Just so you all realise, it is a small world. Bjørn Sørenssen has left a comment on Lauren’s blog. The same Bjørn who wrote the essay you read. As was discussed last year, the internet is small, public, and others will find, read, and judge on what you do here.
Mia picks up the three things that have changed as a result of digital technology and the differences these are making (this was also discussed a lot last year, and will appear again this year, it is the decline of scarcity that we argued around in network media which applies to education/university, know what versus know how, and media practice). So we seem to be in a position to realise Astruc’s vision, though the aesthetic side of this I think is lacking. Sharona notes Astruc’s prescience, and picks up the quote about a new aesthetics, I’d like to think we’re helping build that this year. Natalie has a great over view of the Astruc reading (well done!), particularly noting how the ideas was that we’d use video/film to tell things that weren’t just fictional stories. Hell yeah. Vine is perhaps the most significant intervention in that space since, well, the turn of last century (seriously). Brenton offers a thumbnail over view of the Sørenssen, and I like that for Astruc it’s an epiphany, that gives it more force than just an idea. Daniel uses the Astruc ideas and Sørenssen’s working of them to think about Malick, philosophy and expression, be cautious of generalisations, but a good example of the sort of other cinema that Astruc alludes to. Zoe has a long post picking up ideas about what it might mean to treat the camera as a pen, or more usefully as functional/useful as a pen. Habermas gets a look in too, which might get touched on in Monday’s symposium.
Mardy has a quick and good response to i-docs (I agree, sounds like an Apple product), and what is good and problematic about some of the proposed modes. Tom at the end of a sweeping post has a couple of brief points about the Aston Gaudenzi reading too. Ali picks up a point and elaborates that documentary is much more than story and/or entertainment, and yes, film documentary is a very creative complex area, in some ways it engages with form and content in much more experimental ways than fiction cinema has. Jackie joins up documentary studies with integrated media to think about whether a six second Vine clip is documentary. Nice point about whether documentary is about an explicit point of view versus more interpretive works. One way to think about this is the sorts of documentaries being considered are ambiguous, closer to poems than tracts. If you recall the reading from network media about essays, then we’re interested in documentaries that are essayist rather than explicative. Lauren has notes from Aston and Gaudenzi, and is interested in Nielson’s 90-9-1 principle (which is a version of the same rule we saw in network media in terms of the 80-20 rule). Brenton has some notes, noticing that information flows are not multi directional rather than one way.
Zoe has a detailed write up of the essay, with summaries and explication. An outline of the modes they define, and yes, the most interesting work is when the boundaries are blurred (as if they aren’t or weren’t to begin with, the boundaries came from the academics corralling the work into boxes that were not there to begin with for goodness sake). If you skipped the readings (why??), then check this. Koston has notes, linking some of the ideas back to remediation (it’s always good to find connections between or across ideas), while outlining the modes of i-docs they describe.
And who there, Emily’s made a prezi about i-docs, OK, I’m intimidated.
Interview with my about using Korsakow in teaching. Vanity aside, it might be useful as it provides an overview of what and why we are using Korsakow and what a subject like this does (rather than worrying about what it is about).
Sandra Gaudenzi (an author we’ve already read) with an interesting curated look and commentary on what she’s describing as ‘the living documentary’, part of a larger MIT project that is building an online database of documentaries….
Hot out of the class (Tuesday 2:30) are the following questions (they were voted on in order of significance – those that missed out on a vote have been left out):
Some related stuff to Astruc, who’s essay has been very influential. Two different translations, one from the US, the other from a blog that seems to be about French cinema (“My Gleanings”). Then a post by David Tames from 2010 on a major documentary site that does a nice quick job of moving from Astruc to now – Cinema Will Eventually Become a Flexible Means of Writing.
The two excellent examples Seth raised today in the lecture:
MIT’s Moment’s of Innovation, which is about how documentary has always innovated around technology and showcases some recent digital examples.
And then the rather lovely The Johnny Cash Project.
For my money Moments of Innovation is really interesting if you think of it, in itself, as a documentary, rather than something that is just reporting about documentary. And again while you might think The Johnny Cash Project is about participation it is also remix, data visualisation, interactive. Trying to fit it into a primary ‘type’ commits what we call a category error.
On a related note, think about what Seth said about Google, YouTube, and analytics (tracking and analysing all the use data around a video or user). This is an example of YouTube paying attention to what a video does, rather than what it means. In spite of themselves this is a system that sort of ‘gets’ that meaning is secondary to what these things do, and that their data driven approach is not about what these things mean, but, in the small specific language of a network, what they do. Just interesting.
Perhaps.
Today’s discussion about taxonomy and classification and analysis. And that weird botany example. Let’s rewind and do it all again. In botany we have species. Species are different types of plants, so for example we have over 700 species of gum tree in Australia. What defines a gum tree as belonging to one species or another generally consists of differences amongst bark, leaves, and most importantly flowers and gum nuts – the reproductive parts. Historically someone comes along, reckons that plant there is new, grabs a specimen, writes a very detailed description of it, and that becomes the benchmark for that species. Once another one is sufficiently different, it is a new species. What counts as ‘sufficiently different’ is, though, a point of debate. What the debate is doesn’t matter. What matters is that it is debated because there is not this simple ‘flick’ or ‘difference’ between species, but that there will always be examples where an individual will have some of the qualities of one, and some of the qualities of others. It is a graduated scale, analogue, not discrete and digital. Now, what matters is not whether this is a new species or not, what matters is to recognise that gum trees all vary and so what matters is the extent of the variation, not the fact of variation.
All classification schemes have to do this. They have to invent a boundary or rule that says ‘these qualities or attributes mean you are a part of this group’, and so by definition if you don’t have these then you’re either out, or in another group. Where that boundary sits is always an argument informed by power (whether this be politics, authority, evidence), so it isn’t neutral (which means it isn’t only about the things we are classifying). But this system also creates for us an understanding of the world where things live in particular categories, whether gum trees, dogs, gender, bodies, or interactive documentaries.
The risk and danger then with a taxonomy is that when you build your system what you take to be the ‘specimen’ becomes a centre, and distance from this centre comes to define difference, but why is that specimen (that particular documentary) the centre rather than another one? Similarly, what comes to matter is how that documentary is like what the taxonomy identifies, which risks not seeing, or noticing all the ways in which that particular documentary has other qualities, attributes and abilities too. It creates a world of boxes, when the world isn’t actually boxes. Of course everyone who uses these classifications will tell you that this isn’t the case, that of course the world is complicated and messy, but, well, this is useful as a method and what else can we do? It might be useful as a method, but a method, not the method. As I said today a more interesting approach, certainly right now, is to look at individual works and systems and software platforms and services individually and specifically in relation to what they are. ‘What they are’ is code for what they can do and what they do do. Not what they mean, that comes after, but what they do.
Why? Well as I outlined in the symposium, if I look at a person I can use large scale things (taxonomies) to make some crude assumptions, but that’s not a good way to understand who that person is. To understand the person I need to pay attention to them, to what they do, and then I can worry about or try and work out what that might mean (for you me). If I don’t then I fall into large categories that at best become stereotypes. The difference is significant and lets me build things (arguments, ideas, even taxonomies) from the bottom up. What things do is right now more interesting than what things mean, if only because when we go straight to what they mean we risk missing, not being able to see, what the things are – which surely is the point of classifying them in the first place. So the method I’m proposing is to begin from the understanding that everything varies, and to make that a first principle, rather than identifying what things have in common and making that our first principle. It’s about recognising a world of difference, change, movement, and variation as given and that taxonomies are (false) moments of imagined stillness.
Relations, relations. They’re like family, you don’t get to choose them.
The theme of the semester is ‘relation’, as in relations and the relational. The first constrained task, which really consisted of two constrained tasks, square and round is primarily about composition and so is shape as a relation.
The second task, was light. Video and cinema is, at heart, about a relation to light (of a chemical surface that responds to light, or a CCD that is also built to respond to light).
The third task is about speed. What relations of speed are available available?
Speed
NOTE: for all of these the camera should be static.
Technical
Things to consider
A cliche is fast cutting = speed and slow cutting = slow. But can they be mixed? Why? Why not?
After some readings about interactive documentary and historical examples of the relationship of cinema and documentary to technology now we turn to basics. While reasonably long this is simple to read, and many of you will have read this already. It is from Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 2013. Print. (PDF here.)
I’ve put them all into the one document but they are an introduction to narrative, then an introduction to experimental film, and the last bit is about documentary, nonnarrative, and two nonnarrative documentary forms. We want to make more visible to ourselves what a narrative actually is, and then to think about what experimental practices can teach us to better see the role of multilinearity in general, and for our Korsakow films specifically.
Ali discusses some Twitter based RPL come RLG in relation the first readings. Sam riffs of this further, wondering about i-doc stuff and interactive entertainment. Interesting connections, and there are connections between gaming, interactive documentary (including the horrible sounding docugames)and interactive entertainment. The risk in there is that what makes doco doco gets lost. Like that Arthur joins the reading to Nichol’s modes of documentary. Mark picks up the observation that doco already had close affinity to new technologies, but with digital stuff this even more so, and potentially a bigger change to the form than new lighter cameras. Edward discusses similar things. Tiana takes the preliminary definition that an i-doc is anything that wants to document the real using interactive technology. Natalie has a pretty thorough summary of the definitions of the different types of i-docs that Aston and Gaudenzi reckon are out there. Mia also does a good outline of the key modes of i-docs and how they allow multiple ways to present points of view. Daniel has dot points, useful as a summary and outline. Laura has brief highlights.
The Tuesday 12:30pm class have put their collective enquiring minds together to bring these questions as the prompts for the panel next Monday (11:30am in 80.10.17).
From the Hight reading:
1. Documentary as a ‘project’ in regards to definition is becoming very broad – so, does it need to be redefined or broken up into categories? Does a taxonomy of definitions need to be created?
2. (p. 4) “The second dynamic is the appropriation by digital platforms of aspects of documentary’s discourse and aesthetics, refashioning them especially within participatory online cultures.”
How do documentary practitioners work with participatory contributions in regards to copyright and intellectual property?
And then from the Aston and Gaudenzi reading:
3. In regards to understanding the four categories of interactive documentary – How are they important independently, or should they complement each other?
4. (p.126) “..different types of i-docs demonstrates that a variety of i-docs is already established, and that each of them uses technology to create a different interactive bond between reality, the user and the artefact”
How exactly are these relationships formed using different technologies? What connections can be made between different types of i-docs in regards to how they use technology?
5. (p. 131) “He referred to the 90-0-1 principle, as cited by Jacob Neilsen (2006), which suggests that there is a participation inequality on the Internet with only 1% of people creating content, 9% editing or modifying content, and 90% viewing content without actively contributing.”
In regards to updating this evaluation – how have these statistics and practices altered with developments in social media since 2006?
Chris likes the idea of being able to compose in multiple ways. Gina realises that some things don’t fit a linear scheme, and perhaps the poetry of some of these things is enough. Bec has some good and bad comments to make about a student film, and can see some narrative and non narrative ways to think about making an interactive work. Edward watches another student work and likes its, what, softness and simplicity?