Category Archives: Lecture Notes

Imagine your future, it’s not so far away.

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Today’s lecture was quite different from others so far, it was much more focused on us, how we see ourselves as practitioners and the things we need to consider when working in the field – never have I been told to consider the role my future children will have on my work. Scary shit.
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OCCUPY&IMAGINE
  • Come in, immerse yourself in the world of the space and take control of the thing your working on, and hold a position.
  • Spend time inside the project and imagine – form an image and idea by standing back and considering where this project can take you. Speculate, and look at various patterns of contributions and work with assumptions that arise.
  • Know what exists and develop it.Think about the journey and the outcome.
  • How are you going to translate all these ideas into a project? What will it look like? How can you use your skills to take the media into another space?
  • Imagine the kinds of clients you might work with and how does that shape your potential outcomes?
  • Develop and image and a tagline – make is succinct.
  • Remember to always keep the professional aspect of the course – it’s about storytelling and collaboration. Objectives, planning and agreements result into tasks and activities – this is the element of professionalism you need to develop – its not about being wanky or wearing a tie,its about having a process and being able to produce and work with others and make sure ideas come to fruition.
  • Allow yourself to imagine – what is it now that you want to achieve, where would you love to work, what kind of creator do you want to be and why? Who do you want to work with? What kind of stories do you want to tell? How will you get there? Where do you want to make your mark. Notice your own strengths and interests.

observando

  • Consider how your decisions will make things happen.
  • Work with the idea of a co-creative public and the growing range of literacies in the public sphere – work with them. Think about how a niche community can extend to the public sphere, take unique and special stories and make them accessible.
  • Take a simple topic and get a range of perspectives – you never know what you will stumble upon. Research and produce. Participatory media means we are making in public – we need to work transparently and are inevitably more exposed these types of projects carry their own set of protocols. Participants are engaged in the whole framework of the project – design, production etc.
  • Keep track of things as they develop and comment on them in some way, understand how people are using them, or subverting their original intentions. 
  • The hardest part is finding your way through the onslaught of material – remember you have you experiences, the things that inspire you and the things your interested in participating in and collaborating on.
  • Understand the back end – social media search/search engine optimisation. Use platforms to respond to trends – eg) Mapping Online Publics project aims to trace tweets from different areas to gauge a certain sentiment about a topic or event.
  • Realise the potential to ‘listen back’ that social media provides – some companies are filtering the net for informal responses to their product/service/materials.
  • Giving and receiving feedback – develop a considered response and think about why the person thinks what they think – it can probably help you.
  • HAVE A REALLY STRONG CONTROLLING IDEA! What stories are you trying to tell. 
  • Cooking up a Participatory Project - Blog post from Kyla.

Who are you and what do you think about? What can you bring to the surface?

Sian Prior Guest Lecture

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“Basically, i’m here to talk to about how to make money from your writing”

Visit Sian’s Website/work here.

  • Being a freelancer means you have to be able to write in a huge range of styles and if you want to make a career out of writing you have to be versatile and flexible. Move between formulas and know each well.
  • Be self critical and read your work aloud – hear the voice. Is it easy to read? If you find yourself struggling to read it, then obviously you need to reconsider your piece.
  • Interviewing is a key skill – consider the role of emotional tone and a narrative arc.
  • Find an angle and develop a focus – find a new way in that will excite publishers and editors.
  • Learn to work to a brief.
  • Your reputation is your currency and don’t ever put it on the line – always be truthful and check your facts.
Profiles//
Why do we read/write them, and who do we write them about?
  • Human interest stories - voyeurism, what is their life journey, does their public profile match the reality?
  • Conduit to people – we get to hear their ‘actual voice’ and connect with them on a highly personal level.
  • Grand narratives that make us reflect upon our own lives and we can ‘compare notes’ – we also like to hear quirky, underground stories of people who might otherwise go unnoticed.
  • Relevant to current media happenings.
  • Forms can follow – Q&A, Verbatim style (edit out your questions and make it all their story) Interview based, prose profile which includes additional research such as other peoples perspectives and contextual research.
  • Whats the best way to research – ask yourself what you know, or what you think you know about them, write it down, reflect on how it changes through the process of getting to know them. Do a preinterview and sound out general areas of interest- narrow down your questions/angle/what it is you want to talk to them about. Identify gaps in your own knowledge and do relevant research – the more your subject thinks you know about them the more they will open up to you, identify things you admire in them.
  • Reuse/Recycle old content to base questions on – did this profile satisfy them?
  • Get a copy of their CV and seek out other sources.
  • WHO IS MY READERSHIP/AUDIENCE – what can you assume they know?
  • Use quotes that really say something significant about your subject and reveal certain things about their character – only use them if they are saying something you can’t say as well as they did.
  • Avoid repetition and make every word count, keep the piece fresh.
  • Let readers come to a conclusion – dont ‘sum up’ a person, let the quotes and anecdotes do the work for you.
  • Don’t sound too admiring - hagiography, overdoing it does not serve you well.
Opinion Pieces//
Why do people want to read them? What is their function?
  • Rely on your ability to persuade the reader of your opinions.
  • Tone and style can vary hugely from personal, lighthearted conversational to a very structured formal piece of writing.
  • Air a range of opinions – reflect the pubic sphere/media
  • Makes readers reflect on their opinion and form an opinion they can help inform their own.
  • Contribute to the democratic process – helps participation in current events and open up publications to opinions beyond their own.
  • Have an angle and be timely – jump on an issue straight away.
  • Be cogent, coherent and succinct – develop a clear consistent tone and a fresh angle
  • Identify trends in areas and culture and the media and talk about them.
Write for the human voice, real or imaginary & take risks. Have fun with your writing and always be ethical and kind. Surprise and delight people. 

IM2today.

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As I was absent from today’s proceedings, it’s now time for catching up, and the main question of the lecture seems to be – how did we come to construct this co-creative space we are now existing and working inside, it wasn’t always like this.

  • the emergence of the middle class and the printing press led to the widespread distribution of messages to a diversity of people, paper was cheap and ideas from the Enlightenment were rife. The proliferation of these ideas birthed what Jurgen Habermas describes as the Public Sphere – where public opinion and widespread debate occurred on issues and began to manifest in the form of journals, newspapers and magazines.
  • however, this freedom saw news and information become a commodity which could be bought and sold. became something that was measured and transformed into opinion polls rather than the public debates that took place earlier. Commercial media particularly focused on ‘easy listening’ and on the whole unchallenging programming. Public media, such as the BBC and ABC saw themselves as authorities who transmitted knowledge to the masses.

The Boat That Rocked

  • The swinging 60′s came into play and rouge media came into play and took a step away from mainstream media. This emerged out of student politics and the alternative lifestyle and political movements that aimed to establish their own media channels
Activist and community media is in many ways the precursor to the participatory media that we are engaged with today. Similar drivers exist, but what is different is the scale and the fact that the social media that began with Web 2.0 is now considered mainstream.
  •  We have to understand the shift in how an audience connects with media over time. An audience is drawn to something and decides to engage, or not. This is different to the general public, which is defined by being part of something much larger, like part of the population of a country, or a part of a religious faith. These things are imposed by birth or other factors.
  • There is no obligation to become a member of a community; meet the other members; nor share any other beliefs or interests. This characteristic is crucial to modernity where ‘a relation among strangers’ is a requisite of public interaction. In Warner’s words:

‘The modern social imaginary does not make sense without strangers’ (Warner 2002: 57).

 

  • The concept of relations among strangers enables the modern marketplace to form. It relieves the modern public of having to associate together in tribes or kinship groups and replaces these social forms with the marketplace, which does not require consumers to know or be associated with each other.

coffee shop dream :)

  • Social media spaces as a replacement of the the bourgeois coffee shop?
  • The consumer is now part of the creative process – creative commons, open source, sharing, collaboration are all afforded by the internet/social media platforms
  • Co-creative publics self-elect to join a participatory project, without an obligation to contribute to their own level of expertise. As in a pubic they pay attention to something, such as a call out and in turn are paid attention to. There is no expectation that the co-creator will get to know other co-creators, so they work in a relation among strangers. Co-creation also allows different levels of engagement. A co-creator could initiate a projector simply join in.

Lecture #7

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So, midsemester ends and we arrive back in building 80 on Monday morning – the soft tones in this image remind me of spring, and the beautiful sunshine that shone as I walked towards the lecture….

  • Mark points in time where you feel your ID is developing/changing in incremental stages
  • Make it easy for people to find your ID and understand you
  • How can you break though the noise and highlight the things that are significant – any professional identity is a projection, its assertive and you have to project and speak a little louder to bring things to the front.
  • Moderate your own level of activity and understand how that defines you.
  • ID Hub is a piece of evidence that promotes you as a credible content manager and project manager and provides a reference point for your skills and use of technology.
  • Start to consider your colleagues and look at other people’s ID hubs and assess which ones work and why – think about why you follow certain people and then think back to why people would want to follow you.
  • Be judicious and expository – use the platforms creatively.
  • Think about the way the media is changing, we are connecting with media differently – its less consumptive and more productive. This changes what is produced and how it is received.
  • Media is in a state of flux and we can begin to find new shapes and forms to contribute – be bold and adventurous with your creative practice and don’t be afraid to do things differently
  • The Digital Fiction Factory – multilayered storytelling.

What is a participatory project?

  • A project that solicits and draws on UGC/media for the purposes of creative storytelling and developing creative, collaborative, socially engaged experiences and features.
  • Commenting, liking, conversations, contributions, community, co-creation, collaboration – these are part of a spectrum and participants should traverse the spectrum from strong types of interactive activities and weaker ones.
  • Its co-created and its about storytelling and brings conventional media practise into the frame – drafting, editing, producing (production values)
  • Why would people bother to contribute to your project – think about designing  an EXPERIENCE that audiences can ENGAGE in. How can we think about the mechanics of interaction, consider what kinds of INCENTIVES you want to provide.
  • “while everything, technically is an experience of some sort, there is something important and special to many experiences that make them worth discussing. In particular, the elements that contribute to superior experiences are knowable and reproducible, which makes them designable. Nathan Sheldoff
  • Think about crafting a work that combines lean forward and lean back media experiences.
  • CALLOUTS -You need to lure and be assertive and make a clear and concise offer. Go into details of what you will be asking people to do/contribute in stages and provide seeding material that gives an indication of the kinds of work you want back.
  • Look for people that already have an active presence online and are already contributing work to other projects.
  • Start thinking about new practices, new roles and how you can define these into tasks for people to complete to get participants in.
  • Use social media to market projects and to get things moving – develop a rapport with participants and respond to interactions.

 

Jonathan Hutchinson via Skype.

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Community Manager 

  • Is on the ground/interacting with audience, they look at new content and users and ‘survey’ the online landscape and how people are interacting.
  • Enabling, encouraging and fostering respective skills – start to pair up people who can share skills and knowledge so projects can gain momentum.
  • Start bringing in other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and learn to talk about them on social media platforms.
  • Think about building a community and how you can promote your ideas to the right people. Understand your colleagues and their individual approaches.
  • Maintain a solid relationship with your community.
  • GLAM – galleries, libraries, archives, museums – tap into things that they are promoting and grab a piggyback – use inertia!
  • You are the conduit between all the institutions and how the project can be moved forward in the best way.
  • PARTER UP – Pool allows this in a dynamic way which generates new community members and new energies.
  • Identify motivations and use them

Social Media Producer

  • more about setting regulations, abstracted from the audience, teaching others.
ABC Pool Roles
  • pool team
  • interacting with community members - community manager
  • interaction with the ABC as an institution - talking to other producers, editors, legal staff who keep projects operating
  • project design/management – how you identify audience members you will be working with and decipher emerging interests and map out key elements to fold them into a project design.
  • “if people are talking about techiniques, topics then obviously they are interested in engaging in that space…take these observations and incorperate it into your own creative project”
Networks
  • Are hard to build from scratch
  • Try and engage in conversation with ‘powerful’ people who do have a lot of Twitter followers to attract the attention of their followers.
  • Use the Twitter ‘search’ function to see whats out there – dont underestimate the search within Twitter and Facebook.
  • Aim for retweets and shares and trending hashtags – look at what’s trending in your area and attempt to incorporate it into your own dialogue.
  • Know your audience and know your motivation

Participatory Projects

  • Identify like minded people who will bring new light to your concept
  • Put all your energy into people who are contributing and establish a clear goal
  • Partner up with ANYONE who may potentially be able to connect with other institutions such as galleries
  • Keep in contact with contributors and keep people in the loop and acknowledge contributions.
  • Consider barriers in participation – people are more likely to work with you on their platforms rather than you dragging them onto your platforms.
  • Think about skill levels
  • Start conversations now 

Radio Plays.

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radioSo today in the Radio lecture we talked a lot more about our audio arts piece we have to produce during the semester – to be honest, radio plays, to me have always seemed a little bit, ummm, lame. However, today, my all too quick judgement of the form was reconsidered as we listened to some past student work and actually got up and did our own presentation of a play we threw together in half an hour. It was really fun! I guess I hadn’t realised the scope for creativity a radio play throws up, and especially in our case as we have the freedom to use copyrighted material.

Although my heart lies in radio documentaries that aim to tell untold stories with empathy and angle I am now a lot more open to the idea of a radio play!

Heres a tip from award winning BBC radio dramatist Marcy Kahan from her tips for producing great Radio Plays:

Radio is an extraordinary medium. A radio play can travel through time and space, between centuries and continents.

It can take place in an aeroplane, down a goldmine, on a ship; it can also take place within the confines of somebody’s mind. All this can be done for a fraction of what it would cost to do the same in film. But in every case the audience has to be attracted, and its attention held, by the means of sound alone.

This is what I love about radio – it can transport you and ALL your senses to another place, but it doesn’t show you like television does, it’s not that accomodating. It implores you to make your own images, to formulate your own perceptions and above all, to be active in the story.

Things I need to start thinking about//

  • What kinds of stories can be turned into Radio Plays?
  • Have I stumbled upon any of these recently?
  • Does the story have enough characters/a setting that will grab the audience?
  • What angle can I take?
  • Do I want to make it nostalgic and bring in elements of radio docos?

Lecture #3.

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ABC POOL//
  • Set up as an experiment by Radio National with the hope of building a bigger network – parallel to emerging platforms such as Facebook and MySpace mainly due to the birth of Web2.0 which was creating scope for UGM. It took on its own organic shape via BETA and developed a community of regular contributors and began to generate a range of media.
  • Many saw the introduction of users into the world of online publication as a potential threat to professional standards
  • Radio presenters began to open up the pool space for programming online and brought the audience into the space by inviting them to contribute ideas and content into shows such as 360 Documentaries – This kind of collaboration showed the ability of social media to exist on a professional level.
  • Role of social media producer – professionals moving into the social media space combining authorial and directivity into an open, free for all, unstructured space – a new hybrid was created via Pool which combined elements of traditional heritage media and the social media space.
  • When someone working as a social media producer moves across from a striated space to the smooth space, you would expect some tension – however Pool did not produce this – people were building expertise in the media by working with ABC producers and wanted to be able to communicate across the social media space within Pool and collaborate in a creative space. The space was safe and harvested a safe and positive creative environment that people felt inspired to work in.
  • There was a common ‘bond’ of producers/contributor – a kind of ‘bank’ of personas of Pool users was created to define the kinds of people using the platform and they interacted with it – like a semi fictional portrait.
  • Who uses the site and to what extent – hardcore user, moderate user and lurkers will all use the site in different ways.
  • Guiding Principles of your project on pool will generate more contribution and will give you parameters for the work and it’s direction. EG) lower the barriers to entry so that more of a variety of people can contribute to the work. Make the site sustainable and be realistic about your accessibility to resources and how much time you have and how the project could eventually sustain itself. Lay the groundwork to attract new audiences/new practices by utilising the conventions of social media to create a personal experience of the site (using features developed elsewhere in social media operations to emphasise the personality of Pool)Create an intelligent space: develop ease of entry, ease of use, and clarity of opportunity [to take away awkward functionality and make it satisfying, thus more attractive to new users].
  • Challenge your own thinking about social media – its a new enough thing to be redefined and shaped into new forms. How can we use the form to tell stories?
THIS WEEK//

Final Integrated Lecture.

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  • We are making in a cognitive space
  • The Internet is just a whole bunch of stuff, and requires a tacit knowledge to work around the protocols and procedures. We have to work around the edges, but we also have to understand the procedures that define the space.
  • The internet values sharing and contribution, we can now reach across borders, traverse countries and people are inherently connected via the very ‘flatness’ of the hierarchy of the internet. Reality is, if you don’t have Facebook or an email address or the internet you are absent from a plane where most exist.
  • K-Films – you can have both ways, its open and things can happen however you like, they can happen over and over, it grants you permission to listen to things that need to change, bad ideas talk back, they make themselves obvious and you have to recognise these, and listen to them.
  • Things always want to differ from themselves, its not about the repetition of the same, things shouldn’t come off a conveyor belt anymore. This is an Industrial mode of making.
  • We have become enculturated to take ownership of our work, to make it monumental, to perfect it, to work within the project, to respond to briefs, outlines and criteria. The ability to talk back to the ideas is not applicable, we do not see it as a system for making. We invest everything IN the making, everything is invested in the artefact.
  • Instead of thinking about things, think about relationships. We misjudge ‘the thing’ as where the value lies, and as still the site of experience.
  • We are now in an experience economy.
Wrapping up…
  • What exists outside your circle of comfort? What do you want? What experiences can you offer.
  • This subject had attempted to give us an experience of tacit knowledge, of knowing how, and knowing how to be.
  • It has attempted to keep us looking forward – what can we learn about what we make, where do we want to be? We can work within set paradigms or outside them. It’s up to us.

Lecture # 11

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Collage, Lego & Appearances//

  • Consider duration & viewing – complexity does not come from building complex shapes, the text itself never changes.
  • The less something narrates the more connections and possibilities it creates. Describing things implies causal logic, consequences and sequence. This is not something that belongs in a Korsakow film.
  • When we blog, we connect our fragments of writing to other fragments, nothing is self contained. This is the kind of premise we should be basing our Korsakov work on.
  • Deep architectural logic of the network – a small fragment that is already whole but can be joined to anything else. However, the forms we are using to express these fragments are becoming increasingly fixed.
  • Korsakov allows the looseness of the form to remain after the publication. It can always be addressed, spoken to and reinvented.
  • Crystal line structure –  crystal structure is composed of a pattern, a set of atoms arranged in a particular way, and a lattice exhibiting long-range order and symmetry. Patterns are located upon the points of a lattice, which is an array of points repeating periodically in three dimensions.
  • Users have more agency. To decide what to do, what it means, what particular connections and patterns might mean, even what patterns exist. Users define how long your film is. Not you. There is no reasonable answer to the question – “How long is it?”. So, what is the role of the viewer in a generative work? Do they terminate the text when they become bored, or engage when they are beguiled?
  • Soft Media –its not tangible, you cant ‘export it’, there is no final version, it remains constantly open and re-workable. What would it mean to keep a projects ability in the final object? Video is no longer a moving image with sound over the top.
So, when working in Korsakov we have to consider where the meaning and structure is coming from, because it’s not from us, the author is separate, we provide the frameworks for the patterns to begin. We need to think about this in a way which does not confine our viewers, we want their experience to be organic, we want them to be able to feel at home in the work, to challenge it and play with it. We want them to change the experience of the work.
  • What is the difference between the user and the author?
New directions to potentially take//
  • Think about using QuickTime Player 7 as an editing device which allows users to literally interact with the videos – this is a form of soft media because users can click on the work to change it.
  • What proposition do you think your own K-Film is making? How would you describe this?
Take these two things from this subject, they are threshold concepts;
1. have a sense and some understanding about what it means and feels like to make and be inside of multilinear media. Think like it thinks, really understand what it means to work differently inside the form.
2. Think about what your making, it has propositions and concepts which are outside its framework, you don’t know them, its not the ‘storyline’. What do I want to make? Things make propositions about themselves and about the world, it has agency and engagement outside itself, it asks questions outside itself.

Try and look at the world and find things that are worth noticing.

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I think today’s lecture was really worthwhile for me at this point in the course, as it kind of summed up everything I have found so inspiring and intriguing. I think Adrian used the word ‘beguile’. I love this word, it’s like splendour, it’s onomatopoeic and you feel it’s presence. I have been thinking about the essay component of the Korsakow project a lot today and have bolded the major points I would like to elaborate on/discuss inthe essay.

Here’s my notes from the lecture// 

- We used to believe that the author was the cause and rationale for the ‘real meaning’ behind a text, we wanted to discover this hidden meaning because it would in turn reveal something about the author, so meaning was OUTSIDE the text. The author is sacred and finding meaning is an act of recovery.

- 20th century still believed in the ‘real’ legitimate meaning from a text that the text has innate meaning, but that it can come from within, the logic can be internal to itself and understands the logic is timeless – we dont need the author to understand the work, and we can analyse within its own internal logic.

- The text says something, but we have to demonstrate things it might not know about itself, it’s got an unconscious that it’s unaware of. I think this relates to our Korsakow works, because we are creating the unconscious part of the text?

- Reader response theory – interpretation is now much more focused on the reader and their interpretation. There is a dialogue thats exists between the reader and the text. The reader has agency. 

- Meaning can be constructed if it is said to exist, we will always find relevance in something, we can repurpose things and create understanding.

- The text remains stable but our readings change, but what happens when the text becomes unstable? We arrive at Korsakow, its not a choose your own adventure story, we can’t retrace our steps or choose from two options. It depends on the user, you cant project it onto a surface, it requires people to play it. We depend on the reader to make meaning.

- Readers fill in gaps, and thats where the poetry lies, its where creation happens. The size of the gaps dictates what kind of work your creating, are you trying to open or close gaps?

- David Shields Chapter; Collage – He acknowledges the time he is working in, brickilage method, where you use identifiable bits and pieces that have a history to make something new. The parts have history, they shouldn’t be hidden or unify into something new, the differences should pull and push each other.

- We don’t know what our work will look like at the end – invent a rule for the parts which will produce the object, then we can worry about what we can become. Think about the post industrialist mode of thinking this practice requires. Surrender yourself to the making!

- When you write a script, of course you know what’s going to happen, there is no such thing as a coincidence. Life isn’t like that, you dont know where your going or where you wil end up. Plots are for dead people.

- Collage as evolution – polemic prediction that says narrative has had it’s day, and collage is what is coming next. Kuleshov effect – the relationship of the parts creates the significance of the work. You have to surrender the need to deliver something solid, you just have to make connections. We do not own what we make. The edges don’t meet, we leave gaps for audiences to create their own meaning. Collage is always a form of editing.

- Momentum derives not from narrative but from the subtle progressive build up of thematic resonances”

- “Poetic repetition is what makes a Korsakov film worth watching”

- The question is not what do you look at but what do you see? What does it mean to just be able to look without having to wheel out an apparatus of ‘stuff’. Transcend the givens of a narrative, start with your propostion and begin making fragments. 

- Don’t fictionalise everything – make it real, it should come from you and have a point of connection. Be poetic and associative. Find pleasure in the making, compose it in Korsakow, make lyrical movement.

- Context cannot ever be erased, it inevitably implicates itself in every utterance.

- Narrative necessarily lies to us, its inherent. It should become like opera, and be replaced by collage. Narrative will become more and more embellished and continue to try and ‘out-do’ itself.

- What isn’t collage today? Modern media is collage, and its a mode of making, we use it to get information, copy and paste is collage. We need to stop trying to hide this as ‘copying’, remixing is the order of the day. 

- We generate rules inside the system which lets the patterns emerge through the use – we dont prejudge the relations. Impose and make, or listen and make. Its your decision.

- There are things already there that are worth uncovering, find your capacity and work with it, its not necessarily outside.