MOUNT KARDASHMORE

         My project “Mount Kardashmore” is a remixed JPEG image made from separate pictures of the faces of Kim, Khloe, Kourtney, and Kris from the Kardashian family superimposed onto a picture of the American national monument, Mount Rushmore. The image contrasts the honor of a monument built in the early twentieth century as homage to American figures of the past against the paparazzi photos of members of a notorious celebrity family, who are the faces of American influence and fashion trends of the present. The idea behind “Mount Kardashmore” is to draw attention to how people, or even objects and ideas, who are spectacles or sources of entertainment are given as much importance as beings or entities that contribute to more practical aspects of society.

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         As Ferguson explains in “Everything is a Remix: Part 1”, to create something new is to “copy, combine, and transform” pre-existing cultural elements (2:59-3:03) (https://vimeo.com/25380454). With every remix made from two or more cultural artifacts, its new meaning is almost a mixture of its components since each contributing artifact is packed with its own cultural meaning. Keeping Ferguson’s concept of remix in mind, my composite of the Kardashians on Mount Rushmore juxtaposes the cultural meanings that each set of images carry on their own. When discussing multimodial projects, DeVoss comments that the interpretation of a static image changes depending on the “context in which it appears”, and that layering many modes intricately changes the relationship between each mode as a functioning part of the whole composition (DeVoss 30). For this project, I used only a single mode: digital images. Yet, I aimed to play around with the meaning that viewers would draw from the images layered together. At one point, I considered placing the title of the picture “Mount Kardashmore” somewhere on the image. However, I could not choose whether to include the title in a calligraphic font to carry the same authority and almost noble quality closely tied to the reputations of the men chiseled into Mount Rushmore, or one of the easily-recognized fonts used for the “Keeping Up with The Kardashian” reality TV show. Whether it ultimately makes the message of the image clearer or not from a viewer’s perspective, I decided to leave the picture textless. This decision was from assuming that the connections one could naturally make upon the sight of the Kardashians against Mount Rushmore easily and wildly contrast each other enough, that it would not require text to make it clear.

         Every alteration I made to finalize my project was with the intention of making the piece intermediate. Using Adobe Photoshop, I cut out and arranged the pictures of the Kardashians’ faces over the original Mount Rushmore image, and edit each of their faces to blend in with the rocky texture of the mountains and create a sense of immediacy with a semi-realistic image. As Bolter and Grusin’s explain how immediacy works in regards to digital images, “[d]igital graphics erases the subject algorithmically through the mathematics of perspective and shading embodied in a program’ (Bolter and Grusin 28). The best result I could expect with my Photoshop attempt was to make a mostly-believable image of a mountain with the Kardashian's faces on it. Though, obviously this job was not preformed with the genuine hope of fooling viewers or making them feel as if they could be in front of such a mountain in realtime. Regardless, having finished the project, I feel the completed photo sums up the elusive goal of transparency and achieving near-perfect immediacy that Bolter and Grusin describe. This desire to capture and contain a real-life moment is basically the incentive for remediations or even original creations made by using specific forms of media throughout history, such as photography and photorealistic paintings. Whether or not it has been achieved due to the limitations of using Photoshop’s settings and features, or my imperfect knowledge of photo editing, the already-unattainable goal for complete transparency between media and viewers is pushed farther away with each change I made throughout the process towards the finished version of my digital mash-up. Every slight mistake made with manipulating the pixels in the edited image pulls more attention to the human element involved in making the image, always reminding viewers that it is only Photoshopped. The project is arguably and incidentally hypermediate as it makes “the viewer acknowledge the medium as a medium”, only it was not my goal to highlight this effect of the image going into the project, or even after its completion (Bolter and Grusin 42).

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         Overall, this project is a small example of how the expansion of Read-Write culture in the digital age makes it easier for individuals to control how they interact with content, especially by making new content from pre-existing content. With the unique and multi-faceted relationship that consumers now have with new media in Read-Write culture– which Lessig refers to as "amateur participation"–  audiences can to break through the constraints of Read-Only culture to take advantage of the breadth of content available through various channels, and exercise more power in choosing to transmute the messages we take from content we are exposed to before passing content on (Lessig). Read-Write culture is, fortunately, a byproduct of the speed and convenience of the boundless content made possible with digital culture, and the new media channels to have sprung forth from it. The subject of “Mount Kardashmore”, however, reveals that another consequence of having become accustomed to the speed, various types, and amounts of content available is that one must compete for the average digital media participant’s long-term attention in this digital age. Participants in Read-Write culture of this age have come to value fast and easy entertainment - which the Kardashian family represent, as notorious cultural icons without discernible or at least conventional talent and contributions to society - at such a monumental level.

Works Cited

DeVoss, Danielle Nicole. “DeVoss - Composing Multimodial.”

Ferguson, Kirby. “Everything Is a Remix Part 3.” Vimeo, 20 June 2011, vimeo.com/25380454.

Grusin, Richard, and Jay David Bolter. “Bolter and Grusin - Chap 1.” The MIT Press, 28 Feb. 2000.

Lessig, Lawrence. “Lessig - Chapters 3 and 4.” Penguin Press, 16 Oct. 2008.