Streaming Virtuosities: Media Structures, Accelerated Fandom and Alienation by Volume

Tuesday, March 11, 7:30-10 p.m.

Music, Media and Place Gallery, Arts and Culture Centre

The Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place at Memorial University of Newfoundland is delighted to announce a livestreamed lecture by David VanderHamm titled “Streaming Virtuosities: Media Structures, Accelerated Fandom, and Alienation by Volume.” The talk will take place on Tuesday, March 11, 2025, at 7:30PM Newfoundland time (which is 6PM Eastern Time in North America). You can watch the livestream of the talk here or attend in person at the MMaP Gallery in the John C. Perlin Arts and Culture Centre in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Please see below for an abstract of the talk.

“Streaming Virtuosities: Media Structures, Accelerated Fandom, and Alienation by Volume:

This video will blow you away. Anyone who spends time online has encountered some version of this message, whether in a friend’s post, a corporation’s advertisement, or a video’s own description. When the promise is fulfilled, we experience virtuosity: skill made apparent and socially meaningful. Yet such widespread online encounters are also peculiarly individualized, driven by algorithmic recommendations based on each user’s data. This lecture discusses online performances by a cluster of guitarists (centered around Kaki King and Jon Gomm) to shed light on virtuosity in the era of digital streaming. It combines first-person phenomenology and critical voices from music and media studies to explore how streaming platforms in general (and YouTube in particular) structure mediated encounters with virtuosic bodies. I examine three different (if frequently overlapping) paths through streaming media: (1) “only what I came for,” the path platforms attempt to nudge us beyond, (2) accelerated fandom, and (3) surfing the algorithm. Reflecting on these paths reveals how digital architecture and the algorithms operating within it exercise a social power that we experience regularly, even if their technical workings remain opaque. The very intimacy of the encounter—platforms provide individual recommendations for content that we stream in our homes on devices that serve as constant companions—readily turns our interpretive concerns back on ourselves. Our values and judgments are already temporally “on all sides” of experience, and algorithmic recommendations increasingly replicate these subjective contributions to experience in the media objects themselves, leading to simultaneous intensifications and crises of value.

David VanderHamm is Associate Professor of Humanities at Johnson County Community College and Research Associate with the Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place at Memorial University Newfoundland. His primary research focus is on the phenomenon of virtuosity and its many iterations in American music and media from the 20th century to the present. His work has appeared in numerous outlets including American Music, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Advertising, The Public Historian, and the Journal of the Society for American Music. His 2020 JSAM article exploring the intersections of virtuosity and disability in the performances of guitarist Tony Melendez received the Richard Waterman Prize from the Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology. His books include The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures (co-edited with Harris Berger and Friedlind Riedel), and Virtuosity in the Age of Electronic Media (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan).

Presented by Harris Berger

Event Listing 2025-03-11 19:30:00 2025-03-11 22:00:00 America/St_Johns Streaming Virtuosities: Media Structures, Accelerated Fandom and Alienation by Volume The Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place at Memorial University of Newfoundland is delighted to announce a livestreamed lecture by David VanderHamm titled “Streaming Virtuosities: Media Structures, Accelerated Fandom, and Alienation by Volume.” The talk will take place on Tuesday, March 11, 2025, at 7:30PM Newfoundland time (which is 6PM Eastern Time in North America). You can watch the livestream of the talk here or attend in person at the MMaP Gallery in the John C. Perlin Arts and Culture Centre in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Please see below for an abstract of the talk. “Streaming Virtuosities: Media Structures, Accelerated Fandom, and Alienation by Volume: This video will blow you away. Anyone who spends time online has encountered some version of this message, whether in a friend’s post, a corporation’s advertisement, or a video’s own description. When the promise is fulfilled, we experience virtuosity: skill made apparent and socially meaningful. Yet such widespread online encounters are also peculiarly individualized, driven by algorithmic recommendations based on each user’s data. This lecture discusses online performances by a cluster of guitarists (centered around Kaki King and Jon Gomm) to shed light on virtuosity in the era of digital streaming. It combines first-person phenomenology and critical voices from music and media studies to explore how streaming platforms in general (and YouTube in particular) structure mediated encounters with virtuosic bodies. I examine three different (if frequently overlapping) paths through streaming media: (1) “only what I came for,” the path platforms attempt to nudge us beyond, (2) accelerated fandom, and (3) surfing the algorithm. Reflecting on these paths reveals how digital architecture and the algorithms operating within it exercise a social power that we experience regularly, even if their technical workings remain opaque. The very intimacy of the encounter—platforms provide individual recommendations for content that we stream in our homes on devices that serve as constant companions—readily turns our interpretive concerns back on ourselves. Our values and judgments are already temporally “on all sides” of experience, and algorithmic recommendations increasingly replicate these subjective contributions to experience in the media objects themselves, leading to simultaneous intensifications and crises of value. David VanderHamm is Associate Professor of Humanities at Johnson County Community College and Research Associate with the Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place at Memorial University Newfoundland. His primary research focus is on the phenomenon of virtuosity and its many iterations in American music and media from the 20th century to the present. His work has appeared in numerous outlets including American Music, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Advertising, The Public Historian, and the Journal of the Society for American Music. His 2020 JSAM article exploring the intersections of virtuosity and disability in the performances of guitarist Tony Melendez received the Richard Waterman Prize from the Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology. His books include The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures (co-edited with Harris Berger and Friedlind Riedel), and Virtuosity in the Age of Electronic Media (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan). Music, Media and Place Gallery, Arts and Culture Centre Harris Berger