Vidding Kung Fu Panda in China

From time to time, I use this space to showcase the global dimensions of the kinds of participatory culture which so often concern us here. When I first started to write about fan culture, for example, the circuit along which fan produced works traveled did not extend much beyond the borders of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and perhaps Australia. American fans knew little about fan culture in other parts of the world and indeed, there was often speculation about why fandom was such a distinctly American phenomenon. Now, fans online connect with others all over the world, often responding in real time to the same texts, conspiring to spread compelling media content from one culture to the other, and we are seeing a corresponding globalization of fan studies. Yet, some countries remain largely outside of field of view, because of language barriers, cultural differences, political policies, and alternative tech platforms.

Consequently, most of us know very little about how fan production practices have spread to China -- which is too often described in terms of its piracy of American content and too little discussed in terms of its creative repurposing of that content to reflect their own cultural interests. So, I am really excited over these next two installments to share some glimpses into fan culture in China -- specifically focusing on the vidding community there (but also discussing other forms of fan participation.)

These two posts were created by Lifang He, an Annenberg student who took my transmedia entertainment class in the fall and who is doing an independent study with me this term to expand her understanding of the concept of participatory culture. Here, she talks about how Kung Fu Panda got read in relation to the economic crisis in China, and next time, she will tackle the array of different fan responses to Avatar.

Kung Fu Panda vidding and Chinese fan culture

Lifang He

In this paper, I'm going to write about a Chinese vid based on a movie Kung Fu Panda as it is a great example of fan made extensions in China. I'll introduce the background of the movie, discuss the relationship between the vid and the original movie, and also I'll talk about fan's role in the vidding and Chinese fan culture.

Kung Fu Panda is a 2008 animated comedy movie directed by John Stevenson and produced by DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. It tells a story of a clumsy panda bear Po, who unenthusiastically works as a waiter for his father's noodle restaurant and eventually achieves his dream and becomes a master of martial arts.

According to Sina Entertainment (2008), this movie achieved significant monetary success after it was released on July 20, 2008 in China, which had hit approximately 14 million USD box office sales in the first ten days.

This Hollywood made Chinese movie is much better than other Chinese made Chinese movies, which proves American's leading ability to create entertainment and market Chinese culture. The movie is filled with Chinese elements. The key character Panda is China's national treasure and the other characters in the movie such as the monkey, snake, red crowned crane, tiger and mantis are the classic representatives of Chinese martial arts. Moreover, the Chinese imagery was used so well that Chinese audience felt very excited to discuss how great the movie is. As a famous Chinese film director Lu Chuan commented on his blog, " the movie brought big laugh to Chinese people. It was a big surprise. Our familiar culture is no longer a burden for the creativity, instead it becomes an active and vivid entertainment" (Lu Chuan, 2008).

In response to the success of the movie, a lot of discussion was generated online between the audience and the animation filmmaker after its first release. Fans posted reviews on their blogs and discussed their favorite characters on Bulletin Board System (BBS). Also hey used Photoshop software to make posters with different themes such as Harry Potter, Lust, Caution, Pirates of the Caribbean, which attracted a lot of buzz. They also created music videos and wrote lyrics to compliment the movie, which were posted on social networking sites. After knowing that The Kaboom of Doom, a sequel of Kung Fu Panda, has been currently in pre-production and will be released in 2011 (Wiki, 2009), fans started to make their own versions of the movie.

Among all of these fan activities, producing vids and sharing with other fans on Chinese social networking sites is one of the most popular ways for them to express their love to the movie. They wrote scripts, re-edited video clips using the original footage and did the voice over to tell a new story. Unlike American viding culture that has a relatively long history, Chinese vidding only emerged a couple of years ago owing to the video sharing websites such as Youtube.com, Tudou.com. There's no centralized grassroots community for vidding in China and Chinese vidding culture is very casual. An example to help exemplify how fans use this to publicize their opinions is a vid called Gu Piao Panda (Stock Panda), which is widely spread online and applauded by the fans.

Gu Piao Panda is a three-minute short film, which links Po to China's unsound stock market and tells a parallel story about stock panda. The story starts from a scene that Po was a legend in the stock market, but it turns out that it is just a dream. In reality, he is a rookie stock investor and his money is all tied up in stock because of the global recession. Po is so sad that he goes back home to talk to his goose father and his father persuades him to withdraw money from the stock market because of the bearish market situation. Po has a strong belief that he will become a guru in the financial world someday and the only reason he hasn't achieved that yet is because he hasn't met his teacher. His father has no choice and encourages him to attend a stock master competition at somewhere in the mountain. Po tries so hard to get into the competition and there are three competitive groups --- the happiness group with monkey in it, the fighting group with tiger in it and the desire group with red crowned crane in it. These three groups represent the three different types of stock operators. Then, Po attends the competition and finally his teacher finds him and teaches him how to become a successful fund manger. In the vid, the creator doesn't show an ending in the video, and instead he poses a question that if Po will become a stock master finally.

There are many similarities between the original movie and fan made vid. First of all, both of the film and fan vid chose Po as a main character as he is a good character to conceive the new stories and has become a prototype based on which fans have developed distinct characters in various contexts. In Kung Fu Panda, Po is an every Panda who masters some area through his persistent effort. Gu Piao Panda is a rookie stock operator and finally achieves success as a stock master. In other vids such as Real Estate Price, the key character panda is portrayed as a junior real estate developer who finally becomes a hero to save the real estate from subprime lending crisis. Moreover, the storylines of the two movies are very similar. Specifically, Gu Piao Panda creates a story that Po is a rookie stock operator who wants to become a stock master. In Kung Fu Panda, Po is a worker at his father's noodle restaurant who wants to become a kungfu fighter. Also, they both fight for an evil in the two videos. In Gu Piao Panda, he fights for the stagnant stock market. In Kung Fu Panda, he fights for Tai Lung. Furthermore, Po attends the competition to become a master in two movies either as a kung fu master or financial guru. In the original movie, he fights for a kung fu secret book. In the vid, he fights for two cars as the competition awards. When examining the video clips, it is apparent that fans use the same video clip to convey the same meaning in the different context. They just choose the video clips they like from the original movie to tell their stories. Other vids such as Real Estate Price, Kung Fu Competition, Certificates are all associated with the current social issues to tell different stories.

Real Estate Price

Kung Fu Competition

Certificates

This parody is so popular that fans keep spreading it online because there's so much fun in the video. Some popular terms and events used in this vid are funny in the context of Chinese culture. For example, they use the word "Niu Bi" (newby) to describe how successful Po is in the stock market in his dreams. They also use the word "Tao" (trapped in the market) to explain that his money is all tied up to the stock account. Real figures are also incorporated to make the audiences feel more attached to the story. For instance, Po's goose father persuades him to withdraw the money because the current stock index is above 2000 points - which is where the Chinese stock market was registering at that time when this vid was made. In addition, they use Dong Bei language, a northern Chinese dialect that often associated with Chinese cross talk to voice over the video. This brought more joy to the audiences, especially during the global depression era.

Gu Piao Panda and other vids are great examples showing that Chinese fans' role has changed from audience to active producers. They are not just passively receiving the information, but becoming publishers. The Internet has become a platform for them to distribute their works. This emerges an Internet culture called kuso, which is very popular in China. Kuso, originated from a Japanese word, is a popular subculture in China that deconstructs serious themes to entertain people (Wiki, 2009). Some interesting quotes from ESWN Culture Blog that can explain the popularity of Chinese kuso culture are, "Kuso is people deconstruct burning satire." "Kuso is an art criticism loved by people". "Kuso is people's ordinary, yet interesting, spiritual pursuit." (Soong, Roland & Qing, Huang, 2006)

The most classic case of Chinese Kuso culture is a fan-made short movie called The Bloody Case That Started From A Steamed Bread based on a famous movie Wu Ji (The Promise) directed by Kaige Chen. A Chinese fan, Hu Ge, felt disappointed with Wu Ji and made his own spoof right after the movie was released. This fan-made movie joked about the film Wu Ji and dominant serious journalistic work, attracting huge fan following. From this fan made film, kuso has become more and more popular in China and represents a type of Chinese fan culture in the Internet.

There are two main reasons can account for the popularity of kuso culture in China. One important reason is that Chinese youth are suffering from social pressure and kuso provides a way for them to relieve themselves from the real pressure. They are a new generation who is tired of serious mainstream culture and kuso becomes a way for them to express themselves online. Moreover, kuso requires less technical skills and technology requirement and cheaper cost of movie production makes it possible for fans to make their own videos. Also the video sharing websites give the audiences a good platform to distribute and create a huge opportunity to show their own works.

Lifang He is from China, where she received her undergraduate degree in Journalism. After college, she was hired by two global advertising agencies Wieden & Kennedy and Euro RSCG Worldwide. At these agencies, she worked as a strategic planner for a variety of international brands including but not limited to Nike and Nokia and gained experience in consumer and market research and developing brand strategies. Since August of 2009, she has been pursuing her Master's degree in Communication Management at USC Annenberg School for Communication. It was while attending a USC class taught by Henry Jenkins that her academic interest turned toward transmedia planning and studying fan culture. Her specific areas of interest in these fields revolve around digital culture, brand communities, and how brands relate to and engage fans.

References:

Chuan, Lu (2008). Kung Fu Panda and Hollywood Movie. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009

Kung Fu Panda Ticket sales(2008). Sina entertainment. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009

Kung Fu Panda. Wikipedia. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009

Kuso Culture. Baidu. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009.

Maureen Fan (2008). Kung Fu Panda Hits A Sore Spot in China: Why a Quintessentially Chinese Movie Was Made in Hollywood. Washington Post Foreign Service. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009.

Qi, Cai & Ying, Xie (2009). The Internet kuso culture in China. CulChina.Net. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009.

Qing, Huang (2006). Parody can help people ease work pressure. ESWN Culture Blog. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009

Soong, Roland (n.d.). The Bloody Case That Started From A Steamed Bun. ESWN Culture Blog. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009.

On Anti-Fans and Paratexts: An Interview with Jonathan Gray (Part Two)

In the second part of the interview, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Jonathan Gray talks about his new book, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. Don't know what a Paratext is -- you will soon, as Gray explains how everything from "Oscar Buzz" to action figures help to shape the meanings and emotional experiences we have in relation to the films and television shows we watch. There was not an Oscar given last night for best paratext -- as long as the evening was and as outraged I was to see that Roger Corman (who happened to have trained two of last night's best director nominees -- Cameron and Bigelow -- as well as such recent winners as Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard) and Lauren Bacall (Lauren Fraking Bacall) were given their special Oscars at a separate event! Yet, it is hard to imagine Avatar making the money it did, a low budget genre film like District 9 making the list at all, or for that matter The Hurt Locker building up the critical support it did in the absence of well-crafted campaigns designed to warm us up to these particular projects. And given the huge grosses that Alice in Wonderland took in this weekend, we certainly might pause to pay respect to the creative promotion that the film has received in the months building up to its release, even though much of the press is going to ascribe the box office purely to the growing public interest in all things 3D. So, this interview seems particularly well-timed, even though, in fairness, I should note that Gray answered these questions some weeks ago and might have new things to say today precisely on these topics.

Your new book, Show Sold Separately, centers around "media paratexts." While this concept has a long history, it is apt to be unfamiliar to many of my readers. Can you define it and explain why you prefer it as a category to other ways of talking about these phenomenon?

I draw the word from a book of that title by Gerard Genette, a French literary theorist. He was interested in all those things that surround a book that aren't quite the "thing" (or "the text") itself. Things like the cover, prefaces, typeface, and afterwords, but also reviews. His subtitle to that book - "Thresholds of Interpretation" - is the intriguing part, since it suggests that meaning might be constructed and might begin at these textual outposts, not just at the site of "the thing itself." And that in turn offers a pretty radical proposition, namely that the item that we're studying, whether it be a film, television show, book, or whatever, becomes meaningful and is interpreted in many sites, some arguably even more important than the site of thing itself. The purpose of the book, quite simply, then, was to examine those sites.

I prefer the word paratext precisely because it has a pretty academic background, and from within textual studies at that, and thus isn't encumbered by a lot of the connotations that surround many of the other words that we usually use. Your readers may be more familiar with "hype," "synergy," "promos," "peripherals," "extratextuals," and so forth. But hype and synergy frame paratexts too definitively as wholly industrial entities. Certainly, paratexts are absolutely integral in terms of marketing, and in terms of grabbing an audience to watch the thing in the first place. But we've often stalled in our discussion of them by not moving beyond the banal observation that hype creates profits. What I wanted to look at is how they create meaning, how our idea of what a television show "is" and how we relate to it is often prefigured by its opening credit sequence, its posters, its ads, reviews, etc. Meanwhile, "peripherals" belittles their importance, since they're not at all peripheral, at least in potential. "Promos" is fairly innocuous, and yet I'm interested not just in how the things that surround a film or show create an image of it before we get there, but also in how reviews, DVD bonus materials, fan creations, and other after-the-fact paratexts might change our understanding later on, so that too seemed inadequate. And though I like "extratextuals" (the title of my blog!), "extra" means "outside of," whereas "para" suggests a more complicated relationship to the film or show, outside of, alongside, and intrinsically part of all at the same time. Hence my fondness for that word in particular.

You write in the introduction, "While many consumers deride the presence of hype and licensed merchandise as a nuisance, we also rely upon it, at least in part, to help us get through an evening's viewing or a trip to the multiplex." In what sense? In what ways do such materials shape our experience of films and television programs?

Let's take the trailer as an example. We've all seen thousands of them. And when you do, you often hear evaluations from the crowd around you. That's because everyone is judging the film before it's even been released. But they're not just saying "wow" or "ugh" - they're learning something about the characters and whether they can identify with them, about the genre of the film, about the kind of world that it's set in. In short, they're getting a pre-view of the film's basic components, and it's thus being constructed as a meaningful entity for them. When the film finally comes along, it doesn't begin with a fresh slate; rather, its viewers have a history with it. They've come with expectations, with engagements with certain characters, and with an idea of how to make sense of it. Indeed, in many cases, they'll already be enjoying the film, as played with in a beautiful way by an Onion News Network parodic item about Iron Man trailer fans being worried about the studio making the trailer into a feature-length film.

But all sorts of other things might happen along the way too. Perhaps the trailer confused us into thinking that the film was something different, and so we sat down to watch an action film and got a drama instead. Or perhaps the hype and paratexts annoy us, and so we decide that we don't want to see the film - we don't need to, since we already know it to be junk. Or perhaps paratexts clash - the trailer looks awful, but then you hear an interview with the director and you're fascinated. The frame of mind that we bring with us to any viewing experience is remarkably important, and paratexts often play the key role in creating those frames. Meanwhile, the story doesn't even end after watching, since other paratexts might reframe an experience. Perhaps a "making of" special or a podcast asks us to think of it in a new light, maybe a fanvid, item of fanfic, or other fan creation challenges our understanding of a character. The great Russian theorist of narrative, Mikhail Bakhtin, poetically wrote that no meaning is ever dead, and that every meaning will have its homecoming. So too with all items of media, which aren't just framed; they can be reframed.

I've spent some time in the blog over the past few months reflecting on the benches that were erected in anticipation of District 9 and the ways they contributed to narrative exposition and shaped emotional reactions to the film, well beyond their roles as pure promotion or publicity. I take it you would read these as classic examples of paratexts. How would you explain their contributions to District 9?

Those are great examples, since they put you into the world. When you're faced with a bench that tells you one kind of being isn't allowed there, it opens up a history, at least in the U.S., of segregation, and of racial intolerance. We like to pat ourselves on the back and think that it's all behind us, but such benches haunt us with the notion that it's not. If you're Black, I'd guess there's a sore wound that's opened. And if you're liberal and White, there might be some liberal White guilt over your potential complicity with the segregation: do you really want to sit on that bench now?

All that can happen before you even know there's a movie. Now when you're told there's a movie, and that these benches are part of it, they've given you an experience of that world. You've set foot in it and had an experience in it. The narrative, in other words, has begun. Your allegiances are being pulled on. Or, to point to another classic example from film history, the Jaws poster scared the crap out of me as a kid. I couldn't swim without thinking that a massive great shark was about to gobble me up, as I moved on unaware, just as with the woman in the poster. So the horror and fear began long before the film (and, damn the designer, continued long after!).

You note that paratexts can be "entryway" or "In medias res." Early discussions of transmedia storytelling focused on nonlinearity -- suggesting that the parts could be consumed in any order -- but more recently there's been a focus on notions of seriality and temporarily. What might your book contribute to that discussion?

What I'd hope readers would see is how many different media the story can be told over. It's not just the "big" media, like film, television, books, comics, and videogames - trailers can also play a part here, as can opening credit sequences, or DVD bonus materials, posters, ad campaigns, or, as we've discussed, benches. When we recognize that, we move towards realizing how audiences have always been intimately familiar with serial storytelling and with transmedia. We're all already well-trained to keep shows on hold for years, inbetween trailers and film and bonus materials, so I'm dubious when I hear complaints about audiences being unable and unwilling to deal with seriality and transmedia.

But if I talk of "us" needing to realize that, meaning "us" as analysts or fans, it's also production cultures that need to learn from it. Towards the end of the book, I draw on several interviews I conducted with transmedia producers, and they all point to an industry that isn't currently set up to facilitate discussions between the marketing department, the writers, the DVD producers, the videogame designers, and so forth. Let's imagine a future in which communication improved, and thus one in which all these paratexts and sites didn't work against each other or simply in spite of each other, but instead contributed to the serial development. Then, as audiences, we could have a much richer product, and I imagine the producers would be much richer too.

You suggest that audience-produced artifacts -- such as fan vids or spoilers -- can be paratexts that help shape the meaning of the work. Your emphasis there is not so much on how they resist official meanings but rather how they shape our interpretations of the primary text. An old school cultural studies approach might talk about this as a struggle over meanings or as competing bids for interpretations. How do you think about the relationship between commercial and amateur paratexts in the age of participatory culture?

I don't mean to foreclose the possibilities of resistive readings. But someone very smart and way more knowledgeable about fandom already wrote Textual Poachers, and if there's only one thing that many people in cultural studies know about slash fanfic it's that it's supposed to be doing interesting, resistive things with gender and sexuality (I say "supposed to" only because some don't believe that). So when I came to the chapter on fan-created and -circulated paratexts, I didn't need to make that point. Instead, I wanted to focus on how one can use paratexts to cut one's own groove through a text in a way that isn't necessarily working against the producer's version, but that is personalized nonetheless. Many relationship and character study fanvids, for example, don't necessarily repurpose a character, but they do ask us to stop and think about that character and his or her history in ways that the official text, in its breathless progression, may not have time to do. I don't mean to suggest that this is either the dominant form of fan use of paratexts, or even one that's necessarily changed in a more obviously convergent media era. But it might help cultural studies to back away from some of the desires for an orcs vs. hobbits style bad-and-good battle between The Industry and The Fans, and to focus on smaller, humbler moments of repurposing.

Critics in the 1980s talked about television series such as He-Man, Masters of the Universe as half hour commercials for toy lines, suggesting that the commercial tie-ins stripped them of any real meaning or narrative interest. Your work suggests something different -- that the toys become vehicles for extending the meanings of a series into everyday life. How have action figures impacted our interpretations of blockbuster movies like the Star Wars franchise?

Star Wars is a great example here, since what we had was a text that was seemingly put on ice (or should I say put in carbon-freezing?) for three years between each film. That's a long time in a child's life, so excellent or not the trilogy likely wouldn't have held the attention of those of us who were kids at the time if it weren't for the toys. The toys kept Star Wars alive by transferring the story and the world to the playground, and hence by keeping that galaxy from drifting far, far away.

However, precisely because the text entered the body of the toys for such a long time, we need to ask how they contributed to the popular understanding of Star Wars. On one level, for instance, I think they worked to gender the text. When all the toy boxes and ads were showing boys playing with them, when FAO Schwarz in New York required one to march through a tunnel of GI Joe figures to get to the boys' palace that was their Star Wars section, and when all the figures had guns (even when all we see them do is drink or press buttons in the films), the toys were strongly framed as for boys. The toys also helped, I'm sure, to amplify fans' nostalgic feelings towards the texts, since those of a certain age can think back to countless days spent playing in school yards or excitedly opening a Millennium Falcon for Christmas or so forth, and all of a sudden Star Wars seems such a huge part of our childhood ... courtesy of the toys as much if not way more than the films. So toys contribute to how we make sense of all these films and shows, and to the cultural meanings that surround them.

But more than that, they also teach kids to expect transmedia and participatory culture. When I talked to Lost showrunner Damon Lindelof about what got him into transmedia, he told me the tale of the Boba Fett toy. When I asked Jesse Alexander of Heroes and Day One the same thing, he too waxed eloquently about Star Wars. Licensed toys let us into fictional worlds, and I've yet to hear of a company send a cease and desist letter to kids for playing with toys, even if they're wedding Han to Luke. So if many of us grew up expecting to be able to play with texts, and move their characters into new realms, let's look to toys for where it may've all started.

We've just ended The Oscar season. To what extent is "Oscar buzz" a kind of paratext for more "serious" or "middlebrow" forms of cinema?

I'm glad you asked, since I find it amusing when people hear the topic of my book and quickly pronounce that they hate "that stuff" (hype and paratexts). They'll often list the blockbuster of the moment for illustration, so right now everyone claims to despise Avatar when they want to impress me with the height of their brow. But there is no such thing as a text without paratexts. So it's not a question of preferring a text without paratexts - it's a question of which paratexts are one's poison. Oscar buzz is great for the middlebrow audience, New York Times reviews, buzz at Cannes, or even what their film prof says works for some, and for others it's trailers and huge billboards. So there's no escaping paratexts. If we think we live in a media saturated world, the films and shows are only a fraction of that world - the paratexts are everywhere.

Jonathan Gray is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he researches and teaches on various aspects of television, film, and convergent media, including satire, comedy, audiences, and textuality. His most recent book is Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (NYU Press, 2010), though he has also written Television Entertainment (Routledge, 2008) and Watching With The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality (Routledge, 2006), and is co-editor with Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson of Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (NYU Press, 2009), with Robin Andersen of Battleground: The Media (Greenwood, 2008), and with Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World</em>. He also blogs at The Extratextuals and Antenna: Responses to Media and Culture.

On Anti-Fans and Paratexts: An Interview with Jonathan Gray (Part One)

If you are interested in Lost, The Simpsons, The Daily Show, Star Wars, Fan Studies, or Transmedia Entertainment and you are not reading the work of Jonathan Gray, then you aren't doing it right! And let's face it, if you weren't interested in at least one of the above, then you probably have simply stumbled onto my blog by mistake. Given that I am interested in all of the above, I keep stumbling onto Gray's work and each time I do, I come away a little better educated than I did before. Gray has got to be one of the most productive -- and provocative -- writers working in media studies today. This guy really is an extratextual! And he's someone I'm finding myself working with more and more. He's a member of the Convergence Culture Consortium network of scholars; he's edited several books where my essays have appeared; and he's been working behind the scenes to help pull together our Transmedia, Hollywood events this month. And he's now teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I did my PhD.

So, it's a pleasure to share this interview with you. The first installment covers everything from his recent work on parody, popular culture, and politics to his long-standing interest in fans and anti-fans. Mostly, Part Two focuses around his significant new book, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (NYU Press, 2010). I wrote a blurb for this book, so I got to read it months ago, but it is just now hitting the shelves and starting to have a real impact on how we theorize and criticize everything from movie trailers to action figures.

Jonathan, you are a highly prolific writer who has published books on a broad range of topics. What do you see as the unifying theme(s) running through your work?

One of my key interests lies in how audiences operationalize media, or, in simpler terms, how meaning is created between items of media and their audiences. More specifically, I'm intrigued with how meaning for something can be created outside of that thing itself. Thus my first book was about how parody aims to "hijack" the meanings of various other genres, recontextualizing how we make sense of them. And the recent book, Show Sold Separately, is about how all those things that surround a film or television show, from DVD bonus materials to ad campaigns, merchandise to fan-created texts, actually play a key role in creating meaning. Satire TV, meanwhile, was in one sense a book about how politics and the news come to make sense in entertainment television. Television Entertainment was a little different, but is most clearly indicative of another central and intersecting strand of my work, which involves exploring the social, cultural, and political uses of media entertainment.

One of your primary contributions to the space of fan studies has been to focus attention on "nonfans" and "antifans." Why have these groups been neglected in audience research for so long? How do they relate to older categories like negotiated and oppositional readers? And what do they add to our understanding of fan culture?

Functionally, fans tend to be easier to study, at least from a cultural studies, qualitative perspective. When one is going to spend a portion of one's life sitting down and chatting with people about their media consumption, or reading their postings online, it's understandable that one would gravitate towards those audiences who are most literate about their subject, and most excited. "Snowball" sampling tends to pick up more fans too, since they can often be keen to be interviewed. Theoretically, a lot of qualitative audience research was motivated in part by a desire to show media consumers as not so hopelessly lost in the system as some suggest, and thus it was rhetorically important to make that case with fans.

But along the way, the risk has developed that fans stand in for audiences in general, when many audiences aren't fans, or define their fandom in very different terms. A particular danger here is that fans tend to know the whole object, and they tend to be very close to it. But what about those audiences who, for instance, know they hate something, even though they haven't ever watched it, or have only seen bits? They also have a relationship to the text, and it's created meaning for them, but it's a relationship that we've not studied too closely. Hence my interest in anti-fans. And then somewhere in the middle are those people who might watch semi-regularly, who have opinions on a show, and to whom the show means something, but who miss episodes and who have poor knowledge of background information. Surely much media consumption is casual and "meh"-ish: non-fans. But what is the show to them, and how do they construct it?

I'd see fandom, non-fandom, and anti-fandom as a completely different dimension from oppositional, dominant, or negotiated readings. After all, as fan studies have shown, some fan readings are deeply oppositional, some are dominant. Similarly with anti-fans and non-fans. As to your final question about what studying such viewers would add, they'll allow us to understand how affect works more clearly. Fandom involves anti-fandom (think of the Star Wars fan who hates Trek, since his galaxy isn't big enough for both franchises, or of X-Philes who hated the addition of the Terminator in the final seasons), and vice-versa (many haters are performing a love for something else). So just as we can't truly understand a concept like gender without interrogating both "masculinity" and "femininity," we won't truly get how affect works generally, or even how fandom works specifically, till we explore anti-fandom a little more.

Some critics have argued that news parody programs cheapen political discourse, trivializing important matters, and represent the further shift away from hard news and towards "news entertainment." Your Satire TV book takes a different perspective. What impact do you think such programs have on civic engagement and democratic participation?

That complaint, that The Daily Show and its colleagues take viewers away from hard news, always seems to forget that very few satiric shows actually compete with the news in timeslot. It also seeks to blame satire for the failings of the news. If people aren't watching the news, it's not because Jon Stewart is doing magic tricks in the circus tent down the road: it's because the news is often a seriously debased entity, reporting in a slack, half-ass way, addressed to an older white male audience, often with little interest in others, in a manner that is often the true circus act. So first off, I'd respond to that criticism by saying that if satire TV is so often being compared to the news, that's because the news is doing something wrong. And if people are trusting Stewart more than many newscasters, the productive question would be what is the news doing wrong and what is Stewart doing right, not how is Jon Stewart responsible for the fall of democracy.

But if we move away from comparing them, and consider the shows in and of themselves, their contributions are many. On one level, they're not afraid to be critical or to ruffle feathers. They also speak in a language that many understand, inviting us in, not just using "inside the Beltway" lingo. When successful, they encourage many of us to care about politics in the first place, and they encourage us to be savvy, attentive, critical citizens, watching and listening to politicians and newscasters with our guard up. They are media literacy teachers, while also being voices that empower us to be citizens, rather than cajole us or guilt trip us into caring about politics.

Satire TV mostly focuses on the role such programs played under the Bush administration. We are now a year into the Obama administration. How has his presidency changed the relevance and tone of The Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and other such programs? Why are there not shows about Obama in the same way that Lil Bush made fun of his predecessor?

Satirists aren't going after Obama as much, as you note. Which is a pity, since every person in power needs to be subjected to a satirist's sting. I'm a big fan of the medieval Fool model. But we're in a two party system, and therein lies the problem, since too often it requires a binaristic way of looking at politics, whereby criticism of one "side" becomes, whether it wants to be or not, support for the other. On one hand, then, if your job is to make fun of stupid things said and done by people in power, how could you be expected to see the Democrats when at times you need to look through Rush Limbaugh is encouraging people note to donate to Haitian relief since it'll only embolden Obama, when Rudy Guiliani and Dana Perino are claiming there were no terrorist attacks under Bush, when Glenn Beck is being Glenn Beck, when Jonah Goldberg is saying the Na'vi should've been Catholic in Avatar, when Sarah Palin thinks universal healthcare is a secret Nazi "death panel" plot, and when Dick Cheney is doing his best Emperor Palpatine impression? As they did under Bush, the Republicans just give way too much A-grade material to satirists. And on the other hand, if your sympathies lean left, as most satirists' do, it must prove hard to focus on Obama when it means supporting the Birthers and the Tea Baggers as a result.

I'm not someone who feels it's impossible to satirize Obama. But satirists go after crazy politics, and until the Republicans find a way to instill a semblance of sanity in their ranks, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and co. will likely continue to focus on the Republicans. While that takes the eye off the presidency - which worries me - it's still a vital task.

You've written about "news fans" and I find myself returning to this concept in trying to think about the cult that currently surrounds Glen Beck or Rush Limbaugh. Are we at a moment where reactionary politics is fueled as much by the fan followings of talk show and news personalities as it is by Washington-based leaders?

It certainly seems that way, doesn't it? Limbaugh, Beck, and Hannity on the right are all doing pretty well. And I'd bet that more folk on the left identify with Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann than with many politicians. Rumor has it that Lou Dobbs is even planning a presidential run [shudders]. Granted, few other fan objects get the chance to "cover" their fans on a weekly basis, so there is something of an echo chamber effect. But the more that we find political mobilization looking like fandom, the more that we need to think seriously about the connections. Liesbet Van Zoonen has an excellent book called Entertaining the Citizen in which she broaches the topic, Cornel Sandvoss has done some thinking about this, and you have too. But sadly the folk who study fans and the folk who study politics and journalism have been so successfully segregated from one another in most instances that there's nowhere near enough analysis along those lines.

Jonathan Gray is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he researches and teaches on various aspects of television, film, and convergent media, including satire, comedy, audiences, and textuality. His most recent book is Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (NYU Press, 2010), though he has also written Television Entertainment (Routledge, 2008) and Watching With The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality (Routledge, 2006), and is co-editor with Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson of Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (NYU Press, 2009), with Robin Andersen of Battleground: The Media (Greenwood, 2008), and with Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World</em>. He also blogs at The Extratextuals and Antenna: Responses to Media and Culture.

Don't Miss Transmedia, Hollywood Conference March 16

Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story is a one-day public symposium exploring the role of transmedia franchises in today's entertainment industries. Transmedia, Hollywood turns the spotlight on media creators, producers and executives and places them in critical dialogue with top researchers from across a wide spectrum of film, media and cultural studies to provide an interdisciplinary summit for the free interchange of insights about how transmedia works and what it means. Co-hosted by Denise Mann and Henry Jenkins, from UCLA and USC, two of the most prominent film schools and research centers in Los Angeles, Transmedia, Hollywood will take place Tuesday, March 16, 2010, on the eve of the annual Society of Cinema & Media Studies conference, the field's most distinguished gathering of film and media scholars and academics (March 17--21, 2010) in Los Angeles.

By coinciding with SCMS, Transmedia, Hollywood hopes to reach the widest possible scholarly audience and thus create a lasting impact in the field. It will give cinema and media scholars from around the world unprecedented access to top industry professionals and insight into their thinking and practices.

Mission

Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story

As audiences followed stories as diverse as Heroes, Lost, Harry Potter, and Matrix, from one format to another--from traditional television series or films into comics, the Web, alternate reality or video games, toys and other merchandise--Hollywood quickly adopted the academic term "transmedia" and began plastering it above office doors to describe this latest cultural phenomenon. This is not to say that convergent culture and transmedia storytelling are new concepts; instead, the emergence of convergence can be traced to the 19th century when a Barnum and Bailey-style mode of entertainment first took hold, maturing in the mid-1950s with Walt Disney's visionary multi-platform, cross-promotional, merchandising extravaganza known as Disneyland.

Since then, Hollywood has created countless new transmedia titles, everything from Batman to Star Wars - an evolution only accelerated by the advent of digital convergence. While transmedia, in one way, vindicates the logic of the integrated media conglomerate and activates the synergies long hoped for by the captains of industry in charge of Hollywood's six big media groups, it may also prove to be more than they bargained for. Engaged, "lean-forward" consumers--coveted by advertisers and entertainers alike--are not content simply to watch traditional media but rather, they produce their own videos, remix other people's work, seek out those who share their interests, forging concordances and wiki's, fan fiction, and various forms of interactivity that are still in their infancy and that corporate Hollywood is just beginning to explore. Copyright law, guild rules, and the conventions of audience quantification are frequently operating at cross-purposes with these new, expansive sets of cultural-industrial practices. As the demise of the music industry shows, active audiences and technological advances can create an explosive combination, powerful enough to bring down an entire industry. The entertainment industry wants to embrace this new, active consumer while ensuring its own survival by seeking to recreate familiar rules of what is considered "valuable" and "entertainment" within traditional business models.

Transmedia, Hollywood turns the spotlight on media creators, producers and executives and places them in critical dialogue with top researchers from across a wide spectrum of film, media and cultural studies to provide an interdisciplinary summit for the free interchange of insights about how transmedia works and what it means.

Schedule

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

9:15--9:45 am

Registration

9:45--10:00 am

Welcome and Opening Remarks

Denise Mann, Associate Professor, Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, Annenberg School of Communication, USC

10:00--11:50 AM

Panel 1: "Reconfiguring Entertainment"

This panel brings together visionaries, people who think deeply about our experiences of play, fun, and entertainment, people whose expertise is rooted in a range of media (games, comics, film, television) to think about the future of entertainment as a concept. Transmedia designers often use the term, "mythologies," to describe the kinds of information rich environment they seek to build up around media franchise and deploy the term, "Bibles," to describe the accumulated plans for the unfolding of that serial narrative. Both of these terms link contemporary entertainment back to a much older tradition. So, are we simply talking about a largely timeless practice of storytelling as it gets relayed through new channels and platforms? Or are we seeing the emergence of new modes of expression, new kinds of experiences, which are only possible within a converged media landscape? What does it mean to have "fun" in the early 21st century and will this concept mean something different a decade from now? In what ways will the desire to produce and consume such experiences reconfigure the entertainment industry or conversely, how will the consolidation of media ownership generate or constrain new forms of popular culture? What models of media production, distribution, and consumption are implied by these future visions of entertainment?

Moderator: Henry Jenkins

Panelists: Mimi Ito, Associate Researcher, University of California Humanities Research Institute (Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children's Software; Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning With New Media; Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life)

Diane Nelson, President, DC Entertainment

Nils Peyron, Executive Vice President and Managing Partner, Blind Winks Productions

Richard Lemarchand, Lead Designer, Naughty Dog Software (Uncharted: Drake's Fortune; Uncharted 2: Among Thieves)

Jonathan Taplin, Professor, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California; CEO, Intertainer.

John Underkoffler, Oblong, G-Speak (Technical Advisor for Iron Man, Aeon Flux, Hulk, Taken, and Minority Report)

12:00--1:50 PM

Panel 2: "ARG: This is Not a Game.... But is it Always a Promotion?"

Using a collective intelligence model disguised as play, Alternate reality games, or ARGs, give any individual with a computer a means of problem-solving anything from global warming to the true meaning of the Dharma Institute conspiracy. ARGs also give instant "geek cred" to marketers from stuffy firms like Microsoft and McDonalds tasked with selling consumer goods to the Millennials. Are these elaborate scavenger hunts, which send players down an endless series of rabbit-holes in search of clues, teaching them how to think collectively or are they simply the latest in a long series of promotional tools designed to sell products to tech-savvy consumers? Unlike regular computer games, ARGS engage a multitude of players using a multitude of new technologies and social media formats--sending clues via Web sites, email, or just as likely, by means of an old-fashioned phone booth in some dusty, small town in Texas. For ARG creators, the new entertainment format represents rich, new storytelling opportunities, according to Joe DiNunzio, CEO of 42 Entertainment (AI, Halo 2, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest). However, for the big six media groups, the primary purpose of ARGs is promotional--a new-fangled way of selling Spielberg's AI (The Beast), WB's Dark Knight, Microsoft's Halo 2 (ilovebee's), or ABC's Lost (The Lost Experience). In other words, are ARGs simply a novel new way for the big six media groups to prompt several million avid fans to start beating the promotional drum on behalf of their favorite movie, TV series, or computer game or do they represent a new way of harnessing revolutionary thinking? In this panel, ARG creators, entertainment think-tank consultants, and media scholars will debate the social vs. commercial utilities associated with this latest form of social engagement.

Moderator: Denise Mann

Panelists: Ivan Askwith, Director of Strategy, Big Spaceship (clients include NBC, A&E, HBO, EPIX, Second Life, and Wrigley)

Will Brooker, Associate Professor, Kingston University, UK (Star Wars; Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture; The Bladerunner Experience; Using the Force; Batman Unmasked)

Steve Peters and Maureen McHugh, Founding Partners, No Mimes Media (Watchmen, The Dark Knight, Nine Inch Nails, Pirates of the Caribbean II)

Jordan Weisman, Founder, Smith & Tinker (The Beast, I Love Bees, Year Zero)

2:00--3:00 PM

Lunch Break

3:00--4:50 PM

Panel 3: "Designing Transmedia Worlds"

Transmedia entertainment relies as much on world-building as it does on traditional storytelling. Transmedia practices use the audience's fascination with exploring its richly detailed world (and its attendant mythology) to motivate their activities as they seek out and engage with content which has been dispersed across the media landscape. Recent projects, such as Cloverfield, True Blood, and District 9, have relied on transmedia strategies to generate audience interest in previously unknown fictional universes, often combining promotional and expositional functions. Derek Johnson has argued that these fictional worlds are "over-designed," involving much greater details in their conceptual phase than can be exploited through a single film or television series. This "overdesign" emergences through new kinds of collaborations between artists working both for the "mother ship," the primary franchise, and those working on media extensions, whether games, websites, "viral" videos, even park benches. In this new system, art directors and script writers end up working together in new ways as they build up credible worlds and manage complex continuities of information. What does it mean to talk about fictional worlds? How has this altered the processes behind conceptualizing, producing, and promoting media texts? What new skills are emerging as production people learn to introduce, refine, and expand these worlds through each installment of serial media texts? And how do they manage audience expectations that they will continue to learn something more about the world in each new text they consume? What does each media platform contribute to the exploration and elaboration of such worlds?

Moderator: Henry Jenkins

Panelists: David Bisbin, Art Director/Production Designer (Twilight, New Moon, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Drug Store Cowboy)

Danny Bilson, THQ (The Rocketeer, Medal of Honor, The Flash, The Sentinel)

Derek Johnson, Assistant Professor, University of North Texas

R. Eric Lieb, Partner in BlackLight Media; Former Editor-in-Chief, Atomic Comics; Former Director of Development, Fox Atomic (Jennifer's Body; I Love You Beth Cooper; 28 Weeks Later)

Laeta Kalogridis, Screenwriter (Shutter Island, Night Watch, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Battle Angel); Executive Producer (Birds of Prey, Bionic Woman)

Marti Noxon, Executive Producer/Writer (Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Prison Break; Grey's Anatomy; Mad Men)

Louisa Stein, Head of TV/Film Critical Studies Program, San Diego State University (Limits: New Media, Genre and Fan Texts; Watching Teen TV: Text and Culture)

5:00--6:50 PM

Panel 4: "Who Let the Fans In?: 'Next-Gen Digi-Marketing'"

Most Hollywood marketing campaigns remain overly reliant on expensive broadcast television commercials to reach a large cross-section of the audience despite growing evidence that avid fans are capable of generating powerful word of mouth. In the decade since The Blair Witch Project's website became a model for engaging a core audience by creating awareness online, a new generation of marketing executives has emerged, challenging the effectiveness of top-down strategies and advocating "bottom-up," social media marketing. By fusing storytelling and marketing--ranging from ABC's low-tech, user-generated aesthetic in "Lost Untangled" to Crispin, Porter + Bogusky's polished, eye-candy approach to selling Sprite in its "sublymonal advertising" campaign--this next generation of web marketers has upended previous notions about where content ends and the ad begins. Having grown up reading Watchman comics, playing Sims, and surfing the Web for like-minded members of their consumer tribe, these new media professionals come armed with the knowledge of what it means to be a fan; as a result, they are refashioning the processes and structures that inform the relationship between audience members and the culture industry--forcing today's media conglomerates to adapt to the new realities of the cultural-industrial complex while also ensuring their own survival. Gen-Y consumers' sophisticated understanding of, but less contentious relationship with brand marketing, invites today's media marketers to embrace a revolutionary mode of selling that may impact copyright law, guild agreements, professional standards, and the global labor market. What is the future of entertainment? Will the Internet be run by top-down mid-media corporate owners or bottom-up Web-bloggers or some yet to be realized combination of both?

Moderator: Denise Mann

Panelists: Emmanuelle Borde, Senior Vice-President, Digital Marketing, Sony Imageworks Interactive (digital campaigns for Spiderman, 2012, Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon)

John Caldwell, Professor, UCLA Department of Film, TV, Digital Media (Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Film/Television Work Worlds; Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film/Television; New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality; Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television)

Alan Friel, Partner, Wildman, Harrold, Allen & Dixon LLP

John Hegeman, Chief Marketing Office, New Regency Productions (marketing campaigns for Saw 1 & 2, Crash at Lionsgate; The Blair Witch Project at Artisan)

Roberta Pearson, Professor, University of Nottingham (Reading Lost; Cult Television; The Many Lives of Batman: Critical Approaches)

Steve Wax, Co-founder and Managing Partner, Campfire (HBO's True Blood, Audi's The Art of the Heist; Discovery Channel's Shark Week marketing adventure, Frenzied Waters).

7:00 PM

Reception

Lobby, USC Cinematic Arts Complex

Location

Ray Stark Family Theatre, SCA 108, USC Cinematic Arts Complex, Los Angeles http://cinema.usc.edu/assets/047/10153.pdf

Registration

Faculty/Students:

Event is free for faculty and students of accredited institutions. Registration includes conference badge and continental breakfast. Valid university I.D. is required for admission.

General Public:

Tickets for the general public are $25. Registration includes conference badge and continental breakfast.

To register and for more information, please go to: www.tft.ucla.edu/transmedia-conference

How to Get Academic Credit While Attending San Diego Comic-Con: An Interview With Matthew J. Smith

Today, I wanted to share with you a fascinating experiment in media education which is conducted each year as part of the San Diego Comic-Con. I've written about the centrality of Comic-Con as a meeting point between fans and producers and as a site where academics interested in promoting the study of comics co-exist side by side with dealer's rooms and discussions with comics creators. This past year, I had a chance to consult with two students who were part of a program being offered by Matthew J. Smith, a comics scholar who teaches classes in media studies at Wittenberg University in Springfield, OH. Every year, he organizes a team of students who conduct individual and collective ethnographic projects trying to make sense of the complexity and diversity of Comic-Con. He's now in the process of recruiting students for this year's program so I told him I'd help him spread the word. What follows is an interview with Smith about his ethnographic instruction and about the culture of Comic-Con. At the end, I tell you where you can go to be considered as a recruit for this educational program.

Can you give me some sense of the approach you take to teaching ethnographic research on the ground at Comic-Con?

Students are responsible for several readings before they get to San Diego, so that we can have an informed discussion about ethnographic tools when we meet. But from our first night onward, students are thrown into the deep end of the pool, being asked to record observations and make modest interpretations starting with "Preview Night" on the floor of the convention hall floor. Thereafter, there's a good deal of note taking, and of course talking through observations and constructing interpretations with peers in daily "Breakfast Briefings." After the first few days, students are encouraged to compliment their observations by doing interviews with informants. Some students find their individual topics evolving as we progress through the week, which is just fine with me! However, they do have a week to process the experience and think through their material more before their final narratives are due.

What goals do you set for your participants?

My primary goal is to help students become more media literate for having had the experience. Popular culture is created and marketed with them in mind. If nothing else, I really want them to be aware of their role in this process and exercise greater agency in their future interactions with it.

In addition, I'd like students to realize that they can discover meaning through ethnographic methods. I don't think that the tools of ethnography are taught as widely as they should be and this is an opportunity to expose students to them in what is essentially a laboratory setting.

Comic-Con has emerged as perhaps the most important interfaces between the entertainment industry and the public. What shifts have you and your students noticed in terms of the industry's engagement with fans in recent years?

What stands out to me is the way in which Con is now a multi-media experience in and of itself. I'm not just talking about the multiple media industries that are represented on site, but the way that Con is experienced by both those who are physically there--supplemented by constant Twittering, for example--and also by those who are elsewhere around the country. I return from San Diego feeling like one of the fortunate few who get to attend the Super Bowl, as friends and colleagues come up to me and say, "I saw Con on TV (or read about it online or got the feed) and knew you were there." For that moment, I am the coolest person in the room.

Within the more than 100,000 people gathered at Comic-Con, there are representatives of a broad range of different fan subcultures. How do you and your students deal with the diversity of different fan interests represented?

Some students find the scale overwhelming for the first few days. Given so much to process, I encourage students to focus their individual projects on areas of interest to their individual intellectual interests or pop culture tastes (e.g., Marvel Comics panels). With some filters in place, the stimuli become a bit more manageable. However, I love it when students start to look out for things for one another. Often at our "Breakfast Briefings" they begin to ask one another if they are aware of this event or that person's signing appearance in the hall latter in the day. These moments of overlapping interest really make us a learning community within the 100,000 person crowd.

Many attending the con now beline to the major presentations in Hall H and Hall 20. Yet, this is only the tip of the iceberg of what goes on at Comic-Con. What aspects of Comic-Con culture have emerged through your collaborative research efforts that we would miss if the focus was only on the major events?

Where to start!? My students have found nooks and crannies of popular culture that I would not have thought to explore in twenty trips to Con. Let me share a small sample of some of the project titles to give you a sense of what they have focused on in the past:

• Twitter as a Means of Direct Dialogue between Creators & Fans

• Aggressive Marketing & its Impact on Consumers at San Diego Comic Con

• "State Your Name and Your Purpose": The Talk of Marvel Comics Fans

• Fanbois at Comic-Con: Queer Consumer/Producer Interface & the Intransitive Writing of Comics

• Hollywood Comes to Comic-Con International: An Examination of Glamour & Glitz

• Video Games: On the Bottom Looking Up

Comic-Con is one of the most racially diverse fan gatherings I've ever attended. Has your research offered any insights into how and why this con attracts more minority participants than most other fan gatherings?

In three years my students have initiated eighteen different projects, and while a number have investigated demographics like gender and sexual orientation, none have addressed race explicitly. It's a great topic that some student could investigate this summer! My own impression is that California's diversity helps set up the climate for Con's diversity. Beyond that, is it that popular culture fans judge you by your interests first and not the color of your skin?

There has been a dramatic increase of female attendees at Comic-Con in recent years, partially in response to Twilight and True Blood, and this has generated some tensions with long-time attendees. What insights has your team's research yielded into these sources of friction?

I'm waiting for the student who wants to tackle this project! Over the last two years my students and I have certainly noted the outright hostility directed towards the Twilighters and found ourselves at a loss for how one minority (the comics fan) can turn on another. Is it anger at the encroachment of Hollywood on the Con finding an outlet at long last? Is it a matter of gender? Is it that the cross-over between interests doesn't quite overlap as much as other groups present (e.g., a video gamer can also be a comics fan)? I hope we have a student or two who will want to tackle these kinds of questions this summer.

Your students give a public presentation of their findings every year as part of the Con. How has the Comic-Con community responded to their representations of their norms and practices? How does this public presentation impact the kinds of work your students do?

The reception for my students has been tremendous. Whereas most academic presentations are lucky to draw an audience larger than the number of presenters behind the dais, my students typically draw a crowd of 80+ curious minds. The best audience members are those who want to challenge or extend my students' claims, weighing their own perceptions against those of my students. I love to see that kind of interaction as the students are challenged to either further defend their conclusions or engage in expanding/refocusing their thoughts. I think knowing that a public presentation is an integral part their task focuses their work for the week that we are there and makes them accountable to an audience of more than just me as the instructor.

Critics might argue that the duration of a con is not sufficient time to really immerse yourself into any kind of rich cultural community and that there are serious problems with performing "instant ethnography." What do you see as the strengths and limits of the work your team does each year?

That's entirely a fair critique. I try to keep the course from making the pretension that it is the only course in ethnography one would ever need. To the contrary, I explicitly state that this experience is a mere appetizer meant to whet one's appetites for more and richer ethnographic projects in the future. In Communication Studies in particular, I see a lot of programs where students are typically trained as either survey administers or rhetorical critics, and I want to introduce them to another viable way of coming to know the world around them.

What qualifications are you looking for from prospective students in your program?

There are no academic prerequisite, per se, other than that one be currently enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate program and in good academic standing at one's home institution (which usually means minimally a 2.0 cumulative higher grade point average). The course is really designed to be introductory in its approach, although I've had graduate students participate each year who report learning something new. Beyond that, I've found that the most successful students are intellectual curious, open-minded, and willing to work hard. The experience is intensive: Students find themselves on the go for five consecutive days and that takes stamina. Even so, it is terrifically rewarding to come to the end of the experience and know that you discovered something new about culture and its exercise.

Matthew J. Smith teaches courses in media studies at Wittenberg University in Springfield, OH, including "Graphic Storytelling: Comic Books as Culture," "The Graphic Novels of Alan Moore," and a week-long field study at Comic-Con International each summer (details of the latter may be found at www.powerofcomics.com/fieldstudy). In 2009, Wittenberg University's Alumni Association recognized him with its Distinguished Teaching Award. Along with Randy Duncan, he is co-author of The Power of Comics: History, Form & Culture (Continuum, 2009), a textbook for college-level comics arts studies courses. The two are also editing the forthcoming Comics Criticism: Methods and Applications.

The Field Study at Comic-Con

Earn academic credit while studying the dynamics of marketing and fan culture at the largest comic arts event on the continent, July 21-25, 2010.

For complete program details and costs go here.

Application deadline is March 1, 2010

Five Ways to Read Avatar

If box office returns are any indication, I must have been one of the last persons on the planet, Earth, to see Avatar. (Returns are not in from Pandora but let's assume there's strong local interest there as well.) All I can say is that my delay was a product of being sick between Christmas and New Years and having trouble getting tickets to see a 3D IMAX screening in Los Angeles (People in LA seem passionate about hot new releases. Who knew?) By the time I got there, the talking points among my intellectual cohort and my tweet buddies had jelled around "spectacular visuals; too bad the characters and story are so flat." With this consensus view helping to counter-act some of the advanced hype, I actually found myself pleasantly surprised by Avatar and wondering why the perception of weak characters and story had become so firmly entrenched in popular perceptions of the film. Overall, the story told was a familiar one, well within genre conventions (someone called it "Dances with Smurfs") but the story was well told and I found myself drawn emotionally into the characters and their plight.

As someone who has long taught classes around science fiction, I found myself thinking about the many different levels upon which a science fiction film (at least a good one) operates and the degrees of access different viewers might have to reading Avatar on each level, as well as the challenges James Cameron faced in ballancing those many different kinds of expectations. I can only sketch this in here and as I do so, I should warn you that I make specific references to aspects of the film, enough so that I want to put a spoiler warning on this for those who haven't seen it.

Science Fiction as Visual Spectacle. I am always confused by people who talk about films as "relying" on special effects. We don't say a film "relies" on camera work or editing or music or acting or scripting. Special effects are part of the language of contemporary cinema. Pretty much all films deploy special effects of one kind or another, but the uncertainty about the relationship of the digital to the actual in contemporary films most often gets debated in terms of science fiction and fantasy films -- even though historical epics may rely just as heavily on special effects. In this case, the visual style is part of what makes Avatar transformative in terms of its impact on cinematic (and televisual) practices. It is almost certainly the breakthrough film in terms of our acceptance, even anticipation, of 3-d cinematography and we are already seeing films go back to the postproduction facilities to add 3D much as films in the wake of The Jazz Singer went back to see if they could add some soundtrack elements. We are hearing Lucas is already campaigning to release Star Wars in 3D overlooking the fact that Cameron carefully designed every aspect of Avatar for 3D and didn't add it as a layered on after effect.

As such, the technology is necessarily foregrounded in our conversations at the film, even though Cameron's deployment of 3D is striking precisely in the ways he seeks to move it beyond a gimmick and into a technique which makes its own aesthetic contributions to the film. My son points out that while previous 3D films emphasized the projection of things into the space of the audience (with the result that we remain aware of being in a theater at all times), Cameron's approach is to deepen the space behind the screen and thus to pull us into a more immersive relationship to the story space. We never have that moment of wanting to reach out and touch the projected image or seeing it hovering over the head of the person seated in front of us -- both experiences which foreground the space of the theater -- but rather we see the space open up before us and mentally we are drawn deeper into the story. I was lost in the film from the opening shots foreword, feeling a much more immediate relationship to what was happening than I could have imagined in a 2D film.

By the same token, the extensive use of digitally generated characters made them feel much more a part of the landscape of the film as compared to say the stand alone insertion of Golem in the Lord of the Rings series which always remained a self-conscious spectacle, even as I recognized how well executed it was. The story of jacking into an avatar body helped to guide us through the shifts in perception we experienced and soon, I came to accept the aliens as simply part of the reality of the film. They did not feel like cartoon characters inserted into a photorealistic landscape.

Vivian Sobchack has deployed the term, "special affect," to refer to moments in science fiction films where the characters stand slack jawed in wonderment at some special effect which is unfolding around us, often in ways that are abstracted from denotation or physical referent. I am thinking here, for example, of the opening up of Vger in Star Trek: The Motionless Picture, the closing moments of 2001: A Space Oddysey, or the extended human-alien exchange at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There are similar moments where the character's wonderment about an alien realm are aligned with our fascination with the special effects in Cameron's The Abyss, which is in some ways his least satisfying contribution to the genre. But, Avatar, by and large, doesn't fall into this trap -- even with the spiritual dimensions that are integral to the narrative. And that's in part because the special effect/affect always maintains an intellectual dimension. In that sense, calling it "eye candy" or "visual spectacle" does not do justice to the film's accomplishments.

Science Fiction as World Building. Pandora is such a fully realized world. Taking a decade to make the film gave Cameron an unprecidented chance to think through every dimension of this world -- the ecological system with complex and plausible constructions of alien fauna and flora, the cultural system of the Na'Vi as seen through the lens of both anthropology and comparative mythology, and the language of this people which was constructed for the film by a USC linguist, Paul R Frommer.

Some critics have noted that science fiction tends to deal with events that occur on a global or cosmic scale -- massive transformations of the established order -- and as a result, the characters are often reduced to secondary importance. They are often witnesses to the unfolding of large-scale change -- in many cases, a visitor from outside the world in question who must learn its contours and come to understand the stakes in the conflict or changes occuring. In some cases, the characters are made to stand in for something larger than themselves (see allegory below) and as a consequence, they become mouthpieces for communicating different thesis or arguments about the nature of the change being depicted.

Those fans interested in world-building do not care, seeing characters as vehicles for exploring the world not for telling a story. In the world building, Cameron is drawn to the epic scope and anthropological focus of a good number of recent science fiction novels -- I am reminded of the works of Octavia Butler, C.J. Cherryh, Orson Scott Card, and Kim Stanley Robinson, mong others, who have depicted alien worlds and their inhabitants in particular rich and vivid ways.

Science Fiction as Allegory Science fiction is a genre that asks questions, probes values, and maps the relationships between core institutions and practices. At its best, it helps us to think in more sophisticated ways about the world around us because it opens us up to new perspectives and imagines what might happen if things we took for granted were destroyed (in appocalyptic stories) or altered (as in stories about alien or future socieities).

In that sense, science fiction stories are often described as utopian or dystopian. Cameron's trick in Avatar is to construct a film which is both -- depicting the Na'vi society as a utopian alternative to what humans have done to Earth (though he cut out the scenes on Earth which were intended to provide some of that contrast). In doing so, science fiction does build on central debates of our time and invites us to read what unfolds as allegorical. There are several debates about the film which circle around this allegorical reading -- such as the question of whether the film is in a tradition of "white messiah" narratives where a liberal white must join causes with minorities or third world populations in order to help them progress to the next level, whether the film is anti-American and anti-business in its depiction of the destruction of Pandora by an Earth-based military-industrial complex, and whether the film is anti-Christian (as the Pope argues) or pro-environmentalist in the ways it depicts a people whose spiritual life centers around their relationship to the natural realm. Those who dislike the film often seem fixated on one or another of these levels, understanding it as offering a simple, one dimensional ideological statement.

I am not going to argue that these questions do not surface around the film, but I think that reading science fiction works as allegories often flattens the characters (so that they confirm more fully to this thesis) and denies the complexity of the work. Clearly, there are some flat characters who embody particular extremes -- the military commander comes to mind here -- but Cameron as a director is strong enough that he offers a more complex picture of the military as a whole and increasingly shows this character as pushing further than the rank and file are ready to follow. True we do not get whole sale mutiny though we do have a notable defection from his ranks and many of the reaction shots show increased discomfort, moral concern, rather than depicting all of the military members in the film as simply gung ho on large scale destruction of a people. There's similar suggestions that the corporate leader here is feeling prickles of consciousness as the events unfold, suggesting a more dynamic character than we would see if we simply described this as an "anti-corporate" title. There are also hints that the anthropologists are not as "purely good" as some readings of the film suggest, especially around the comments that the Na'vi people they had met before had not been able to listen and learn, implying the paternalistic and interventionist values of anthropology in its more colonialist period, though here we get a strong sense of the character's capacity to learn and adapt to their changing understanding of the situation.

Our protagonist is the character who is shown to be most capable of changing and adapting, starting out with a fairly cynical relationship to the mission, more than willing to be a double agent, and only gradually coming to see the world through a very different lens. Cameron's protagonists, then, are not locked into embodying a thesis so much as they show the capacity of learning and adapting, which is often the highest value in science fiction stories of all kinds.

Science Fiction as Speculative Fiction. Science fiction as a genre asks "what if" questions and answers them by envisioning alternative possibilities. Avatar, for example, depicts a world where there is very little technology in our sense of the word yet much of what we use technology for gets performed through the interface between man and nature. There's a long tradition of organic or biological conceptions of technology, which provide the raw materials for Avatar, which uses "network" and "interface" languages throughout to describe the bonds which the Na'vi form with the mother tree or with the Banshii. Though this approach may seem "new agey" when read in relation to our planet where such "communications" are a matter of faith, Avatar changes the terms of this debate because the Na'Vi's ability to communicate with plants is the reality they experience, a reality the Terrans dismiss at their own loss. This is not about faith vs. science, in other words, but rather about the inadequacies of our science to grasp other realities we might encounter. For me, this is what keeps the film from being patronizing to the Na'vi: when Neytiri tells Jake that he needs to learn and really listen before he can understand their people and their planet, she is telling the truth, and by the end of the film, the major failure of the military-industrial complex is that it rejects these claims as superstition without fully investigating them.

Similarly, while the protagonist of Dances with Wolves can not change his race, the protagonist of Avatar can change his species, paving the way for a more sympathetic representation of post-humanism. I was struck by the contrast between the closing battle in Cameron's Aliens where Ripley, in her battle suit, confronts the alien (and we are totally on her side) and the final confrontation here where a similarly armoured Colonel Miles Quaritch does battle with the "monster" and in this case, he is the alien invader while our sympathies lie with the nonhuman character. The first counts on our revulsion over nonhuman biology, while the new film embraces the posthuman. Here, we experience science fiction not as an allegory for our reality but as the mythology for another reality, one which follows its own rules and logics.

Science Fiction as Melodrama. One of Cameron's real strengths as a filmmaker has been his ability to fuse science fiction or action conventions with those from melodrama. I offered a complex analysis of the roles which melodrama played in a single sequence from Aliens in a recent article I wrote with Matt Weise for Cinema Journal.

Cameron's early films in particular spent their first segments setting up an ensemble cast of characters, defining their antagonisms and bonds, and suggesting the dynamics of a particular working group community. That's what comes in the first parts of Aliens and The Abyss in particular, and he does something on a smaller scale in setting up the family unit in Terminator 2 (and adding others to the mix as the film progresses). There's a much more abridged version of this process in Avatar -- basically everything that happens before we leave the compound. From there, Cameron is able to layer reaction shots onto action sequences, allowing us to see how various characters are reacting to what's occurring over time and through this process, reminding us of the stakes of the action for each participant.

Aliens is his most satisfying version of this process at work, where Cameron may juggle more than a dozen character's responses to the first raid of the alien's stronghold. Avatar is not as strong in this regard, but the emotional impact of the final battle sequence occurs because we've formed emotional relationship to a range of human and Na'vi characters and so every moment of physical conflict comes attached to emotional issues.

This focus on the melodramic often sits badly with those who are drawn to science fiction as a genre which celebrates the rational, the intellectual, and the technological. The more a viewer is drawn to science fiction as world building or as speculative fiction, the less likely they are to appreciate the more melodramatic aspects of Cameron's work, yet these techniques open the films to viewers who might well not be engaged by a pure science fiction work. Often, when I hear people smacking down on Avatar's characters, I see signs of this tension, a dislike of the roles that romance, say, plays in the film, or a tendency to see the prologned death scenes as a bit over the top. For me, this stuff is what I love about Cameron -- he's so good at upping the emotional ante in his action scenes compared to most other American directors working in the genre. The closest counterpart might be John Woo.

So, there you have it. Cameron is trying to balance and satisfy at least five different sets of interpretive expectations which sit uneasily in relation to each other. Clearly most viewers experience the film first and foremost on the level of audiovisual spectacle and thus this is often the first thing anyone wants to comment on. How they feel about the plot and characters, though, has to do with which of these other levels enter into our interpretation. I am not saying that the characters and plot here are as good as Cameron's best work -- for my money, Aliens -- but they are better than the general consensus seems to indicate.

For those of you who enjoy my writing about science fiction, check out Religion Dispatches, where I am joining three other scholars for an ongoing conversation about Caprica, the new series from the producers of Battlestar Galactica. So far, the discussion has been fascinating and we are just getting started.

Announcing Transmedia, Hollywood:S/Telling the Story

Conference Overview:

Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story is a one-day public symposium exploring the role of transmedia franchises in today's entertainment industries. The event brings together top creators, producers, and executives from the entertainment industry and places their critical perspectives in dialogue with scholars pursuing the most current academic research on transmedia studies.

Co-hosted by Denise Mann and Henry Jenkins, from UCLA and USC, two of the most prominent film schools and research centers in Los Angeles, Transmedia, Hollywood will take place on the eve of the annual Society of Cinema & Media Studies conference, the field's most distinguished gathering of film and media scholars and academics, which will be held this year in Los Angeles from March 17 to 21, 2010.

By coinciding with SCMS, Transmedia, Hollywood hopes to reach the widest possible scholarly audience and thus create a lasting impact in the field. It will give cinema and media scholars from around the world unprecedented access to top industry professionals and insight into their thinking and practices.

Location:

USC Cinematic Arts Complex, Los Angeles

Conference Summary:

Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story

As audiences followed stories as diverse as Heroes, Lost, Harry Potter, and Matrix, from one format to another--from traditional television series or films into comics, the Web, alternate reality or video games, toys and other merchandise--Hollywood quickly adopted the academic term "transmedia" and began plastering it above office doors to describe this latest cultural phenomenon. This is not to say that convergent culture and transmedia storytelling are new concepts; instead, the emergence of convergence can be traced to the 19th century when a Barnum and Bailey-style mode of entertainment first took hold, maturing in the mid-1950s with Walt Disney's visionary multi-platform, cross-promotional, merchandising extravaganza known as Disneyland.

Since then, Hollywood has created countless new transmedia titles, everything from Batman to Star Wars - an evolution only accelerated by the advent of digital convergence. While transmedia, in one way, vindicates the logic of the integrated media conglomerate and activates the synergies long hoped for by the captains of industry in charge of Hollywood's six big media groups, it may also prove to be more than they bargained for. Engaged, "lean-forward" consumers--coveted by advertisers and entertainers alike--are not content simply to watch traditional media but rather, they produce their own videos, remix other people's work, seek out those who share their interests, forging concordances and wiki's, fan fiction, and various forms of interactivity that are still in their infancy and that corporate Hollywood is just beginning to explore. Copyright law, guild rules, and the conventions of audience quantification are frequently operating at cross-purposes with these new, expansive sets of cultural-industrial practices. As the demise of the music industry shows, active audiences and technological advances can create an explosive combination, powerful enough to bring down an entire industry. The entertainment industry wants to embrace this new, active consumer while ensuring its own survival by seeking to recreate familiar rules of what is considered "valuable" and "entertainment" within traditional business models.

Transmedia, Hollywood turns the spotlight on media creators, producers and executives and places them in critical dialogue with top researchers from across a wide spectrum of film, media and cultural studies to provide an interdisciplinary summit for the free interchange of insights about how transmedia works and what it means.

Conference Panels

Topic: Reconfiguring Entertainment

Henry Jenkins, USC, Moderator

The recent news that Disney is buying Marvel Comics has sent shock waves through the entertainment industries as two companies, which have built their fortunes on transmedia experiences but for very different groups of consumers, are being brought together under single ownership. What implications does this merger have for the kinds of entertainment experiences we will be consuming in the next decade? This panel brings together visionaries, people who think deeply about our experiences of play, fun, and entertainment, people whose expertise is rooted in a range of media (games, comics, film, television) to think about the future of entertainment as a concept. Transmedia designers often use the term, "mythologies," to describe the kinds of information rich environment they seek to build up around media franchise and deploy the term, "Bibles," to describe the accumulated plans for the unfolding of that serial narrative. Both of these terms link contemporary entertainment back to a much older tradition. So, are we simply talking about a largely timeless practice of storytelling as it gets relayed through new channels and platforms? Or are we seeing the emergence of new modes of expression, new kinds of experiences, which are only possible within a converged media landscape? What does it mean to have "fun" in the early 21st century and will this concept mean something different a decade from now? In what ways will the desire to produce and consume such experiences reconfigure the entertainment industry or conversely, how will the consolidation of media ownership generate or constrain new forms of popular culture? What models of media production, distribution, and consumption are implied by these future visions of entertainment?

Topic: ARG: This is Not a Game.... But is it Always a Promotion?

Denise Mann (UCLA) moderator

Using a collective intelligence model disguised as play, Alternate reality games, or ARGs, give any individual with a computer a means of problem-solving anything from global warming to the true meaning of the Dharma Institute conspiracy. ARGs also give instant "geek cred" to marketers from stuffy firms like Microsoft and McDonalds tasked with selling consumer goods to the Millennials. Are these elaborate scavenger hunts, which send players down an endless series of rabbit-holes in search of clues, teaching them how to think collectively or are they simply the latest in a long series of promotional tools designed to sell products to tech-savvy consumers? Unlike regular computer games, ARGS engage a multitude of players using a multitude of new technologies and social media formats--sending clues via Web sites, email, or just as likely, by means of an old-fashioned phone booth in some dusty, small town in Texas. For ARG creators, the new entertainment format represents rich, new storytelling opportunities, according to Joe DiNunzio, CEO of 42 Entertainment (AI, Halo 2, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest). However, for the big six media groups, the primary purpose of ARGs is promotional--a new-fangled way of selling Spielberg's AI (The Beast), WB's Dark Knight, Microsoft's Halo 2 (ilovebee's), or ABC's Lost (The Lost Experience). In other words, are ARGs simply a novel new way for the big six media groups to prompt several million avid fans to start beating the promotional drum on behalf of their favorite movie, TV series, or computer game or do they represent a new way of harnessing revolutionary thinking? In this panel, ARG creators, entertainment think-tank consultants, and media scholars will debate the social vs. commercial utilities associated with this latest form of social engagement.

Topic: Designing Transmedia Worlds

Henry Jenkins (USC) moderator

Transmedia entertainment relies as much on world-building as it does on traditional storytelling. Transmedia practices use the audience's fascination with exploring its richly detailed world (and its attendant mythology) to motivate their activities as they seek out and engage with content which has been dispersed across the media landscape. Recent projects, such as Cloverfield, True Blood, and District 9, have relied on transmedia strategies to generate audience interest in previously unknown fictional universes, often combining promotional and expositional functions. Derek Johnson has argued that these fictional worlds are "over-designed," involving much greater details in their conceptual phase than can be exploited through a single film or television series. This "overdesign" emergences through new kinds of collaborations between artists working both for the "mother ship," the primary franchise, and those working on media extensions, whether games, websites, "viral" videos, even park benches. In this new system, art directors and script writers end up working together in new ways as they build up credible worlds and manage complex continuities of information. What does it mean to talk about fictional worlds? How has this altered the processes behind conceptualizing, producing, and promoting media texts? What new skills are emerging as production people learn to introduce, refine, and expand these worlds through each installment of serial media texts? And how do they manage audience expectations that they will continue to learn something more about the world in each new text they consume? What does each media platform contribute to the exploration and elaboration of such worlds?

Topic: Who Let the Fans In?: "Next-Gen Digi-Marketing"

Moderator: Denise Mann (UCLA)

Most Hollywood marketing campaigns remain overly reliant on expensive broadcast television commercials to reach a large cross-section of the audience despite growing evidence that avid fans are capable of generating powerful word of mouth. In the decade since The Blair Witch Project's website became a model for engaging a core audience by creating awareness online, a new generation of marketing executives has emerged, challenging the effectiveness of top-down strategies and advocating "bottom-up," social media marketing. By fusing storytelling and marketing--ranging from ABC's low-tech, user-generated aesthetic in "Lost Untangled" to Crispin, Porter + Bogusky's polished, eye-candy approach to selling Sprite in its "sublymonal advertising" campaign--this next generation of web marketers has upended previous notions about where content ends and the ad begins. Having grown up reading Watchman comics, playing Sims, and surfing the Web for like-minded members of their consumer tribe, these new media professionals come armed with the knowledge of what it means to be a fan; as a result, they are refashioning the processes and structures that inform the relationship between audience members and the culture industry--forcing today's media conglomerates to adapt to the new realities of the cultural-industrial complex while also ensuring their own survival. Gen-Y consumers' sophisticated understanding of, but less contentious relationship with brand marketing, invites today's media marketers to embrace a revolutionary mode of selling that may impact copyright law, guild agreements, professional standards, and the global labor market. What is the future of entertainment? Will the Internet be run by top-down mid-media corporate owners or bottom-up Web-bloggers or some yet to be realized combination of both?

Speakers include:

Ivan Askwith, Director of Strategy, Big Spaceship (recent projects include work for NBC, A&E, HBO, EPIX, Second Life and Wrigley).

Danny Bilson, THQ (The Rocketeer, Medal of Honor, The Flash, The Sentinel)

Emmanuelle Borde, Senior Vice-President, Digital Marketing, Sony Imageworks Interactive (her award-winning team of marketers, designers, producers and technologists have developed thousands of websites and digital campaigns for Sony Worldwide products, including Spider-man, 2012, Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon, etc.)

David Bisbin, Art Director/Production Designer (Twilight, New Moon, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Drug Store Cowboy)

Will Brooker, Associate Professor, Kingston University, UK. (selected publications: Star Wars [2009]; Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture [2005]; The Bladerunner Experience [2006];Using the Force [2003]; Batman Unmasked [2001]

John Caldwell, Professor, UCLA Department of Film, TV, Digital Media (selected publications: Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Film/Television Work Worlds [ 2009]; Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film/Television [2008]; New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, [ 2003]; Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television, (1995)

Alan Friel, Partner, Wildman Harrold & Associates

John Hegeman, Chief Marketing Office, New Regency Productions (spearheaded marketing campaigns for: Saw 1 & 2, Crash at Lionsgate; The Blair Witch Project at Artisan, etc.)

Mimi Ito, Associate Researcher, University of California Humanities Research Institute (Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children's Software; Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning With New Media; Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life)

Derek Johnson, Assistant Professor, University of North Texas

Laeta Kalogridis, Screenwriter (Shutter Island, Night Watch, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Battle Angel; Executive Producer, Birds of Prey and Bionic Woman)

Richard Lemarchand, Lead Designer, Naughty Dog Software (Uncharted: Drake's Fortune; Uncharted 2: Among Thieves)

R. Eric Lieb, Partner in BlackLight Media; Former Editor-in-Chief, Atomic Comics; Former Director of Development, Fox Atomic (Jennifer's Body; I Love You Beth Cooper; 28 Weeks Later)

Marti Noxon, Producer (Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Prison Break; Gray's Anatomy; Mad Men)

Roberta Pearson, Professor, University of Nottingham (selected publications: Reading Lost [2009]; Cult Television [2004]; The Many Lives of Batman: Critical Approaches [1991], etc.)

Steve Peters and Maureen McHugh, Founding Partners, No Mimes Media (recent credits include: Watchmen, The Dark Knight, Nine Inch Nails, Pirates of the Caribbean II)

Nils Peyron, Executive Vice President and Managing Partner, Blind Winks Productions

Louisa Stein, Head of TV/Film Critical Studies Program, San Diego State University (Limits: New Media, Genre and Fan Texts; Watching Teen TV: Text and Culture)

Jonathan Taplin, Professor, Annenberg School For Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California; CEO, Intertainer.

John Underkoffler , Oblong, G-Speak (technical advisor for Iron Man, Aeon Flux, Hulk, "Taken", and Minority Report).

Steve Wax, Managing Partner, Campfire (Northern Lights, The Little Sister, Unmade Beds)

Jordan Weisman, Founder, Smith & Tinker (Credits include: The Beast, I Love Bees, Year Zero)

Admission is free to Students and Academics, $25 for general public.

Register now at: http://www2.tft.ucla.edu/RSVP/

Watch this space for more information.

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Harry Potter: The Exhibition, or what Location Entertainment Adds to a Transmedia Franchise

While in Cambridge for the Futures of Entertainment conference, my wife and I stopped over at the Boston Museum of Science which is currently playing host to Harry Potter: The Exhibition. We had both attended a fascinating presentation about the design and development of this exhibit during last Summer's Azkatraz convention in San Francisco and so we had high anticipations for the show and were not disappointed. If you live anywhere near Boston, you should definitely try to make it there for the exhibit which runs through Feb. 21. The exhibit is pricy since you have to pay a fee above and beyond the price of admission to the museum itself, but we found it more than worth it.

Since my head was still filled with thoughts from two days of conversations about transmedia entertainment, the exhibit gave me some chances to reflect upon what location based entertainment can contribute to a larger cross-media franchise. Throughout, I will be making reference to some of the principles I introduced in my "The Revenge of the Oragami Unicorn" posts, so if you missed them, you may want to pause now and catch up. We'll wait up for you.

First, we might think of the exhibit as an example of immersion. That is, from the very start, we are encouraged to enter into J.K. Rowling's universe as manifest in the feature film franchise. Before we enter the exhibit, one or two children are asked to step up, put on the sorting hat, and get placed into the proper "house." The museum has lovingly recreated some of the key settings, filled them with costumes and props, and thus offer us a chance to tour the fictional environment. We can, for example, enter into Hagrid's Hut and even sit in his giant chair which dwarfs even the adults in the party, or we can enter the Great Hall as it is decorated for one or another of the festive ocassions depicted in the story. The designers went to some length to minimize the number of glass cases we have to look through, prefering to situate props and costumes in their "natural" settings, such as the Gryfindor Boys Dormatory or a Quiddich Trophy Room.

Some of the professor figures -- such as Lockhart or Umbridge -- get represented through their living quarters. We see the life size self portrait of Lockhart or experience directly the pink monstrosity, complete with mewing cat plates, which is Umbridge's personal quarters. As we enter and exit the exhibit, we must pass the interactive portraits which figure so strongly in the films and our entrance also takes us past the railroad car that the students take from Paddington Station to Hogwarts School.

Often, a sense of being embedded in the world gets created by scale as we find the dementors towering above us when we meet Voldemort and his minions or when we see how much larger than lifesize Hagard's costumes are. There was something magical about the time spent inside the exhibition precisely because it felt as if we had left Boston and entered into the territory of the imagination. Everything was familiar because we knew them so well from the books and films so this sense of immersion was a kind of homecoming.

As may already be suggested from the above, the exhibit focuses primarily around the Harry Potter books and films as a world rather than as a story. We can imagine, for example, a trip which took us through a series of vignettes which lay out the memorable moments from the narrative as a series of spectacular spaces. To a large degree, this sense of transforming events into spaces would characterize many of the earliest exhibits in Fantasyland at the Disney Theme Parks -- the Peter Pan or Snow White rides come to mind as the most obvious examples of this process. And something similar occurs often when films are adopted into video games. After all, games, amusement parks, and museums are organized spatially and our primary experience is a movement through compelling landscapes, but what gets represented in those spaces may have strong or weak narrative hooks.

I will bow here before the ludologists who would argue that such spaces are not narratives -- yet we may see them as evoking familiar narratives, as part of a storytelling system, as alternative ways we experience exposition which alters our relationship to the more overtly narrative manifestations of the franchise.

There are some examples in the Harry Potter exhibition which point to very specific moments in the films -- for example, there's an arrangement of the costumes which the primary characters wore to the Yule Ball which unmistakingly refers to specific events. But most of what is showcased here are recurring elements from the fictional world, scenes which appeared across multiple books or films, even if they are more central to some installments than others. There is a sense of the passing of time contributed by some exhibits which juxtapose the costumes worn by the primary characters over time, allowing us to watch the characters grow up across the series.

The exhibit rewards our sense of fan mastery, both by allowing us to recognize and place for ourselves various costumes and props, thanks to relatively nonintrusive signage. It allows us to examine each artifact closely and often gain new insights into the characters, as we learn by studying Lockhart's exams and realizing that they ask about nothing other than the teacher's own exploits, or scanning the wrappers of the candies or the covers of the textbooks to see details which never really were visible on the screen but help to flesh out the world of the story. This is often what is meant when tourists comment on the attention to detail -- not simply that we get every detail we expect to see there but that looking more closely teaches us things about the world we would not know from consuming the other media manifestations of the franchise. So, we might see this attention to detail as part of the drillability Jason Mittell has described as a property of complex narrative systems.

There was some tension here between the desire to immerse us in a fictional realm and the desire to provide the kinds of annotation and background we anticipate from a museum experience. There are thus video monitors at various points throughout the exhibit, creating a sense of hypermediacy (see Bolter and Grusin's Remediations). These videos offer us just in time glimpses into key scenes from the films which are evoked by the costumes, props, and settings on display. In some ways, seeing the film footage alongside the costume deepened our sense of immersion, while in other senses, it pulled us out of the suspension of disbelief since these monitors had little to do with the world of Hogwarts and everything to do with our experiences as museum goers.

A greater sense of disjunction was created for me by the experience of taking the audio tour where key production people comment on and provide background on the design choices which went into the construction of these costumes and props. After all, the only justification for this exhibit occupying space in a Museum of Science, other than because of its crowd appeal, has to do with showcasing the technical skills and industrial design which went into the production. We might think of the audio tour as something like a director's commentary on the film world -- except that I always find it hard to listen to the director's commentary and remain absorbed in the fiction at the same time. In the case of a DVD, they represent different kinds of experiences, different modes of interpretation.

Yet walking through the immersive exhibit space and listening to the audio tour invited us to think about what we see as real (through suspension of disbelief) and constructed (through our behind the scenes perspective). In some cases, the information provided was illuminating, inviting us to look closely at the costumes as personifying different aspects of the character's personalities, or explaining why lifesize models were created for some of the mythological creatures, like the Horntail dragon. But it always competed with the fantasy I was constructing in my head about getting to visit Hogwarts and its grounds. This is not a challenge that faces amusement park designers, for example, who are able to simply allow us to immerse ourselves in an entertaining fantasy without feeling compelled to offer educational background.

The exhibit clearly functioned as a cultural attractor -- creating a shared space for Harry Potter fans to gather and have common experiences. I found myself engaged in conversations with many of the other patrons in ways I would have been reluctant to do at an art museum, say, or at the science museum in its normal mode. We had a common relationship to this fiction and in one way or another, we were fans.

The exhibit also was a cultural activator, giving us some things to do -- get sorted upon entrance (if you are lucky enough to get picked), rip up a mandrake root and watch it squirm, through a quiddich ball through a hoop, and so forth.

But many of us came into the museum with our own fantasy investments as well. For example, I strongly identify with the Ravenclaw House and its most famous character, Luna Lovegood. I have been "sorted" through a variety of mechanisms through the years and always end up getting placed in Ravenclaw. Over time, I've discovered many of my closest friends in Harry Potter fandom are also self-identified Ravenclaw, which put us in a minority within the fandom, which veers towards Slytherin (and Snape/Malfoy fans) or Griffyndor (with Harry and friends). Indeed, of the two children being sorted on my tour, both had proclaimed fantasies about being Gryffindor, and were so sorted.

Because of this identification, though, I found myself increasingly annoyed that my house was under-represented in the exhibit -- most blatantly in an area which shows the uniforms of three of the four Quiddich team captains, but makes no mention of the Ravenclaw captain. I suppose even in fantasy you can't be an intellectual and a jock at the same time. :-{ We could accept that Luna is a sufficiently secondary character that she would not necessarily be represented but many of the other secondary characters on the same level of obscurity do find at least token acknowledgement here. The "houses" are so central to fan identifications within the Harry Potter world that it strikes me as odd that one house would be so totally neglected -- except for occassional banners -- and it suggests to me the one major misfire in an otherwise respectfully and lovingly created exhibit.

Next time: Transmedia for Social Change

Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: The Remaining Four Principles of Transmedia Storytelling

3. Immersion vs. Extractability These two concepts refer to the perceived relationship between the transmedia fiction and our everyday experiences. At the Studio Ghibli Museum outside of Tokyo, there's a fascinating exhibition on the history of motion pictures. Much of what is there could have been in a western museum on the same topic - various motion toys designed to capture and exploit the persistence of vision. Yet, there are also panorama boxes - little minature worlds which you have to kneel down to look inside, worlds constructed of plastic figurines in front of cellophane backdrops. On the wall, there's a quote from animator Hayao Miyazki, who explains,

"just as people wished to make pictures move, they wished to look inside a different world. They yearned to enter a story or travel to a faraway land. They longed to see the future of the landscapes of the past. The panorama box with no moving parts was made much earlier than the Zoetrope."

Miyazki is making the case, then, that immersion - the ability of consumers to enter into fictional worlds - was the driving force behind the creation of cinema and has fueled the development of many subsequent media. It is certainly not hard to move from the microworlds constructed in the panorama boxes to the microworlds created for contemporary video games. But if we step outside the museum proper and into the gift shop, we see another principle at play. Here, one can buy tiny figures and massive models of key characters, props, and settings from Miyazki's films, or we can buy props and costumes which can become resoures for Cosplay. Ian Condry has made the case that the toy industry in Japan and its need for extractable elements has dramatically shaped the development of anime and manga.

In immersion, then, the consumer enters into the world of the story, while in extractability, the fan takes aspects of the story away with them as resources they deploy in the spaces of their everyday life.

Again, neither principle is new: just as we had panorama boxes in Japan, the movie palaces which sprung up in the United States in the 1920s were instruments of immersion, offering fantastical environments within which to watch movies which were themselves often exploring exotic or faraway worlds, and we might extend immersion to include more contemporary amusement parks, such as the soon to open theme park that seeks to reconstruct the world of Harry Potter or the Dubai based theme park focused around Marvel superheroes to open in 2012 (assuming either Dubai or the world doesn't end before then). On the other end of the spectrum, we can see early examples of extractable content growing up around Felix the Cat, Mickey Mouse, Buster Brown, or Charlie Chaplin, to cite a few examples, even around Nanook of the North (which helped to introduce the Eskimo Pie to the American buying public).

4. Worldbuilding.

In Convergence Culture, I quoted an unnamed screenwriter who discussed how Hollywood's priorities had shifted in the course of his career: "When I first started you would pitch a story because without a good story, you didn't really have a film. Later, once sequels started to take off, you pitched a character because a good character could support multiple stories. and now, you pitch a world because a world can support multiple characters and multiple stories across multiple media." This focus on world building has a long history in science fiction, where writers such as Cordwainer Smith constructed interconnecting worlds which link together stories scattered across publications.

We can point towards someone like L. Frank Baum, author of the Wizard of Oz books, as someone who had a deep investment in this concept of the author as world builder. For most of us today, The Wizard of Oz is a story - really reduced to a single book from the twenty or so Baum wrote and from there, to only those characters and plot elements that appeared in the MGM musical. Baum would have understood Oz as a world and indeed, he presented himself as the "geographer" of Oz, giving a series of mock travelogue lectures, where he showed slides and short films, which illustrated different places within Oz and hinted at the events which had occurred there. Oz as a place got elaborated not simply through the books but also through comic strip series (recently reprinted), stage musicals, and films, each of which added new places and characters to the overall mix. Some of the Oz books were novelizations and elaborations of stories introduced through these other media. And consistently, the logic of these stories were focused on journeys and travel, so that the Oz franchise was constantly uncovering more parts of the fictional world.

This concept of world building is closely linked to what Janet Murray has called the "encyclopedic" impulse behind contemporary interactive fictions - the desire of audiences to map and master as much as they can know about such universes, often through the production of charts, maps, and concordances. Consider, for example, this map of the character relations which have unfolded in the X-Men universe over the past 40 plus years and compare it to the complex social dynamics ascribed to the great Russian novels, such as Tolstoi's War and Peace or Anna Karenina. Pushing back even earlier, we can see this world building impulse at work in something like the Sistine Chapel Ceiling Murals, which seek to stitch together characters and stories from across many different parts of the Bible into a single coherent representation.

The concept of world building seems closely linked to the earlier principles of immersion and extractability since they both represent ways for consumers to engage more directly with the worlds represented in the narratives, treating them as real spaces which intersect in some way with our own lived realities. Witness the production of travel posters for fictional locations, for example. Many transmedia extensions can be understood as doing something similar to Baum's travel lectures as offering us a guided tour of the fictional setting, literally in the case of a real estate site created around Melrose Place, or simply flesh out our understanding of the institutions and practices.

Increasingly, transmedia producers are creating the media which exists in the fictional world as a way of understanding its own logic, practices, and institutions - so we see, for example, the production of fictional pirate comics within Alan Moore's original Watchmen graphic novels to show us the fantasies of a world where superheroes are a reality, or the newscasts created around the film version of Watchmen, which help us to understand the altered history created by the superhero's intervention into 20th century events.

These extensions may take physical forms, as in the park benches for District 9, which helped us to experience the segregation between humans and aliens. They might include mock advertising campaigns, such as those for Tru-Blood, or political posters, such as those created in support of alien rights in District 9 or vampire rights in True Blood. And they might extend to the production of fictional media franchises and fandoms, such as Jesse Alexander has created for Sargasso Planet in his upcoming Day One miniseries.

5. Seriality

The idea of seriality has an equally long history, which we can trace back to 19th century literary figures, such as Charles Dickens or the Dumas factory, and which took on new significance with the rise of movie serials in the early 20th century. Indeed, Kim Deitch's Alias the Cat graphic novel uses this earlier historical moment to comment on our current push towards transmedia entertainment, with his protagonist gradually drawing connections between events depicted in movie serials, comic strips, live theatrical events, and news stories, suggesting ways that an earlier media system might tell a story across multiple platforms.

We might understand how serials work by falling back on a classic film studies distinction between story and plot. The story refers to our mental construction of what happened which can be formed only after we have absorbed all of the available chunks of information. The plot refers to the sequence through which those bits of information have been made available to us. A serial, then, creates meaningful and compelling story chunks and then disperses the full story across multiple installments. The cliff-hanger represents an archtypical moment of rupture where one text ends and closure where one text bleeds into the next, creating a strong enigma which drives the reader to continue to consume the story even though our satisfaction has been deferred while we await the next installment.

We can think of transmedia storytelling then as a hyperbolic version of the serial, where the chunks of meaningful and engaging story information have been dispersed not simply across multiple segments within the same medium, but rather across multiple media systems. There still is a lot we don't know about what will motivate consumers to seek out those other bits of information about the unfolding story - ie. What would constitute the cliffhanger in a transmedia narrative - and we still know little about how much explicit instruction they need to know these other elements exist or where to look for them. As we work on these problems, there is a great deal we can learn by studying classic serial forms of fiction, such as the serial publication of novels or the unfolding of chapters in movie serials or even in comic book series.

Early writing on transmedia (mine included) may have made too much of the nonlinear nature of the transmedia entertainment experience, suggesting that the parts could be consumed within any order. Increasingly, we are seeing companies deploy very different content and strategies in the build up to the launch of the "mother ship" of the franchise than while the series is on the air or after the main text has completed its cycle. So there's work to be done to understand the sequencing of transmedia components and whether, in fact, it really does work to consume them in any order. We are, however, seeing some very elaborate plays with time lines and seriality occurring as the stories of television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, or Supernatural extend into comics, or consider the ways that each of the Battlestar Galactica films has added some new chunk to the timeline of that particular universe.

6. Subjectivity

Transmedia extensions, then, may focus on unexplored dimensions of the fictional world, as happens when Star Wars games pick up on particular groups - such as the bounty hunters or podracers - and expands upon what was depicted in the films. Transmedia extensions may broaden the timeline of the aired material, as happens when we rely on comics to fill in back story or play out the long term ramifications of the depicted events (see for example the use of animation in the build up to The Dark Knight or The Matrix Reloaded). A third function of transmedia extensions may be to show us the experiences and perspectives of secondary characters. These functions may be combined as they were with the Heroes webcomics, which provided backstories and insights into the large cast of characters as the series was being launched. These kinds of extensions tap into longstanding readers interest in comparing and contrasting multiple subjective experiences of the same fictional events.

We may learn a good deal about this aspect of transmedia by looking at the tradition of epistolary novels. Works like Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, or Dracula, constructed fictional diaries, letters, even transcripts. While they are contained within a single binder, they can be described as transmedia works insofar as they imitate multiple genres, including both manuscript and print forms of prose, and thus invite us to construct the fictional reality from these fragments. Typically, the author constructed himself or herself as having found these documents rather than constructed them, much as ARGs often refuse to acknowledge that they are games or works like The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity pretend to be constructed from found footage.

As we read such works, we are encouraged to be aware of who is writing and who they are writing for, thus using the letters or diaries to help further construct the relationships between characters. Something similar occurs when we look at the mock websites constructed around transmedia fictions - for example, District 9 was accompanied by a website for an alien rights organization which directly challenges some of the claims made by the government characters in the film and in some cases, we are seeing mock government propaganda footage as it is being "read against the grain" by these resistant organizations, thus creating a layered subjectivity. If Ghost Whispererr, the television series, is about a human woman who speaks with ghost, the webisode series, "The Other Side," shares the perspective of ghost who speak to human women. The promoters of 2012 recently sparked controversy when they created a mock educational website that while clearly marked as tied to a fictional film represented "scientific" perspectives on why the world was ending, a site which provoked responses from NASA who were concerned that it might be misleading the public about actual scientific thoughts and theories about the state of the universe.

This focus on multiple subjectivities is giving rise to the use of Twitter as a platform through which fans (Mad Men) or authors (Valmont) can elaborate on the secondary characters and their responses to events represented in the primary text. We even saw this focus on multiple subjectivities extend into reality television this season when Project Runway, which focuses on the designers, added a second series, which focused on the same events as experienced by "The Models of the Runway."

Transmedia texts often rely on secondary characters because it is too costly to bring the primary actors over to work in lower yield media like mobisodes and webisodes. Yet, we have a lot to learn about how to turn this into a strength by exploiting the audience's desire to see through more than one set of eyes. Battlestar Galactica's webisode series, "The Face of the Enemy," showed some of this potential in focusing around Felix Gaeta, a previously marginalized figure on the series, and creating interest as they lead into a season where he was going to play a much more central role; the episodes fleshed out his backstory, explored his motivations, and hinted at some of the future developments, all within a short and largely self-contained storyline.

7. Performance

In Convergence Culture, I introduced two related concepts - cultural attractors (a phrase borrowed from Pierre Levy) and cultural activators. Cultural attractors draw together a community of people who share common interests - even if it is simply the common interest in figuring out who is going to get booted from the island next. Cultural activators give that community something to do. My classic example would be the map flashed in short bursts in the second season of Lost. Hardcore fans were motivated to create their own screengrabs, share them online, construct their own maps, and try to decipher the cryptic text and figure out how it related to the depicted events. Increasingly, producers are being asked to think about what fans are going to do with their series and to design in spaces for their active participation. Sharon Marie Ross discusses these as invitational strategies, suggesting that these can be explicit (as in the appeals to vote on So You Think You Can Dance) or implicit (as in the depiction inside the series of fans in The O.C. or mobile social networks in Gossip Girl.)

But even without those invitations, fans are going to be actively identifying sites of potential performance in and around the transmedia narrative where they can make their own contributions. Indeed, much of the discussion at Futures of Entertainment this year centered around various ways that producers were engaging with these fans, supporting, "harvesting," or shutting down their own creative contributions. In my original talk, I refer to "fan performance" but it was pointed out through these discussions that producers are also "performing" their relationship to both the text and the audience through their presence online or through director's commentary. We typically think of these director commentaries as "nonfiction" or "documentary" breaking down the fiction to show us the behind the scenes production process, yet some authors - Ron Moore in the case of Battlestar Galactica or JMS in the case of Babylon 5 - deploy these platforms to expand our understanding of the fictional worlds, the characters, and depicted events, suggesting that they may also be understood as an expansion of the narrative and not simply an exposition on its conditions of production.

As Louisa Stein noted at the conference, there's still much to be explored as we expand the discourse of transmedia entertainment to engage more fully with issues being raised by those working in the fan studies tradition. I can't fully elaborate on these issues now, but in the talk, I simply pointed to some examples of these fan-made extensions, such as the performance videos on YouTube where fans re-enact or lip sinc musical numbers from Glee which Alex Leavitt discussed on the Convergence Culture Consortium blog recently, or The Hunt for Gollum, a fan constructed extension of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, or Star Wars Uncut, where each fan is allowed to reconstruct a single shot from the George Lucas film, which no unfolds through a giddy array of representational strategies (claymation, lego, drag queens, manipulated or re-enacted footage).

I also suggested that we can understand transmedia activism, such as that illustrated by the HP Alliance, which deploys themes, characters, and situations from the J.K. Rowling narratives to motivate real world social change, as a logical extension both of performance and of the tension between extractability and immersion. All of these represent unauthorized forms of extension which are not directly acknowledged in the primary text. Yet, a central theme running through the conference centered on how these fan productions and performances might feed back into the creation of the commercial transmedia franchise itself, with Purefold being held up as an emerging model which deploys crowdsourcing and Creative Commons liscensing to encourage viewer contributions to thinking through future directions in the series.

So there you have them - seven core principles of transmedia storytelling. Is this an exhaustive list? Probably not. Some of them weren't even fully on my radar at the start of the semester. These represent insights into the various transmedia experiments we've seen so far. Some of these have drawn a good deal of critical attention, while others represent new and unexplored spaces. Most point to ways that transmedia connects to historic cultural practices and thus can draw insights from historical and critical writing on those practices. Most point to ways that the study of transmedia narrative needs to reconnect with the study of commercial industries and fan communities if we are to really understand the dynamic being created by these interventions. And most of them point to new spaces for creative experimentation.

If you are enjoying this discussion of transmedia, stay tuned. More is coming next week including some previews of the work we are doing on transmedia activism. For now, you can check out two more of the sessions from Futures of Entertainment 4 which deal with transmedia issues.

Session 1: Producing Transmedia Experiences: Stories in a Cross-Platform World

Moderator: Jason Mittell - Middlebury College

Panelists: Brian Clark - Partner and CEO, GMD Studios; Michael Monello- Co-Founder & Creative Director, Campfire; Derek Johnson - University of North Texas; Victoria Jaye - Acting Head of Fiction & Entertainment Multiplatform Commissioning, BBC; Patricia Handschiegel - Serial Entrepeneur, Founder of Stylediary.net

Case Study: Transmedia Design and Conceptualization - The Making of Purefold

Moderator: Geoffrey Long - Gambit-MIT

Panelists include: David Bausola - Co-founder of Ag8; Tom Himpe - Co-founder of Ag8; Mauricio Mota - Chief Storytelling Officer, co-founder The Alchemists; C3 Consulting Practitioner; Leo Sa - Petrobras

The Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: Seven Principles of Transmedia Storytelling (Well, Two Actually. Five More on Friday)

Across the next two weeks, we will be rolling out the webcast versions of the sessions we hosted during the recent Futures of Entertainment 4 conference held last month at MIT. (see Monday's post for the session on Grant McCracken's Chief Culture Officer). Many of the conference sessions were focused around the concept of transmedia entertainment. The team asked me to deliver some opening remarks at the conference which updated my own thinking about transmedia and introduced some basic vocabulary which might guide the discussion. My remarks were largely off the cuff in response to power point slides, but I am making an effort here to capture the key concepts in writing for the first time. You can watch the recording of the actual presentation here and/or read along with this text.

Many of these ideas were informed by the discussions I've been having all semester long within my Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment class at the University of Southern California.

Revenge of the Oragami Unicorn: Seven Core Concepts of Transmedia Storytelling

[Electronic Arts game designer] Neil Young talks about "additive comprehension." He cites the example of the director's cut of Blade Runner, where adding a small segment showing Deckard discovering an origami unicorn invited viewers to question whether Deckard might be a replicant: "That changes your whole perception of the film, your perception of the ending...The challenge for us, especially with the Lord of the Rings is how do we deliver that one piece of information that makes you look at the films differently?" -- Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collides (2006).

I first introduced my concept of transmedia storytelling in my Technology Review column in 2003 and elaborated upon it through the "Searching for the Oragami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling" chapter in Convergence Culture. For me, the origami unicorn has remained emblematic of the core principles shaping my understanding of transmedia storytelling, a kind of patron saint for what has emerged as increasing passionate and motivated community of artists, storytellers, brands, game designers, and critics/scholars, for whom transmedia has emerged as a driving cause in their creative and intellectual lives. We all have somewhat different definitions of transmedia storytelling and indeed, we don't even agree on the same term - with Frank Rose talking about "Deep Media" and Christy Dena talking about "Cross-media."

As Frank has put it, same elephant, different blind men. We are all groping to grasp a significant shift in the underlying logic of commercial entertainment, one which has both commercial and aesthetic potentials we are still trying to understand, one which has to do with the interplay between different media systems and delivery platforms (and of course different media audiences and modes of engagement.)

Whatever we call it, transmedia entertainment is increasingly prominent in our conversations about how media operates in a digital era - from recent books (such as Jonathon Gray's Show Sold Seperately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts and Chuck Tryon's Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence) to dedicated websites (such as the Narrative Design Exploratorium which has been running a great series of interviews with transmedia designers and storytellers) and websites created by transmedia producers, such as Jeff Gomez, to explain the concept to their clients. We are seeing senior statesmen across multiple disciplines - from David Bordwell in film studies to Don Norman in design research - weigh in on the aesthetics and design of transmedia experiences. All of this influx of new interest invites us to pull back and lay out some core principles that might shape our development or analysis of transmedia narrative and to revise some of our earlier formulations of this topic.

Six years ago, fans and critics were shocked at the idea of transmedia as they first encountered what the Wachowski Brothers were doing around The Matrix. Now, there is almost a transmedia expectation, as occurred when fans of Flash Forward complained recently because the series introduced a Url on the air and then only provided impoverished extensions to those fans who tracked down the link. Have we reached the point where media franchises are going to be judged harshly if they do not sustain our hunger for transmedia content?

Let me start with the following definition of transmedia storytelling as an operating principle: "Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story." Some of what I will say here will complicate this conception of a "unified and coordinated entertainment experience," as we factor in the unauthorized, grassroots expansion of the text by fans or consider the ways that franchises might value diversity over coherence in their exploration of fictional worlds.

We should be clear that narrative represents simply one kind of transmedia logic which is shaping the contemporary entertainment realm. We might identify a range of others - including branding, spectacle, performance, games, perhaps others - which can operate either independently or may be combined within any given entertainment experience. During the conference, Nancy Baym asked us to think about when and how music has gone transmedia. We struggled to come up with examples - everyone of course immediately latched onto the ARG created around the Nine Inch Nails; I proposed the Comic Book Tatoo where artists and writers used Tori Amos songs as their inspiration. The question looks different, though, if we ask about transmedia performance, because most contemporary musical artists perform across multiple media - minimally live and recorded performance, but also video and social network sites and twitter and...

We might also draw a distinction between transmedia storytelling and transmedia branding, though these can also be closely intertwined. So, we can see something like Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader as a extension of the transmedia narrative that has grown up around Star Wars because it provides back story and insights into a central character in that saga. (Thanks to Geoffrey Long for this example) By comparison, a Star Wars breakfast cereal may enhance the franchise's branding but it may have limited contribution to make to our understanding of the narrative or the world of the story. The idea that Storm Troopers might be made of sugar sweet marshmellow bits probably contradicts rather than enhances the continuity and coherence of the fictional world George Lucas was creating.

Where does this leave the Star Wars action figures? Well, they represent resources where players can expand their understanding of the fictional world through their play. Minimally, they enhance transmedia play, but in so far as coherent stories emerge through this play, they may also contribute to the expansion of the transmedia story. And indeed, writers like Will Brooker and Jonathon Gray have made compelling arguments for the specific ways these toys expanded or reshaped the transmedia narrative, adding, for example, to the mystique around Boba Fett.

While we are making distinctions, we need to distinguish between adaptation, which reproduces the original narrative with minimum changes into a new medium and is essentially redundant to the original work, and extension, which expands our understanding of the original by introducing new elements into the fiction. Of course, this is a matter of degree - since any good adaptation contributes new insights into our understanding of the work and makes additions or omissions which reshape the story in significant ways. But, I think we can agree that Lawrence Olivier's Hamlet is an adaptation, while Tom Stoppard's Rosencranz & Guildenstern Are Dead expands Shakespeare's original narrative through its refocalization around secondary characters from the play.

My own early writing about transmedia may have over-emphasized the "newness" of these developments, excited as I was to see how digital media was extending the potential for entertainment companies to deliver content around their franchises. Yet, Derrick Johnson has made strong arguments that the current transmedia moment needs to be understood in relation to a much longer history of different strategies for structuring and deploying media franchises. Indeed, when I head to University of Southern California each morning to teach, I am given a forceful reminder of these earlier stages in the evolution of transmedia entertainment in the form of a giant statue of Felix the Cat which has sat atop a local car dealership since the 1920s and has become a beloved Los Angeles landmark. Felix, as Donald Crafton, has shown us was a transmedia personality, whose exploits moved across the animated screen and comics to become the focus of popular music and merchandising, and he was one of the first personalities to get broadcast on network American television. We might well distinguish Felix as a character who is extracted from any specific narrative context (given each of his cartoons is self-contained and episodic) as opposed to a modern transmedia figure who carries with him or her the timeline and the world depicted on the "mother ship," the primary work which anchors the franchise. As I move through this argument, I will connect transmedia to earlier historical practices, trying to identify similarities and differences along the way.

1. Spreadability vs. Drillability

At last year's Futures of Entertainment conference, we unrolled the concept of "spreadability" which is the central focus of my next book, which is now being written with Sam Ford and Joshua Green. Spreadability refered to the capacity of the public to engage actively in the circulation of media content through social networks and in the process expand its economic value and cultural worth. Writing in response to that argument, Jason Mittell has proposed a counterveiling principle, what he calls "drillability" which has some close connection to Neil Young's concept of "additive comprehension" cited above. Mitell's discussion of drillability is worth quoting at length here:

"Perhaps we need a different metaphor to describe viewer engagement with narrative complexity. We might think of such programs as drillable rather than spreadable. They encourage a mode of forensic fandom that encourages viewers to dig deeper, probing beneath the surface to understand the compleity of a sotry and its telling. Such programs create magnets for engagement, drawing viewers into the storyworlds and urging them to drill down to discover more...The opposition between spreadable and drillable shouldn't be thought of as a hierarchy, but rather as opposing vectors of cultural engagement. Spreadable media encourages horizontal ripples, accumulating eyeballs without necessarily encouraging more long-term engagement. Drillable media typically engage far fewer people, but occupy more of their time and energies in a vertical descent into a text's complexities."

A key phrase here may be "necessarily" since we've seen that helping to spread the message may well be central to enhancing viewer engagement and may encourage further participation - as we've seen in the past few weeks where the release of Susan Boyle's album, more than six months after the participatory circulation of her original video, has broken sales records this year, swamping by something like seven to one the release of an album by American Idol winner Adam Lambert.

Yet, Mittell invites us to think of a world where many of us are constantly scanning for media franchises that interest us and they drilling down deeper once we find a fiction that captures our imagination. Both potentials may be built into the same transmedia franchise, yet they represent, as he suggests, different dimensions of the experience, and there may well be cases where a franchise sustains spreadability without offering any real depth to drill into or offers depth and complexity without offering strong incentives to pass it along through our social networks. More work needs to be done to fully understand the interplay between these two impulses which are shaping current entertainment experiences.

2. Continuity vs. Multiplicity

I mentioned earlier that some of my recent thinking about transmedia starts to challenge the idea of a "unified experience" which is "systematically" developed across multiple texts. It is certainly the case that many transmedia franchises do indeed seek to construct a very strong sense of "continuity" which contributes to our appreciation of the "coherence" and "plausibility" of their fictional worlds and that many hardcore fans see this kind of "continuity" as the real payoff for their investment of time and energy in collecting the scattered bits and assembling them into a meaningful whole. We can see the elaborate continuities developed around the DC and Marvel superheroes as a particular rich example of the kind of "continuity" structures long preferred by the most dedicated fans of transmedia entertainment.

Yet, if we use these comic book publishers as a starting point, we can see them pushing beyond continuity in more recent publishing ventures which rely on what I described in my contributions to Third Person as a logic of "multiplicity." So, for example, we can see Spider-Man as part of the mainstream continuity of the Marvel universe, but he also exists in the parallel continuity offered by the Ultimate Spider-Man franchise, and we can see a range of distinctly separate mini-franchises, such as Spider-Man India (which sets the story in Mumbai) or Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane (which stands alone as a romance comic series for young female readers). And indeed, some of these experiments - Spider-Man India, the DC Elseworlds series - use multiplicity - the possibility of alternative versions of the characters or parallel universe versions of the stories - as an alternative set of rewards for our mastery over the source material.

Multiplicity allows fans to take pleasure in alternative retellings, seeing the characters and events from fresh perspectives, and comics publishers trust their fans to sort out not only how the pieces fit together but also which version of the story any given work fits within. We can compare this with the laborious process the producers had to go through to launch the recent Star Trek film, showing us that it does indeed take place in the same universe as the original and is part of the original continuity, but the continuity has to be altered to make way for the new performers and their versions of the characters.

This pleasure in multiplicity is not restricted to comics, as is suggested by the recent trend to take works in public domain, especially literary classics, and mash them up with more contemporary genres - such as Pride and Predjudice and Zombies, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, or Little Women and Werewolves.

The concept of multiplicity paves the way for us to think about fan fiction and other forms of grassroots expression as part of the same transmedia logic - unauthorized extensions of the "mother ship" which may nevertheless enhance fan engagement and expand our understanding of the original. For those franchises where there is a strong desire to police and preserve continuity, fan fiction can be experienced by producers as a threat, something which may disrupt the coherence of their unfolding story, but where we embrace a logic of multiplicity, they simply become one version among many which may offer us interesting insights into who these characters are and what motivates their behavior.

In my class and at the conference, this concept of multiplicity has been experienced as liberating, allowing us to conceive of alternative configurations of transmedia, and lowering some of the anxiety about making sure every detail is "right" when collaborating across media platforms. My key point, though, would be that there needs to be clear signaling of whether you are introducing multiplicity within the franchise, as well as consistency within any given "alternative" version of the central storyline.

TO BE CONTINUED

On the Pleasures of Not Belonging, or Notes on Interstitial Art (Part Two)

Most current academic thinking dismisses the idea that genres are stable and essential categories, that we can determine what genre a work belongs to once and for all, and that doing so tells us all we need to know about the example in question. Instead, this new scholarship talks about what genres do rather than what genres are and describes the processes by which works get classified and reclassified over time.

When these categories are deployed as a system for regulating the production and distribution of culture, The publishing industry is misusing genre theory. As music critic Simon Frith notes, "genre maps change according to who they're for... A committed music fan will soon find, for example, that she's interested in sounds that fit into several categories at once and that different shops therefore shelve the same record under different labels.... It's as if a silent conversation is going on between the consumer, who knows roughly what she wants, and the shopkeeper, who is laboriously working out the pattern of shifting demands. What's certain is that I, like most other consumers, would feel quite lost to go to the store one day and find the labels gone – just a floor of CDS, arranged alphabetically."

So, for Frith, genre categories have some temporary use value in helping consumers find the music they want to hear. But those categories are also subject to recall and modification without notice and are often deployed in idiosyncratic ways, reflecting the personalities of the owners of different record shops or even the whims of the clerks who shelve particular titles. If you print the genres on the book jacket, you automatically limit their shelf life by restricting your ability to shuffle the pieces to reflect changing tastes and perceptions. The result will be as much bad business as bad art.

Of course, on the consumption side, we all adopt very idiosyncratic systems for shelving our books anyway: that's the pleasure of reading someone else's bookshelves as a map of their mind, displaying what things interest them and the perceived relationships between the parts.

You might think that this "shelving" metaphor for thinking about the cultural work of genres would break down quickly in a world where fewer and fewer books are purchased in brick-and-mortar bookshops and more and more of them are being bought online, where listings can be easily reconfigured, where the same book can be listed in an infinite number of categories.

Paradoxically, though, genres have had a tighter hold on our imagination in recent years as the range of cultural choice has broadened and audiences have fragmented. Film historian Rick Altman tells us that far from imposing rigid boundaries between genres, the old studio system depended on the idea that the same film could appeal to multiple audience segments at a time when pretty much everyone in the country went to the movies once or twice a week. Hollywood films rarely fit into some narrowly composed category: the same film had to appeal to men as well as women, the young as well as the old, by signaling different entertainment elements ("Comedy. Romance. Action. Exotic Locales. Singing. Dancing....")

Over the course of the 20th century, however, genre categories have become ever more specialized as media industries refine techniques for monitoring and targeting particular clusters of consumers. These more rigid and precise subgenres are the product of a more general tendency towards what anthropologist Grant McCracken calls "specification." Subcultures break down into smaller subcultures, niches become smaller niches in an eternal dance between our desire to differentiate ourselves from and affiliate ourselves with others who share our tastes. There are more different categories of books, records, and films than ever before; all that diversity produces an anxiety that is being met by more aggressive policing of boundaries. Using more sophisticated tools, media consumers are trying to find the "perfect choice," rather than taking for granted that a work designed for a general audience is going to contain some things we like and some things we don't.

And where the market doesn't impose such specifications, we add them ourselves. Catherine Tosenberger has argued that the best fan fiction is "unpublishable" in the sense that it operates across the genre categories, aesthetic norms, and ideological constraints that shape commercial publishing. Fans self-publish in order to step outside those filters. Yet, the fan community also imposes its own categories, which help readers find the "right story" through author's notes that tell us, for example, which "ships" (relationships between specified pairs of characters) are being explored, offer a rough sense of their sexual explicitness or emotional tone, warn us about vexing themes, and so forth. And if you read the letters of comment, there's enormous anger directed at any writer who asks a reader to read a story that doesn't deliver what was promised and, even worse, gives them something they didn't ask for.

All of this focus on using genres to classify and shelve works assumes that we know where one genre ends and another begins and that genre works stay where we put them. Genres may be optical illusions, which come and go like mirages, depending on the ways we look at the texts in question.

In one formulation, genre classifications offer reading hypothesis: we start a book with the assumption that it will follow a certain path; we read it "as" a mystery or as a romance or as a fantasy, and as we do so, we look for those elements that match our expectations: depending on our starting point, we may notice some things or ignore them, make certain predictions or avoid them, value or reject certain elements, form or dismiss certain interpretations. Start from a different hypothesis and you will have a different experience.

Some critics are rereading familiar texts through alternative logics: so, for example, queer cultural critic Alex Doty has made the case for The Wizard of Oz as a power struggle between butch and femme lesbians, Jason Mittell has read the HBO series The Wire as a video game, and Linda Williams reads pornography in relation to Hollywood musicals. Might we see such essays as interstitial criticism?

For some readers, there is a certain pleasure in playing a game where all the parts match our templates (much as a sparrow feels more like a bird than an ostrich does). For other readers, there may be a pleasure in the unanticipated or the indeterminate. Let's hear it for the duck-billed platypus!

Tzvetan Todorov has talked about the "fantastic" as playing with this uncertainty about classification. For instance, most ghost stories create a special pleasure from our uncertainty about whether we are supposed to believe there really are ghosts or whether we are to come up with a natural, logical, real-world explanation for the events. The pleasure, he says, is in toggling between multiple interpretations, not knowing what kind of story we are reading: there was a ghost; the narrator was crazy; or in the Scooby-Doo version, it was all a scheme by the guy who runs the old amusement park.

Even when we kinda knew where the ghost story was going, the process of hiding and unveiling can be as much darn fun as a good old fashion striptease. What if we were to imagine the interstitial as another kind of indeterminacy, one that flits between genres in the same way that the fantastic flickers between levels of reality. Maybe this is what Heinz Insu Fenkel is getting at when he writes, "Interstitial works make the reader (or listener, or viewer) more perceptive and more attentive; in doing so, they make the reader's world larger, more interesting, more meaningful, and perhaps even more comprehensible. The reader, who has been seeing black-and-white, suddenly begins not only to see color, but to learn how to see other colors."

Just as there are systems of cultural production where audiences express confusion if a work straddles genres, there are others where artists thrive upon and audiences anticipate mixing and matching genre elements. Take for example the so-called "masala films" that come out of the Bollywood film industry in India and are popular across Asia, Africa, and increasingly the west. The same film might move between historical and contemporary settings, might mix comedy and melodrama, might follow an intense (and disturbing) action sequence with a musical number, might mix the most sudsy romance with social uplift and political reform, and might acknowledge both Hindu and Islamic traditions. The descriptor "masala" refers to a mixture of spices used in Indian cooking. Just as one would be disappointed if an Indian dish only contained one spice, the Bollywood spectator would be disappointed if a Hindi film contained only one genre.

We are seeing greater cultural churn as more and more works move across national borders, get picked up by new artists and audiences, get combined in new ways, paving the way for nouvelle culture in the same way that the global availability of spices and ingredients has led many of our best chiefs to experiment with radical departures from and reinventions of traditional cuisines. The anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has contrasted a classic understanding of cultures as so many exhibits in an ethnographic museum with a more contemporary notion of cultures as garage sales, where people push, pull, and paw over other people's used stuff before taking it home, trying it on for size, and altering it to suit their needs.

Many young American consumers are using the web in search of Korean dramas, Japanese anime, Latin American telenovelas, or Bollywood films, anything that takes them outside the parochialism of their own culture. The result really does defy any classification: look at something like Tears of the Black Tiger which starts as a classic Thai novel, throws in a little opera, adds a much more intense color palette, and tells the man's story as a western and the woman's story as a '50s style melodrama to suggest that the two protagonists are living in different worlds.

Globalization is simply one of a number of forces which are breaking down the tyranny of genre classifications and paving the way for experimentation within popular storytelling. In his book Everything Bad is Good For You, Steven Johnson makes the argument that the most popular forms of entertainment today are popular because they make demands on our attention and cognition. For example, a television show like Lost, one of the top ratings successes of the past decade, demonstrates a level of complexity that would have been unimaginable on American television a few decades ago; with its large scale ensemble casts of characters, its flashes forwards and backwards in time, its complex sets of puzzles and enigmas, its moral ambiguities and shifting alliances, but also its uncertain and unpredictable relationship to existing television genres.

If we knew what the operative genre model was, we might figure out what's really happening on the island, but without such a clear mapping, we remain pleasurably lost. Such dramas thrive in part because they support robust internet communities where readers gather online to compare notes, debate interpretations, trace references, and otherwise have fun talking with each other. Its interstitial qualities are essential to Lost's success, even as they account for why other viewers got frustrated and gave up on the series convinced that it was never going to add up to anything anyway.

Lost illustrates another tendency in contemporary popular culture towards what I call transmedia storytelling. Lost is not simply a story or even a television series; Lost is a world that can support many different characters and many different stories that unfold across multiple media platforms. As these stories move across media platforms, Lost also often moves across genres: not unlike early novels, which might be constituted through mock letters, journals, and diaries, these new stories may mock e-mail correspondence, interviews, documents, websites, news magazine stories, advertisements, computer games, puzzles, cyphers, and a range of other materials which help make its world feel more real to the reader. These transmedia works will add a whole new meaning to the concept of interstitial arts.

So, to borrow from Charles Dickens (who borrowed from everyone else in his own time), this is the best of times and the worst of times for the interstitial arts. In such a world, the interstitial thrives and it withers. It finds receptive audiences and harsh critics. It gratifies and grates. It inspires and confuses. Above all, it gives us something to talk about. It opens us up to a world where nothing is what it seems and where little belongs, at least in the narrow sense of the term. We're going Out There!

What happens next is in your hands. Read. Enjoy. Debate. Tell your friends. But also create. Write. Appropriate. Remix. Transform. Just leave your cookie cutters and jelly molds at home. We can figure out what shelf this belongs on later.

Bibliography

Ellen Kushner, "The Interstitial Arts Foundation: An Introduction," in Nebula Awards® Showcase 2005, edited by Jack Dann (ROC/PenguinPutnam, March 2005), http://www.interstitialarts.org/essays/kushner_iaf_an_introduction.php

Delia Sherman, "An Introduction to Interstitial Arts: Life on the Border," http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/intro_toIA.html

Susan Stinson, "Cracks," http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/reflectionStinson.html

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (University of Texas, 1982).

Heinz Insu Fenkl, "The Interstitial DMZ," http://www.interstitialarts.org/why/the_interstitial_dmz_1.html

Barth Anderson, "The Prickly, Tricky, Ornery Multiverse of Interstitial Art," http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/reflectionAnderson.html

Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Harvard University Press, 1998).

Rick Altman, Film/Genre (British Film Institute, 1999).

Grant McCracken, Plenitude 2.0: Culture by Commotion (Periph: Fluide, 1998).

Catherine Tossenberger, Potterotics: Harry Potter Fan Fiction on the Internet, Dissertation, University of Florida, 2007.

Alex Doty, Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (Routledge, 2000).

Jason Mittell, "All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling and Procedural Logic," in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (MIT Press, 2009).

Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (University of California Press, 1999).

Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cornell University Press, 1975).

Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Reworking of Social Analysis (Beacon Press, 1993).

Charles Vess, "Interstitial Visual Arts: An Impossible Marriage of Materials," http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/marriage_of_materials.html

Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You (Riverhead, 2006).

Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton University Press, 1988).

John Caughie, Theories of Authorship: A Reader (Routledge, 1981).

Peter J. Rabinowitz, "The Turn of the Glass Key: Popular Fiction as Reading Strategy," Critical Inquiry, March 1985.

On the Pleasures of Not Belonging, or Notes on Interstitial Art (Part One)

Last January, I wrote the following essay to run as the foreword for a recently published collection of short fiction -- Interfictions 2: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing -- which was edited by an old friend, Delia Sherman. The essay offers my explanation of what we mean by "interstitial writing" and my exploration of the deforming and informing value of genre in contemporary storytelling. Over the next installments, I will also be featuring an interview with Delia about her goals for the book and an interview with some of the contributors about their relationship to the genre conventions of popular fiction. I am hoping that this series of posts will serve to introduce readers of this blog to the work of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, a really wonderful group of writers and thinkers, who are on the frontiers of contemporary popular fiction. This pendant, inspired by my introductory essay, was produced by artist Mia Nutick as part of an auction being organized around the book. For more, see http://iafauctions.com/

On the Pleasures of Not Belonging

Henry Jenkins, 2009

(Note: The following essay appeared as the introduction to Interfictions 2, the recently-released anthology of interstitial fiction from the Interstitial Arts Foundation.)

"Please accept my resignation. I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member."

– Groucho Marx

Let's start with some basic premises:

1. I do not belong in this book.
2. The contributors also do not belong.
3. You, like Groucho Marx, wouldn't want to belong even if you could. Otherwise, you probably wouldn't have picked up this book in the first place.

Let me explain. The editors of most anthologies seek stories which "fit" within prescribed themes, genres, and topics; the editors of this book have gone the opposite direction – seeking stories that don't fit anywhere else, stories that are as different from each other as possible. And that's really cool if the interstitial is the kind of thing you are into.

At the heart of the interstitial arts movement (too formal), community (too exclusive), idea (too idealistic?), there is the simple search for stories that don't rest comfortably in the cubbyholes we traditionally use to organize our cultural experiences. As Ellen Kushner puts it, "We're living in an age of category, of ghettoization – the Balkanization of Art! We should do something." That "something" is, among the other projects of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, the book you now hold in your hands.

Asked to define interstitial arts, many writers fall back on spatial metaphors, talking about "the wilderness between genres" (Delia Sherman), "art that falls between the cracks" (Susan Simpson), or "a chink in a fence, a gap in the clouds, a DMZ between nations at war" (Heinz Insu Fenkel). Underlying these spatial metaphors is the fantasy of artists and writers crawling out from the boxes which so many (their publishers, agents, readers, marketers, the adolescent with the piercings who works at the local Borders) want to trap them inside. Such efforts to define art also deform the imagination, not simply of authors, but also of their readers.

All genre categories presume ideal readers, people who know the conventions and secret codes, people who read them in the "right way." Many of us – female fans of male action shows, adult fans of children's books, male fans of soap operas – read and enjoy things we aren't supposed to and we read them for our own reasons, not those proposed by marketers. We don't like people snatching books from our hands and telling us we aren't supposed to be reading them.

One of the reasons I don't belong in this book is that I'm an academic, not a creative artist, and let's face it, historically, academics have been the teachers and enforcers of genre rules. The minute I tell you that I have spent the last twenty years in a Literature department, you immediately flash on a chalkboard outline of Aristotle's Poetics or a red pen correcting your muddled essay on the four-act structure. Throughout the twentieth century, many of us academic types were engaged in a prolonged project of categorizing and classifying the creative process, transforming it to satisfy our needs to generate lecture notes, issue paper topics, and grade exam questions. After all, academics are trapped in our own imposed categories ("disciplines" rather than "genres") which often constrain what we can see, what we can say, and who we can say it to. Academics are "disciplined" through our education, our hiring process, our need to 'publish or perish', and our tenure and promotion reviews. Most academics read or think little outside their field of study. As Will Rogers explained, "there's nothing so foolish as an educated man once you take him out of the field he was educated in."

I may gain a little sympathy from you, dear reader, if I note that for those twenty years, I was a cuckoo's egg – a media and popular culture scholar in a literature department – and that I am finally flying the coop, taking up an interdisciplinary position at a different institution, because I could never figure out the rules shaping my literature colleagues' behavior.

Many literature professors may hold "genre fiction" in contempt as "rule driven" or "formula-based" yet they ruthlessly enforce their own genre conventions: look at how science fiction gets taught, keeping only those authors already in the canon (Mary Shelly, H.G. Wells, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Pynchon), adding a few more who look like what we call "literature" (William Gibson, Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick), and then, running like hell as far as possible from any writer whose work still smells of "pulp fiction." Here, "literature" is simply another genre or cluster of genres (the academic mid-life crisis, the coming of age story, the identity politics narrative), one defined every bit as narrowly as the category of films which might get considered for a Best Picture nomination. I never had much patience with the criteria by which my colleagues decided which works belonged in the classroom and which didn't.

What I love about the folks who have embraced interstitial arts is that some of them do comics, some publish romances, some compose music, some write fantasy or science fiction, but all of them are perfectly comfortable thinking about things other than their areas of specialization. In that sense, I do very much belong in this collection as a kindred spirit, a fellow traveler, both phrases that signal someone who does and does not fit into some larger movement. Maybe we can go to each other's un-birthday parties and not belong together.

To be sure, academics are not, as Buffy would put it, "the big bad." We may have gotten inside your head but with a little mental discipline, you can shove us right back out again. Most interstitial artists ritually burned their old course notebooks years ago. They started to write the stories they wanted to be able to read, only to be told by their publisher that their book would sell much more quickly if it could be positioned into this publishing category for this intended audience and to achieve that you just need to cut back on this, expand on that, and add a little more of this other thing. I often picture James Stewart in Vertigo gradually redressing, restyling, and redesigning Kim Novak's entire identity, all the while creepily asserting that it really shouldn't make that much difference to her. That's the process those of us who sympathize with the concept of interstitial arts are trying to battle back into submission or at least push back long enough so that we can demonstrate that there are readers out there, a few of us, who want the stuff that doesn't really fit into fixed genres, though it may bear some faint family resemblance to several of them at once. Viva the mutts and the mongrels! Long live the horses of a different color!

So, you are now about to enter the Twilight Zone, where nothing your freshmen literature teacher taught you applies, where we eat with the wrong forks and wear white shoes after Labor Day. But it doesn't mean that academic genre theory has nothing to contribute to our efforts as readers and writers to step across the ice floes and navigate the shifting sands of the interstitial. For the next few pages, I will be proposing a more contemporary account of how genre works in an era where so many of us are mixing and matching our preferences and defying established categories. The work of genre is changing as we speak – in some ways becoming more constraining, in others more liberating – and genre theorists are rethinking old assumptions to reflect the flux in the way culture operates.

To start with Genre Theory 101, all creative expression involves an unstable balance between invention and convention. If a work is pure invention, it will be incomprehensible – like writing a novel without using any recognizable language. Don't worry: a work that is pure invention is only a theoretical possibility. None of us, in the end, is all that original; we borrow (often undigested) bits and pieces from the already written and the already read; we all construct new works through appropriation and transformation of existing materials. As Michel Bakhtin explains, we don't take our words out of the dictionary; we rip them from other people's mouths and they come to us covered with the saliva of where they've already been spoken before. Sharing stories is swapping spit.

However, If a work is pure convention, it will bore everyone. While most of us feel gratified when a work sometimes meets our expectations and most of us feel somewhat frustrated when a work fails to deliver those particular pleasures we associate with a favored formula, none of us wants to read a book that is predictable down to the last detail. All artists fall naturally somewhere on the continuum, in some ways following the dictates of their genres, in other ways breaking with them. And most readers pick up a new book or video expecting to be surprised (by invention) and gratified (by convention).

As they seek to satisfy our desires for surprise and gratification, genre conventions are both constraints (like strait jackets) and enabling mechanisms (like life vests). They are constraints in so far as they foreclose certain creative possibilities, and they are enabling mechanisms in so far as they allow us to focus the reader's attention on novel elements. In the Russian formalist tradition that shaped my own early graduate education, we didn't speak of "rules"; we spoke of "norms," with the understanding that a work only achieved its fullest potential when it, in some way, "defamiliarized" our normal ways of seeing the world and ordering our experience. Or in another familiar paradigm, the auteur critics embraced those filmmakers who were "at war with their materials," that is, who followed the expectations of genre just enough to continue to be employed by the Hollywood studio system but also sought to impose their own distinctive personality by breaking as many of those rules as possible.

Now, let's consider how some of the writers featured on the Interstitial Arts Foundation website are confronting these competing pulls towards convention and invention as they think about their work. Some are seeking to break with the conventions of genre more dramatically than others; they each lay claim to different positions on the continuum between convention and invention.

Here, for example, is Barth Anderson: "If the work comforts, satisfies, or generally meets the expectations that viewers might carry of a genre in question, then the work is genre. This might even apply to works attempting to redefine genre or works which introduce alien elements and disciplines into the genre mix... Interstitial art should be prickly, tricky, ornery. It should defy expectations, work against them, and in so doing, maintain a relationship to one or more genres, albeit contentiously.... Interstitial art is often upsetting. It rocks worldviews, political assumptions, sacred cows, as well as bookstore shelves." Anderson values surprise and sees genre primarily as a constraint.

Susan Stinson, by contrast, sees the artist as moving between the pleasures of operating within genres and the freedom of escaping their borders: "The gifts of being in a genre – reading the same essays and stories; seeking out the same mentors; publishing with the same magazines and presses; writing books that share shelf space; gathering at workshops, retreats, and conferences often enough to know each other – create a common language... I've felt both embraced and constricted by the conventions of those worlds.... The interstitial idea of thriving in cracks and crevices feels like [another] kind of home. Nurturing active, creative, receptive, demanding relationships and institutions that welcome genre-bending and respect a wide range of sources, traditions, and affinities sounds so good that it scares me. The expanded possibilities for joy are worth the risks." Stinson acknowledges the gratifications of consuming genre entertainment and understands genre formulas as both enabling mechanisms and constraints.

Anderson speaks about the interstitial as "prickly, tricky, ornery," while Stinson sees it as welcoming, "nurturing," joyous, and "receptive." One stresses radical breaks from the genre system, while the other is negotiating a space for singular passions within the system.

MORE TO COME

How Do You Sell an Artsy Board Game?

Part of the pleasure of relocating to the University of Southern California has been the chance to meet a whole new cast of characters, to discover just how intellectually diverse and interesting the students are here -- especially when you factor in that my classes attract students from across the two schools, Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and the School of Cinematic Art --- where I have an appointment. It has always been my pleasure to help introduce some of my students to my readers and give you a glimpse of the kind of conversations that take place in my classroom. A few weeks ago, James Taylor, a student in my Transmedia Entertainment class, booked time during my office hours and came in bearing a beautifully crafted box, proceeded to unpack a game board and pieces, and asked if I wanted to play. We had a great conversation about his project -- The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands -- and the thinking behind his design. What I got a glimpse into was someone who was turning the oft-neglected and modest craft of designing board games into an expressive artform. The game was one which encouraged us to reflect on the nature of play, of representation, and of gender. It was a delightful and engaging provocation, and I wanted to share it with you now. I got even more interested when I asked him what he planned to do with his game and he described the process by which he was putting the game onto the market via a microfinancing website. I thought even those of you who are not into games might enjoy learning more about the new kinds of entrepreneurship which are emerging within a networked culture.

Microfinance and the Market for Independent Board Games

by James Taylor

The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands is a fantastical board game with a rich history, an unusual narrative, and surreal Victorian-style artwork. It is a board game that sits comfortably at the intersection of art, logic and literature. It pushes boundaries and opens critical discussions in each of these realms: the board art needs to stand on it's own, but also remain subservient to the game play; the story provokes questions of gender, desire, master-servant relationships, reliable narration, and the permutations of the game over a questionable 200 year history; and the game itself has a rule set that structures a peculiar mode of courtship.

Yet, can a small, provocative game ever make it in the (somewhat stalled) American board game industry? Is there a market for small, art-house board games?

How the Game Works -

"The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands (TGSSI) is an absurd logic puzzle about crossing bridges. The bridges determine how many people can cross. The gentlemen are each trying to strain the group in order to converse with Lady Ashley alone."

It is worth noting that the game is based on an old riddle. In the riddle, a farmer is trying to cross a river in a canoe with a fox, a chicken and a sack of corn. He can only take one at a time so he has to carefully plan his trips back and forth, without ever leaving the fox with the chicken, or the chicken with the sack of corn. TGSSI is a two-player game with a similar feel. Each of the gentlemen characters is trying to speak with the lady Ashley alone, and must use the bridges to constantly separate and recombine the group. A mathematician friend of ours calculated about 300,000 possible arrangements for the pieces on the board.

Matters of Academic Interest -

Art & the Dilemma of Perspective -

After refining the rules for several months, I met with the board artist, Dan Gray. We knew we wanted a top-down view of the islands, because that's what's best for the game-play. But we quickly found that a matter-of-fact, top-down view of the islands wasn't visually interesting - we were losing a lot of the detail and character of the locations by only showing them from above. After some thought, we decided it would be best to take a lesson from the cubists, and crack the perspective in order to accommodate the top-down play-view, while also managing to include the buildings, monuments, and ruins of the islands at mixed angles. The scale of the locations is also mixed. (For example, the octopus is bigger than the cathedral and the boat is larger than the volcano.) The result is a gameboard with a rather warped perspective. It is a top-down vantage point of the islands as though seen through a piece of wavy, distorted glass, and this distortion for the board would later serve as the inspiration for the themes of distortion that run throughout the narrative.

Making the Game British -

There were two reasons for making the game British. Looking back, it now seems like an obvious choice because of the high level of politeness built into the rule structure (the group typically moves together as a matter of decorum because it would be impolite for a character to walk off in a different direction), but there was another reason as well that had more to do with the objective. The core mechanic of the game is about stepping aside with a lady - and this is an objective that can be read the wrong way, to say the least. In light of this complication, we insisted on the word "Gentlemen" in the title, to squash any accusations of underhanded intentions. Given the high-level of social decorum, and the word "Gentlemen" in the title, the game just seemed British, so we decided to run with it.

Questions of Gender and the Focus of Desire -

At first glance, the game appears to be a simple, perhaps ridiculous, love story in which two men are competing for the attentions of Lady Ashley. Simple enough. But questions of sexism are distributed, alleviated and then further compounded throughout all of the materials of the game. The representations of gender are contradictory because these questions are mixed with questions of the reliability of the character descriptions and the permutations of the game over it's 200 year history. Whether the game is played in a male-centric universe is a fertile ground for debate.

Soon after opening the box, a player will discover that no one controls the female characters. The rules state: "the Ladies move on their own turn and move independently of the group." The phrasing (deliberately) implies that the girls are aloof and disinterested, that they do not care about this and have other places to be. But the problem of gender is unavoidable: if no one controls the Lady characters, then they do not have creative agency. Instead, they move along a set path. The question of gender in the rules sends the players outwards to explore the character booklet.

According to the narrative materials of the game, it was invented by two wealthy (and perhaps mildly insane) gentlemen living on an island. They devised the rule set. This means that we are not looking at the "official rules" of a courtship, by any means, but rather we are looking at what two gentlemen, in their paired delusion, imagined those rules to be. The gentlemen characters are ridiculous enough that it's hard to take them seriously. If they weren't getting gender right, then, well, nor were they very adept at anything else. Jules is a manufacturer of distorted glass and Hodge's "maps might find their best place in a childrens' coloring book." Again, the theme of distortion (originating with the game board art) runs deep throughout the narrative and the game.

A more nuanced look at gender and desire reveals even more. At the end of the character booklet, Jules suggests to Hodge that they should save themselves the "legwork" of chasing after her. He suggests that Hodge "draw up a map of these islands" so that they may resume in the "cool shade of representation." The implication here is that Hodge (the cartographer) drew up a map to serve as the game board, and that Jules (the manufacturer of distorted glass) provided the melted marbles for the pieces. The final image in the character booklet shows them playing the board game. At this stage, Lady Ashley is nowhere to be found. She has been pushed out of the frame and nearly out of the scope of the game. In the image, it is as if the two gentlemen are content to compete with each other over her as an imagined trophy and this might have been the case all along. Is Lady Ashley simply a cipher in order for the 2 gentlemen to keep score with each other? Or rather, is she a canvas on which to paint their affections for one another? Once they reach the stage of playing out the courtship as a board game, one gets the sense that the game is less and less about her.

To determine if the game is in fact sexist - if the world is in fact a male-centric universe - we can find more information in the descriptions of the characters. As we know, Lady Ashley is described as an absent-minded wanderer. This is not a particularly empowering, or redemptive view of the female character, but it's hard to say whether the narrator's description is at all reliable. On a page of direct quotations, Lady Ashley states: "I simply find it odd, that not one person on these islands has asked me even a single question ... Yet clearly I am in the middle of something..." So if we can trust this quotation, and if no one has asked her a single question, then how can we possibly believe the narrator's three-paragraph description? Especially when there is evidence that contradicts even his basic description. A publisher's footnote from a 1925 version of the game reads:

According to the partial memoirs of J.T. Trotwood, there was indeed a Lady Ashley who briefly visited these isles. In reality she was a naturalist commissioned by the British Royal Society to collect flower specimens.

This is a more empowering view of her, but without a firm grounding in truth, one can simply not say who (between the narrator and the gentlemen and the multiple editors) is providing trustworthy information. If in fact there was a Lady Ashley to visit these islands, her true identity might be lost forever under a history of unreliable male narration. While gender remains an issue, perhaps it is easiest to allay the concerns of sexism by discounting the men. The epitaph introducing the game seems to speak on Lady Ashley's behalf. It reads,

"When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools."

The Layers of Story -

Owing to the loose "facts" of the game, it is quite difficult to determine the exact history, or even to count the number of diegetic layers. However, a rough estimate turns up between six and eight layers of story. We start with the original competition on these islands that was played (on foot ) by crossing bridges to speak with the lady. Because it is hard to say if there was ever a woman on these islands, the second diegetic layer is possibly what Jules and Hodge imagined in order to occupy their time. We know that at some point, the gentlemen decided to sit down and create a representation of the game, at which point Hodge drew up a map of the islands and Jules provided the pieces. Later on, the game and several historical documents from these islands were discovered, and the game was brought back to England and published by Edward B. Tickert. 100 years later I myself played a beat-up, depleted copy of the game in a pub in England and decided to seek out more information (which makes me perhaps the 4th or 5th diegetic layer.) Long-story short, I acquired the rights to republish the game. The players who buy the game are acting out the roles of Jules and Hodge as they play, well, the characters Jules and Hodge in the game. Finally, if I pass the game to a larger publisher, they will create yet a seventh layer of editorial commentary; and if we include essays and comments about the game to be included in the box...then the public discourse becomes yet another layer.

The game's history relies on an elaborate, interlocking web of historical documentation surrounding different episodes in the game's discovery and development. The layers of the game create the following epistemological paradox: one can only sort through the facts of the game's history by referring to other questionable facts of the game's history.

Much like Freud's dreams, every element followed will lead to another significant element in a vast web of significance.

Going Transmedia -

There is a nice array of transmedia elements surrounding the game. Perhaps most noteworthy is the upcoming documentary, in which several historians and professors discuss the origins of the game and it's 200 year history. We wanted to build up a rich environment of critical discourse surrounding the game. We wanted to tease out the details of this absurd British colony in the midst of which the game was created. In essence, we wanted to take a simple game and discuss it not only as a historical artifact, but also as a game based on a real events. The fun in the short documentary is in taking a fantastical game and discussing it as a very real representation of an antiquated courtship. It's an anthropological approach to a strange, fictional culture.

The documentary about the islands gestures toward the game, while the game raises questions that demand further exploration in the documentary. Both of them point to other media properties. Kim Moses (co-producer of The Ghost-Whisperer TV series on CBS) describes this type of cross-referencing media as an Infinity Loop.

Marketing, Micro-funding & KickStarter.com -

Basically, on our financial budget, it doesn't make sense to print 500 copies of the game unless we know we have 500 buyers.

We have chosen to assess the level of public and investor interest in The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands by posting it to a microfunding site called Kickstarter.com. On this site, people can preorder the game, or become benefactors. If there is enough interest in the game from the public, then we will move forward and print the first 500 copies.

According to the website, "Kickstarter is a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers..." They advertise their website as a way for project creators to "pool" their social networks and turn them into an micro-investment community. It is highly encouraged on the site to offer incentives for different levels of investment.

Another unique aspect of kickstarter is that it is all or nothing. People who post projects set a funding goal for the project. If the goal is met in the two-month time period, everyone who contributed is charged the amount that they pledged. But f the goal is not met, no one is charged, and the project receives no money to move forward. The website offers three reasons for it's sink or swim approach:

1. It's less risk for everyone this way. If you need $5,000, it can suck to have $2,000 and a bunch of people who expect you to be able to complete a $5,000 project.

2. It allows people to test concepts (or conditionally sell stuff) without risk. If you don't receive the support you want, you're not compelled to follow through.

3. It motivates. If you want to see a project come to life, it helps to spread the word.

The site encourages creative marketing, and necessitates spreading the link to the site as far as possible. Here are the things they encourage potential project creators to consider:

1. How will you tell people about your project? The key to a successful project is asking your networks, audience, friends and family for help. Kickstarter is a tool that can turn your networks into your patrons; it is not a source of funding on its own.

2. Rewards are very important. Offer something of real value for a fair price. And more experiential rewards, things that loop backers into the story, are incredibly powerful. Most of the successful projects include them -- take a look around the site and you'll see some great examples. PS: Three or four reasonably priced rewards seems to work quite well (think of it as S, M, L, XL).

3. Include a video. It's more personal.

4. Be clear and specific about your project's goal.

5. And finally, when it comes to your funding goal, raise as little as you'll need to move forward. Projects can raise more, but never less.

In order to preserve the integrity (and strangeness) of The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands (TGSSI), we have found this micro-investment site to be the best approach. We are selling a fantastical board game with a deep, rich story across multiple platforms. Moreover we are selling it in a country that has slim-to-no independent market for board games.

It seems that the game could find it's home in high-school or college classrooms, but one can't help but notice that studying games is not a common practice in our education system. But why is that? Perhaps this last question is better left to someone more qualified to answer it.

James Taylor is graduate student in Interactive Media at USC's School of Cinematic Arts. Resisting the current of digital media, he has chosen to work primarily with board games. You can order the game here.

Click Click Ranger: A Transmedia Experiment for Korean Television (Part Two)

Circular Nexus of Screens Why does Click Click Ranger need this complicate maneuver over multiple forms of screens, and for what purpose? In order to dissect the discursive logic behind this nexus of screens, we need to understand the current configuration of these screens in Korea.

Mobile Phones: The prodigy of Korean IT mythology.

Click Click Ranger's experiment of incorporating the mobile phone into a television show directly corresponds to the recent development of Korea's mobile phone industry in the convergent media paradigm. Since ETRI and the consortium of corporations launched the world's first commercial CDMA mobile phone service in 1996, Korea has been a step ahead in exploring CDMA based technological innovations and the latest mobile media services including mobile TV (DMB: Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) and Wibro (the first wireless high-speed broadband). Following SK telecom (the major wireless network provider in Korea)'s 3G mobile content service June in 2002, Korean wireless companies have explored the diverse forms of mobile multimedia content. I conveniently categorize content for mobile phone into two types: "migrated mobile content" which refers to repurposed and repackaged content from conventional media and "original mobile content" that is initially produced for mobile screen devices such as mobile cinema and mobile drama)(Ok, 2008). In the midst of industrial effort to find the 'right' content for mobile screen, these new hybrid forms of moving images explore the aesthetics of convergence that continues and at the same time disrupts the conventions of existing media forms. Mobile TV has expanded the horizon of the mobile screen by combining mobile telecommunication technology and broadcasting.

While mobile phone content service and Mobile TV serve as extended venues for conventional media, the conventional media have also tried to incorporate mobile screen technologies into their formats in many different ways. Overall, the most heated concern for both parties is how to develop 'new' content that fit the condition of media convergence, which is often expressed as a 'media big bang' and 'content war' in popular media in Korea (Kim & Lee, 2005). Click Click Ranger is an early attempt to tackle this challenge on the television network side, which continued to the fever of UCC (User Created Content). Following Click Click Ranger, other television networks and popular media organizations launched similar programs such as SBS's "Uporter" system. Literally, "Uporter" means "ubiquitous reporter" and it mobilizes citizens to capture news on the street with their digital camera or mobile phone camera, which are then selectively shown through regular News shows on SBS.

Click Click Ranger's use of mobile phone imaging directs attention to the multifaceted nature of the mobile phone. Notably, MSM (multimedia short message) which allows users to attach pictures or short video clips to a mobile phone message is generally discussed as a private communication tool or a vehicle to expand private space with the combined practice of blogging. Although the formation of shared 'community'- whether it is exclusive or relatively open to the general public- has also been discussed, the prevailing assumption is on the practice of 'private imaging' among individuals. Compared to this model of private imaging, Click Click Ranger's adoption of mobile phone imaging is closer to and continues the practice of "citizen journalism" only with changed technologies- from the (video) camera and to the mobile phone-. Hence, while being true to the technological premise of the medium that provides 'personal mobility' (for the mobile rangers and citizen reporters), their mobile phone imaging resides in and further serves to reinstate the value of the public. Most of all, it is the particular use of the outdoor screen with the mobile screen that distinguishes Click Click Ranger from other home-video shows or citizen reports programs and enables it to construct a broader discourse of the 'public space' out of mobile screen usage in Korea.

Outdoor Screens

City Hall Square during World Cup Soccer in 2002

Okay. Click Click Ranger was able to find a way to connect the mobile phone to the television. Now, what makes this nexus of screens unique is the presence of the large LED screen as an integral part of the television show. Simply put, in Click Click Ranger, the large LED Screen technically functions as an additional outdoor TV to broadcast its program. Although the use of the mobile screen is also equally unconventional, the potential of mobile phones as screen media has already been explored in diverse ways. Yet the large LED screen, in spite of its ubiquity in urban landscapes of the global metropolis, has received little attention in the conventional media industry other than in the outdoor advertising business. Becoming one of the latest form of screen media, the Large LED screen not only succeeds the function of the commercial or public advertising that outdoor billboards once fulfilled but also continues the visual pleasure of the urban spectacle. Since 2000, the LED screen in Korea was moved from the category of 'outdoor advertising' to the 'LED display screen broadcasting,' becoming one of the 'broadcasting-telecommunication convergent media' that would be governed under the new broadcasting laws.

Compared to the traditional TV at home, the experience of outdoor TV is deeply conditioned by the material condition of place, as TV screen is usually an implemented part of the architectural surroundings. That is, the location where outdoor TV displays, whether it be waiting room, subway/train station or rooftop of building, tends to predetermine the content and flow of content on outdoor TV screens. At the same time, the meaning of place is also rendered by the viewer's activity of watching TV: If in Seoul, the subway station might turn into a living room momentarily for the passengers who enjoy entertainment show clips on ubiquitous screen panels installed inside the train and/or waiting area, beyond its practical functions. In Click Click Ranger, it is the symbolic meaning of 'public space' (as in the location of Seoul City Hall) that the commercial LED screen in City Hall Plaza embodies and that Click Click Ranger systematically appropriates and reproduces. Then, why is the location of Seoul City Hall Plaza crucial for linking up-to-date screen technologies?

Physically located at the busy intersection of the political and economic center of the downtown Seoul, the Seoul City Hall Plaza has served as a central place for many important national events. By running the show on the rooftop of city hall building following the fashion of 'live news report on spot,' Click Click Ranger successfully appropriates the sense of 'liveness' and intentionally adds 'moral weight - news-worthy-ness-' to the clips. This simulated urgency and liveness that supports the show's goal of being connected to everyday realities of Korea is intensified on the symbolic level since for Koreans the Seoul City Hall Plaza is the emblematic center for national identity as manifested during the World Cup Soccer tournament in 2002.

The image of the Seoul City Hall above illustrates the scene of World Cup Soccer frenzy during which, with the unexpected achievement of the Korean national team going on to the semi-final, crowds gathering in front of the large electronic screens to cheer reached the point of becoming a nation-wide ritual. The intensity and enthusiasm represented by the image of the 'wave of Red Devils' (the official name of Korean team supporters as well as the icon of 2002 World Cup) left an unforgettable impression on Korean popular imaginary. In fact, many Korean scholars agreed that World Cup Soccer frenzy in 2002 does not simply reflect interest in a national sports match but rather represents a demarcating historical moment in Korean society- a culminating point to celebrate regained national pride and strength after the collapse of the economy in 1997. More interestingly, the 2002 World Cup syndrome parallels the increasing self-awareness of Korea's position as a world- leading player in the global information technology industry.

It is not a mere coincidence that the 'mobile phone' and the 'screen' were two of the primary export products of Korea at the time. Led by the semi-conductor chip, various sorts of screens (PDP, LCD/LED screens, computer screens, and the traditional electronic screens) and mobile phones ranked among top three export products in 2005 (Ministry of Information and Telecommunication, 2005). The first pivotal moment when large LED screens came into the public media awareness in Korea was also around the World Cup Soccer in 2002, when it served as a key display venue for broadcasting the Korean national team's matches in public places. The large LED screen that Click Click Ranger deploys is one of the several LED screens that drew large crowds around Seoul City Hall Plaza. In its pilot episode, Click Click Ranger explicitly delivers this intertwined discourse of the screen and the nation. The show dwelled on the significance of City Hall Plaza by inserting clips of City Hall Plaza scenes during World Cup Soccer 2002 and charts with the statistics of mobile phone exports sales. In this way, the culturally accumulated meaning of the particular place of Seoul City Hall Plaza- a center of the civil and nationalistic ideology- enhance Click Click Ranger's attempt to replicate the sense of 'liveness' of live broadcasting and foreground the 'collective' meaning of being networked.

All Together: Networked Public in Wired Korea

Overall, Click Click Ranger represents multilayered meanings of the physical and the discursive movements of images within current Korea: images migrate from the 'micro' screen to the 'macro' screen, from private space to public space and as a result, individuals are assumed to occupy the position of citizens. For instance, in Mobile Ranger, the implication of 'private imaging' constantly changes as it travels across diverse screens: from private imaging to public exhibition on outdoor screen, and back to the private viewing on Mobile TV. In this circulation, mobile phones and Mobile TV, which represent personal screen devices, are mobilized into the formation of 'public space' by conventional media. By creating public space within the domain of private space, Mobile Ranger inevitably questions the fixity of the boundary between private and public space which is considered to be contingent on the specificity of media. When the show is eventually broadcast in mobile TV, the flexibility of the public and private space becomes more intensified. Due to the mobility given to the viewer, the previously established and spatially fixed 'public' dimension of the outdoor screen in city hall square is disrupted as the diverse viewing situations of individual Mobile TV viewers multiply the meanings of space for themselves.

In the end, Click Click Ranger's complicated exhibition process does not simply aim to increase the pleasure of experiencing images, but to foreground the very technological competency of appropriating new technologies. The realization of the idea of 'connecting' these up-to-dated screen technologies symptomatically reveals the social discourse about the importance of 'networked public in wired Korea'. Considering that mobile technology becomes a source of national pride, the cultural use of mobile technology in Korea, especially mediated through the conventional media practices, often invites the individual to the formation of national identity. Not only doesClick Click Ranger resonate with the popular techno-nationalistic discourse around the mobile and new media technologies but it also reproduces it through its construction of imagined citizen within networked screens. In this way, mobile phone imaging meets television and the outdoor screen in City Hall Plaza and in this more or less blunt self-explanatory gesture, Click Click Ranger conjures up the mobile phone exactly at the center of the 'current' Korea.

Works Cited

de Certeau', Michael, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)

Kim, Taek-Hwan & Lee, Sang-Bok, Media Big Bang: Korea changes, (Seoul, Korea: Knowledge Supply Publishing Company, 2005)

Jenkins, Henry, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, (NYU Press, 2007)

McCarthy, Anna, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space, (Duke University Press, 2001)

Ministry of Information and Telecommunication, "Suchiro Bon IT 2005 ( IT 2005 by Statistics)," 29 December 2005.

Ok, Hye Ryoung, "Screens on the Move: Media Convergence and Mobile Culture in Korea," ph.d dissertation, Department of Critical Studies, School of Cinema-Television, University of California, 2008

HyeRyoung Ok is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Irvine, working for the Digital Media and Learning Hub. Currently she is carrying out research for the Public Participation Research Network led by Joe Kahne. As a cultural studies scholar, HyeRyoung looks at newly emerging transmedia culture from interdisciplinary perspective, with a focus on the transition of cinematic tradition to digital media, mobile media culture, and transnational flow of cultural content, particularly in East Asian context.

Click Click Ranger: A Transmedia Experiment for Korean Television (Part One)

I am offering today's post as part of the ongoing conversation I've been having throughout the semester about transmedia storytelling practices. Below you will find the first of two installments written by HyeRyoung OK, a recently minted USC PhD, who I have met through my work with a new MacArthur Foundation Research Hub on Youth, New Media, and Public Participation. She has done some groundbreaking research on the deployment of transmedia practices in Korean television, projects which have gotten very little attention on this side of the world, but which have a lot to offer as an alternative model for how mobile technologies and public space can be deployed as part of a transmedia strategy. Click Click Ranger: A Transmedia Experiment for Korean Television

by HyeRyoung Ok

By now we all know that the mobile phone is not simply a phone anymore. Since its introduction, the mobile phone has evolved into something that constantly broadens and transforms its boundary. Indeed, it is one of the most convergent media devices available that materializes the paradigm of media convergence. In most countries where mobile technology is widely adopted, the mobile phone is rapidly becoming a new outlet for traditional media industries responding to the "visions of wireless phones becoming hand-held entertainment centers." Yet the mobile phone's entry into the existing media environment is not a natural and homogeneous process. Continuing, disrupting, and mixing existing media practices to a newer form, rather, it came to terms with conventional media in heterogeneous ways depending on the socio-culturally specific contexts.

Then, here comes the story of the mobile phone in Korea, the country recently known as "IT powerhouse" where the adventure of the mobile phone ever continues. The mobile phone in Korea is literally a focal point where technical, industrial, and cultural innovations to explore the 'newer' forms of media service converge (see my blog posts on general review of Korean IT practices). What is particularly unique about Korean mobile culture is the continuing emphasis on the potential of mobile phones as 'screen' media. It is not surprising phenomenon considering the weight of 'screen' related - all dimensions of hardware and software - industries in Korean society. I would like to illustrate how the mobile screen is positioned in the flux of these transmedia experiments across new and old media in a culturally specific way through the case of Click Click Rangers: aka Mobile Rangers, an entertainment program on channel MBC in Korea.

Click Click Rangers: aka Mobile Rangers, is an interesting case that shows how the media content is designed to be produced/consumed based on the principle of "connecting" multiple forms of screens: mobile screen, television screen, and outdoor LED screen. Click Click Ranger is one of three sections in the popular Sunday prime time entertainment show, titled !: Exclamation Mark which was broadcast from December 2004 to August 2005 on channel MBC - one of three major television networks in Korea. In Click Click Ranger, the mobile screen is used in two significant ways: mobile phone imaging for moving image production and mobile TV for moving image circulation. Although it was short-lived, this show set up a model for employing mobile phone technology thematically as well as formally into the television program format and inspired other shows in competing networks. As a prototype, Click Click Ranger raises several interesting issues on the relation between new media technology, the existing media conventions, and culture. Taking Click Click Ranger as a starting point, let's begin to explore how Korean television mediates the mobile screen as part of the larger outdoor screen culture and thus complicates the issue of 'convergence of spaces.

Click Click Ranger (aka Mobile Ranger): Capture Korea's Today

Click Click Ranger's catchphrase of "Capture Korea's today" literally and symbolically sums up the goal and the structure of the show: To report the present realities of Korea. In terms of content, Click Click Ranger presents several short video clips of anonymous do-gooders and misbehaviors on the street in a fashion similar to citizen reports. These clips are captured and sent by random citizens and "mobile rangers," a group of pre-selected young college students and volunteers (in total, 100 members). Technically, mobile rangers and anonymous participants capture videos on the street and send clips 'in real time' to the studio while the program is being pre-recorded. It is reported that ninety percent of participants use a mobile phone camera and send clips through the wireless internet on their mobile phone. Most interestingly, Click Click Ranger adopts a multi-screen format of display that tackles the paradigm of media convergence by manipulating the 'flow' of content across media (Jenkins, 2007). The clips captured by mobile phone camera and selected for showing on regular television are simultaneously broadcast on a large LED screen installed over Seoul City Hall Plaza. In fact, the program itself is shot on the rooftop of the city hall building, where two MCs run the show as if they were news reporters as is illustrated in the picture above. Hence, what the viewers on a regular television set at home actually watch are alternating shots between the outdoor screen display, the MCs, and small video clips in quick-time movie format. Later on, the program re-runs on Mobile TV, particularly on the channel BLUE of Satellite DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) service on the following Monday. Following this path, the clips of Click Click Ranger finish their journey from the street to multiple screens encompassing all hot spots ('hot screens') in the current mediascape of Korea as diagram below illustrates.

Creating the Public: Private Imaging and Public Exhibition

To the savvy viewers, who got used to all sorts of strategies to utilize the mobile phone for the television show by now, early attempt of Click Click Ranger may not look so fresh. What makes this show unique is the way in which it attempts to employ the mobile phone, an icon of personal media, in the service of constructing the 'public space' within a commercial entertainment. As a matter of fact, from the beginning, ! : Exclamation Mark has built a reputation for being a 'public value concerned entertainment' program. Previous and current sub-sections of the show have adopted 'human documentary' or 'news report' format in which show hosts visit and follow various people, with the goal of promoting the 'good civilian life and consciousness' in the fashion of a public service campaign. So far, its campaigns have been successful in generating issues in public discourse and have had real consequences in social life in Korea. Some of its famous campaigns include: "Let's read books," "Let's obey the traffic sign," "Let's eat Breakfast," "Street Lessons," "Open your Eyes (Donation/Transference of cornea for the blind)," "Asia Asia (Illegal worker's home visiting project)" and so on.

Partially, the show's strategy to foreground public good within entertainment content reflects the unique hybrid characteristic of its network, MBC: MBC is private but at the same time closer to a public broadcasting network. It runs as a private company but is in fact indirectly owned by the government (by KBS, a major public network) and under the direct control of the Commission of Television Broadcasting. This dominant discourse of the program not only circumscribes the content of the clips in Click Click Ranger but also affects its program format. Typical clips of Click Click Ranger would feature various incidents such as violation of minor civil laws, misdemeanors, or good samaritans who help weak, elderly people at the subway station and so on. In each episode, if the best citizen is chosen among the good samaritans, the show's host calls up the mobile ranger on the scene and runs to there to give the samaritan a reward-a golden badge.

(To be continued)

HyeRyoung Ok is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Irvine, working for the Digital Media and Learning Hub. Currently she is carrying out research for the Public Participation Research Network led by Joe Kahne. As a cultural studies scholar, HyeRyoung looks at newly emerging transmedia culture from interdisciplinary perspective, with a focus on the transition of cinematic tradition to digital media, mobile media culture, and transnational flow of cultural content, particularly in East Asian context.

Transmedia Tacos? You Bet!

I recently asked the students in my Transmedia Entertainment and Storytelling class to write short analytic papers on examples of transmedia extensions. I ended up with papers on amusement park attractions, mobisodes, web sites, comic books, computer games, and a range of other media which have been used to expand our experience of popular media franchises. I was impressed across the board with my students's grasp of core transmedia concepts which have proven elusive in public discussion of the concept. Of these papers, this one by Benjamin Burroughs caught me by surprise, since it is exploring the way that transmedia tactics are moving from the entertainment industry to other sectors - in this case, the food industry. Here, Burroughs describes the ways that a local LA vendor has become the source of fascination for highly wired local residents, creating a mystique and perhaps even a mythology around the migrations of a taco truck. Indeed, as this paper suggests, I started to hear rumors of this truck before I even moved to LA, suggesting that the spread of this information extends well beyond the local community.

I would be curious to know whether readers can point to other examples where transmedia strategies are being deployed to create or promote local brands.

Transmedia Tacos: Hybridity, New Media, and Storytelling

By Benjamin Burroughs

The first way I ever heard about the legend of Kogi begins with two ever-present facets of my life, hunger and late nights. While deliberating on where to possibly satiate this beastly hunger at such an hour a group started talking about food and re-telling experiences of recent adventures in dining. This is where I was told about the Kogi myth.

Uncle John (no relation, a local Hawaiian title for esteemed family friend) told my wife and me about his first trip in tracking down an elusive Kogi kimchi taco. He explained that the truck stops at different areas and, despite being hesitant, he agreed to go with his friend to get this taco he heard so much about. He said when his friend took him to the spot there was a really long line. He waited in the line for a half an hour and then an hour and just as he was going to get a taco they ran out.

I was not only puzzled but stunned that an engineer like Uncle John was going to wait that long for just a taco. He said they go to a place and serve until they are out of meat. I found it silly to a certain degree but promptly looked at my wife as if to say, 'I got to get me one of those kim chi tacos' (and I don't even remotely like kim chi).

That began our first foray into searching out the 'Kogi dragon'. I googled the thing, read the website, looked up its twitter feed, jumped in the car and literally tracked its movement to a place in Little Tokyo not far from our apartment. Uncle John would no longer be the only privileged purveyor of information. When we arrived I was awed, a huge crowd of people--a diverse cross section of Los Angelenos had converged on this taco stand at just after 11 pm at night. We waited in that line for what seemed like hours (because it was!) and I tasted the forbidden elusive fruit for the first time. I hate kim chi and cilantro but oddly enough I really like these tacos, especially the short rib tacos and kim chi quesadillas. Seriously, you should go try some.

So what could be remotely transmedia about a taco? How can a taco be conceptualized as an integral part of the transmedia storytelling process? It's just a taco not a new medium, right?

We begin by diagramming some of the transmedia components that construct this particular transmedia franchise built around food before moving on to its theoretical justifications. What exactly is this Kogi I was hearing so much about? Kogi has not been around for very long. The company started with one truck last November and has since spawned what some have called a mobile eating revolution. Kogi has gone from one truck to many trucks, including a stationary sit-down restaurant. Awards have come pouring in, along with plenty of media coverage, as Kogi has been reported in every major newspaper from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times, even being listed as one of Jonathan Gold's 99 top LA eating experiences.

As we unpack the buzz surrounding this purported new media innovation, we hope to uncover through our own personal familiarity how this tiny truck stand is blazing a path for transmedia possibilities in food distribution and consumption. It is important to note that we are not looking at a mature transmedia franchise but are looking for where this my take us in an attempt to synchronize the transmedia model to more seamlessly sew together online and offline disjunctures as well as multiple media platforms.

Transmedia Mechanics

Kogi is first and foremost a truck and it is safe to understand the stand and its food content as the 'mothership'. Trucks are one of the oldest modes of food distribution and taco trucks have a particularly rich tradition. With a truck you can constantly be advertising and the truck can construct a unique dialogue with the consumer saying--look, we are one of you, we drive around to the same places and serve you food in your own locales. We are not different, abstract entities or identities but part of the community.

However this form of appeal has seemed limited, trucks as the primary form of food distribution as a business model have largely been untenable, especially in terms of franchising and expanding a company beyond a particular locality. Kogi's uses of new mediated technology and multiple platforms of this technology have attempted to bridge the gulf between the producer and consumer. No longer is the chef a distant 'other' in the back of a large restaurant but is now in close proximity and spatially there is the perception of closeness.

Taking the food to the streets takes on a form of renaissance--a return to a perhaps mythic, forgotten age when food was more interactive and participatory. The truck not only gives a sense of 'street cred' and raw authenticity associated particularly with Mexican taco stands (eating 'real' Mexican as opposed to Taco Bell, although Taco Bell has now gotten into the mobile taco stand game as well, mimicking the perceived success of these start-up franchises). Kogi also has a certain novelty about it because of its manipulation of new technology. Mobile food stands are not new to the cultural food landscape, but this recent re-articulation has been acclaimed as such because it is not just building a relationship with one community but enables a linkage to the cultural heartbeat of an entire city, even one as vast and diverse as Los Angeles.

If we understand transmedia as the reading of multiple texts that help to tell a larger story can we not see the truck as a text not only in its self promotion and banners but in its very form? The truck is speaking to an age of increased mobility, flexibility (flexible specialization), and fluidity in our culture. Can we not read the taco as a text that speaks to the hybridity of a culture and society where Korean kim chi and Latino tacos are representative of larger forces of cultural fusion?

Lastly, as we learned on the very first night of our taco pilgrimage, there is a sociality present in these long lines. These crowds identify and interact with each other, relating experiences with the food--what one should try, particular favorites, where else one could eat in a great blending and sense of communal participation inherent in any vibrant, lasting transmedia franchise. These sorts of informal media channels can and perhaps should be included to enlarge our understanding of transmedia. In our Kogi example this form of knowledge exchange and 'encyclopedia capacity' (Murray 1999) exists less in mediated spaces than other transmedia franchises but there is certainly potential for future transmedia food projects to explore more deeply how to connect consumers in the purely online context. Again, however, it seems important that we not de-value the informal gift exchanges of information that happen in specific communal contexts such as the public practice of waiting in line.

Tweets and Eats

This brings us to the next transmedia component: an online presence. So we have the taco and the stand and even the line as transmedia extensions but what ties these together is the utilization of new media technology. '

First you have the Kogibbq.com website run by the sister of one of the founding members, Aliiiice (this is how her screen name is presented on the blog). Interestingly enough, she lives in New York. She has her brother send her pictures of the food as she updates the community on what is going on with Kogi, portraying an interactive story of the growth and some of the inner workings of the company. She makes things very participatory, engaging the audience by allowing the community to help decide on the names of the new trucks, introducing the personalities of the staff, and explaining the stories behind new foods coming out. This is where Kogi adds a level of seriality (Haywood 1997).

Not only is seriality built into the food process, wanting to eat more after chowing down on a tasty morsel but Alliiice gives you the latest creation from chef Roy Choi so you have a reason to go back every week. People like what they have already eaten so when presented with a new concoction they are hooked into coming back. This is also the logic behind the majority of food advertising but such grand productions lack the intimacy and trust that Alliiice has massaged by being close to the community. She participates quite deeply with the readers of the blog, often commenting herself in the comments section of the blog in a very personal and 'real' manner.

What is most compelling however, is not only the intimacy, but the descriptions of the food. I have on more than one occasion sought out the truck because of what I had read. Sometimes the food is a one day special, so you are literally compelled by the pictures and descriptions to not miss the food served only on that particular day. I am currently thinking about needing to go and get the 'Ride or Die Sweet and Sour Chicken' I just read about.

These are essentially food stories, narratives that shape our encounter with the product and add layers of meaning to that experience. Recently this story was put on the website about a Cuban pressed pork dish. Alliiice writes:

"Once upon a time, there was a bun of Pan BLanco. A piLLow-soft, innocent loaf of angeLs' bread fresh from the warm confines of a simpLe baker's oven.

::SLiiiiiiiiiiiCE!!::

It was a quick and siLent death. Witnesses caught but the quick fLash of a cook's knife and two, snow-white ovaLettes faLLing away from the unforgiving bLade of the kitchen guiLLotine.

Two hands grabbed the symmetricaL, soft remains of Pan BLanco and shoved them face down on a redhot griLL. Fat sLices of juicy red summer tomatoes and spicy pork gathered 'round to mourn her death. But before they couLd pay their proper respects, the Hands of Death snatched her from her grave and sLathered her insides with fatty, unctuous gLobs of chiLi mayo."

It is hard not to get hungry just reading that. But this is not the only level of storytelling that is going on. The use of Twitter has moved these stories from static places online to dramatic emotion laden episodes that one can act out as adventures.

A series of youtube videos sprung up around the beginning of Kogi as part of its marketing strategy but also spontaneously as active audiences filmed and put on the web their own personal treks to find the Kogi tacos.

One of the first to do this was a local area DJ named akaider, the title was called "Chasing the Dragon (The Kogi BBQ Adventure)", who was later invited to start performing alongside some of the trucks stops in Little Tokyo in response to his video.

The twitter feeds make this very participatory. There is an emotional resonance when people are given a space to play and perform as audiences feel empowered to collect the information and connect the dots of where the truck will be at any given place and time. There is a certain degree of prestige in uncovering the buzz, but also great pleasure in sharing that gift in and through social exchanges.

This is mobile hypersocial technology (Ito 2008), as twitter allows for a conversation never before possible. Twitter feeds and tweets tell about the truck coming to an area, if it is stuck in traffic, if the cops made them move to a new area, or if they ran out of food for the day. People want to collect this information and have that 'insider' information on the next big eating thing. This knowledge is especially valued in eating circles as a form of status and coolness associated with the pooling of privileged information.

Transmedia Futures and Cosmopolitan Aesthetics

Food is compelling; it is an integral part of our lives. Although not being altogether obvious, it is not too far a stretch to contextualize the purchasing, eating, dining--the consumption practices of food as interwoven in the very fabric of our lives. Food is conducive to good stories. Food is universal and ubiquitous; we all eat (although economic and cultural stratification are prevalent and important processes beyond the scope of this paper). The consumption of food is often a highly public, commercial enterprise. Food consumption is a hypersocial activity.

Living in an age of convergence culture (Jenkins 2006) where consumers are the point of convergence, appropriators and re-mixers of form and meaning, how will this shape our relation to something as recurrent as eating? A convergence culture is participatory and demands for the reorganization of production.

Kogi is a small example of the new spectatorship that creative artists can maneuver to empower a deeper synergy between production and consumption (or future prosumption) as chefs and diners, food critics and passive consumers can all benefit from the increased connectivity and emotional resonance afforded through transmedia productions. What is going on is the sharing of privileged knowledge and information conveyed as a narrative construction.

Perhaps we really are what and how we eat. Kogi can be representative of larger shifts and cultural trends. It is a Korean and Latin fushion cooking driven by new mediated technologies and platforms that allow for increased sharing and participating. Transmedia has a certain cosmopolitan aesthetic and democratic participation that should be cultivated as we move further into the hybridity and diversity of a networked world.

Sources

Jennifer Haywood, " Mutual Friends: The Development of the Mass Serial," Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (University of Kentucky Press, 1997), pp. 21-51

Ito, Mizuko. 2008. "Networked Publics: Introduction." Pp. 1-14 in Networked Publics, edited by K. Varnelis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Henry Jenkins, "Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmeda Storytelling," Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 93-130.

Janet Murray, "Digital Environments are Encyclopedic," Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 83-90.

Ben Burroughs is currently completing a double degree Masters program from the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism and the London School of Economics and Political Science in Global Media and Communications. He has authored several publications including "Kissing Maccaca: Blogs, Narrative, and Political Discourse "(2007), and is hoping to pursue a PhD in the coming fall. His research interests include: civic transmedia, politics, emergent fandoms, and media anthropology. Ben is a former high school French teacher, who grew up on the North Shore of Oahu. He and his wife presently reside in Los Angeles.

Cordwainer Smith Imagined Convergence Culture (and Viral Media) in 1964

Science fiction writers do not so much invent the future as they inform it. I mean inform here in two ways - first, they give us the information we need to process issues in the present moment and to therefore anticipate some likely consequences of the choices we face as a society and second, having given a vivid picture of a possible future, they inspire scientists, policy makers, and others to reshape reality to conform to their depiction.

How many contemporary technological developments emerged from designers whose imagination was incited by some science fiction novel or television series? Without Star Trek, would we have flip phones? Without Snow Crash would we have had Second Life?

I have been pondering this relationship between science fiction and reality a lot this week having recent taught some short stories by Cordwainer Smith in my transmedia entertainment and storytelling class at USC.

If you just mumbled, "Cordwainer who?," you are not alone. Smith's works are rarely cited today. Smith wrote short stories rather than novels, scattered them across a range of publications, and published many of them after his death. Even hardcore science fiction fans may know him only for his first published story, "Scanners Live in Vane," which is included in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology which is often deployed in science fiction classes. The New England Science Fiction Association collected and republished his stories several years ago as The Rediscovery of Man. Maybe it's time for the rediscovery of Cordwainer Smith.

When I first read "Scanners Live in Vain" some years ago, I was stunned. The writing is challenging and vaguely modernist, especially when compared to the hard edged realism and classicism of his 1950s era contemporaries like Robert Heinlein or Issac Asimov. He thrusts you into the world of the story without much preliminaries; he relished the strange and unfamiliar elements which are dealt with it ways that are at once defamiliarizing (in that they break from our world) and familiarizing (in that they treat these strange elements as if they were perfectly normal, even banal.) In many ways, the story's focus on the fusion of man and machine, which gets depicted with ambivalence rather than dread, helped pave the way for similar representations in the early cyberpunk movement.

As I've read more of his work, I've become fascinated with the ways that he prefigured science fictions fascination with media change - digital media primarily in the case of the Cyberpunks but something very close to what I call Convergence Culture in the case of Cordwainer Smith. Consider, for example, this passage from "The Dead Woman of Clown Town" which seems to anticipate the concept of viral media:

"A bad idea can spread like a mutated germ. If it is at all interesting, it can leap from one mind to another halfway across the universe before it has a stop put to it. Look at the ruinous fads and foolish fashions which have nuisanced mankind even in the ages of the highest orderliness."

Here, Smith tries to capture the perspective of a totalitarian regime which seeks to manipulate the flow of information in order to prevent a shift in public sentiment towards the underpeople, a permanent underculture which exists of half-human/half-animals. Smith warns after a particularly empassioned speech on human rights of the need to reframe what is being said lest it undermine the established order:

"The dog-girl was making points which had some verbal validity. If they were left in the form of mere words without proper context, they might affect heedless or impressionable minds."

Published in 1964, "Dead Woman of Clown Town," can be easily read as an allegory for the civil disobedience and nonviolent protest which shaped not only the then-contemporary protests of Martin Luther King, but also a range of protest movements across Asia during the struggle against colonialism. In the story, the human, Elaine, and the dog-girl, D'Joan, lead an army of underpeople on a march which brings them into the face of armed guards, who obligingly shoot them down or in D'Joan's case, torches her alive, forcing them to confront the brutal consequences of their own discriminatory policies.

Smith's depiction is particularly concerned with the psychological experience of subordination and oppression, using for example the figure of C'Mell, the cat-woman and professional "girly-girl" (escort) in "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" to deal with the ways that the enslaved must develop much greater knowledge of the dominant group than the other way around:

"She had a womanliness which was truer than that of any hominid woman. She knew the value of her trained smile, her splendidly kept red hair with its unimaginably soft texture, her lithe young figure with firm breasts and persuasive hips. She knew down to the last millimeter the effect which her legs had on hominid men. True humans kept few secrets from her. The men betrayed themselves by their unfulfillable desires, the women by their irrepressible jealousies. But she knew people best of all by not being one herself. She had to learn by imitation, and imitation is conscious. A thousand little things which ordinary women took for granted, or thought about just once in a whole lifetime, were subjects of acute and intelligent study. She was a girl by profession; she was human by assimilation; she was an inquisitive cat in her genetic nature....Sometimes it made her laugh to look at human women with their pointed-up noses and their proud airs, and to realize that she knew more about the men who belonged to the human women than the human women themselves ever did."

Key scenes occur at the moment when the human characters are forced to experience something of the subjective experience of the lower castes, as occurs when Elaine gets linked to D'Joan through telepathy, which is understood here as a kind of radicalization process, a shift in sympathy not unlike that experienced by many white liberals in the Civil Rights era who were motivated by the burning of black churches and the slaughter of black children to rethink a lifetime of segregationist practice.

Smith's interest in the concept of information war-fare and media as a resource for political transformation can be explained by his own fascinating life story. Here's some of the details as presented by Wikipedia:

Cordwainer Smith - pronounced CORDwainer[1] - was the pseudonym used by American author Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (July 11, 1913-August 6, 1966) for his science fiction works. Linebarger was also a noted East Asia scholar and expert in psychological warfare...

Linebarger was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His father was Paul M. W. Linebarger, a lawyer and political activist with close ties to the leaders of the Chinese revolution of 1911. As a result of those connections, Linebarger's godfather was Sun Yat-sen, considered the father of Chinese nationalism. As a child, Linebarger was blinded in his right eye; the vision in his remaining eye was impaired by infection. When he later pursued his father's interest in China, Linebarger became a close confidant of Chiang Kai-shek. His father moved his family to France and then Germany while Sun Yat-sen was struggling against contentious warlords in China. As a result, Linebarger was familiar with six languages by adulthood.

At the age of 23, he received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University. From 1937 to 1946, Linebarger held a faculty appointment at Duke University, where he began producing highly regarded works on Far Eastern affairs. While retaining his professorship at Duke after the beginning of World War II, he began serving as a second lieutenant of the United States Army, where he was involved in the creation of the Office of War Information and the Operation Planning and Intelligence Board. He also helped organize the Army's first psychological warfare section. In 1943, he was sent to China to coordinate military intelligence operations. By the end of the war, he had risen to the rank of major....

In 1947, Linebarger moved to the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where he served as Professor of Asiatic Studies. He used his experiences in the war to write the book Psychological Warfare (1948), which is regarded by many in the field as a classic text. He eventually rose to the rank of colonel in the reserves. He was recalled to advise the British forces in the Malayan Emergency and the U.S. Eighth Army in the Korean War. While he was known to call himself a "visitor to small wars", he refrained from becoming involved in Vietnam, but is known to have done undocumented work for the Central Intelligence Agency. He traveled extensively and became a member of the Foreign Policy Association, and was called upon to advise then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

In short, Smith was the consummate political insider both to global politics and to the emergence of what Eisenhower called "the military-industry complex." He brought to science fiction complex theories of communication, psychology, and political change and at the same time, grafted them onto story traditions he had absorbed from classical Chinese literature and he had learned through his global travels. Underlying his almost surreal stories, then, is a deeper understanding of the nature of power and how governments seek to shape the subjective experience of their populations.

Smith's relevance for a transmedia class is two-fold. First, Smith was a consummate world builder. All of his 32 short stories and his novel, Norstrilia, take place within a single timeline which spans more than 16000 years of future history and play out across the interconnected history of many different worlds. He depicts a future which emerges from Earth's past as our cultural traditions are revived, reproduced, forgotten, and reperformed until they have lost much of their meaning, becoming mere formalisms. In this world, he shows an acute understanding of how cultural change impacts the ways we treat each other and how we structure labor and governance. Here, for example, is a vivid passage from "The Story of Lost C'Mell," another key work in his depiction of the undermen:

"Ever since mankind had gone through the Rediscovery of Man, bringing back governments, money, newspapers, national languages, sickness and occassional death, there had been the problem of the underpeople -- people who were not human but merely humanly shaped from the stock of Earth animals. They could speak, sing, read, write, work, love and die; but they were not covered by human law, which simply defined them as 'homunculi' and gave them a legal status close to animals or robots. Real people from off-world were always called 'hominads.' Most of the underpeople did their jobs and accepted their half-slave status without question.... Human beings and hominids had lived so long in an affluent society that they did not know what it meant to be poor. But the lords of the Instrumentality had decreed that underpeople -- derived from animal stock -- should live under the economics of the Ancient World; they had to have their own kind of money to pay for their rooms, their food, their posessions and the education of their children. If they became bankrupt, they went to the poorhouse, where they were killed painlessly by means of gas. It was evident that humanity, having settled all of its own basic problems, was not quite ready to let Earth animals, no matter how much they might be changed, assume a full equality with man."

As this opening passage suggests, Smith treats his readers not as outsiders to whom such worlds must be explained but rather as insiders for whom these worlds are already well known. Consider the opening paragraph of "Dead Woman" which refers not only to some of Smith's other tales but also seeks to debunk existing representations of the events depicted in (yet fabricated for) his story:

"You already know the end -- the immense drama of the Lord Jestocost, seventh of his line, and how the cat-girl C'Mell initiated the vast conspiracy. But you do not know the beginning, how the first Lord Jestocost got his name, because of the terror and inspiration which his mother, Lady Goroke, obtained from the famous real-life drama of the dog-girl D'Joan. It is even less likely that you know the other story -- the one behind D'Joan. This story is sometimes mentioned, as the matter of the 'nameless witch,' which is absurd, because she really had a name. The name was 'Elaine,' an ancient and forbidden one."

Throughout the story, Smith offers many passages which refer outward from the current narration to discuss how the same story was told across many years, across many different media. Here are just a few examples:

"Much later, when people made songs about the strange case of the dog-girl D'Joan, the minstrels and singers had tried to imagine what Elaine felt like, and they had made up The Song of Elaine for her. It is not authentic, but it shows how Elaine looked at her own life before the strange case of D'Joan began to flow from Elaine's own actions."

"There are many famous painting of that scene. Most of the paintings show Elaine in rags with the distorted, suffering face of a witch. This is strictly unhistorical. She was wearing her everyday culottes, blouse and twin over-the-shoulder purses when she went in the other end of Clown Town. This was the usual dress on Fomalhaut III at that time...."

"On the actual stage the actors cannot do much with the scene of the interlude, where Joan was cooked in a single night from the size of a child five years old to the tallness of a miss fifteen or sixteen. The biological machine did work well, though at the risk of her life. It made her into a vital, robust yung person, without changing her mind at all. This is hard for any actress to portray. The storyboxes have the advantage. They can show the machine with all sorts of improvements -- flashing lights, bits of lightning, mysterious rays. Actually, it looked like a bathtub full of boiling brown jelly, completely covering Joan."

"This is the scene which we all remember, the first authentic picture tape of the entire incident."

"You all know about the trial, so there is no need to linger over it. There is another picture of San Shigonanda, the one from his conventional period, which shows it very plainly....This is all clear from the painting, and from the wonderful way that San Shigonanda has of forming them in informal ranks and letting the calm blue light of day shine down on their handsome, hopeless features. With the underpeople, the artist performs real wonders."

"And you have the real view-tapes, too, if you want to go to a museum. The reality is not as dramatic as the famous painting, but it has value of its own. The voice of Joan, dead these many centuries, is still strangely moving....The words of the trial, they too have survived. Many of them have became famous, all across the worlds."

"We know what the Lords Femtiosex and Limanono thought they were doing. They were maintaining established order and they were putting it on tape. The minds of men can live together only if the basic ideas are communicated. Nobody has, even now, found a way of recording telepathy directly into an instrument. We get pieces and snatches and wild jumbles, but we never get a satisfactory record of what one of the great ones was transmitting to another. The two male chiefs were trying to put on record all those things about the episode which would teahc careless people not to play with the lives of the underpeople. They were trying to make underpeople understand the rules and designs by virtue of which they had been transformed from animals into the highest servants of man. This would have been hard to do, given the bewildering events of the last few hours, even from one chief of the Instrumentality to another; for the general public, it was almost impossible."

Smith, thus, depicts a world where the most important stories flow across all available media franchises, get retold many times for many different audiences, with some details being encoded through cultural conventions and others distorted over time. Consider, for example, this description of a gesture which has become more cyptic as it has moved from real-world events to multiple media representations:

"The records show his appearance. He comes in at the right side of the scene, bows respectfully to the four Chiefs and lifts his right hand in the traditional sign for 'beg to interrupt,' an odd twist of the elevated hand which the actors had found it very difficult to copy when they tried to put the whole story of Joan and Elaine into a single drama. (In fact, he had no more idea that future ages would be studying his casual appearance than did the others. The whole episode was characterized by haste and precipitateness, in light of what we now know.)"

Smith's version, then, becomes not the point of origin for the story but rather a debunking of conventional versions.

Not only does he imagine the event as retold many times after they occur, Smith also depicts the events as predetermined because the figures have already become encrusted in mythology. A human intelligence embedded in a computer has run a range of simulations to try to determine how the underpeople can escape their brutal fate at the hands of the human, how they might avoid death. Out of all of the possibilities, she has discovered one which leads to the best possible outcome and she has sought to prepare her followers for that eventuality. Generations have named their children "D'Joan" and have rehearsed the particulars of their mythology so they can play the roles that are required of them. When Elaine, the witch, wonders into their warren by accident, she must be instructed in her expected role and actions, and must be continually reminded her function within the prescripted narrative whenever she seeks to exert free will. Like many of the other scenarios, this script results in the death of its key participants, yet it has the chance of forcing the issue upon the oppressors and forcing them to experience powerful emotions - the pangs of conscience and consciousness - which might lead ultimately to political change.

As we enter the climax of his story, Smith describes not only what happens but how it gets transmitted to subsequent generations, discussing what events were captured by cameras (and in some cases, from what angles) and describing which are preserved in archives, which have been subject to competing interpretations, and which have been restaged and commerated through paintings, video dramas, stage plays, songs, and prose. Such descriptions look forward to our own time when something isn't real until it has been transmitted through all available media channels:

"Fisi, in the pictures, stands back, his face sullen. In that particular frame of scenes, one can see some of the spectators going away. It was time for lunch and they had become hungry; they had no idea that they were going to miss the greatest atrocity in history, about which a thousand and more grand operas would be written."

Smith's writings, thus, anticipate our present transmedia moment and at the same time, offer a critical perspective on how stories flow across media. His own background as an expert on psychological warfare and as an adviser to the intelligence community allows him to anticipate how the spread of information can be manipulated by governments or shaped by dissent movements. In that sense, his references to alternative media presentation of his fictional events represents not simply a formal acknowlegement of the intertextual connections across all of his works but also as a critique of convergence, one written almost fifty years ago.

We might read Smith's fiction as a letter sent from his generation to ours. Too bad so few of us are reading his remarkable stories. Check them out.

To learn more about this remarkable writer, read Karen L. Helleckson's The Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith.

The Aesthetics of Transmedia: In Response to David Bordwell (Part Three)

This is the third and final segment of my response to David Bordwell's thoughtful analysis of some of the pitfalls and challenges associated with transmedia storytelling. Thanks to David for sparking what has been a fascinating exchange, one which has forced me to sharpen my thinking about certain key issues that I am working through for my class.

Bordwell writes:

Another drawback to shifting a story among platforms: art works gain strength by having firm boundaries. A movie's opening deserves to be treated as a distinct portal, a privileged point of access, a punctual moment at which we can take a breath and plunge into the story world. Likewise, the closing ought to be palpable, even if it's a diminuendo or an unresolved chord. The special thrill of beginning and ending can be vitiated if we come to see the first shots as just continuations of the webisode, and closing images as something to be stitched to more stuff unfolding online. There's a reason that pictures have frames.

Again, I'd argue that Bordwell is describing a specific kind of filmmaking, one that may gain very little from transmedia expansion. Yet, as I said earlier, the aesthetic properties of texts that lend themselves to transmedia experience are world-building (as we've been discussing) and seriality. By definition, a serial text is not self-contained. It resolves one chapter and immediately plants the book that will draw us into the next. It is, as Angela Ndalianis stresses in Neo-Baroque, a work which pushes beyond its frame. Now, to be clear, the cliffhangers which have shaped many classic serial forms do depend on an understanding of where one text stops and another begins. But we can see this as an art of chunking rather than framing. They know how to break the story down into meaningful chunks which are compelling emotionally within themselves but which gain greater urgency when read in relation to the other installments of the story. We still have a lot to learn about how to create meaningful chunks and link them together across media platforms. As such, I am watching more and more vintage serials to see how they balance between self-containment and openness.

This may be why transmedia seems so far to work best in relation to television, which is increasingly relying on seriality (and back story) to create a particular kind of aesthetic experience, and where it is applied to film, it seems to work best for franchises which will have a series of increasingly preplanned sequels. No one would take away the aesthetic pleasures of closure and containment, but there are also aesthetic pleasures in seriality, openness, and especially, for me, a pleasure in suddenly understanding how a bit of information consumed in one medium fits into the puzzle being laid out for us in a totally different platform.

So far, transmedia texts have been most compelling while they are mid-process and have tended to disappoint when they reached their conclusion. This phenomenon may tell us something about the degree to which they rely on open-ended and serialized structures rather than the kinds of closure which is the pleasure of a different kind of fiction. The anxious fan wants to know that the producers of Lost isn't making it up as they go along, though of course, on one level, every storyteller is making it up as they go along. The hope though is for a certain level of integrity and continuity between the pieces which allows us to find the coherent whole from which the many parts must have once broken adrift.

For me, though, I am also intrigued by the moment when the story is rich with possibilities, when fan speculations span out in many different directions, and when each of us has taken the parts as resources for constructing our own fictional world. I wrote about this almost 20 years ago in response to Twin Peaks: I was much more interested in the hundreds of complex theories about who killed Laura Palmer that invested fans constructed individually and collectively than I was in the official version which David Lynch and Mark Frost were forced to add under pressure from the networks.

Bordwell writes:

In between opening and closing, the order in which we get story information is crucial to our experience of the story world. Suspense, curiosity, surprise, and concern for characters--all are created by the sequencing of story action programmed into the movie. It's significant, I think, that proponents of hardcore multiplatform storytelling don't tend to describe the ups and downs of that experience across the narrative. The meanderings of multimedia browsing can't be described with the confidence we can ascribe to a film's developing organization. Facing multiple points of access, no two consumers are likely to encounter story information in the same order. If I start a novel at chapter one, and you start it at chapter ten, we simply haven't experienced the art work the same way.

Transmedia storytellers are becoming increasingly skilled at deciding when extensions should be rolled out in relation to the franchise's "mother ship." Some plot developments do require careful sequencing. There's a pleasure to be had in watching Robert Rodriquez's Shorts in making fun of a schoolboy who claims that sharks ate his homework in an early scene and then looping back in time to discover that he is telling the truth. Even though the plot of the film shifts around the story information so we see events out of sequence, there is still a larger rationale determining why we experience these events in a particular order.

The same may be said for the difference between materials released to the web before we encounter the film or television series, which often are designed to help us manage the complexity of an unfamiliar world or an ensemble-centered narrative, and those which come later in the unfolding of the franchise. Enter the Matrix comes at a particular juncture in the film series, while the multiplayer game based on The Matrix comes only after the film series was completed and the Wachowskis wanted to cede greater creative control back to the consumers to take the world in new directions. The Battlestar Galactica webisodes , "Face of the Enemy," which came on the eve of the final season went back in time to refocus us on the character of Felix Gaeta, who had been a secondary figure for most of the run, showing us the events from his point of view and revealing previously unknown aspects of his motivation, just in time to set us up for the character to play a much more central role in the series's final year. This is why transmedia "chunks" often tell us explicitly where they fit into the larger time line and why many of us prefer to read those chunks within a narrative sequence.

So, we may simply be over-stating the degree to which the dispersal of information is open-ended. Certainly, once the information moves beyond the borders of a single text, there's no control over what order the spectator encounters it. And it may not matter in which order we encounter certain aspects of the world building. But it may still be the case that the release and roll out of transmedia content is carefully timed and structured to construct a preferred reading sequence. Geoff Long has called for navigational tools that help viewers to find relevant content and to identify at what point it fits into the unfolding of the larger transmedia story. Given this, I believe that it would be possible to do a formalist reading of a transmedia narrative which mapped the functions of different bits of information and for me, that would go beyond simply a list of joints and citations. It would simply be a task of enormous complexity. Much as Roland Barthes could apply his methods to only a small segment of a Balzac story, Geoff Long has been able to apply the narrative analysis to only a short segment of Jim Henson's transmedia texts.

Bordwell writes:

Gap-filling isn't the only rationale for spreading the story across platforms, of course. Parallel worlds can be built, secondary characters can be promoted, the story can be presented through a minor character's eyes. If these ancillary stories become not parasitic but symbiotic, we expect them to engage us on their own terms, and this requires creativity of an extraordinarily high order.

Well, yes, and these are the functions of transmedia extensions which interest me the most -- and for that matter, the ones which spark the most excitement in the industry types who seem to grasp the concepts the best. It isn't simply about the narrative; it isn't simply about filling in gaps in the plot. "Gap-filling" seems to be a special case: the parlor trick that The Matrix franchises plays with the delivery of information from the doomed Osyrus which unfolds across three different media platforms. More often, transmedia is about back story which shifts our identifications and investments in characters and thus helps us to rewatch the scenes again with different emotional resonance. More often, it is about picking up on a detail seeded in the original film and using it as a point of entry into a different story or a portal into exploring another aspect of the world. And yes, to do this well is creativity of an extraordinarily high order, which is why most transmedia extensions disappoint; they fail to achieve their full potential. Transmedia is appealing to artists of a certain ambition who nevertheless want to work on popular genre entertainment rather than developing avant garde movies or art films. It appeals to intellectually engaged viewers who are more at home with popular culture than with gallery installations.

I'm curious to hear what other transmedia critics and creators are thinking about this exchange.

The Aesthetics of Transmedia: In Response to David Bordwell (Part Two)

Today, I continue to share my responses to David Bordwell's recent blog post on transmedia storytelling. It is worth stressing that these are still early days in the evolution of transmedia narrative practices and even earlier in terms of our theoretical understanding of those practices. Exchanges like this one have the potential to help both critics and practitioners think more deeply about these developments. Every time I step in front of my transmedia class at USC, I feel like I am playing without a net and that's what makes the classroom experience so exciting. We are really thinking through a relatively new phenomenon together. And each set of questions which get posed will push all of us to dig a little deeper. Bordwell wrote:

For one thing, most Hollywood and indie films aren't particularly good. Perhaps it's best to let most storyworlds molder away. Does every horror movie need a zigzag trail of web pages? Do you want a diary of Daredevil's down time? Do you want to look at the Flickr page of the family in Little Miss Sunshine? Do you want to receive Tweets from Juno? Pursued to the max, transmedia storytelling could be as alternately dull and maddening as your own life.

There aren't that many films/franchises that generate profoundly devoted fans on a large scale: The Matrix, Twilight, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Star Trek, maybe The Prisoner. These items are a tiny portion of the total number of films and TV series produced. It's hard to imagine an ordinary feature, let alone an independent film, being able to motivate people to track down all these tributary narratives. There could be a lot of expensive flops if people tried to promote such things.

Well, actually, my bet is that Diablo Cody's penchant for snarky one-liners might have been better served if Juno had unfolded via Twitter rather than on the screen, there are many excellent comic book stories which center around the "downtime" of superheroes and thus focus on their alter egos, but I catch David's drift. I don't think that every fictional work should become a transmedia franchise, though I think the approach lends itself to a broader array of genres than simply the fantasy and science fiction franchises that have been its primary home to date.

For me, the core aesthetic impulses behind good transmedia works are world building and seriality. For this reason, the transmedia approach enhances certain kinds of works that have been udged harshly by traditional aesthetic criteria because they are less concentrated on plot or even character than more classically constructed narratives. It's long been a charge directed against science fiction works that they are more interested in mapping complex environments than in telling compelling stories. Many of my favorite SF novels -- Snow Crash for example -- break down into near incoherence by the end, yet they offer us richly realized worlds which I would love to be able to explore in greater detail than any one narrative allows. I might make the same argument about Martin Scorsese's The Gangs of New York: Marty got so invested in the historical background of his film that it sometimes swamps his characters and as a history buff, I kept wanting to stop the film and chase background figures down the street so that I could learn more about who they are and what they are doing. In some scenes, I was more interested in the extras than the protagonists.

I recently read an outstanding dissertation written by a recent UW-Madison graduate, Derick Johnson, who talks about "overdesign" as a principle driving contemporary media franchises: his example is Battlestar Galactica, which he suggests overflows with throwaway details which convince us that the depicted vents are unfolding in a world as rich and complex as our own. Speaking at last year's 5D event, I argued that the art director takes on new importance in transmedia franchises, becoming almost as central as the screenwriter or the director, in terms of adding to our understanding of the fictional world. We could go back to Syd Mead's contributions to Bladerunner for an example where much of our appreciation of the film stems from a complex and well considered rendering of a plausible future society. So, we can see many of the extensions around transmedia narratives as examples of this "overdesign," adding greater "texture" (to use a concept Johnson draws from Ron Moore) to our over-all experience. Such extensions may or may not add something key to the unfolding of the narrative, but they nevertheless impact our overall aesthetic experience.

All of this is to say that not every work should become transmedia, but we may not yet know enough to prejudge which works can be meaningfully enhanced through such an approach.

Bordwell writes:

film viewing is already an active, participatory experience. It requires attention, a degree of concentration, memory, anticipation, and a host of story-understanding skills. Even the simplest story gears up our minds. We may not notice this happening because our skills are so well-practiced; but skills they are. More complicated stories demand that we play a sort of mental game with the film. Trying to guess Hitchcock or Buñuel's next twist can engross you deeply. And the very genre of puzzle films trades on brain strain, demanding that the film be watched many times (buy the DVD) for its narrational stratagems to be exposed.

Here, I can only agree. Indeed, Bordwell's teaching shaped my own investment in the cognitive and social/cultural activities of film consumers, giving me a theoretical vocabulary to make sense of some of the things I'd experienced in and through fandom. I don't buy the "Lean back"/"Sit Forward" distinction offered by many transmedia advocates. That said, I do think that there is an increased awareness of audience activity driving the push towards transmedia storytelling.

Bordwell and others in the formalist tradition make a distinction between story and plot. The plot of the film is the sequence in which we encounter specific bits of information, while the story of the film is our mental construct which rearranges that information into a coherent sequence. So, a mystery may begin with the discovery of the body and work backwards (to show us the events which motivated the death) and forward (to show us how the detective put together the clues.) If we take this distinction between the sequencing and structuring of information, transmedia storytelling simply expands the scope of the process, allowing us to continue to collect and assemble clues once the specific unfolding of the film is completed.

Yet, in a networked culture, this ongoing process of information gathering, hypothesis testing, and interpetation/evaluation takes on a more profoundly social dimension. It is no longer something that occurs in a single mind during the two hours the film is unfolding; it is something which we do together, pooling resources, and comparing notes. Mimi Ito describes this as the "hypersocial" logic underlying Japanese media mix. Clearly this process is most vividly suggested by the Alternate Reality Game, where the information scavenger hunt becomes the driving force of the entertainment experience, but we can understand the dispersion of videos about the world of District 9 as also setting a similar process in motion.

Bordwell writes:

No narrative is absolutely complete; the whole of any tale is never told. At the least, some intervals of time go missing, characters drift in and out of our ken, and things happen offscreen. Henry Jenkins suggests that gaps in the core text can be filled by the ancillary texts generated by fan fiction or the creators. But many films thrive by virtue of their gaps. In Psycho, just when did Marion decide to steal the bank's money? There are the open endings, which leave the story action suspended. There are the uncertainties about motivation.....Many art works exploit that impulse by letting us play with alternative hypotheses about causes and outcomes. We don't need the creators to close those hypotheses down.

Geoff Long, a CMS graduate, has long advocated the use of the concept of "negative capability" to understand how gaps in the fiction incite certain forms of aesthetically pleasing speculations and anticipations. There is of course a complex dance between gaps and excesses where we are talking about narrative information. Johnson's "overdesign" may seem to provide "too much information" about the story world, yet for every new bit of information given, there are new spaces for speculation opened. We become like nagging five year olds who follow every explanation with a new question.

That said, most good transmedia artists know that there are certain gaps which should not be filled if they want to maintain interest in the series as a whole. There are certainly reasons to create ambiguities and uncertanties. We may offer more clues through other media, but we certainly don't want to destroy the mystery which makes such characters and worlds compelling in the first place. Fans resent the addition of information simply to close down avenues for speculation -- take, for example, the closing chapter of the last Harry Potter novel which amounted to J.K. Rowling spraying her territory telling us who married who and what they named their children even though most of that information had limited narrative impact and simply felt like she was trying to foreclose certain strands of fan expansion. In some cases, authors are better off allowing fans to create their own narratives, since the community will generate multiple explanations, much as critics will offer multiple accounts of what motivates Hamlet or Travis Bickle to do what they do.

Bordwell writes:

Storytelling is crucially all about control. It sometimes obliges the viewer to take adventures she could not imagine. Storytelling is artistic tyranny, and not always benevolent.

To me, the key word here is "sometimes." Bordwell is describing a particular kind of storytelling. It's no accident that critics of transmedia and interactivity almost always fall back on Alfred Hitchcock to illustrate their point. Hitchcock's works are certainly about control, shaping not only the sequencing of events and unfolding of information, but also playing around with the hierarchy of knowledge between the characters and the shaping of the point of view shots through which we see each moment of the film. Hitchcock famously slept on the set because he had thought all of this through before the cameras roll. So, yes, let's give Bordwell Hitchcock.

But, then give me Tim Burton, whose films are often sprawling messes, because he is so much more interested in art direction and world building than storytelling. I have limited interest in the plot of his version of Planet of the Apes, say, but I never cease to be amazed at the complex thinking which went into every aspect of the Ape cultures -- a classic example of Johnson's "overdesign" and "textures" in action. The human characters amount to cursers we deploy to navigate the fictional space and in that case, I would be quite happy to be free to explore this world on my own, digging deeper into details that don't happen to be required for the unfolding of a particular story but which deepen my experience of this imaginary culture. We can call Tim Burton a bad filmmaker because he doesn't need to exert this kind of "tryanical control" over the unfolding of information, but then how do you explain the pleasurable anticipation I have for his version of Alice in Wonderland, even though I know he will once again disappoint me as a storyteller.

So maybe Planet of the Apes is not a film I would go to the mat for. But if we shift media, I would argue that works like War and Peace or Moby-Dick or Dante's Inferno are much more invested in world-building than story-telling and that their authors seemed content to stop their novels dead in their tracks for pages on end as we wander through their fictionalized geography, trying to map its contours or understand the connections between scattered events. In both cases, what frustrates high school students who want them to get on with their stories is what has made them of lasting interest to critics who want to better understand the realms they are depicting. (It's no accident, I think, that some enterprising producer out there is trying to adopt the Divine Comedy into a transmedia franchise. Surely, that was Dante's plan all along.)

Clearly the author always exerts a certain degree of control over the unfolding of story information, but there are some authors who seek to create a more open text and others who seek to close down varying interpretations. I would say that so far transmedia storytelling has appealed to storytellers who want to open up greater freedom of interpretation rather than those who want to totally shape the reception of their work.

The Aesthetics of Transmedia: In Response to David Bordwell (Part One)

David Bordwell, my graduate school mentor and one of the leading figures in academic film studies, joined the conversation about transmedia storytelling the other week with a typically thoughtful and engaging entry that explored the strengths and limits of transmedia as an expansion of the cinematic experience. Personally, I read Bordwell's analysis as a friendly amendment and generous "shout out" to the work I've been doing on this topic, not to mention a timely one since it arrived on the eve of the start of my Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment class at USC. His greatest contribution here is to raise a series of constructive objections and challenging questions any filmmaker would need to think through before moving their film -- mainstream or independent -- in a transmedia direction. To keep the conversation on these topics flowing, I thought I would respond to some of Bordwell's arguments. Bordwell writes:

Transmedia storytelling is very, very old. The Bible, the Homeric epics, the Bhagvad-gita, and many other classic stories have been rendered in plays and the visual arts across centuries. There are paintings portraying episodes in mythology and Shakespeare plays. More recently, film, radio, and television have created their own versions of literary or dramatic or operatic works. The whole area of what we now call adaptation is a matter of stories passed among media....

What makes this traditional idea sexy? ... Some transmedia narratives create a more complex overall experience than that provided by any text alone. This can be accomplished by spreading characters and plot twists among the different texts. If you haven't tracked the story world on different platforms, you have an imperfect grasp of it.

I can follow Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories well without seeing The Seven Percent Solution or The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. These pastiches/continuations are clearly side excursions, enjoyable or not in themselves and perhaps illuminating some aspects of the original tales. But according to Henry, we can't appreciate the Matrix trilogy unless we understand that key story events have taken place in the videogame, the comic books, and the short films gathered in The Animatrix.

I would certainly agree with Bordwell that transmedia storytelling does not begin with The Matrix. When Jeff Gomez (Starlight Runner) spoke to my students last week, he repeatedly used the phrase, "mythology," to describe the structure of transmedia narratives and others adopt a long-standing industry term, "Story Bible," to describe the documentation that organizes the continuity. Both metaphors pay tribute to earlier forms of branching or encyclopedic narrative. In Gomez's case, we might trace the concept of "mythology" backwards from the D&D games he played as a young man into the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien who clearly conceived of Lord of the Rings as modeled on structures found in folklore and mythology. I'd also argue that C.S. Lewis's writings on stories contain a lot of great insights onto the value of telling details in fleshing out fictional worlds, suggesting that modern transmedia fans might have enjoyed a rich exchange if they were able to sit down in the faculty room at Oxford in the early part of the last century.

If I was having an imaginary conversation about the origins of this concept, I'd also want to include L. Frank Baum, who unfolded the world of Oz across a range of media platforms. What we now might read as a series of novels that fleshed out the Land of Oz began life as short films produced by Baum's studios, Broadway musicals, and comic strips. (See the recent republished edition of The Marvelous Land of Oz which collects the comic strip elaborations of his "mythology.") Indeed, you could argue that the shifts across media give the book series a kind of wacky incoherence, involving radical shifts in tone or theme, inconsistent conceptions of characters, and so forth.

I might also want to invite Cordwainer Smith, a science fiction writer who I've long been convinced was a time traveller, since his works prefigure many of the key themes and motifs of cyberpunk. Smith developed a complex and interlocking "mythology" which links together dozens of short stories published across a range of different magazines, and he specifically depicted many of his stories as "versions" or "installments" of a narrative the reader is already presumed to understand from encountering it across a range of previous media incarnations. Smith himself wrote only prose narratives, but in his fictions, he imagines explicitly how his tales would take shape on stage or television.

I would argue that the contemporary moment of transmedia has heightened our awareness of these earlier moments of authors unfolding stories across media, much as the rise of digital media more generally has led to a revitalization of the study of "old media when they were new" or the history of the book. We certainly want to understand what is new about our current push for transmedia entertainment, which to me has to do with the particular configuration of media systems and the push towards a more participatory culture.

Tolkien, Lewis, Baum, and Smith all sought to model contemporary fictions on the dispersed, episodic, yet interlocking structures of classic mythology -- creating a folklore for a post-folkloric society. And so, yes, there are going to be many resemblances to be drawn between transmedia stories, informed by these creative figures, and traditional religious or mythological works.

That said, many of Bordwell's examples above are simply adaptations of works produced in one medium for performance in another platform. And for many of us, a simple adaptation may be "transmedia" but it is not "transmedia storytelling" because it is simply re-presenting an existing story rather than expanding and annotating the fictional world. Of course, this distinction assumes a pretty straight forward adaptation. Every adaption makes additions -- minor or otherwise -- and reinterpretations of the original which in theory expands our understanding of the core story. These changes can be read as "infidelities" by purists but they may also represent what I describe in CC as "additive comprehension" -- they may significantly reshape our understanding of what's happening in the original work. Still, I think there is a distinction to be made between "extensions" to the core narrative or the fictional universe and adaptations which simply move content from one medium to another.

Bordwell continues:

The "immersive" ancillaries seem on the whole designed less to complete or complicate the film than to cement loyalty to the property, and even recruit fans to participate in marketing. It's enhanced synergy, upgraded brand loyalty.

For the most part Hollywood is thinking pragmatically, adopting Lucas' strategy of spinning off ancillaries in ways that respect the hardcore fans' appreciation of the esoterica in the property. Caranicas quotes Jeff Gomez, an entrepreneur in transmedia storytelling, saying that for most of his clients "we make sure the universe of the film maintains its integrity as it's expanded and implemented across multiple platforms." It would seem to be a strategy of expanding and enriching fan following, and consequent purchases.

As best I can tell, then, in borrowing this academic idea, the industry is taking the radical edge off. But is that surprising?

I've long ago given up trying to separate the creative and commercial motivations of transmedia entertainment, but then, all popular culture, no, all art depends on a complex balance between the two. From the start, most transmedia has been funded through the promotional budget rather than being understood as part of the creative costs of a particular franchise, even where it has been understood as performing key world building or story expanding functions. This was a central issue in the Writer's Strike a few years ago. Indeed, in so far as Hollywood has grasped transmedia, it has been in the context of a growing awareness of the urgency of creating "consumer engagement" that has been a buzz word across the entertainment industry in recent years. This is why the transmedia chapter in CC follows so closely after the discussion of "affective economics" and American Idol.

Yet, as I suggested in my recent discussion of District 9, one man's promotion is another man's exposition. Increasingly, transmedia extensions are released in advance of the launch of major franchises and do some of the basic work of orientating us to the characters, their world, and their goals, allowing the film or television series to plunge quickly into the core action. Yet, even at this level, they can do other things -- creating a more layered experience by introducing us to conflicting points of view on the action (as when we learn more about alien rights protesters through the District 9 promotional materials). Most of the people in the industry who take transmedia seriously are open about the fact that they are highjacking parts of the promotional budget to experiment with something that they think has the potential to refresh genre entertainment as well as reward viewer investments.

On another level, I'd say we are still at a moment of transition where transmedia practices are concern. Each new experiment -- even the failed ones -- teach us things about how to shape a compelling transmedia experience or what kinds of tools are needed to allow consumers to manage information as it is dispersed across multiple platforms. In some ways, the transmedia stories may need to be conservative on other levels -- adopting relatively familiar genre formulas -- so that the reader learns how to put together the pieces into a meaningful whole, much as the first jigsaw puzzles we are given as children take shape into familiar characters and do not have the challenges found in those designed for hardcore puzzlers.

(Two More Installments To Come)