vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

The Second Post Industrial Media Afternoon Tea (draft)

I ran one of these late last year, and am in the process of editing the contributions into an ebook, and a colleague and I are also working the video of the event into an interactive video essay. The model works very well, and so a second one is being planned for mid March while Andrew Morrison (Oslo School of Architecture and Design) is visiting us.

Critical Practice? A second Post Industrial Media afternoon tea.

What: A series of responses, riffs, ideas, appropriations and critiques around the concept of ‘critical practice’ in the context of post industrial media (more or less using the outline below as a framing proposition).

How: Participants will each make a 5 minute presentation in relation to the concept of ‘critical practice’. This will be followed by a moderated open discussion, debate and conversation amongst all participants. All will be recorded for reuse in an academic publication. All participants will be invited to submit essays of approximately 1000 words in length that reflect their presentations. These will become an electronic anthology.

If you would like to participate (all participants get to contribute a 5 minute position statement and a 1000 word essay reflecting/restating this position statement) please email Adrian Miles (adrian.miles@rmit.edu.au) or Laurene Vaughan (laurene.vaughan@rmit.edu.au) by the end of Wednesday, March 8.

AN ANECDOTE
At a gathering of senior academics last year a brief discussion was held around using existing Technical And Further Education (TAFE) subjects to teach specific technical ‘skills’ to students enrolled in degree programs. As a response it was suggested that in an age of information abundance, married to rapid technological change, learning the specifics of (for example) an individual piece of software was not a particularly relevant, progressive or transferable skill, and that the development of a ‘critical practice’ provided a legitimate alternative. Unfortunately, half the room understood ‘critical practice’ in terms of its now traditional theoretical definition, and most of the rest of us were none the wiser.

PROPOSITION
Critical practice in the context of post industrial media refers to the abstract tacit knowledge that those adept in working within contemporary media formations, tools, and flows possess. It is abstract to the extent that it relies upon deep patterns of understanding that are transferable across a wide variety of contexts, being unbound to any particular practice or thing. In addition, being abstract it is amenable to change if and when required. Such abstraction appears to be amenable to thinking of ‘critical practice’ as theory. On the other hand, these patterns are always and only constituted through acts of making and doing, they are, quintessentially and primarily applied, and so are a practice. However, how and to what extent are they, or can they be critical?

This symposium aims to investigate just what such a ‘critical practice’ is, in the specific context of media and communications tertiary education where a historical distinction (and disjuncture) between theory as ‘thinking’ and practice as ‘doing’ continues to haunt teaching and curricula. What is it to treat theory as tacit knowledge, and does this provide a framework by which to engage with, critique, change, or simply make different the imaginary gap between theory and practice, thinking and doing? We invite reflection, examples, disagreements, engagement with this.

BACKGROUND
1. The ‘critical’ in critical practice
Critical practice is a concept that has a long and firmly entrenched place in the humanities academy. Ever since Catherine Belsey’s “Critical Practice” was first published in 1980, as a part of Methuen’s hugely influential New Accents series, critical practice has been understood to be the application of French inflected high theory in the context of the literary. Here ‘critical’ has connotations of critique, of an applied engagement with existing knowledge and ways of doing that fundamentally challenges and changes the role and function of theory. Theory shifts from something hermeneutic and descriptive towards a mode that believes it can offer engagement through the doing of theory to the world.

Critical practice, outside of the vicissitudes of any particular theoretical fashion, provide a ‘meta’ role for theory to adopt. Theory reflexively discusses itself with great self confidence, and so becomes a particular sort of abstracted practice. This abstracting has allowed theory to become mobile, labile and promiscuous. It is distant enough from any applied, specific object of study to provide a framework that can be used elsewhere and differently, so as theory becomes unstuck from its object it gains significance and authority. It has become nomadic yet its ‘criticalness’ has been retained.

2. The ‘practice’ in critical practice
Practice as a research method is best expressed by Frayling’s canonical distinction (here simplified) between research for, research about, and research through. The first is the research that we do in order to be able to do something (what is the population of Australia? , why did Kodak go broke?). The second is where we choose to make something the object of study (what do designers do when they design?, what can Freudian psychoanalysis tell us about this film?). Each of these two sorts of research can be undertaken by researchers from outside of the field being investigated – I can learn what the population of Australia is even if I am not a social geographer, sociologist or statistician, and I can study a film psychoanalytically without having to be either a psychoanalyst or a film maker. The third mode, research through, is the only mode that is specific to practice, and so is the form of research that is realised in and through a doing, a tacit research.

As a consequence any discipline that wants to use practice as a mode of legitimation for the creation of knowledge is required to ground this activity deeply within that practice in-itself, quite apart from any artefacts that may be its trace. This would seem to require a heightened specificity as a critical practice because it is strongly situated within the individuality of the practitioner and their specific field, and appears to offer little, outside of the vagueness of ‘practice’ itself, that provides the basis for a critical practice.

REFERENCES
Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002.
Frayling, Christopher. “Research in Art and Design.” Royal College of Art Research Papers 1.1 (1993): 1-5.

Draft: Deleuze, Take Two

From the hypertextual book chapter I’m writing. The nodes do not have a canonical order. Here’s another:

I remember my first struggles with trying to read “Cinema One”. I have read it several times now. When I first opened it I thought I had a solid grasp of many of the key terms and approaches in cinema studies. I certainly recognised and knew many of the films mentioned within the book. However, the writing and ideas did not fit within any theoretical template or schema that I could recognise. It was exciting, intriguing, sophisticated, and intimidating all at once, and certainly seemed to come from a deep appreciation, even love, of film – something which could not always be said for much cinema theory – but what would or could you do with it? I then struggled through Bergson’s “Matter and Memory”, and returned to “Cinema One”. I looked for other commentary and found little (haven’t those times changed), and what little there was repeated film theory’s fascination with the pscyhoanalytic and looked past the cinema books to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.

At some moment during this second reading I found the pattern that helped me to begin to understand how to read this book. Film theory usually works by applying a specific theoretical frame over cinema. From this it generally does one of two things. One is to show how that particular frame provides a rationale by which we can understand the cinema. For instance, the use of semiotics to provide a way of understanding how genre works, and then using this to help define genre in film, which in turn can also be used to further genre studies and semiotics itself[need to expand a bit here to show how this is circular and is about theory - cinema - theory. the loop gets closed.]. The second, which basically ignores the cinema as cinema, applies a theory to illustrate or understand something that happens in the cinema, but pays little attention to anything outside of what the theory reveals. For example, the sorts of work where Freudian psychoanalysis might be applied to explain that the relation between two characters is ‘Oedipal’. Here the intent of the work is to ‘uncover’ something in the film, but this sort of second order theory does not then return to the originating theoretical proposition (it would never pause to wonder how our relation to the characters might be so framed) and so at heart keeps cinema as something outside of itself. Both of these approaches, which I have artificially separated here since in practice the best work has always had a hermeneutic to and fro between theory and cinema, work by a logic of similitude and analogy. There is a theoretical proposition which is outside of the cinema which is then used to map the cinematic [check frampton's filmosophy for a quote here?]. Deleuze, for me, radically tosses this out.

For Deleuze there is cinema first. While he certainly does rely on Bergson to create an explanatory schema this thinking expresses a filiation to the cinema that means Bergson will be melted into the cinematic, rather than the other way around. This was an ecological turn for me, in what is possibly a naive way (I could also frame it as the beginning of my understanding of the posthuman). The implication of an ecological milieu is the deep realisation that we, as a species, are not at the top of anything, and that any such scale or ranking is a reflection of our arrogance as a species, and our ability to anthropomorphise nearly anything. We are deeply implicated in a complex system where we are only one part, and the complexity and sophistication of this system means that we are always implicated and intertwingled into a manifold of relations at a multiplicity of levels to the extent that it appears specious to privilege one aspect or facet over another. In my reading of Deleuze’s conception of the cinema the cinema think us (much like Dawkin’s ‘selfish gene’ argument that we are merely vehicles for the protection and replication of DNA), or perhaps more accurately thinks itself through us. This I find compelling. I see no sensible argument that demands that the structures and systems we find ourselves within in the world must be ours, even where we have apparently made them. Like the example of language, it is intellectual folly to believe think that we speak it rather than the reverse, at best we cohabit, if you like.

Desert Island Research Readings

I just sent this to staff in my school, but WTF, let’s take it off the reservation:

The new honours program is about to start with over 30 students, including four from other universities and two from elsewhere at RMIT. Staff have, to date, provided over 40 possible research questions/topics for students, so thank you!

The next step is to try to ‘seed’ research strategies for these students in a way that can accommodate their diversity of disciplines, practices, skills and abilities. Which is where I’m asking for your help. I am wanting to compile (and share) a ‘collection’ of the key research methods texts/essays that we rely on. Very simply, what was/is the one thing you have read that you would always recommend that is about doing research (aka Desert Island Research Reading)? It might be about a specific method or something more general (a specialist essay on action research or your favourite book on How To Write a Better Thesis). If you want to suggest two, knock yourself out, but I’d really appreciate one to start with.

How? Well send me the citation, and ideally a couple of sentences about why it matters to you and if there are specific disciplines you think it is relevant to. Personal is fine. I’ll collate them. You can either email this to me (adrian.miles@rmit.edu.au) or use the google form I’ve created.

Edit Versus Writing

So I hit that point in my writing where I couldn’t figure out how to end, or quite what had to happen next. If anything. That is when I know it is time to step free form drafting, print it all out and start editing. Stage one is the sketch. Stage two, where I need it on pages, is the sculpting of the form. Stage three is the polishing. This chapter, which is about affect, interactive video and I guess what I think is the poorly titled ‘database cinema’ has been good to write since it is for a multilinear electronic format (Scalar) so it can be granular, open, and porous to its own meanderings.

They be Butterflies

As I try to finish writing a ‘chapter’ for an anthology I am meeting those hard bits where the ideas sing and dance their own bits back at you. They talk back, push back, shaping the writing and argument in ways unexpected and unconceived. Every now and then a really good one seems to arrive. Thrillingly good. One that, if you were that sort of writer, probably deserved a chapter of its own. When this happens I get butterflies in my stomach. Isn’t there something amazing that writing about ideas can have such a corporeal thrill?

Current Tools

The things I use a lot on my MacBook Pro.

Research

• Mendeley
• TweetDeck
• Google Reader
• Ecto
• Scrivener
• Papers
• Tinderbox
• Mailplane
• Posterous
• Evernote
• Keynote
• Compositions
• Google Chrome
• Firefox
• Kindle for OSX

Video and Graphics

• Korsakow
• Photoshop
• iMovie
• QuickTime 7
• Compressor
• WordPress
• iPhoto

Social Media Related

• TweetDeck
• Google Reader
• Ecto
• Delicious extensions

Organising

• iCal
• gCal
• OmniFocus
• Bento
• Evernote

Network Geek

• Transmit
• Ecto
• BBEdit
• Coda

Services I Rely On

• Google
• Google Scholar
• Mendeley
• Flickr
• WordPress (.org and .com)
• Twitter
• Kindle Store

Hardware

• MacBook Pro
• iPhone 4s
• Sanyo Xacti

Histories of Film Theories

This site is archiving the Histories of Film Theories which is, as far as I can tell, an informal coalition of the interested looking at historical contributions to theory of cinema, ie writing on the cinema from then. They have an interest in translating work, and a list of some very cool looking conferences.

New Media Writing Prize

Bournemouth University has a very good media school. Well, better than very good really. And they run a new media writing competition. This is a very good idea, and if it keeps going has the opportunity to become something very special. Think Man Booker for new media. Flattered that I know two of the finalists too.

Bournemouth has the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice. I think I need to try to visit. This is so in line with what I am doing, trying to do, thinking in terms of media pedagogy, the post industrial media project, and the new honours.

QuickTime Got Broke

Finally part aside the time to begin the rebuild of my vog site. The problem, as I recently discovered, is that the QuickTime plugin no longer seems to support much of the deep programmatic interactivity that has been a part of QuickTime since, well, it was a twinkle in JOb’s eye. (A lot of the work that was going to become a bigger new Hypercard actually got put into QuickTime.) This means nearly all of my online video work doesn’t work. But it does in QuickTime player. So the plan was to rebuild the site, using HTML5, and target the QuickTime player, taking advantage of the JavaScript libraries that Apple provides that let you do nifty things. Except, well, fuck me. The most recent QuickTime player, that dumbed down thing that, dare I say it, is all about surface and polish but is empty underneath. Well, that is just like the plugin. All the programmatic goodness has been stripped out of that too! QuickTime Player 7, which is still available, works just fine. But this means most of my stuff will now only work if I put up some sort of declaration saying “open and play with QuickTime 7 please, you can get it here”. But I can’t target it.

I don’t know what Apple’s rationale is here, except to shift all the stuff about video and QuickTime towards iDevices and production (Final Cut). In other words they’ve taken a sophisticated technology and stripped it bare, dumbed it down, turned it from a programmatic form to just a media container for making and delivering. A moment worthy of, well I was going to say Microsoft but that might be a bit harsh. At this point I have no idea what I will do. Perhaps make all the work available for download so it can be played locally with QuickTime 7. Perhaps make a 100 screencasts of what they actually do and turn the site into a bloody archive.

2015 Second Riff

A second riff on thinking about where a School of Media and Communication could be by 2015. We will:

• have a scholarship program for students from developing nations in the South East Asia – South Pacific region
• have a critical group of teacher researchers leading a rethink of media and communications in a university of technology by imagining what such a thing would look like if it were created now, not back in an era of industrial media
• let students be co-creators with staff in knowledge making
• have students involved in curriculum development
• invite students to undertake staff training
• have an annual student run unconference that is available online to all
• not be in a building that has the colour scheme of a 1960′s hospital
• have students curating the atelier on a regular basis to show what they do
• be known for innovative practice in terms of the artefacts we create and how to teach and do, not just for our ‘content’
• have a program or intensive course that is dedicated to experimental teaching and research in media and communication