3.15 - The Gothic and Remix Culture

Summary

Gothic media have reached unprecedented levels of commercialisation and, as a result, have begun to proliferate in new and interesting ways. From its roots in twelfth-century architecture and eighteenth-century fiction and theatre, Gothic has always been multimedia, and has always been remixed. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, however, the genre’s patchwork qualities began to take on a new intensity. What are the implications of this rapid rise in remixed Gothic, both for remix practices and for the Gothic mode? This chapter explores how remixes such as the GIF, the digitised photograph, the updating database and the social media network have all functioned in ‘monstrous’ or Gothic ways.