I felt very strongly about not taking a required Media Theory class right away. I’d been away from school for years, and wanted to let the brain warm up to academic forms of thinking again before taking that particular plunge.
Well. I am glad to have waited, and that a combination of fate, schedules and kindness landed me in a Media Design class in which I was introduced to Zeega. Zeega is a platform for multimedia storytelling. You can pull in GIFs, sound and images from around the web and weave them together into a moving cascade of information.
“What does this have to do with theory?” you may ask. It turns out that while reading Adorno and Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” I came across a passage that made me look at classic workplace sitcom “The Office” in a whole new light. My thoughts turned to Zeega and I made this piece remixing the passage with “Office” GIFs.
Mixing theory and pop culture representations is not only addictive and fun, it’s taking off within our culture. How delightfully meta.
If you’re into this remixing, there are plenty of smart people mashing up theory, nostalgia and pretty faces. Saved by the Bell Hooks and Lisa Frankfurt School, here’s to you. And hats off to the inimitable Feminist Ryan Gosling.
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