vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Ban Kids

Last week in the local newspaper of record there was a lifestyle opinion piece complaining about children in art galleries. That they’re noisy, disruptive, but lets face it they don’t really want to be there and you’d only take them anyway because you’re pretentious. Or words to that effect.

Rubbish like this in The Age, and newspapers wonder why some of us think they’re on the way out? I like informed opinion but have a very low threshold but dumb opinion masquerading as something else. Now, I don’t even want to buy in to the value of art, or that my kids like the gallery, or even point out that most of the works originally were in places where people lived, that kids were sort of common and part of the household, and it’s only when art gets reified through the rise of the public gallery that all of a sudden we have to be hushed and shooshed.

No, what pisses me off deeply is just the assumptions that something like this has to make, has to accept (and that the paper then accepts as reasonable enough as able to be published) about children. A Victorian seen but not heard which comes from a deep lack of respect of and for the child as a person, a human subject. With rights. If in Australia (and many other western nations) we recognised that children were not the chattel of their parents (or the state), but were people with legitimate rights on a par with others then this article would never even be written. To make this very plain, substitute “child” and “children” in the article and replace with any descriptor of your choice: women, muslims, blacks, Aboriginals, the disabled. Immediately you see it for what it is. How come we can talk about children like this and while we might debate the merits or not of children in art galleries, no one can even see the issue for what it is?

Imagine, for a moment, that we recognised children as having rights in this everyday manner. As beings with legitimate needs, concerns and so on. As soon as we do that the conversation is no longer about keeping kids out, it becomes how to cater for them. Just like we do for the disabled (“need a wheelchair?, sorry, can’t come in”, “Can’t see, sorry, no signage for you, and don’t touch the bronze!”), or the elderly, or even (OMG lactating mothers). Our institutions then become porous to children (and ipso facto, families) so that kids being there is just part of the fabric. This is not the same thing as being child centred if you think that means kids decide what to do, it is about respecting the child which means also that there is a mutual obligation towards each other, including children towards others, which is the opposite spectrum of the 3 year old screaming in the cafe because to teach them it is a social place would be to unnecessarily constrain them.

So you’d have signs for them, a place to hang out, ways for them to navigate or use the stairs, loud and quiet spaces. It would be more like Ikea than the NGV (note in Ikea that there is cheap food, things you can play with, a play room where the kids can play if you and they want, low bannisters on all the stairs, it is not that kids get the run of the place, but it recognises that kids are part of a parcel of the world and that they have legitimate needs and rights and so need to be designed and catered to). It really isn’t a big deal, it requires our approach to children to change, and our institutions too, but in 2012 how do we get off even claiming that one entire category of people should not be allowed in somewhere and no one actually stops to wonder how that statement is even legitimate in the first place. And an art gallery? A public institution?

Job at Latrobe

Level C position, Latrobe Uni in the new Creative Arts area they are setting up out there. Opportunity to build something new and get some runs on the board/kick some goals (yeah, OK, enough with the sporting metaphors). But is new program and there is some licence to invent so is a good opportunity. Details online.

Nice Gig, Media Artist in Residence, Buffalo

Would love to be able to do something like this one day, perhaps when the nest is empty? (Though I’d be nearly retired if I bother to count the years….)

Temporary Visiting Media Artist Position

The Dept. of Media Study, State University at Buffalo, has a temporary one-year visiting media artist position for academic year 2012/13. We are looking for a maker with experience in some of the following converging areas: emerging documentary practices, platform-crossing formats, social documentary, film/video production, experimental nonfiction, cross platform narrative or online collaborative environments. We value socially engaged work and are interested in cross-disciplinary work across the arts, social sciences or science research. All forms welcome: long, short or micro as well as Internet and installation. Applicant must be able to theorise the moving image. Prefer skills in videography, video editing and/or audio production with some teaching experience. Send CV or URL to Sarah Elder, selder@buffalo.edu

A Week Ago

This week has seen the beginning of new honours program in the School of Media and Communication. We don’t have a real name yet, though ‘canopy’ is being played with (oh, the vanity of it all). The current site is unofficial and will be moved to its own domain in the near future. I hope. There’s the official university information but follows unicorporation guidelines and so doesn’t have the research topics, or the student profiles (which will be appearing in the next couple of weeks). The heart of the new honours is that all students will be working in one of three themed research labs. The themes are nonfiction, advocacy, and slow. They are from a wide range of disciplines (games, creative writing, journalism, media, photography, communication studies, and so on) and so will be working on different problems and topics, but within each lab all that they will be working on will intersect with the lab theme in some way. Well, that’s the plan. I note with interest though that Macquarie have just announced that they’re dropping all Honours for a two year research Masters. Partly to feed into PhDs, and partly because honours with its mix of research and coursework doesn’t quite get it right because there is not enough of either in one year. Sympathetic to that and personally think a two year masters with the structure of themed labs would be something else again….

As a part of honours I stumbled across Podio. They were offering free services to .edu subscribers so I asked, and they said yes, and we are using it. The model is elegant. You have ‘workspaces’ which can have members. A workspace has ‘apps’ which are basically small web apps. These are available from an internal ‘app store’ but you can make your own very easily, and modify any app that you choose to use. Apps are used to make bits of stuff, and what is the big point is that content in one app can link to content in another app. In the screenshot the workspace (they’re listed on the left) is for a research subject, and apps for that workspace are listed across the top. The app I’m ‘in’ is one I modified and have called “class stuff”. This has fields to name the class, set date and time, a category, some notes, and you can also see that this bit of class stuff (a bit of content within the class stuff app) is connected to some reading which lives in the Library app. If I went into the Library to that file it would automagically know that this class object is linked to it, and provide a link back to the class note. That’s kinda cool. Since it has a date then it is also automatically added to the calendar of everyone who is in that workspace, and you can subscribe to this calendar in anything that supports the iCalendar format and protocol. I’m getting students to set up personal workspaces in Podio, this will let them keep a backup of key documents, but also they can build a library of their most important references, upload notes, cross link them between thesis chapters to references to notes, so that when it is time to write they have all the stuff they know they’ll need near to hand and won’t waste time trying to find that note they made in that notebook somewhere. There’ll be resistance and friction to get them to that point, but once there it will help them a lot. Oh, I also used a couple of project apps so they can project manage a thesis. Break it down into drafts and chapters, assign word length and hours, and it calculates totals and progress for you. Noice (that’s ‘nice’ with a particularly Australian accent.)

Last week I got to hang out at UTS with Chris Caines and Kate Richards for most of the day. Rather elegant lunch but the real purpose of the day was to work on some of the back end intellectual infrastructure for a journal that Chris is developing. Sort of applied critical media knowledge objects. Has a lot of possibilities and potential, and it’s exciting to be a part of it, but aside from meeting to talk about it, still in gestation.

Finally, as some may have noticed on some bits of pieces of commentary on Twitter over a few weeks, I’ve been trying to replace the printer in the honours lab. University procurement people had some blinding insight nearly two years ago which involved (I get this fourth hand so just imagine the Chinese whispers here) something like 1) we spend too much on printers, 2) lets do a deal with the One Company to get them cheaper, 3) in the meantime, no new printers, apparently anywhere. So over a year ago I ask for a printer (I had money for it) to hear about this whiz bang procurement plan. I ask each month. Same reply. Finally, four well dressed professionals from Fuji Xerox came and audited our needs (not sure if they were doing my School, the whole Uni, who knows). Then I’m told yes, I can get a printer. Except. It is a photocopier/scanner/printer/ size of a filing cabinet thing or nothing. Um, I say, I just really want and need a printer. I know I’m told. But they can do this now, can’t promise anything about when a printer might happen. Shit I say. OK, give me the works then. I mean, its only paper, carbon, electricity and my budget, isn’t it?

Groundhog Day

Here it is the first morning of a new academic year and semester. Summer. Darkly sub tropical wet sticky rain. I have muttered here about wanting to upgrade to Lion. I’ve figured out I need to do a clean install to remove the official RMIT things that have been installed that get in the way (managed preferences that always rewrite themselves even after I use admin privileges to change them). This will take quite a while and I need to be able to go back to Snow Leopard just in case I cause problems. So, the task is temporarily deferred. However, each day when I run software update (which insists on running through a RMIT copy of it), I get this:

I can install it, and it tells me it has been successfully installed. But next morning. It returns. I refuse to believe this is a problem with the update, for with Snow Leopard and is a consequence of the tinkering that RMIT have insisted on doing. That it turns up each day is sort of reassuring in an odd sort of way, while also a bit of a pain.

Notebook Page 3

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.

Notebook Page 2

Notebook Page 1

Click, Think, Link: Interval and Affective Narrative

This is the abstract I proposed (and which was accepted) for an anthology around database narrative, cinema and aesthetics.

In trying to engage audiences with database narratives there seem to be two dominant modes at play. The first is what I would characterise as the “Encarta” model which is where large scale productions are undertaken that have, at the end of the day, all the hallmarks of studio production. Such works generally lack what could be characterised as ‘voice’ and in lieu of this emphasise comprehensive detail, a high level of technological spectacle, and high cultural capital. The second mode is more personal, the works are of a smaller scale and rely less on spectacle and more on the emerging of a narratorial voice within the work. They are intimate, crafted, and in many ways minor pieces. If the first mode emphasises information, the second is about experience. Such works are ambient, associative and affective. In this series of observations and reflections I intend to use Deleuze’s model of affect in relation to Bergson’s sensory motor schema and the cinematic interval to explore a poetics for cinematographic database narratives. In this way database models can be understood as combinatory systems that produce poetic and metaphoric works, where the rules of participation and engagement need to be reconsidered in relation to traditional linear models. A consequence of thinking of such works as affective is that the role of teleological narrative is lessened and this helps provide alternative ways to think about making such works, and what the relation between work, author, and audience might become.

And a later note to myself: Such assemblages enable the production of affect via complex forms of media practice suggesting that narrative will not be a dominant form as these systems continue to develop.

During the course of the writing I’ve departed some way from this. I am still deciding whether the editing is to try to return to this, or to let it follow the course it has.