Camden Ostrander’s “Roscoe’s Wetsuit: Metamodernism Identity and Existentialism Surfing the Web Together in Donald Glover’s Because the Internet” analyzes Childish Gambino’s 2013 album through a metamodern lens and breaks down the transmedia element of the project. Ostrander starts by listing and describing the many transmedia components of the album. This list includes: the album itself, a 73 page script, a short film titled Clapping for the Wrong Reasons, Gambino’s own website, private performances, blogs, chat room interaction, and performative art. All these elements helped perpetuate a metamodern concept.
He then gives examples of what metamodernism, postmodernism, and modernism might be. After questioning the line between Childish Gambino and Donald Glover (metamodern identity), Ostrander continues his piece by delving into Gambino’s examination of identity. This includes race, sexuality, and setting. These identities are played out in the album in the form of characters. Gambino is The Boy, Jhene Aiko is the presumed love interest of The Boy, and so on. He finishes by examining Gambino’s existential references by quoting and explaining certain song lyrics. The brown recluse spider, “represents the center of center of Glover’s existential crisis, magnified by his African-American identity and the pressures of the web, and the dissipating syntax reflects the loss of self, the separation caused by succumbing to these pressures.”
This text heavily relates to the “Cinderella 2.0: Transmedia Storytelling” posted to YouTube by FCB Global. In that video, it is shown how Cinderella can be retold through modern day applications. It shows an idea that can “work seamlessly across a variety of media touch points to connect with consumers.” This is no different from Ostrander’s piece. They both show the ability of the piece of work they are describing to transcend the original intended purpose and cross different media touch points.
This text also relates to “The Performance and Practice of Research in A Cabinet of Curiosity: The Library’s Dead Time” by Bonnie Mak and Julia Pollack. This text describes a piece of art that shows the process of information gathering as a librarian. In a way, the Cabinet of Curiosity is a transmedia piece of art, because instead of being confined to a piece of paper or canvas, it is a three dimensional diorama expressing a multitude of things. The article states, “In the early modern period, the cabinet of curiosity was a dedicated space in which collectors experimented with different ways of ordering and understanding the world. Contents of such cabinets might include real or fictive specimens of nature, such as a stuffed crocodile, a unicorn’s tail, or a botanical oddity, as well as books, religious relics, and works of art.” The artists recreated this cabinet and turned it into a piece of art that physically shows the dead time of librarians. Dead time, as described by the article, is “events that are edited out of the final version of a film because they are considered unproductive for the overall narrative.” Ostrander’s work, just like the cabinet, shows and explains the deeper meaning in a piece of work.
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