Tag Archives: Network Literacy

Lists

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Lists. An alternative to narrative.

poems, lyrics, dance, paintings, photographs collected under a theme, family albums, my record collection, our constrained tasks, the collection of someone’s vine clips, the Vietnam war memorial wall in Washington, William’s Changed the Locks, Eco’s The Infinity of Lists, A poetry of lists: heuristic approaches to complexity and ambivalence, latour litanizer, list of my favourite films.

Lists don’t have ends, they open up connections and possibilities. They celebrate that things are actually and always densely connected rather than pretending they aren’t. This is why they are common with monuments as to narrate is to categorise and separate and claim to be able to know that which can’t be known. So an ethics to the list.

Any my favourite, “things that make the heart beat faster” from The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon:

Sparrows feeding their young. To pass a place where babies are playing. To sleep in a room where some fine incense has been burnt. To notice that one’s elegant Chinese mirror has become a little cloudy. To see a gentleman stop his carriage before one’s gate and instruct his attendants to announce his arrival. To wash one’s hair, make one’s toilet, and put on scented robes; even if not a soul sees one, these preparations still produce an inner pleasure.

It is night and once is expecting a visitor. Suddenly one is startled by the sound of rain-drops, which the wind blows against the shutters.

Which formed the basis for this experimental iBook.

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Tactical Making

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it nevertheless remains the case that the two ways of acting can be distinguished according to whether they bet on place or on time. (p.39.) Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Print.

This is an intriguing little almost aside. Strategies bet on place and tactics on time. Today I’ve been thinking about this with undergraduate students in the integrated media subject and tried to use it to begin to prise open how we can use this to think about Korsakow films and our curriculum.

Industrial or heritage media (what was once known as ‘mass media’), even where it is time based and so revolves around programming (TV and radio) occupy time spatially. That is they treat time as place like. The simplest way to approach this is (that rasping noise you hear is the sound that happens when you shove philosophical niceties aside) that a place is always something that can be returned to, whereas time is not. We can return to the same lecture theatre each week, and it is, more or less, the same place. But it is never the same time in the sense that a different event will happen there (even if a lecture in the same subject), and that there is no real possibility of repetition. Time, in the sense used be de Certeau in the quote, is fluid, transient, ephemeral and casual. It is the time of ‘hanging out’ where you don’t’ parcel it out into measurable blocks (even if you said ‘let’s hang out for 10 minutes that 10 minutes rarely has the strict occupation of time that say 10 minutes of film, television, radio, or even examination occupies), the time of being with friends, or just doing something which is more about the doing of the some thing than it is for accounting for the time.

Industrial media, on the other hand, has to do nothing else but account for its time. Each moment is mapped, quantified, monetised and audited. Here time is not extended because something is ‘interesting’ so lets do it a bit longer, but time is made to fit into these quanities. Hence at 6pm each evening this thing is what will appear there (because it is a place), and next week, or even the next night, the same again. There are, of course, exceptions (live events) but even here we know that this is now negotiable where events are often in themselves paused to fit the place of the broadcaster (this extends from scheduling decisions through to interruptions in play). In this conception place is strategic, certain parts of the day are more valuable than others and the object is to of course maximise return for every moment of this. To this extent it is in no way dissimilar to a merchant maximising returns per metre of floor space in a mall or a store.

Similarly, when we make this media we also turn time into a place so that in the newspaper the sports section will always be in the same place, and the most expensive advertising is always in the same place, and in the film that edit will mean that that shot will always be there, each time, on each screen. The variability and difference that is fundamental to time is rendered into the repetitive sameness of place.

One way to think about making and using a Korsakow film then (as a method of doing, a way of being a networked media practitioner, and a different sort of viewer) is to realise that it is tactical in relation to industrial and heritage media. Time stretches so that viewing is subject not to the cartesian coordinates of a clear beginning and end (the film is 97 minutes long) but to the attention of the viewer, that is their interest. We are exploring ways of making that fall outside of the industrial of needing to know more or less what is to be done before it is done (scheduling, shot lists, production sheets, and so on), that if you notice something then in that moment use the ready to hand everyday to record it, for some sort of later use, finding time and making do amongst everything else. It can also be thought as a tactical in de Certeau’s sense in a deeper way, as the way we make things in Korsakow is through loose connections, fuzzy clouds of relations rather than fixed and directed relations. This might relate, might appear together, they might not. This opens up an informal space alongside the directed ‘this will be and then this will be’ of strategic media that does not choose or have to contest the self important grandness of strategic big media, it just finds moments in the margins, alongside, differently. This is one of the many reasons why it is a disruptive technology and why some of the curriculum is disruptive, it isn’t like Korsakow takes aim at something (that would be strategic) so that we can understand what it is by what it takes issue with. It’s more like parkour, happening over there not really that interested in what you’re supposed to do with street furniture, or dance, or places, but finding new uses in the time of its own doing.

This is not a no but, rather it is a yes and.

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Quickened, Introduction

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Latish draft of the introduction I’ve written to a small iBook collaboration:

Quickened is a minor creative work inspired by wondering out aloud about the possibilities of Apple’s iBooks Author and the iPad for new forms of videography and documentary.

The response was to look to The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon as an exemplar for a multivocal, informal, erudite, articulate, playful, serial and repetitive form of documentation. One brief passage, inspired by Marker’s reference to it in Sans Soleil, is a list of things which ‘quicken the heart’ and this was used this as a prompt to invite others to practice a particular variety of observation and to document this using what ever media they wanted (still image, sound, video, text).

The technological line from the HD camera in my phone, through my laptop, then freely available compression software, authoring templates within iBooks Author, and the the iPad as a hardware defined distribution platform, offers a first world frictionless path for new sketch like making and this is a first step in realising what these sorts of making might, or could, be. The intent was to see to what extent ready to hand and easily accessible technologies, in concert with the iPad, might offer for existing and new forms of ‘everyday’ documentary practice.

This means we are using these tools not so much as intended — in Apple’s case to largely produce electronic books (with a strong orientation to academic titles to create a pedagogical hierarchy of teacher created content, user experience, and simple distribution all wedded to Apple’s talismanic iPad, iTunes and App Store ecology), but tactically to see what, as video makers dedicated to the small screen and the network, they offer.

As a result Quickened is an interesting experiment. It is the first work in what may become an ongoing series that lets those of us interested in forms of nonfiction, the network and the observational create non–narrative works that utilise the intimate, personal and private nature of the iPad that is so dramatically different from the mass anonymous audience of traditional cinema and the familial socialised viewing of the television. Here viewing scale approaches the privacy of the novel and so, as a first step, small gestures and glimpses are offered by each contributor in lieu of the anthropomorphism of narrative.

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no more monuments

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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
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Industrial Video and Professionalisation

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Draft extract from a brief essay I’m writing to accompany the publication of a collaborative mixed media iBook I’ve worked on:

In the case of industrial video an economy of socialised practices of professionalisation created particular assumptions that became fetishised into a technocratic mantra of ‘quality’ which generally referred to little more than the explicit technical felicity of the artefacts made to these internalised norms of a sophisticated craft practice. This produces a tautological circuit, most visible in the annual spectacle of the Academy Awards where the industry awards itself statuettes for excellence within the terms of this own small definition of technical excellence, yet remains the benchmark by which industrial media resolutely defends itself against the technical vulgarity of the postindustrial. This is not only to state that now anyone can make a film, if they desire, but to point out that as scarcity of access to all three facets of media (production, distribution, consumption) has declined so too has the previously clear distinction between a professional class and its others. This relation is now ambiguous, at best, and the response of the industry, of the professional class, has been to insist ever more forcefully on the significance of its own standards of excellence and technological scarcity – using ever more expensive cameras, effects, and stars. Except apparently everyone is happy to watch it on YouTube, in spite of the low resolution and questionable production standards.

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The Long Swell

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New semester. Collect blog URLs, subscribe via RSS, add to a blogroll, correct the inevitable errors. Add people to whatever experimental CMS I am exploring this time. It makes the first week very slow with low level low brain grunt work. Time consuming just to set it up.

However, once done, the smoothness is obvious. RSS reader, auto post, favouriting, IFTT pathways, mobile apps, simple weaving – auto and manual – to build a community.

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A Sketch Proposition for NonFiction Making 1

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Koi at ANU 2 from adrianmiles on Vimeo.

1
Words are valuable because they are easy to make, store, and read.

2
Video production, distribution and viewing was once valuable because they were difficult to make, distribute, and view.

3
I have a video camera in my pocket. I have a video camera and an editing suite, in my pocket. I have a video camera, an editing suite and a publication platform, in my pocket. I have a video camera, an editing suite, a publication platform and a viewing ecology, in my pocket.

4
The iPad brings the material intimacies of the novel to the moving image. A personal, intimate and therefore private scale in contradistinction to the semi-anonymous viewing of cinema or the socialised familial incandescence of television.

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 ≠ 10

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The Three Things That Matter If You Work In the Network

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This is the proposition I’ll be riffing from at a symposium tomorrow in Canberra around digital documentary, audiences, and research methods.

There are three things that matter in relation to network specific practice and media. These three terms apply to the formal attributes of digital media, the qualities that practice requires, and how audiences participate, use and engage with networked media. There is no hierarchy amongst these three terms (and they may prove to be insufficient). The terms are granularity, porousness, and facets. The list does not include database, user, or interactivity (these are not causes but consequences of this triumvirate).

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Textobjectext Part One

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TinderboxScreenSnapz001.jpg

The Textobjectext symposium was a well run event. Very well organised, small group in attendance but diverse and interesting mix of presenters all worrying about objects, materiality, affect and practice. Excellent catering by way of a gift to those that participated.

My own ‘paper’ was sketched and presented in Tinderbox as a hypertext. Let’s be blunt. This was because I did not have enough time to let the work get crafted enough, and using Tinderbox made the writing faster, more agile, while also doing a lot of work in the presentation to make present some of the questions I was wanting to explore. But it was a first version, and I lost all my contextual threads while waiting to present as I got quite engrossed by the prior papers (one made easily intelligible some really interesting things in maths, the other did a nice job of thinking about invasive species and what that language is all about), so when it came to my turn I was befuddled!

As a result I lost the sense of what it was I specifically wanted to get to. I knew I wanted to draw a line between writing and thinking to the rule of n-1 (Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatics), Bergson’s sensory motor schema and perception (where perception is always a reduction in relation to what is), and Harman’s stuff about the way objects withdraw themselves to approach each other and hypertextual writing. That line is pretty straightforward, and I briefly sketched it out, but then was left with wondering, OK, and? It felt like a reprise of mid 90s hypertext theory where I was substituting new materialism and objects for ‘poststructuralism’ and saying that writing hypertextually (so much of the theoretical work around hypertext looks at its relation to the literary/narrative, or to reading, but very little has explored the experience of writing hypertext in itself) allowed the objectness of the ideas to be maintained since each object in the Tinderbox work kept its facets available to other facets all the time. But I was clumsy, and even worse, inelegant.

Thankfully the questions and the conversation threw up some very nice ideas and I think provided more context for what I have been struggling to express and explore. I was trying to situate hypertextual writing as a specific form of humanities academic research practice that allows the thickness of research to be closer to the surface and experience of writing, all the way through writing and editing, and that within a post humanities context this is to participate in a larger assemblage of parts where the writer is a relay amongst other parts, and where the nodes within the hypertext retain their, their what?

I will return to it, but after Christmas, as Visible Evidence is looming large and I don’t want to trip over myself a second time.

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Affective Slowness and Robert Croma

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Been writing an essay about Robert Croma’s work, preprint version now available – Affective Slowness, the Web Films of Robert Croma. With a thank you to Robert for letting me write about his stuff.

The abstract:

This paper will undertake a reading of Croma’s online videos using a variety of theoretical frames. It uses Deleuze’s movement image (Cinema One, passim) as a concept relevant to a specifically online and digital practice, with attention paid to the role of affect as an ‘interruption’ within the cinema of the movement image to produce varying economies of the ‘slow’. The implications and possibilities of this will be expanded upon, including a preliminary outline of how this work provides a template for an object orientated digital practice.

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