Today is the last meeting of ENGL527: Multimedia Writing. The fruits of my labor are showcased in this sort of digital installation/Google Site. This was my first real/focused experience with creating video/visual compositions. Maybe they’re not much to look at, but they required a lot of careful work, much exploration and self-teaching, much revising and re-imagining, ultimately a large portion of my life this semester. My struggle with these partly came from identifying myself as invested in visual rhetoric, which then meant I was beholden to creating texts that better have a rhetoric to their visual composition. Maybe they aren’t as established in their rhetoric as they should be, but I attempted to be thoughtful in the material choices I was making. Maybe they aren’t are not not not not not not not not lacking. Maybe, they are and can and do in their composition. Maybe I can create/write/compose visual texts. And maybe I am beginning to understand some of the complex considerations that must take place in teaching visual/multimedia/multimodal composition.

It’s small. But I’m not going to give into my urge to erase the works created. It’s not about perfection, not about polished products locked into finality in amber.

I need reminding and so do others. Professor Krause jokes that the lesson of this course is to beat perfectionism out of us. I think I’m actually letting myself do this though, doing without fretting and sweating over not looking creative or insightful or enough for others. It’s still careful, but it isn’t paranoid. composition isn’t perfect, pass it on.

Eraserhead: This class also made me realize the depth of my David Lynch fixation. And the extent to which interests influence the composition process.