Media Aesthetics: COMM 309
syllabus | schedule of events

Composition 1: The Mash Up

For your first composition in Media Aesthetics, you will be creating a mashup.

I’ve broken the formation down into steps to help you get started:

1. Select a particular medium. This medium should be one in which you are literate (you can “read,” “write,” and operate on texts in the medium).
2. Select two related documents in that particular medium. The two documents should be related by a common thread; for example, DJ Danger Mouse famously created a mashup of the Beatles’ The White Album and Jay-Z’s The Black Album. He titled his mashup The Grey Album.
3. Blend the two documents together to produce one original third document, the mashup. Remember, we should be able to read your mashup document in the same way we would read the original documents, for example, if you mashup two photographs, we should then see one single photograph. Likewise, if you mashup two songs (as occurred on Glee, season 1, episode 8), we should hear one song.
4. Edit, Revise, Edit, Revise.

The tools in the Knight-Crane Convergence Laboratory can be extremely helpful to you in composing your mashup, although your mashup does not have to be digital in nature. Let me know if you have questions or need technical support.

For your reflection on this assignments please consider some of the following questions to get you started:

1. How well did the mash-up demonstrate what you intended for it to demonstrate?
2. What successes or frustrations did you experience as you created the mash-up?
3. How did you decide what pieces of the original documents to include and what not to include?
4. How does creating a mash-up change your awareness of the process of making messages? In the news? In movies? In advertising?
5. Now that it is finished, how could you have improved your mash-up?