vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Creative Computing adopted

The program I teach within here at RMIT has just formally adopted the manifesto for creative computing as a pedagogical document that defines our approach to the teaching and learning of Information Technologies. This is a good thing. Because

• it provides us with an educational rationale for the conversations we need to have with our technical support staff
• it provides us with an educational rationale for the conversations our technical support staff need to have with their managers
• it provides a framework to think about, or at least to render visible our assumptions, what it is we are doing when we teach technologies
• it provides a framework for staff to perceive what they think they ought to do with technologies
• it legitimates our activities in the language of the institutions we are located within
• it provides our students with a constructive framework for their activities

it is a document that generates relevant and appropriate discussions about learning, knowledge and the ecologies of new media for students, IT staff and academics

Snow From the Train

Another vog, another one of the European holiday series (and yes, I am trying to get them out a week at a time and yes, I do want to finish them!). This is called Danish Snow and is material I shot out of the train window as Anna and I travelled from Copenhagen to Amsterdam. In the south of Denmark we travelled through a wonderful snow storm, all the fields carpeted, rabbits hopping away from the train across the snow, trees with their white umbrellas. I love the snow, I think it is mysteriously magical the way a landscape is transfigured, silenced, and relit by snow. The novelty and beauty is something I never tire of (though I live in a country where snow is a long drive away so I guess if I lived somewhere where snow was a regular event my views may be different).

This vog is like the previous Brussels Park vog (explanation here) where I have two child movies loading next to each other and mousing into one controls the playback speed of the other. As in the previous vog the effect is to speed up playback. Clicking in one videopane restores the original speed of the other, and also lets you toggle through a series of textual annotations. One of the things I’m interested in with the textual annotations is perhaps using this to provide a specific date stamp for the work. There is still the usual date and time stamp within the blog post itself, but another timestamp that appears within the work. I did toy with making this a text track and clickable so it operated as a permalink, but wasn’t happy with the outcome, though this is something I expect I’ll be returning to shortly.

Increasingly I’m realising that my work is very much about time, duration, the quotidian and the effect come affect of duration in indexical media. The specific indexicality that I’m interested in is time based, so it is important in vogging, at least in my vogging, that work records worlds that are verisimilitudionous (is that a word or have I just spelt it wrong), a condition that I think is actually key to blogging (he adds). So my vogs seem to be less concerned with complex interactivity, or even that mutlimedia broadband media rich experience, than time poems.

Hence this work is about movement, place, memory, the exotic, and embedded variable durations.

Hypertext.RMIT adds another research blogger…

Melissa Gregg from the University of Queensland has just taken residence in a blog that is being hosted by hypertext.rmit. We now have over 20 academics and postgraduate researchers using blogs that we make available here, largely because they can’t find supportive or flexible enough policies or people internally to allow such activities. A revolution of small moments.

Announcing KnetLit …

Jeremy Yuille and I have moved the manifesto for creative computing to a new blog come website. The object of this is to extend our ideas and thinking about what we mean by each of the terms, and to, let’s be frank, set an agenda. It is open for comments, but please keep in mind that it is very early days yet – we’re writing, adding, and designing. This will also form the basis of a research paper we are writing about creative computing, and an action research project we intend to undertake in the second half of this year. The site is located at http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~knetlit and comments, additions, revisions, criticisms, are welcome.

Nearly End of Semester

Well, only three weeks to go to the end of semester one. I’ve been teaching a new first year subject, Editing Media Texts, which forms part of the new curriculum we’ve developed for the Media degree. Several years ago we initiated a review of all that we did in Media, including curriculum, industry relevance, administrative structure, and so on. This gave us the opportunity to pretty much completely redress and redesign everything that forms the curriculum, and start from scratch, emphasising process based teaching, collaborative practices, and media relevant literacies.

Historically our first year required students to stream into either TV or radio production, to undertake a humanities major, and to do some compulsory communication subjects. The new structure in first year has removed TV and radio as options, and its object is that by the end of first semester every first year will be able to:

• take photos
• shoot video
• record sound
• edit photos
• edit video
• edit sound

and be able to reflect on these activities critically. By the end of first year all students will also be able to:

• write a basic web page
• write and maintain a blog (which will double as their research journal for all their media subjects)
• publish video and audio to CD, HTTP, and DVD
• be able to read media texts in a critically reflexive manner

Academically theory in first year is something you read about, so it is all secondary and descriptive sources. More, “what is ideology” rather than reading say Comolli and cinema and apparatus (Comolli would be second year). So, I’ve been responsible for Editing Media Texts, where, you guessed it, we’ve introduced editing. I’ve used the subject to also introduce a series of basic computer literacies, such as using the student server, using OS X, backing up work, and so forth. I’ve also been able to use the subject to begin to teach students computer literacy, where they are learning how to read an interface and so figure out by themselves what to do in any given program (I’ll write more about this shortly). Within EMT the emphasis has been on process based teaching, with a lot of reflective practice, and a lot of peer and staff feedback for each of the editing exercises they’ve had to do. While they haven’t submitted final work yet, things on the whole have been excellent. Students ‘get it’, and so while we may be using iMovie to edit, they are spending four or five hours editing a one minute sequence where all the time is spent thinking about editing, and not learning how to negotiate a complex program.

This is, very specifically, one of the major objects of this course, students are to be spending their time editing and thinking about editing, and not doing party tricks in Final Cut Pro or Avid (and there are party tricks enough in iMovie) or Photoshop. There has been some excellent work, some mediocre work, and some poor work, attendances have been maintained throughout the semester, and while my reading list is abysmal (I think all my time and energy went into developing the process based methodology, now that I’ve got most of that working next year the reading can be more appropriate) all of the students are now, in a basic way, media capable in terms of getting content into the computer, cutting it, and saving it. Next semester we concentrate on ways of getting back out again.

Too Kewl for School

During some discussion at the presentation at SIAL a student showed me this URL, which has the very wonderful TouchGraph Google Browser. Type in your URL and you get an interactive graph of the link architecture. Move nodes around, retrieve them, get information on them. I like this and I think it might even be useful in relation to teaching with blogs to draw emergent blog architectures.

Places to Visit

Places to visit as part of the talk on networks that I’m giving to students at RMIT’s Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory this morning:

• blogdex
• technorati
• all consuming net
• blogroll.com
• del.icio.us
• movable type
• blogger.com
• grandtextauto
• Creativity Machine

Key Points.

Networks are ecologies. They are constituted by communication flows. These flows are symmetric and asymmetric. They exhibit emergent properties (including strange attractors and phase transitions). They are distributed. They are acentric and polymorphous. They are participate in and constitute a sociality.

Revisting an Old Question

If I make a vog that allows ergodic realtime interaction with its users, where is the work? For example, imagine a vog that is networked, so let’s say 100 users are ‘viewing’ it simultaneously. Let’s imagine that this vog is scripted with various bits of narrative content delivered off a server via child movies. This means that the work each user ‘views’ could be qualitatively distinct.

In this context, what, or where, is the critical object that we ordinarily describe as the work?

This is a problem that has been well described by people like Thomas Pavel (see Pavel, Thomas. Fictional Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) who problematise where a text resides (if we burn all copies of Hamlet, have we destroyed Hamlet?) but here it would appear to develop an added layer of complexity or confusion (noise) simply because there is no substantive substrate to what constitutes the text. At least in the Hamlet example there is an artefact that we can, to a significant degree, recognise and accept as Hamlet.

While the ontology of this gets interesting, it is also indicative of the manner in which contemporary textuality (for want of a better term) is increasingly determined or defined by its experientiality. This is the same thing that John Thackara describes as the province of design. For example, let’s say for the sake of demonstration that there are 10,000 news orientated Web sites online. Each of these sites relies on three or four major sources for all of their news, and then some local reporters for local content. Because all news services rely largely on the same sources (and even where they don’t, still largely follow the same newsworthiness criteria) the only thing that can separate each of these sites from the other is the experience of the site that they provide. This is an act of design, and this design experience extends from visual presentation to writing style to what information is provided and its architecture. The point is that what discriminates or separates one from the other is primarily experiential. This is why the ‘creative class‘, to use Richard Florida’s terminology, is so significant for this is the economy we now find ourselves participating within (blogs being of course a prime example of this, blogs are design experiences not textual artefacts if by artefacts we mean discourses that a community of readers can read and agree on what the textual object is). This economy is not only economic (sorry) but more significantly semiotic and it affects the ontological semiology of the objects or artefacts we now write, make, publish, and participate in.

Returning to my vog example, the textual object here is less important as an object of study in itself than the sets of experiences that it produces. That is the effect and substrate of the work, and is where the work is to be found. This might suggest that these works are closer to sport (and games of course) than the sorts of artefacts humanities scholars ordinarily think they’re studying. It has become a participation sport, with blogging simply being the textual networked equivalent of extreme sports.

Network Speed

This is from John Hopkins via a current discussion on empyre:

Have eBay, can Fantasise

I got this via an email so if he’s made the office email rounds then no doubt he’s got a lot of traffic and popped up all over the place, still, you’ve got to admire the self confidence. (What’s it about? Jay Maynard’s TRON costume.)