Screens of intensification: on DIY concert videos of Lady Gaga and the use of media interfaces as tools of experience intensification

Abstract

The article is based on the analysis of user-generated videos from a particular event: the Lady Gaga concert in Denmark on October 20, 2010. Within the theoretical framework of a media practice perspective, theories of a media cultural movement from sign to signal, and an affective understanding of the experience of liveness, I argue that the DIY videos do not only attest to the documentation or representation of the concert event, but rather show an urge to feel it, connect to it, and relate to others by sharing it. In that way media and screens can be understood as technologies that under certain circumstances enable intensified relations between bodies, spaces, and significant others. The experiential intensification of the event is established by using media to (1) visually enrich the real-time experience, (2) turn the collective receiver into an individualized and creative real-time auteur, and (3) deterritorialize the real-time experience by sharing it on social media platforms. Furthermore, I discuss two ways of analyzing “the signal” in my material: one focusing on the relation between body, event, and mobile media technology and the other on the formal features of the videos themselves. This distinction is nevertheless purely analytical given that the formal traces of the signal (the sensory turbulence of the videos) are so closely related to the spatially affected camera-body. The body in the space, the camera, and the audiovisual surface is in other words affecting each other, as the signaletic force of the concert-event affects all the three.Carsten Stage, Assistant Professor, Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University. His research interests are cultural and media globalization, affective online communication, participatory and DIY culture. Recent publications: Tegningekrisen—som mediebegivenhed og danskhedskamp (trans. The cartoon crisis—as media event and national identity struggle) (2011), “Contagious bodies. Affective and discursive strategies in contemporary online activism” (co-authored with Britta Timm Knudsen) in Emotion, Space andSociety (2011), and “Thingifying Neda. The construction of commemorative and affective thingifications of Neda Agda Soltan” in Culture Unbound (2011).