“Still I Rise: Remix” is a visual, lyrical, digital interactive fight song for civic action for the Black Lives Matter social justice and social change movement. Created during and by the stressors intensified from the global pandemic, this JavaScript interactive poetry remix embraces the digital activism made exponential during the pandemic through the platformization of counternarratives. The remix blends multiple digital mediums with cultural artifacts of the past and present to weave together a rhetorical and semiotic interactive experience that enlightens society and uplifts the human spirit. Through multimodality and intertextuality, “Still I Rise - Remix” exploits the aesthetics of the digital interactive experience through multiple artistic forms of expression, including code, video, audio, and hypertext. This COVID E-Lit interactive exhibition is a multimodal expression and declarative statement for the Black Lives Matter movement which embodies the spirit of change, inclusion, and social justice. “The medium is the message.” Experience “Still I Rise - Remix.”

This poster paper explores semiotics and rhetoric as narrative in social media visual culture, specifically with issues of identity and social change on social media platforms such as YouTube. Under the umbrella of semiotics, postmodernism, and poststructuralism, the paper builds upon the work of Roland Barthes, Stuart Hall, and Safiya Umoja Noble by expanding the concepts of visual semiotics, visual rhetoric, postcolonialism, critical race theory, and algorithms to examine the narrative of the image.

SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT: A NARRATIVE CASE STUDY examines Spike Lee’s 1986 breakout film. Within the arena of Narrative Studies Criticism, the case study examines the primary character introductions and a determination of the narrative’s fabula and syuzhet.

The thriller is an all-encompassing umbrella genre that corrals all other genres underneath it. It is difficult to determine if a movie is only a thriller. The most popular sub-genres of the thriller include spy, detective, psychological, horror, action, and supernatural thrillers. Thrillers habitually mix the tenants of other genres in a single film as well as the tenants of the sub-genres of the thriller. The main ingredient of a thriller is suspense, excitement, and tension, whereby thrillers set out to evoke an emotional reaction. Thrillers often create an atmosphere of creeping menace and sudden outbursts of violence, crime, and murder. Gunfights and chase scene are common set pieces. One of the main themes of thrillers is the existence of a double world – one civilized and one savage. In Hollywood, the dark corrupt, dangerous, savage world is usually overcome by the status quo, but with lingering side effects. Thrillers also favor, loose, episodic structures with labyrinthine, maze-like plots, filled with myriad twists and tangles. There is a loss of control for both hero and spectator. Both hero and spectator become tangled up and a part of the same mysterious world that they are investigating.

In Henry Jenkins book, ‘Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture,’ Jenkins presents the interesting metaphor of TV fans as textual poachers. In short, textual poaching is the action whereby aficionados become so versed and immersed in a text, that they proclaim themselves legitimate experts of the text and thereby create their own contextual meanings which supercede the meanings of the legitimate critics and original authors of the text. On some levels, the aficionados do possess specific knowledge about their texts, but these aficionados often socialize in isolated subcultures - fan clubs - which propagate mythical contextual meanings regarding the text which thus become fact, being accepted as true by the majority, within their own social circles; circles in which they perceive themselves to be the experts of the contextual meanings of their texts of interest. By this token, the elitism and hubris of the contextual precepts of the aficionados, thereby intrinsically make the aficionados textual poachers, whereas the legitimate critics are careful to delineate.

Stylistically, CITIZEN KANE and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS are similar, but not the same. The majority of the scenes in each film utilize group shots, showing every character in the scene in the frame at the same time emphasizing community. Both films also utilize depth of field, where characters are filmed in large rooms or at great distances apart. In Citizen Kane, the depth of field is more widely used, especially in the group shots. The kicker scene for that is when Charles and Susan are arguing in Xanadu from the two separate ends of the room. Charles seems to be a hundred yards away. This is very spooky because it’s supposed to be their home. Later when they have a picnic, Charles tells Susan to stop shouting at him because they are in a tent and not at home, so he can hear her just fine. That scene, like all the other scenes are a microcosm of the whole film. CITIZEN KANE is about not really knowing who a person really is. Once you figure that out, it’s enjoyable to watch the film over and over again, because each scene, each line of dialog, and each frame constantly rings true of this.