This is how I feel right now.

A mountain of work sweetly calling out my name. No… Actually, it’s screaming out my name…

So, last night, I read up the assessment sheet for Project #4 and for the portfolio. Turns out that we all have to write up three essays for the studio, all due too soon. The writing of three essays completely slipped my mind, I knew we had to write up an essay to accompany our short film, an essay to act as a script where we narrate it for our short films and also an essay for our portfolios. But somehow… All this slipped my mind. I think week 11 is getting to me…

I’ve already finished writing up my script.

I’ve already written up nearly 2000 words for the essay that will accompany my film. HOWEVER! I did not use this essay prompt as a basis for my essay: ‘Let’s adopt ontography as a name for a genereal inscriptive strategy, one that uncovers the repleteness of units and their interobjectivity. From the perspective of metaphysics, ontography involves the revelation of object relationships without necessarily offering clarification or description of any kind’ (Bogost 2012), in the week one reading of Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology article.

Instead, I’ve been using one quote of my choosing to be the basis for my essay which is a quote from  Claire Colebrook’s article Queer Aesthetics:

‘I am the being who I am and have always been; that I do not expect or hope to change’.

And to think that I’ve written a 2000 word essay based on this quote alone. Far out. So, you can only imagine my horror when I read the assessment guideline for project #4.

I freaked out. All that time spent writing this 2000 word essay. Gone. Down the drain. Or so I thought. Instinctually, I notified Adrian at once through the Doco Ontography Facebook group to clear things up.

After Adrian cleared this mishap of mine, that’s when I finally realised that there are three essays to write for this studio. Even though, sub-consciously I knew that.

There are a total of five questions that I can discuss in the essay that will accompany my film, I am to select one of the questions and I am required to write my essay in regards to it. I have decided to write my essay on ‘how and in what way (is?), your interactive ontography a documentary? Why? How?’. I will continue to write my essay using the 2000 word essay I’ve been working on a couple of weeks ago.

I have not even started writing my 1000 essay for my portfolio. I have not even thought of that yet. I’ve been so focused on this 2000 word essay.

I better get a move on.

AND STOP FREAKIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIG OUT!

This just reminds me of the student’s line in Latour’s On the Difficulty of Being an ANT: An Interlude in the Form of a Dialog, a week 4 reading where the Professor says to the student:

‘I have never understood what context meant, no. A frame makes a picture look nicer, it may direct the gaze better, increase the value, allows ti date it, but it doesn’t add anything to the picture. The frame, or the context is precisely the sum of factors that make no difference to the data, what is common knowledge about it. If I were you, I would abstain from frameworks altogether. Just describe the state of affairs at hand’ (Latour pp. 144).

I think that’s what I have to do. I have to ‘just describe the state of affairs at hand’ (Latour pp. 144) of what is in my film and just focus and describe in great detail of the “why” and the “how” of my film. I know I can do it. I just need to get my confidence back. I lost a bit confidence of myself last night after discovering I’ve written my essay wrongly.