Track Listing

I didn’t really get to pick out all the tracks I really enjoyed from the last performances [too busy enjoying the sets] of DJ class at RMIT.

but I thought it would be nice to post up the few tracks I did save and enjoy =)

from the awkward but awesome Mr Huang, gotta say I loved his set

from Mitch and Gemma the music students who were really cool. I wonder I’ll ever be that cool.

from Michael and Jessica

I kinda did make the suggestion in one of our classes for a space where students of the DJ course could get together to talk shop, exchange ideas, maybe form connections with people outside of the tutes. Something like a RMIT DJ forum hahah. I mean I get that the objective of the course isn’t just about DJ’ing, it’s about the study of the culture and effects on society the whole scene has on people. But why not make a culture while we’re at it, it’d be great to see how under supervision from those wiser than us, can create a booming dance music culture. Maybe even a sorta student held festival of sorts at the end of it, maybe even a years worth project for the willing! Hopefully the course continues to run with all serious amendments taken into consideration. Especially after the talk by Graham St George we had today, I see that people will continue to gravitate towards these kinds of events as they have in the past to large congregations in search of themselves. Having a place where they can be with people on the same wavelengths to grasp a better understanding of it will be invaluable. But I think I’ll save blabbering about this all in another post.

Peace

The Culture Nomad

Repost from my other blog, thought it would be relevant here too

At DJ class today we had Graham St John come by to talk to us about his research into rave/music cultures and festivals. What an awesome job, honestly, just going around partying everywhere and taking notes on how awesome each party was. I did look a little into him before he came by, just so I could be prepared this time with questions instead of sitting there like a useless lump, and I was actually quite interested in how he made a connection between these kinda big rave cultures and the Matrix.

Feel free not to watch the whole thing

Basically the idea that within a festival [and perhaps for the sake of this argument a specifically non-mainstream festival] most people are confronted by the idea of the blue pill vs. red pill in the form of actual mind/body altering substances. The kinds of substances in particular that change your perception and make you see the world in a different light. Depending on the individual that could range easily from MDMA for seratonin boosts right up to DMT for the ultimate spiritual experience, but the end result is to leave the festival a changed person. For the veteran however it’s not so much about revelation but about reveling in that atmosphere of discovery and freedom of judgement and oppression. There’s this comparison.. no more like a connection with these festivals and a form of religious enlightenment that seems deeply rooted in what I believe their purpose is for people today. I don’t mean religious in a contemporary sense because those religions haven’t really served the people and if anything have caused more strife.

The prosumer, popup city of Burning Man
The prosumer, popup city of Burning Man

My own personal experience with psychedelics was, as labeled, completely life altering. I can’t really remember what I was like before that point but I do recall simply being ignorant and very unwilling to accept anything outside myself. However I lacked the guidance that everyone should have when taking substances like it and that resulted in [essentially] what seemed to me like the collapse of the fabric of reality or you know.. a psychotic episode that didn’t end. I was basically stuck in the trip even after it wore off and there was no way out. It took me a good year or two before I was able to piece things back together to some degree and was able to start a degree here at RMIT. Even after all of that I still find that psychedelics hold great power and are somehow imperative for us to understand each other and our place in this world, just because I had a bad experience whilst I was on it, it taught me a lot about what I needed to do to keep moving forwards. If it wasn’t for my bad experience I’d probably have simply gone down a spiral of drug abuse and ended up a deadbeat junkie, instead I’m studying for a degree and trying to make my life count for something maybe bigger than myself.

In a sense it was like a right of passage into reality, and in that way I think he was right to point out the Matrixness of the festival scene. It’s a place where this kind of thing goes down, where people go to learn that there’s more to life than what we see on it’s surface but that means confronting the fact that it’s not all roses and butterflies, and thats what makes it both invigorating and terrifying. I hate that my mind is broken, that everything I once was is dead and gone, but I wouldn’t give up what I am today to take it back.

Also here’s a track I’m listening to now

Just a side note, Graham is publishing a book soon on DMT that looks pretty exciting.

 

Thinking too much

Often I wonder..

what happens to an idea once it is fully expressed. When you look into something for too long, for instance, you keep repeating a word you’re very familiar with until it starts to become alien and strange, and at first its all kind of bizarre and fascinating, then it becomes watered down and loses its meaning. Maybe thats the same with life, the more we try to figure out what it is, the less meaning it has [at least that we can associate with]. Would that mean discovering the meaning of life, would result in a meaningless life? Or does it mean that that particular meaning is no longer functional -[((I’m not sure if I can get this point across well enough) Then the meaning, if found [and turned meaningless] would mean that the working knowledge up to that point no longer serves a purpose)] – and a new idea must be explored instead?

Would that mean that the meaning of life, if any, is constantly changing. How are we supposed to find it then?

Animal Farm!

So with Art of Persuasions documentary, Dom and myself basically split the work to a video each. We had to make one clip purely out of found footage and one out of stuff we filmed ourselves but with no interviews in either as a cool limitation to work with. I decided to make the found footage one cuz I dunno how to work a camera fo shit. But like I mentioned in my previous post we had the problem of trying to tackle a very large issue in a small frame of time (3minutes) which resulted in the overall idea changing two more times from the initial one.

My first attempt was simply too factual and wordy, which is precisely what I was trying to ebb away from, as I may or may not have mentioned in the past; explaining things to people isn’t how to convince them of anything. You need to somehow reach their inner feelings and desires.  With this initial idea we wanted to put propaganda in a place where it [although sinister] served a higher and greater purpose to maintain a stable society – as the alternative was complete and utter chaos. I acquired a vast cornucopia of knowledgeable clips and snippets to demonstrate the actuality that humanity was incapable of itself and required the leash, however the deeper I dug the more I found this to be the case only because humanity has been under the leash for so long in the first place. This research helped solidify some of my own world views which was great, but like any good apocalypse – in the original Greek sense of the word – brought more questions than before. If anything, my objective was now further from sight.

Knowing I had a long way to go, I made a contingency video which heavily featured themes from The Matrix, particularly the scene where Morpheus offers Neo the red and blue pill as an analogy to choosing between accepting the propaganda and to believe the lie or to realize that you’re just a cog in a system who has no say whatsoever in the direction of your life. But it was just too much of the Matrix in the end and I hated it for being so gross and cheap.

In the end I decided to make something I thought about when I was younger – a documentary, where the narrator talks about human beings the same way he would talk about animals in wildlife.

“This is a wild human mother in her natural habitat” – and you just stalk mothers in malls or wherever it is mothers spend their time. (pardon my ignorance, I thought Dubai was in India, I’m not perfect)

Gahah it’d be brilliant.

Recently I even saw something extremely close to it. An Aussie show called Bogan Hunters, where the hosts are blatantly capitalising on getting people to self proclaim their Boganism with or without them realising they’ve basically turned into circus animals for the entertainment of people higher social class. Heck the Bogans probably even watch it themselves believing they’ve attained a greater place in life by acting a fool on TV. Sigh.

anyway

I didn’t really explain why I thought this was appropriate to the theme of propaganda. You see in my research I’ve found that people are so well under control that we’re basically being shuffled around and made to do things to the same extent that livestock are, all without realising whats going on. It’s the greatest damned illusion ever blanketed over humanity, and if it’s not, it’s definitely up there. You know how you hear about those farms where nobody really gives a shit about the animals and treats them like they weren’t living beings (I don’t wanna post vids but you can find em if you look really fast)? Yeah thats what the people in control of your lives are probably like <<assumption>but a pretty strong one>. You’re just the oil for the cog in their machine of money.

You’re born and raised through a factory process, where you’re sorted by age, and shuffled down two potential paths of life |ARTS| and |SCIENCES| or Sir Ken Robinson puts it –

Since the arts don’t generally produce much wealth you’re immediately considered second rate, but regardless of which line of work you end up in, it’ll always be for someone elses benefit. You’ll be squeezed for every last bit of potential you have like chicks in a macerator. I say ‘you’re’ because if anybody reading this is most likely not in that wondrous “1%”. This affects and has to do with basically everybody. We’re so content with this complacency which might be fine if the situation merited it, but as a species that has such an immense capacity to learn, we seem to be going more and more backwards with each day that passes. I mean.. seriously.. Bogan Hunters.. how is that a thing.. religious beheadings and killing of civilians.. how is that still a thing? Civil war and discontent.. how is any of this still a fucking thing?
It just doesn’t make sense, I don’t think it’s possible for people to be this horrible if there wasn’t something or some force that desired or even required this kind of pain and unrest. It’s almost like the only reason people are horrible to each other, is so that they remember to cherish the times and appreciate when they are good to each other.  Like some kinda dualic Yin and Yang system we truly can’t seem to step out of. Does that mean we’re condemned to repeat mistakes? What’s the point of learning anything if you don’t adapt from the mistakes?

ANYWAY, I feel like I get so lost in these rants the point I try to make loses itself. THE POINT here is that I wanted to make a clip that would make people think for a moment that they are a part of a farm, not as farmer, but as farmed. What resulted, or rather was intended, is a clip, almost like an infomercial for the 1% to look into the lives of the 99% of their livestock. Three minutes, still isn’t enough, and I might like to expand further on this in bigger projects for greater reach, but I hope that at least I got some people in my own class to think about this. Even if only one person. Because the truth is, this is something nobody will want to accept or face. It’s like taking off the blindfold to see a meat cleaver, and I don’t have the solution, but I think it’s worth thinking and talking about, because “nothing strengthens authority so much as silence” – DaVinci.

 

EDIT: Here is the final vid I made. Hope you enjoy.

Another day in the West part of the East

Day one, first semester and last year of my education at RMIT. I’m pretty excited and also scared to see how shit plays out. In my time here I’ve got to say I’ve loved every moment of it, but I’ve struggled badly with doing and retaining the readings, and also making any real connections with people. Already in our first classes we have to forge our own groups and I’m dreading this process and I have a feeling I’m going to be just chucked into whatever raggidy bunch is left at the end. I’m back in the class with activist Liam Ward leading the way, kinda exciting as the subject is trying to turn political documentaries into an art form but staying true to being a documentary. Whatever that means? I mean I only took up one semester of film study so I can’t really pull quotes or examples out of my ass, but the problem with documentaries, at least from what I picked up in the first class, seems to mainly be about definition. You have your purists who say things need to be only a certain kind of way and then you kinda have a mixture of everyone else who treat it more as.. (for lack of a better phrase I’ll quote a quote I heard Liam use by John Grierson)”the creative treatment of actuality”. I don’t know if this approach to something is really the best way to do things, where you pick a set definition for what you’re setting out to do and try to make sure it fits in your little box of definitions. Particularly with a political documentary, I believe what you’re trying to posit is a rhetorical argument of sorts, so it’s not so much like a wildlife documentary where your focus really is on the images and videos you see on the screen “oooh look at the pretty zebra getting mauled by that cheetah, nature such beauty, much love, so bloods”. It’s the visual aid that really pulls you in, but with a political documentary, you’re not showing people things they can’t catch a glimpse of, you’re trying to incept an idea into their minds. It’s not about the visuals, it’s about the message they carry. Thats not saying the visuals aren’t important, but they are a means to an end.

From watching the Adam Curtis documentary “Century of the self”, I found some clarity in how I would ideally tackle the task. He points out how giving people factual information and telling them what something does as well as how and why it will benefit them,  simply isn’t effective. The way to sell an idea, I feel, is like selling a product; it’s not about trying to appeal to peoples intellect, but to their selfish inner desires, that they will feel better knowing they’ve experienced it. It’s not that you think you need this knowledge, but you’ll feel better knowing you have it. How that will help me at the moment? I really have no fucking idea, but it’s the groundwork I hope to use to realise any work I do.

And then on the way out of uni I stopped by the Socialists little hut outside building 8 to sign a petition and ended up arguing with the lady about the role of capitalism. I argued that for it to be the dominant form of social structure today, there had to be some valid points in it’s prevalence. She simply refused to see what I was trying to ask and told me to go and figure it out on my own.. well the thing is I already know the plus points of capitalism (it’s just a shoddy list but the basic ideas are there) but noting how she had that biased opinion and disregarded the benefits whatsoever kinda helped me understand a little more why socialists are hard pressed to really get their message spread. They’re almost like the religious extremists of the political world, and they shun the thought of any system outside of their own. Much like making a documentary by defining what it is first and then trying to squeeze the real world into that criteria, isn’t really a conducive way to disseminate your message. The socialists today remind me of the capitalists against the monarchs. They faced similar issues, except perhaps this time on a global scale; a rich ruling class that basically owns most of wealth and run how the world works, a class that you mostly had to be born or married into – then you have the people who feel like they’re being unfairly treated and are demanding change. If anything the actual history of socialism is evidence enough to show that  it’s a terrible idea because it eventually just turning back into that “monarchy” type situation where the country is run by a ruling class or family that can never be voted or kicked out, one that abuses it’s people just the same, if not worse than any capitalistic democracy. Just like the barons who fought the monarchs for the magna carta, the rich and powerful eventually formed a new kind of kingdom, this time, it’s just a little more invisible, and now history looks like it’s attempting to repeat itself.

I know this is sensitive stuff, and I’m not exactly the best versed in any of these areas or topics, but this is just my opinion from what I’ve managed to see thus far. The consensus..

Everyone is nuts.

Maybe Freud was right, we’re all just a bunch of crazy mafakkas and we’re just going to kill each other dead. Argue with me if you want, but don’t be dumbass and don’t waste my time with definitions or be all like capitalism is evil because it’s ‘exploits the people man!!’. People are evil, and they do bad things. It doesn’t matter what political affiliation or style of life they choose to lead, if a rich dick wants to be a dick, he’s going to be a dick. And not all rich people are dicks.

Peace. Seriously.

Polutin the Airwaves

So this year I’ve been part of a couple of crews in preparing and presenting a show for community radio station 3RRR’s Room With A View which plays every Monday at noon. The reason I took radio over TV this year at RMIT was simply because.. well I’m terrible with my social skills. You can probably ask anyone in the class about how I just stay very quiet and keep to myself.. when inside I’m constantly at war with myself trying to talk to anybody at all. Well I swayed over to radio on the basis that I had to work with less people. The first thing I would probably say is that, whilst it was probably not the best reason to pick radio it did pay off the moment we walked into 3rrr made me feel right at home. The first room they got us to sit in just had this giant wall of records on it and I just wanted to sit there and got through them all one by one! Just when I thought I knew a thing or two about music -pfffffffffffttttt-

I was put into the panel position for most of the shows because once again, my social ability -coughdisabilitycough- made me want to veer away from being the presenter, but I knew I had to keep trying if I wanted to break these demnd chains of anxiety. Working at any panel for the first time for most people probably seems like they’re about to get training on how to send the room they’re in to outer space (the looks on their faces is just pure gold) but since I had done some audio work before the panel job didn’t really scare me and I picked it up pretty quickly. That doesn’t mean it was a relaxing time sitting behind that booth! You had to be constantly vigilant and always be making sure something is on air and that your buttons and tracks are working and everything is lined up on cue and that the levels are good and just..yeah. My groupmate Zoe pointed out after her first live show as panel operator that after presenting a show she always felt great but after paneling  it left her felling stressed out till even after the show was done.

My first time going live on air? Holy shit I was terrified! I mean I can’t even stand the sound of my own voice the few times I actually do speak out, now it was being sent out to the general public for an hour? Hahahahahahahahahaha! But it turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought! I actually kinda enjoyed talking to people and asking questions. Maybe the thing I can learn from here to apply to my daily life is to have scripted questions to ask everyone I meet, that way I’ll actually have conversation starters .lol. I kid, I’m not that bad. OK maybe I am.

Doing this show at 3rrr has been really fun I would say compared to making TV shows because it’s more to do with the message. I would definitely like to still work in film related mediums, but for now at least after what I’ve experienced in 3rrr I would love to continue being a part of radio. The only problem for me is I hate ad’s so much I refuse to listen to most radio. I mean I hate them with a dark passion.

 

If I had my own  show !! I have no idea how I’d run it to be honest.. I guess I realize the importance of ads amongst other things and that I could probably endorse things that support my ideals. I’d have to try it to find out but I don’t know the protocol behind running my own radio show. I would guarantee a lot of swearing and arguments which is just the way I like it! And probably what would not let my show stay on air =(

Besides that though I would say the biggest issue was forcing topics out of thin air. I don’t know if I’d run a show where it was necessary to have effectively schizophrenic topics every week that had no connection to anything besides a preferably obscure nature. It’s like we had a direction which was no direction besides what we explicitly couldn’t do. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be shows like it, don’t get me wrong, people need shit to fill up their time when they’re bored and can’t stand the sound of their own thoughts – it’s just not what I would want to do with a radio show.

Apart from my little rant! I loved working in radio and I really hope to be better at talking to people.. I see Australians do it so well and easily and I just don’t know how they do it.. and if I do get better then I can meet awesome people who know awesome things and it could be fun! Or extremely terrifying. I guess we’ll just have to see. Peace!

derp..

I’m having a little difficulty really placing this blog in my life. I’m not really sure what to find appropriate content to put up here. If this should be a place where I document only things from uni and or related to it, or just everything. I think thats why I find myself struggling to post things up. I keep judging myself thinking that content that isn’t related to the course isn’t worthy of being posted here.

The Feeling of Being Body Part

No I didn’t misspell anything, that really is the title of our new Korsakow film. This was a collaborative project made by our awesomely Asian team comprised of

myself Ajeet Singh
the humorous Azim Iskandar
the brilliant cameraman Zijing Yang
and the charismatic Anh Vu

Who all play staring roles in this little project. Hope you have fun watching it.

Along with our collaboratively written accompanying essay on what its all about and why we did what we did and why it turned out the way it did.

There are many ways that can help us to understand what a hypervideo like the kind Korsakow provides us can do. A simple way would be the way in which we might browse a single webpage on the internet and navigate through the various links that it provides. These are usually labelled to give us an indication of what and where they link us to. What this means for a K-film is that it is a viewing experience unlike any normal linear narrative film as it allows the audience to actively engage with the film and to some degree create or derive their own meaning from it. As for the title of our film, we initially named it as ‘The Feeling of Being” however as our cameraman and editor saved the folder under the more utilitarian name “Body Part” we jokingly put the two together to form the name that we thought was humorously in line with the content of the film itself and decided that it actually worked and so we stuck with it. In order to describe our film  better it’s important to discuss a little on the process of creation behind it.

The way we make meaning in a film is more often than not from the editing that combines various clips together, and with a standard narrative this editing process is done before hand and in an order suited to the filmmaker. The complete film does not deviate from its set path and that is what makes it a linear narrative.Using Korsakow with its complex and seemingly random connections, it seemed like an interesting approach that could be taken to portray and explore the human body and its various verities. When we took to writing and elaborating further on the types of clips we wanted to capture, there were various things that we had to consider as the human body encompassed a very large field of possible observation, and 60 clips would probably not be able to do it full justice. Another concern we faced was whether or not or to what extent we would include intimate human interactions with each other and whether this was something we would be comfortable with getting footage of. Whilst this would have proven to been a much more compelling piece, the general consensus was to stick to a more family friendly piece. In our very drafting of the idea, we wanted to show how we used our body parts in everyday life, especially in showing love and affection to people we love for instance kissing and touching. Our body parts are an important and pivotal way for us to interact with the world and people around us and we use them and various fascinating ways.

It’s difficult to really consider the way a narrative functions within something like a K-film as a narrative is defined as a sequence of events that tries to tell us a bigger story, and since with a K-film the narrative is different on every viewing, it could distort as well as change the story that the audience takes away from it every single time. It’s almost like a story generator. However the nature of our film, and another one of the things that K-films can do, is create a greater sense of a theme or emotion rather than a linear narrative. As a K-film can have no real ending and the audience is only given thumbnails from which to analyse and decide where to go next, the possible narratives are immense and would take unreasonable amounts of time for any one person to successfully attempt to view all the various forms or orders it could manifest into.

One of the other things we concluded on earlier in the planning and shooting stages was to either have a narrator romantically speaking in the background over the whole K-film about the human body, or to have a mini-narrative within each clip. However as we accumulated our first set of clips before being presented to our class, we noticed the humorous nature of our banter and behavior that was caught in the filming process whilst filming and in our first prototype we realised that this made it quite an enjoyable experience as the user is exploring through the various clips. We filmed a number spontaneous and impromptu clips that we felt were necessary on moulding our K-film into what it is we wished to express.We formed a table of content with a strategic plan of what to shoot, and to get roughly equal parts of each category of the body we had set up which were the ears, mouth, eyes, nose and skin. When it came to the subsequent shooting sessions we found that in order to suit our new direction we had to reform all our ideas to better suit this light hearted and humorous take on things and what resulted was a very organic set of clips that were a mix between shots that we had planned and shots that we came up with impromptu. The captivating commentaries and behavior we made whilst filming were incorporated to add to this “raw” filming trait that we had picked up in the process of filming. It also makes the viewing experience of this non-linear narrative more varied and enjoyable.

We only used 4 subjects to capture our footage, and at first we thought of getting more but we decided to stick to the 4 to maintain that sense of exploration and being able to traverse a range of emotive expressions rather than schizophrenically bouncing off random emotions from random individuals. Not all clips conveyed a deeper emotional agenda but all were supposed to give off a certain mood, this was emphasised particularly in the depth of our extreme close ups and with the post film use of black and white and film grain to give everything a deep intrinsically raw emotiveness. The k-film were just a series of clips of people in extreme close up. We aimed to go through the human body by starting up with the head and working downwards so the film always starts out with the eyes, however due to the evolving nature of our film this plan didn’t really stick for long as our K-film turned into a clip about how humans communicate with each other and express themselves.

Within the film itself initially we can see that it is completely insane and has no real connection with itself apart from the same four people who may not all necessarily even show up on some viewings and appears to be just a series of clips of them rambling about and complaining about trying to make a K-film. In a way it turns into a documentation of the 4 subjects, with each viewing we get a better understanding of their demeanours, behaviors and attitudes which are the actual observable patterns.

We chose the interface based on how it presented our clips and we were striving for a very simplistic look. we felt as if the thumbnails had more than enough information to give the audience a better sense of which direction they want to take the K-film. We were contemplating on having descriptive text alongside the clips to put some context into what they were about but that would have distorted and interrupted the flow of the film design we have carefully cultured. The end result is a single viewing clip on the left hand side of the page with three smaller thumbnails all neatly arranged on the right with frozen thumbnails of the clips they depict. We decided to have them as still images because we didn’t want the viewer to catch a preview of the following clips, as it creates a greater sense of discovery.

 What made this viewing particularly interesting was how it turned out to be very meta in that we all made it clearly obvious we were being filmed for the purpose of making a K-film and used that as a major part of the finished product. As K-films are a relatively new phenomenon and there is no real ‘correct’ way to use it, this original attempt at creating something that turned into something more impromptu and experimental yielded some pretty entertaining results. And even though we appeared to have somewhat deviated from our original course of action, our end result brought us back to our somewhat core meaning of human interactions with each other and the world around them.

 

Bibliography:

(Sawhney et. al. 1996, p. 8)
Sawhney, N, Balcom, D & Smith, I 1996, ‘HyperCafe: Narrative and Aesthetic Properties of Hypervideo’, in Proceedings of the Seventh ACM Conference on Hypertext, Hypertext ’96 (New York, NY, USA: ACM), pp. 1-10.

(Miles 2008)
Miles, A 2008, ‘Softvideography: Digital Video as Postliterate Practice.’ Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 10-21.