Tag Archives: media 1

Week 9 Class and Organisation

Organisation of our Korsakow project.

We’re really on track with our Korsakow project. We each have given tasks, so this week outside of class we will each conduct 5 different interviews, each consisting of 4 questions. That gives up 60 clips in total. We decided to shoot on our phones, horizontally, and all will be framed the same way.

Then by next week’s class we will have a draft put together to show in class. Then we will work more on the interface design and key words of the Korsakow during that week.

The week after that we will work on the essay. We have already decided that we will each write 600 words on a different topic. I will be covering the content of the piece.

We have all this information tracked in a Gant chart.DSC_4813

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.

Week 6 Reading Media 1

An interesting point to this reading was the fact that digital interactive documentaries are limited as much as they are innovated by technological advances. In this way works become outdated and not accessible anymore as online languages change.

Another point is that Korsakow stories are “contemplative, interpretive and explorative” rather than “propulsive.”

I would argue that Adrian Miles and the writer are wrong, and that even linear narratives are experience based, not only information based. I also think they’re rather interpretive works.

“Works that challenge easy consumption of ideas…” Does this statement infer that all works that are difficult to understand are challenging the easy consumption of ideas. And what is wrong with this easy consumption of ideas, what is wrong with clarity and transparency? Even metaphor and symbolism are easier ideas to consume (for example in literature) than many ideas represented in Korsakow works. The ideas are ambiguous. Difficult and potentially not even there, and therefor audience-constructed.

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.

Week 5 Lecture Notes and Thoughts Media 1

Experimental films are art for art’s sake- non argument. Beautiful things should be beautiful in themselves. It doesn’t need to do more than that to be valuable.

The value is in the perception of the viewer but it doesn’t need to have a distinct purpose. It will affect the way that people see things, even if only slightly and only for a moment.

Everything we do and everything around us has to give us something. What does the world owe me? Not the way to think.

Sell an experience not a product. What sort of experience can I provide here?

When making something you need to think about the experience it provides, this is what people are interested in now. Times have shifted from product focus to experience focus.

Documentary is future orientated.

Korsakow makes you think differently about your role as maker.

I’m excited about this. I want to see what I can do with the strange clips I’ve taken and how I will think about these in conjunction with each other. I want to see what I can do and be creative within the limitations of what I cannot do. Also, how will the medium of i-doc alter my thought process as a creator?

A close reading is not deconstruction.

The new avant-garde in documentary realized?

The third reading was about how technological advances in media change the ways that media is used and functions within the public sphere.

I would like to go into my own thoughts on this. As much as technology creates possibilities, it always has limitations. As discussed in this weeks class, photographs are constrained by their lack of time. In a less clear way film is limited because it is difficult to negate a point of view. It is easy to show what is, but not what is not.

There’s also the fact that the limitations that create opportunity or enhance creativity. By asking, What can it do? you can really utilise the creativity and possibilities of a media form. Particularly with digital where the answers to ‘what can it do?’ are become more and more vast.

The invention and development of digital technologies in particular has expended the possibilities within media phenomenally in the past decade. It has also made the technology to create and produce content available and easily accessible to the masses. The public sphere connects in social online networks and create and share content. For example the platform Instagram allows users to share their photography withe the world and is used by millions of people.

However this also has its drawbacks when lines are blurred between what is valuable and what isn’t. What is art and what isn’t. Time magazine used Instagram to document Hurricane Sandy and Jeanette Hagglund uses Instagram to create stunning architectural photos, but 90% of the population are using Instagram to take photos of food or their cats, like me.