Speaker Series | Sumanth Gopinath: "鈥楴ow you can finally throw out that Rolex鈥�: Unboxing the Digital Watch and Beyond"
Sumanth Gopinath
鈥楴ow you can finally throw out that Rolex鈥�: Unboxing the Digital Watch and Beyond
(co-sponsored with Faculty of Music)
Abstract: Among the innumerable bizarre and prominent video genre cultures found on YouTube, the "unboxing video," in which products are unwrapped from their packaging, ranks as a prominent and fascinating one. Thanks to YouTube's monetizing of video viewing, the unboxing video, which began as an amateur undertaking, has spawned an industry of micropayments to content providers (some of whom have thereby accrued substantial wealth) and the emergence of professional and semiprofessional unboxers. After beginning by recounting his accidental foray into the world of unboxing videos, the author provides a general account of the genre, reflects on the role of music and sound within it, and offers a broader set of reflections on the materialities of packaging within contemporary capitalism.
Bio: Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota鈥揟win Cities. He is the author of听The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form听(MIT Press, 2013) and co-edited with Jason Stanyek听The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies听(2014). He is co-editing听Rethinking Reich听(forthcoming) with Pwyll ap Si么n and is working on various projects, including a revision of his dissertation on Steve Reich's "race" pieces from the mid-1960s.
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