Weekly Update: Typography etc
Week 7B: Easy does it
Hi everyone,
We’re back into it tomorrow at 11:30, but I’m keeping it fairly freeform this week. I’d like to check in with each of you to see how you’re going with Project Brief 3, and allow you some time/space to refine/plan/edit/do whatever you need to do. If we have time, and you have the footage, we may well screen some stuff for peer feedback.
Given you have 11 days left to complete your craft/craftsperson/business profile video, you should well and truly have some footage in the can by now. If you don’t, you should have very detailed plans/question lists/storyboards/moodboards, and pretty much be ready to go. Edits always deserve time, and patience, and thought, and you won’t be able to give them what they deserve if you’re rushed!
Show me tomorrow what you’ve achieved thus far, and let’s talk about how you can make it your best work.
Below the fold is a specs list for your video: you MUST ensure it meets these minimum exhibition standards for the screening in Wk9 and for the Media studio archives.
That’s me in the corner
“Do Old’s Cool, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.”
Technique/medium
Liked this one. Might be a good source for thinking through some principles for PB3. A wonderful rebuttal to McLuhan.
Source:
Postman, Neil. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. London: Penguin, p. 84.
Not my pencil marks!
Old Media Principles
Mind map from Week 5B.
A record of our discussion around some principles emerging from old media practices (alternative photography processes, radio drama, typography). Can the same principles (handmade, quality, experimentation, shortcuts, process etc) be observed in digital art/data visualisation practices?
Week 6: Databending with images
origlitchi
Data-shifting (images x text editor)
getmosh.io (slightly more automated glitch generator)
Databending images (PC-friendly)
What is ‘digital craft’?
Map of the internet; via https://blogs.ubc.ca/rowlandslibrarymedia/2013/03/25/mapping-the-internet/
Some questions for this week…
- what is big data?
- does big data change us (the ostensible subjects of that data)?
- how can we understand big data?
- materialising the web: maps of the internet and other visualisations
- is art possible in digital form
- what is digital craft?
- how do our tools mediate between us and the product of our thought?
- can we materialise thought digitally?
- how does the digital change us?
- do we think of computers/phones/tablets/mice/keyboards in the same way we think about pens/paintbrushes/musical instruments?
- complete the readings, then add your own questions/comments in comments on this post or on your blog — I’ll add them here…
Weekly Update: Something in the Air
The focus of this week’s classes was audio. We looked at old audio mediums, modern music platforms and audio drama.
In Wednesday’s class, a few of us brought in some ‘old media’ audio materials including vinyl records, cassette tapes and an old school, Elvis-style crooning microphone.
Dan then wrote on the whiteboard the controversial statement, “Streaming is killing music”. He split the class in half and told us we would be debating that statement. We had 20 minutes to prepare three speakers from each team. Some ideas that came up in the debate were the effect of music streaming on the artist, on the music business and on the consumer, as well as the challenges of music streaming in relation to individual appreciation and experience of music.
THIS IS THE DEBATE!
(filmed/edited by Nick Paton)
It was a well fought debate, but in the end the team arguing for the negative emerged victorious, obligingly adjudicated by 4 first year visitors.
Thursday’s class was devoted to audio drama. We had a guest speaker, Ben McKenzie, who works on a sci-fi comedy radio drama show called Night Terrace. He is also an authority on audio drama in general and gave us an insight into:
- The origins of audio drama, or Old Time Radio (OTR)
- The evolution radio drama from live broadcast radio into pre-recorded, edited radio drama
- The presence of radio drama today, particularly in the UK
- The different styles of audio drama including narrated, dialogue driven, dramatic and cinematic
After Ben’s lecture, we got into groups and started to work on some audio dramas of our own. As a class, we agreed on two characters and a location: a dog walker and an aquarium attendant in a construction site. Each group wrote about 1 minutes’ worth of script and then took some audio recorders to go out and get what we needed. Next week we will be editing our audio into hopefully some kind of coherent story, but we’ll just have to see how that goes.
Week 4: Audio, Streaming, Radio Plays
Sound-based genius in progress.
A bumper crop of audio explorations last week; here’s what I remember, feel free to send me your notes to append:
- a debate on whether or not streaming is killing music
- a visit from our Media 1 friends, who adjudicated the aforementioned debate with insight and aplomb
- we discussed the audio formats used by our elders, with a brief look at some of the crafts involved in recording to and playing from those formats
- we were visited by podcast producer, writer, and general storyman Ben McKenzie, who took us through a history of radio drama and radio comedy
- we brainstormed our own script in response to some prompts, and then set about recording the dialogue and foley for that script against a deadline
In Wednesday’s class this week (Week 5), we’ll be doing some audio editing, so please ensure you have the audio you recorded last week, plus any extra bits you’ve captured in the intervening days. Also, there’s a video on bespoke bookmaking that’ll be worth a read before Wednesday’s class (plus the typography reading for Thursday).