vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

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.

Twas the Week Before Christmas

And we moved house. Tis a day after Christmas, and it feels like a warehouse. Boxes, and then boxes. For variety? Yep.

Bugger

And fuck. Just discovered that most of my vogs don’t work via the QuickTime browser plugin. Work just dandy in QuickTime Player, but not online. Suspect I’m going to have to:

1. target QuickTime Player for all the videos
2. which I’m not sure I can do from a jpeg
3. and so rebuild and republish the whole lot

At this point very pleased I’ve built this in Tinderbox as the site is generated via 4 or 5 HTML templates and that’s all I need to change. Don’t exactly know when I’m going to have time to do it though!

Sweet and Sour

We have a lemon tree in our rented backyard. They can be a tad pithy, and this time of year we have a glut of these delightful, aromatic, astringent things. Last year I tied, with an old coat hanger, a childs play bucket upon the front fence and filled it with lemons. Strangers would stop, put a couple in their bag and continue either on to work or home. If we were there they’d ask, with a rising smile “are you giving these away?”, or “can I have a couple?”. Just sharing with the neighbourhood. A little nice thing to do. (We should all aspire to do little nice things, don’t you think?). One day the small pink bucket could not be found. Never mind. Chalk it up to losing things, after all as anyone with children (of any age, I suspect) knows there is a lot of stuff, and it walks.

Lots more lemons. OK, bigger bucket then. My best bucket. Not that cheap wire handled thing you get from the local $2 shop but almost German in all its moulded solid complexity. My favourite bucket. Sit it by the front gate, lots of lemons there now. Over a day or so the bucket empties. I fill it again. Then it happened. It walked. I reckon it was at least 1/3 full, which is what? two kilo’s of lemons? But the whole bucket? Now I am using those cheap plastic shopping bags from the supermarket. Two have gone so far.

It’s like an episode of Seinfeld. Should this person (because surely it is the same person) know that it is only the lemons, not the buckets and bags, that are being given away? Do they know this anyway and so, well, have added theft, as if not minding giving away lemons means I’m good for a bucket too? But what really pisses me off, perhaps even irrationality, is that they take so many of the lemons each time. If you really need two kilo’s of lemons a time, go buy some. The idea is to share them, a few at a time. Some part of me thinks this is a deep breach of the rules of engagement here, the ethics of the exercise. To take them all for yourself is not just greedy, but immoral. I guess it is what we try to teach our children, when there is a plate of fairy bread everyone should get some. It isn’t yours. I’m not sure why I care as much as I do, since I am giving them away, but I do.

Perhaps I’ll put a sign, asking for the bag to left.

She’s a Moaner

Went to MONA on the weekend. The big new game in, well, the east coast of Australia I suppose. Feels like anything you might say must have been said before, already, somewhere. Feels like anything you might say will somehow skate across the surface of it all anyway. For out of towners. MONA is the folly, foible, fearless contribution of a very wealthy Tasmanian, David Walsh. I’d link to his wikipedia page but that just shows how small his footprint is. Filthy rich, too smart by half, MONA is his stick in the sand. And what a stick it is.

So, my first immediate scratched on an iPad impressions:

cocksure, a cinema of attractions, irreverent, masculine, monumental, Grand Guignol, labyrinthine, transactional, didactic, smart, smug, internationalist in an obscure corner of the world, confident, conversations, Silence of the iPods, all male but female commentary woven deeply through all, libidinal, fin de siècle, brutalist, playful, scatological, odd, eros, thanatos (which I find out later is the name of two function rooms there)

It is unusual in Australia to have such a large museum, and collection, privately funded and made public. But that is just the beginning. It is the Museum of Old and New Art, though it is most definitely mainly the new (which begs the question of what happens to it as it ages). There are antiquities, largely confined as far as I could see to erotica and mortuary art. While the modern is all that any self respecting collection ought to have. But as a private collection, and this is also unusual in Australia, it means the piper gets to the play the tune. What he likes, he buys, fuck the rest. And so the entire project is presented as, becomes, wants to, feels like, a dark lyrical essay to anyone that wants to bother (and since it is free to get in, it isn’t like there’s any effort on the surface to make getting to the ‘essay’ hard – indeed there is even a dedicated ferry service, to the 99 steps from the pier to the entry, from the centre of Hobart). As everyone has written, it is all sex and death. But not really, it is all bodily, corporeal physical. Bodies are there because they are meat, and it is the meat that is probably the thing that underwrites the collection. Meat and decay, meat and death, meat as site of pleasure, meat as it intersects with everything else.

That thought ended. So, the gallery. Three levels. All underground, hewn and hefted into the local stone. You climb up, only to enter and descend. The finest moment, the most obvious way down is a tiny spiral staircase with a glass circular lift in the middle. It is all James Bond. Down you go, Dantesque, to see extraordinary views of metal causeways, art works, and a void that is called, cunningly, The Void. You keep imagining Dr No, or Mike Meyer, to appear around a corner. It is a crypt, a morgue, a vault. It is not really big rectangles of rooms but playful in a thick, lustrous, Aladdin’s cave sort of way. The velvet curtained corridor to a video wall of bodies of guts and piss, to a U shaped room of other work. This sort of vaginal architecture turns up again through the raw concrete pipe (still with their industrial logos there in all their rawness) you walk through to the library, which opens out onto sky and air and light. (Yes, there’s a library, with a librarian, you can sit and read and since each book has a Dewey number, I imagine someone must borrow them too.) Or perhaps the pipe is penile so we are like the sperm cells in Woody Allen’s Sleeper, like them not really knowing what lies at the other end? See, the space and work just encourages scatology.

What is really quite fascinating is I haven’t even written about the work yet. Probably won’t. It isn’t like a gallery where I come out besotted with the line and force of Toulouse-Lautrec (which I only understood once I’d seen the work in the flesh at the Musee d’Orsay). This crypt and the work are written into each other and your first impression, like the cinema of attractions, is one of having been immersed and almost overwhelmed sensually. The other sense is, and this is very strong, is that David Walsh (who made his fortune gambling) enjoys the risk and the spirit of it all, but if it doesn’t work he could easily just walk away from it. A bet that didn’t come of. It is serious, imperious, but it also just doesn’t take itself seriously in the way that Art Museums do. Refreshing, but it needs another, much longer visit to get past the rawness of it all.

Tags: Lifes Little Pieces

Karma

Cadel’s in yellow and the Tour is his. His ride in the time trial bought a tear to my eye, finally some things have fallen his way. It is not just that he’s Ostraylean mate, but is universally recognised as clean. He has raced amongst so many who have been caught using, god knows how many victories or chances have never happened simply because those he raced against cheated. A good guy has won. Eccentric. A bloody outstanding bike rider, but not the sort of personality that imposes itself on others, or a race.

Oops

So, read about how iMovie 11 can talk to the iPad iMovie app. Thought that might be useful. Quick check on my new laptop (I had asked for iLife 11 to be part of the install but wasn’t sure if it was) and my version of iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie etc, well, none were version 11. So off I scooted to hand over $69 of my own money to buy iLife11. Try to install, not much seems to get installed. mmm. Have had strange permission problems (maybe from the Time Capsule migration, maybe the anti virus software they have stuck on for me). Run disk utitlity, repair permissions, then, you know, just in case, launch iMovie. Oh. Turns out the version number you see in the finder is not the same numbering for the retail titling. iMovie 11 is version 9.04 of iMovie. Bugger. Really would like not to have spent $69 like that.

Her leg

The boot, black and I expect leather, wrapped itself around her calf. One leg of the wool tights speckled her smooth leg with its gentle diamond cut outs. Rocked by the rhythm of the train and my glance as a moment.

On the way home

He stood on the platform, quite near the edge keeping an eye on the monitor. As if the train might arrive, unexpected. Late 40s, probably from the university. He clutched near under his chin a bag of fancy chips. These were pecked, drawn quickly carefully one at a time, crunched like they could be snatched away at any moment.

New Lappie

My MacBook Pro has been retired and replaced by a nice shiny 15 point something inch MacBook Pro with 2.2 GHz processor, upgraded graphics and 8GB of RAM. But the biggest change is to 10.6 (just before 10.7….). So as I’m finding my way round have upgraded Papers to Papers 2, and just wanted to say that the animations of the house being demolished, rebuilt, with the sign out front as it upgrades the library. Nice touch.