159 Purpose & Choice in the Remix Project

Critical Imagination is a “tool to engage, as it were, in hypothesizing, in what might be called ‘educated guessing,’” interpretation, and curious expression “as a means for searching methodically, not so much for immutable truth but instead for what is likely or possible,” or interesting or revealing or powerful given the facts in hand “given the facts in hand” (Jones Royster and Kirsch 72)

A translation of a work is an interpretative act, a film adaptation is another, fan theories or fan fiction, paintings or songs based on a story or myth or historical moment, and works of critical analyses like you see in a literature course are all interpretative acts.

A multimodal remix project in which you reformat and intentionally reshape one of your previous essays into a multimodal format for a new audience is a type of interpretative act (an act of critical imagination). A multimodal project is made using digital (computer) or physical (hand-made or embodied/gestural) means, the goal of which is to translate information from a plain, written text into other modes of communication.

A Quick Note on Multimodality:

Simply put multimodality is literally just when you combine and utilize more than one mode of communication. Those modes are usually broken down into five key categories: aural, gestural, linguistic, spatial, and visual. We as humans communicate via signs and symbols and visual sounds and music and colors and body language and basically, our communication has and always will move beyond one form of  “talking” or “writing”  or “reading.” When utilized together, all of these modes can create and transmit knowledge and understanding.

And I think that you can probably understand that and might even think of it as kind of a common sense thing. Particularly within our digital landscape, we certainly live in a world of communicative signs and symbols, from emojis, memes, TikToks, Instagram Stories, and on and on the list goes. All communication is multimodal. Memes are a great and easy example of multimode today because it’s literally imagery combined with words to create a different layered meaning, usually to create a humorous meaning, to transmit jokes, to transmit cultural conversations, touchstones, and references.

Multimodality shows how using more than one mode of communication can get your point across better and more effectively. You can create more emotion or connection or understanding. You can help inform and provide more explanation to the thing you are talking about. Multimodality is all about layers of meaning and understanding that can be gained when utilizing these multiple modes

Back to Critical Imagination and Remix Projects:

With multimodal remix projects, you attempt to make audiences understand your topic and argument using different modes of communication.

And remix projects are not about your mastery of either digital or physical construction skills, it’s not just about how creative or talented or crafty you are. It’s also about the intentional rhetorical moves you make in the project as well as the execution of those moves. It is about how can you use images, colors, words, audio, gestures, video, etc. together to create meaning and reshape your original words on a page essay into an effective something else.

In other words, you are re-imaging or re-interpreting an essay.

And a good interpretation usually has the following elements:

Quality of the Form. A piece of visual artwork should be striking, a graphic novel should transport us, a brochure should be stylized, informative, and organized, a PowerPoint should be engaging,  a song should be a good song, a podcast should be well made with solid audio quality, and a fan theory should convince, or at least make us wish it were true. There are of course allowances for budget and time. But you should try to do good work with the materials and tools available.

An Implied Understanding Of Topic: You can transform, play around, invert expectations, and embed fan-theory-type interpretations into dramatic action. But we shouldn’t ever get the sense that you don’t actually know the origin or topic or point or mythology you’re playing with. Base everything you do, even the changes, on a genuine understanding of the original thing.

A Compelling Interpretive Act. Finally, your project should do something interesting with the interpretation—it should make some kind of clearly thought-out decision about how to interpret something, reinterpret it, and modify it for effect.

Thus, choice and intention are important things to keep in mind as you craft and revise an essay into a multimodal remix project.

You should still have the What and So What. You should still be able to show audiences your topic and provide them with enough information or context or understanding to know what you’re talking about. But you also need to embed in some way the why behind your creation. Think about how and why your topic and new project matters or is helpful or is interesting or revealing. Think about why you are crafting a project about this subject. Think about what new or significant message or information you can get across. Think about what or who you want to represent in your remixing. So again you’re balancing literally showing or explaining what your audience needs to know to understand the topic, with the little bit extra of what is the deeper or layered element that audiences need to get.

So you’re still doing everything that you’ve learned to do in composition and writing. You are still communicating something. You are still transmitting knowledge. You’re still maybe proving or arguing or analyzing and exploring your topic; just in a different format and with different, multiple modes of communication.

And so with purpose and choice, intention and planning come into play because you’re not just listing information. You’re not just throwing together random quotes from your essay with random pictures and random sounds to them. You’re not just drawing pictures and gluing chunks of your essay to a poster board. Rather the creative choices you make should have a reason for existing. You don’t want to use blue as a color because you like blue, you don’t just add a background song because it’s your favorite song, and you don’t just want to throw in images or sounds that do not match the tone or the subject matter of your topic.

You need to choose a format that is the best fit for your topic. You need to choose images, audio, video, etc. that help the audience gain an understanding and appreciation of your topic.

You need to think about and reflect on the choices/formats/design elements/etc. you want to make within this project. You should be able to provide a sufficient answer to these questions:

  • Why did you choose that format to remix your project?
  • Why do you think your chosen format is the best option to critically reimagine your previous essay?
  • Who is your new audience that is receiving this remix and what choices do you need to make to clearly relay your information and research?

Depending on what format you choose, you will be working with different design elements, but it is important to think about your creative choices as being a source and means of communication. That is to say, you need to choose images, audio, video, colors, embodied/gestural choices, etc. that help your audience gain an understanding and appreciation of your topic.

  • Why did you choose your design element/s?
  • Why did you use that color scheme/palette?
  • Why did you choose that video insert?
  • Why did you choose those audio cues?
  • Why did you choose that song?
  • Why did you choose your images/imagery? On and on.

Readings and Supplemental Materials:

 Design Principles: 

These links provide some nice guidance regarding the four major design principles that guide a lot of graphic design elements. These four principles are not all there is to know about graphic design, but understanding these simple related concepts and applying them to slide design can make for far more satisfying and effective designs:

Color Design Principles: 

Color is an important element to consider because colors are symbolic in nature; they represent certain ideas and emotions and connotations. They are persuasive in nature as well as color does affect our psyche and whether or not we find a presentation pleasing to the eye or whether we are struck by something or disturbed on and on:

 

Fonts and Typeface: 
Negative White Space:

Remember you don’t want to overcrowd and overuse images, quotes, graphs/charts, etc. On the flip side, you don’t want to create something too minimalist or populate your project with sparse content as that is sometimes a bit awkward or it underutilizes the space and time available to you. You want to utilize the space on your slide or page or document or whatever it is you are creating effectively and in a way that allows audiences to follow your train of thought and not feel over or underwhelmed.

 

Iconography: 
  • Charles Hill writes how “historically, images have played an important role in developing consciousness and the relationship of the self to its surroundings. We learn who we are as private individuals and public citizens by seeing ourselves reflected in images, and we learn who we can become by transporting ourselves into images.”
  • Comic book scholar Scott McCloud notes how “icons demand our participation to make them work” (59).
  • Anthony Blair notes that images are powerful tools for persuasion and transmission because “visual communication can be more efficient than verbal communication” and can “evoke involuntary reactions” (54).
  • W.J. Mitchell also notes how “we want to know what pictures mean and what they do: how they communicate as signs and symbols what sort of power they have to affect human emotions and behavior. When the question of desire is raised, it is usually located in the producers or consumers of images, the picture treated as an expression of the artist’s desire, or as a mechanism for eliciting the desires of the beholder” (71).
  • Think about these quotes in relation to how you want your images to translate meaning.
Movement and Aural Elements: 

What other choices are offered in digital text? How do they impact users/readers? Think about how you weave in images or audio or add transitions.

MOVEMENT:

AURAL ELEMENTS:

Research and Citational Ethics:

You will need to determine the best way of citing your sources, given the form you chose to work in. You may decide to use academic citations in non-academic genres if you think that will be most convincing to your argument, or you might consider other ways to “cite” (to share the same sort of information about your sources–and resources, like sounds or images you might use in building this text—that we would in an academic citation system).

For example, you’ve probably all seen YouTube videos that make use of research. How do they show us what information came from what source? How/why does the “citing” (or not) their sources, and resources, impact credible viewers who might find the argument?

Be sure to consider citational ethics! Since these documents are going to be potentially public it is more important than ever (although it’s really always important) that you practice careful and deliberate citational style. You’ll need to cite both research sources, as well as resources—images, sounds, charts, etc.–used in building your text.

If you are making a video, or a podcast, or something else using images or sounds, you will need to keep track of what you got, and where (NOT the address for the Google search—but the address to the page where Google found the resource published or shared) so you can cite those somehow. Different creators do this differently. I have even seen academic-style citations in YouTube videos. Presumably, the creators decided it built credibility to do so. I have also seen works cited lists included in the descriptive text under a video, and in the first comment of Facebook posts!

You will need to decide how you want to do this, but it is an integral and ethical part of this project, so feel free to look around for more examples or ask me questions on how to accomplish this.

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Reading and Writing in College Copyright © 2021 by Jackie Hoermann-Elliott and TWU FYC Team is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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