1. Critical Transformations intertextuality in the digital age
Martin Phillips
Sussex University
2008

3. Is sleevefacing a
creative act?

5. Creativity
“ .. the process of imagining, supposing and generating ideas which are original, providing an alternative to the expected, the conventional, or the routine” (All Our Futures)

6. Extract from a 2008 proposal for a Creative Writing A Level
“It is important to our plans that Creative Writing is not seen as just an adjunct to English or English Literature: so while students could indeed write stories, poems, etc. they might equally write journalism, web-sites, adverts, etc.”

7. CREATIVITY vs. ORIGINALITY
“Immature poets imitate:mature poets steal”
T.S.Eliot essay on Philip Massinger
“When a man of genius steals, he always
makes the thefts his own.”
George Saintsbury on Laurence Sterne

8. Objectives for the workshop
To consider what “reading” means in 2008
To explore notions of transformation, appropriation & intertextuality
To consider the effectiveness of a range of conceptual models and key ideas in supporting critical reading of a range of cultural texts
To investigate some practical classroom outcomes which emerge from these sorts of consideration

9. Reading for Change Report for OECD’s Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA)
Dynamic readers:
Question and challenge
Make connections
Envisage, speculate and predict
Play with ideas
Keep options open as they read
They do this across a full range of text types

10. Defining the terms Appropriation: The act of taking for one’s own use
Transformation: A change or alteration – especially a radical one
“Much of the interest of works of art lies in the ways in which they explore and modify the codes which they seem to be using.”
Ferdinand de Saussure
Culturally we have become used to sampling and remixing as the norm. The history of film is partly about appropriation from other forms – technically from the magic lantern and the Daguerroetype (the Realist tradition) but also narratively/fantastically from strip cartoons, pulp novels, Wild West shows, melodramatic theatre.
Transformation for our purposes is where the content of one text is transformed into another. A useful technique in its own right for engaging students with texts.

11. Defining the terms
Intertextuality: The ways in which texts refer to other media texts that producers assume audiences will recognise
Connotation: Responses of individuals to the combinations of signifiers in an image
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
T.S. Eliot

12. Link to the conference strands
Critical Practice: where the transformation or appropriation are consciously part of the shaping process, some critical engagement with the initial source will have taken place.
Creative Process: For “art” to have happened, something beyond straight plagiarism needs to have occurred. Is this “ .. the process of imagining, supposing and generating ideas which are original, providing an alternative to the expected, the conventional, or the routine” (All Our Futures)
Cultural Perspective: The intertextual/connotative processes either break down completely in the face of cultural boundaries or enhance enjoyment

13. Visual literacy
To be literate in the 21st century means understanding all text types
Inferential reading skills operate as much with multi-modal as with print based text
Learning should embrace both ANALYSIS and PRODUCTION

14. Intertext, intertext, everywhere
The ubiquitous nature of appropriation

15. Skymag reference here for you?
What are the
connotations that
Skymag reference here for you?

18. What connotations did the
BBC hope to tap into to
sell this TV cop series?
Do you recognise the
appropriation?

19. The rise of the ironic reader
Intertextual associations for persuasive intent in TV advertising
Typhoo and Tango

22. Reading meaning in visual design
Questions to ask about pictures

23. Rod Taylor’s conceptual model
CONTENT: The content of the work in terms of subject matter; its significance, how the artist has accumulated the information
FORM: The formal qualities of the work; its arrangement into shapes, its form, the colour scheme employed
PROCESS: The techniques, processes and methods involved in the making of the work
MOOD: The mood,atmosphere or feeling evoked by the work

24. MOOD
Can you imagine what the artist’s feelings were while producing the work?
Is the work quiet/noisy, soothing/disturbed, happy/sad, relaxing/jarring, angry/calm?
Is your mood simply the one of the moment or has the work directly affected you? If the latter, what qualities in the work so affect you?
The Actors
Randy Hartzenburg
1987

25. Voices in texts
Roland Barthes contends that what he calls “the grain of voice” exceeds the verbal meaning of a text. Thus does Agard’s reading takes on greater significance than Osundare’s words in a transformed version?

27. Classroom Practice 1
Working on meaning and mood through grain of voice, lighting and framing
Transformational activities involving moving image texts take students deeper into the original, linking Creative Process with Critical Practice

29. From still image to time based text
Film animation as
politico/cultural weapon

30. Key Concepts from Media Studies
Audience:Who are the texts aimed at, who will see them, and how will they receive them?
Media Language: How are meanings being created by camera shots, editing, mise-en-scene, sound, performance and other aspects of moving images? How important is narrative in the text? How are stories being told and structured?
Representation: How are characters, groups of people, places and ideas being portrayed? Whose viewpoint are we seeing things from?
Institution:How have the texts been produced, who have they been produced by, and why? And crucially, how has this affected the meanings created by the texts?

33. Musical transformations
The rise and rise of the pop video

34. MTV: Changing the visual landscape
.MTV changed the way we read. The advertising industry reckon that reading speeds – in terms of the ability to process fast cut sequences – has doubled in 15 years.
Industry training manuals now often refer to “MTV style editing”. This is distinguished by:
- side-stepping of traditional narrative
- jump cuts which break with concern for contiguity of time and place
- more concerned with establishing mood or feeling than narrative coherence

35. Transformational continuum for analysing pop video
Illustration: the most straightforward – a very literal set of images. Everything in the finished version derives directly from the song
Amplification: elements are added to the original. The mark of the auteur director will be evident, but the video enhances or develops ideas rather than fundamentally changing them
Disjuncture: here a whole new set of images are constructed, with abstract ideas sometimes making little initial sense. Often arty bands are promoted by this approach to stress their originality
From:
Andrew Goodwin: Dancing in the Distraction Factory