Sound perspective

After Jasmine’s lecture, I was interested in further examining sound perspective and decided to practice with a few more images.

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11:00 A.M. Monday, May 9th, 1910. Newsies at Skeeter’s Branch, Jefferson near Franklin. They were all smoking. Location: St. Louis, Missouri.
Metropolitan Museum of Art via Archive.com

Figure: crackling & puffing of cigarettes, rustling of newspapers

Ground: other boys advertising their newspapers, talking to customers, clink of coins as they’re exchanged

Field: horses on a nearby road, maybe a passing car? Foot traffic, street vendors, possibly sounds of construction? Daily life on a busy street

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Street Scene, La-Queue-en-Brie (Val-de-Marne), ca. 1896
Metropolitan Museum of Art via Archive.org

Figure: group talking

Ground: footsteps of the woman walking away, possibly church bells (seems they’re standing in front of a church), umbrellas and feet tapping

Field: wind through the leaves, voices or horses in the distance

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The Diva and Her Most Trusty Friend and Companion ca. 1900-Metropolitan Museum of Art via Archive.org

Figure: woman laughing, dog “talking” or whimpering, dress rustling

Ground: photographer and assistants, instructions to the woman, people making noises to get the dog to look at the camera (which I have extensive personal experience with)

Field: people moving through the studio / apartment (?)

Steps to collaborative success

What is collaboration, anyway? ask Adam Hyde, Mike Linksvayer, Kanarinka, Michael Mandiberg, Marta Peirano, Sissu Tarka, Astra Taylor, Alan Toner and Mushon Zer-Aviv. In this reading, they examine this question and, in turn, ask more. It’s evident from the beginning that collaboration can take on many forms and shades of itself; ineffective collaboration might be the most true to the definition of the word (two feuding script-writers working together on a screenplay that never gets past a few pages, for example) or a hazy interpretation might yield strong and engaging results (the example Hyde & co use is of aggregation – essentially, co-ordination of unrelated parties rather than true creative collaboration).

The writers identified several criteria for assessing the strength of a collaborative project: intention, goals, self-governance, co-ordination mechanisms, knowledge transfer, identity, scale, network topology, accessibility and equality. With these criteria in mind, I looked at Project Citizen as a case study. From their website:

Nearly two decades after futurist author David Brin declared privacy dead, we’ve never been more obsessed with secrets and confessions. … it’s again up to collaborative art to tell the most compelling stories about truth, secrets, lies, and privacy.

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Intention: the collaborators for Project Citizen are all actively involved in their projects and are often professional artists. The intention is to create something rather than recycle ideas through a hashtag.

Goals: the goals of the project (social work, social entrepreneurship and social creativity) are clearly defined but are able to be widely interpreted.

Self-governance: I struggled to find any information on how to submit my own project or idea for a project to the Project. Their website (hosted by tumblr) has an ask feature, but any structures or rules are not clearly accessible. There are a few programs you can participate in but no information on how to initiate your own.

Co-ordination mechanisms: human beings need to actively participate, regulate and add to the Citizen Project to keep it alive, although it might be possible to submit and be automatically uploaded to the system (again, there’s no information on the website).

Knowledge transfer: as the sharing of secrets and letters is a large part of the Project, a literal transfer of knowledge is central to its mission. The unity – everybody on earth has a secret – means that anyone could contribute, and gain knowledge, from the Citizen Project.

Identity: since the group identity plays on the universal theme of secrets and confessions, the group identity is created and made stronger by personal and cultural differences.

Scale: although the Project is on a worldwide scale, the size of most of its collaborate offshoots (for example, a service where you exchange one-sentence secrets with a stranger) is small enough to facilitate a potentially huge number of people. Basic contributions contribute en masse to create a wide-sweeping shared goal.

Network topology: this project couldn’t work without the internet. The goal is to unite people from all over the world in a variety of situations that would normally never meet or have much in common.

Accessibility: for the most part it seems that anyone can participate in a project, but initiating one is more complicated and rare. Obviously, participation is limited by access to a computer and literacy although some programs set up pop-up booths in public places.

Equality: aside from the project manager / contributor hierarchy, there’s very little to to distinguish the size, scope and value of the contributions.

At your fingertips

Week 5’s lecture reminded me of the reason I chose RMIT, chose to take Media – really, the reason I’m motivated to learn these skills at all. Coming to the lectures and finishing assignments is one very small part of what the university experience should be. Wanting to push yourself further and learn beyond the basics of the curriculum is essential to getting ahead in study and in life. With this in mind, I followed the advice of our visiting librarian and investigated Lynda.com.

At the risk of this blog post turning into an advertisement (or a love letter) for Lynda, I have to stress that it’s an example of what you can get out of your time at uni if you choose to take it. I was struggling with my editing skills – or blatant lack thereof – but by accessing Lynda I found a tutorial that taught me what I needed to know to create a stronger and more interesting video for my project brief #3.

Self-motivated learning is such an important element to a successful career. I aim to continue using Lynda and other resources to build on my skill base (also, it looks like it can also teach you how to file a tax return, which I really need to learn how to do).

Project brief #4: reflection

Project brief #4’s social experiment went in directions I didn’t expect. I think we did well with the diversity and relevance of platforms we engaged with and the theory we explored that led us to make those decisions. Looking at the audience from a producer’s point of view was a take that interested me because the way content is produced and distributed has changed so drastically with the popularisation of social media and the internet. I’m fascinated by the way the audience has, in many ways, become the producer and especially the distributor. Cate Klancey was a great medium to explore this change in audience dynamics. The theory that motivated our decisions was strong and I think that blogging our findings as we went (on https://cateklancey.wordpress.com) was a good way to supplement and add texture to the videos and social media.

 

Unfortunately, because we put Cate Klancey out into the world, we gained very little information to work with. Our lack of data meant that we had to rely on research for most of our information. The nature of our experiment meant that it was unlikely from the beginning that Cate would be ‘accepted’ by audiences, who are notoriously good at detecting anything inorganic. It’s a shame that we didn’t have the opportunity to draw our own conclusions about audience engagement and participation. Tragically, not every video will achieve the awe-inspiriting popularity of ‘Dog screams like a man’.

 

An alternative could have been to reach out to a former reality star and use their “celebrity” base (which Cate obviously didn’t have) to kickstart a campaign. Logistically (and possibly legally), this would have been nearly impossible but would have given us a better chance at actually connecting and interacting with a relevant audience, rather than one comprised of Russian spam-bots and 12 year-olds from South Carolina. The fact that most of Cate’s followers were gained through the #followforfollow hashtag meant that a majority of her following was disengaged, only having followed her to boost their own follower count. We debated buying followers, but that would have weakened their quality even more. The theory follows that potential audiences are impressed by a large follower count and are therefore more likely to follow. As we were examining audiences from a producers point of view, this was an option, but since were motivated to interact with any followers we did gain as part of the experiment we decided against it.

 

Collaboration is something I’ve struggled with in the past. I often find group projects frustrating and was very lucky to work with a team that were receptive and honest communicators. In some ways, it would have been a good learning experience to work in a relatively low-stakes situation with a group that was completely dysfunctional but overall I’m glad that I could learn and solidify some collaborative skills.

 

My belief that communication is key has been strengthened by this assignment. Every group member needs to attend the meetings, respond to texts and emails promptly and voice any problems they’re having with their workload or other members of the group. Fortunately, I don’t believe my group suffered too much from any communication problems and overall what we did worked. A group message service, like WhatsApp (which we used) or Facebook Messenger was essential for keeping in touch and is something I’ll continue to use in the future. Sharing the Google Drive first thing was also good and afforded everyone equal access to see and upload documents, rather than having a ‘gatekeeper’ who was in charge of uploading everything. Finally, a blog that we could all update with our findings as we went was an easy and well-presented way to present a portfolio of our information that we could update as we went along. Open sharing tools like these are fantastic and I’d like to build upon my knowledge them for future collaborations.

 

Creating a contract was very helpful in initially setting our goals and standards. Next time I do a project like this, I’d like to make it even more specific and refer back to it more often. It was difficult to create it with formal tasks and goals when our project was constantly evolving and I felt that there were occasional problems in dividing the work. I’m not sure how to address this problem but knowing that it could be an issue means that I’ll focus on it future projects and develop a solution through experience.