vogmae interactive networked video practice

Contemporary theory in its approach to digital media has largely relied upon traditional notions of story and narrative to understand the similarities and differences afforded by digital media. While this work has been invaluable it has emphasised the ways in which things like hypertext may, or may not be, story like and so has examined the new roles of the reader (Douglas 1994; Douglas 2000), and the implications for multilinearity for story sense. (Bolter 1991; Joyce 1995; Joyce 1995; Joyce 1995; Aarseth 1997; Gaggi 1997; Bernstein 1998; Dovey 2002; Landow 2006) However, emerging dominant digital forms juxtapose highly local content and practices with system wide and global combinatory systems.

This is the brief I was received:
"they have no idea what Web 2.0 means but would dearly like to know how, why, when and it [sic] what way it effects the way they do their job."

Much teaching practice that looks to video and blogging, including the examples offered by pod and video casting, confuses the affordances of blogging (what makes blogging successful and qualitatively different to other writing practices) with ease of publication, and in doing so replicates old media paradigms of video in new media contexts. However, for video to be successfully integrated in converged online environments it requires similar affordances to those identified and established in educational blogging. Hence, video needs to become granular, fragmentary, and something that is 'written with' rather than just a delivery or publication format.

This paper proposes that within the practice of writing small scale, local hypertext, critical questions of relevance to all hypertext researchers are foregrounded, in particular problems of excess, context, and teleological interpretation.

The hypothesis I wish to pose is simple. Within link node hypertext it is clear that context is fundamental to link interpretation, and that context is largely reader (i.e., pragmatically) determined, in no manner is the significance of the link exhausted by any particular context in which it may occur. Furthermore, a significant factor in the contextual interpretation of the link is the development of narrative schemas, and such schemas determine meaning retrospectively. This suggests that structure in hypertext is produced pragmatically, and its principal meaningful structures are defined retrospectively. The tension between links as pragmatic, open, and excessive, versus the teleological imposition of coherence, is the space within which hypertext writing defines its own practice.

Internet desktop video is constrained by conservative notions of distribution, authorship, and genre. Content is developed and delivered utilising traditional broadcasting paradigms and our browsers become little more than de facto television receivers.

These are slides (presented as pdf) of some thoughts about writing as a specifc sort of academic material practice. I use some ideas about the actual and virtual to tease at this, eventually using hypertext as an exemplar. The work is to be developed into an essay.

These are the slides (as pdf) of the report I gave at the Affective Atlas 01 Symposium at RMIT in October 2007. The affective atlas is a large research project to investigate and prototype alternative geoknowledge tools, and this report is on a field trip with honours students where we collected media samples to make a prototype atlas using a GoogleMap.

Slides from a brief introduction at the Affective Atlas 01 Symposium (Melbourne, October 2007) outlining why the larger project is entitled "affective atlas". Uses Deleuze's concept of affect and applies it to a digital atlas.

Brief slides about the relationship of blogs to film documentary practice.