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From fan-generated content on TikTok to music videos, the contemporary media landscape is becoming ever more vast, spectacular, and intense. In The Media Swirl Carol Vernallis examines short-form audiovisual media—Beyoncé’s Lemonade, brief sequences from Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, TikTok challenges, YouTube mashups, commercials, and many other examples—to offer ways of understanding digital media. She analyzes music videos by Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Janelle Monáe, Kendrick Lamar, Anderson .Paak, and others to outline how sound and image enhance each other and shape a viewer’s mood. Responding to today’s political-media landscape through discussions of Fox News and Presidential inaugurations, Vernallis shows how a media literacy that exceeds newscasts and campaign advertising is central to engaging with the democratic commons. Forays into industry studies, neuroscience, and ethics also inform her readings. By creating our own content and knowing what corporations, the wealthy, and the government do through media, Vernallis contends, we can create a more just world.

This colloquy provides a multi-perspective look at a music video. Though music video is central to our culture today (videos accumulate view counts that surpass the mathematical sublime—Despacito h...

This article features an interview with music video, film, and commercial director Jonas Akerlund. Akerlund has directed videos for many major pop and rock stars of the new millennium, including Be...

Many scholars worry that we are accelerating into socioeconomic and technological configurations for which we are unprepared. Vectors with steep trajectories include the information sciences: artif...

We’re excited to publish our analyses of “APES**T” (16 June 2018), a music video featuring Beyonce, Jay-Z, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa , and dancers in the Louvre.[1][1] For us this video’s issues are timely. Thank you to the JPMS editors, especially Robin James, for so swiftly bringing our work

Cet article a pour objectif général de montrer comment analyser des clips musicaux. En m’intéressant à plusieurs vidéos de Beyoncé ainsi qu’à d’autres exemples issus de l’histoire du clip, je montrerai comment Beyoncé en est venue à incarner une figure charnière de cette histoire : celle qui est parvenue à nouer innovation formelle et préservation du passé de cette forme. Je proposerai une définition opératoire de ce genre avant d’évoquer les influences technologiques et socioéconomiques à l’œuvre dans le clip musical. Je mettrai en lumière les spécificités de ce genre ainsi que les évolutions des relations entre image et son. J’interrogerai la manière dont on peut se saisir de la technologie, de la plateforme et du style musical. This article’s broad aim is to demonstrate how to analyze a music video. I’ll consider several videos by Beyoncé as well as a number from music video's history. I’ll show how Beyoncé stands as the genre’s fulcrum, both formal innovator and historical guardian. I’ll propose a working definition for the genre, and discuss music video’s technological and socio-economic influences. I’ll highlight some of the genre’s specificities, as well as show how audiovisual relations have changed, and the ways analysis might attend to technology, platform, and musical style.

This chapter explains how writers can approach music videos, offering practical strategies for analyzing the formal and narrative elements of music videos and emphasizing the value of collaborative approaches to music video analysis. Music videos on YouTube are how young people most commonly consume popular music. And the genre’s aesthetics are shared with many other forms of moving media, including commercials, YouTube clips, trailers, political ads, and audiovisually intensified segments of post-classical cinema. Music video is dependent on ephemeralities of color, movement, and sound. Like popular music, music video possesses motifs, rhythms, grain, and fine details that carry weight. Music videos as a form often have odd peculiar entailments: background figures, for example, partly because they are mute tend to adopt strange roles. Music video directors like to say that there is no one right setting for a song–there are many possibilities.

This chapter provides methods and models for thinking about avant-garde and experimental films and videos that incorporate popular music. It sketches the history of intersections between avant-gardists and popular music. It also provides close readings of works by Kenneth Anger, Bruce Connor, Joseph Cornell, Derek Jarman, Tony Oursler, Pipilotti Rist, Andy Warhol and others. It claims that institutional, formal and cultural constraints not only limit the frequency with which avant-gardists participate with pop musicians and pop music, they also colour the audiovisual relations within the works themselves. Avant-garde films and videos with pop soundtracks emphasise particular kinds of audiovisual relation—relations that differ from sound-image connections in narrative films, YouTube clips, commercials and music videos. It is demonstrated that this experimental subgenre embodies a unique sort of sound-image relation and suggests, finally, that these videos can expand our knowledge of audiovisual relations more broadly.

The first party sequence in Baz Luhrmann’ s The Great Gatsby (2013) counts as one of the most opulent, densely articulated, and extravagant in film history. On its release critics noted its ‘frenetic beauty’, ‘orgasmic pitch’, and ‘Vincente Minnelli-style suavity with controlled vertigo’. Décor, costuming, sound, movement, and colour come to the fore because the sequence’s spatial layout can’t be determined until its end. The mélanged soundtrack itself refuses to grant the viewer a sense of ground. What distances might this musical sample brook? Who’s performing and who isn’t? To which period and community does this music speak? Why this snippet against that? Sounds’ sources and imagined spatial locations seem to cross and overlap with elaborate vectors. This analysis plumbs the ways nineteen aural and visual techniques pull the viewer affectively and proprioceptively in different directions, helping, with the aid of digital technologies, to construct an extravagant rhetoric appropriate for our unfortunate gilded age. Considering Gatsby provides a way to further understand audiovisual aesthetics, the newly emergent role of soundtracks, contemporary cinema, and our time.

This article’s broad aim is to demonstrate how to analyze a music video. I’ll consider several videos by Beyonce as well as a number from music video's history. I’ll show how Beyonce stands as the genre’s fulcrum, both formal innovator and historical guardian. I’ll propose a working definition for the genre, and discuss music video’s technological and socio-economic influences. I’ll highlight some of the genre’s specificities, as well as show how audiovisual relations have changed, and the ways analysis might attend to technology, platform, and musical style.

IntroductionMusic video continually reconfigures and reasserts itself, emerging in new guises. It jumps platforms: from television, cable, DVDs to iTunes and YouTube; from high-gloss looks and extravagant budgets to footage shot on cell phones. Its borders are changing and uncertain. Few directors have stayed in the game through the genre's many shifts. Floria Sigismondi, along with only a handful of others - Hype Williams, Dave Meyers, Sophia Mueller - has been able to reinvent herself throughout music video's transitions.Interviews with music video directors are rare. Until recently there wasn't a venue for them. Academic journals have given little space to scholarship on music video and much less to the directors. This interview with Floria Sigismondi aims to give a sense of her craft and what it's like to work in an industry over a twenty-year period.1This conversation starts near the beginning of her career and takes us to the present. Born to Italian opera singers and raised in a Canadian industrial town, Floria Sigismondi was educated in Catholic girls' schools and received her artistic training at the Ontario College of Art. Her work draws from painting, illustration, sculpture, photography and film. This article will consider six of her videos: 'Little Wonder' for David Bowie (1997), 'Makes Me Wanna Die' for Tricky (1998), 'The Beautiful People' and 'Tourniquet' for Marilyn Manson (1999), 'Hurt' for Christina Aguilera (2006), and 'E.T.' for Katy Perry and Kanye West (2011).2But before we begin the interview, some context may be helpful. Today, participation with the audiovisual is informed by an explosion of platforms, formats and styles; but what lies behind these media changes? I (interviewer, Carol Vernallis) want to argue that music video has been a prime driver of this new media swirl. Music video's role has been under- acknowledged. Today's media relations become malleable and volatile in a 'mixing board' aesthetic, and our accrued knowledge about how to work fluidly with this material is informed by music video. Music video's major contribution to today's audiovisual turn stems from the fact that ways of placing music and image together are learned: they form genealogies. One can't just speed up Godard and put music against it. Today's unique audiovisual relations developed through music video directors' and editors' experiments at reconfiguring images and sounds. From its advent in the 1980s, music video deployed new technologies (cheap, reusable videotape) and was shaped by new commercial and social demands (the impetus to make it fast, creative, musical, different, wild). Subsequently, these changing audiovisual relations of music video have influenced practices in film sound and music; the soundtrack in toto has become 'musicalised': sound effects and dialogue are now shaped alongside composed music into musical phrases. Sonic features can also adopt leading roles, driving the film; or sound can mediate, enabling individual film parameters to come to the fore. The image acquires a sense of speed and flexibility: the image's contents can seem as if they had been poured from one shot into the next. Cutting, too, can bestow an almost percussive rhythmic drive. An image in the new digital cinema often avoids a ground because the sound wafts it along.These audiovisual forms of knowledge were shaped by music video. In the eighties music video was the laboratory: while commercials and films in that era tended toward tightly controlled client-author supervision and careful storyboarding, a music video director or editor might try anything. (Turn the image on its head and abut it with some red.) In the nineties music video directors streaming into cinema helped drive the new, audiovisually intensified, post-classical cinema.3 A second wave then immigrated, as industry funding, in response to free downloading, dried up in the noughties. Music video directors have flourished in the industry because they're especially attuned to the new technologies and the new audiovisual relations. …

Focusing on audiovisual viral web media distributed during the 2008 presidential campaign, this article registers a cultural shift in which political debate now happens online. It analyzes clips like “Yes We Can,” “Barack RickRoll’d,” and the presidential debates on YouTube for the ways they work aesthetically and intertextually.

“Music video was the most terrific sandbox, where I could try anything.” 1 David Fincher David Fincher, personal interview, October 1998. Lawrence's and Meyers's videos can be seen on the web. A li...

This collection of essays explores the relations between sound and image in a rapidly shifting landscape of audiovisual media in the digital age. Featuring contributions from scholars who bring with them an impressive array of disciplinary expertise, from film studies and philosophy to musicology, pornography, digital gaming, and media studies, the book charts new territory by analyzing what it calls the “media swirl” and the “audiovisual turn.” It draws on a range of media texts including blockbuster cinema, video art, music videos, video games, amateur video compilations, visualization technologies, documentaries, and immersive theater to address myriad subjects such as the transition of cinematic discourses to digital production and distribution, the relations between screens and public space, and the shifting nature of noise within digital ecosystems. It also examines noise, droning, and silence as recurring themes in New Extremist films of Europe, along with temporal and generic anomalies by citing examples such as the Silent Hill videogame series, the performance/installation Sleep No More, and the poetics of David Lynch’s Inland Empire. In addition, the book discusses the translation of information into digital media, how music has both shaped and become embedded within the aesthetic culture of political conflict, the nature of “realism” in relation to new audiovisual media networks, and the accelerated aesthetics of networked mediascape and the ways in which they may be connected to contemporary labor and global capitalism.

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This collection examines the rapidly shifting landscape of audiovisual media in the digital age. The volume initiates a dynamic, transdisciplinary dialogue between and among scholars, and takes up a range of media texts including blockbuster cinema, music videos, video games, amateur video compilations, documentaries, immersive theater, visualization technologies, and video art. One resonant theme is the ways sound and image can exist in myriad relations. Alongside harmonic convergences and ecstatic audiovisual mélanges, we find glitches, noise, rupture, and uncanny vestiges of outmoded practices. Our own mélange of scholarly approaches attempts to capture the texture and feel of this diverse media field.