Month / October 2018

by amandathai

Assignment 3 – Report

Name: Amanda Thai s3656343

 

I declare that in submitting all work for this assessment I have read, understood and agree to the content and expectations of the assessment declaration – https://www.rmit.edu.au/students/support-and-facilities/student-support/equitable-learning-services

 

Media Making Blog Posts

Week 9 Photo (https://www.mediafactory.org.au/amanda-thai/2018/09/18/week-9-photo-exit/)

Week 9 Video (https://www.mediafactory.org.au/amanda-thai/2018/09/18/week-9-video-now-arriving-at-narre-warren/)

Week 10 Photo (https://www.mediafactory.org.au/amanda-thai/2018/09/25/week-10-photo-lonely/)

Week 10 Video (https://www.mediafactory.org.au/amanda-thai/2018/09/25/week-10-video-the-door-that-makes-me-late-for-class/)

Week 11 Photo (https://www.mediafactory.org.au/amanda-thai/2018/10/02/week-11-photo-hidden/)

Week 11 Video (https://www.mediafactory.org.au/amanda-thai/2018/10/09/week-11-video-level-1/)

 

Title of Report: Post Pumpkin Gnocchi

Word Count: 1462

 

Post Pumpkin Gnocchi

I am at dinner at Eating House in Rowville with my high school friends. My pasta arrives, pumpkin gnocchi in one of those large black dishes somewhere between a plate and a bowl. It’s February 2018 and my friends have been encouraging me to get Instagram for years.

            My friends peer over my shoulder as I edit the photo, enhancing the orange colour of the pumpkin.

            ‘Oh, wow,’ they say, ‘that really brings out the pumpkin.’

            They give me the hashtag: #poppinpumpkin.

            I first used Instagram in 2012 and I thought it was a photo-editing app.

            Now I realise 2018 Instagram is a totally different world.

 

~

 

Vintage

It’s Christmas 2014 and my eldest cousin, Kat, hands me a Polaroid camera so I can take a photo of her in front the Christmas tree.

            ‘Stand closer than you think you need to,’ Kat instructs.

 

            It’s Week 9, Semester 2, and I’m using Instagram for the first time since the pumpkin gnocchi and I realise I can’t zoom in. I’m pinching the screen—as smartphones have taught me to—but the image isn’t enlarging.

            So there I am, in an empty media classroom, leaning over desk chairs and Macs trying to take an Instagram photo of a door.

 

            I look for a zoom ring on the Polaroid camera. There is none.

           

            The square format and vignettes were constraints of the Polaroid, limitations that the technology was striving to overcome. In 2018, we have this technology. I’m taking, viewing and distributing these photos and videos from the same device on which I call people.

 

            While we have this impromptu photoshoot, my older uncles and aunties discuss how impractical the Polaroid camera is, how we all have phones, why don’t we use them?

 

            Yet these constraints transcended and became ‘conventions…literally hard wired in camera designs’ (Manovich 2016, p.54). Instead of sports mode and portrait mode, Instagram has simply—vintage. Even in the digital age, we mimic physical qualities of a technology long obsolete , all the while we distribute these “vintage” photos across the globe in milliseconds.

 

            My younger cousin, Paris, wants a photo with me. After I see the Polaroid in her hand, with its natural vignette and classic white border, I ask to take another one for me.

 

            When I edit photos on my phone, I always, without fail, add a vignette or a lens blur—both potential flaws or limitations in the early days of photography.

            To this photo of a door, I intentionally blur two-thirds of the photo.

 

            That Polaroid photo is still stuck to a magnet board on my bedroom wall.

 

            We idealise a past we were never part of. It translates not only to the features of our favourite software, but our idea of what makes a perfect image.

 

~

 

Tactile

I’m down in Cape Paterson with my friends, Sam and Meg. Sam got a Polaroid camera for Christmas and we are walking back from the beach, instant photos pinched between our sandy fingers.

            We pass them around. There is only one copy of every photo.

 

            I’m writing my Week 10 blog post. My phone is open to my student Instagram account, this week’s photo on screen. In a browser tab, that same photo is open, just larger.

            There are potentially infinite copies of my photo.

 

            I’m at Stacks Pancake Bar in Karingal and Sam is back home from the Cook Islands.

            She passes me her iPhone—‘a miniature photo album…passed around the dinner table with friends’ (Palmer 2014, p.248).

 

            I’m on the train home from uni and I’ve just posted my Week 10 photo. Seconds after I uploaded it, my phone buzzes with a like from an old dancing friend.

            I passed my photo to her phone. She, and anyone else on my Instagram from their phone, holds a copy.

            Physical distribution—more instant than an instant camera, but just as tactile.

 

~

 

Artificial Spontaneous

I’m with Sam at the 2017 Melbourne Show and we just bought a massive fairy floss flower.

            ‘Let’s take photos of us eating it!’ she says.

 

            It’s Week 12, I’m late to posting my Week 11 video, and I’m standing at the back entrance of Building 9, waiting for the elevator. My finger is poised above the record button on the Instagram app.

 

            ‘Don’t look at me, look at the fairy floss,’ she says, ‘just eat normally.’

 

            Inside the elevator, I aim my iPhone camera at the open doors and lean over to press the ‘close doors’ button, careful not to disrupt my camera angle.

            I press down and film the doors closing.

 

            Instagram photography and videography is kind of like ballet.  Like ballet, Instagram demands effortlessness. It craves spontaneity and the slice of life yet it must be beautiful, aesthetically pleasing, polished.

 

            I press the ‘open doors’ button and the record button simultaneously. Then I stand there, alone in an unmoving elevator, trying to get the video posted.

            Someone calls the elevator up to the fourth floor. I’m stuck here.

            A teacher enters and looks mildly confused why I didn’t exit the elevator.

            I stand there awkwardly and exit with him on the ground floor.

 

            How do you achieve this paradox without preparation or planning? Like ballet, Instagram’s effortlessness is often the product of choreography and practice.

 

            I would love to say that I truly embraced the spontaneity afforded by Instagram, whipping out my phone to video any doors I passed.

            In reality, there was a lot of me seeing a door, seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘perfect moment’, struggling to get my phone out of my bag, waiting impatiently for the app to load and, finally, watching that ‘perfect moment’ disappear before my still-loading Instagram app.

 

I’ve done ballet for thirteen years. Maybe it’ll be another twelve years before I master the artificial spontaneity.

            But by that point, Instagram will be something totally different.

 

~

 

Identifying

‘I’ll post it to my second account,’ Meg says as I show a photo of her attempting the splits.

 

            Instagram affords cross-posting to other platforms with just a flick of a switch. Yet as I linked up my Facebook and Twitter accounts, I realised a fatal flaw in this cross-platform distribution.

 

            I flick to a posed photo taken at the beach.

            ‘Ooh,’ she says, ‘I’ll put that on my main account.’

           

            My identities:

            Instagram—a disembodied project on doors. Facebook—me at school formals and friend catch-ups. Twitter—a book reviewer.

 

            I now I understand why many of my friends have a second account.

 

            The network is centralised (https://www.mediafactory.org.au/amanda-thai/2018/07/24/week-2-design-as-a-disease/). We spend all of our time there and hence, we—or our online personas (what’s the difference?)—become centralised too. You make a new online identity and you are making a new account on every single platform.

 

~

 

Thematic

Praise on my writing from workshopping sessions:

            ‘Your piece has a really strong sense of image.’

 

            It’s Week 10 and I’m archiving several impromptu Instagram posts from Week 9 because they didn’t match my theme.

            Goodbye, photo of pink dance studio door with clock and glowing exit sign. Goodbye, photo of brown wooden door with passive aggressive sign.

            It feels wasteful and restrictive. It feels sly.

 

            ‘The sense of colour is so vivid in your piece.’

 

            It’s Week 10 and we’re in class looking at the Instagram account @basebodybabes. I could scroll through their page forever, watching the colours shift.

            I now realise how much work is required to achieve that engagement. It’s not in the hashtags or the captions or the bio. The words don’t matter—it’s all about the visual.

 

            ‘I love the image of these coloured doors/the rain/your five-year-old self.’

 

            I am a writer with a strong sense of image, colour and metaphor. When I write creative nonfiction, I will often manipulate the framing of a piece to better suit an emotional or visual progression. I don’t feel sly reframing the truth in writing, in authoring a cohesive piece.

            Perhaps Instagrammers are writers too.

 

~

 

With Instagram and its affordances, photos and videos are authored, published and distributed in a way that is at times paradoxical and unique to the network-centric era in which we live in.

            Instagram photos and videos are vintage in appearance, with conventions that harken back to instant cameras’ constraints. Thanks to smartphones, they are tactile like Polaroids, yet can be infinitely duplicated. They encourage an effortless spontaneity only achievable through artifice and planning. It demands theme and consistency, not just from the content produced, but the person behind it.

 

            I’m getting dressed up to go play Dungeons & Dragons. I bought a new orange lipstick.

            Maybe I’ll author a photo for Instagram, enhance the orange on my lips.

            I can publish it with the hashtag: #poppinpumpkinlipstick.

            Seconds later—when Instagram distributes this photo to my friends—I’m sure they’ll be proud.

 

_______________________

 

References

Manovich, L 2016, Instagram and the Contemporary Image, University of San Diego.

Palmer, D 2014, “Mobile Media Photography”, The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media, pp.245-255.

by amandathai

Week 11 Video: “Level…1”

Previously on Amanda’s blog…

“Tune in tomorrow for my video post.”

Turns out “tomorrow” is code for “next week”.

How did you author the video you recorded for upload to Instagram?

This video was taken on and edited on the Instagram app on my iPhone 6S using the rear facing camera. The featured door of this video is the elevator near the back entrance of Building 9 at RMIT and I edited this video by removing the sound and adding a black and white filter, sticking with my video theme of ‘silent black and white videos of automated doors’ (catchy).

The story of how this video was authored is rather amusing.

I filmed a ‘first draft’ of this video in Week 10, during our tutorial’s allocated Instagram time. At first, I wanted to film opening the elevator doors from the outside, then closing them from the inside, using Instagram’s start-stop feature.

Unfortunately, that draft somehow disappeared from my Instagram’s draft section. And that’s why I couldn’t post the video last week because, in all the three days I was at uni, I forgot to film a second version of that video.

So come today, Week 12, and I have to film again. Having done a draft, this video feels much more staged and less spontaneous than any other Instagram post I’ve done.

I call the elevator, take my video, one hand on the phone, the other on the buttons, when suddenly, as I’m choosing a thumbnail in the closed, empty elevator, someone calls the lift up to Level 4.

So there I was just awkwardly riding the elevator up and down with a random teacher.

 

How did you publish the video you recorded for upload to Instagram?

The publishing process for this video was the rockiest it has ever been.

First, I accidentally filmed and posted this video to my personal Instagram instead of my student one (no big deal, I rarely use my personal one anyway). Thank god for the fact that Instagram saves a copy of your photos and videos to your phone because by the time I was posting the video, I was halfway down the Pakenham line, the elevator at RMIT far, far behind me.

Speaking of the Pakenham line, there are several dead spots of internet along that line, most notably between South Yarra – Caulfield and Dandenong – Hallam.

When I was publishing this video, I fell into one of these dead spots and hence, when I tried to correct my mistake, I was stuck with long loading screens, especially when trying to geotag.

It showed me something I had taken for granted:

Instagram is only as spontaneous as your internet is fast.

The internet itself, your access and your speed, is a constraint as well as an affordance.

Additionally, when I reposted this video to my student Instagram, I forgot to chnge the thumbnail so now it just looks like a black screen. (I don’t take a video for one week and suddenly I’m a noob.)

For my caption, I threw back to Week 9 and quoted the door itself, this time announcing “Level…1”. When I play D&D with my friends at Monash Uni, I always make fun of their elevator’s voice and the hilariously long pause between “first” and “floor.” Well, it looks like RMIT is in the same boat (unlike its revolving doors which are far inferior to Monash’s).

For my quirky hashtag, I referenced my lateness: #impostingfromthefutureitsnotactuallyweek11.

How did you distribute the video you published on Instagram to other social media services?

This answer has been pretty repetitive over the last five posts. However, today is a little different.

Because I was signed into the wrong account, when I tried to flick those handy little switches to cross post to Facebook and Twitter, it took me to the respective sites and asked me to sign in.

NBD, I thought. Maybe it just automatically signs you out every few weeks for security reasons.

I should’ve realised something was wrong.

I struggled with these external sites and bad internet for no reason, because soon enough, I was reposting the video on my correct account, where the switches worked just fine.

This brought to my attention the struggle of distributing across multiple platforms. I had to go to my Facebook and Twitter and delete the cross-posts because otherwise, I would’ve had two identical videos crossposted from separate Instagram accounts, which would’ve raised a couple of eyebrows.

However, after all that struggle setting up cross-posting on my personal account, I figured, why not actually post something for real on that account? (As opposed to these student posts as a door aficionado).

That’s when the centralisation of the network really hit me.

My Twitter account is largely connected to my Goodreads account. It has the same profile pic as my Goodreads account (a purple eye) and I used to use this Twitter account to follow authors, post links to my reviews and get writing advice.

My Facebook account is just a polished image of me, somewhere to send new acquaintances that want to contact me.

My personal Instagram has one photo of pasta and advertises myself as a Mercy main.

My student Instagram doesn’t even have my name, it has my student number, and bunch of doors.

 

I am not the same person on any of these platforms. I don’t want to be the same person across these platforms.

But that is the world we live and work in today.

If I want to create a new online identity, I don’t just go to a new platform – I make a new account on every single platform.

I think I finally get it. With a centralised internet, you can constantly surround your audience with a certain image of yourself, consistent across platforms. And when your life is the internet, whose to say this online self isn’t your real self? You keep to the canon you wrote for yourself. You maintain a character.

Consistent. Centralised. Constant.

by amandathai

Week 11 Photo: Hidden

View this post on Instagram

Hidden. #networkedmedia #rmit #doors #tbhimgladthisisnearlyover

A post shared by s3656343 (@no_metaphors_allowed) on

How did you author the photo you recorded for upload to Instagram?

I authored this photo using the rear-facing camera on my iPhone 6S, all within the Instagram app.

I found this door by wandering through the Old Melbourne Gaol, past the door from last week, and to the side of what I think is Building 13.

Following the theme I set for myself last week, I placed the door on the right of the photo. For colour editing, I chose green for the shadows to emphasise the plant on the left of the photo, and orange for the highlights to put some warmth into the white building. I used the Adjust feature to make sure the door was straight, added a quick vignette and then added a linear blur (which I think looks awesome with the plant in the foreground).

I still don’t think this photo lives up to my first photo, but I think it’s better than last week’s.

How did you publish the photo you recorded for Instagram?

My first instinct was to take a photo of this door with it right in the centre. However, I soon remembered my theme and retook it with the door on the right side of the frame. It actually worked out for the better because I was able to get the plant in the photo, which created a nice contrast to the white building.

My one-word caption for this week is ‘Hidden’ because I think the blurred foreground plant makes it look as though I had to sneak through a jungle to find this pristine white building. The caption also works because I don’t think this is a very well-known door. I don’t even know if it works or is just decorative. Every time I’ve been here, there’s been no one.

My usual hashtags were used once again, however my ‘thoughts’ hashtag was a little more negative than past weeks. Where Week 9 was the funny and artificially desperate #thisismysecondinstagramposteverplshelp, and Week 10 was the self-aware #amithematicyet, Week 11 is just my thoughts on uni in general: #tbhimgladthisisnearlyover.

How did you distribute the photo you published on Instagram to other social media services?

As always, during the captioning and tagging phase of creating this photo, I simply switched on the buttons to share the photo to my linked Facebook and Twitter accounts. Easy as pie.

Swiping those buttons made me remember something. The first time those switches appeared on my old iPod Touch, I was confused how to use them. In the beginning, I would simply tap each one. Then I would over swipe. Now, my thumb knows exact how to swipe each one.

In Seth’s summary post from this week, he talks about affordances and their hierarchy. Hardware affords certain actions. Take for example, a smartphone, which affords tapping, zooming, scrolling, etc. Software, working within the constraints of the hardware, has its own affordances – things like sharing photos, typing notes, recording video, etc. What I found interesting was that the physical affordances of the hardware are then used to create intangible affordances in the software, which map our interactions. Eventually, these interactions become ingrained in our physical bodies.

Using a mouse is second nature to me. When I first opened up Mediafactory in Week 1, it felt relatively intuitive and simple to use because it looked similar to the book review writing page on Goodreads, a platform I am very familiar with. Perhaps that subconsciously influenced me to write my first blog post about book reviews.

Outside this class…

My mum has an Instagram account, on which she posts her handmade cards. Recently, she’s gotten more into it and keeps asking me how to do things. I told her that she should use the Story feature, despite the fact I’ve never actually used it myself.

Just recently, her card was featured in a video on the stamp manufacturer’s Instagram account.

I find it funny that, after this class, I can tell her how to use Instagram, despite the fact I’ve barely used it myself.

On a serious note, I appreciate this class for the new perspectives it has given me on design and the internet that increasingly grows and surrounds us. I think it provided me valuable information on the network as a whole and a platform that I don’t use but one day, most likely will.

I would write a better conclusion, but it’s Week 11.

Tune in tomorrow for my video post.