Let a thousand moments bloom.

My general project is an applied exploration that sketches the terrain of a post industrial media (and post industrial video more specifically) practice. Here ‘old’ media is historically, politically, economically and socially conceptualised as industrial. It is, of necessity, reliant on hierarchies of production, distribution and consumption as industrial media has an economy of scarcity of access to production, distribution and audiences as its definitional norm. The enormous capital costs required to create an organisation to produce and distribute media necessitated Taylorist models of production efficiency and expertise, and often a reliance on advertising to fund production, infrastructure, and distribution. While it is extremely expensive to make industrial media, it is even more expensive to distribute and broadcast it. As a consequence strategies to maximise value from these capital outlays are necessary to ensure that expensive equipment and channels are not under utilised, let alone applied to informal, personal, or simply idiosyncratic making. In addition, distribution is particularly constrained as the channels of broadcast are so narrow (one program per station per moment) so there is enormous pressure to maximise audience at all times.

Postindustrial media on the other hand is the media practice that arises where the constraints of scarcity for production, distribution and consumption disappear due to the combined impact of digital media (digitisation, miniaturisation, and the economies of scale driven by consumer media demand) and the internet. These costs can now approach zero with distribution completely broken from the one item at a time broadcast model and consumption moving from the metronomic regularity of the broadcast schedule to the anywhere, anytime, of mobile on demand making and consumption.

Therefore, for an online nonfiction practice

• no more monuments
• celebrate the minor, ephemeral, marginal, ordinary
• distribute making
• distribute using
• distribute viewing
• serialised forms
• serialised making
• grow, change, evolve, mutate, tear, rip
• sing
• you are dancing in the dark, at home (with someone peeking), not on a stage, on TV
• sketch
• reveal, discover, find, share
• constrain
• refuse the hegemony of a story

Tags: Network Literacy, practice, Vogging Theory