Candidate 5001: CRITICS Critique your favourite piece of creativity

Vidding, the art of cutting-up a video-text and reassembling its pieces alongside the narrative of a musictrack to reveal hidden meanings, began in 1975 at a Star Trek Convention. A woman named Kandy Fong presented a slideshow exploring Spocks torment in being part Vulcan. It started as a form of fandom, studies made in homage to popular, cult characters. Today however, vidding has become something quite different. Forty years after Fongs original work, a vid entitled Nine Inch Nails+Closer explored hidden masochistic homosexual desires between Spock and Kirk. Vidding has become a raw, biting yet beautifully creative critique of popular culture; a provocative commentary on the conservatism of the mainstream. It is highly provocative and challenging. And not surprisingly the Studios and Networks dont like it very much. What surprises most people however is that vidding is dominated by women.

During the 1970s at the same time as Fong was experimenting with editing techniques, female academics like Elaine Showalter were arguing that female criticism demanded the world learn to see meaning in what has previously been empty space. The orthodox plot, must recede and another plot, hitherto submerged in the anonymity of the background, stand out in bold relief. Showalter's cry captures the essence of modern vidding. The best set out to make us see the "submerged." 300 Vogue splices scenes from Frank Millers film 300 with the track Vogue, re-stitching gory action sequences to fit the beat and lyrics of Madonnas song. The video does a beautiful job of bringing to the fore the film's latent homoerotic glorification of war because, as with all vids, the choice of music-track is no accident. Vogue was originally the name of a dance from the underground New York gay scene; a series of moves used by gay men to signify their love of beautiful icons. Its use by the cult vidder Luminosity in conjunction with images from 300 provides a biting commentary. Luminosity is just one of many women re-editing footage from cult films and TV series in this way; playing back hidden, repressed themes, reclaiming characters from the orthodox narrative threads by which they are bound and typecast by mainstream studio demands. Vidders show us that although the camera may never lie, the 'truth' it tells is certainly highly subjective; that alternative truths and themes lay submerged and hidden within the stories presented. Another of Luminositys critiques Womens Work shows how female characters in a range of sci-fi series are continually used, abused and then subsequently killed having served their purpose. It is only when the clips are threaded together by the bitter narrative of Courtney Love's Violet that we begin to see this theme that has hitherto remained submerged. "When they get what they want, they never want it again" Love sings, threading together clips of women being seduced and beaten.

Candidate 5001: CRITICS Critique your favourite piece of creativity

Vidding is simply a re-expression, in a digital age, of a relationship that women have always had with texts. Storytelling has long been linked with sewing (we spin yarns with narrative threads) an association particularly pertinent for women; American story-quilting for instance is a long established tradition of women threading narratives together, stitching old scraps and pieces of material into new stories. In her history of embroidery, the feminist Rozsika Parker talks of the subversive stitch by which women have managed to make meanings of their own in the very medium intended to inculcate self-effacement. Vidders are simply the modern-day digital equivalent; setting out like many before them to find meanings and explore the subversive ambiguities of popular texts.

Candidate 5001: CRITICS Critique your favourite piece of creativity