Award-Winning Filmmaker 🏆 Digital Media Researcher 🎓 (DEI) Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Activist ⚖️ Social Media Marketer 📱 Communication & Culture Advocate 🗣️ MFA Film & Television 🎥 PhD Texts & Technology 💻
Category: PORTFOLIO
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Christopher Odom has long been drawn to the significance of visual stories. Their power to influence people and enact social change through digital mediums captivated him and led him to pursue a PhD in Texts and Technology here at UCF. He believes that digital stories may hold the key to making a difference in our society and raising awareness about issues that might otherwise be ignored. “What someone feels through the power of imagery and story might inspire them, over time, to change the world,” he says.
“Still I Rise: Remix” is a visual, lyrical, digital interactive fight song for civic action for the #BlackLivesMatter 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 #BlackLivesMatter movement which embodies the spirit of change, inclusion, and social justice. “The medium is the message.” Experience “Still I Rise: Remix.”
MINNEAPOLIS, MN – MAY 26: Protesters march on Hiawatha Avenue while decrying the killing of George Floyd on May 26, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Four Minneapolis police officers have been fired after a video taken by a bystander was posted on social media showing Floyd’s neck being pinned to the ground by an officer as he repeatedly said, “I can’t breathe”. Floyd was later pronounced dead while in police custody after being transported to Hennepin County Medical Center. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Through the narrative retelling of the events leading up to and through the Capitol Riot and George Floyd protests, I reveal the point-of-views from polar opposite cultural viewpoints and how the cultural context changes the visual social semiotic meaning of the same imagery through the vantage point of an alternative concept. I do not believe that this visual analysis alone will change what people believe about the Capitol Riot and George Floyd protests, but it is my goal to use the narrative information visualization for this visual analysis, as a tool to broaden the audience’s understanding of why people believe what they believe about the Capitol Riot and George Floyd protests. Perception is reality and everyone’s perceptions are unique; thus, peering into reality is no more distinct or precise than peering through a prism, to see what color is on the other side. Culture and context are the prism, and reality is the rainbow of refracted light on the other side.
