Category Archives: Observations

33 Objects

DSC_4794 DSC_4796This week I went to visit the NGV, and check out the new works there. Something I noticed was there is now a lot of media art on exhibition, whereas a few years ago it was mainly paintings and stills.

One artwork that seemed relevant to our media class in particular was Charlie Sofo’s video piece, 33 Objects That Can Fit Through the Hole in my Pocket.

This arwork showed the artist’s feet and random objects fell out the bottom of his trousers after shaking his feet. It was list-like, in that the objects were random and were connected by their ability to fall through his pocket. It also reminded me of our Korsakow projects because it was extremely abstract.

When watching these random objects fall out of the artist’s pocket, I had no idea what it meant or what the artist was trying to do. The description of the artwork states that it “raises questions about perceived and actual and resourcefulness or artists, humorously critiquing criteria that claim to separate treasure from trash.”

This is an interpretation that I would never have guessed at, and I think it is an example of how ambiguous media list-like works can be, and how this does not devalue them.

Lists as Art

In order to compliment this week’s Media 1 reading, I looked into the art of lists, or lists as art. As mentioned in a previous reading, lists are considered naïve compared to traditional literature because they lack narrative and story. However, this doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable or beautiful.

I read this article about artists and their lists, unrelated to their art

And this list of artists who use lists in their art

It was interesting because the lists say so much about the people who write them, and in my opinion are more personal even than a story written by these artists might be. This because they are true, they are not fiction. Lists are compiled by what is chosen to display and what is chosen not to display. You can tell a lot about a person, or an artist by what they choose to list and what they do not.

Behind the Candelabra

I watched this movie almost by accident, I had nothing to do and was procrastinating wildly when I found it on my housemate’s hard drive and gave it a play.

I belong to Gen Y. A generation that is so used to hypermedia that we refuse to pay attention for more than two minutes to anything we stumble across on the web. So naturally, I found myself skimming through the movie.

I watched this semi-non-fiction, fictional narrative, in a non-linear way. It was an interesting way to go about it. Completely different to the Korsakow project that I created and the ones we viewed. Those were not narratives, they were lists. The interface guided the user between objects on a list, whereas in the movie I guided myself between different stages of a story. It didn’t matter that they weren’t in order.

This I think would be the only way to effectively tell a story through a Korsakow project. Rather than trying to tell a narrative, take different stages in a story. It needs to be a story such as the exploration of the deterioration of a relationship, where the cause and effect aren’t necessarily the most important thing, more rather, the beginning status and the end status are important and different events that show how the protagonists got there.

I now have an idea for a Korsakow fiction project where it explores one person’s life through a diary. Each clip having a date but the viewer not having the opportunity to watch them in order, only relatively randomly. So you can explore someone’s journey not from start to finish but from random state to random state and piece together their personality gradually. I think it’s a great idea and could work fictionally or non-fictionally if you were to use a real person and a real visual diary, or to create a person and their story through fiction.

Clown Train and Her

Clown Train utilizes sounds extremely well. In the beginning it sets the tone, as it overlays a blank, black screen and we hear the creaking and squealing of trains and engines running. It is extremely unsettling. There are also SFX that emphasize important or emotive moments, such as the quiet booms that happen when we first see the creepy clown. There is tentative silence beneath the dialogue at first, which really makes the tension between the clown and the boy, and also the film and the audience, palpable. The buzzing when the lights go out is creepy and gets on the viewers nerves, as it accompanies the frightening darkness. There is also creepy ‘music’ that plays in a crescendo in moments of building drama.

In, Her, the film creators use music, dialogue and silence incredibly well. In particular silence is used to create a feeling of loneliness. In both the beginning and toward the end of the film, there are a lot of shots of the subject alone, and these shots are silent. Sometimes these shots are accompanied by sad instrumental music in the minor key. During the middle of the film when Theodore is dating his OS, Samantha, there is laughter and dialogue and warm music. The film also really utilizes Scarlet Johansson’s voice incredibly well as it is warm, playful and immediately loveable. The movie really captures the way that solitude life is full of silence, therefore emulating the emptiness of a lonely life, whereas a loving relationship is full of joy, conversation, laughter and warmth.

Notes on the Week 3 Integrated Media Lecture

Here are the most important points that I took from the lecture and my thoughts on them:

Don’t seek to define by what it means, define by what it does

Taxonomy is dangerous. It limits and it doesn’t include variations and options. These days everything is messy, entangled, connected and complicated. The distinctions between different categories and groups and definitions are dissolving with the progression of social media. Adrian used the dissolution of the distinctions between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ as an example, and it’s a great one.

Increasingly definitions to common terms and ideas are broadening, this is breaking down barriers and limitations and changing the world around us constantly.

This means that increasingly we need to think of things (and in the case of this class, media) as all-encompassing and enormous, and when we seek to understand and define things, we need to look at what they ‘do’ and not what they ‘mean’. So when you go about making something, start with, “What can it do, not what does it mean.”

This I think is a great point, because in life we are taught to seek to categorise and organise things. I in particular am constantly trying to organise things neatly, but I find this difficult because everything is connected, entangled and messy. Attempting to categorise it has so far been too difficult and so perhaps accepting it and working within the world with this knowledge is the most effective way to work, live and create.

In interactive documentaries there is a relationship between reality, the user and the artefact

These are the three main engagers with the project and should be taken into consideration when planning or analysing a project.

The relationship is there and is irrelevant to the category of i-doc, (experiential, participatory etc).

Users are internal or external to the work

Participatory, the user is internal, and this is an ontological work.

Exploratory, the user is external and is an active observer. (Korsakow works are exploratory.)

First Kiss

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This video intrigues me because (other than the fact that I’m a hopeless romantic) as far as the content goes, it’s kind of like a list. There isn’t really a story there, the creator has taken twenty strangers and asked them to pash, and recorded it.

There you have a list of twenty identical situations using different subjects, with no hierarchy- as is the nature of lists as we discussed in yesterdays Media class.

The  different elements on the list, the videos, the chunks of media, have been cut up and structured, so that they do have a narrative.

There’s a clear beginning, middle and end.  Nervous introductions, a build up of anticipation, the climax: the kiss, multiple of them, and the resolution, breaking up and remembering that the intimate kissers are total strangers.

So here we have a list that has been given a linear narrative.

It’s interesting because it works so well, of course because visually it’s beautiful (the guy at the start please marry me) and also it is emotionally engaging and it appeals to people’s genitalia, and things that do always win.

This is a method that could be applied to other movie making. Documenting actions, events etc, in a list like manner, creating a database, and creating a narrative from this.

Lava’d it.

Lover of lists

For a long time, I have loved lists.

When I was little I kept books of lists, lists of my favourite things mostly, and my least favourite, and things I wanted and places I wanted to go etc. I kept them updated and I did stuff with them.

When I got a bit older I wrote zines which asked people to write their own lists about things they wouldn’t usually think of.

Then I started to become interested in art and film and photography and junk, and I began to think that lists were artless and primitive.

Now I only use them for productivity, writing To Do lists every day and watching my effectivity like a hawk. It works really well for me.

Then last semester in Networked Media we looked at databases, and the way that they act almost as a type of list, or a list as a kind of type of database, and how this in itself was kind of an art and something that modern artists were exploring. The different ways of exploring databases and user experience etc.

And today I ready this, an interview with Umberto Eco, about his exhibition that is preoccupied with lists. He explores lists in modern culture. It’s an interesting read and worth coming back to later if I ever need to justify my list writing to myself.

If Homer did it then why can’t I?

 

Kurt Vonnegut’s Shapes of Stories

Having just studied narratives for my media class, I stumbled across this today and found it quite interesting in the way that it is a visual exploration of story structure and plot.

kurt-vonnegut--the-shapes-of-stories_502918a226d9a_w479.png

The article where I found this is here.

This could be an interesting way to visualise the complexity or style of story structure whilst planning or analysing a narrative. I have to admit that I haven’t read any of Vonnegut’s work but I really admire this anthropological concept.

Institutionalised Education, Actor-Network Theory and Elliot.

This is something that I don’t think I’m supposed to say on an academic blog, particularly one made for and by the people at RMIT; I am not hoping nor aiming for anything above a pass in this course or in many of my courses. And I don’t think that that should reflect badly on me.

My intelligence (what ever of it there is) is more insightful and creative than academic. I’m forgetful. I will remember the names of theorists and their theories but not together. I can describe the painting and make an educated guessplanation of what the painter was thinking when he painted it but I won’t be able to name the painter; I’ll give you a deep analysis on the themes behind a poem, but I won’t be able to cite a single line.

More importantly though, I’ll remember the idea. I will apply that to my work and to my own ideas. The things I’m learning are constantly influencing my opinions, my philosophies and the work that I do. I make connections and I apply them, and I think that that is more important than being able to name-drop Baudrillard and Nietzshe over dinner.

I wholly believe that studying topics which bore you is of very little purpose at all, because if it won’t aid in your personal happiness, even in the very long term, what good is it to you at all? And so of course I study; but the study I do out of class is very infrequently on class content. I study the things that I am passionate about: advertising campaigns, innovative ideas, contemporary ethical social ideas, new philosophical realms. And then I write and I design and I conceptualize, outside of class. The work I do that interests me seems to always happen out of class.

This course in particular hasn’t interested me all that much. And so I have allowed myself to give it low priority. There is obviously something in the content that our tutor, Elliot, is passionate about and that makes me want to be passionate about it as well. I’m caught between wanting to understand what he sees in the content and my own boredom. There’s nothing quite like seeing a person in their element, someone who has an interest in something that most people overlook, and is dedicated to it and knowledgeable on it and good at it. I don’t think that networked media is exactly that thing for Elliot, maybe this all has something to do with games or film and the ideas underlying them or what ever it is that he is passionate about, but I can’t see it. I did make my own connections though, and I am happy about that. Actor-network theory and design fiction have made some sort of impression.

Actor-network theory is one of the first things that I have found of interest and practical use in this course, personally. I wish I’d had the guts to stand up for it in the class symposium, but I didn’t.

Actor-network theory makes it possible to trace broad relationships between people and things, and things (actors) could be anything, to understand perfectly what effect different actors have on each other and how they act in connection to one another. It’s an exciting proposition. It would be difficult to map out, considering the amount of actors in any given scenario, but when done efficiently it would be an effective way of understanding and explaining relationships. You could understand the functionality of every actor within a network, eliminate the defunct ones, reinforce and strengthen the effective connections.

This might be practically applied to advertising, one area that I am passionate about, and it might also be used in conjunction with design fiction, another topic that I found practical and interesting. Design fiction and actor-network theory are both related to strategizing, and I think they’d compliment each other extra-ordinarily well.

Imagine understanding relationships and the actors within a network so well that when adding another actor to this network, a speculative one, a design, you could anticipate the reactions of the other actors.

Actor-network theory could be a method of realizing the attitude and complexity of the relationships of individuals, within a particular society, most applicably in our case to online communities and people who share interests online. Target groups, if you will. It’s an open prospect, and one that could be used to better understand people for more effective manipulation of individuals within societies, which of course is the role advertising plays in supply and demand, isn’t it?

I have found something that I could be passionate about within a stream of content that I didn’t think could offer me anything, but something which Elliot made to seem like a golden pool of opportunity.

I am paying terrifying amounts of money to study this course at RMIT, and it is a very highly esteemed course that I was surprised and proud to be accepted into; and I look forward to working in media and to work in media a “Bachelor of Communications (Media)” ought to come in handy. And I didn’t only sign up for the piece of paper, I wouldn’t let myself put in so much time and effort just for a qualification, I do want the knowledge, and knowledge such as actor-network theory and design fiction is exactly what I want.

What I’m trying to say with this post is that I may have purposely only scraped the surface of this subject, and perhaps I should feel irresponsible, perhaps, to quote Adrian Miles himself, I should wonder “what the fuck am I doing wasting my time here?” as I did ask myself when I read this post, but I don’t. Instead I am glad because even if this isn’t my thing like it is or relates to Elliot’s thing, I found some things from it that are my thing.

It’s nearly 2am now. I think we’ll put this tired and irrational writer to rest for the night. This may be my last post on networked media, but it won’t be my last academic blog post, because the use of this blog is another thing from this course that I hope will become my thing, and I’ll be glad if this post is my last, because it’s my favourite.

Independence and power of the online network

In class discussion we covered the readings as usual, covering mainly the dependence (or lack thereof) of the internet on humans.

A few points were made, such as the fact that these days programs make decisions on their own, that no matter what the internet might do on its own it was originally made by people, that people were brought up by their parents but they are still independent when they leave home and therefore the internet can be too, and also the fact that all of nature is determined by pre-existing factors and a great butterfly effect, and therefore neither humans or the internet are independent.

My opinion is that, no, the internet is not currently independent and for as long as human beings use it, it never will be. As long as there are the ‘makers’ out there writing scripts and protocols that develop the internet, and as long as there are ‘users’ out there whose needs and wants are shaping the way that the internet develops, it can not be independent of people. (I’m also a determinist philosophy-wise but I really think we went of track with that tangent so I’m not going to comment on it.)

This brings us to the power play within the internet. It is very interesting that, as the reading points out, the development of the internet has destabilised former societal power structures and instead this technology that doesn’t have a central power is the focus of so many lives and indeed is fundamentally entangled with our day to day beings. I agree with the reading in that there still is power in the internet, however the fact is, the internet is developed by the people who use it. It is an extremely democratic network because there is not central power, the needs and desires of every person lead to new technologies and processes on the internet. I think this is a great thing, politicians and global leaders may not. The issue it does lead to though is that people with great programming skills have an advantage over the average user on the internet and therefore have more power than them. They could use this power to do the wrong thing, as has happened in the past with viruses and online scams, but for the most part people with developing skills use it for good, and progress the internet into new and promising waters.