Deformin' in the Rain: How (and Why) to Break a Classic Film

Digital source materials such as films can be transformed in ways that suggest an innovative path for digital humanities research: computationally manipulating sounds and images to create new audiovisual artifacts whose insights might be revealed through their aesthetic power and transformative strangeness. Following upon the strain of digital humanities practice that Mark Sample terms the “deformed humanities,” this essay subjects a single film to a series of deformations: the classic musical Singin' in the Rain. Accompanying more than twenty original audiovisual deformations in still image, GIF, and video formats, the essay considers both what each new version reveals about the film (and cinema more broadly) and how we might engage with the emergent derivative aesthetic object created by algorithmic practice as a product of the deformed humanities.