Looking for Mimesis and Remix in The Scared Is Scared

• In Event: Literacy, Language, and the Exploration of an Online Text: Where Are We Now?

Abstract

Overview and Purpose: Art imitates life and from an early age, individuals play and remix the content and multimodalities of texts to make meaning. Mimesis is an age-old practice of representing life in art. Remix is the art of taking one thing and making it into something else entirely. Children learn from the texts and semiotic systems around them and their compositional work often maps processes and practices of mimesis and remixing. The art of choosing parts of media and vernacular texts from books, television series, toys, videogames, and popular movies is a naturalized process of mimesis. This paper explores mimesis and remix in The Scared is Scared video extrapolating examples of recontextualized ideas and text and then extending this analyses out into my own research. After analyzing The Scared is Scared video, I will offer examples of similar videos and multimodal texts produced as a part of a research study on children and adolescent’s multimodal compositional practices.

Theoretical Perspectives: The paper approaches meaning making from a multimodal and socio-cultural view of literacy (Kress, 2010; Siegel, 2006). Additionally, this work draws on other work that explores how individuals reconstitute and recontextualize texts and content from one place to another (Williams, 2008). Jenkins (2006) identifies how digital literacies in participatory cultures invite remixing practices and varied forms of mimesis in virtual worlds. YouTube videos have heightened remix and mimesis as pervasive multimodal compositional practices (Barkhuizen et al., 2014; Crystal, 2003). As well, videogames have been identified as texts that remix content from disparate genres and media outlets (Curwood et al., 2013). Wohlwend talks about how young children engage in “playful remixing and repurposing of media” as they negotiate spaces (Wohlwend, 2015, p. 554). Related work on remix, bricolage, and mimesis will frame my analyses of the Scared is Scared video as well as videos drawn from my own research.

Methods and Data: Applying Jenkins’ (2006) concept of convergence with Iedema’s (2003) concept of resemiotization as “more than translation of one kind of meaning into another” (Iedema, 2003, p. 46), I analyze Scared is Scared and two other videos from my own research.

Findings: There is very little research that takes a common set of data and interprets it from different vantage points and this symposium provides this opportunity. By combing virtual worlds theory by Jenkins and semiotics and intertextual interpretations, I will expose sophisticated, and under-valued intellectual practices, completed by children and youth.

Significance: The significance of this paper and the larger symposium is twofold. First, the differing perspectives on the same corpus of data will show the benefits of a more variegated and polymorphic approach to data analyses. Second, the exercise compels researchers to combine theories in sophisticated and expansive ways.

Author

• Jennifer Rowsell, Brock University