Second Dot: Vidding as a method and position

Second ; Vidding as a Method and positioining

One of my main concerns until recently was my position as a maker towards society and cinema in particular. Where do I enter "in and through cinema"? In the first semester's critical review, I reflected upon my VJ -practice as a strategy to keep creating while operating outside of the dominating art discourse( Book 01 p.02). When I recently came across the 'Vidding' phenomenon, I felt a strong connection to the vidders strategies, aesthetics and operating form. In her article "An Editing Room of One's Own: Vidding as Women's Work" Francesca Coppa explains what Vidding is:

"Vidding is a grassroots art form in which fans reedit television or film into videos called "vids" or "Fanvids". A form of video production overwhelmingly dominated by women, vidding is also one of the oldest ongoing forms of remix."

(Francesca Coppa)

Coppa explains Vidding as a form of "in-kind media criticism: a visual essay on a visual source". Unlike music videos that illustrate songs, vidding gives the spectator a different read on the video that represents it and mass media in general. When I read Coppa's article my position towards VJing fell into place.

"Vidding is an art form that happens through editing- a field historically open to women, as it was thought to be related to sewing. In the case of vidding, editing is not just about bringing images together; it is also about taking mass-media

images apart. A vidder learns to watch television and movies fetishistically, for parts; to look for patterns against the flow of narrative structure; to slice desire images out of the larger whole."

(Francesca Coppa)

My way of watching TV and films resembles a surgeon; at times ignoring the patient as human, focusing mainly on the body parts. Searching for images that call my attention and desires. During those long nights VJing, I was exploring the way women were presented in mass media. Bringing female characters that were usually functioning as a backdrop into the frame. I was isolating these characters from the original narrative, cutting their physical backgrounds, bringing them to the front of the frame and sewing them into my own world.

"What a vidder cuts out can be just as important as what she chooses to include. Entire characters and subplots can be eliminated or marginalized, so that the vid asserts own narrative values.

This customization of the visual text is particularly important for women and people of color, who often find their desires marginalized. In vidding, their priorities are central."

(Francesca Coppa)

In the first critical review, I explained my desire to keep telling my stories through assembling found footage:

I could not stop creating personal work, I found ways to continue doing what I must do, but on my own terms. I exposed my deepest secrets on the screen; texts from my diary, made adaptations of films- using its heroines as the protagonists in my own story. My work had no beginning nor end; it had no logic or chronology. It was a 17,664 hours night. A night never painted black but filled with projections of women layered on more recordings of beautiful women."

(Critical Review, first semester p. 03)

The vidders choose to remain invisible, just as I was as at the time. Yet, we have the power to tear films and other media products apart for our own pleasure and as a critical, political act. Our control lies in the editing, including and, even more powerfully, excluding video footage.

"The powerful invisibility of the video editor- and the pleasurable invisibility of the vid spectator to whose sensibility footage has been tailored-comes as a welcome change from the pain of objectification and identification"

(Francesca Coppa)

Vidding is initially a female practice and also popular in the gay community (especially in the lesbian community), as it offers "reading against the grain", away from the dominant point of view.

My practice focused on female repositioning. Cutting out the female protagonists, marginalized in the original text, to finally grant them the spotlights. It gave me the chance to engage, play and talk to them, myself and the audience. Here is a short compilation of VJ work:

https://vimeo.com/240365473

"Revisiting my past work was a journey full of surprises. To my great delight, I found out that I was not as oblivious to the world around me as I thought I was. The Post- Research workshop helped me realise that I was in a constant dialogue with other makers and thinkers (see blogpost).

I held a discourse not only at the university but also on the screen. My discussions took place in the realms of aesthetics, the female body, the female gaze and the limited possibilities of authenticity being a woman. I used commercials, films and media fragments to hold up a mirror to society."

(Critical Review, first semester p. 03)

This way of "sewing" the material gives footage a new'Lo-Fi' existence. The first vidding was done by Kandy Fong in 1975, she was performing the vidding with two slide projectors to make the live editing quicker. When VCR was commercially available, vidding was done by two videorecorders, one for playing and the other for recording. The technical challenges in this workflow were incredible. The video layer was edited first and only later the music track was added, hence the syncing is a true craftwork. Digital media possibilities make vidding much simpler technically. 'Gleaning' the material became easier, as well as the editing and the sharing of it.

The analogue age was technically challenging for me as well. Before the year 2000, I was still VJing with VHS videotapes. I had 200 VHS tapes laying around my desk. I needed to find the right tape on the spot, never knowing what music the DJ will play next. For the live mixing, I used a Panasonic MX50 video mixer permitting me to remix live recorded footage from TV and DVD. With the new millennium, new technology was developed. The first VJ program "Resolume", a powerful tool for 'live' mixing, made my workflow so much easier. Resembling Photoshop it can mix three layers of videos live. It enabled me to feed the DJ audio into the program and make the footage react to the music. Let's not forget that my vast footage collection now fitted on a 20x40 cm hard drive.

Resembling the Fanvids, I too was using footage of the films, series and music videos I admired. The venue and the type of music being played, of course, had an influence on the footage I used. The music at the Melkweg on a Saturday night (where I held a weekly residency for 16 years) consisted mainly of pop music. That is also the reason I can relate my VJ-practice with Vidding. I also offered new readings to the played songs and used footage, the only difference is that I was vidding an average of 160 songs per session.

As VJ Tarantula, I was sitting on the sewing machine creating a tapestry of videos. My practice was to take the different footage-fabrics and sew them 'live' in front of the audience. I embroidered a huge video-rug during my 17,664 hours night. The action of cutting, weaving together often juxtaposing, gave me a sense of power and freedom. While doing that, I was telling my stories and at the same time the narrative of the society I live in.