication I’ve been talking about for my last couple of posts, that’s exactly what happens.
In online fandom, as you can see if you follow the links I gave in my last two posts and their ever-multiplying counterparts, abundance is the rule. Every participant has a soapbox and if their contributions to public conversations are considered valuable they get cited and passed around, fans develop reputations for particular critical and political positions, paradigm shifts happen and are contested, personalities clash. I think of fast-changing landscapes like this and other blog-based communities when I think of a living system of publication, in large part because my own scholarly work (whether or not it is about those spaces) is shaped by them and by the networks I’ve built through them at least as much as, if not more than, it is by traditional academic contexts.
As one of the editors of Transformative Works and Cultures‘s Symposium section, I’m committed to bringing the online meta-sphere’s and academia’s institutional discourses into conversation, to the idea that academia and other subcultural presences can meet on something approaching even terms. Media Commons shares the same commitment, as far as I can tell. It still seems clear to me that institutional professionalism and the nonprofessional, community-oriented (even when conflict-driven) spaces of living, open publication must always sit uncomfortably together. Yet I can’t think of them as wholly separate. I’m not sure if that’s just because I personally occupy the borders between them or if there’s something more significant to be said there.
Maybe I’ll get to figuring that out in the second part of this post, about this exhibition, which I will put up in the next day or two. I wish I were a speedier blogger.