Jenna Ng, Finders, Users, Upenders: the prezi

Here is a link to the prezi used by Jenna Ng with her paper 'Finders, Users, Upenders, or: Authoring Media in the Digital Age: Mash-Ups, Crowdsourcing, Machinima.

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. 

Speakers at Remix in Retrospect

I am happy to announce that the following speakers have agreed to take part in the symposium:

Professor Adriaan van der Weel, Book and Digital Media Studies, Leiden University
Adriaan van der Weel is Bohn Professor of Modern Dutch Book History and lecturer in Book and Digital Media Studies at Leiden University. His research interests include the digitisation of textual transmission and popular reading and publishing. Van der Weel is member of the editorial board of Logos, Forum of the World Book Community. His most recent book project is Changing Our Textual Minds: Towards a Digital Order of Knowledge, which will appear with Manchester University Press in August 2011. 

Dr Kate Eichhorn, Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts, New York
Kate Eichhorn's research is broadly concerned with the aesthetic and political efficacy of our everyday practices in those places where literature, art and social activism meet. One of her current book-length projects is Adjusted Margin: The Copy Machine as a Co-Agent of Social Change (a media history investigating how copy machines supported the rise of feminist and queer counter-publics in the late twentieth century). In addition to her research in the fields of book and publishing history, cultural studies and media studies, she is a writer and literary editor. 

Dr Adam Smyth, Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London
Adam Smyth's research explores the literature and culture of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His research interests include the circulation and evolution of texts between different readers, writers, and forms of publication, and the cultures of manuscript and print. He published on textual fragmentation in seventeenth century England, on printed anthologies and on life-writing. He is currently working on a book titled Literature and Laughter in England, 1485-1660,and a book on the 1630s Anglican religious community of Little Gidding.

Dr Jenna Ng, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge
Jenna Ng is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her research at CRASSH explores the intersections between image, presence and mobility in digital media technologies, particularly on how the kinesthestic in digital media images challenge screen engagements in digital culture today. She researches primarily on the cultural, technological and critical dimensions of images in digital media, with particular interests in mobile media, haptic devices, motion and virtual capture systems. Her other research interests include digital cinema, cinephilia and Asian cinema (Chinese, Japanese, Singaporean). 

James Barrett MA, HUMlab, Umeå University Sweden
Jim Barrett is a doctoral candidate at Umeå University in Sweden in English Literature and works as a teacher and researcher in HUMlab. He researches on narrative in transcultural and digital media contexts, with a particular interest in the concepts of reading and performance. He also works with digital art, virtual worlds, pedagogy that involves digital media, and digital culture. He teaches cultural studies, literature, and narrative design in 2D and 3D media. 

Feike Dietz MA, Department of Early Modern Dutch Literature and Research Institute for History and Culture, Utrecht University
Feike Dietz' PhD-project 'Emblematic Dynamics in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century: Word, Image, Religion' is part of an international research project and focuses on the reception of the Counter Reformational emblem book Pia desideria (Antwerp, 1624) in the early modern Northern Netherlands. Her publications include an article on manuscript rewritings of printed emblem books in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century.