ABSTRACT
Work on transmediality, despite being concerned with intellectual properties moving across media, has tended to focus on film, television, comic books and video games. This chapter addresses the role(s) of fandom and place within the transmedia undertaking of 'Welcome to the Dark Ages' (WTTDA). Transmedia theory and work surrounding participatory art have rarely collided. The participatory art of 'WTTDA' thus became similarly transmedial and multiplied. Fans responded by creating and uploading videos, by distributing lyric sheets and by tweeting, while others aimed to archive or record as much of the art and its presentation as possible, also using social media. Weaving (trans)media together in this bounded, ritualistic space and time, 'WTTDA' was both local and transnational; impermanent and textually traced; co-present and disseminated via social media; subversive and promotionally on-brand. In this case, theorizing popular music and its mythologies as a form of transmedia undertaking means accepting the contradictions.
