The last eleven months have brought forth three media projects.

In March, I performed a reading over a screencast at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). I was on a panel (The Rhetoric of Technoscience: A Remix Approach to Reading Technologies, Texts, and Ideas) with  Sarah Hallenbeck and Chelsea Redeker. I started putting together my presentation about two weeks before the conference. I was looking at the ways that the Get a Mac characters—Mac and PC—can be read as embodied metaphors. So I was composing a screencast, using the recording process as a means of arranging and discussing materials (the ads, quotations from texts, Web pages). I ‘ve presented videos several times at the conference, and have thought, along with others, about the irony of fueling thousands of miles of travel to walk into a room and push play. I had the script ready from laying down the audio track. The link formed easily: perform the reading live at the conference. The performance went well. The crowd was small, but gave me excellent feedback.

At the time of the CCCCs conference, I added a vocal track and posted the video, which became the draft of “I’m a Map; I’m a Green Tree.” I sent the link to Cheryl Ball who later asked me to develop the piece for possible submission to Kairos. Along the way, Cheryl played the video at the opening Town Hall meeting of 2010’s Computers and Writing Conference, where we got feedback and had a lively discussion about what counts as scholarship. I subsequently reworked the piece, concentrating on mixing the video scholarship (or poem) with some thoughts in words. The end result is available in issue 15.1 of Kairos.

In the meantime, I had so much fun performing the script of “I’m a Map” at the CCCCs conference, that I decided to push the concept and  perform my presentation at the Computers and Writing conference. The push came in the form of a live take of the recording of the screencast. Screencasts often use many takes edited together. Each segment is a performance of activities on the screen. Sustaining a take is a challenge because performing on a computer gets messy. The cursor gets bumped. The Web page takes too long to load. A typo. Cut. Take again. Instead, I planned, staged, and began recording takes of the recording of the screencast, giving the project a title that emerged somewhere in the middle of the process, “Watch the Bubble.”

I also wrote a script to accompany the screen performance. I delivered a reading of the script over the screencast at the Computers and Writing Conference. I also posted a  version with recorded narration. Bill Wolff asked if I would submit that for consideration in an online collection on remix composing. For Bill’s project, I reflect  on the composing of the screencast. I had artifacts from the creation of the piece—journal sketches, rough takes of the screen performance, note cards, script drafts, improvised recordings. I tried to make sense of the composing as I revised the composition, finding myself in a recurrent loop that has resulted in the draft here.

I was thinking about the convergences of screen and live performing/recording when I sent a query to Jenn Fishman for her call for projects to be submitted to an online issue of College Communication and Composition. On tracks parallel to my interest in performing and screen recording, I sometimes compose and usually assign portfolios for my courses. In the mode of “Watch the Bubble,” I asked students to screencast reflections on their work. I also assigned a warm up composition to introduce screencasting software and moves. I have to say the warmup projects were invigorating. They offered some creative composing opportunities, drifting somewhere between academic essay and mashup. And there was a nice performative element to the screencasts, especially the portfolio screencasts. Jackclyn Ngo, Sydney Stegall, and Kyle Stevens joined me to put together a piece that collects and reflects on these projects. Also a prepublication draft, it’s called “Casting Learning into Flowing Streams, or How to Put Together a This is What I Did in My Class Reflection that Sings, or This is What I Did in My class.”