Content Warning: Animal Cruelty / Abuse

The quote I chose from by Lisa Cartwright and Marita Sturken's Practices of Looking is this: “Images’ meanings emerge through these processes of interpretation, engagement, and negotiation.” Upon reading Rhetoric of Remix written by Virgina Kuhn, I could see the concepts Virginia Kuhn have illustrated on the intermixing elements of the verbal, aural, visual and how those elements could be used to communicate what Kuhn describes as the “the affordances of the digital carry some of the immediacy and sonic features of the oral, as well as some of the abstraction and permanence of the written”. In this case, through my own project, which is going to be a dialogic conversation on the way people perceive how they see animals, I want to explore 2D gif depictions of animals transitioning into videos of animals into a scene of animals being butchered and killed and then lastly seen as food through a montage of food videos (i.e. chicken as fried chicken, pigs as bacons, and etc). Through these evolutions and different interpretations, I believe images’ meanings can be rich in meaning in the video remix if juxtaposed and contrasted. Overall, the concept of images understood through the remixing process would open the dialogic argument that people don’t view animals as food and vice versa in order to spark an emotional response from the audience to reconsider the norms of eating meat.

In the final product of the remix, I wanted to solidify the concept of how meanings emerge from these interplaying of people's interpretations, engagements, and negotiations with the realities they handle. Particular to my remix is that I had a clear narrative of clear distinct people who perpetuate animals into the cruel system of live-to-death for our food industry. The beginning of the video depicts a clear, complicit relationship of the farmers, processors, and the government in the food industry. Moreover, I really wanted to focus on using different media such as cartoon gifs of animals, real-life animal videos, and food videos. They are all different interpretations of the way humans see animals, so it fits perfectly with the quote I derived meaning and theme in the video. Videos, unlike writing, which has the qualities of abstraction and permanence, carried itself with having an immediate influence on how people's feels. Having to describe my theme in the way that people don't equate animals viewed as a gif, as a pet, and as the food was heavily guided by bold white text in the video, so I could allow people to view the video as it is with helpful text to question the nature of food. Overall, this project allowed me to do what I intended to create, and I am glad I spent a lot of time capturing the essence and mood of the video I was trying to emulate.

Especially, with such a controversial topic since many people easily disregard animal lives because they are willingly ignorant about the meat industry and dairy industry that continues to exploit animals for people's subsentence.