vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

One of the Moments of My 2005

Was sitting next to my daughter and watching her response to “Howl’s Moving Castle“. She was, thoroughly and utterly, enchanted. A smile of joy fixed throughout, laughing at the humour, and, well, absorbed in the film’s world. This was not the pleasure of the identification of a shallow already known (Harry Potter, Narnia, some Disney flick) but of an imaginative and created world where the story was unfamiliar, its terms unknown, and its outcome not assured. It was was a pleasure of discovery.

Upgrade done…

Have just upgraded to WP 2.0, in the 10 minutes or so that it took (where I had to turn off plugins), received 8 spam comments. At the moment spam is the biggest problem facing blogs in education:

1. Unnecessary network traffic. You want your IT support to host blogs? Imagine 1000 student blogs, public, comments on (and trackbacks). Email sent each time a new comment for approval or trackback. On my own blog that would generate around 100 emails a day. Times 1000, that’s 100,000 largely unnecessary emails a day for a small student population of blogs. (Which is why things like Spam Karma are life savers.)

2. Student is required to blog. Student blog gets inappropriate spam, let’s say an explicit link to child pornography. Student is on holidays and because they clicked the wrong button last time they posted, (because they didn’t want to get lots of email on holidays) has actually let comments go through unmoderated. Such a link is illegal in Australian law (and most other jurisdications). Student is prosecuted, I am prosecuted, university is too.

3. Student then sues me, and the University, since now they can’t a) be a teacher, b) a police person, c) travel to quite a few countries but the blog was a requirement of their course.

This is not an argument against blogs in universities, but it is a very clear description of why it needs to be done carefully and properly (and that’s just the spam problem).

Paul Pfeiffer at NGV

After having a look at the British art of the 60s (from the Tate) we went upstairs to the new media gallery. Morning After the Deluge was installed. This is by Paul Pfeiffer As we sat watching the horizon line do its thing I was wondering why, in an age of speed and acceleration, so much new media art actually requires patience. You have to sit, wait, and watch, otherwise not a lot happens (well, even when you sit and watch and wait not a lot happens). But new media (and probably contemporary sound art, but not my scene) requires and forces a slowness that is if not at odds then certainly interrogates the time of art. (I spent longer waiting for this work than I did in the BritPrint exhibition downstairs!).

A Smorgasbord

I am submitting some of my video works for the Real Life on Film documentary festival. This is probably the first time I’ve succeeded in even getting work considered, since in the past most of these festivals that I’ve looked at, while saying they want internet based video, have not actually provided computers to show work. Which means they are happy to screen video made for the web, but not to provide a mouse and keyboard which might actually be necessary to play these works. Bit like inviting games but not realising that you need to be able to play a game for the game to be presented as a game (even while spectating). So, they are trying to show a small range of interactive Web based works, and I’ve put my hand up to see what happens.

So, I’ve made an interface which is a small interactive QuickTime movie that loads a selection of other movies. Each is now located on its own webpage, so all bloggish, voggishness is completely erased. See http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/RealLife.

A Quotation of Sorts

Some of the prototypes I used for BlogTalk DownUnder have been re-presented by Yuh Huann of the National University of Singapore, blog notes online. (And I’ve only noted this here to help me build my ‘portfolio’ when next I need a job, or promotion.)

Near-At-Hand

I’m burning up too many neurones on what is supposed to be a holiday trying to write a book chapter. The book is about time and the internet, or things thereabouts, and I am not sure what I said I’d exactly write, but am currently writing about the temporality of hypertext. It is Deleuze and Bergson inserted in the link, via the sensory motor schema and the link as a Bergsonian interval. It is hard work. Rich with possibilities which will only get sketched since each does appear to be quite dense with possibilities, and my writing style really does suffer from me thinking that showing the connection is enough.

But that’s not the point of this post. In Deleuze there is an idea of the ‘any instant whatever’, from Cinema One. I think I might appropriate this into the near-at-hand which is in some way equivalent to any instant whatever. Any destination, any possible destination (real or imagined, now or in the future) of a link (real or imagined, now or in the future) is, like the any instant whatever, always near-at-hand.

Because: the mouse (insertion literally into the sensory motor schema), because the only distance that matters is temporal (“how long will it take?” not “how far away is it?”), size which might be in bytes is actually translated into bandwidth where again I suspect time is key, so all points are equidistant.

Ok, that’s enough brain splurt for today. Off to the British Art and the 60s show at the NGV.

Critical Blogging

Bag News Notes provides a cultural studies sort of inspired critique of news photography. Fantastic way to think about making a difference. Also seriously good resource for students to learn how to do this. (eg, what is a critique, how to do it, why.) [Email via Matthew Clayfield]