This, if I have counted correctly, is my last required post for Writing and Digital Media. I’ve actually had a blast in this course. The projects required a great deal of hard work — often more than I realized until they were in full swing — and really challenged me to push the bounds of my own writing as well as that of my multimedia skill set.
The course was an exercise in embracing the unfamiliar: I learned how to operate at least half a dozen entirely new media platforms or applications and had to not only adapt to them but push them to their limits to see what they were capable of creating. I learned to edit video, make recordings in a sound booth, compose music, write essays in Tapestry, refresh myself in HTML, critically analyze new apps, and countless other peculiar little skills that I suspect may actually be useful somewhere down the line. Even if they aren’t directly, performing these tasks made me more comfortable with working in an unfamiliar medium, and challenged me to expand my ideas of what multimedia discourse really is, and the ways in which I’m capable of contributing to it. And that, to me, is pretty damn worthwhile.
It’s very late at night as I’m typing this post and I’ve got a song stuck in my head again. I listened to this track on repeat while working on a number of the aforementioned projects this semester. It’s from a band called How To Destroy Angels, and has a bit of a multimedia quality itself — the band uses a blend of traditional and electronic instrumentation in their songs, and the visual aesthetic of all their videos focuses on “analog glitches” — taking digital film, converting it to analog VHS cassette recordings, running it through a broken VCR, and filming the results with a digital camera. Multimodality is really an excellent thing.
Here’s to the end of something great, and to the hope of more quality digital adventures in the future.