One of my video projects, “A Post-Production Turn: New Media, New Practice, New Ontology” published in Textshop Experiments, has been taken up by the Dr. Ethna D. Lay’s WSC 124 Digital Composition course at Hofstra University as one of their objects/artifacts of interest. And while I had hoped to be able to zoom/skype in for their class to talk with the students and answer their questions, my travel schedule has prevented that from being an option. So, as a second choice, they sent me their questions about (and shared their blog responses on) the project and I took a few moments to respond to their inquiries. My video response and the student questions can be found below.
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1. What is your background in mediation that initially inspired you to create this compilation of video, music, and words?
2. How is making related to imitation and to our primal drives?
3. Personally, I found the video to be disorienting and distracting. Was this intentional? If so, is this a commentary on the process of making?
4. What gave you the idea to combine so many media into one (e.g. the audio, photos and videos, and screencasts)? I am most particularly curious to know what influenced your choice of what songs to pair with certain passages. I believe that I understand your choice to use “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thick and Pharrell Williams as it paired well with the content of the texts, despite how distracting it was. With the additional songs, I believe that they may have been chosen with the intent to bring up the considerations of copyright infringements and such; however, I would like to learn what your actual intention of the other songs may have or have not been?
5. Did you purposely intend to use your own modulating voice in this video even though you could have possibly hired someone? Why did you make this rhetorical choice?
6. What was your intention in choosing the words that you did? I noticed that throughout the text, you had a very lyrical tone and often used anagrams to emphasize certain points. In short, you seem to be quite textually oriented. What’s your particular relationship to the digital?
7. What made you choose the imagery you chose from the word choices you made? For example: the critic is a leech, 8-bit spittle, the lovers; to name a few.
8. How did you choose which words to combine? → It made me think of the movie Pitch Perfect, when they combined anything with the prefix aca-. That was somewhat distracting, as I know you were playing on aca-demic and not aca-pella.
9. How do you apply mediation and making to other aspects of your life? In other words, are you a bricoleur at all times? Or just in digital spaces?
10. What is the effect that digital media has had on the greater socio-political conversation? You reference the way that memes have entered a part of a larger conversation, how does this affect the ways that we communicate with each other and our sensitization or desensitization to national and global issues?
11. The transcript to your piece demarcates a change in the human quest for meaning to a quest to make (and making). Is this a recent, contemporary turn? Are there any other historical moments that so move?
12. Do you feel as though the remediation of text is the future of literature as we know it? Will we soon see media about other pieces of media become mainstream?
Links to Student Blogposts Responding to my video:
https://thecompositioncorner.wordpress.com/2019/10/15/response-to-a-post-production-turn/
https://writinginmanyforms.wordpress.com/2019/10/14/post-4-a-response-to-hodgson/
https://kennedysmindblog.wordpress.com/2019/10/16/justin-hodgson-response/
Justin Hodgson 
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