Remix Project Idea

For my Remix Project I decided to draft a new poem and then modify it through translation. The poem itself would be simply one stanza, two lines, and four words;

This means
absolutely nothing.

I am planning to translate it through several languages and show each translation from the orignial text as an evolutionary stage of the final product's development. The languages I plan to translate it through are all of the languages I was exposed to growing up in the order I first learned them. This means I'd be translating it from English to Korean, Korean to German, German to Spanish, Spanish to Japanese, and finally from Japanese back to English. I thought it would be fairly interesting to see what the final translation would be especially with the irony of the original text.

I'm doing this also as an expression of my experience as a bi-racial army brat growing up in a foreign land (in so many ways). My father is a boricua (New York born Puerto Rican) and my mother is from a small town outside of Seoul, South Korea (the name of which I probably couldn't pronounce even if I knew it). Shortly after I was born my family moved to Germany where my father was stationed with his Army Reserve unit and lived there for over 15 years. Well that's pretty much the gist of my Remix Project so let's see what happens.

Know Your Rights (Exercise 2)

The video and text posted on my webpage were obtained from the Internet Archive under a Public Domain copyright. The image was also obtained under a Public Domain copyright from Creative Commons. Public Domain as I understand it is a virtually unrestricted use of the published material provided proper citation and credit of a work's origin is listed. I am uncertain whether or not the citation I have on my website is adequate but hopefully it will provide a better legal argument in court than no citation at all.

On the works of Donna Leishman

When I first viewed Donna Leishman's interactive graphic Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw I was immediately disoriented. My confusion was likely Leishman's intent based on what I read of the project's description. Leishman's interactive graphic was based on the historical account of Christian Shaw, a little girl in 1695 who was suppossedly possessed by a demon in the small town of Paisley, England. Altough contemporary historians cite credible evidence that Chritsian's "possession" was likely a clever ploy for attention it was convincing enough to have seven members of her community tried and executed as witches.

At first I didn't believe Leishman's work counted as a online text because on my first few 'exlporations' of the piece I found very little text within the interactive graphic. After several more experiments with the interactive elements of Shaw's work I discovered a journal within the piece written by one of the story's key characters. As I played more and more with Leishman's project I began to understand not so much the story itself but the methodology behind the project. Because I was unfamiliar with the Christian Shaw story Leishman's project it forced me to research and read more about it. When I revisited the interactive graphic after conducting my research of the story I better understood the visual presentation.

What struck me as ironic about having to research the story is that I needed have it presented to me in a textual medium in order to understand a visual interpretation. Although it is said that picture can represent a thousand words it is words that give us context. This interactive graphic lead me to think of text as a grounding point for interpretting complex visual images. To me every movie, animated film, or even wordless comic panels all begin with textual framework that is built upon. That is what I believed made the compelling images and scenes of current films like The Lord of the Rings series becuase the computer animators were using a textual source to formulate the images in their minds' eye. Therefore I don't believe the written word will ever go away in spite of the latest evolutions in visual technology.

Text enables humans to construct complex visual images into a comprehensive product therefore a visual medium without a strong textual base is lacking no matter how elaborate the details. This is what I believe Leishman's work revealed to me because the strength of the images invoked a curiousity that lead me back to the story's origins, a textual medium.