»Fan culture is nomadic, ever-expanding, seemingly all-encompassing yet, as the same time, permanent, capable of maintaining strong traditions and creating enduring works,« wrote Henry Jenkins in his article »Layers of Meaning«: Fan Music Video and Poetics of Poaching (1992). The art of fan videos, he explained, »lies in transforming 'borrowed materials' from mass culture in to new text« and »(fan-generated texts) cannot simply be interpreted as the material traces of interpretive acts but need to be understood within their own terms as cultural artefacts«.
This is what happens in remix art, as well. An artist changes previous meaning of a piece of art into something new – makes his or her own interpretation of the same thing, and at the same time, a completely new context is set. According to fan videos, Jenkins sees this as gaining “new associations from its contact with the borrowed images”.
Jenkins argues, that “fan art is important as a means of commenting on the original program, as a form of cultural creation with its own aesthetic principles and traditions.” One the other hand, Benjamin Walter would probably suggest that fan art cannot be termed as art at all. To put aside the usage of new technology equipments that cannot produce “real” art (although, this was his main point in his article Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)), such videos would definitely not have any “it” thing, or “aura” as he called it, at all!
Still, I shall agree with Jenkins that fan art exists and plays an important role in fan community. “The creation, exhibition and exchange of videos create the conditions for a communal artform (...) What the videos articulate is what the fans have in common: their shared understandings, their mutual interests, their collective fantasies.” Through understanding the meaning of fan artwork as a kind of collective and community act, Jenkins’ article might be useful for my research paper about collaboration in remix art, thus fan videos demand an active participation of both, the viewers' and artists', as well as when making and viewing remix art in the collaborative processes.
