Digital Pedagogy Slides from C's 2013

new year's day 2013

test shot. screencube

2013, hello. 

i am glad to see you. 2012 was productive and challenging ... like, crazy. As you know, i was unspeakably happy to stage my very first immersive installation, screencube, at our MoMLA gallery in Seatlle. Seattle, btw, is an outstanding city; i could see myself visiting often. Especially fantastic was The Steelhead Diner,  Metsker Maps, and this nearly underground bar i visited with Mike, who was invited after bumping into Cheryl E. Ball just following a publisher's party. My cocktail of choice was the "Dr. Cocktail," something of a lemon-infused martini with a splash of soda. Amazing. The bar was dark, small, crowded, intimate, ... and, and this place has everything (cue Stefon).

Speaking of Cheryl, as you know, she edits the outstanding online journal for digital scholarship, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. She and i have been exchanging email for the past few days because, as you know (given that the issue will be published in your time!), the installation will "appear" as a publication in the journal, along with the other gallery pieces that comprised our performance. There will be writing about this process (of converting cinematic works into webtexts). 

This writing emerges from writing i've been doing since i started making digital films in 2004 and publishing them as part of their contextualizing webtexts in 2009. Why write about it? Why not, say, make the documentary, instead? Good question, and i may do both. But so first, the book i've been working at since i started "writing" cinematically? It wants and needs to grow up. 2012 has done much to help me grow up (some of it, as you know, has been very, very shaky and rough). And but the book needs me; i've heard that the field in which i work may also want, need, and enjoy the book. So, you will likely be the lucky year that sees me cramming that plan into my life's time, teaching load and personal drama notwithstanding. 

More conceptually, the book is done waiting, and the 2012 drama emboldens. So beyond a straight up history -- how we have talked about film in our field -- which i will shape through the lens of affective discourses (hope, fear, etc.), the book longs to materialize as a kind of ironic play. It insists upon its own irony as a print book about what i've been calling film-composition (an aspirational and playfully, historically "serious" term that illuminates a discussion of film as a kind of writing we have longed to fully engage in our field for many years; more specifically, film production -- even if "merely video" -- in the field of rhetoric and composition). But don't worry; it doesn't languish in irony and snark because you see, there are some p-r-i-t-t-y sexy ways of thinking about the relationship between print and film (the glaringly obvious: think for one second about the allegedly "in crisis" critic/filmmaker relationship, and if this is insufficient as a prompt, read David Denby's Do The Movies Have A Future?). 

Still lost? To put it simply, my experiences resisting print in deference to cinematics unspool complex dynamics that are instructive and sometimes hilarious! The book insists (and i have argued since i shared these thoughts at a New Orleans' CCCC conference, in a presentation entitled "image.pleasure"), that this resistance is essential. However, at certain stages in the production cycle (aka "composing process"), i/we must write words, even if only minimal text files as overlays that, say, identify a person speaking in a documentary, or open a new section of a short, conceptual film. More expansively, i am called upon to write words for the webtexts i publish. And what i've lived through is a profound complexity (a euphemism), a  tension between print and film imaging that is painful, maddening, confounding. Nevertheless, the book insists that this procedurally induced tension is immensely productive, despite my long beloved agreement with Brian Massumi's assertion that in light of the intensity of affect associated with image reception, "will and consciousness is subtractive." i mean, i will agree (obvi), but i will argue, in a particular formulation, that print (as "language," as driven by "will and consciousness") is "subtractive" (29), and this may seem a fairly harsh critique that dismisses  print in favor of cinematics -- not my point, because see "subtractive" need not screen as damaged, wrong or less than. In many ways, the harsh, brightly lit damage of language (esp print, in my formulation) lights up space for reflection, pedagogy, and most importantly, revision. It does this by reducing the complexity of the imagistic intensity of cinematics, and while i/we may mourn this compression (i do), we recognize the essential language function in it. So see, even if the work of film-composition desires a less clearly defined set of guiding objectives (it does) than "writing it up," "the article," or "the book," and instead first desires pleasure (it does), the writing serves. Of course, here, i could go all groovy on you. Talk about how film-composition is writing ...  that the term "writing" as a signifier for print language (words) is outdated. Don't worry. i do all that in the book.

But i go too far. The point is that you are my time. For the book, for new projects (my remix project on the matter of privacy), for continued personal shinymaking. 

2012 gave me a little space; you, YOU, however, are immense, and i love you ...

becoming the book

yu-cheng chou,
"emotions" 

Yesterday, i responded to one of Cheryl Ball's FB status updates regarding her current sabbatical and book project. i used the response as an opportunity to see with greater clarity how our driving concepts are (re)animated, (re)mediated within real and virtual spaces. Cheryl offers a perfect lens through which to read this possibility, her identity fluctuating luminously across a variety of screens, from all points (inter)national, and always radiating a sense of wonder and emerging possibilities for our rhetorical work, for our bodies, for our hopes, for our professional identity, and so on. 

So but when i read her post, in which she states her intentions for getting to work on that book, i can't resist seeing the obvi Cheryl truth, the one that we see in various live and virtual spaces in routinely delightful ways. Cheryl is her book. Book as ethos, as tool for encouraging creativity in others, for garnering interest from potential students, colleagues, and funding agencies, and so on (all the stuff a book "does" as an academic and professional function). i will read Cheryl's "book," but i wonder if i already do.

Some of the early responses to Cheryl's post encourage, along the lines of "just do it. shut off your 'life' and get it done," and this should seem like perfect advice.

And but full disclosure: My own single-authored book is struggling to breathe under the weight of a heavy teaching load, my role as the lead for UVU's ePortfolio work, and personal matters, among other things & to say the least. i keep hoping that a more reasonable workload will aid me in the process, and i do love the book. But i see it differently and worry less as time and uncertainty and etc., etc. keep pushing it around so that it keeps seeming quite far away. But so importantly, @ the same time (and supporting the quasi-claims i am making here), it feels very close and very true. See, each of my conference presentations and publications since 2004 involve the subject of the book (what i've been calling "film-composition") ... and if i look carefully it's simple to see traces to the mid-to-late 1990's, to the dissertation, to my thinking about chaos and emergence. And but the live performances, audience exchanges, palpating experiences of watching as they watch, the publications that emerge from the encounters ... they all feel so terrifically vital (shout out to Byron Hawk!) , and but when i resettle into my routine teaching-and-being-on-campus life, "writing it up" is beyond destructive. Maybe i am simply not feeling generous with the affective intensities i've been so thrilled to experience in the work, but then, aren't such affects "unassimilable" (Massumi 27) in ways that assuage my convention-driven guilt? Am i simply (simplistically?) rationalizing? i don't know, but i do know that i read an awful lot (since grad school) about scholarship that deadens, publications for the sake of having published, and so on. So i can't help wonder if maybe it will be best (for me) to let the events have been the events, the live performances as sufficient. In my deepest bones, this beat is correct.

nb, one prominent Rhetoric colleague told me once that i should not be expected to publish, given my "teaching university" status, but she has been known to condescend, and her comment did nothing to lighten my load but instead simply galled me, fw that's w).

inventory

So i've just completed the latest revisions to my c.v. It's fine looking, i suppose. Alotta lists. Alotta work. But so also just happened: i'm posting a response to a friend's Facebook post about a long-ago audition, in which he reflects upon the advice of the Director ("go home and listen to Frank Sinatra"). i'm empathizing from the perspective of a girl who's studied acting since her early 40's and share my disaffection for the process. All of this in the span of a short 1/2 hour. Convergences? Epiphanies? Who can say? (certainly, i cannot say, not here ... not in public!). 

What i think i'm writing about here is my ennui regarding auditions, and i'm doing so by thinking about how the c.v. is a kind of "first look," which is all fine. Except that i have this radically over-entitled belief that i needn't be auditioning at this late stage in my career. And this of course compels me to question many of my choices, past and present. And, well, after last night's complete indecision regarding whether or not to drive up the canyon to The Owl Bar for a little social interaction but worrying that without Mike, who rarely drinks and usually ends up doing the driving after such outings ... well, in the hangover of that uncertainty, i cannot say that i'm much in the mood for indecision. 

But then, isn't my work as a rhetorician and compositionist and DIY filmmaker, teacher, and wanabe "creative" about exploring a smattering of possibilities all at the same time? ... and feeling comfy doing so? i think the answer is "yes," and so i'm reposting the image, above. i'm looking at it and crushing myself to accept and even attempt to radiate what she's putting out there. A girl can try, and sometimes, she believes it.

summer teaching ...

All kinds of economic factors mean that i am teaching the Summer B Block class. This is a compressed semester of 7.5 weeks, my favorite way to teach Introduction to Writing. i have so many projects up in the air, but i am choosing to focus almost exclusively on my teaching, for now, because the past year has been so full of family drama, travel, conference presentations, publication preparation, more travel, teaching demos and research talks, and difficult decisions. i am not entirely sure that I've decided correctly, and i do have some regrets. But the shiny, joyful news is that i have met and worked with some truly remarkable people, i continue to learn, and i am hopeful about the upcoming year and what it may bring (in some respects, it's "rinse and repeat," and i do like the shiny new!).

i had been planning to begin shooting for my new documentary, NOMO, but i have put that on hold. i am focusing on the teaching (didn't i tell you?!), for now, so but my creative and improvisational energies are there (say! that reminds me ... that article on improv. maybe soon). the book? or webtext? or documentary? ... we are still confused, where to begin? i make slow progress; i wonder if it's going to happen without serious revisions to my teaching schedule, and this compels me to think about the upcoming "season," so i'll be done, tidy up the main console in this empty classroom (it's "Virtual Friday" of Week One. i'm here to see any students who haven't yet attended while my other students are designing their blogs at their homes or other workspaces). 

Fascinating, right? If you've read this far, you are a good listener, and frankly, i have been needing to do some sort of public writing that moves beyond the level of a tweet or status update. And but yes, i realize that this post doesn't go much farther, but at least it's framed up as a "blog post," and that means i've gotta be motivating myself for something bigger (cue Liza!).