masterwork
Fandom: Playing Across Languages and Beyond
My graduation project is a video essay, a type of motion picture collage that presents the internalisation of linguistic cacophony of South-Korean pop music (K-pop) and its fandom in audiovisual form. I juxtapose my own thoughts, recorded as self-interviews, with a collection of found footage originating from different sources, whose constituent parts cover different genres. The archive consists of video clips, TV programmes, Internet video material, slam poetry performances, podcasts of an academic quality, multimodal memes, and other sources. Language play, musicality, and rhythm play a crucial part when editing montage inserts based on personal associations. The purpose of the video essay is to identify the linguistic habits and hybrid language identities that emerge in a multicultural environment. I would also like it to serve as an introduction into the world of Korean pop and its fandom, from both a subjective and an objectively scientific point of view. At the same time, it doubles as an investigation of my own identity, where I study the phenomena of language mixing and multilingualism in myself and the community.
thesis
Language Play in Transcultural Fandom
The urgent game of environmental interpretation
The aim of my thesis is to inspect how a transcultural fandom treats language as a communication tool; how they apply creative linguistic solutions to resolve cultural differences, and how this is boosted by their shared interest towards a specific cultural phenomenon, South-Korean pop music (K-pop). In the course of my theoretical research and subsequent analysis of concrete examples, I seek to answer the following questions: Is it necessary to be fluent in the language of the cultural content that is the subject of the fandom? How are fans able to understand each other despite coming from all over the world, from countries and cultures that are radically different from each other? How does the playfulness of the fandom contribute to the resolution of conflicts arising from the cultural differences? Building on fan studies and the published works of media theoreticians from the fields of aesthetics and linguistics, the thesis examines how the participatory culture of fandom uses the possibilities provided by online platforms to rise above linguistic and cultural barriers; and how the fans reshape the rules of everyday language games to better fit their own linguistic play.
