Digital Remakes: Lauren Redniss' Radioactive

As part of the course "Digital Rhetorics," students read Lauren Redniss' Radioactive: a Tale of Love and Fallout. Radioactive----a multimodal account of the life and work of the Curies--pushes the boundaries of the printed page, forcing readers to consider different ways of presenting stories, arguments, and information. Redniss has shown us how to combine word, image, and primary documents and to reimagine what a book can be, and the remakes take that lesson into digital rhetoric and writing. For this project, students used the affordances of digital technology to remake portions of Redniss' narrative. Below you will find links to several of the projects, posted with student permission.

Paul's Permutation Remix

by Bree Duros

Through 24 permutations of a four-image sequence, this project explores the effects of arrangement on persuasiveness. Paul Langevin, a fellow scientist and friend to Pierre and Marie Curie, is the character through which this exploration is guided. Ultimately, I found that the order of messages does, in fact, influence perceptions.

The project can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/f7zh5r2sne5agii/index%2012.20.13%20AM.htm

Radio / Active

by Logan Middleton

Lauren Redniss's "Radioactive" helped spark my interest in exploring the limits of what makes a book a book, and as such, I wanted to explore similar territory by investigating the boundaries of aural media in this project. So in my digital remake of "Radioactive," I aimed to use episodes in her book as thematic starting points for a choose-your-own-audio adventure. As Redniss's book is so difficult to categorize—it houses a number of genres and discourses, typefaces and page layouts—I wanted to recreate this collage of print media in an audio file by using a variety of voices, music, and sound effects to explore notions of science, magic, technology, and choice.

Radioactive

by: Phillip Bothun

Radioactive is a music video of Imagine Dragon's song Radioactive. The film has two separate timelines: one follows two modern day scientists' race to save the world from an impending disaster, while the other, an extrapolated future, shows how the life-saving technology of the modern day has been perverted to cause endless conflict. Ultimately, Radioactive depicts the cyclical nature of human invention: healing, then death, which mirrors the Curie's discovery of radium and radioactivity.

Disclaimer: Cited within, this is a mash-up of Imagine Dragon's "Radioactive" and music videos from Coheed and Cambria's "Here We Are Juggernaut" and "The Broken". The compilation and editing of the footage, along with the titles are my own work. The footage and sound are copyrighted by their respective owners. Other sources include a public domain radio broadcast by President Truman, and declassified footage of an atomic bomb explosion.

This video is posted as a work submitted for scholastic credit, not monetary gain or to remove market share from the Copyright Holders and thus falls under Fair Use.

Radioactive Digital Remake

by Ian Erickson

This remix of Radioactive was created through the game Minecraft. Trying to incorporate every element of the game in the remix, I tried to create world of Pierre Curie as presented in the graphic novel. The movie shows aspects of Pierre's life and Pierre going to hell to see the what the fruits of his labor have indirectly yielded.

Watch the video here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/e9x4rgmlnqma5zq/Radioactive%20Digital%20Remake...

Radioactive Relay

by Stacy McClain

In the name of advancement, scientists sacrifice their health. By using tracings from images in the Radioactive text, I create a stop motion animation to signify the Curie's sacrifice. The animation is looped three times followed by a compilation of images to make the viewer question if the advances in science are worth the generations of health deterioration.

Watch the video here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/34wolgfr4hgnomd/Radioactive%20Remix%20Project.m4v