III/3/A "Toaster Lover"

Videomaker Toolkit is a fan-driven promotion that's heavily advertised on the official site. Its instructions {http://scifi.com/battlestar/videomaker/instructions/} invite us to "be a part of Battlestar Galactica" by creating a four minute tribute film, the best of which will be selected to air on television. In order to "help give your videos the Battlestar look and sound," a menu of downloadable audio and video clips is provided, while the rules place a premium on an archaic "ex nihilo" model of originality by stipulating that the only additional material permitted is that which "you created." Moreover, these "tools" are limited to less than 40 short CGI-based establishment and action sequences (divided into "land" and "space" and including mostly ships, architecture, and explosions), plus a number of signature sound effects and only seven partial music tracks (also included is the show's logo image and a required ending clip plugging "new episodes of Battlestar Galactica" and Videomaker itself). That is, Videomaker's conception of sanctioned derivative filmmaking is extremely narrow, notably excluding the character-based dramatic scenes that make up the majority of the show. This constriction is a by-product of at least two larger contradictions in which the project is embroiled: first, its conflicting creative and promotional imperatives to pay homage to the show thematically and formally (using its "look and sound"), while nonetheless generating a work that is otherwise wholly original and non-infringing; second, television and the internet's conflicting regimes of distribution and value, wherein the existence of a fanbase skilled in internet video production is assumed, while it is simultaneously assumed that recognition by and on television is incentive enough to channel this artistic labor out of the internet at large and into SciFi's walled garden.

Given the over 100 approved Videomaker submissions, these contradictions don't seem to be crippling, but neither are they likely to be easily expelled from the burgeoning brood of fan-driven promotions. Delving into the contest's Terms and Conditions {http://scifi.com/battlestar/videomaker/terms/}, it becomes evident how entrenched these two conflicts are in the Byzantine folly of current intellectual property law. The former, here most succinctly stated "SCI FI is only interested in your original work," simply ports over copyright's founding ideology of self-contained artistic production. Notably, SciFi claims only non-exclusive rights to Videomaker submissions (outside of Toolkit materials); the imperative, in the instructions, to "not post your film on other sites, such as YouTube, MySpace, Google, etc." is thus more polite request than binding condition. This slight loosening of SciFi's juridical border patrol can also serve to remind us that Battlestar Galactica's production team is far from equivalent to NBC legal (as Ron Moore suggests in his schizophrenic disclaimer about fanfic, quoted above), and their untenable position between a creative rock and a legal hard place may be similar to that of fans. Copyright is equally entangled with the latter issue: changing architectures of digital distribution. The lawyers have come up with a remarkable catalogue of verbs enumerating everything that can or conceivably could be done to a media object, one practically worthy of science fiction itself:

you are granting SCI FI, its licensees, successor and assigns, the perpetual and irrevocable, non-exclusive right and license to (a) reproduce, distribute, display, exhibit, host, cache, store, archive, index, categorize, comment on, tag, transmit, broadcast, stream, edit, alter, modify, synchronize with visual material, create algorithms based thereon, and transcode the Submission to appropriate media formats, standards or mediums... throughout the world in perpetuity, in any and all media, whether now existing or hereafter devised...

The legal terms must here contend not only with present-day conditions of media reproduction, but with the futures and fantasies of remediation. These fantasies of transcoding media "hereafter devised" are not unrelated to BSG's Cylons' fantasies of hybrid offspring, and pose similar challenges of containment to their more hierarchical human counterparts.

If both Colonial and corporate authorities respond to runaway procreation with a combination of force and subterfuge, both also recognize that it would be a death sentence to shut out the possibilities of hybridity entirely. While Videomaker attempts to carefully channel and circumscribe audience labor, it has nonetheless become a vibrant occasion for and celebration of fan creativity. Unlike many internet promotions, this project assumes and allows a broad technical latitude among its participants, who are expected to use their own video equipment, software, and expertise (rather than a "user-friendly" web-based interface) to produce their submissions. This expectation demonstrates an understanding of and respect for the community of science fiction fans, who historically tend to be aficionados of real-world as well as imagined technologies. In Jenkins' chapter on fan filmmaking in Convergence Culture, he takes Star Wars as a case study, describing various films and several web sites that have collected them, including Lucasfilm's official clearinghouse Atomfilms.com (launched in 2000, and running contests in 2003 and 2005). Like Videomaker on a grander scale, Atomfilms attempts to draw bright lines around fan production, offering its stamp of approval (as well as a library of audio clips) in exchange for strict adherence to intellectual property law (parody and documentary only, no "attempts to expand on the Star Wars universe" [quoted in Jenkins, 154]). As Jenkins points out, "these rules are anything but gender-neutral" (155): the "original" (ostensibly materially and critically distanced) genres that enjoy legal and corporate sanction are disproportionately produced by men, while creative works that explore relationships between characters and "expand the universe" are the almost exclusive preserve of women. This schism is generated, perpetuated, and negotiated in complex ways, but it remains baldly entrenched: in the case of Videomaker, 81 of the authors listed for the first 100 submissions have typically male names, by my count (8 have typically female names, and 11 are indeterminate or collaborations). This gendered hierarchy is one example of the Gordian snarls of power that arise as media producers and fans (and their respective products) become increasingly interdependent and indistinguishable.

Take, for instance, one of the two initial sample videos posted in Videomaker Toolkit: "Toaster Lover" {http://video.scifi.com/player/?id=64712} (written, directed and edited by Margaux Luciano and Randy Giudice, who we might assume to be a male-female team). "Toaster Lover" takes the form of a fake movie trailer, a parodic genre recognizable from YouTube. Ordinarily, fake trailers combine an edited sequence of video clips with new or borrowed trailer audio to suggest a humorous reinterpretation of the source (one popular variant is the "Brokeback Mountain" spoof: these highlight the gay subtext between everyone from R2-D2 and C-3PO to He-Man and Man-at-Arms). As such, they are formally similar to fan videos, while differing greatly in tone and context. "Toaster Lover" obeys the contest's stipulation of originality by using homemade instead of appropriated video (adeptly integrated with stock establishing shots from the Toolkit), but includes the framing captions and voiceover of a trailer, as well as Brokeback Mountain's famous line "I wish I could quit you." Its imagined movie tells a tale of star-crossed love between a male pilot and a Centurion (the big metal "toasters" who were among the first Cylon models), with the tagline "for years they were enemies, until the day that chance brought two lonely souls together" (Figure 2). "Toaster Lover" thus showcases the ways that Videomaker can mobilize hybridity on multiple registers: it (like other "Brokeback" style trailers) combines the parodic distance typical of the male-dominated world of fan films with the focus on same-sex romance that is a signature of female vidding communities, and (like all Videomaker submissions) it toes the line between ostensibly original and derivative production.

"Toaster Lover" is particularly effective as a spoof and as an exemplary Videomaker film because it comments astutely on an aspect of Battlestar Galactica: the queerness that infuses its narratives of alternative relationships and families. Centurions are not explicitly gendered, and the fact that, with its quotations from stories of forbidden love, "Toaster Lover" draws a parallel between inter-technic and same-sex romance highlights the overarching queer subtext of human-Cylon connection and conflict. Beyond the diegetic parallels, I'm tempted to read "Toaster Lover" allegorically as a romance between big media producers and fanboys: the monstrous automaton and the scrappy softie who find true love as war between their kinds wages around them. Certainly this is the fantasy that Videomaker itself embodies, with its show of community participation in the "rate this video" stars, comment box, and "send to friend" button – while at the same time reinscribing normative boundaries through the control it exerts over the process (the viewer ratings, for example, have no discernable importance or effect). Given this allegory, we might ask whether derivative labor overall is metaphorically queer, since it's a form of reproduction that mates supposedly incompatible parents ("original" media source and "original" creativity) to spawn hybrid offspring. BSG, Videomaker, and "Toaster Lover" as it marries them foreground the way that mediation is itself a species of forbidden desire. Both Cylons and fans are threatening because they're in networked communication with technology, and because their desires to be mediated dispute sanctioned boundaries and generate rogue progeny. It remains to be seen whether the constraints of sponsored initiatives like Videomaker, with their intrinsic compromises and contradictions, can adequately channel these desires into one big happy capitalist family.

III/3/B And They Have a Plan

Videomaker represents only one possible familial and reproductive structure among many, however. We find another in the tradition of fan song videos: montages of visual material culled from mass media source texts and set to music. This underground art form, which has been part of media fandom since the mid-1970's, was inaugurated using slide projectors and has evolved through consumer VHS technology and into the era of ubiquitous digital video. For a more detailed historical analysis of vidding I refer you to the work of Francesca Coppa, who charts, among other things, how the technical hurdles involved in VCR editing encouraged artists to cluster into groups of enthusiasts and mentors, thereby developing distinct aesthetic conventions in turn. My concern is with the present-day evolution and hybridization of vidding as the maturation of internet video since the mid-2000's renders it more accessible and visible than ever before, both inside and outside its fannish milieu. The fact that Videomaker's fan films reference fake trailers and other YouTube genres attests to the riot of cross-pollination among moving image mashups that the code and infrastructure for web video sharing has enabled, including an undergrowth of "feral" fanvids that adopt the format without evincing strong ties to the customs and resources of the established vidding community.

Contrarily, this creative jungle has sprung some classic vids into the limelight while uprooting them from their interpretive landscape, most notably Killa and T. Jonsey's Kirk/Spock vid "Closer" {http://youtube.com/watch?v=1PwpcUawjK0} which took the blogosphere by storm in fall 2006. This is one test case for the ways in which the outbreak of viral video can generate problems as well as possibilities for grassroots art: in addition to the critical impoverishment that is a side-effect of "decoupling amateur media from its original contexts of production and consumption" (Jenkins, "How to Watch a Fan-Vid"), such mainstream attention (which went as far as "Closer" being quoted on television) can be directly threatening to creators because of the potential legal and personal repercussions of unauthorized and non-normative appropriations of proprietary media source. Killa took most of her work off the internet in response {http://seacouver.slashcity.net/vidland/vids.html}, and hers are not the only famous fanvids uploaded to YouTube without the artists' permission. Fan producers are thus no more able to control the dissemination of their texts than commercial producers (in fact they may be less able, since the derivative status of their oeuvre, not to mention their lack of corporation-sized resources, puts them in a weaker position with respect to copyright law). Such interplay and conflict is one instantiation of the vagaries of the digital archive, in both its technological and discursive dimensions: its oscillation of persistence and ephemerality, publicity and privacy, openness and closure structures the possibilities for fan engagement and production.

Vidders are avidly debating how to engage tactically on this uneven and shifting terrain. At Vividcon 2007, the sixth annual convention for and by the vidding community, a "Town Hall on Vidding and Visibility" panel explored the stakes of the customary closet, which offers safety, sisterhood and shared language while threatening fanvids with misunderstanding and marginalization. Concerns on both sides are fused with gender issues, as vids (like fan fiction) have been created almost exclusively by women throughout their history (an oft-repeated statistic is that the greatest number of men thus far at Vividcon, an event with over 100 attendees, has been five). The painstaking and meticulous labor vidding requires has been likened to traditional "women's work" such as quilting and needlepoint (not to mention early film cutting and computer programming). The technological mastery intrinsic to vidding and other media craft has gone largely unrecognized, however, because it is conducted out of view and contradicts ideological expectations for female behavior. It is only with the recent mainstreaming of various species of fan film online, and with advancements in the consumer apparatus that allow the best vids to look every bit as polished as professional music videos, that vidding may appear, within the overdetermined framework of gender stereotypes, to be taking on some of the "masculine" characteristics of other genres of DIY video. Concurrently, as influential sectors of the community have come to value a "shiny" aesthetic that emphasizes matching rhythm, motion, color, and other visual attributes to the music with increasingly elaborate and technical editing, vids that carry on a "feminine" tradition of melodramatic romance may now be relegated by some to the tongue-in-cheek category of "Lord King Bad Vids." While vids that privilege emotion and/or narrative are certainly presenting a critical interpretation, and while even more openly analytical vids don't necessarily adopt the same register of distance as fan parodies or critiques produced within male artistic conventions, the perceptible shift in tone away from the intimacy of traditional relationship-focused vids nonetheless raises questions about the implications of the changing technological, social, and economic environment for this women's subculture. The developments are complex and defy attempts to map them on binary axes, but they do indicate the array of hybridizations that are among the issue of digitally-enabled intermixtures of form and context, including (for better or worse) the possibility of layers of gender blending.

In her post "You Can't Stop the Signal" {http://community.livejournal.com/vidding/893694.html}, eminent vidder Laura Shapiro points out that under these circumstances, the debates about visibility are to some degree moot: "The minute we put our vids online, we expose ourselves to the world... We can't control the distribution of our own work in a viral medium." This pragmatism animates a collective campaign to stake out a consolidated public enclave for vidding – an opt-in archive calculated to support this family of practice. In the absence, for now, of a hosting infrastructure that is fan owned, vidders deliberately adopted the multimedia social networking site imeem.com en masse {http://community.livejournal.com/vidding/tag/imeem}. Imeem was judged to have a number of advantages over other video-sharing services (YouTube in particular) in terms of its mechanics, components, and policies: for example, its streaming quality is high, its feature set is rich (including group hubs, embeddable playlists, searchable tags, and customizable profiles), and according to its TOS {http://imeem.com/terms.aspx}, "imeem does not claim any ownership rights in any articles, information, materials, data, files, programs, photographs, concepts, communications, footage, ideas, opinions, and other materials ("Member Content") you post, store, or exchange through the imeem Site or Service; you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Member Content." And while these generous licensing terms technically apply only to "Member Content" that is within "appropriate rights," leaving derivative works vulnerable to unilateral suspension, enforcement still relies on copyright holders to flag potentially infringing cases, a far more forgiving system than SciFi.com's proprietary vetting (although imeem did recently implement a digital fingerprinting schema to track and protect audio files, and automated video monitoring may not be far behind). So, as the advent of digital and then internet video makes vidding both more accessible and more difficult for its practitioners to superintend, the architecture of imeem provides the ground for a tactical intervention: a hybrid position that gives vidding a public face while demarcating and reinforcing the community, that renders vids widely shareable while asserting their creators' authorship, that trades some loss of control for some gains in usability. In contradistinction to Videomaker Toolkit's top-down arrangement, which attempts through its interface and conditions to recontain excessive fan productivity within SciFi's exclusive perimeter, the distributed network of vidders on imeem (best indicated by the 200+ members of the vidding "meem") reproduces their fantext without a patriarchal center. Fanvids deploy love via the raw material of the show itself, fragmenting, recombining, and multiplying it with a fertility of which official transmedia can tap only a fraction. This propagation is still delimited by the archive, however, the lattice of power materialized in available technologies – of media, but also more broadly technologies of law, commerce, and desire.

[this section, especially the third paragraph, has been revised following an invaluable consultation with Francesca Coppa]

III/3/C I Think We re Alone Now

While there are debates about the degree to which predominantly female fan communities legitimately embody a queer experience, I'd like to honor the metaphorical affinities between Hera's cluster of lesbian mothers and the family of vidders, where love by women in collaboration is the genesis of a hybrid brood that, like Hera, is part of "the shape of things to come." Fanvids are one manifestation of the irrepressible excess of media reproduction in today's technological context: digital video, in particular, levels the barriers between television and the internet, between producers and consumers of entertainment, making commercial texts available as raw materials to anyone with computer file sharing and editing capabilities. With growing volume and diversity as their tools become increasingly accessible and sophisticated, vids capitalize on this condition to celebrate, critique, and de/reconstruct mass media in what Anne Kustritz calls a "genre commensurate form." This is to say that they engage the source via its own visual language, appropriating its images (along with their webs of intertextual connotation) and instilling coherence across a fragmented re-edit by means of the music and lyrics of a song. As such, there's an ongoing debate among fans and fan scholars about how to assess fanvids' "transformative" status in comparison to medium variant derivatives (such as fan fiction and fan films that use original video): on one hand, vids make something new out of the text itself, but for the same reason their divergence from it is often less stark. In addition to the ideological dimensions of this moral discourse, infused as it is with assumptions about what genders/races/classes/nationalities of people are creatively enabled, the question has concrete legal ramifications: "transformative" standing is a key axis of a fair use defense of appropriative art. Certainly vidding articulates very different evaluative criteria from orthodox IP law or from a project like Videomaker in its form, themes, and orientation. While fanvids proper span a growing range of distinct genres and approaches, they may appear overly formulaic to outsiders because they rarely deviate from the conventional music video format. This uniformity, however, is a technique for building an interpretive community, wherein what's privileged is not novelty and widespread appeal, but rather the ability to speak compellingly through and about media to an intimate audience within familiar constraints. What's "original" about vidding is a technology of seeing: it is a literalization of fans' ocular prosthetics (the girlslash goggles, for one), rendering as montage the strategies of active viewing that are animated by love.

While "meta" (critical) and "gen" (general, including character study) vids are garnering increasing attention and acclaim, relationship and slash vids (such as Killa and T. Jonsey's famously erotic "Closer") are still at the heart of the form. Here I'd like to look in detail at a vid that manifests the girlslash goggling of Battlestar Galactica directly: "Save Yourself," a Kara/Sharon vid by jarrow272 {http://jarrow272.imeem.com/video/0u5Jn951/bsg_saveyourselfrm/}.

This project is representative of an orthodox aesthetic within today's vidding community, and screened at Vividcon 2007; it simultaneously addresses the core vidding audience, who are familiar with the genre's conventions but not necessarily with the nuances of the source, the assemblage of BSG enthusiasts situated within online media fandom, and the more localized coterie of BSG femslashers (it implies a tragic amour as a preferred reading, although its tone is not overtly romantic). Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, the gender non-conforming and ambiguously saintlike hotshot pilot, and Sharon "Boomer" Valerii, the rogue "sleeper agent" persona of Cylon model Eight, had a history together serving on Galactica in Sharon's pre-activation past, but in the course of the show's canon their relationship has accumulated only a few isolated moments of shared screentime. These scenes are intensely charged with both characters' ambivalence about the contradiction between their human friendship and Sharon's newfound Cylonicity, but the rest of the available lesbian reading inheres in the gaps and latencies of BSG's multidirectional narrative. "Save Yourself" occupies these conditions strategically by highlighting and capitalizing on the fragmentation of television editing, which represents affect via shot-reverse-shot patterns that are replicated here (and in many slash vids) using originally unrelated close-ups to evoke mutual emotion and desire. It also encodes the thematic question of the degree of permeability and transmissibility between the consciousness of individual Sharons (plus the ramifications of that for Kara and the ways she can know and has known her) by indiscriminately mixing images of Boomer and the other important Sharon copy, later distinguished with the callsign Athena. A heartfelt conversation in the brig wherein the characters broach this issue explicitly is cited as a pivotal moment in the vid (this is its first clip of them together, and it occurs more than two minutes in). Outside such judicious glimpses of onscreen Kara/Sharon snippets, however, "Save Yourself" is primarily staked on paralleling these two across multiple registers: movement and gesture (pairing shots of their eyes, hands, and pacing feet, for example) as well as circumstance (pairing the women firing guns, captive in hospital beds, and so on), suggesting the similarities of their experiences despite the fact the one is human and the other Cylon. With the strident, angsty rhythm and lyrics {http://lyricwiki.org/Stabbing_Westward:Save_Yourself} as a unifying element, "Save Yourself" constructs a metatexual explanation in music video form for the conspicuous under-elaboration of Kara and Sharon's relationship in canon (a common necessity of femslash interpretations of BSG, given that, for its rich abundance of female characters, it portrays few interactions between women): their love for each other cannot transcend the brutality to which they are individually subjected.

Narratively, "Save Yourself" presents an impressionistic chronicle of violence, opening by introducing Kara and Sharon in close-ups and locating them within the apocalyptic context of space battles and explosions. The body sections are composed around occasions of trauma: Kara's intimate losses and crash landing and Sharon's dawning panic about her activities as a Cylon saboteur (season 1) in the first verse, their separate experiences of hospitalization and incarceration (season 2) in the second verse (though the topical segments don't break cleanly with the musical divisions, for the most part, fostering a seamless feel). While numerous physical assaults against Kara are included, her main thread in the vid is her terrifying detainment in a covert Cylon facility on Caprica after being shot (and, it is strongly hinted, having surgery performed on her ovary). The most concentrated and disturbing Sharon passage begins during the song's bridge, and incorporates her outing as a Cylon, her own horror and attempted suicide, the ensuing barbarity of her tenure in shackles and aborted rape, and the faked death of her child. Just as the vid touches visually on Kara and Sharon's relationship at the beginning ("searching for an angel") and middle (their scene in the brig) for emphasis, the fulcrum here (at 3:05) flashes back to the standoff involving the two of them upon their return from Caprica, leading into a fluid concluding section punctuated by Sharon's multiple shootings. At the end, Kara escapes from her Cylon captor, while the final image is of Boomer's dead body (though of course she survives by downloading, and both characters go on to have further near-death experiences in season 3).

"Save Yourself"'s panorama of physical and emotional abuse, inscribed across two interconnected women, evokes the specter of homophobic and/or racist violence as much as the recuperation of homosexual and/or interracial love. The pathos of the closet Cylon is unavoidably inflected as a queer allegory, and this dimension is even more strongly accented in the vid, wherein Sharon is kept from Kara by a catalogue of cruelty (from insults scrawled in her locker to punitive sexual assault). The conjectured relationship between Sharon and Kara is thus transgressive by virtue of being same-sex and of being inter-technic (human-Cylon), and the vid's tragic saga of forcible heartbreak yokes these two registers together. While "Save Yourself" is hardly a celebratory slash romance, in this sense, metatextually it gleefully exposes a submerged intimacy – its own existence as an artwork, that is, contradicts its pessimistic diegetic implication that Starbuck and Boomer will never be together. This buoyancy is perhaps most apparent in Jarrow's second-order mashup of the vid which, as per an informal divertissement among vidders, plays the existing video montage against a different audio track – a commentary in itself on the malleability of media in this technological context. The "I Think We're Alone Now" version {download}, which sets "Save Yourself" to Tiffany's classic anthem of forbidden love {http://lyricwiki.org/Tiffany:I_Think_We%27re_Alone_Now}, is exuberantly perverse in its juxtaposition of brutal images and candy pop, and features uncannily and hilariously perfect alignments at points between the vid's narrative and the song, between its images and the lyrics. "We gotta hide what we're doing / Cuz what would they say / If they ever knew," Tiffany sings, "And then you put your arms around me / ...I think we're alone now," and it sounds like a happy ending for Kara/Sharon and illicit couples everywhere (human-Cylon, girl-girl, and otherwise subtextual). Not to mention a happy ending for vidders and other creative fans themselves, running away from admonitions to "watch how you play" to tumble into their hideaway where they can be alone, "holding on to one another's hand," (re)producing to "the beating of our hearts." But reappropriating and remediating love undercover and on the run is only a provisional triumph, of course, easily evading vain attempts at enforced textual containment but not escaping normative and protocological hierarchies of power.