In November, I gave a talk at the Society for Science, Literature, and the Arts (SLSA) conference in Atlanta, for the Narration and Authorship 2 panel, chaired by Aleksandra Hernandez.
My talk was about the art form of comic book battle debating, and built off my Owie project that I have been doing on Comic Vine for a few years now, as well as a talk I gave at the Paradox conference in Poznan, Poland last year, which was on the art form of performative fandom in general, from wiki-writing to fan fiction to cosplay to battles.
Basically I see these performative fan activities as worthwhile objects of study as legitimate artforms on their own, and of value equal to the artforms that inspired them, such as comics, movies, and video games.
I am also writing an essay on the subject for the Polish journal Czas Kultury, which I think will be out some time in 2017.
I keep wanting to do an actual battle debate with the audience, but unfortunately time constraints have kept that from being practical so far. Hopefully some time in the future I’ll be able to do that as a performance, either at a conference or in a more direct performance setting.
(Also, I should note that while I haven’t been posting in a while, I have a lot of projects going on. They’re just ongoing projects that I’ve been working on continuously for years and don’t really wrap up for a presentation or exhibition somewhere. They’re just going on in their native contexts, as Owie does on Comic Vine.)
Chris Wildrick 