vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Back

Well, rained off and on through the Saturday. Though by Sunday it had stopped, with just a grumpy wind to remind us of the storms. Breakfast is a well established ritual while camping – fire, eggs, bacon, tomato, toast and anything else that can survive frying over a very hot top. Usually with lashings of tomato sauce. We all remembered the art (well, except for Y. who insisted she has never learnt how to light a campfire properly) of getting the fire going, necessity being the mother of pragmatic invention.

Conran is an excellent campsite. A lot of sites all scattered through coastal bush, so that even when full at Easter you still have the experience of camping. In the bush. Plenty of bird life to boot, around the camp there were pied currawongs, gang gangs, crimson rosellas, eastern spinebills, a bevy of blue wrens, yellow robins, kookaburra’s, grey fantails, and something that I think might have been a striated thornbill or similar.

Of course the Easter bunny still found us, J. and S. having been reassured before leaving that yes, though we weren’t at home great wads of chocolate eggs would still arrive. S. is old enough to know better, and young enough to still enjoy pretending, while J. summed it up when he mentioned that he was looking forward to getting some easter eggs – “well, when they get here ‘cos they’re not here yet”.

Camping with kids is fun, but when you go with people who don’t have kids it is easy to find yourself doubly anxious. Once for the kids just making sure they’re not freezing, starving, playing with snakes, and again to make sure that the others on the trip aren’t buried or lost in the child-centred world that is the young family. I think we managed pretty well – the kids are old enough to do a good job of finding things to do, playing with each other, or even (my goodness) reading.

It was cold, it got warmer, and of course the last day was glorious.

A Brazilian

I was interviewed before Easter for a newspaper article in Brazil, Sao Paulo paper I think. Was an awkward interview, long distance phone, me with no Portugese and the journalist with very good english, but probably not quite good enough for the questions he was after. I see that the article is online.

Roland is delicious

Within Integrated Media we are attempting to make a series of interactive, time based media essays that respond to one brief quote from Barthes’ canonical essay, “From Work to Text”. To help the students approach this task, and also to model research as a productive and contributory, exploratory act, we spent a good deal of class time making a list of things we might want to find out to help us understand the essay. Things like a glossary, background on Barthes, key terms, and so on.

Once the list was compiled everyone had to then identify what they would contribute from that list. I suggested that I could tag each blog entry (as their contributions would appear via their blogs) so that we would have a custom RSS feed out of del.icio.us and then each student could easily aggregate the group research using what ever RSS client they had decided to use.

The del.icio.us tag is IMRolandBarthes, and the research is starting to come in. With mixed results. Here you can see that a list of resources have been found, but unfortunately all that has been written in the blog is links, no contextualising commentary, no real indication that they have read what they found, through to entries such as this which describe process, activity, outcome, reflection and so on. I can see that we will need to hasten slowly here, which is why a good four weeks of studio time will be set aside for realising these projects!

Away

Easter has announced itself in a sweet rush. The forecast is poor, the corridor is a camping surplus store, and tomorrow is another day.

Speechless

This will be causing a storm out there. I of course am a Macintosh advocate. Started back in DOS, thought Macs were for people who didn’t understand computers (though always hated how their essays looked better than mine). Then one day thought about a new laptop. Went into an Apple store, the salesman left with the machine and told me to have a play. In a couple of minutes I’d set the system time, created a folder, renamed it and made a file. I realised that I could not do any of those things, I mean any of them, in DOS without having read a manual. That was that. I still tinker under the hood, OS X has blessedly given us a command line, and I can still just get things done. I remain bemused by my friends who all drive old Renault’s and Peugeot’s because they are well designed, etc, even when the cost of keeping them serviced is higher than that Hyundai over there with CD, central locking, air conditioning etc, yet won’t buy a Mac because it costs a few hundred dollars more than a no name PC. Why does that bemuse me? Because their rationale for the car is based on recognising excellence in design and the difference that that makes. Well, that’s Apple in the computing. As I mentioned to some designers the other day, at Apple Mr Ive is involved at the start. Elsewhere the engineers make the computer, then they give it to the designers, who’s brief then becomes little more than package this. If you don’t understand and see the difference, that’s OK, but one day you will realise that you buy product X not because of price, but because it does what it is supposed to do better, more elegantly, more pleasingly. Pause, you have recognised design as a quality. I had titled this “speechless” since I was gobsmacked by letting the Intel Macs dual boot. Turns out I wasn’t.

A Company Blog

Anecdote is an Australian consultancy that specialises in organisational change and management. Well, let’s say they specialise in the pointy and relevant end of contemporary management practice. It is run by Andrew Rixon, Mark Schenk and Shawn Callahan (none of whom I know, just read their bio page) and I mention it here because their company blog is a very useful collection of all matters organisational, social networks, communities of practice, and the like. These would be people who are well aware of the emergent nature of contemporary information and social networks and what this might mean for any organisation. Will go and subscribe now.

Seven Points that Quicken (four)

4. The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination. The plural of the Text depends, that is, not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric). (p. 159.) Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text.” Trans. Stephen Heath. Image–Music–Text. London: Flamingo, 1977. 155–64.

This is the quote that I think I will be using for the creative research brief in Integrated Media. It is dense enough that simply expanding from its terms (what do the words mean, what does the quote actually say or seem to be about?) provides one point of entry. Yet it also has suitably suggestive language to also let students follow lines of thought if they wish.

For example, the idea of plurality. This suggests not that it is about the multiple interpretations that we can make of any individual piece, or for that matter the range of interpretations that a range of individuals might make. It is rather that the thing being interpreted has a quality within itself, foregrounded and as a fundamental facet of its textuality where what it means is not able to be thought of as a singular, ‘correct’ and canonical analysis or idea. The thing being read or used reverberates continuously, for everyone, with possible meanings, implications and interpretations.

This is why the ‘text’ is not about interpretation (well of course it is, you have to interpret it if we take interpretation to be about working out what it means, even if that is to decide it means nothing) but about dissemination. Here Barthes is using a different sense to interpretation, the older hermeneutic sense where you think interpretation is about finding the one true meaning (a sort of biblical come religious sense of interpretation). Here possibilities are produced, it weaves things in and out. A simple illustration of this would be to use blogs as an example. What would it mean to ‘interpret’ a blog? A blog, and not a blog post? It is about so much, links in, is linked in to, that the idea that you might have a single canonical and ‘right’ interpretation of an individual blog is just a big waste of time.

Which of course ties to the quote neatly, doesn’t it, since Barthes specifically discusses the weave of signifiers. Remember this was written well before the World Wide Web and the internet. Barthes is not describing the web or hypertext or blogs, but writing and reading. Yet of course there are some aspects of the web and hypertext that seem to make this literal (which is why this essay is regularly cited by early hypertext theorists, for example George Landow and Jay Bolter). Now, how might this let us think about video and audio blogging? Well, substitute ‘video, or ‘film’ or ‘music’ or ‘radio’ for work and then think about what ‘video’ or ‘film’ or ‘radio’ (music is trickier) would be if it had the qualities of the text as described in the quote. What would need to be different? What could be different? How much is something like television already like a text, and how much isn’t it?

The Research Brief

This is a QuickTime movie that I authored using eZedia QTI http://www.ezedia.com/products/eZediaQTI. It is the research brief for students undertaking Integrated Media this semester at RMIT. A written outline of the project is available, in conjunction with this interactive version but please note that they’re actually two different things, and the most important one is the QuickTime version.

The video is around 1.1MB but it also contains two child movies (of 1.4 and 2.6 MB) so if you click the video links inside this video then additional video is downloaded. On the first screen of the research brief a link is provided to download the project to your own computer. This has the benefit of removing any lag in playing its parts, just do not shift the .media folder in relation to the quicktime file! Oh, the video uses H.264 so it is QuickTime 7 only.

Why is it presented as QuickTime? Because this is what the project requires you to do so I think that it is appropriate to present the brief/assessment task in the same language as the project requires. In addition it helps model what the task requires so rather than leaving students in some sort of vacuum (after all they’re not interaction designers) it provides some scaffolding for the task.

Currently working to: It’s A Dream from the album “Prairie Wind” by Neil Young.

Things that Interfere

I’ve turned off comments on the blog. Returning to how it was once upon a time (before there were comments, before I turned them on after there were comments). It is not because I have the blog comment equivalent of a stalker (I left their comment, and it is only the second one I have got recently), nor that there is an absurd amount of spam that my filters catch.

Why? Well, the stalker like comments. I can delete it. I can leave it. I could even edit it so it says something nice. But comments do allow these sorts of anonymous, reactive comments that are closer to an idiolect than conversation. I don’t begrudge someone the effort to write these, but things that move towards old fashioned flame wars can live in their own authorial spaces. To be clear, it is not this particular comment. It is that by having comments this becomes possible. I don’t see the point.

An other reason is that my own very personal view is that blogs are about people writing. Connecting parts, or not, but it is a networked, distributed, docuverse of connection. Comments are too close to old media models of aggregating to the self. (Of course this doesn’t mean that some forms of comments in blogs, for example fictional blogs that utilise comments in various ways, or even the extraordinary comments that grace the world’s dullest blog, are inappropriate.) It keeps the conversation in house, almost under my name, and runs the risk, real or imagined, of confusing the accrual of comments with quality of conversation.

It could also be that most of my posts don’t attract comments, and certainly don’t attract comments that really contribute to the debate. The comments that I do get are usually affirming, they make you glow and realise that people do care, for which I am always grateful, but the self conscious ethnographically semiaware academic in my recognises that comments are the legacy of other media, and other emotional ecologies.

I think if someone is interested enough they can email (that’d be adrian.miles@rmit.edu.au), or write something in their own blog. If they don’t have a blog, then they won’t leave a comment because they can’t, and you’re writing can remain as that series of probes and hesitant questions into an imaginary readership where the hesitancy of the non-return (which is the comment) becomes the affirmation of writing as expressive possibility. If it doesn’t matter if what I write here passes when I die (and it doesn’t), then why invite comment?

Research Brief

In Integrated Media everyone is going to make an interactive QuickTime essay using eZedia QTi. It is going to be difficult work for the students as I will be inviting them to apply a quote from (more or less) poststructural literary theory to video and audio blogging. The aim of this is to encourage them to draw connections between ideas, to invent ways in which theory can inform their practice, and to help make visible the way that theories inform ideas across domains. And we will be spending a lot of class time developing ways to do the needed research and so on.

But that’s not what I wanted to write about. eZedia QTi is a snap to learn and teach, so like my experiences with Storyspace we can move past problems of technology very quickly and then concentrate on content. Such ‘content’ includes graphic design, interaction design, appropriate development of rich media, as well as research, documentation, and making an argument.

On the downside, eZedia QTi, while making it trivial to make a button to open a web page, or to play and pause video embedded in a project, has no access to any basic programmability. You can’t count anything, you can’t tell your project to do something else on the basis of some condition. And you can’t even trigger an event on a mouse enter, only a mouse click. This last one really gets to me. In most of my work I use ‘mouse enter’ triggers so that simply moving the cursor through the work makes things happen. I prefer this to clicking on anything and everything – it really does reduce the experience of a work to the most banal forms of pavlovian reward and reinforcement (not that merely caressing the surface with a mouse is that great a step forward). So as I write the research brief, in eZedia (something I learnt from Jeremy – your assessment tasks should be expressed in the same form as the task is asking), I just wanted to reveal some more information when the user mouses into a button. You can’t. It is click or nothing. Unfortunately clicking triggers the button (for example launching a web page in your browser) so it has already happened. So my choices are either to clutter things up with textual cues where I don’t want them (unless revealed through use), or a two button approach where click tells you what a click (the next click) would do. Neither very useful, and definitely not elegant.

I miss ‘mouse enter’.