Week 9: Remix Culture and Remediation
This week was focused on remix culture and remediation and the lecture/workshop as well as my own research trajectory is the ultimate in remixing. Through my own creative skills, I was able to turn a presentation that I did in 2015, which became a co-authored article in 2017, into a lecture and interactive workshop in 2020. How did I do it? Well let me tell y’all . . .
In lecture and the workshop for this week I focused on two of the keywords for the course: Black Vernacular Technological Creativity and Quare Shared Recognition. Black Vernacular Technological Creativity comes from Rayvon Fouche "Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud: African Americans, American artifactual culture, and black vernacular technological creativity" and is defined as “Innovative engagements with technology based upon Black aesthetics” (Fouche 641). In the context of this course, I see Black Vernacular Technological Creativity as the means by which Black folks remix and remodel various technology and algorithms to suit their own cultural needs. In the article, Fouche offers three ways that we see this creativity expressed: redeployment, reconception, and re-creation through a focus on music, and in particular jazz.
For Black Digital Studies, I not only introduce these three ways but added in a consideration of Jay D. Bolter and Richard Grusin’s writing on “Remediation”. For Bolter and Grusin, remediation demonstrates the mutual shaping and changing of media/technologies as they develop in relation to other media/technologies with the belief that new products or media recreate or reproduce older forms. I then linked this concept to a consideration of remix culture through a discussion of the many ways that Black artists and creatives combine and edit past materials to make new productions. The majority of the lecture focused on the concept of a Black aesthetic from art and music to film and television, with a special focus on the role that Hip-Hop has played in all of these areas. Beginning as a mechanistic manipulation of records to the use of computer programs to sample songs and make beats, we can see many ways that the creation of music from the 20th to the 21st century offers an ideal example of these concepts.
Moving from Hip-Hop and Remixing, we then began to discuss the role of remediation in film and television. Especially in the 21st century, the technological affordances of cell phones, laptops, and digital cameras have ushered in a new era of culture and video sharing through machines and platforms. While the masses were once positioned as consumers, we now all own the means of media production in the palms of our hands and households. Through a discussion of the rise and fall of Vine, and the platforms of YouTube, Tik-Tok, and Instagram I discuss how the internet offers multiple opportunities for mediated representations of Black culture, creativity, and community.
Ending with my own research interest on web series, the students and I were able to discuss how the concept of “Quare Shared Recognition” can be used to think about the importance of diversity in media representation of Black communities. In the workshop for this week, I reverse engineered my own research through the “Locating Black Queer TV” article to teach the students how to utilize Grounded Theory method to analyze YouTube comments and content. Building on the first presentation slides that I constructed for the project, I gave the students links to the video content I analyzed as well as the presentation screen-shots of the comments which exemplified the themes I found to be important in the article. Then I offered them the opportunity to examine the comments section for themselves to see if their findings were similar to, or differed from, what I was seeing from 2014-2017.
I have never taught my own research as part of a class that I designed and this week truly felt like the culmination of my entire research trajectory for the past decade. Overall, the class really enjoyed our weekly discussion and I was happy to get deep into the fun of online and my own research. This also piqued the students interests, as one of my students asked me after class: How did I begin work on a research topic that was so niche while also being so relevant in the current time period? Sometimes I wonder this same thing, but in talking to my students about my process, I realized that I came to my research because I went to a very small liberal arts college that supported me in whatever research I wanted to do and whatever studies I wanted to pursue.
I will never forget taking my first undergraduate class, which was an English course in Digital Humanities. I was so excited because it was then that I knew I wanted to major in technology and “The Humanities”. However, when I looked at the course catalog to declare a major I learned that “The Humanities” was not an option. I remember walking into the registrar's office crestfallen, to tell her of my woes. I wanted to major in the humanities, but we didn’t offer a humanities degree so what was I going to do?? The registrar looked at me with such sympathy and concern, as she reached into her desk for a blank form. She slid that form to me across the desk, looked me in the eyes and stated: “This is your college degree, you can major in whatever you want to”. As I looked down at the form she gave me, I read the words “Self-Designed Major” and my journey to my current research projects began.
I spent the next two years remixing resources and researching the Digital Humanities (DH) from institutional websites and articles, designing and defending a DH degree based on that research, and another two years completing a self-designed major on the topic. During the course of this time I took on several theses and research projects, with yearly defenses on everything from cyber-poetics to computer chess and hip-hop to hypermedia. As I look back I don’t know if I would have ended up doing the same type of research that I do today if it was not for the special kind of support that one gets from going to a private liberal arts (and in my case women's) college. In teaching Black Digital Studies this year I have greatly enjoyed my small class size and topic because of this. Moving forward, I hope that I can continue to inspire students to take their education into their own hands through teaching the importance of interdisciplinary learning and a liberal arts education.
Readings
