vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Forced Slow Down

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.

After Publication?

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]

Teaching, Creative Practice, Learning

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.

Porousness

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.)

Another To Do List Manager

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.

Fav Or It

Get it (favorit)? Beta web based aggregation service, seems to also be offering commenting within there that ends up at the original blog post (that’s cool) and something about a ‘slice system’, which I don’t quite get. Interesting to see these developments as we move from just aggregation towards additional services.

Rebuilding a History

In 1999 I started, and dropped, several blogs. Then in late 2000 I started and kept on going. In 2001 I think I used Ceres (later to be named Tinderbox) and then later my first installation of Movable Type (when it was still free and TypePad was not even a twinkle in anyone’s eyes), and before then it was via Tinderbox. But I’ve moved servers, let things die, moved to wordpress, and so on. But I’ve got most of the stuff sitting in a corner of my computer gathering dust. So I’m going to retropublish this old stuff here in the new blog. I’ll simply backdate it to the original date of publication, which strikes me as very 1984 but I shouldn’t have to rely on the Wayback Machine to show that I was there.

Peter’s Research

Peter Bayliss is completing a PhD which is investigating the role of the body (via pheneomenology) in the interface in computer games. There’s a promo profile on the RMIT website, and of course his blog.

Swings and Roundabouts

I teach in a quite loose way. A lot of it is closer to jazz, sort of riffing on ideas to see where they might lead. It can be hard for students since the map often only arrives afterwards. This week I gave a lecture that I reckon was good. Strong questions, teasing out ideas, not just trying to dump a pile of information but more sketching the shapes of the ideas. It might have worked for the class, it might not have, but it was OK. Then in the labs I had one that went really well, so I tried to do the same thing with the next group. It didn’t grok. Instead of letting go and changing tack I pushed on. It just got worse. In the third class I just went a bit elsewhere. The mistakes: to push on when it wasn’t working. To think that the same process could be used in a different context. As if.

Water and Lumiere

Andreas has curated lumiere’s around water. There is an affinity between film and water, much like there is between sky and film (think of Stieglitz’s clouds) since they allow the medium to be. What I mean by this is that it is able to be indexical (it is water, they are clouds) while also approaching the abstraction of being only pattern, shadow, light, movement. So when you have such a strict constraint the camera finds fluids.