Abstract of Jenna Ng's paper

Finders, Users, Up-enders; or, Authoring Media in the Digital Age: Mash-ups, Crowd-sourcing, Machinima

Dr. Jenna Ng

Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities

University of Cambridge

Up-end the stick and what happens next

Is a music that you never would have known

To listen for.

~ Seamus Heaney, “The Rain Stick”

This paper discusses a specific vectorial approach to thinking about digital media authorship, which I summarise as “finders, users, up-enders.” The idiom “finders, keepers” relates to an ancient Roman law (uti possidetis) of finding something (finders) and claiming ownership (keepers) to it if it is unowned or abandoned. I adapt the rationale behind this adage to the case of authoring digital media today, whereby, as I will argue, one comes across (finds) a particular media artifact, consumes it per its intended purpose (uses), and then employs it for goals beyond those intents (upends). I call this approach vectorial because it sets out a path—a specific trajectory—for that authoring process. This approach also implies that, instead of laying claim in terms of physical possession of property (as is the current practice of copyright), with digital media one now “possesses” creatively—by making something visually, conceptually and/or aurally new out of the media artifact, by subverting its intended purpose and content, by recontextualising it and shifting it to new places in the mediascape; a claim of possession to creative intent rather than to title, if you will. If authoring is conventionally about a distinctive style, an unmistakable influence, a vision writ large (in the narrow sense of la politique des auteurs), then digital authoring in this particular “up-ending” approach is about collaborative creativity, subversive humour, and an evolution of tools which take on varying degrees of imaginative and artistic expressiveness. I illustrate my argument with three cinema-based media forms: the film mash-up; the digitally crowdsourced film; and machinima. Using various examples, I show how each media technology follows the “finders/users/up-enders” trajectory, and how each is first acquired, adopted and then transformed. In the process, I also discuss two issues:  the first is the changing and sometimes overlapping roles of the viewer in the digital age as passive consumer, as active and collaborative producer, and as up-ender of media. This can also be compared to the past practice of attributing genius, finality and ownership to the vision of a particular author/auteur. The second issue is the fluidity of the digital text, significant here in the sense of being in dialogue with previous works as the media consumer/producer/up-ender re-works the text. The mash-up is held in particular relief here qua film text because the edit—the cut—as its central digital practice is, in its digital form, stripped of materiality and, in turn, its finality and finitude (you can only cut a film strip once; you can edit a digital text endlessly). I argue that the transformative authorship inherent in up-ending is thus also about a posthuman turn, a constantly changing, constantly resurrecting entity transcending a bodily materiality, as compared to the analogue text of a humanist paradigm, of materiality and of imperfection, wearing its marks, grains, cuts and scratches  on a body which bears all too clearly every scar and trace. Whether this is the music we would never have known to listen for or the rush of apocalyptic thunder is debatable.