Adrain was away today and left us with a bunch of instructions to follow in the studio, we were to have a self-guided class.
‘What I would like to have happen in the studio is:
General discussion (can be in groups, or as a class) that is an explaining to yourselves what you understand ontography, ‘materialism’ and the various ideas in the readings (Bogost, Frankham, Latour) to be, questions you have (any and all questions, this is an open gathering of all questions) about what it is, their purpose, point, what to do with them. The emphasis here is on discussing and defining amongst yourselves to find all the gaps (which become questions).
These questions are to be documented (just write them out as a list in a GoogleDoc that you share with me or on a blog post). This should take at most an hour.
Then everyone is to take one of these questions (they can be different questions, it does not matter if several people want to use the same question) and use that as an interview question (what we call a prompt) and interview everybody else in the room to get their answer. Do not include the question/prompt in the interview. The interview will be video or audio. This should be done quickly (pair up, I interview you, then you interview me, then next person, repeat).
This is quick sketch media making. Edit all the material together into a single audio or video piece. Upload to vimeo.com or soundclound. Embed in your blog. This is an exercise in a) knowledge mapping, b) problem discovery, c) vernacular media practice, d) sketching, e) listing, f) using what we call a pattern language, g) how to make a microdoc.’
There were a total of nine students in the studio: nice and intimate
Sitting in the circle as a class, we discussed the task set upon us.
Each person were asked whether or not they have any questions about what an ontograph,
Monique noted that ‘the things only exist because we see it that way’.
Using the Alien Phenomenology reading task as a reference point to complete our tasks, we went around and spoked about the three quotes that: what we enjoy, what troubled us and what intrigued us.
Brainstorming the concepts and the questions that will be use as a prompt for the final product of the studio to upload to a website video or audio service provided such as SoundCloud or Vimeo, various ideas were explored.
We went around in a circle using an iPhone to capture each person’s answer’s to the question. The question that we all chose to answer was “How do all things ‘equally exist’ but yet, ‘do not exist equally’, which was based on the quote, ‘All things exist equally, but some things exists equally.’
My answer for the question was,
In George Orwell’s novel, Animal Farm, one of the seven commandments that the pigs come up with is that ‘all animals are equal’, but what they actually meant was that ‘all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.”
An audio recording lasting around 7 minutes was recorded on Andrea’s phone, she will be uploading the audio file to the studio’s Facebook group.
