So far, all of my ideas are pretty nebulous at the moment. My clearest and most cohesive idea is to take Anne Carson’s essay “Kinds of Water,” which describes her journey along El Camino de Santiago in Spain, and remix excerpts from the essay (either recordings of someone reading the essay or just text from the essay) to combine them with clips from the 2010 movie The Way, which is also about El Camino de Santiago. The purpose would primarily just be for entertainment and artistic purposes, but I could see the possibility of including some kind of informational component about the trail itself and its history. The audience would likely be somewhat niche—people who are familiar with either The Way or “Kinds of Water,” people who are interested in El Camino de Santiago, or people who are interested in remix generally. This project would include visual and either linguistic or aural modes, depending on how I choose to incorporate the excerpts from the essay; I think I would likely be able to combine these elements using iMovie, which is the video editing software I’m most familiar with.
I’ve also considered a couple of other ideas, such as remixing videos of dances that I’ve performed, but I’m not really sure what I’d do with them and I think that might be more difficult as I’d have to get the video files off of the DVDs that they’re currently on. I’ve also thought about somehow remixing my own poetry or nonfiction writing, which I think would be interesting, but I’m also not sure what I’d do with it. I like the idea of creating some sort of web page that would take the original work and make it more interactive, maybe by including photos or videos that are aesthetically connected, previous drafts of the writing as a way to talk about process, or hyperlinks to works that inspired or influenced my own. This idea is significantly less developed and the practical details are far more vague.
At the moment, I’m leaning towards pursuing the idea of remixing the film and the Anne Carson essay, possibly with additional information about El Camino de Santiago, mostly because that idea is the most concrete, and because I’d like to get started on something so that I have time to revise or change my idea if problems arise in the process.
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