Welcome to my website where I document and organize my thoughts on readings, projects, and random things.
Welcome to my website where I document and organize my thoughts on readings, projects, and random things.
This article published with Television and New Media (2023). Open Access link.
Abstract: This article examines (im)material digital labor essential to the production of closet decluttering videos on YouTube by analyzing two case studies: Leighannsays and Bestdressed. I highlight three interconnected forms of tidying labor, that is, home, data, and waste management, mobilized for influencer work and cultural platform economy. Wardrobe clean-out videos capitalize on both corporeal and affective aspects of housework and content production in the construction and maintenance of the digital self. They also assemble management labor to organize material articles in domestic space, produce/manage multimedia, and construct/amplify digital existence. The essay also discusses the (im)material labor required by the personal and outsourced handling of the disposed’s hereafters as goods and trash outside of the home. Unpacking how closet decluttering video production nests together (im)material tidying labor associated with disparate sectors from home-based platform cultural production to public management of household waste shed lights on imbricated operations of the influencer ecosystem.
This article is published with Wide Screen 9.1 (2022). Open Access link.
Abstract: There is a long-overlooked history of Indigenous resistance through mediamaking in Los Angeles. Diné multimedia documentarian Pamela J. Peters is one such artist whose works foreground stories and portraits of urban Natives living in LA. In this essay, I examine her two major photography/film projects Legacy of Exiled NDNZ (2014/2016) and Real NDNz Re-Take Hollywood (2016) with a spatiohistorical approach to argue that Peters remaps key locations for Indigenous history in LA, such as Union Station and Indian Alley. I discuss the mediated relations between her works and earlier films, especially Kent MacKenzie’s The Exiles (1961), and the Hollywood film industry in different time period. This essay also emphasizes Peters’ triangulating role as a media maker-curator-activist in destabilizing the temporal-spatial logic embedded in quotidian violence against Native Americans in the settler colonial LA. Via shedding lights on Peters’ practices, this essay calls for more scholarly and public engagement with contemporary Native artists and their active reworkings of Indigenous histories, criticisms of settler time-space, and maintenance of Native hubs.
This chapter is collected in the Bloomsbury Academic anthology The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda: Feminist Practice and Pedagogy (2022), edited by Colleen Kennedy-Karpat and Feride Çiçekoglu. Open Access link.
Abstract: This chapter explores the cultural history around Agnès Varda’s English-language film Lions Love (… and Lies) (1969). Partially an auto-fiction inspired by Varda’s own troubled experience with the Hollywood film industry, the film follows New York filmmaker Shirley Clarke as she stays in Los Angeles to negotiate a studio contract. I propose a reading of Lions Love that centers how Varda’s and Clarke’s individual experiences meet and unfold amidst the social, political, and industrial movements in the late 1960s. In part through casting, the film uses self-reflexivity as social critique to expose the structural exclusion facing women directors in the 1960s, even as the women’s liberation movement and other countercultural forces were underway. This study integrates production cultures, film history, and women’s studies, examining Lions Love alongside published interviews and autobiographies to re/construct Varda’s and Clarke’s experiences in-between Hollywood, the French New Wave, and the New American Cinema movement.
Keywords: Women directors; Hollywood; the French New Wave; the New American Cinema; 1960s
Extended abstract published at AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research 2021
Abstract: This paper sheds light on the hidden interdependence in unboxing videos by examining brown cardboard boxes and the mechanism of “brown-boxing” through one extravagant unboxing video by makeup influencer Roxette Arisa on YouTube. I use brown boxes to illustrate the entanglement between digital influencer media and supply chain. Brown boxes are integral sites to explore the operating mechanisms and aesthetics of digital capitalism. Similar to how black-boxing signals the practice of hiding information/labor, and masking operation in technology, brown-boxing points to the mechanisms of concealment across capitalist sectors along the supply chain. Although supply chain is rarely discussed, logistical labor and/as infrastructure do unexpectedly show up in influencer media. These linkages sometimes unintentionally seep into audiovisual media. Perhaps the most unexpected scene takes place when Arisa’s filming of the unboxing video is interrupted by a doorbell ring with the delivery of more boxes by a UPS worker. From the off-frame interaction captured and remain visible briefly in this unboxing video, we feel the presence of the delivery worker. Examining brown boxes and the process of brown-boxing is to think through the containerization of supply chain capitalism. Brown boxes and black boxes are typically discussed in separate spaces, with the former attracting scholars of logistics/supply chains whereas the latter appealing to scholars of digital media/communication. My analysis of the materialities of unboxing video adds to the conversation around the overlapping of infrastructures and the labor that sustain the operation of these infrastructures.
Keywords: unboxing videos, labor, infrastructure, brown-boxing, logistics
Article published in Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures’s Fall 2019 Special Issue “Buzzademia: Scholarship in the Internet Vernacular”
Abstract: Miquela (@lilmiquela) is an avatar Instagrammer programmed as a 19-year-old Brown Brazilian-American female influencer and musician. She has garnered a significant amount of popularity, controversies, and hatred as an “it” influencer. A popular transmedia storytelling project like Miquela can provide additional insights toward how social media images deliver technocultural imaginaries. Popular social media narrative and image constructions of Miquela point to certain underlying issues around race and gender in the digital culture, including habits and performativity, forgotten histories, and the digital updates of oppression.
Keywords: social media, GIF, media studies, performance, gender, race.