Fanvids and Television: Archives, Appropriation and Argument

My thesis concerns the practice of vidding, which is the creation by media fans of a form of short video called a fanvid. This practice has a thirty-year history, uses existing television and film sources to create critical texts responding to that source material, and relies on a dense interplay of image and sound in its meaning-making.

I am writing from the perspective of television studies, paying attention to issues regarding control of, access to, and uses of television texts. I am particularly interested in the related practice of after-broadcast recording and storage of pre- and post-digital television, specifically in the context of existing theories of flow and television textuality.