vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

horizon report (part one)

Today was the workshop for the New Media Consortium’s horizon.au report. I’ll write more about the process later, but for now I was just impressed with the methodology, organisation and how things were run. To the point, a clear structure, intervention when needed and enough experience with how they do this to know that what matters will rise. I don’t agree with some the stuff, but that isn’t the point of activities like this. It was quite an effective way to develop overviews of significant stuff without getting bogged down in endless argument and definition, or in ensuring consensus. The group I participated in was lively, and our responses to the seed questions are in the wiki.

ASPERA Program

The program for the Australian Screen Production Education and Research Association annual conference is up. I’m a participant in session 6 on the Wednesday where the PIM team are pimping their stuff. Yes, we have a lot of jokes about how Post Industrial Media could be the Post Industrial Media Project, or the Post Industrial Media Program, and so on. Too many boys in the team me thinks.

Acting Out

A friend of mine, David Barison, has translated two works be Bernard Stiegler. They’re due for release in October and the book is called “Acting Out“. David co-directed “The Ister” and is currently studying medicine. He might be the smartest person I have ever met. At least, along with Ted Nelson, he’s one of the smartest I’ve met.

Presentation Washup

On Wednesday I participated in an organised session as part of this years IAPL conference. The session was up against an impressive looking series of papers on Deleuze related stuff (I’d link to the session via the conference website but it is a frame based nonsense) so we had an audience of three. A session entitled ‘geoplaced knowledge’ at an international philosophy and literature conference is not a good match, but still five concurrent sessions starting at 4.45 and scheduled to finish anywhere up to 7pm is just a bit extreme in my book.

So, being an audience of three they of course had no choice but to be attentive. My slides are available, I ended up calling the presentation “Notes Towards Affect Engines” and I intend to turn it into a ripper little essay in a couple of months. The saving grace was that Anna Gibbs of UWS’s Writing and Society group was in the audience and introduced herself. This research group looks very interesting in terms of the work they do and also the model they offer for how to go about these sorts of things.

Diptych

Andreas has posted two recent videos, no. Two posts with two videos each – here and there. Both involve water (a common lumiere theme it turns out, more on that another day but I think why is pretty obvious – think Renoir and impressionist cinema, Steiglitz and clouds and water is one sort of cinema’s mirror) and both have the video above each other. The point is that the relations established between the two video panes creates better work than if the videos were by themselves. I’ll let others wonder for now why or how this would be better.

Desk

The kids are home since it’s school holidays so I’ve had two surprisingly productive days with the kids. Productive in that family sort of way, having things to do, getting help with some jobs around the house, seeing a film together, some time at a cafe, getting the household shopping done and so on. Those days where you have to turn your day into just being a parent and so all you’re doing is cleaning, tidying, planning dinner at lunch time, and ferrying friends to and fro. This is good, and the only reason it ever gets hard is if you think this is not what you’ll be doing all day. I find it is a mind swap sort of thing, and one that often confuses the bejesus out of me as I try to flip from ‘work’ to ‘full time dad’. Each requires different emotional registers (or something) and as a full time academic work obviously does not end at 5pm on the desk in the office but trails behind and ahead of you all the time, so to be with my kids and present for them I find that work stuff has to be not nudged aside but completely shoved, locked and kicked somewhere else. It’s easy if there are blocks of time, this week harder as today, three days in, I’m presenting at an international conference and am desperately putting together the presentation.

So I’m in the office, and since my desk is of course a cluttered mess of memos, paperclips, things that should have been read last week, pens, cables, dust, trays and what not I have appropriated the studio’s conference table for the day. Yet another thing I have only recently really owned up to. My day to day desk is messy, it is how I work. But when I have to write, write properly, a large clean desk is a necessity. So I guess I actually need two desks, one for the day to day work stuff (the administration desk) and then another one where I rather pompously write. Though Laurene is the same, and I have no doubt this is also the case for many others. So, I’ve got quiet, the heater is on (outside is a Melbourne misery) and I’m pulling together the key ideas from my abstract. This is surprisingly pleasing as I have just revisited a presentation from last year on the affective atlas and realised that this is very relevant and can be easily used here. And that the earlier symposium presentation forms an excellent outline for an essay which I will begin shortly as the preliminary work for the current conference paper to become an essay. This feels a bit like repetition, however both essays are for different academic communities, but it is also my belatedly recognising that these ideas of mine are worth saying, and if they’re worth saying then they are also worth repeating (and that repeating them is how they not only get more solid but also disseminated).

I like having a large clear desk. I like writing as thinking out ideas. It gets the cells ticking off and I find it easy developing the presentation, dropping into the blog, riffing back into new ideas. It is a productive day. Friday is the zoo with the family for C’s second birthday. Now that she knows what an elephant looks like (and the giraffe, gorilla, penguin – you get the picture) it is going to be a ripper.