DMAC Theory by Ryan Omizo

This video emerged from the Digital Media and Composition Institute conducted at The Ohio State University by Cynthia Selfe and Scott DeWitt. During one of the discussion forums, a student mentioned that she wished she could use digital media to learn more about digital-media theorists. Her suggestion, featured at the beginning of the video, inspired these guiding prompts: How do we as scholars of rhetoric, composition, and digital media do digital media theory? How do we develop these theories and put them into action in digital media? Based on these questions, I intended to create a video that would operate according to a “B-roll” aesthetic that, like the surrealists, would incorporate and re-invest the remnants and discards of life with an artistic dimension. In other words, I had shot hours of crummy video footage over the two-week institute and was driven to make good use of it. In the back of my mind were two notable concepts in the domain of digital media and composition, both of which figured explicitly in my final production: Lev Manovich's database cinema and Geoffrey Sirc's box logic. The former theorizes a cinema that emerges in real-time from a network of feeds; the latter argues for a sensibility based on the curatorship of found objects, of detritus, of gleanings. The following video represents an initial attempt at doing digital media theory with digital media by drawing on these concepts and then, admittedly, departing wildly in several directions.