Media Work
Link: B L O W O U T.
Reflection
What were the questions that arose for your group and that you might like to explore in future work?
Throughout assignment 3, my group and I were constantly questioning each other, asking for feedback and critically analysing our media work in search of areas of change and improvement. Upon receiving feedback for assignment 2 in class from the panel of judges, feedback that was shared across most of the judges stemmed on how we need to have more of an emotional impact on the audience in order to have an impact on the viewer. My group and I all greatly agreed on this feedback and decided to explore this further. This is something that I not only want to explore in this assignment but definitely in future work. The reason being, I feel as though anyone could create a video about saving beaches, stating facts and telling peoples stories. But it isn’t until someone begins to evoke the audience’s emotions, making them feel empathy, sadness and anger that one’s media work will truly stick with the audience. Another question that arose throughout the development of this assignment was how we wanted to change and develop our then current ideas. We had to use trial and error to find out what media forms worked better and what variation of these forms worked best. For example, we decided against any bodies of text in the piece and instead chose to use voice recordings throughout the piece where we had originally planned to have text. Once adding the voice recordings, we decided to add various sounds and to create a soundscape to accompany the dialogue. For example, on the second page of our work, we have a poem about = our subject matter. We begin the piece off with peaceful and calm ocean sounds, however, once the dialogue begins talking about the possible destruction of the great Australian Bight, the ocean sounds are no more, and drilling and machine noises take over. This is something I would like to explore further in many different types of ways. I was quite happy with the dramatization that these sounds were creating and the various emotions that the timing of these sounds evoked. I would like to explore in other video/ sound pieces, the emotions that various soundscapes throughout the piece can bring on an audience and the direct effect that they have on the viewer.
How did you consider the way someone might engage with your work in an exhibition space after seeing the exhibition in class (or another of your own choosing)?
My group and I decided to stay with the interactive PDF design used in assignment 2, however, we expanded on ideas, themes and on the overall design of the piece. In Assignment 2, our piece was full of colour and was a very vibrant piece. We felt as this was unnecessary, and the vibrancy didn’t go well with the points we were trying to make. We decided to eradicate this colour and decide to make a black and white interactive piece, to match the tone of the content we are discussing. As for the overall design of our exhibition space, we decided to go with a simple and symmetric design. We chose an area of the room where we had a television with a table and feature wall available. In the centre of our space, we had a wireless mouse which controlled the PDF on the screen, with a pair of headphones on either side of the mouse. The PDF opens up with a menu with the functionality of choosing the first page, or any page the audience intends on going to. The PDF is full of soundscapes, audio and video on the issue of oil drilling in the Great Australian Bight. The PDF has navigation on the side of the screen with arrows and also has a menu button to return to the first page and to select a page from there. I created a PDF that had seamless page transitions, as when the user turns the page and progresses through the PDF, various media such as audio and video pieces will play automatically, in order to give the audience one collective experience that carries on page to page. On the wall to the left of TV we had multiple coloured images of beaches across the Great Australian Bight. The coloured images were intentional as we intended to create an exhibition space which showed the contrast between what we have and what we could have. The images on the wall are vibrant beautiful photos of beaches across the Australian surf coast, whereas in the PDF, it is full of dark images of petrol stations, images of machinery sky scrapers across the beach etc. I felt as though we were quite successful for the exhibition, however I noticed two flaws. The first being that on our last page we had the option to go to a website, however going to this website meant that the computer switched to an internet browser rather than stay in the PDF itself, this meant that we as a group needed to stay in close proximity of the exhibition space in order to reset the PDF whenever an audience member was finished with it. Furthermore, another flaw I found was the menu. The functionality was no issue, however I felt as though it was unnecessary, as we wanted the audience to start with page one and finish on page 4, thus the menus functionality was interesting, however quite pointless overall.
How have your ideas about entanglement and making ‘entangled media’ changed over the semester?
Throughout this assignment, through individual work and group work, I have been gradually developing my ideas surrounding entanglement and now have a quite solid understanding of what ‘entangled media’ truly is. The first reading in which we investigated in class, gave us a very good idea on the content we would be exploring throughout the semester. In Tim Ingold’s, ‘Being alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description’, Ingold uses the example of the entanglements of a circle. Ingold draws a circle, and then redraws the circle as a line with no boundary. Although different objects, Ingold describes them as “Each such trail is but one strand in a tissue of trails that together comprise the texture of the lifeworld” and further stating “It is a field not of interconnected points but of interwoven lines; not a network but a meshwork”. Ingold goes on to then represent the meshwork as one line, with dozens of lines stemming from the one main line. This was a good starting point in my journey on understanding entanglement, as it opened my mind to understanding objects as not just objects, but objects with almost an endless number of relationships. For example, rather than looking at a pencil as a simple pencil, we look at a pencil that has been created in a factory, gets distributed across the world, gets passed around people’s hands until it is used completely and/or thrown out. The relationships are near endless. Another point from Ingold that heavily influenced my studies was that “Every such line, in short, is a way through rather than across”. Further elaborating on my point that one may think a relationship with an item ends at that relationship, but every relationship has another relationship and so forth. We tried to demonstrate these ideas of entanglement in our assignment in regard to emotion and colour. We explored the emotions that the oil drilling would have on people and the type of feelings it may evoke, we did this through a dark presentation, with chilling and threatening images of a petrol station and of cranes peering menacingly over a beach. We used the black and white images to represent the fear and sadness that could be prevalent if the oil drilling were to fail. On top of this we used the photos on the wall of the exhibition to evoke the peace and tranquillity of the beaches, and what may be lost if the drilling continues its plans. A media example we studied in class was “Chioke, Grain of Sand” In the “Everything is Alive” podcast. Chioke is a grain of sand, Chioke explores ideas and relationships that sand would have rather than sand itself, such as all of the life forms and different environments surrounding him. My group and I aimed to involve this entanglement in our assignment by exploring issues on a broader scale, such as the effects on the beach itself, the economy and most notably the effects on people.
References
Ingold, T. (2011). Being Alive : Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, pp.69-71.
Everything is Alive. (2019). Chioke, Grain of Sand. [online] Available at: https://www.everythingisalive.com/episodes/chioke-grain-of-sand [Accessed 5 Jun. 2019].