Sunday of the Prodigal Son.

My son hath betrayed his trust.

The gentle probing of his beloved.

The gun, Nick. Stop it, girl. Truly, he is a King.

And thus my intent. Sunday of the Last Judgment.

This electronic wonder. Why did you send him to me?

* **** ***** ******, *** ** ***, **** ***** ** **, * ******.

The magicks in my fingers. Hmmm… That gives me an idea!

You must come back! You must! Cheesefare.

The one girl I can’t forget.

I hear the rustle of linen.

Not the most flattering of metaphors.

Nothing mechanical can survive a blow

which shatters its delicate

electronic circuits.

Representational fabric.

You have given a match to a child

who lives in a tinderbox.

Triumph of the icons. Arise! Arise against tyranny!

Next: Disaster! Do you read?

Grab your hardware, guys.

But men often forget that all

progress has a price. I must go higher.

To the heights! To the heights!

This unit is now totally automated.

When you needed me most. For my eyes have seen it.

I am but a humble servant of my people.

Here, Betty. This is pretty.

Yet, after all, who pays any attention to …

a butler? Let your circuits carry the word.

Well, it all started with reading books.

… But what of it? You took me and made me your tool.

I didn’t fail you. The elitists are now

entering the destruct zone.

The Ladder of Divine Ascent.

He’d have to be … with you for his mother.

My gadgetry performed as expected.

I believe I’ve started a rhubarb.

What a bummer. Like something out of one of those

3-D movies from a few years back.

You’re not doomed to an early death

by the crazy elastic powers that made a freak

out of hollywood’s hottest glamour girl!

Mother Mary of Egypt. A final, penetrating scrutiny.

But where’s the corpses? Ain’t no corpses!

An’ nobody’s missin’!

My enchanted uru hammer begins to tingle.

The vacu-lift! It’s the fastest way up.

No… I’ve absolutely nothing to worry about.

This one is for no reason in particular.

Entry into Jerusalem. Tired … so — so tired!

Holy Smoke! This isn’t just an old piece of paper.

I must quickly turn into my ectoplasmic self.

No matter how unbearable the burden may be…

Say the word!

I say thee nay, emperor of evil!

An exercise

Starting with the first Sunday of this recent Lenten season, every day I posted an image to the Instagram image sharing service and simultaneously sent out a Tweet with the link to the image and caption (if any) I chose for the image.

The images are, to me at least, variously whimsical, obtuse, humorous, sacred, profane, and disturbing. Monday thru Saturday I posted comic book images (usually a single panel; occasionally a crop that includes more than one panel or parts of more than one panel). On Sundays, instead of a comic book panel, I would post an icon of the saint (St. Gregory Palamas, St. John Climacus, Saint Mary of Egypt) or event (Triumph of Orthodoxy, Veneration of the Cross, Entry of Christ into Jerusalem) commemorated on that given Sunday. Sometimes I included a caption for the icons; other Sundays I let the icon speak for itself. The comic book panels always included a caption. I would use the comic panel’s text or, more often, an extract from that text as the caption for the image. The shift to icons on Sunday reminded me that this project was a Lenten discipline. And of course the icons and the comic book panels provide interesting juxtapositions. The sacredness of the icon is not cheapened by the association with the comic; rather, I think the comic panel is embiggened, and the potential iconic significance and sophistication of the comic is suggested by the juxtaposition.

Process

Most of the images were created on an iPad. I used the following apps:

• ComicZeal, an app that reads .cbr .cbz file formats, tar and zip formats for packaging image scans of comics.
• Instagram, photo/image-sharing and social networking app with retro filters for styling images.
• Photogene, image-editing app, used mostly for cropping panels out of larger screen shots.
• Brushes, image-editing, painting app, used for additional image edits.

I have hundreds of comics on the iPad, more on my laptop computer. Many of these come from DVDs Marvel comics had licensed, including complete runs of Amazing Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Avengers, The Hulk, etc. I would browse through the comics, looking for panels/images that would work compositionally in the square format of the Instagram image. If something looked visually compatible and interesting, I’d look more closely at the image and text to see if they had some particular interest, evocation, or resonance outside of the context of the original book. When I found a suitable image for the day, I’d take a screen shot on the ipad, open the image in one or both of the image-editing apps to crop and clean the image, and then post the image to Instagram, using Instagram to also share the image and caption on Twitter. I followed a similar process in selecting icons, but instead of browsing through digitized comics, I searched Google images and browsed various Orthodox Christian web sites.

I worked on this project simultaneously with the writing of an essay on “The Christian Icon as Information Object,” which I presented recently at the Information and Religion conference at Kent State University’s Center for the Study of Information and Religion. The playful and creative nature of this Instagram/Twitter exercise was a useful complement to and distraction from the more academic focus of the conference paper.

What does it all mean?

I agree with Steve Ramsay that digital humanities involves building. As Steve said in his remarks at MLA 2011:

[D]igital Humanities is about building things. [. . .] If you are not making anything, you are not . . . a digital humanist.

And I believe further that since digital humanists are builders, then many digital humanists are artists, poets, makers. As I wrote my academic paper, which barely touches on anything “digital,” I also wanted to be engaged in a related creative work, hence the Lenten exercise.

The exercise allowed me to engage with images and small bits of text, which one finds in both holy icons and comics. Instagram, the service/app I used to share the images, comes with a variety of retro filters that may be applied to the images. The filters are important. They remind me that I’m not just capturing or communicating an unfiltered crop from a digital comic. I am a filter, my selection is a filter. I want to provoke associations and evocations like the association and evocations that led me to choose a particular image. The filters personalize the comic and the icon. The image presented on Instagram is not an objective view of the image. It is my memory of the crop of the icon or comic book page. The Instagram filters are mostly retro nostalgia filters attempting to replicate the look of images produced vintage film cameras. Having grown up in the era of cheap film cameras, my memories are full of images that look like those produced by these filters. By applying the Instagram filter to each of these images, I am reinforcing the personalized response to the image and situating these images alongside others in the deep recesses of memory. For the reader/viewer without direct access to my memory, the filter still provides the sheen of an unknown memory upon the surface of the image.

Sometimes I sought panels that resonated with something going on in my life personally (the birth of our son Jude), some event from the news (e.g., the “Arab Spring” or the Tsunami in Japan), some issue I might have been thinking about, perhaps related to digital humanities, or March Madness. Often the choice was more arbitrary and random. But no matter how deliberate the choice, there was always a huge role of chance in what I browsed and what I found.

The result

The project exists as an unannounced process, with an unexplained image going out every day over Twitter. That process is represented in this blog post as a visual/textual/aural impressionistic quilt/collage/journal, a festering pool of reference and indexical relationships to the sacred, the absurd, the personal, the profound, and the banal. The icons are indexes to people, places, stories, and specific texts, biblical passages, and so on. The comic panels are index points to larger narratives in larger bibliographic entities. And each image and caption (icon or comic book panel) is an index to a journal-like packet of memory from a few days in a life.

The images and captions are presented above as a slideshow; the captions have been assembled and reformatted to resemble a poem in quatrains; and an audio file is included with a reading of the “poem” by my trusty iPad, using the [Speak it!] text-to-speech app, with music I composed and created in Garageband on my laptop and iPad.

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