For this week, we have started our assignments using the questions we have gathered from our video essays. For the reading, I found it extremely interesting how the 9 different people differed in styles of shooting, different perspectives and artistic choices that they all implored – focusing on the different “language” and “movements” that occurred in the research they conducted. It was also interesting to see that our fellow teachers at RMIT were the ones involved in this essay!

My group partner, Tessa, and I have combined our questions into what is shown above. Using this brainstorm we came up with many ideas and ultimately came up with the idea focusing on childhood memories and ways to capture nostalgia and fleeting memories that we can link to environment, setting and places. Ultimately, we decided to narrow down our ideas into videos and pictures that evoke childhood nostalgia and interaction with nature and how it links to sentimental connections. Using class feedback, people suggested the importance of low angle shots and shots from a childish perspective, and also utilising archival footage or pictures to tie into the notion of memories. At this point, we have not chosen a specific form or platform to showcase these media artefacts, but hopefully within the next week we would have explored these ideas further.

This last week of specific video response has lead us to that of ‘dynamic’. Our reading this week focused on “Changescapes” with Gibson describing a changescape as a setting that helps us allow and experience what change is, by changing itself. A “project or process … that help us understand our existence in a world of unremitting change.” (page 17) We discussed in class that dynamic means to be flexible, always changing and varied, linking it closely to our previous response – precarity – in which it can also be unpredictable and unexpected on how it changes from time to time.

For my artefact, I wanted to focus on a particular system – as discussed in class and also the workshop exercise. I wanted to do the system of paths, but unexpectedly enough, they were actually fixing the paths in the park and having construction on it. So, I filmed the process of my dog visiting the park and how my dog’s ‘dynamic’ worked. I tried to capture how she kept doing the same thing as a repetitive, looping element on her walking, sniffing and then kicking around – but she kept doing this in unexpected places. I found this artefact to be quite weaker than the others obviously due to the unexpected hurdle I had to face, but I tried my best to capture the response in an alternative way.

Reading Reference: Gibson, R. (2015) ‘Changescapes – An Introduction’, in Changescapes: Complexity, Mutability, Aesthetics. Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, pp. 1–20.

This week’s response is ‘messy’ or, the “lack of clarity” according to this week’s reading by John Law. The reading describes the world as “messy, unknowable in a regular and routinised way” (pg. 597) which is interesting for something to be “routinised” yet messy at the same time. The reading opened my eyes to the world being messy not inherently being quite a negative thing that we have been familiarised with, but something necessary for the unpredictability and vast change in every setting in the places we live in and interact with.

To show this in an artefact, I have chosen to focus on the birds who live in my park and displaying its “lack of clarity”. I thought it was very different to focus on birds instead of rubbish or things like that, but I realised that birds and more living things are way more unpredictably messy instead of inanimate objects, as I tried to focus on their erratic nature and also the bird poop that was in the park. Also, I tried to focus on the inconsistencies in the park itself like the grass patches and rocks while placing birds in the forefront as well. I personally think that I could have done things like split screen, etc. to show the messiness in a clearer way, or tried to interact with the birds more – but I was too scared.

Reading Reference: Law, J. (2007) ‘Making a Mess with Method’, in The SAGE Handbook of Social Science Methodology. SAGE Publications Ltd, pp. 596–606.