vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

MashedMedia

This semester in Integrated Media all students are (meant to be) making minor video works each work. They are, at the moment, in response to specific briefs. As the work is published in individual blogs I am republishing the work via a group weblog (well, it was set up as a group blog but I’m the only one there at the moment). The category in the blog for this stuff is MashedMedia, and the works are usually also categorised according to the brief they are responding to – where the work is unsolicited, ie the student’s just made it, then I just use the MashedMedia tag.

The work is deliberately experimental, currently moving into multiple pane video works, and is inviting students to critique (positively and negatively) a media practice that is different to that which informs and underwrites ‘professional’ media practice.

Oh, you could subscribe to MashedMedia via RSS, but it won’t actually work for the multipane videos. These use child movies and RSS is firmly old media in its conception of media objects as it assumes that each object is single and only made up of a single file.

Haiku Media

Fraser at The Long Tale does a nice job of joining in to the conversation about what I have (I guess controversially) described as ‘dirty’ media. So, lets think of the word ‘dirty’ as poetic not literal, metaphoric rather than metonymic, connotative rather than denotative. So it is, let’s see, dirty, rough, quick, noisy. Ah, noisy. OK, I’m going to refer to it as noisy media.

Fraser is right, we do want your blogs to be closer to sketch books than finished canvasses, études rather than symphonies, working drafts and sequences rather than novels. It is an informal media. This is also how we are approaching the sorts of media objects we make for this environment – we are not trying to use your blogs as a platform to make features (though you certainly can if you want to do that as well).

On the other hand it might help Steve’s position to introduce some more ideas. Sketches (for example) are not just on the way to something else. For some artists sketches are the work, and in other cases they get valued because they provide evidence of the work behind “the work” (for example sketches on paper and in oils as studies towards a major painting). Just as some writers (for example Raymond Carver) only wrote very short stories, or their working notes might be valued as a way of showing the process of what went into a novel. In music there is a genre, the étude, which describes musical sketches, because you have to play and experiment on the way to making a larger work, but the étude remains a legitimate work in itself (as do the drawings of many many artists). Finally, there are numerous creative forms that are about the miniature, the small scale, and so in some ways this is the aesthetic we are currently using.

Now, two important things here. One is that you’ll notice these ’sketches’ help with process, it is very hard to make the ‘big’ (good) work without making sketches on the way, and it is in looking at the sketches that the process of your work is revealed (for you and others). Process is something this subject is very interested in. We want you to be able to learn and to discuss/document your decisions, theoretical and creative.

The second is that, as suggested, you need to sketch to get to the big thing. If you don’t sketch, your big thing will be lesser for it. So this is why we are making sketches. Improvisations. Noisy little pieces.

OK, I’ll finish up with this quote from Steve:

You have a draft because you want to end up with a finished product. You have a sketchbook to experiment with ideas. Each is possible to be “beautiful, ideal and perfect” but as they are by definition drafts and experiments, they are most often half formulated ideas and rough outlines of an end goal, be it a painting, a film, a song, a story… whatever.

What about a haiku? A form that can be informal, elegant, deeply sublime. It has a strict structure, is very small, and is not a ‘half formulated idea’ on the way to ‘an end goal’. A haiku might take you a month to write, but it will always be ’small’ media. That is its beauty and its strength. So perhaps we are making haiku media?

Lectures

I am about to stick my lectures online. They will be (sometimes) the Keynote slides I use with a soundtrack. You’ll be able to play the slides and the soundrack independently of each other. I don’t like podcast lectures, so I am doing this to

• shamelessly promote that I can do this and have been experimenting creatively and critically with video and audio online and in teaching and learning via blogs since 2000
• show that we can formally do more than just stream a voice (my content might be crap but others might do better once they realise that more is possible)
• that if I ever listened to myself I would probably realise what a dodgy teacher I am (do I really want to have to address that?)

Anyway, as I was making notes for today’s lecture I realised I have a terrible habit of using what I think are really nice phrases. Resonant, sorts of phrases that carry the weight of thought, careful reading and scholarship, indeed the sorts of phrases that students might do well to ponder upon.

I also realised that one of my rules for this year is to slow down. To show students how I’ve joined the dots. These phrases (one of today’s examples is education as a ‘knowledge regime’ all Freire and Foucault that one) are my theoretical shorthand and it is these points where I actually have to slow down. Ask what it might mean. Flesh it out. My thinking style is all kernels, I pare things down to a kernel, stick it out there, and then get frustrated that no one else can see how I distilled that, let alone how to reconstitute it.

Int Media 2007, The Final Project….

This is a pdf that describes what the major project (aka Creative Research Project) will be in Integrated Media One this year. There will be plenty of discussion around this in class, so don’t panic when you first read it.

Integrated One Major Project | pdf |

Space Again

Jules has a dig at space. Unfortunately (not sure where the defintion is from) space is not a place for a use. As Weinberger says, place is a different sort of space, it is space made cultural and social. Space is neutral, sort of empirical and abstract, place never is, it’s the difference between a hectare and home.

Emma also (to her very great credit, and no, you were not shot down) has another go, wondering if “emotion can occupy space; it can occupy the space in your mind, or the space in your time”, they’re good ideas aren’t they? My view is that space is space, and it becomes place because of time. Time is different to space, and space through time changes from being abstract and not much to becoming meaningful. So “space in your time” for me would be “time in your space”, since I can revisit that space over there, but I can never revisit that moment now.

Home Sampled

A brief that was set for students in Integrated Media was to make a sample movie. The logic is quite straight forward. Recording technologies require sampling, for example a film camera takes a sample 24 times a second. Taking this principal we apply it as an argument or logical basis for a creative practice: take a visual sample every 5 minutes (a sample at each 5 minute point) for an hour. The sample should be brief (it’s a sample after all) and you can make it as interesting (visually?) as you wish, but it should be of whatever and where ever you happen to be at that 5 minute interval.

This is one I made. I’ve used eZedia to put it together, which I tend to worry about since it doesn’t let me do any checkign of downloads (for example to show something else while the download is happening and not allowing anything to play until enough has been delivered – something I can do in Livestage), so if one of the videos just doesn’t play for you open the following URL directly in QuickTime Player and it should be happier (under File – Open URL…). (this url: http://vogmae.net.au/works/vogmedia/HomeSamples.mov).

The content is domestic, which is what happens when you have kids and a baby who’s just started crawling, home pretty much is your universe.

Play Quicktime version

Filming Twice

Jules wonders about short videos and why. I’m not sure which task required you to film the same thing twice, unless it’s the recent circle project. (For an explanation of that check out the flickr squaredcircle tag, which appeared a few years ago as a ‘naturally’ occuring ‘accidental’ informal art practice only made possible by social sites like flickr. AS of today it consists of 49,000 photos, how is this so far removed from Olafur Eliasson’s ’structural evolution project’ at NGV International?)

Why short? There are 60 students, if we all made 5 minute films that is 300 minutes a week, 5 hours. Who amongst us can view 5 hours of material? Add that to your own example of YouTube and brevity becomes crucial. Brevity, like an aphorism, or a haiku. This is what the form is well suited to. It does not really work well (perhaps one day) for long forms. Serial works fine, which is just lots of short bits that make sense as short bits (so you can see one and no others and it still makes sense) but also make sense as a series.

So the exercises we are doing is a way to let individual work (my single piece) to become a part of a series. In this the context of my work is able to change, it is no longer an island but now an archipelago (well, you know what I mean – perhaps it is no longer a lone star but a galaxy?).

However, it only becomes learning when you think about what you are doing. If you’re just doing it to tick off the task, and aren’t pausing to think about how you do it, what you’re saying, why, then you’re right, there is no learning outside of some basic tech. stuff. How would you tell a story like this? Or make a documentary? A game show? Once a bit more tech stuff is down pat we this will change. But for now, what do you think you would do differently so that you could learn from it what you think you would like to learn? (A possible answer could be that in a world where there are millions of people adding their stuff to the YouTubes of the world what do you have that makes what you do worth viewing – remember, we already have ‘funniest home video’ shows, police chase shows, etc, add Big Brother and other reality TV and the amount of drama on TV is in decline…)

LutherCorp, I Wonder?

At LutherCorp there is an excellent post about agency and the web. Most of it I think might lead to error, though I’m not sure, so to see if it does I’m going to think about it here.

First off we have:

For some reason, Adrian and Seth have been preaching this idea that the internet changes, and that it may, in fact, change us. Now, I interpret this as “some people we don’t know writes something or changes something on the web, so it appears different to us”. But a closer listening to our lecturer’s ramblings shows this is not the case, they seem to think that the internet is some sort of entity, and that it is changing itself. I think Seth once said it was adapting to our society.

I guess ‘entity’ here means sentient, that is thinking, hold on, no, that it is “changing itself”. Well, yes it is. A simple example is a blog ecology. A blog is not in the singular (you don’t have ‘a’ blog, only ever ‘blogs’). These blogs are constituted through their ongoing practice (posts) which are in turn also constituted by links (for example if I stop blogging but people keep linking to my blog then my blog is definitely still happening). The structures (or patterns) these links forms are not predetermined, and change in or through time, they are what we call emergent (that is patterns emerge over time, and there are patterns, it is not random). This is quite similar to the patterns you get in ecosystems in the real world, and other complex things that involve relations between parts. So a blog is an ecology (just think of your current blogosphere in this course) which has structures which are in fact form patterns (this is caused by the link structures that you create amongst these blogs). This is change, and it is changing itself – you or I cannot determine this structure.

Now, you might argue we are changing it, since we make the links. Mmm. I link to you, technorati (an automated service, Google, an indexing robot) follow this and use it to measure and map these patterns. Certain spots get more links than others and this in turn attracts more links, this is a product of the system, not of individuals. I use a tag in Technorati, and completely unknown to me, others use the same tag, this forms a cluster of linked interests, with each of not knowing of the others. If we don’t know we are doing this, then clearly we are not doing it (in terms of planned, structured pattern making).

LutherCorp has made a great post, it has lots of bristling ideas, and I reckon I should use one of them, or perhaps a constellation of similar posts from your blogs, as the basis for a lecture. What do you think? (I would use them as seeds to ask you what you think and play devil’s advocate, it would not be about trying to show how anybody was right or wrong.)

AV04 (number four video task)

Drum roll, more drum roll. And perhaps another instrument….

OK, the next task is bought to you by circles. Photograph and or film all the round things in your room (as round things). Then round things that you find anywhere else.

Each is to be used to make two different films (two different round films) which can be put together in eZedia in the now familiar manner. Decide if you would like to add a controller (button) for each video, and in your blog entry discuss:

• what informed any decisions you made about interaction – what buttons? what do they do? why? where are they? why?
• notice the patterns and rhythms that develop, all by themselves, within each round video, and between each one. Is this a story? Why?
• Normally when we make videos what ‘joins’ one shot to another is a narrative logic. How is this different? What ‘logic’ is informing the connection between each shot?

Blogs and Participation

OK, it is that time of the semester, you need to write a blog post that looks at the criteria you established in the first two classes (about participation and your blog) and see how they’re travelling. How would you assess yourself to date against what you said you would do? Is there anything you said you would do that you now realise is irrelevant, or not very important? Something that you now realise is really important and should be in there? These are to be written in your blog and should be done by this Friday please.