This course is about media transformation. Yet rather than merely focus on
adaptation from one specific medium to another, we will study the
convergence of various media, such as video games, graphic novels, song
covers (and remixes), musicals, and movies. What meaningful changes result
when a graphic novel is made into a video game? How do the ideological
implications of the two texts differ, and why? Does the status of “the original”
matter anymore? Taking our cue from musical artists such as DJ Spooky and
Girl Talk, we will focus on the aesthetics of the database, the sample, and the
fragment as we follow information through different kinds of cultural
networks. In our study of the collage of contemporary media culture, we will
reflect analytically on adaptation as not only a textual process, but also a
social and economic one. This course will therefore ask students to consider
their own positions as readers, viewers, interpreters, producers, and
consumers. We will analyze several remix/adaptations within their historical
and cultural contexts and discuss what these artifacts give up and what they
retain, how changes in the work that they perform shifts in their political and
economic circumstances, and in what ways do the rhetorics of different media
shape what we might problematically call their “meaning.” Integrated with
these interpretive questions are the fundamental principles of copyright,
intellectual property, the Fair Use Doctrine, and how these specifically apply
to remixing music and video content. Since one hallmark of new media
technologies is that consumers are also creators, students will exercise
critical skills they develop throughout the course (including rotoscope
animation and Final Cut Pro) in order to create their own “remixed” media
content. The course will culminate with an individual or group project in
which students share an aspect of their research and creative production with
the rest of the class, demonstrating their ability to give life to the archive by
quoting, analyzing, and manipulating cultural material in order to repurpose
and reframe it. |
