Final Project Proposal

For my final project I want to expand the ideas I developed in my blogpost from Week 3 and look at how digital media enables a new sort of engagement with ideas by making the “noise” Katherine Hayles asserts “cause[s ideas] to reorganize at a higher level of complexity.”  I ended that post by contrasting the hypertextual narrative of Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl with the more freeform multimedia environment of Linda Dement’s Cyberflesh Girlmonster, and asked “In what ways does the digital lend itself to new forms of narrative and in what ways does narrative restrict the new possibilities afforded by the digital?”

In a sense, I want to begin with that question by formatting my essay in a way that makes use of the affordances of a digital environment, one that operates more like a web than book with a beginning -> middle-> end.

To execute this in a way that’s suitable for presentation, not to mention more interesting for everyone than an essay formatted like a wikipedia page, I’m going to put together a video essay that makes use of text (both my own and quoted from our readings), as well as relevant visuals and sound. Perhaps the best, and best known, of my influences for this project is the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis who makes use of found footage and electronic music to tie together the wide-ranging topics of his films:

But even more so the Chinese-British video artist Lawrence Lek whose thematically organized video art/essay Sinofuturism (1839 – 2046 AD) inspired this sort of project that brings together the elements of Curtis’s straightforward documentary and updates them to suit the topic at hand:

I’m also interested in the style of the more aphoristic collaboration between visual arts collective 0rphan Drift and philosopher Nick Land, which combines one of Land’s most famous essays (from before his unfortunate turn toward alt-right intellectual icon) with a collage of semi-related visuals:

 

My work, however, intends to engage with the ideas of the work through both the content and the form of the video by working from the modular visual programming language Max. Unlike other video editing programs Max allows users to break apart and rebuild the elements of a video non-sequentially and lets these broken pieces reassemble themselves according to whatever degree of randomness the programmer decides.

By working in this way my essay directly engages with a digitalized version of a key topic from the blogpost, Burroughs’s cut-up method.  A video of this nature also allows me to work freely across other themes from our readings such as sampling, remixing, and remediation into conversation with the writers and artists already mentioned in the blogpost. 

Through my writing, in selection of images and sounds, and with my programming, I hope to provide that sort of meaningful “noise” that Hayles discusses and bring out a new layer of understanding to the topics we’ve been working through this semester in a way that would be lost to the demands of a traditionally structured seminar paper.

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