I just got a message from counteragent saying that she, laurashapiro and cesperanza want to show "The Future Stops Here" at Vividcon in their panel on "vids that push the envelope"!! I am very, very excited, I only wish I were going to be there.

It's interesting to think about the vid and its envelopes -- it comes right out of the intersection of all my interests (fannish, political, musical, sfnal) but is probably more or less marginal to all of them.

Because I have had to take down the visual annotative academic frame of the vid, I thought I'd post the written part of my acavid project here. The text below each word would come up when you clicked on the word, an different scenes from the movies would play at the same time as the vid depending on what you clicked on.

( The future is coming to get you. What are you going to do about it? )

My professor just asked me to take my acavid down because she's worried about my university's rather draconian IP policies. I've done so for the moment. She agrees with me that the project is fair use and valid as a scholarly transformative work, and is looking in to whether there's any way to get institutional support for that argument. I don't want to leave it down forever, but I also don't want my professor to feel that she has to ban future students from using copyrighted material in their projects.

I'm going to look into the legal issues in a little more depth after I finish the term paper that's due on Friday. The aca dimension makes this a little different to the liability most vidders face, but I don't think it's fundamentally different, which is why I feel okay leaving the vid itself up; I think there's a little more leeway with the part that doesn't technically constitute a class project.

This is why it's good to maintain boundaries between fannish and RL identities, I guess. I don't know whether my professor *would* look at my LJ, but I did show some of the comments I got for the vid in class, so she could easily have made a note of the URL.

ETA 2: the professor for whose class I made the vid has asked me to take it down for copyright reasons, so the full aca-project is offline for now although you can still download the vid or watch it at imeem. She agrees with me about its validity as fair use so I'll hopefully put it up again at some point; I'm going to look into the legal stuff once I get done with my semester work.

****

I have posted the interpretive interface for my vid. It is here. I don't think of the interface as interpretation for the vid so much as I see the whole thing as a transformative scholarly work that reinterprets/reframes the films. Scholarship as vidding, with the argument being in the way the various citations and analyses/manifestoes (acadrabbles, really) are combined.

Talking to everyone who commented about my vid has given me a slightly different reading of it myself, interestingly. There's totally a feminist science fiction story in there! I mean, I had a story-like movement in mind when I made the vid, but I was definitely thinking more thematically than narratively. And yet the narrative is there and works; It's rather amazing. Evidently certain feminist sf writers (Le Guin, Butler) are deeply embedded in my subconscious.

I'm definitely seeing my own interpretation/intention as just one of many possibilities even more now than I was while I was making the vid. Still, hopefully you will find the annotations/context/complete work interesting.

ETA: click on the words. Things will happen. It isn't just random words on a screen and 200 words of text.

(I'm not sure I'll be able to leave it up permanently, FYI, but I hope so.)

Having finally posted my vid, I think that before I delve into the pile of grading that awaits me it's time to do something I haven't done in a while -- post some documents of my dilettantish fannish participation, or in less pretentious words, recs.

First of all, thingswithwings and I have been learning to vid on the buddy system. She made two vids in the time it took me to make one -- the marvellous and hilariously Freudian SGA vid A Lieutenant Colonel Is Being Beaten, and now the multifandom The Glass. Which is a commentary on the representation and signification of queerness in TV and film and slash reclamation of same-sex desire, and which pushes all my queer sentimentalist emo buttons very hard indeed. To the point of tears, in fact.

I've also been catching up on BSG vids a little. BSG fans make amazing vids! You all already know this, but for the few on my flist who lag behind me in noticing things, I must point to dualbunny's diptych of Starbuck vids God is a DJ and Cuz I Can which I have been keeping on my ipod to cheer me up when I feel sad and need to see some hot dykey fabulousness. I can barely express how much I love Starbuck nor how annoyed/betrayed I feel by the BSG writers' decision to make everything I love about her character -- her butch swagger and arrogance, her fuck-you ease -- the outward sign of inner trauma, and then to take it away. Anyway, dualbunny captures the sheer irrepressible (well, I wish it were irrepressible) joy of Starbuck wondrously, and after learning to vid myself, the virtuoso editing on "Cuz I Can" in particular just makes my jaw drop.

I also enjoyed nicole_anell's Jolene this week, a vid offering a sympathetic and moving perspective of the underused and, as of S3, painfully shrill Cally from BSG. The song is perfect for this reading of her life, and it draws out the implications of Cylon presence among and within the humans in ways I really appreciated (vid has many spoilers).

I've also been reading some fic, for the first time in a while. I read cesperanza's OK Computer in the interstices of the conference I was at last weekend, and enjoyed it enormously. I haven't been reading much SGA fic recently, but this one plays beautifully with some of my favourite obsessions -- what it means to be human, time travel, identity, virtual reality cyborgs, porn. It's both hilarious and moving, and a great metacommentary on fandom and our preferences for the characters we make up over the ones that are 'real'ly provided. Um, see my comment on Starbuck above, although cesperanza is also addressing matters of autonomy and the images we give to others and such more intellectual things.

Finally, I've been browsing a bit at lgbtfest and following some of kyuuketsukirui's recs. There are some great stories there; one of my favourites is Being Liquid by rotaryphones. It's about Teddy Lupin as a teenager and young adult, and it traces the queerness of his ability to metamorphose through his emerging genderqueer identity and relationship with a lesbian-identified Victoire Weasley. The story brings up trans/gender issues with a light touch through the way characters deal with Teddy and Victoire; I enjoyed the young queer witch OCs and the cameo performance artist especially, but I think my favourite parts were the passing references to Remus Lupin and Tonks and the suggestion I think I completely read into the story that their son was following in his parents' queerly metamorphing footsteps. I haven't read HP in ages, but this story made me want to get back to it.

I finished my vid. I am very excited to find out what people make of it.

I've been calling this an acavid, because it's part of the work I'm doing for a graduate class (although the use of copyrighted material is entirely my initiative and responsibility and is in no way affiliated with my institution) and because it is basically a visualization of my intellectual obsessions (although much less abstract after beta than it was before).

( The vid! Download, streaming, credits, etc )

Hi, LiveJournal!

Is there anyone out there who has seen the films Children of Men, V for Vendetta and 28 Days Later and who would like to look at my vid? I think it is pretty close to finished, thanks mostly to projectjulie and thingswithwings, but the only person who has seen it actually knowing all the films also had me talking his ear off about all the themes and politics, and I'd like to see how it works for someone who doesn't have that familiarity.

*looks around hopefully*

Thank you in advance!

I spent much of the weekend vidding and playing with Flash, and I now have a draft of my acavid project. Which is, you know, a vid (about dystopian futurity, paranoia and resistance, oh yes) and a faintly interactive interpretive framework to put it in. The most important part to me, clearly, is the VID, which I intend to keep working on after I have to turn in the project. I’ll be ready to show my academic peers long the rest of the world, by which I naturally mean fandom, because fandom is a lot more discerning in its vid-appreciation.

Vidding, it turns out, is a lot like critical academic writing. At least, it is the way I appear to be doing it. The same kind of excitement and frustration all mixed up. The way I write my scholarly work usually starts by getting inspired by what a text or image or whatever is doing and how I think it is all revolutionary and changing the world, or it could be but it’s doing it wrong, or it’s just generally so fabulous I have to figure out what makes it tick. Then I gather quotations and epigraphs, from lots of different sources, and shuffle them around until I’ve built a framework that captures the initial feeling. After that, I just polish it till it’s shiny enough that other people will be able to look in and see my thoughts reflected.

And that’s what I seem to be doing in making this vid. Of course, I am trying to vid a set of ideas that have been rattling around in the academic part of my brain for a long time, so maybe it would be different if I were doing a character study or something (although I suspect not. I keep having ideas for more fannish vids so maybe I’ll find out one day, although given my time commitments for the next ever, maybe not. I really want to though). Where I’m at is that I’ve built most of the framework, albeit with a few gappy places, and making it shiny/nuancedly comprehensible is pushing the limits of my skillset, but I'm doing my best.

Why don't I have an icon that says "geek"? I really must remedy that.

Please direct anyone you may know who may be interested to this post.

I am going to be out of the country from May 27 until August 12, and I would like to sublet my lovely apartment to a nice, trustworthy person.

My apartment is:

• On the second floor. Newly renovated with a brand new kitchen and bathroom, ceiling fans, enormous fridge. Laundry in building.

• Located here, close to Silverlake, Hollywood and Los Feliz. Street parking.

• Great place to live without a car -- I don't have one. It's a stone's throw from a large grocery store and walking distance from lots of restaurants, shops, etc. Great location for public transport (the 4, 704, 2, 206, 204 and 754 are among the nearby buses and the Vermont/Santa Monica Red Line stop is less than ten minutes' walk away).

• $850/month including utilities, wireless internet and AIR CONDITIONING. For two months' rent you can have it the full two and half months I'm gone.

( see pictures! )

I'm behind on my flist, because it was spring break and I went to Vegas like a real American college student. Now it's still spring break and I have a to-do list the length of my arm like a real overcommitted graduate student, but at least I've seen Vegas.



It was neither the first nor, I expect, the last time I was astonished to discover that certain places and atmospheres I had always assumed science fiction writers made up actually exist in genuine American reality. The celebrated simulacral spectacular: indoor eternal sunshine of the Venetian and twilight under rooftops in New York New York; plastic castle facade of our 'medieval' hotel and casino; pyramidic Luxor; cruelty of the lions, real lions, in MGM Grand. And even the quotidien: acres of affordable suburban homes in a brutal, barren landscape that needs so much artificiality to be livable it might almost as well be the moon.

My favourite part awas the old-fashioned neon of the old strip, which we visited on the second of our two days. That's what the Vegas of my mind looks like; a scale I can twist my brain around, that bears some relation to my reference points of Saturday night drunken crowds and amusement arcades. Though it's probably more interesting to contemplate the moments and monuments that I had to go off-planet to comprehend.

Slot machines and card tables everywhere, of course, but I didn't gamble much. A week before payday, I didn't have the money to lose.

And now I come back and hear there's a strike brewing, or indeed brewed...

So I, um, might be sort of trying to learn to vid.

As a class project, no less; we are supposed to be using Flash to make a visual project in relation to our research interests, but I managed to persuade the professor that a vid was a visual project in relation to my research interests, and so I get to spend all the time I would spend writing a 20-page research paper in a more traditional class learning to vid, provided I also do something with Flash at some point. I plan to figure out how to use Flash to make vaguely interactive scholarly annotations to whatever vid attempt emerges from this. Part of this project is actually going to be proving to the professor that vidding is hard, because when I suggested the project she was all 'oh, that'll be easy,' so the annotations (and showing the class some of the most complex vids and explaining them to the best of my ability) will be necessary components.

So I am trying to vid my academic obsessions with utopia/dystopia/futurity/science fiction politics, which is basically just the intellectually pretentious side of my fannishness. And vidding, unsurprisingly, is hard; I feel like I'm trying to write poetry in a language I just barely understand. (And I am not nor have I ever been a poet.)

BUT.

Last night I finally decided it was time to stop obsessively making clips out of Children of Men and 28 Days Later and see what happened when I actually opened the open source video editing software I found via lim's amazing vidding resources page. And it was surprisingly easy to figure out the basics of how to do stuff in the software, and I imported a couple of clips and played around with them, and there was this moment when something happened on the screen right on a beat and it totally made me see something I hadn't seen before and I put it there, me!

So, mild breakthrough amidst continued stumbling in the dark. And I think there might be an advantage to poetry in languages you don't understand, at least for the obsessively overanalytical: you might not be able to make poems as *good* as those by people who understand the nuances of the language, but you don't get so hung up on its failures that you fail to make anything at all, which is what happened to me a long time ago vis a vis creativity in the language of fiction.

OMG OMG OMG, WisCon is going to be so exciting I might die!

I submitted the second panel on that list, astonishingly enough (I almost didn't see it because I was looking really far down for it). I really hope that it happens and that exciting people sign up to be on it! *looks hopefully at certain marvellous bloggers on flist and thinks hopefully of other marvellous bloggers*

Of course, it's about the transformative power of online meta, or the lack thereof. (I wrote it thinking about race meta on LJ, but hoped that it might apply to lots of other issues as well.)

Can internet drama change the world?
Impassioned blog debates have initiated many into feminist praxis, queer critique, and antiracist ideology. But they also generate frustration, disillusionment, and flamewars. Participants in online political discussions are frequently derided for wasting energy that would be better expended in 'real' political work than in online drama, but many can also attest to the importance of online participation to developing understandings of power and privilege. This roundtable will raise questions of the validity and importance of online micro-political interventions, and their relationship to social justice activism on a larger scale.

Should I sign up to moderate or just hope that someone else does? I think there are a lot of people who would do a much better job than me, but I really want the panel to go ahead, and possibly it wouldn't if no one signed up to moderate?

(Also, WisCon newbie question: is there a place to vote for which panels one would like to *attend*, or is it just basically every panel that participants sign up for will go on?)

This essay by Andrea Smith strikes me as seriously worth reading, sharing, and remembering.

Look how much I am posting! Four times in two days! When will this craziness end? Um, probably soon...

I think that being in the illustrious presence of all those vids and vidders at DIY has warped me. In a good way. As I was walking along the street innocently listening to my ipod on shuffle today, my brain suddenly started imagining vids at me. (Songs uploaded so you can imagine them too.)

First The Decemberists' ""Sons and Daughters" came on and I thought "OMG! There should be a BSG* vid to this about the Cylons winning and remaking the world in an image of antihumanist reproductive futurity, with explosions and heroic babies and downloaded consciousnesses and shiny centurions on "aluminium" Gaius Baltar snogging his Cylon ladyfriend on 'fill our mouths with cinnamon'!"

And then Nick Cave's "The Weeping Song" came on and I thought "OMG! There should be a multifandom vid to this about fandom's obsession with emo man pain, in that simultaneously mocking and sincerely celebratory that fannish things do so well! With pained/constipated expressions and averted eyes and covered faces and the occasional screaming child and melodramatic woman to make feminist points about masculinity and how the suppressed pain of white men is more 'true' and signficant than the emotions of the less privileged!"

For all I know, those vids or vids like them already exist in the vast realm of vids I have not seen. *looks around hopefully*

I'm supposed to conceive of/design a multimedia project that challenges conventional definitions of scholarship for one of my courses this semester. I hadn't had any ideas, really, though I had thought about playing with my essay on "Us" (I tend to think that vidding as a genre is often in itself a challenge to conventional definitions of interpretive scholarship). Perhaps I could make that point by playing around designing (I am pretty sure learning to actually vid would be beyond what I could achieve in 3 months, if ever given my lack of a)rhythm and b)visual imagination) a vid to my own scholarly concerns. I've been wanting to do something that connected the dystopic future Londons of Children of Men, V for Vendetta and 28 Days Later for a while.


* This is quite possibly an idea thoroughly un-coherent with canon, as I have only seen season 1 and the first 4 episodes of S2. Please don't spoil me too badly (I am already a little bit spoiled because I hang out with projectjulie, and I am generally not dreadfully averse to spoilers)!

I'm attending the 24/7 DIY Media Conference this weekend. I have met, and felt awkward near, vidders of whom I am in awe (laurashapiro, cesperanza, heresluck, absolutedestiny jarrow, renenet and several other people whose LJ names I wasn't able to remember or triangulate with cathexys's encyclopedic knowledge of things and people fannish) (ETA: par_avion, anoel and hafital, hurrah!). And some academics, too.

The T-shirt I got for being a volunteer (my cunning plan to avoid $50 entry charges) says SHUT UP AND MAKE SOMETHING in extremely big letters on the back. Like, Frankie Goes to Hollywood RELAX T-shirt big. Given my general incapacity to do either, this strikes me as rather amusing.

I attended academic panels yesterday, and I will do my best to post something more substantial over the weekend here or at my acablog, possibly based on the muttered conversations cyborganize and I kept having during the presentations. (I was going to liveblog, but decided my notes are too random to really do so.) But now, I'm off to spend most of a day watching fanvids! And ushering.

Isn't this exciting?

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is a Gold Open Access international peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works edited by Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson.( Read more... )

Monday is the deadline for proposals for the conference I'm organizing. I would love it if some of the fabulous grad student types on my flist would submit! For those of you not already here, doesn't a trip to sunny LA in March sound alluring?

Please pass the details on to anyone you think might be interested.

( Getting Obsessive )

Hello, LiveJournal.

I haven't been around much recently -- skimming my flist, commenting occasionally and randomly, ignoring 99% of the links and fic and such that you guys post. I have been buried in papers to write, papers to grade, bureaucratic trivia, and all the paraphernalia of being a graduate student at the end of the semester.

But ten minutes ago, I emailed off my last term paper. My grades are in. I am DONE.

So tell me, internets, what have I missed? What amazing fic have you read*, vid have you watched, blog entry or youtube video or any amusing thing whatsoever have you come across online in the past few weeks while I haven't been paying attention?

I am looking forward to catching up on copperbadge's steampunk novel jack_and_ellis, and cathexys just recced me leahwoof's Male Enhancement, and I have a lot of tabs open to go through, but I want more! I need some recuperative recreation before I start on my holiday projects.

(*Preferred fandoms include SGA, Who, Whedonverse, HP and I've never read any fic for Heroes or Dexter but it would be cool to try some, especially if it improves on the myriad problems with Heroes canon. I'll read anything if it's good, though.)

Any of you whose childhoods were shaped (and hopefully not too badly warped) by the works of Enid Blyton really must check out shewhohashope's new venture kirrin_bay, wherein she and co-conspirators document the experience of rediscovering the Famous Five, Secret Seven and such in all the glory of their sociopathic youngsters, bumbling criminals, preternaturally intelligent dogs and lashings of delumptious ginger beer. I laughed so hard I thought I might break something.

Graduate student friends: please think about submitting a paper for this and/or pass it on to people you think might be interested in submitting (and also, please attend). I really think it will be very intellectually stimulating, and very fun.

***

Getting Obsessive: Culture and Excess
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Symposium, March 28 and 29, 2008
Sponsored by USC’s Assocation of English Graduate Students and the USC Center for Feminist Research

Keynote Speaker: Tavia Nyong’o, NYU Performance Studies.

Everyone’s a little bit obsessive; academics are usually more than a little. But what consitutes our obsessions and what work do they do? What is the relation between obsession and knowledge production; and what about less legitimate obsessions, the things, places, people and cultural forms about which we feel excessive love or hate?

Thinking about the subjects and objects of obsession raises crucial questions about knowledge and culture. How do literary and cultural texts provoke and represent obsession? Whose investments get defined as excessive and obsessive and whose are seen as justifiable (in) moderation? What politics underlie obsession? Who gets to say when enough is too much?

We invite 20-minute papers, panels or performances, from all disciplines and interdisciplinary locations, on any aspect of obsession and excess. These might include:

• ideologies of excess
• excess and obsession in literature
• affect in theory and theories of affect
• fandom and antifandom
• sexual obsession and excessive sexualities
• how race and gender contour understandings of excess
• work/overwork and academic labor
• class, excess and restraint/moderation
• excessive femininities and masculinities
• dressing to excess; fashion and drag
• paranoia
• ‘cult’ objects and the canon
• obsession, time and memory

300-word abstracts are due January 14, 2008. Please email .doc or .rtf files to uscaegs@gmail.com.

We invite all participants to share their obsessions and find new ones at a music and poetry event in the evening of March 29, organized in association with USC’s Pop Music Project.

I have never posted a YouTube video before. I don't even watch the YouTube videos that come up on my flist all that often, so this has probably been posted by several of you already. But cathexys (who doesn't even find LOLcats entertaining!) just pointed me at this, and it is one of the funniest things I have seen in, well, ever. nixwilliams, I thought of you.



(ETA: I just got reminded why I don't usually watch people's YouTube videos. When they come up on my flist, they show up as different videos that people linked to further down my flist. But when I click on the posts (not the links to youtube, but the posts) they turn back into the right video. Does anyone else have that? I thought clearing the cache might help, but it didn't...)

ETA again: lunchmaker points out that the video's appropriation of Martin Luther King's language, and the details of his assassination, are pretty trivializing and offensive. I didn't see this or think of MLK at all, which goes to show how unobservant and ignorant I am, but now she's pointed it out I can definitely see the whole video's civil rights analogy framing (present throughout history but written out of dominant narratives, the LOLcats' marginalization ended with the dream of Happycat, which lives on after his death) as deeply dodgy. Huh. Why don't I pick up on these things? Can I use not being American and thus not inundated with civil rights narratives from an early age as a reason, or would that just be a pathetic excuse?