basementwall

Yowza! There's a conference coming up in Australia that I would love to attend. But wow....Australia. Lots of money to get there from Florida. We'll see!

Here's the description, straight from

nushanakt 's journal:

Here is the official announcement looking for fan and remix artist submissions for our conference. Please feel free to send us an email with any questions you might have about the event or what sort of submissions would suit.

Revise: The Art and Science of Contemporary Remix Cultures
Dec 2-3, 2010
University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia

An upcoming conference on remix cultures is seeking contributions from remix artists and practitioners. This event aims to bring together researchers whose work investigates aspects of remixing, alongside practitioners working in remix cultures, for a collaborative conference. We invite remixers of all kinds to submit artworks in the media of their choice, and/or to speak on their style or aesthetics, or other features of their practice. Live performance submissions are also welcome.

Expressions of intent of 200-250 words should be sent to revise2010@gmail.com by 15 April, 2010. Please include your full name (and/or artist/fan name), email address, and institutional affiliation (if applicable) along with the proposal, and include any tech requirements.

Please see http://revise2010.blogspot.com for more information, or email revise2010@gmail.com if you have any questions.
You can also contact me individually via LJ ([

nushanakt ) or at fanthropology@gmail.com.

For the first time, I'm delving into LJ. And since I'm not sure if I'll be around here forever ("Huh?") it seems best to explain why I came here at all.

I'm a PhD student in rhetoric composition at the University of South Florida, focusing especially on intellectual property, fan studies, digital rhetoric, and teaching writing. I'm findable on my blog, Twitter, Delicious, and Facebook--and now LJ. I'm a fan who actively reads news/wikis/blogs in my fandoms (mostly Lost and Star Trek) but I've never written a fic.

That's right: I'm a scholar, and part of the reason I'm hear is to hear opinions of fic writers on two main areas:

Ownership and intellectual property (Who owns what writing?)
Remixing text (What happens to "mine" when I rewrite someone else's fic?)

I know that scholars of fandom have at times been notoriously nasty, especially recently with the mess surrounding the SurveyFail. The best I can do is point out why I think my survey/interview project is different. Of course, no one needs to believe me. But anyone who does, and who has opinions on those two points above, can take an open-ended 5-question survey here. (Feel free to read my FAQ first.) If you choose, you'll be able to leave contact info so I can interview you further on the same issues if you want; otherwise, the survey is completely anonymous.

But let me explain myself quickly, in case you're wondering:

Why I think my survey/interview project is different
The Fanlore page on the SurveyFail quotes eruthros's description of the SurveyFail survey:

In their pm, they (unintentionally) made it quite clear that their intent in their project is to talk about human universals -- to use our fannish experience, our erotics and our desires, to reinforce ideas of universal, hard-wired, biological desire. They are outsiders to fandom. They are outsiders to fanfiction. They are outsiders to slash. And they haven't tried to learn, or to understand, or to think about fannish communities. Instead, they have made assumptions about who we are, about what we read, about what we find hot; they plan to use those to explain what makes women tick, what our brains make us do.

Just so you know, my project is designed to describe the creative practices of real individuals, not to "talk about human universals." I want to get a better handle on some of the many kinds of decisions that go into, in this case, writing fic, especially when it's a remix of someone else's fic or if you think others might remix it. That focus on the practical is important to me as a writing teacher, since I want to help explain the nitty-gritty details of what people actually do when they write different kinds of stuff for different kinds of audiences. In short, I want to add to my understanding of real-world composing, to keep me and other teachers from giving, boring, stupid, or wrong advice.

It's true that in many ways I'm "an outsider to fandom" and an "outsider to fanfiction" and an "outsider to slash." But I can say that I've "tried to learn . . . understand . . . and think about fannish communities" from the inside. Partly that's through reading the work of the controversial OTW , partly through the stuff I've read from acafans writing about themselves (lots of Henry Jenkins; Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet), and partly through conversations I've had with fic-writing scholars at places like the IAFA.

And unlike the SurveyFail folks, I'm trying my utmost to not make "assumptions" about the fan community, but to structure the whole thing as open-ended as possible, so I can take whatever rabbit trails fic writers lead me down.

See my FAQ for more on this.

So for better or for worse: I'm here, and I'm eager to listen! Help me out if you like, or tell me what my problem is if I still don't get it.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31