https://vimeo.com/mediafactoryrmit/review/468958263/d96b9c863c
Reflection –
Outline the singular most successful and singular most problematic aspect of your process/finished work in responding to your research question and why.
Originally I had not planned on working in a group for this assignment. I believed that my work commitments would make it too difficult to incorporate another personas expectations into this process, on top of the expectations of RMIT. When Star communicated that he would like to work together again, I was convinced that it would be a more enjoyable and creative process with a teammate.
I believe Star and myself worked well together. Star had more free time to take extra footage, and I was able to utilise my editing skills and creativity to bring more sound and colour into our media artefact. My work on the medical and economical side of COVID-19 ended up bookending our media artefact, with Stars contribution to the social impact being centred. I believe we worked together successfully, utilising each other strengths, and helping each other out on our weaknesses. A difficulty in this project was definitely working around each others conflicting schedules, and it meant both of us staying up late on many evenings, getting our work completed just in the knick of time. It’s also difficult taking two very different people and creating work that satisfies them both equally. I think we both saw potential in each other’s various interpretations of poetic listing, and hopefully managed to incorporate the best of both of us into our media artefact.
Outline one key thing you’ve learnt about listing as a poetic approach to experimental/new media/documentary media production through the making of this project and whether this supports/challenges your initial ideas & research.
Biggs states that new media art “be regarded as qualitatively distinct to conventional artistic practices as the artwork embodies novelty within an expanded set of criteria.” This really resonates with me, as it is something that I have tried to consider when creating poetic lists. I love that I can utilise different aspects of the film, without being beholden to a narrative structure, or any of the other common structures found in classic media. The novelty that I have tried to use in this piece particularly is sound and humour. I have incorporated multiple clips of various males saying ‘Oh Yeah’ through the economic portion of our video, and this is in stark contrast to what is on screen, whether it be a for lease sign or a spray bottle. I then use it in a more literal sense as it is conveyed on the screen that covid could be easing. I also use novel, fun music, and bursts of colour to convey a sense of unease. Loud noises are also used for this purpose; This would be a difficult and probably unproductive method in classic film making, but I think it fits into our poetic list very well.
I think it’s interesting to consider drone footage and its place in ‘covid film’. When we discussed the footage we would take, I thought it would be an awesome way to show the vast expanses of our cities in these weird times. Unfortunately, neither of us had access to a drone, and obviously, this has already become a bit of a trope anyways if it is being reported on at this early stage. I think its cool to consider filming techniques as a way to convey a certain emotion, and I think this really works with poetic listing, which not only works being random, but I feel really lends itself to efficiency, almost in the same way as people say a ‘picture tells a thousand words’ I feel like poetic listing works in this way too, as its not just the individual things in the list and what they say, but the manner in which they are collected conveys meaning too.
A Weidle quote that really jumped out at me was “Drawing towards exploration and expansiveness, hypertext served as an attempt to find forms of representation that would match the associative and inexhaustible workings of the human mind” I feel like poetic listing can be seen as a fantastic method of conveying associative and inexhaustible workings, maybe the best method. It took me back to our reading on “The Database” by Manovich. The human mind, and a database, have so much in common, with a major factor being the infinite nature of these collections and the lack of apparent associations between the items collected into these groups. Poetic listing is a fantastic way to represent not only items in a group such as this, but also as a way of conveying the nature of the undertaking in and of itself.
References:
Weidle, F., 2016. Korsakow Perspective(s): Rethinking Documentary Knowledge in Digital Multilinear Environments. (Links to an external site.) VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture 5, 110–123.
Manovich, L., 2001. ‘The Database’ in The Language of New Media. The MIT Press, Cambridge. pp. 218-243.