ENG 1280 Writing Workshop IEssay #1: What’s in Your Archive?

Remixing—or the process of taking old pieces of text, images, sounds, and video and stitching them together to form a new product—is how individual writers and communities build common values; it is how composers achieve persuasive, creative, and parodic effects. Remix is

perhaps the premier contemporary composing practice. —DeVoss & Ridolfo

In “Loops of Perception,” DJ Spooky takes a radical position on creativity and artistic genius when he asserts, “An artist is only as good as his archive.”  Like the rolodex metaphor for the mind, his statement inverts the Romantic version of creative genius by placing more importance on what goes INTO the mind (the archive) rather than what’s already there (genetic).  As we discussed in class, a postmodern or archival theory of creativity is a theory that offers possibility because your creativity expands as your life expands (experience, education, that new musician you discovered, everything—atoms and electrons—with which you come into contact).  Whereas the old model was based on a set of givens, the new model is based on addition and multiplication, mosaic, mélange, collage, stitching, sampling.On one hand, an archive is a material thing—a place or collection of things—usually referred to in the context of a library or museum.  In the United States, for example, the National Archives houses historical documents and ephemera. On the other hand, we’re talking about archives in a metaphorical sense, as your collective memory of experiences and influences. In postmodern theories of creativity, “archive” is used in the metaphorical sense, the mind in this case being like a container that holds things, ideas, and experiences.

For this assignment, you will write a photo essay using the contents of one of your archives. Think of it as a mashup, a remix. You can think of your archive as broadly or narrowly as you wish. Broadly speaking, your archive could be your entire memory; narrowly speaking, an archive could be considered your iTunes library, your Facebook, Flickr stream, or any other collection of data (either electron or atom form). Your photo essay should be 10-15 slides total.

Suggested ways of sourcing/creating images:

Surf the internet for live web cams or take screen shots of selected web cam images

Capture images with a smartphone

Find images from social networking sites like Pinterest or Fancy.

Use the photo album function on Powerpoint to create your slideshow and and an opensource app like Slideshare to publish your narrative to the web.

For each image, create a one sentence text caption that remixes autobiography, fiction, poetry and/or theory focusing on themes that resonate with contemporary ideas of the "virtual self," "systems of memory," "sampling as composing," "semantic web," or any other phrases and concepts you research, remix, or make up on-the-fly.