Network Squared
From a Bruce Sterling talk:
Digital culture, I knew it well. It died — young, fast and pretty. It’s all about network culture now.
Love that.
Archived entries for
Soluble Fish
Will, one of the original and key vloggers (I’d include him in the vog camp but that’s my terminology) has moved his blog: Soluble Fish.
Workshops
These are the notes I made available to students about some of the ideas informing how the labs in Integrated Media are approached:
The workshops should be thought of as a mix of instructional sort of stuff – here’s how to do something – and studio practice.
The instructional stuff you are familiar with. Copy what the teacher does or shows, or try to figure out something the teacher asks you do to. There will be a lot more of this rather than the former, for example in learning how to use eZedia, and this is part of what I mean by reflective and process based learning (actually this is also a rather small sort of problem based learning too).
Studio teaching and learning is something that none of us are very familiar with, largely because we all have educational experiences (which is much the same thing as saying training) which is classroom based. Studio subjects are generally design and art subjects where you need space to make. But studios are not just about making, they also have a particular teaching style or design associated with them. This is where you prototype or sketch, making multiple versions of something, and each version receives some sort of critique or feedback. This might be formal through set criteria, or it might be informal from others in the studio as you show your work as ask for views about it. This is often described as an iterative practice, where iterative means you make multiple versions of your work with the view to improving it over time by making, reflecting on it,and making changes.
This is not new to us. It is exactly the same process as drafting an essay, revising it and doing this several times over. Of course many don’t do this, but we all know if we did then our work would be better for it.
Well, this is what I mean by the labs as being like a studio. A lot of the work you will be doing this semester in Integrated Media One is to make stuff, think about it critically, and make something else in response to this. Often students end up not coming towards the end of semester because they aren’t being taught anything ‘new’. This is not the only role of a class you know. If you bring work in progress then you can see other’s work, get comments on your own (from the class and the teacher) and it will be better as a result of this.
We do this for two main reasons. The first is that we want you to learn and see the difference that this sort of iterative process can do for you – after all it is not much different to making a pilot episode of a TV or radio show. The other is that in second year a lot of your media production experience moves towards larger, more professional scale works, and because of the economies of these sorts of projects you tend to work to a model of ‘monuments’. Big things. But in this model you lose sight of the importance of smaller scale sketches to help understand your practice, and even how these things might help your big project.
Finally, it is worthwhile thinking about why these other disciplines use studios. Yes, they require you to make stuff so you need room, but that is not what I mean. There is something recognised in these disciplines where what you are teaching are not only or merely technical competencies, but something much more amorphous, and difficult. It is being able to learn how to design, what makes a good design decision. How do you know that your design is good, as a design? These are the sorts of things that Schön has famously studied and described in relation to teaching music, teaching, and architecture. These are forms of socialisation and acculturation to the ‘ways of doing’ or ‘ways of being’ in a discipline, it is difficult to teach and often difficult to describe. For example, how do you know when a design is finished? When a decision is good? So studio teaching is modelled on the idea that you have an exemplary practitioner and through watching, discussion, criticism and conversation those qualities that make this practitioner exemplary are able to be transmitted to the students. (Schön identified key things that help here, with his reflection-in-action being very significant.) Well, rather than it being somehow magically transmitted by osmosis, by utilising reflection in action, by making and thinking in, through and after the making about what the making is doing, we can develop a vocabulary and a teaching practice that sees making as integral to knowing and not something that is prior or afterwards.
You can find discussion about what was done in the workshops in mog, using the workshop tag.
References
Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action, Basic Books.
Schön, D. A. (1987). Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.
Visible Evidence
The 16th edition of Visible Evidence, a conference all about documentary. USC, August this year. The deadline for paper proposals is March 15. The stream about ‘emerging modes of documentary: mobile, distributed, computational’ looks particularly interesting. Has a good reading list too.
Water Hole at ACCA
We went to ACCA today to see Water Hole. The mobile in the later gallery was mesmerising in a Schwitters come Merz sort of way. The work is by two Swiss artists, Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger. This is some of the video that I shot on my phone, one is the mobile (where you lay on a bench under it, gazing up). The other a series of shots of the shadows that the mobile made.
Click the poster movie to launch it in QuickTime Player.
[qt:http://vogmae.net.au/vogs/2009/february/WaterHolePoster.mov 320 240]
12 Second TV
12seconds.tv, as the domain name suggests, allows the posting of 12 second grabs. This is the video answer to twitter, where posts are video, and are limited to a maximum of 12 seconds. I like, and of course are sympathetic, to the idea. However, a brief look at the content and the paucity is depressing. Talking heads, pets. Of course I probably would have said that about twitter once too, but I think the point needs more discussion than just a sort of brushing aside.
Most of us are text literate. For example, it’s hard to get through high school without having to write at least one haiku, and so we learn something about writing and constraint. In fact, in our education, nearly all our writing is under constraint. We write to word lengths all the time, but also topic, theme, structure. Write a story, a poem, an essay, a report. So when we come to twitter – and of course we also have SMS (and even text blogging) – we are pretty good at saying a lot with little. We don’t have this literacy and understanding with video. Ozu and Bresson do, but let’s face it, not many of us get to make things like this as a part of our secondary education.
So, the problem with something like 12 second TV is simply how visually and televisually illiterate most of us are, so while the 12 seconds is a nicely compelling constraint, it is not sufficient of itself. For example an interesting exercise would be 12 seconds at the same time, from the same time, every day. After all it’s easy to write reasonably well in Twitter, but to do the same in video, with the same economy of production, is much more difficult.