Navigable Remake Project

Using Photoshop and Dreamweaver, take the content of an "old media" text and create a series of five to fifteen screens that realize the original's effects in new-media principles defined by Lev Manovich: That is,

• making words visual by using font, contrasting sizes, color, placement, backgrounds, layering, etc.
• mingling these "visualized" words with images (and images on other layers)
• making these screens as "navigable" or "spatial" lexia, rather than sequential pages, lines, or shots that follow the linear structure of the original.

The point is to make the decisions about how you visualize words, mingle them with images, and reorganize the lexia, according to the emotional and aesthetic effect you want to achieve.

You can assume that your reader/viewer knows the original work you are translating.

Examples
Take a look at a few examples of navigable remakes from previous classes (each opens in a separate window, which you should close to return to this page):

• the film Seven done by Erik Yanda
• the he-said-she-said story of the break-up of Barbie and Ken
• the Cohen Brothers' movie The Big Lebowski.

Notice how each of these projects mingle words and images to the point that the look of the words themselves becomes important.

Here are some examples of New Media (Web sites) "remediating" old media (television):

• the ABC television Web site Lost Connections
• the interactive map of Albert Square in Walford, setting of the British soap Eastenders, or, even better, the Walford Death Map (Game?) showing details of various characters' who've died over the series' thirty-plus years on the air.
  
  

Where to Start
The original text that you choose to work with can be either your own work or someone else's, but it should be an aesthetic or "literary" text, rather than something analytical or journalistic. Choose a film, novel, short story, television series, poem, etc. Consider re-making not the entire work but a scene, passage, section, or other component unit.

An Alternative Possibility
Take a non-aesthetic text and make it aesthetic: for instance, take a particular news report of the Iraq War, and make it a kind of verbal/visual poem in the tradition of "found poetry.")

Criteria

1. that the project successfully translates an old-media work (or a portion of it, such as an individual scene or passage) into new-media operations and forms in five to fifteen screens.
   
   
2. the extent to which the project mingles visual and verbal elements, and how well their integration achieves the intended effects and meaning of the work
   
   
3. the degree to which the project is unified by a consistent look and feel through choices of font, color, graphic style, size, etc. Images from varied sources, for instance, should be modified to look like part of the same project, rather than scraps of other works.
   
   
4. the extent to which the project is informed by an understanding of new media operations and forms drawn from the class readings and discussions, as well as the subtle continuities between old and new media in specific works.
   
   
5. the degree to which the project is reorganized and reconceived to be "navigable" and spatial, rather than strictly linear, and how significantly the reorganization contributes meaning of the project or constitutes an interpretation of the original--rather than just mechanically breaking it up to make it spatial.
   
   
6. the degree to which the project demonstrates the author's technical grasp of the software, techniques, and work flows learned in class so far
   
   
7. how well thoughtfully the project is analyzed in a formal, well-written, grammatically correct commentary of at least 500 words (about 2 double-spaced pages), speaking to the criteria above.
   
   
8. how specifically and productively the commentary explains the effects and meaning of the old-media version, the issues raised by creating the new-media translation, and the ways that the translation attempts to achieve and/or interpret those effects and meaning in new-media terms.
   
   
9. that the commentary includes at least two passages where you perform a "close reading" of your new-media translation, looking at how specific details demonstrate the techniques and strategies you used for achieving the goals of the assignment above
   
   
10. that the commentary thoughtfully employs--and elaborates its use of--the critical vocabulary drawn from the class readings by Lev Manovich and Janet Murray at least four times. The use of these terms should be productive and seem natural, rather than forced and mechanical. Please type these critical terms in bold.
    
    
11. whether all outside references in the commentary--including online ones--are cited correctly using MLA-style in-text citation format and bibliographic documentation at the end of the commentary.