the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar

Francesca Coppa

Fan Art as Counternarrative: Responding To Popular Culture

This lecture took place on November 9th, 2010 at 7:00 pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union

Lecture introduction

Francesca Coppa will discuss the ways in which fans celebrate and critique popular culture by making and sharing art.  In particular, Coppa will discuss art, comics, vids, and multimedia works made by women and people of color, who often end up rewriting mass media narratives in order to make them more palatable to feminist, queer, and multicultural values and points of view.

About Francesca Coppa

Francesca Coppa is Director of Film Studies and Associate Professor of English at Muhlenberg College. She is also a founding member of the Organization For Transformative Works (OTW), a nonprofit organization established by fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and culture.  Coppa and OTW recently worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to get a DMCA exemption for noncommercial remixers. Coppa also writes about fan vidding both as a feminist art form and as fair use.

Relevant Links

• Readings for this lecture are available on the student login page.
• http://techtv.mit.edu/tags/2522-otw/videos/1246-otw-fanvidding-series-what-is-vidding