London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship: ‘Reframing Popular Culture: Media Fannish Response From Slideshows to ‘Mashups’

Thursday 23 May
17.30-19.30
Institute of English Studies
Room 234, Senate House
University of London, Malet St, London WC1E 7HU

Faith Lawrence (King’s College London): ‘Reframing Popular Culture: Media Fannish Response From Slideshows to ‘Mashups’

The mash-up video rose to prominence as part of the web 2.0 remix ethos, but the roots of the phenomenon are much deeper. This talk will look at the history of “vidding” from its pre-digital origins in media fandom in the 1970s to highly technical works produced today. In doing so we will consider some of the significant contributions with the genre and look at how the narratives expressed in the works parallel and reflect on traditional literary tropes and motifs while offering and illustrating alternate readings. Examples will explore the multitude of ways the video creators – as audience – respond to, celebrate, deconstruct and reinterpret the narratives of popular culture across the decades and themselves in relation to them.

Warning: this talk contains nudity/sexuality, violence, scenes which the viewer may find disturbing and 80s power ballads. Specific warnings will be given as appropriate during the course of the presentation.