Remember in April when I announced the first in a series of Battlestar Galactica season 4 crack vidlets (http://cyborganize.livejournal.com/18745.html#vid)? beccatoria and my Plan was to mashup each episode with audio from the Prelinger Archives (http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger) of mid-century sponsored films, thereby creating our own archive that chronicles the season against the backdrop of our own cultural and technological history. Months later, the project is complete! Part one, at least, with the rest to come when BSG returns in 2009. Length: 9:20 (10 parts, mostly under 60 seconds each). Stream: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=DE5FB59D5F1827CC or http://www.imeem.com/cyborganize/playlist/b7ptRJq1/tomorrow_bsg_video_playlist/ Download: http://beccatoria.babealicious.net/Tomorrow2008.avi (61MB). Im absurdly proud of how these vids emerged as a collaborative artwork, and I think you can witness our skills improving as the series progresses. For a more sober portrait of season 4.0 (or as a reference point for anyone who might be arriving at this post without a sense of what a more typical fanvid looks like), let me recommend beccatorias Tricks (http://beccatoria.livejournal.com/55876.html) (to Bruce Springseens Magic). In addition to its elegant distillation of S4s key moments and themes, this vid is notable for contrasting them with a heartbreaking montage of earlier BSG scenes, and for an ingenious use of the final episodes final shot (interspersed throughout on the refrain). Its also technically dazzling, and could be taken as an exemplar of Windows Movie Maker vidding. WMM offers a very limited palette of capabilities, but Becka pushes them to their limits, perfecting the rhythm with extensive time toggles. I had the pleasure of doing some light beta duty on this. Finally, one of the perks of selecting concepts for Tomorrow was having an excuse to plumb the depths of the remarkable Prelinger collection. Click to the full post for a sampling.

It is with immeasurable awe, pride, and jubilation that I announce the birth of
Hera Has Six Mommies by tallulah71
a Battlestar Galactica fanvid that I commissioned through Sweet Charity.
{ feedback | download | stream }

I. CONCEPTION
For those who don't know, Sweet Charity is a cyclical auction wherein fans can bid on the creative services of other fans to raise money for a non-profit organization (in this case, the Writers Guild Foundation Industry Support Fund, as I won tallulah71 in January during the WGA strike benefit).

This project came into being when I got the official notification of my winning bid, and in turn emailed "ho" tallulah71 enumerating my BSG femslash fanvids wishlist. Here's an excerpt:

HI I AM DYING OF SQUEE! this is, like, my ultimate Sweet Charity fantasy -- I seriously cannot believe I actually managed to buy you. in case you haven't noticed, I'm a huge fan of your vids, and plus I'm thrilled to have an occasion to donate to this cause. so thank you!! [...]

- Hera Has Six (or more) Mommies!
OK, this is the vid of my wildest dreams, and a concept that I think is especially well-suited to your artistic and intellectual skills and approach. it's also potentially quite ambitious. it's the story of the alternative kinship networks that coalesce around Hera, and how various configurations of women learn to love each other through being her family (Helo and Gaius can potentially come too). it has one strand tracing the lineage of Cylon mommies (from Athena, to Caprica and Gaius and/or Boomer around the whole "Downloaded" upheaval, to Caprica and Three, to Boomer, and back to Athena) and one strand about the Laura/Maya/Tory love triangle. it's partly an epic romance and partly an apocalyptic battle for the future of humanity, and I elaborated on my picture of it in the talk I wrote for Mary McDonnell! which I'd be very happy for you to read or listen to if you're willing. another fan [carla_scribbles] passed along to me a song I LOVE for this, which is a mashup by Wax Audio...

More than five months later, I can take no credit for any of the remarkable artistry evident in the vid that evolved. I let tallulah71 loose with my notes to generate the narrative, not to mention the stunning visuals, as inspiration dictated. However, it was my great pleasure and privilege to collaborate with her in an intense and often magical betaing process. I returned extensive feedback on three distinct drafts, co-parenting it toward what I hope is the most lucid and elegant communication of this story/interpretation. I couldn't overstate how breathtaking it was to witness the show *I* watch take shape fully onscreen. My betas, friends, and vidding co-conspirators heyiya and beccatoria were likewise invaluable midwives, bringing fresh eyes to the project. Of the many priceless gifts fandom has given me, this vid is the most acutely astounding, and I love it with a ferocity that befits the miracle of bringing something new into the world. I cannot even begin to quantify how much I got more than my money's worth.

II. GESTATION
Recent months have seen intensifying discussions about the modus operandi of vidding (historically and in its contemporary transformations), particularly giandujakiss's musings on the perceived relationships between vids as visual arguments and their written paratexts. In light of this debate, I wanted to weigh in on how I understand the articulation between this collaborative artwork and my more academic projects. Although tallulah71 read an essay of mine on this topic as part of its development, I would not take the vid that emerged as based on, illustrative of, or otherwise subordinate to that document.

Hera Has Six Mommies, for that matter, is far more than an essay: it is what I might call a lens for focusing the all-consuming experience that is my love for this show, which has infiltrated vast reaches of my heart, mind, and body. This focus has coalesced in a variety of tangible iterations in my work over the years, from a talk to a chapter; from a ficlet to a drawing. The essay and the vid alike grow out of this reservoir of obsessive, inexhaustible desire and vitality.

In fact, if I had to hierarchize these artifacts, I'd say it's the vid that is their ultimate apotheosis. I can write endlessly about the technologies of seeing that Battlestar Galactica incites us to cultivate. But here I can instead USE those technologies to SEE, in it's brevity and purity, and take you with me to the show.

III. DELIVERY
I wouldn't call "Hera Has Six Mommies" a meta vid or a political vid or an experimental vid. Though it is a bit of an experiment in slash ensemble rather than couple storytelling, mostly it's your traditional interpretive vid. But if there's nonetheless a meta-level of allegory here (and isn't there always?), it's that we fans are the collective of lesbian mommies who conceive and nurture illegitimate offspring as a labor of love, the queer families who originate a mongrel brood that, like Hera, is part of "the shape of things to come." Hera is our vids, our art, our fics, our hybrids -- the harbinger of a new dawn or a final apocalypse, depending on how you look at it.

"Hera Has Six Mommies" has at least four mommies, and creating it within a cooperative kinship network did feel a little like making a baby, complete with its own erotics and marvels. But really, we can't stop counting there, with the vidder and the videe and the betas, because it was a whole community of femslashers who parented this progeny, who produced the branching lineages that link the women of Battlestar Galactica, via variable couplings and intertexts, into a lesbian family tree. For that reason, I invite all of you to join its geneology and to celebrate its birth.

Please bear with my rhapsodizing -- like every mother, perhaps, my own little one seems to me like the most wondrous exemplar of its kind!

I'm thrilled to welcome Francesca Coppa to Brown University for this event!

Friday, April 6th, 4-6pm @ Kassar Foxboro Theater (151 Thayer St.)
FREE and Open to the Public

girlboymusic pointed me to a mention of this vidshow in comments at Idolator -- what more incentive do you need than that?!

BLURB
Fanvids, a mashup genre with a 30-year history, are attracting increasing attention today as YouTube and its ilk make internet video ubiquitous. These music videos, constructed of recombined clips from movies or TV, are traditionally created within a predominantly female subculture, and often make feminist and/or queer statements about their mass media source texts. This combination screening-lecture- discussion will contextualize vidding as form and practice and explore its intricate techniques for queering media technologies and bodies. Insider veejays [us] will highlight examples that critique the mainstream representation of gender and sexuality and that self-reflexively elucidate vidding as a technology of fannish fetishism. Variably provocative, joyous, hilarious, and surprising, these ingenious underground artifacts offer a unique vision of the possibilities of popular appropriation.


FEMINIST FETISHISM

vidder(s): California Crew
title: Oh Boy
music: Buddy Holly
fandom: Quantum Leap

vidder(s): California Crew
title: Pressure
music: Billy Joel
fandom: California Crew

vidder(s): Rache and Sandy
title: A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness
music: Buster Poindexter
fandom: multi


QUEER EYES

vidder(s): laurashapiro
title: Wouldn't It Be Nice
music: The Beach Boys
fandom: multi

vidder(s): Media Cannibals
title: Detachable Penis
music: King Missile
fandom: The Professionals

vidder(s): killabeez and tjonesy
title: Closer
music: Nine Inch Nails
fandom: Star Trek TOS


VIDDING VIDDING

vidder(s): laurashapiro and halcyon_shift
title: I Put You There
music: Mary Schmary
fandom: Giles

vidder(s): flummery (Seah and Margie)
title: Walking on the Ground
music: Sheldon Allman
fandom: multi

vidder(s): counteragent
title: Destiny Calling
music: James
fandom: vidding


GENDER TROUBLE

vidder(s): absolutedestiny
title: I Enjoy Being a Girl
music: Sandra Allen
fandom: Alias, Buffy, BSG, Firefly, Veronica Mars

vidder(s): obsessive24
title: Piece of Me
music: Britney Spears
fandom: Britney Spears

vidder(s): sockkpuppett
title: Vogue
music: Madonna
fandom: 300


EPILOGUE

vidder(s): dualbunny
title: Snakes on a Plane
music: Cobra Starship
fandom: Harry Potter

We have obtained permission from the vidders in the show. Many of these vids, and more, screened at 24/7: A DIY Video Summit.

I had a fantastic time at Swarthmore and was enthusiastically received! Nonetheless, it's decidedly a first draft of this presentation; please be gentle.

production notes
- my first time using slideshare.net, which is amazing -- you can page through (or download) the powerpoint, or hit play to watch with my synced voice
- audio recorded on the fly on my macbook's internal mic; sorry about the fluctuations
- because of the difficulty of attribution and permissions, not to mention the barely adequate sound quality, the excellent and extensive comments/questions from the audience are edited out
- I should soon be adding an alternate videotaped version of the lecture to this post

http://slideshare.net/cyborganize/04-march-08-skewtube-swarthmore/

@ SCMS, my talk was a highly excerpted version of the BSG chapter already posted here; I'd be happy to provide you with that 10-page text if you're interested.

• 10:23 @jeangenie you just got namechecked in "state of research"! #
• 11:20 Eric Garland with an interesting question: what IS user-generated or internet video content? BitTorrent doesn't discriminate.#
• 11:29 four white men on the opening panel? srsly? #
• 11:56 Alexandra Juhasz: DIY is not just user created + distributed; it implies (or should) a critical opposition to dominant culture. #
• 13:38 OMG HI I'M SURROUNDED BY FAMOUS VIDDERS! #
• 13:51 Juhasz's 6 binaries of pedagogy: public/private, cyber/real, oral/visual, entertainment/education, amateur/expert, control/chaos. #
• 14:17 awesome political critiques of YouTube's "consumption model" on this panel. we want to own the infrastructure! #
• 14:55 Sam Gregory: we need not just DIY, but DIWO (Doing It With Others). also: YouTube lacks community-building architecture. #
• 14:59 I'm cheering this, but wondering how "state of the art" is only dealing w/ live-action docus - where's the rest of internet video? #
• 15:35 Jenkins: YT does not exist in a vacuum. its strength is as a distribution architecture for content that is relocalized elsewhere. #
• 16:31 go watch the slate.com video 'hillary's inner tracy flick' on youtube. #
• 16:36 Fred von Lohmann of EFF is explaining strict liability (old media) and notice-and-takedown (DMCA) as velvet rope vs. bouncer. #
• 16:44 LOL! also sadkermit.com, an example of YT TOSsing as censorship of legal works. #
• 17:15 dear Yochai Benkler: the decentralized information economy is still a capitalist economy -- domination does not go away! #
• 21:14 drinking bud light at a hotel bar, baby. but with VIDDERS! #

[repost of February 9th tweets from 24/7 DIY, originally hashtagged #video247]