(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Notes on ghost_lingering's amazing "Silent Fandoms" vid/not!vid/experimental video/thing. Some new observations, some adapted from the rants that constituted my beta notes on an earlier version of the vid. Fair warning: I've been thinking about "Silent Fandoms" since ghost_lingering first told me her ideas back in November. I have a lot to say.

-Having just read, in the OTW's submission to the Library of Congress for extending the vidding exemption from the DMCA, an essay on fannish boundary policing in terms of what constitutes a fanvid, I'm hesitant to make any judgement on whether or not "Silent Fandoms" is a vid or not. In my estimation it probably is, but I'm inclined to defer to ghost_lingering's not!vid name, and I think I do understand the sentiment. There are a lot of fannish expectations about what a vid looks like that this not!vid violates. At the same time, it is a submission for Festivids involving fannish video set to music, so by the clearest definition of fanvid anyone can come up with, it's hard to argue that it's not one. I don't know, so like I said, I'm inclined to defer to the vidder's wishes.

-I love that ghost_lingering uses 4'33" in its classical mode, but also in a less passive mode. By which I mean, classically we understand 4'33" to involve the composer reflecting back the obligation of creating sound and meaning to the audience. If a critic argues that there is a musical content to 4'33", which is not something there is universal agreement about, but for those critics who believe there is, they usually point to the sounds made by the audience, by the concert hall itself, by other ambient presences. The pianist is not the one creating the music, they are creating the space in which the music happens.

This not!vid definitely uses that technique. It makes wonderful use of silences, and it makes use of other vidders' work and ideas to create a space where the viewer has to create meaning. The effect is very deliberately like reveals day, where there are hundreds of new vids, most in fandoms the viewer doesn't know, and the viewer needs to weed through them to find the ones that have meaning for them- either because they already know the fandom, or because the vid introduces them to fandoms and elements of fandoms that they find exciting. Because there is such a volume of information, and because by the nature of Festivids, different viewers will key onto different elements of that swarm of information, every viewer's experience of "Silent Fandoms" is completely their own. Of course, this is true of any vid, any piece of media that someone consumes, but it is more apparently true here because of the contextualization against 4'33", against a silence that by the absence it creates, actively encourages the viewer to add themselves into the story.

But at the same time the not!vid also, more actively, pushing specific and intentional messages and ideas about vidding and particularly about Festivids. In particular, the not!vid comments on what I've labeled the classical mode, by enlisting 4'33" into a conversation about the 'volume' of fandoms. "Silent Fandoms" isn't just meta on Festivids, it's also meta on 4'33". It's not set to 4'33", it's set to a remix of 4'33", because the kind of silence ghost_lingering wanted was a lot more active and deliberate, a lot less aleatoric than Cage supplies. "Fandom is a conversation", one of the snippets in the not!vid says, and by intention I think "Silent Fandoms" hosts a particular conversation.

And you have a wonderful contrast: On the one hand, there is the AU Reveals Day where all the unvidded fandoms get their volumes turned up, but at the same time ghost_lingering brings out carefully curated quotes from an array of vidders about the unique set of frustrations and satisfactions that comes from being in small fandoms. And because every viewer is creating their own version of the vid by picking out pieces that have meaning to them, it becomes really clear how Festivids is an uncommunity based not on shared love of particular content qua most fandoms, but on shared tools, that there are many miniature communities of Festividders within Festivids.


-Which leads me to what I think is one of the major themes of "Silent Fandoms", this idea of uncommunity. In the weeks between golive and reveals, hanging out in #vidding, someone pointed out that there were 160 vids, but the ten or fifteen people who were guessing on the guessing thread were only guessing about ten or fifteen vidders. The thing about Festivids is that it isn't a community. I mean, obviously, it is a community, it's a group of people who get together once a year to make vids for each other, but it's not really one unified group where everyone knows everyone. It's a bunch of smaller groups with some amount of overlap, and not everyone knows everyone, and not everyone likes everyone, and not everyone vids the same way.

Because I've met ghost_lingering in real life, because she overlaps with my community more than a lot of other Festivids participants, I immediately recognized her through the distorting filters in that shot towards the end of the not!vid where she's eating soup. And while betaing we talked a bit about whether that compromised the anonymity of the vid. Ultimately, we concluded it didn't since only a very small handful of Festividders know what she looks like (I guess a rather larger number of Festividders do now), and most of us were already spoiled because as members of her particular Festivids subcommunity, we'd been recruited for brainstorming and betaing anyway. ghost_lingering told me that another beta who didn't know what she looks like had asked "Is that you?" and I saw similar questions in the comments section after "Silent Fandoms" was aired. That ambiguity that for me wasn't an ambiguity highlighted how clever the identity play is in that moment.

Vidding is a visual medium, but vidders mostly communicate via text, so we don't know what most of the rest of us look like, and we don't know what most of the rest of us sound like. In that way, too, there is something Silent about our fandom. Vidders hide behind our vids, letting the art do the visual communication for us. I love that ghost_lingering violates that taboo by becoming herself a visual element of her not!vid, much as she violates the taboo by letting audio recordings of other vidders become audio components of the 4'33" remix. As much as "Silent Fandoms" is about bringing forward the fandoms that never get attention, it is also about bringing forward the vidders themselves, who also never get attention, who stand silently behind their vids. I think that's one of the reasons why the credits, the amazingly dense credits, are a key visual element of the presentation, because the fellowship of vidders become characters in "Silent Fandoms". That's also why the not!vid traces the process of creating a Festivid. It begins with getting the assignment and then, by progressive zooms and transforms of the text of the assignment, models the process of emotional and intellectually processing the request and figuring out how to vid it. Then it moves to the video editor and the construction of the timeline (many timelines! many different vidders working in parallel on different projects!). And it concludes with the familiar FV-Poster pages where Festivids are posted and publicly available for enjoyment and dissection. This experience is the only shared experience of all Festividders, so it is naturally the narrative throughline of the vid from beginning to end.

One of my favorite moments in the vid is at 2:13, when we see the "Vids are Due in 8 Days" clip from 4:06. The viewer watching the first time cannot possibly understand its meaning, but the viewer watching Silent Fandoms for the tenth time, unpacking its meaning, knows exactly what that shot is doing there. It's injecting ghost-lingering into the not!vid, and it's also specifically inviting rewatches.

This idea of uncommunity is built fabulously by the Behind the Scenes vid/not!vid. It's 20 minutes long and nobody, not even the people who made the vidlets, knows all the fandoms. So a person flips through and their eye is caught by the things they're familiar with. I loved chaila's comment on the vid: "Many people have smart things to say above, and I'm like I SPY BORGEN and my fav Borgen lady and her EPIC SWAGGERING." I think chaila's response is precisely on point, that by design this not!vid will have not just different responses but radically different responses, because the people coming to a Festivid come from so many different vidding experiences.

For me, personally, the vid snippets that jumped out to me as part of my own not!festivids experience include the Batman vidlet to "Behind Blue Eyes", the Ghostwriter vidlet that was specifically for me, the Borgen vidlet to Dessa, the WarGames vidlet to "Deep Blue", the Blazing Saddles vid, the Noah's Arc Losing Our Religions hat-tip,

In my world, the Adam West Batman to "Behind Blue Eyes" is the perfect vid snippet. The quick-hit, instantly obvious joke that is narrowly tailored to the most ridiculous detail of elipie's request is a wonderful statement of the power of Festivids to interrogate our desires as vidders. I checked on this during the beta process- there are multiple other Batman "Behind Blue Eyes" on youtube, though this is the only Adam West one... because it is utterly inappropriate for Adam West beyond the one note joke. What I love about this is that it is absolutely a not!vid. It is not sustainable as a vid, it is not tantalizing in its promise of further effort, it is just a joke that works perfectly at its length.

The Ghostwriter snippet, meanwhile, is tantalizing, because it offers a little bit of Jamal/Lenny, a little bit of visual textual play, and then before we can get anywhere with it it's over. I want more! All the Ghostwriter vids! Similarly, the Borgen vidlet is the obvious and perfect Borgen song, in a tiny taste that leaves us wanting the full version, leaves us wanting the fandom to be louder. And "Deep Blue"? I think I gave that song to sanguinity, and I think I now want to make that full vid myself. Damn you, sanguinity!

Meanwhile, the joke of ghost_lingering making even more snippets to "Losing My Religion" will never stop making me crack up. What, "Losing Our Religions" wasn't enough? She had dug up so many extra covers of the song while making Sarah Connor Chronicles snippets that they would have been wasted if she hadn't used them on this project? I love ghost_lingering's ambitious approach to vid exchanges, which we've seen twice now with gifts over 20 minutes in total length. I love that when she gets a crazy overambitious idea, she follows through, and she follows through magnificently even if she may regret the commitment.

-The whole idea of a 4'33" "mashup" is wonderful and terrible at the same time. I feel very strongly about the power of formal structures in art: sonnets and Madonna and Childs and James Bond movies and string quartets, patterns that artists deliberately force their work into because of the benefits of working within the structure. It works because you follow the rules imposed, and find your creativity within the restriction. And there are only limited circumstances in which you can violate the rules of the structure and still have a meaningful work of art.

I think it's hard to parse out exactly when those moments are. I remember struggling in high school with my junior English teacher teaching us Hemingway while simultaneously telling us not to write like him. As a somewhat more mature artist now, I am less frustrated by the idea that breaking the rules of a formal artistic structure is a difficult judgement call that an artist needs to make, because I have a clearer idea of the kinds of parameters you need to consider when making that decision. Violating the rules has its own artistic effect, jarring the audience and forcing them to rethink their expectations, and if you do that correctly it can be powerful, but if you do it wrong, it can destroy any beauty in the art. And the flip side is that if a rule is not clear enough in an audience's mind, breaking it has no effect other than to violate the purity of the structure and weaken the art.

4'33" is a tricky formal structure to work with because it is itself designed as a violation of the rules of the classical concert hall. A musician or group of musicians gets on stage, sets a score in front of them, and then as the audience expects them to play a piece of music, they don't play anything. That silence is itself the formal structure, but it's also a perversion of a different, more classical formal structure. And this makes the choice to 'mash up' 4'33" with sounds a perilous choice. The risk is that rather than sounding like 4'33" with sound, it will just sound like a bunch of random sounds.

I think ghost_lingering manages to avoid this trap though, for a couple reasons. The first is that the first 21 seconds of the mashup truly are just ambient noises, and the first non-ambient noise we hear is a beep that chimes in the transition between "Vid to John Cage's 4'33" if you want" and "To a John Cage Mashup". That beep is an advertisement of the balance that is being struck between the silence and the noise of fannish activity. And it follows 21 seconds of silence that up until this point has gone unexplained. The length of Cage's piece is arbitrary. He could have made the same point with a composition called 4'32" or 4'34", or for that matter 0'21". For the first 21 seconds, ghost_lingering draws the viewer into the world of Cage's silence, and then with a beep she jars the audience into a new formal paradigm. It's startlingly effective.

The second reason I alluded to briefly before. Even after that transition into the mashup, even after we start to hear sounds of vidders talking about Festivids and snippets of the music from not!vids weaving their way into the mix against the ambient noises of a number of different versions of 4'33", the idea of silence remains the vid's primary theme. We get quotations from other vidders about the level of silence in their fandoms. In a beautiful sequence that begins at 3:07, we get a series of windows with not!vids layered on top of each other. The vid on top moves for a few seconds, and then the cursor clicks on the upper left corner and the vid disappears, and on we move down the pile, extinguishing the life of the vids in parody of Haydn's "Farewell Symphony". And most persistently of all, we have the vid's title, "Silent Fandoms". No matter how much noise we hear in the vid once the mashup section begins at 0:21, we cannot forget the connection to Cage.

There's something brilliantly askew about vidding Festivids by using silence and non-Festividded fandoms to talk about what makes Festivids great. Your first expectation on hearing that someone is going to make a Festivid Festivid is that it'll follow the pattern of "One Night Fandoms" and be a tribute to things actually made for Festivids, especially if you're making a vid for the co-creator of "One Night Fandoms". I pointed out that this vid is literally the opposite of "One Night Fandoms", and ghost_lingering responded by putting in some of both the music and video from "One Night Fandoms" into the vid as a hat tip to the influence. Because this vid is nothing if not absurdly self-referential.

At the same time, the silence is meaningful for precisely the reasons laid out by the vidder comments in the vid. The fandoms Festivids is for are tiny, quiet fandoms. As much as Festivids is a gift exchange, an intimate one-to-one conversation between two vidders who share a fandom, it also constitutes a bazaar where every vid is an advertisement for a fandom that doesn't get attention. The act of unifying these fandoms under the Festivids banner serves to amplify all of their sounds together, as people who would never show interest in rare fandoms cluster to watch Festivids. One motivation Festividders have in participating is to put the call of their quiet fandoms out their for others to hear. And so we get silence, but as the time and the intricacy of the not!vid builds, we also get sounds, shouts in the street. They constitute calls for attention. And yet not all calls for attention earn the same amount of attention. "Silent Fandoms" is carefully crafted, but it is full of asymmetries, videos that get more or less time or focus for no particular reason other than their place in the overall visual scheme.


-So the end result is that "Silent Fandoms" and its companion "Behind the Scenes" piece create a world of their own that looks at Festivids through a very singular lens and tells many, many stories about it, through its own act of creation. One last contrast between "Silent Fandoms" and "One Night Fandoms": Whereas "One Night Fandoms" was created as a tribute to Yuletide, it is not actually a part of Yuletide. "Silent Fandoms" is itself a Festivid, a gift from a vidder to another vidder, a testimony to the creativity of the whole community but particular a testimony to the creative gifts of ghost_lingering and sanguinity.

Comments

[sanguinity]

YAY YOU DID THE POST! I knew you would be good at words about it. When she first asked me to look at a draft, I hoped very very much that she had tapped you for beta, because it slots so nicely into your interests and strengths. You would be able to do useful unpacking and discussion and fine points, whereas I was mostly just doing generalized enthusiasm.

The mash-up of 4'33", yes: it lives on a knife-edge of "you shouldn't be able to do that," and "okay, I suppose you CAN do that, but it shouldn't WORK," and "yeah, well, 4'33" shouldn't work either, so a mash-up of it is in some very real sense a perfect extension of the logic of 4'33"." Which immediately segues into a vigorous debate about what a mash-up of 4'33" would even be, and if this qualifies as one. (Does it? I STILL DON'T KNOW. But I find your framework of "classical mode" and "less passive mode" useful, even if I'm not fully convinced that you can have a "less passive mode" and still call it 4'33".)

That whole vid/not!vid business: Magritte strikes me as being relevant, no? But this was the big philosophical issue I kept trying to not get hung up on while making the fake-vid snippets: when does it cross the line from being a snippet of a vid that doesn't exist, to becoming a vid itself? I showed a lack of discipline in the face of the trapeze one and it became a coherent vid on its own terms; we discussed pulling it from the project and gifting it to china_shop outright, but she wasn't signed up to gift it to, so we shrugged and kept it in. (I suspect there were quite a few decisions-made-by-shrug, which is another 4'33"-ish aspect to the project: a mix of deliberate construction and happenstance.) The thing is, there were another several vidlets that could easily have gone the same way as the trapeze one. After a while, I felt like I was perversely and maliciously refusing to make vids for people -- I had the request! the source! the concept! the song! the fucking timeline right there on my screen! -- just so that I could call them "not!vids" of "unvidded" fandoms. Wouldn't it be better to just make the damn vids?? But the only reason I could make any of those vidlets was because I had decided to make none of them: if I had looked at that list with the idea of making treats for people, I would have frozen at the "select something to commit to" part of the process, and made none of them. And especially so with the fandoms I knew nothing about: there was a whole lot of "stop dithering about selecting a fandom, if you can lay hands on source, you can string clips in a row and pretend it's a vid, it doesn't matter what the fandom actually is or if it speaks to you or not." (Except it did, kinda, because every fandom had a request behind it, a person who does have an emotional investment in it. But because of the way we were coordinating vidlet-making, I was having to commit to fandoms before I really knew my feelings about them; it was an utterly bizarre exercise in trying to do right by these fandoms without any of the usual tools we use to accomplish that.) The whole thing kept wildly see-sawing between "these aren't real vids" and "yes they are" and UGH.

And then I'd tell myself to STOP THINKING AND PUT CLIPS ON THE DAMN TIMELINE YOU DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS SOMEONE ELSE CAN DO META LATER.

...and that was only for the input-snippets, the convo gets much hairier at the meta-level that ghost_lingering was manipulating!

Which returns me to what I was saying up top: ghost_lingering sent me her draft of the project, a bunch of explosions went off in my brain when I watched it, and I desperately hoped she was talking to you, too, because you would probably have kept your words and said clarifying things. Which it sounds like you did! And I'm so glad you came back and took the time to share them. :-D

Yes, you gave me the song for Joshua. (In other conditions, I would have expected you to finger me the maker of that vidlet, because.) The whole time I was making it I was thinking, "I shouldn't be making this vid; seekingferret should be making this vid." I'M SO GLAD YOU AGREE HAHAHAHA.

(If you do make it? Please don't feel that you a need to keep any of my editing choices. That vidlet was a slapdash demonstration of concept, nothing more. I am very aware that time for doing it properly + needs of an entire vid might lead to that little section of music looking quite different.)

And YES about her Batman '66 vidlet! It is an inspired choice, hilariously wrong to the point of being right again, and there's absolutely nowhere more to go with it.

I giggled for ages at her using Losing Our Religions for Noah's Arc. I gave her a ridiculous quantity of Noah's Arc footage to select from, thinking that that she was doing something like "One Night Fandoms," and would need exactly the right half-second and would then toss the rest. That she looked at what I gave her, saw four distinct sets of material, and did a set of four related not!vids, creating an in-vid shout-out to Losing Our Religions... Yeah, I'm still laughing, too.

And while we're talking about individual vidlets: I'm sorry I didn't think to pick up the ball for Alphaville. I saw in the spreadsheet that you had sent footage and that it hadn't been made up, and I knew ghost_lingering had her hands full with all the other things that needed doing. But somehow I never thought to say, "Send me the Alphaville footage, I'll do something with it." (Would it amuse you to have me do something with it now? It would have different meaning outside the project than in, of course -- and the outside-of-the-project meaning might or might not be sufficient unto anyone's needs -- but if it would entertain you to drop that footage in my lap and see what I do with it, I am happy to put my hand to it.)

Mostly, though: it was a super-exciting project, I'm thrilled that she let me help a little, and I'm very happy to see you draw out for discussion so many of the things that were cool about it, hooray!

[sanguinity]

And because I had more things to say APPARENTLY...

:: And yet not all calls for attention earn the same amount of attention. "Silent Fandoms" is carefully crafted, but it is full of asymmetries... ::

It's odd, but I was expecting "Silent Fandoms" to trigger a discussion of the asymmetries in the calls for attention that comprise Festivids...? Because that was one of the very first thoughts I had, watching the beta draft. There are several interacting layers of selection that leads to something being an "unvidded" fandom in Festivids, and then ghost_lingering and I were imposing several whole new layers of selection on that: what fandoms we chose to make fake-vidlets for (the selection process was its own odd mix of external structures, strategic algorithms, and personal idiosyncracies), how much attention we put into making each fake-vidlet (it's no surprise to me that the longer and less-random fake-vidlets got namechecked more frequently in comments), and how ghost_lingering chose to arrange them both in the final vid and in the behind-the-scenes material.

One of the things that is beautiful and frustrating and utterly characteristic about Festivids is how there is TOO MUCH. From nominating, to sign-ups, to creation, to watching and commenting, we have to make choices about what we will and won't get to. (And I have yet to feel content in how I make those choices.) Consequently, one of the things I adore about "Silent Fandoms" is how she often put more on the screen than most minds can actually take-in. Even while watching this one single vid-about-Festivids, we have to make those same hard choices about what we will watch and what we will ignore, and all too often those choices are not so much "choices" as "some semi-arbitrary thing that drew my attention this way instead of that."

But the overwhelming scale of TOO MUCH wasn't just something she was deliberately injecting into the final not!vid, it was also something that was happening to us behind-the-scenes: a bind that we couldn't get out of (and I had pitched in solely to ease its grip on her!), even as she was deliberately creating a work that directly engaged it.

[seekingferret]

Yeah, I think I was engaging with that element as well when I wrote about how ghost_lingering engineers the not!vid to require/support rewatches in order to make sense of it, because there is far too much going on in it for a single watch to make any sense.

And like you say, that's both beautiful and frustrating. It's hard to say whether that's a virtue of Festivids or not, whether the way that 160 vids come out, hours and hours of vids to watch, in nearly as many fandoms, is a good way to present this media to the world. But I think it's undeniable that THE MASTERLIST has a sort of aesthetic beauty in itself as an artifact. (One of my beta notes to ghost_lingering was that in the earlier draft she was using the image of scrolling blurrily through several of the Festivids-associated lists as a visual element, and I found it distracting and confusing. But even though it didn't quite work visually [the final version, which is more streamlined in its use of the lists, is a lot better], I understand exactly why she wanted those lists. I remember the first time I introduced you to the list of Yuletide nominated fandoms and you were just scrolling through the list, agog. There's something really impressive about just seeing the breadth of things that people are fannish about.)

[sanguinity]

Yes, you did!

And I had wondered where those scrolling lists went! I liked them, but do not argue with their going away.

And yes, that sheer breadth! I suspect that in building her lists, ghost_lingering developed a more concrete sense than most of exactly how broad it is, but even the taste she gave us in her behind-the-scenes is the barest sampling of the whole.

[seekingferret]

As far as Magritte goes, as I say to ghost_lingering below, I think Magritte is a really interesting painter, consistently one of the painters whose paintings I walk past at museums, then stop and turn back and take another look at, and The Treachery of Images is one of his more boring works of art.

I would rather we talk about all the other interesting things the surrealists and Dadaists do than rehash these basic definitional questions over and over again. At a basic level, genre is interesting to me as a set of tools to play with, not as a checklist for boundary policing. I don't care very much whether something is or isn't a vid, I'm interesting in how it plays with the rules of fanvidding. And when it comes to the Treachery of Images, all there seems to be is that simple question: Is it a pipe or is it, as the painting claims, 'not a pipe'? In general, I don't really care.

Compare that even to a comparatively simple-to-interpret Magritte I love visiting at MoMa: Palace of Curtains III, which explodes The Treachery of Images' binary by suggesting there's more to it than just whether or not it's a pipe. (It's also a visually much more interesting composition, in my opinion). There are all these different and sometimes competing dimensions of thingness and beauty comes in combining them all in interesting ways.

[ghost_lingering]

Thank you for such a detailed, thoughtful review! You've pulled out things in the not!vid that are making me think & that I hadn't entirely realized were there or that I was thinking about in slightly different ways. I don't want to be gauche and pontificate about my work … but I'm going to do it anyway.

FWIW: my calling it a not!vid has less to do with it not being a vid and more to do with two things – first, if it is a vid, I think it’s a weird one and that makes me self-conscious; second, it *looks* more like a behind-the-scenes making of video about making a vid than an actual vid.  “Pressure” by the California Crew proves that something can be both a vid and a behind-the-scenes making-of video, but “Pressure” also conforms to many standards of what a vid is, chief among them that it’s cut to an actual song.  “Silent Fandoms” does not conform (that’s sort of part of the point). 
 
One of the things that I thought was so strange when making this was that the snippets I was making were actually the behind-the-scenes making-of, despite the fact that they looked more like what you would assume the end product would look like.  “Silent Fandoms” – as the end product – is deeply strange; it’s an ouroboros vid, a tautology: to make it you have to make it you have to make it.  The comparison I kept thinking about was if the LotR films had been made (or partially made) so that they could make the BTS DVD extras.  Or if the LotR BTS extras were actually about making the LotR BTS extras. 
 
Calling it a not!vid, then, is less about whether or not it is a vid, and more about the fact that, to me, it’s an exploration of the process of making a vid (or vids), which seems more like a(n experimental as shit) documentary.  Again, “Pressure” proves that a vid can be a documentary, but absent other vid-qualifiers … ???  I am not as certain.

There is, too, a sort of protective stance in claiming it is not a vid: if I am the first to say it is not a vid then no one can argue about how it is not really a vid. Boundary policing — not just in the OTW definition* but in fandom as well (I remember when people were saying Lim's Us wasn't a vid, which seems funny in retrospect) — is definitely a thing I was conscious of when I decided I wasn't calling this a vid, at least officially. Personally, if someone else had made “Silent Fandoms" and called it a vid I wouldn’t even blink: sure, yes, of course!  But I made it and so I am blinking.  

Also, calling it a not!vid makes me laugh.  I mean, I take vidding seriously, but not seriously.  I’m the person who wants to make a LotR vid to “Ring of Fire” and not call it a LKBV.  4’33” and other things like it are often taken seriously: this is profound.  And I don’t think of most things like that, particularly not self-referential, meta things.  Film school killed any ability I have to consider people taking themselves seriously seriously.  I think 4’33” is a fascinating concept — a fun concept — but not a serious one.  It’s playful; perhaps in its initial performance it was a bit too practical jokey, but subsequent performances, at least the ones I’ve run across on youtube, have been full of humor. It engages with complex ideas (what is music? what is silence?), but it's not serious.  By calling this a not!vid, I’m playing with the definition of vidding in the same way.  Maybe it’s only funny to me, but to me it’s very funny.

(Most of the choices in this can be summed up as: does it make me laugh? Ok, great, it goes in!)

*I just looked up the OTW definition in the DMCA brief and had to stop, there was so much annoyance: "television shows and movies" as being the source of vids??? What about games and internet shows and comics and podcasts?! The use of Coppa's "visual essay that stages an argument" quote, which I reject. I mean, I get, legally, that why they are defining vids and I understand the appeal of framing them as arguments, but. No. I would rather my vids all end in question marks than periods. Or exclaimation points! I love exclaimation points. I also love semi-colons (obvs that's punctuation mark between the Losing Our Religions vids) and dashes and colons and parenthesis. Ellipses! Just not periods. I know that arguments don't have to be close-ended, that they can be part of conversations (not that I don't, clearly, have conflicted feelings about conversations), but I don't think of vids as arguments or essays. Collages, soup, poems, questions, babies, mistakes, failures, fucking what the fucking fucks, wastes of time, experimental short films, but not essays that stage an argument.

+++

I like everything you say about uncommunity: at the end I think I was worried that I was defining things in the opposite direction or that I was defining fandom too narrowly, community too narrowly; this reassures me that I wasn't.

+++

One of my favorite moments in the vid is at 2:13, when we see the "Vids are Due in 8 Days" clip from 4:06.

FUNNY STORY: the anon vid that was up during the anon period was actually finished the night before Go Live. I had submitted a filled-in timeline version (the credits for that were "FESTIVIDS & a bunch of other stuff") when vids were due, but I kept working on it and I replaced the Vimeo file multiple times in the two weeks before Go Live. So that moment where you see that "vids are due in 8 days" at 2:13 was actually one of the last sections I finished, almost two weeks after vids had been officially due. It should have been "vids are due in -12 days".

+++

The best part about the Adam West snippet is that no editing was involved. I literally just put a clip from the show over the song. I think the randomness of the ducks makes it: if that was a vid that would be a fucking terrible choice in clip placement.

+++

My one concession to the ambient noise of 4'33" was that I recorded a recording of the audio for (the majority) of the vid & used that. The recording of the recording drops out at the end after the shot of me. Over the fv-poster page there is actual silence (…I think…) and when "This Isn't Disneyland" starts that's just a straight up audio file of that, which I did purposefully, because the whole idea is that that is the actual gift that was made, the end result.

[sanguinity]

Ah, but in the sense of "Pressure," that "eight days" panel was an accurate documentation of your eight-days point, no? Am I misremembering seeing that panel in a draft when you were still approximately eight days out? I know you made subsequent edits to that section, but in part this vid is a documentation of the process of making it -- and by extension, of the process of making ANY Festivid -- and that "eight days until DOOM" sensation is absolutely one of the hallmarks of this (and any!) exchange. *does the thing where I don't blink in defense of someone else's vid* :-P

[ghost_lingering]

Well, sort of accurate. The section starting at 3:55 was put there 8 days before vids were due (which is where the 8 days came from), but the soup eating itself was actually recorded earlier; the text & adding it to the timeline happened 8 days before vids were due. But the moment at 2:13 where you see a still of "vids are due in 8 days" in mpeg streamclip was added ten or twelve days AFTER vids were due. The whole section from 2:00 - 2:30 (or thereabouts) was the last I did.

The DOOM sensation was absolutely what I was going for! I was actually planning on taking the soup eating section out -- I put it in because I thought it was funny -- but everyone I showed it to reacted so well to it that I kept it in.

[seekingferret]

When betaing, I assumed you were taking out the soup section, but the more I thought about it, the more interesting it was. When I was betaing, I started out by writing that I wasn't sure what parts of the ending were "finished/unfinished/deliberately looking unfinished/etc." But then I started analyzing it as if it were really the ending and I found a lot of cool things about vidder identity in your choice to put yourself in the vid. So I'm glad you kept it.

[seekingferret]

Hmm... I mean, the reason I've been ignoring sanguinity's references to Magritte is that I think Magritte is a really interesting painter, consistently one of the painters whose paintings I walk past at museums, then stop and turn back and take another look at, and The Treachery of Images is one of his more boring works of art. I would rather we talk about all the other interesting things the surrealists and Dadaists do than rehash these basic definitional questions over and over again. As I say in my Yuletide letters, "I say 'Down with the tyranny of genre' a lot, and sometimes I'm being ironic, but sometimes I'm not." At a basic level, genre is interesting to me as a set of tools to play with, not as a checklist for boundary policing. I don't care very much whether something is or isn't a vid, I'm interesting in how it plays with the rules of fanvidding. Which is why I defer to your name. If you say it's a not!vid, that's fine with me.

I agree with you completely about how this kind of art needs to be playful to work. (I get so angry at people who haven't read Joyce who complain about how dry and boring and self-important and pretentious Joyce is, when he's one of the funniest writers I've ever come across. I get even angrier at the people who tell me they don't understand Duchamp's Readymades and when I tell them "It's a joke", they say "But then how is it art?" Is Dada really that hard to understand?)

The best part about the Adam West snippet is that no editing was involved. I literally just put a clip from the show over the song.

THAT IS THE GREATEST.

Thank you

[brainwane]

Just yesterday I was thinking, a little, about wanting to rewatch "One Night Fandoms" and "Silent Fandoms" together, to understand them better. It overwhelms and delights me to read this essay, which addresses that comparison but goes so much further to contextualize and anatomize "Silent Fandoms" in such thoughtful ways. I am so grateful that you have written this and that I get to read it.

Re: Thank you

[seekingferret]

Thank you. :)

[violetemerald]

Thank you for writing this. I only watched the Silent Fandoms vid, not the companion, and only once, when it was still anon haha... but it was enough to leave quite the impression on me and for most of this essay to basically make sense to me. :P

[seekingferret]

Thanks. Trust me, it really does reward rewatching.