#3EHD: The Colonial Remix. Hybrid Media from Colonial Codices to Contemporary Motion Graphics
Susana Sevilla Aho participará en el Tercer Encuentro de Humanidades Digitales, donde nos presentará The Colonial Remix, un proyecto de transmedialidades en que se pretende la adquisición de conocimientos históricos por analogías transtemporales. Sometemos aquí su ponencia, titulada Hibridación de medios de los códices coloniales a los gráficos animados contemporáneos al escrutinio de nuestros lectores, y esperamos sus comentarios y debates:
This paper is based on the author’s digital humanities project The Colonial Remix, which compares cultural production in colonial Mexico to cultural production in our contemporary digital age. It draws parallels between the hybridity that characterizes media in these two seemingly different moments. It urges readers to reflect on how colonialism has shaped the way we use text and image, and how it has led us to privilege certain media forms over others.
Scholars have often compared the rise of the digital age with the invention of the printing press in Europe. It is certainly useful to compare the history of the book with that of digital platforms, as both technologies took on important roles as containers of knowledge. However, I believe we can gain more insight into the way these media operate if we analyze the effects of Gutenberg’s invention in colonial contexts, and particularly in New Spain. Situating the printed book in colonial Mexico (home to the first printing press in the Americas) allows us to grapple with what Walter Mignolo calls “the darker side of the renaissance.” Indeed, the story of the colonial Mexican book also provides a starting point to think about some of the darker sides, as well as the possibilities, of digital technologies.
The printing press was brought to present-day Mexico as a tool of evangelization and empire. Religious and royal officials aimed to replace indigenous forms of expression with Western ones. The printing of dictionaries and translated sermons would help them reach this aim. Indeed, colonial discourse reveals one of the principle cultural values that defined print technology of the era: the perceived superiority of alphabetic communication over other forms.
Although colonialism in Mexico did lead to a displacement of indigenous pictographic forms by alphabetic ones, this did not happen from one day to the next. Indeed, the initial encounter between European and and indigenous forms in the sixteenth century led to a brief period (or as anthropologist Serge Gruzinski has called it, a “renaissance”) of hybrid communicational codes. The Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco presents an emblematic case of hybrid media production. Here, the sons of the Nahua elite were taught by friars trained in the humanist European tradition. These Nahua students became trilingual in Nahuatl, Spanish, and Latin, and worked alongside friars to record and document indigenous traditions in the scriptorium of the school. Codices that emerged from such contexts contain combinations not only of content but also of writing and reading methods that were borrowed from two systems that had never encountered each other before.
The hybridity in colonial media of the sixteenth century parallels the hybridity that defines digital media and its remixes today. Just as the colonial encounter provided a platform for new combinations of formerly separate communicational strategies (Western alphabetic and indigenous pictographic strategies), the software environments of a digital age provide a platform for new combinations of formerly separate media techniques. This type of hybridity in digital media is perhaps most clearly elaborated by theorist Lev Manovich, who has analyzed the “logic of deep remixability” that operates in a media software context. According to this logic, it is not just the contents of separate media that are remixed, but thetechniques associated with them. For him, the most emblematic example of this is the invention of the software After Effects. After Effects is a kind of Photoshop that moves in time, creating limitless possibilities for remixing all types of still and moving visual media content. Techniques are easily remixed as well: motion blur (native to the camera) can be applied to computer graphics, animated movement can be applied to typography, changes in opacity and colors associated with graphic design can be applied to film, etc.
If, in the colonial period, formerly separate visual strategies collided in the scriptoriums of the Colegio de Santa Cruz, they are once again colliding in After Effects and other digital environments. This paper argues that understanding colonial remixes in sixteenth century Mexico gives us a better understanding of our own remixed culture. Analyzing hybridity in colonial documents can shed light on the both the warnings and possibilities presented by contemporary hybrid media.
In this presentation, I will also speak about the role of hybrid methods in the creation of The Colonial Remix. The piece was inspired by long-form, web-based journalistic essays like the New York Times’ Snow Fall that incorporate full-scale images and parallax scrolling, as well as video and textual content. Colonial Remix seeks to use the language of hybrid media while presenting an analysis of hybrid media. It combines the visual techniques of film and motion graphics (in its video trailer component), contemporary web design (in its use of parallax scrolling and mobile friendly templates), and graphic design (in its print-inspired images and typographic choices). It is the product of a digital humanities and arts practice that involves combining digital storytelling methods with humanities research.
Otros recursos de la autora:
¶ https://commons.mla.org/deposits/item/mla:577/
¶ http://susi.pro/
¶ http://dh-terms.net/
