Extra Credit Memes and Photos

During my last two years at UC Davis, my wife and I became involved in the protests that were occurring over the increased tuition for the UC system. You may have heard about these protests because 21 students, several of whom we knew and taught, were pepper-sprayed by a UC Davis police officer. The incident was covered by the national media, but what is especially interesting and pertinent for this course is that some of the coverage was devoted to the internet meme that the event spawned:

The Lt. Pike meme actually proved to be quite significant because the myriad representations of Pike spraying everyone from Adam to Snooki communicated the excessive nature of the incident and added to the story of the protests in a significant way.

If you choose to do the extra credit assignment, try to think of the ways in which memes are becoming a genre of digital composition and keep this in mind when you create your own.

Here are some examples of what I had in mind for the extra credit assignments included in this week's schedule.

Assignment #1: Create Your Own Meme

This meme plays off of one of the primary ideological differences between certain sectors of French and American culture and presents two issues that are obviously highly contentious here. If you do borrow from an already existing meme, make sure you make it your own by adapting it to cultural issues you've encountered and then explain those issues and the significance of your meme.

Or, Assignment #2: Turning Your Back on History

This is a photograph of me with my sister, mother, and grandmother in front of the Pantheon in Rome.

Now the Pantheon, which is a near perfect example of the archon of Roman culture, is an amazing monument that is nearly 2000 years old and is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in existence. It is the burial place of both Raphael and King Victor Emmanuel II. And yet, dominating the Piazza della Rotonda directly in front of it is a McDonald's (as you can see behind us). In this particular instance, the 'frame' of the Pantheon, in the form of the McDonald's, has less to do with Roman culture than it does with the tourist culture (i.e. Americans) that frequent it.

Whichever assignment you choose, I'm excited to see what you come up with or what you find when you turn your back on the archon of your host cultures.

So there's a new app out for the iphone that I though you all might be interested in. It's called Qwiki, and it works by turning the photos on your iphone into a minute long slide show while also setting a random song from your iTunes as background music. I actually hesitated telling you about it because it's so easy that I didn't know how constructive it would be for the course, but it is an interesting app. What's most significant, I think, is that the app is being marketed on it's website as a storytelling app that turns your photos "into a beautiful story to share." This is, of course, another example of the way that technology and apps in particular are changing what we consider stories or compositions, and these types of new compositional strategies are precisely the sort of thing you should be thinking about when you construct your final video projects.
Anyway, for those of you that are interested, you can pick up the app from qwiki.com or the app store.