Traveling Music Videos offers a new interdisciplinary perspective on how contemporary music videos travel across, shape, and transform various media, online platforms, art institutions, and cultural industries worldwide. With the onset of digital technologies and the proliferation of global video-sharing websites at the beginning of the 21st century, music video migrated from TV screens to turn instead to the internet, galleries, concert stages, and social media. As a result, its aesthetics, technological groundings, and politics have been radically transformed.
From the kinaesthetic experience of TikTok to the recent reimaginations of maps and navigation tools through music video cartographies, from the ecofeminist voices mediated by live-stream concerts to the transmedia logic of video games and VR, from the videos’ role in contemporary art galleries to their political interventions —the chapters map the ways music video is continually reconfiguring itself. The volume tracks music video’s audiovisual itineraries across different geographies, maps its transmedia routes, and tackles the cultural impact that it has on our current media ecosystem.
"Introduction Into the Music Video Traffic: Platforms, Interventions, Extensions (Tomáš Jirsa, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic, and Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, Aarhus University, Denmark) Section 1: Topographies and Interventions 1. For Real? The Cross-Pollination of Music Video and Documentary (Laurel Westrup, UCLA, USA) 2. Moonwalking ""Backwards into the Future"": 'Poi E,' Music Video, and Documentary (Lisa Perrott, University of Waikato, New Zealand) 3. Moving Maps into Musical Images: Music Video Mobile Cartographies (Tania Rossetto, University of Padua, Italy) 4. Rapping a Scandal: The Political Interventions of Central European Music Videos (Tomáš Jirsa, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic) 5. Pop, Protest, and Transformation: Peter Christopherson's 'Tainted Love' (Emily Caston, University of West London, UK) Section 2: Extensions and Intersections 6. Art Music Video and the Gallery (Caleb Kelly, The University of New South Wales, Australia) 7. Ghostly Transmedia: Julian House and Hauntological Audio-Vision (Jamie Sexton, Northumbria University, UK) 8. Music Video Aesthetics in Live Stream Concerts: Aurora’s A Touch of the Divine (Anna-Elena Pääkkölä, Åbo Akademi University, Finland) 9. Lil Nas X’s Hedonistic Travels of Earthly Delights (Zachary Bresler, University of Stavanger, Norway, and Stan Hawkins, University of Oslo, University of Agder, Norway) 10. Miley Cyrus’s ‘Mother’s Daughter’ as Intersectional Feminist Activism? (Hanna-Mari Riihimäki, University of Turku, Finland) Section 3: Platforms and Interfaces 11. Music Videos and Video Games: Radiohead’s Kid A Mnesia Exhibition (Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, Aarhus University, Denmark) 12. Transmedia and Intertextual Hauntology: Steven Wilson’s “Drive Home” and 505 Games’ Last Day of June (Lori Burns and Patrick Armstrong, University of Ottawa, Canada) 13. Music Video’s Forays into Online Interactive Concerts: Fortnite’s Ariana Grande and Travis Scott Events (Carol Vernallis, Stanford University, USA) 14. Enacting Virtual Boundaries: Music Video and the Changing Technological Landscape (Eugy Han, Stanford University, USA, and Saul Quintero, UCLA, USA) 15. Traveling Sounds, Embodied Responses: Aesthetic Reflections on TikTok (Berenike Jung, University of Southampton, UK) Index"
Tomáš Jirsa is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at Palacký University Olomouc, Czechia. Interested in relations between literature and the visual arts, affect theory, and music video studies, his most recent book is Disformations: Affects, Media, Literature (Bloomsbury, 2021). Mathias Bonde Korsgaard is Associate Professor of Online Video Cultures at School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published extensively on music video and audiovisual studies, including the book Music Video After MTV (2017). Korsgaard is the editor-in-chief of the Danish online film journal 16:9.
Reviews for Traveling Music Videos
No longer confined to cable television or YouTube, music videos are constantly migrating to platforms as diverse as TikTok, commercials, VR, and video games, picking up remedial attributes native to each of these platforms along their journey. Traveling Music Videos provides a valuable roadmap for scholars to find their way into, through, and around this sprawling audiovisual ecosystem. * Brad Osborn, Professor of Music Theory, University of Kansas, USA *
