Traveling Music Videos - (New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media) (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Traveling Music Videos offers a new interdisciplinary perspective on how contemporary music videos travel across, shape, and transform various media, online platforms, art institutions, and cultural industries worldwide. With the onset of digital technologies and the proliferation of global video-sharing websites at the beginning of the 21st century, music video migrated from TV screens to turn instead to the internet, galleries, concert stages, and social media. As a result, its aesthetics, technological groundings, and politics have been radically transformed.

From the kinaesthetic experience of TikTok to the recent reimaginations of maps and navigation tools through music video cartographies, from the ecofeminist voices mediated by live-stream concerts to the transmedia logic of video games and VR, from the videos' role in contemporary art galleries to their political interventions -the chapters map the ways music video is continually reconfiguring itself. The volume tracks music video's audiovisual itineraries across different geographies, maps its transmedia routes, and tackles the cultural impact that it has on our current media ecosystem.

Review Quotes

"No longer confined to cable television or YouTube, music videos are constantly migrating to platforms as diverse as TikTok, commercials, VR, and video games, picking up remedial attributes native to each of these platforms along their journey. Traveling Music Videos provides a valuable roadmap for scholars to find their way into, through, and around this sprawling audiovisual ecosystem." --Brad Osborn, Professor of Music Theory, University of Kansas, USA

"Music videos have been an independent art form for more than forty years now. They stand apart from the musical recordings upon which they are based, as well as from cinema and television. They are often characterized as much by formal experimentation as by commercial considerations. But in our current media environment, music videos have promiscuously intermingled with other expressive forms, and have multiplied on all sorts of media platforms. Traveling Music Videos explores these interactions, giving us an up-to-the-minute account of the cutting edge of both art and entertainment." --Steven Shaviro, author of The Rhythm Image (2023)

"More than a decade after MTV dropped 'music television' from its logo, the music video as cultural object has moved from the postmodern flow of linear television to digital platforms and other spaces of exhibition. Introducing the concept of 'music video traffic, ' Traveling Music Videos presents fifteen essays that use productive case studies to follow the music video in its trajectory across various media, from YouTube and TikTok to art galleries and video games. Moreover, Traveling Music Videos demonstrates the continued relevance of the music video as an object of cultural analysis in the study of music and media, both aesthetically and politically." --Jaap Kooijman, Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

About the Author

Tomás Jirsa is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Palacký University Olomouc, Czechia. Interested in relations between literature and the visual arts, affect theory, and music video studies, his most recent book is Disformations: Affects, Media, Literature (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Mathias Bonde Korsgaard is Associate Professor of Online Video Cultures at School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published extensively on music video and audiovisual studies, including the book Music Video After MTV (2017). Korsgaard is the editor-in-chief of the Danish online film journal 16:9.