III/3/B And They Have a Plan

Videomaker represents only one possible familial and reproductive structure among many, however. We find another in the tradition of fan song videos: montages of visual material culled from mass media source texts and set to music. This underground art form, which has been part of media fandom since the mid-1970's, was inaugurated using slide projectors and has evolved through consumer VHS technology and into the era of ubiquitous digital video. For a more detailed historical analysis of vidding I refer you to the work of Francesca Coppa, who charts, among other things, how the technical hurdles involved in VCR editing encouraged artists to cluster into groups of enthusiasts and mentors, thereby developing distinct aesthetic conventions in turn. My concern is with the present-day evolution and hybridization of vidding as the maturation of internet video since the mid-2000's renders it more accessible and visible than ever before, both inside and outside its fannish milieu. The fact that Videomaker's fan films reference fake trailers and other YouTube genres attests to the riot of cross-pollination among moving image mashups that the code and infrastructure for web video sharing has enabled, including an undergrowth of "feral" fanvids that adopt the format without evincing strong ties to the customs and resources of the established vidding community.

Contrarily, this creative jungle has sprung some classic vids into the limelight while uprooting them from their interpretive landscape, most notably Killa and T. Jonsey's Kirk/Spock vid "Closer" {http://youtube.com/watch?v=1PwpcUawjK0} which took the blogosphere by storm in fall 2006. This is one test case for the ways in which the outbreak of viral video can generate problems as well as possibilities for grassroots art: in addition to the critical impoverishment that is a side-effect of "decoupling amateur media from its original contexts of production and consumption" (Jenkins, "How to Watch a Fan-Vid"), such mainstream attention (which went as far as "Closer" being quoted on television) can be directly threatening to creators because of the potential legal and personal repercussions of unauthorized and non-normative appropriations of proprietary media source. Killa took most of her work off the internet in response {http://seacouver.slashcity.net/vidland/vids.html}, and hers are not the only famous fanvids uploaded to YouTube without the artists' permission. Fan producers are thus no more able to control the dissemination of their texts than commercial producers (in fact they may be less able, since the derivative status of their oeuvre, not to mention their lack of corporation-sized resources, puts them in a weaker position with respect to copyright law). Such interplay and conflict is one instantiation of the vagaries of the digital archive, in both its technological and discursive dimensions: its oscillation of persistence and ephemerality, publicity and privacy, openness and closure structures the possibilities for fan engagement and production.

Vidders are avidly debating how to engage tactically on this uneven and shifting terrain. At Vividcon 2007, the sixth annual convention for and by the vidding community, a "Town Hall on Vidding and Visibility" panel explored the stakes of the customary closet, which offers safety, sisterhood and shared language while threatening fanvids with misunderstanding and marginalization. Concerns on both sides are fused with gender issues, as vids (like fan fiction) have been created almost exclusively by women throughout their history (an oft-repeated statistic is that the greatest number of men thus far at Vividcon, an event with over 100 attendees, has been five). The painstaking and meticulous labor vidding requires has been likened to traditional "women's work" such as quilting and needlepoint (not to mention early film cutting and computer programming). The technological mastery intrinsic to vidding and other media craft has gone largely unrecognized, however, because it is conducted out of view and contradicts ideological expectations for female behavior. It is only with the recent mainstreaming of various species of fan film online, and with advancements in the consumer apparatus that allow the best vids to look every bit as polished as professional music videos, that vidding may appear, within the overdetermined framework of gender stereotypes, to be taking on some of the "masculine" characteristics of other genres of DIY video. Concurrently, as influential sectors of the community have come to value a "shiny" aesthetic that emphasizes matching rhythm, motion, color, and other visual attributes to the music with increasingly elaborate and technical editing, vids that carry on a "feminine" tradition of melodramatic romance may now be relegated by some to the tongue-in-cheek category of "Lord King Bad Vids." While vids that privilege emotion and/or narrative are certainly presenting a critical interpretation, and while even more openly analytical vids don't necessarily adopt the same register of distance as fan parodies or critiques produced within male artistic conventions, the perceptible shift in tone away from the intimacy of traditional relationship-focused vids nonetheless raises questions about the implications of the changing technological, social, and economic environment for this women's subculture. The developments are complex and defy attempts to map them on binary axes, but they do indicate the array of hybridizations that are among the issue of digitally-enabled intermixtures of form and context, including (for better or worse) the possibility of layers of gender blending.

In her post "You Can't Stop the Signal" {http://community.livejournal.com/vidding/893694.html}, eminent vidder Laura Shapiro points out that under these circumstances, the debates about visibility are to some degree moot: "The minute we put our vids online, we expose ourselves to the world... We can't control the distribution of our own work in a viral medium." This pragmatism animates a collective campaign to stake out a consolidated public enclave for vidding – an opt-in archive calculated to support this family of practice. In the absence, for now, of a hosting infrastructure that is fan owned, vidders deliberately adopted the multimedia social networking site imeem.com en masse {http://community.livejournal.com/vidding/tag/imeem}. Imeem was judged to have a number of advantages over other video-sharing services (YouTube in particular) in terms of its mechanics, components, and policies: for example, its streaming quality is high, its feature set is rich (including group hubs, embeddable playlists, searchable tags, and customizable profiles), and according to its TOS {http://imeem.com/terms.aspx}, "imeem does not claim any ownership rights in any articles, information, materials, data, files, programs, photographs, concepts, communications, footage, ideas, opinions, and other materials ("Member Content") you post, store, or exchange through the imeem Site or Service; you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Member Content." And while these generous licensing terms technically apply only to "Member Content" that is within "appropriate rights," leaving derivative works vulnerable to unilateral suspension, enforcement still relies on copyright holders to flag potentially infringing cases, a far more forgiving system than SciFi.com's proprietary vetting (although imeem did recently implement a digital fingerprinting schema to track and protect audio files, and automated video monitoring may not be far behind). So, as the advent of digital and then internet video makes vidding both more accessible and more difficult for its practitioners to superintend, the architecture of imeem provides the ground for a tactical intervention: a hybrid position that gives vidding a public face while demarcating and reinforcing the community, that renders vids widely shareable while asserting their creators' authorship, that trades some loss of control for some gains in usability. In contradistinction to Videomaker Toolkit's top-down arrangement, which attempts through its interface and conditions to recontain excessive fan productivity within SciFi's exclusive perimeter, the distributed network of vidders on imeem (best indicated by the 200+ members of the vidding "meem") reproduces their fantext without a patriarchal center. Fanvids deploy love via the raw material of the show itself, fragmenting, recombining, and multiplying it with a fertility of which official transmedia can tap only a fraction. This propagation is still delimited by the archive, however, the lattice of power materialized in available technologies – of media, but also more broadly technologies of law, commerce, and desire.

[this section, especially the third paragraph, has been revised following an invaluable consultation with Francesca Coppa]