Got this from Daniel. This is interesting. The rush action camera. Not just because it is a low tech possibly decent camera that you can just put anywhere, but also the interface they have between the lens and capture and the watch as screen. It has the potential to be a very simple (and so very useful for low rez media practices) way to go about video blogging.
Roger Ebert via Mark Bernstein:
I would begin a story time and time again on an old Smith-Corona manual typewriter, ripping each Not Quite Great Lead from the machine and hurling it at the wastebasket. [Bill] Lyon watched this performance for a couple of weeks and gave me two of the most valuable pieces of writing advice I have ever received: (1) Once you begin, keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it’s going? (2) The Muse visits during creation, not before. Don’t want for inspiration, just plunge in.
This week in the honours studio most of the workshop was taken up with a simple, but surprisingly interesting exercise. Each of us (myself included) described a problem we encountered in doing our writing (everyone is working up a 5000 draft of what will hopefully be the opening of their thesis or exegesis). The problems ranged from needing to plan first, difficulties in knowing if what is being written will be relevant, difficulties in being concise or relevant, stylistic repetition, spending too much time proofing and making things right before writing more, confusion about what ends up relevant or included in the exegesis, being over organised so feel like can only write if have large blocks of time, procrastination where always being distracted and only spending a small amount of the time actually writing, having too many ideas at once and not knowing where to start, struggling forever to find a first sentence (and not being able to write until that first sentence is there), and finally needing to find the essence of the writing and struggling through a lot of writing and not liking the writing until this essence begins to emerge.
We then discussed ways to address these problems. What was interesting was that all of us had problems and in the majority of cases these are quite easily addressed by (a) first recognising what lies within or under the problem, and then (b) having a strategy that either addresses or acknowledges that.
For example, needing to plan first is simple, create the plan then write to it. Relevance is a tricky one, but one of the biggest issues is honours is simply developing the discipline of writing, so it is much more valuable to be writing regularly, on stuff in the field (more or less), than not having the discipline of writing at all. For those who try to make things perfect before moving on, free writing can be very useful, both as a tool to get writing, and also to force yourself to let go of being perfect if this keeps slowing you down. For those who have to have everything just so before writing, it seems you are usually hyper organised, or at least into lists and those sorts of things. Here we talked about putting things like ‘doing the dishes’, ‘tidy my desk’, and ‘clean my room’ as things on your list that you get to tick off and do as part of your writing routine. That way instead of sitting down and then deciding you can’t write until the dishes are done, and so on (which becomes deferral and procrastination) this gets incorporated into the writing activity. (Of course it will be interesting to see if other things then pop up that just have to be done before you can start writing.) Some who write then just do other stuff, are what I call ‘burst writers’ (I’m one). For these people it really is a recipe for frustration if things are approached based on time. It is much more productive to set word quantities, for instance ‘write 200 words’ rather than ‘write for 2 hours’. As a burst writer the 200 words come easily, then go off and do all those sorts of things that you do instead of writing for half an hour or so, then do another 200 words. You end up with more words, less stress, and feel more productive. Finally, when there are just too many ideas floating around writing is the only way to actually make sense of things. In my own practice I would move towards hypertext to manage this idea of connectedness and simultaneity, but when not using hypertext generating a list of sub headings (keywords, a word cloud, a brain storm) and then just writing, somewhere between free and structured writing, under each of these, is enough to begin to sculpt.
In all of this I remain fascinated by writing as the site of a particular sort of practice.
Yet more evidence that video on the web is television. Via Inside Online Video we have the Interactive Advertising Bureau setting guidelines for ads in online video, while also mentioning Videorix, one of a growing band of services all about getting ads into your videos.
This just helps push audience aggregation into an area where it has no right being, and once again mistakes audience quantity with the qualitative publishing, video creating and writing we can do online. Yes, you don’t have to use these services, but this is where the traffic goes and becomes the hegemonic normalised and normative form for what video online will be. Petit TV. The mediocrity of the vision is despairingly impressive.
This is a pre print extract from an essay I’ve just about finished, for a design journal:
This can be visualised, quite separately from the interface of any particular hypertext system, through the following illustrations. Figure One is a simple sketch showing the common experience of writing an essay (or designing ). The horizontal axis represents time, and the end can be thought of as a deadline — perhaps when the work needs to be finished or simply when a required number of pages or words have been achieved. It can also be thought of as an illustration of what it might mean for the work to be completed, when something has been sufficiently explicated so that what falls outside of the cone is not perceived, or otherwise made minor courtesy of our normative ‘good enough’ argument which has been realised through the materialisation of thought as writing. This suggests that what is outside of the cone becomes not relevant or otherwise accounted for and so the end is sufficient in relation to its beginning — whether this be a concluding paragraph or a realised design. In this illustration research and the practice of writing is an activity of collecting material and then filtering and concentrating it down, distilling it if you like, towards and into an argument. The point at the tip of the cone (labelled “essay”) is this end point and it is represented in this way because in the normative model of the good essay all that falls before this point ought to teleologically lead us to it. In other words to the left of the end of the essay we can imagine the contents of this research and writing cone to include those references and other material that are deemed relevant to this conclusion, and all of the arguments and clauses contained within its paragraphs that are to help move us, inevitably, towards this conclusion. Like any good narrative it will all make sense in light of this ending, and anything that falls outside of this, that is outside of the cone, needs to be excluded since it disrupts, interferes with and otherwise problematises the inevitable trajectory of the argument and the writing of the essay.
If we then treat the horizontal axis as time and the tip of the cone as representing a deadline then this situation is exacerbated as the closer you get to the deadline the more disruptive anything new becomes and so the more likely it is to be ignored or at best acknowledged via a footnote. This form is highly teleological, and encourages an emphasis on finding material that ‘matches’ and in disregarding that which disrupts or otherwise problematises this end. This is clearly the case in much essay writing, whether undergraduate or professional, which historically and institutionally has valued clarity, certainty and concise causality of argument over thinking per se.
Figure Two, on the other hand, is how I represent writing hypertext hypertextually, and in this case also how a material digital practice in the domain of writing (as thinking) can be illustrated. Clearly this illustration is schematic and simplifies matters (but in this case isn’t that it’s value?) by its reversal of Figure One. Here we begin from an idea or a problem which we take to be a complex knot that is to be investigated. This model is promiscuous and the sorts of objects that are produced are not teleological in the manner of a ‘good’ essay. They may have no conclusion, many, or one that while offering itself as a good enough place to finish will also contain links back into the writing so that other passages and ideas can be found or explored. In this model the intent is to include what might ordinarily be regarded as ‘outside’ so that those ideas or things that would disrupt and problematise an argument can be included. This is achieved through the use of the link as a performative and connective event so that when writing in this manner the link is no longer instrumental (in the sense in which they are most commonly treated as navigational or interface elements) but generative, associative, metaphorical and inclusive. In this model, which is of course as normative in its own way as the ‘good’ essay, it is possible to include that which disrupts what you are doing, that may have arrived at the eleventh hour, but which is valuable and indeed may even suggest new directions. In other words links are part of the very materiality of such a writing and become a part of a particular mode of thinking within the activity of writing where these links produce an architecture of argument that lies between the affordances of writing–as–thinking and a thinking–through–writing.
This is not intended to be an idealist argument, nor to suggest that such writing systems erase the problem of what can and cannot (or should and should not) be included, or of relevance. Arguments still need to be conducted, claims explored and justified, and all of the usual procedures of academic and intellectual conduct apply , however, it does indicates how the digital is able to produce and construct a particular practice that complements and is a mode of material thought, and to situate material thinking within quite specific terms to help sketch what in fact a materiality of thought as a realised practice might be.
While each of the figures suggest something single or unitary as the point of each cone, within Figure Two this point is not singular but can be more productively conceived of as having a crystalline structure.
Last Sunday got home from my first mountain bike race to find the home broken in to and my laptop stolen. So I’ve been able to borrow a computer from the AV techs at work for the weekend, but I’m pretty much using the student labs, and of course I don’t have access to all the tools I regularly use (that aren’t part of the ’standard’ RMIT installation). So for the time being I’m not reading RSS feeds, am struggling with email (I’ve got recent email, post theft but all from before is in the backup) and can’t get back on track till a new laptop arrives.
It was backed up (thanks Time Machine) but I’m getting behind on a lot of things with no computer at home.
Today I had a lecture where I wanted to introduce the idea of granularity, its importance to blogging, networked practice more broadly, and how cinema and sound production already relies on granularity. From there it was about how we may have softmedia while we’re editing but once published it becomes hard, and so one aspect of softmedia would be to retain this granularity after publication.
As an example I used this children’s book. It is stunning, what I particularly like are the commentaries which also operate across a triptych. These are systems that are about the production of novel but constrained patterns, and this is one our projects in networked practice. I’m currently finishing an essay about this, using Videodefunct and the Korsakow System as examples.
This image is from Meeuwissen, Tony. “Remarkable animals: 1000 Amazing Amalgamations.” Harper Collins, 1997. All rights reserved and copyright resides with original holders. [Amazon]
I’ve introduced the rhizome templates to second year students. Some interesting nodding (up and down, and sideways) as they either think they’re of interest or just a sideshow. (I think they’re a bit of both.) Andrew though has an interesting idea, so I’m interested to see what comes of this.
A paragraph I just dumped from an essay I’m bleeding and sweating through right now:
This is a particular sort of porousness, where each image has a series of attitudes (facets) which can be realised depending on what relations the shot is placed within, that is in what series it is located within, and for softvideo this porousness is to be maintained after publication. This problem of granularity and porousness is one of the major contributions that blogs and wikis have made, as each of these predominantly textual architectures fully recognises that the network is their medium of use and so are what we would recognise as soft environments. Blogs and wikis are wholes made up of smaller wholes (posts and articles) that are porous to the network in innumerable ways and this is one of the reasons why they have been so successful as network derived forms of textual practice. (Indeed they are probably the first two mature media forms to have emerged in situ on the web as previous efforts have largely remediated older media and appropriated the web as a publishing or distribution platform. This is certainly the current case with video online.)
Todoist is a web based to do list manager. One of a burgeoning set of productivity tools that you can find out there. I am still resolutely bookish when it comes to Google Docs and things like todoist. That doesn’t mean I have to have a paper calendar, just that it has to reside on my computer. My essays have to be here, not over there on Google. Sort of quaint, but aren’t really sure why it matters. But matter, at the moment, it does.
