Blog O’Clock

Week 12 Lectorial:

Watching Valorie Curry’s short film, Kara, I was shocked by the sympathy I felt for the machine who had become a girl in front of my eyes. Even though I knew full well that a) she had been developed as a piece of technology and b) she was merely a creation in a film, not real life, when I saw what looked like a human, my response was to think of her as a human. 

I recognise that technology has not yet developed to the extent portrayed in the short film, and also that there are many breakthroughs that we have yet to learn about. However, at the end of the day, I think that humans are more intelligent than machines. I don’t mean that we can do all the computation that machines can, nor can we have 10 tabs open and running in our minds at the same time or speak every conceivable language, but humans are capable of thinking for themselves; machines are not.

If technology humans have developed is clever, it’s because somebody had the idea, the initiative, the tools and the intellect to bring that idea “to life” (no Kara pun intended). What may at face value seem like a machine’s intuition cannot possibly be so. 

Machines of every kind need to be programmed in some way, thus building the options we will then see when we use said technology. I think there is a risk that humans are coming to rely too heavily on technology and this begs the question of how much we are thinking for ourselves. This is the real danger; relying on technology that does not have the capacity to think for us, and losing our own capacity to create and use initiative.

Week 12: Media Materialism

  1.  Technology
    1. Role of human body – technology, functional tool
  2. Technique
    1. Things are taught to us – social expectations and how we react to them, based on our values and upbringing
  3. Culture
    1. Identifying subgroups within population
    2. The world as culture, humankind
    3. Art, theatre, cinema: creative expression

There are contradictions between the above three features of media materialism, each of which are ever-changing and unpredictable. The culture industry, for one, is dictated by people’s own personal tastes and incorporates aspects of human life, as well as design and manufacturing.

“Culture is something that we do, but it is also something that we are.”

  • Technological determinism vs. social constructivism
    • Essential question: Does technology dictate culture or do we control how technology progresses?
    • No matter the innovation, it’s still up to us how we control the use and regulation of technology
    • This view accounts for the humanness in creation and innovation
    • “You’re only human” – development is a process

Examples of Technology:

  • Walkman – create our own soubdtrack, cut out outside sound cues of the world, changed the way we engaged with the world
  • Dziga Vertov believed the camera is a natural extension of the eye and brain, and thus the only way to capture the transactions of life
  • Valorie Curry – Kara

Thinking about the ….

  • Holocene (geological period)
  • Anthropocene – the age of humans
    • Largely the damage (destruction of the planet) is already done
    • Molecular red: theory for the anthropocene – McKenzie Wark
    • In modern media there is an obsession with resources and the end of the world (at least as we know it)
      • Dystopian societies, preparing for an apocalypse

Advice on Brief 4

Last week, Rachel made some suggestions for how we could best progress with our final project brief.

  • Make sure that everyone is asking the same questions of the texts they are analysing (this prompted us to create a list of 3 questions to focus our work)
  • Keep the focus narrow so you can increase the depth of the work
    • Take out side ideas – remixing, Space Odyssey
    • Left with: Texts > Adaptations > Romeo & Juliet
  • Extra ideas for looking at Romeo & Juliet
    • Look at soundtracks separately from the films as this is a whole different medium
      • E.g. original soundtrack composed for West Side Story
    • Book of West Side Story

This advice was helpful for us as it gave us a better idea of the direction we needed to go in for our brief and helped us clarify in our heads the work we still needed to complete.

“True to the Spirit” – Adaptations & Textual Analysis

One of my sources for Project Brief 4 was a book titled, True to the Spirit: film adaptation and the question of fidelity, by Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Murray and Rick Warner.

The following are the notes I took that have helped me to better understand what is meant by “textual analysis”. This reading will be invaluable going forward with analysing the different adaptations of Romeo & Juliet, as I intend to incorporate these analytical tools into my work on this brief.

  • “First error: critics claim films have a duty to be faithful to a literary sourceSecond error: Critics ignore the unique language of cinema and thus do not acknowledge a filmic adaptation to be an independent cinematic work.”-p41
  • “acknowledge film adaptations as specifically cinematic, rather then viewing them simply as translations into another medium of the essence of the work”-p42
    • NOTE: Shakespeare seen as highly academic while adaptations lose the essence of this
  • Transformation that takes place between the source text and the final film. This includes changes made in the story as well as the more subtle transformations involved in the transfer to another medium…“textual information”…“diverse semiotic levels”…“adjustments that take place during shooting, and quite crucially during post-production…”-p42-43
  • “Innovative staging and composition, lighting, decor and styles of acting, and most importantly, a variety of means of conveying characters’ motivations or reactions, frequently occur in films that involve literary appropriation.”-p45
  • *Of silent films in particular* – “order of narrative incidents… early filmic adaptations frequently retell the events in strictly chronological order, converting literary back-story into the early narrative events”-p49
    • Flashbacks were introduced to film at a later date

Structuring Brief 4

This week, we created a proper plan to split up the work between group members. Rob will be working on the adaptations page of the blog, conducting an interview with a dancer who creates adaptations for a living. Lucas will create the introduction for the Romeo & Juliet page and I will do the same for the static home page, “Texts”. Lucas and I will also analyse a number of Romeo & Juliet adaptations – including West Side Story – in different mediums.

We came up with three questions to help keep our analyses focused and on the same track.

  1. What is the core focus of this adaptation?
    • Themes, characters, story, setting
    • Do these elements stay constant or are changes made?
  2. How does each adaptation reflect the time in which it was made?
  3. How does the form influence the message and relatability of the text?

The coming week…

The next week will be busy in terms of working towards completing a polished draft of our media artefact. There are a number of things that still need to be done, which include:

  1. Watching each of the films and productions I will be analysing
  2. Researching academic interpretations and critiques of these texts to cement my own analyses in theory with a sound understanding of the context of each
  3. Answering in depth the three standard questions we are asking of each text
  4. Working on editing the aesthetics of the blog
  5. Adding to the “texts” page of the blog using information from further research
  6. Keeping track of new sources and write brief annotations for each

Aside from the project, I also need to write some more blog posts!

Remixing

“There may be no such thing as an original idea, but we can choose to deliver content in new and original ways.”

Walter Benjamin

  • Starts with photos and other mediums before talking about music
  • On hashish – practice and culture of smoking hashish
  • Started in 1930s
  • Popularisation of sound – linked to film
  • Alice in Wonderland and many other films remade for sound in the 1930s
  • Predating printing press – mass communication, mass media
  • Notion that ideas could be spread around the world easily, quickly and inexpensively
  • How does reproducing something change it? How does it change the new version? How does it change how we see the original? How might it be considered authentic?

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be”

  • Art begins to be based on politics
  • Concept of the aura – the experience/atmosphere/quality generated by a work – what is the relation to the original? How much of the original is captured in the remix (question of authenticity)?

Eduardo Navas

  • Remix Theory: the aesthetics of sampling

Copy | Combine | Transform

“The quest of art: the moment between what was and what could be”

The Process of Filmmaking

“My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.” – Robert Bresson

I was reading through quotes made by filmmakers and came across this gem.

I think it speaks volumes about the role of a filmmaker pushing through the challenges inherent in bringing a film to life. There are so many stages involved in this process and it is so difficult to translate ideas from imagination to a physical reality, that the process naturally flows up and down. What this quote also stresses is the importance of pushing through to see the beauty of the final product, which makes everything else worth it.

Making short films for the first time this semester, I had trouble at times carrying through the vision for my work through from conceptualisation to the end of production. This quote helped me to realise that this is a common challenge, and to think about the key times in the process when I really need to stay focused.

Our Sample Artefact

This week, we began constructing our website on weebly.com, adding pages and outlining the content we will be putting in each tab. Below is the draft theme for the “adaptations” page.

Screen Shot 2015-05-21 at 2.45.00 pm

Note: we will now be using a Media Factory blog as the platform for our final product

 

 

The Essence of a Moment

Capturing the essence of a moment is no easy feat. I found that this was a particularly interesting topic touched upon in Dan’s week 11 lectorial.

In terms of creating media, it is so wonderful to have the freedom to create something you are passionate about, because this emotional attachment to your work shines through in the final product.

I think it is unavoidable that remixes often lose the unexplainable “magic” of an original. This may be because we’re hearing sounds we’ve heard before being used in a different way that sounds bizarrely foreign to us.

The same goes for photographs and other media forms. Though you can never get a moment back, occasionally you can capture it in still or video form and feel the same emotions again. Especially with new technology, you can recreate scenes from your life in your head triggered by a panorama shot, a video, even a 360 degree capture of a place (created through taking 100 different shots at different angles and piecing them together in an app). However, recreating this video or photograph at another time will still not produce the same effect.

 I think that often, moments are trapped in memories so no matter how imaginative, creative or altogether wonderful a remix or adaptation may be, it can never produce the same feeling or trigger the same memory, only new ones.