Monthly Archives: April 2012

Planning something that Shouldn’t be Planned.

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Tutorial tasks for Final Korsakov Project//

  1. Complete a rough Gant chart
  2. Prototype Due next Monday (7th) – Extra 5% Bonus
  3. Production Portfolio = 5%
  4. Does the project need a second filter/focus?
  5. Working title and recorded group members
  6. Questions, problems, solutions to collaborating (tools/methods)
  7. How should the product look, how should it feel? Think about HOW the decisions you make contribute to the feelings of the work.
Production Management//
  • shoot video
  • edit video
  • post production
  • soundtrack
  • interface design
  • thumbnails
  • keywords
  • read
  • draft – use a google doc and draft them early, the editing should be the most important part.
  • proof
Production Portfolio Requirements:
  • Gant Chart
  • Minutes of Meetings
  • Contextualisation of who is doing what and why.

The Moment of Risk.

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At this point in the Semester, we are at a moment of risk….

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This work reminds of that moment of feeling like everything is a half-idea, half formed and kind of in limbo – you know what you have to do, but doing it seems abstract and you realise that there is no correct entry point, no predetermined exit point. Centrality is comfortable, an essay is easy, but this kind of work which is open, living and evolving and not defined entirely by our agency asks something more.

Final Project – Korsakov

1. Project Planning

2. Collaboration.

  • Obviously, we need these skills to collaborate, to learn and to develop ideas. The post it note exercise allowed structure to emerge from brainstorming ideas. If there was a structure there, then how could it be there when one was used to produce the content?  The proposition ‘what is’ is a prompt – its forward thinking and we respond AROUND it, so it comes down to this formula: simple procedure – repetition – pattern = post-it note exercise.
  • We start with a simple proposition and make complex reponses, we find strcutre because its a response to a simple rule.
  • YOU NEED TO START THE PROCESS INSIDE KORSAKOV, MAPPING OUTSIDE WONT WORK.
  • Pattern, ordering, rhythm, repetition,form, shape, connected, understandablilty, connectabliltiy – how do these arise without a structure in advance? Adrian says that structure emerges with the repetition of a simple rule, a procedure. Sometimes you might need to know this rule to ‘get’ it, or sometimes you dont. One may be very arbitrary and more or less about structure and rules itself, the other may rely on what we already bring and rely on that structure (how we understand) – most things do both.
  • This repetition produces a pattern and by nature we are pattern matching,finding, discovering beings, because without patterns things seem chaotic, random and messy.
  • Artists and Filmmakers use this method to ‘innovate’ new ideas/techniques – its not enough to ‘do it once’. EG) Alfred Hitchcock continually introduced new cinematic propositions, he explicitly plays with the affordances and properties of cinema.
  • Think about micro-themes/microdocumentaires. The project doesn’t have to be all encompassing, notice the big things and the little things which give an experience texture and voice. A good example to keep in mind is the way you would show someone around Melbourne, its about the micro and macro, the obvious and the hidden.
  • Dont approach this as a ‘voice of god’ or ‘shopping catalouge’, you don’t have to show everything, think about showing the same thing in different lights, angles, times etc. THINGS CHANGE WITH EXPERIENCE
  • This work is not an argument, its landscape video art

It’s oh so Quiet…

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Iv’e been a bit quiet on the blog front this week, not because I haven’t had anything to say but it’s just been one of those weeks where everyone seems to be stuck in a rut of coldness and assessment tasks and group meetings. Anyway, I thought I would start off my Friday with a post on something I have explored in a bit more detail since the lecture.

Korsakow has to be performed, there is no chronological order, its all middle, the user must play it in order for it to come into being. It’s a musical score, and an action must be done  by the user to make it sing.

The guts of this quote is that basically, until a user engages with a Korsakow work, it’s jut an abstract text, but by turning the information into experience, users create something else, something new and entirely unique. Its a performative text, the notion of performance conceptualises what a spoken or written text can bring about in human interactions.

I think this means, in essence that to say something is to do something, or to implore others to do something which relies on everything being outside the text and them bringing in things from the outside.

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I thought of it like a house. You can buy a house with an oven, some chairs, even a couch. But it’s when you start to play with the space and introduce photos, colours, plates and spoons and pillows that it starts to speak back, starts to mirror you and your personality. Because if you didn’t bring in anything from outside, the house would stay the same, you would starve, physically and emotionally, and no journey would even begin, no memories would be made or connections forged.

Early theories (J. L. Austin) acknowledged that performance and text are both embedded in a system of rules and that the effects they can produce depend on convention and recurrence. In this sense, text is an instance of ‘restored behaviour’.

Austin says that;

Language not only represents, but also can make something happen. He distinguishes between two types of performative speech acts.

  1. The illocutionary act act is concerned with what an person is doing in saying something (e.g. when someone says ‘hello’, he is greeting another person).
  2. The perlocutionary act involves the unintended consequences of an utterance and refers to that what an actor is doing by saying something (e.g.when someone says ‘hello’ and the greeted person is scared by it).
So, Korsakow is pretty much a series of perlocutionary risks?
Lets see what Derrida had to add, remember, he belongs to the post modern camp so at the time, context was dead.
Instead of emphasizing linguistic rules, scholars within this strand stress that the performative utterance is intertwined with structures of power. Because a text inevitably changes a situation or discourse, the distinction between text and context is blurred.
Derrida actually stays with a few of Austin’s core ideas, maintaining that by illocutionary force, language itself can transform and effect. Derrida however rejects that a performative utterance relies on conventions or rules and  values the distinctiveness of every individual speech act, because it has a specific effect in the particular situation in which it is performed

According to Derrida, the effects caused by a performative text are in a sense also part of it. In this way, the distinction between a text and that what is outside it dissolves. For this reason it is pointless to try to define the context of a speech act. Due to the possibility of repetition, the intentions of an individual can never be fully present in a speech act. The core of a performative utterance is therefore not constituted by animating intentions, as Austin says, but by the structure of language.

 

 

 

Building.

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TumblrOnce upon a time there was a RMIT Media student named Zoe. She woke up, had breakfast and caught the train to University in time to get a nice front row seat in her Integrated Media lecture. She opened her laptop with a sense of anticipation and waited for Adrian to start talking.
First, Adrian went through the latest reading by a lovely old fellow by the name of Roland Barthes who in a nutshell fleshes out the notions of a ‘work’ and a ‘text’ and how the existence of these two concepts of writing polarise us as working, producing ‘artists’.
I think it’s time to appeal to Adrian’s fabulous dot points/my notes on his dot points:
WORK//
  • Meta/Method – EG) Essay ‘Rules’ which produce works, TV production. You can only ever respond to the things you have already mapped.
  • Co-creation, exploration, initiation, always a plurality of meanings. There is no magic bullet answer or embedded answer.
  • Bush wild
  • Playful – happens in the space between self and other and you begin to play with the clarity of the distinction. Art can happen in this space. Play with the notion of identity where the bountry between myself and world becomes problematic, you no longer consume it, it does something to you.
  • Mobile, multiple, poetic, disruptive – fluid, unfixed.
  • Knowing, eventfulness of knowing
  • Open – deliberately opens itself out and continues generating new questions
  • Maternal – material nature on the sign, the physicality of our signs matters, reason rules the roost. This is so easy to disrupt via our making.
  • ‘body’
TEXT//
  • Method as ‘given or fixed’
  • Interpretation (a true, hidden, real meaning)
  • Parks as structured and deliberately framed from notions of the sublime, its utterly an essay.
  • Serious, authoritative (trusts, relies on, wants, believes in its authority)
  • Fixed, ordered, logical, rational
  • About what is known (‘reportage’) – it always reports on what you know.
  • Closed and closure – knowing what it means by tying off the ends.
  • ‘paternal’
  • ‘mind’

EXAMPLES//

  • WORK//MATTHEW RILEY  – utterly secure in knowing what it can say, identity is unproblematic, language is unproblematic, the way it ‘thinks’ about audience, genre is purely grounded in consumption.
  • TEXT//JAMES JOYCE – biblical references, Latin, invents works, makes puns that rely on Irish, French, English history, it bleeds everywhere, it means so many things at once. It will never be/cannot be exhausted.
  • TEXT//BLUE POLES, JACKSON POLLACK – Politically disruptive, the idea that paint is a material thing in itself, what are its properties? It’s liquid, you can swing it and flick it – what does it mean to treat paint as a liquid and what does it mean to physically paint? Essay as about paint as liquid on a solid surface material form.
  • WORK//WHEN HARRY MET SALLY – we know what to expect, we know the rules and how to play the game.
  • TEXT//ALPHAVILLE – Not naturalistic in terms of acting, lighting – it plays out what it suggests, they play with it. No effort in continuity. They wilfully and joyfully embrace their messiness.
After the lecture, Zoe went and did a few things, caught up with her friends and had just enough time to get to Integrated Media tutorial. There were still notions of methodological fields and the child and the maternal floating around in her head, but they weren’t yet clarified or connected. Adrian opened the class by asking if there were any questions, so Zoe decided to be bold and raise her hand.
She said “I don’t really get the whole paternal maternal thing, and how it all relates back to the child as a metaphor for meaning becoming fixed”
Adrian promptly said…”well then, your an idiot”. Haha, not really. He actually answered her question in a highly succinct way which inspired an ‘ahhhh moment’ as all at once, the penny dropped.
Zoe wrote notes down furiously as he spoke so she could return to them later to clarify her understanding.
  • Presence trumps absence – the present things are greater than the things that are absent. EG) Writing was understood as secondary to reading, you could read a text but the author could be absent so you don’t have the chance to ask questions/clarify.
  • Presence of the author is considered superior.
  • Writing as something which is ‘dangerous’ as it erases the need for memory.
  • History has always said that if meaning isn’t present/misunderstanding it’s the fault of the speaker or the way they have used language. Post Structuralists argue that meaning can only be defined by what it is not. No language without absence.
  • Gender Ideas – post structural feminists – presence as a positive as inherently male, notion of absence as female and negative.
After Adrian’s little lecture on Oedipus and bottoms, Zoe felt a move towards group work was well due. However, the Oedipus story did inspire thoughts of an artwork Zoe had long admired…
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Adrian began helping everyone map out their concepts for the final projects, and Zoe, along with her lovely group members Sam, Ian and Tom decided on the topic of ‘We Are’ in the hope of achieving an autobiographical map of how their paths had come to cross.
Zoe was keeping a few things from the lecture in mind:
  • Korsakow has to be performed, there is no chronological order, its all middle, for it to come into being, the user must play it. It’s a musical score, and an action must be done  by the user to make it sing.
  • Argodic Text – Action of the user has a non trivial effect on the work, something about the users action changes the work. Action dictates experience and impacts on the shape and form of the work. The user has agency. Loops in Korsakow give agency – the user know their choices matter and can change the course of the work.
  • Pleasure without separation – meaning is found in difference, it when things change or borders and boundaries appear between the inside and the outside
Zoe loved the way that she got to write her ideas down on post its, she loved post it’s with all her heart because they made her feel as though she was organised. But as usual, things got messy – brainstorming is hard because we have been taught to think before we write, but brainstorming is suposed to be a short burst of unconscious thought captured. Zoe realised It’s hard not to filter your ideas, but that it’s easy to join them up with the one’s your friends had:

After a long discussion, Zoe decided, instead of writing everything down that she would use her wonderful, life easing device to photograph each idea to make it static. She made works out of texts and then went home and laughed.

Instagram, I’m a Fan!

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8a00d3fc7cc211e1a87612313804ec91_6_largeSo, something happened to me recently that I never though would – I became theowner of an iPhone. Quite simply, im poor and would never have dreamed of owning such an indulgent piece of communication technology – my previous phones have done two things – called and texted. My boss actually GAVE me her old one and now I can navigate where I’m going, check Facebook, emails, get LIVE train timetables, Urbanspoon potential eateries and so much more other fun stuff (Autodance, Agify anyone?) However, my favourite app has got to be Instagram, or as us gen Y’ers call it – indie gram. Yep, i’m one of thoooooose people now who takes photos with their phone of their coffee or their mate drinking a coffee, puts a filter on it and posts it to Facebook – i’m sure this phase will pass.

The other day I was waiting for a friend in the city and reading a Magazine instead of checking my News Feed. In the magazine, I stumbled upon this article which screamed INTEGRATED MEDIA at me, so naturally, I took a photo of it with my phone.

I think the word polyphonic is key here; I first remember the word being used to describe ringtones that sounded like songs instead of a succession of beeps on mobile phones in year 7 and 8; the dictionary says:

producing many sounds simultaneously; many-voiced.

Noisiness, Messiness, Clamour, Commotion - this are all terms we have explored through different frameworks throughout the semester, I’m just trying to figure out how to best ‘use’ them in my own work without producing something which evokes a sense of unpleasantness or confrontation – it’s hard to be intrusive and loud without getting a negative response, or a black box style ‘misunderstanding’.

However, it’s clear that multiple voices and ideas are key, that sharing ideas will only ever serve to enhance them and that collaboration produces a work with greater depth and therefore scope for a volume of meaning and implications.

Kids and Art.

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"There are about ten thousand things children would rather do than traipse around a place where they have to be quiet and look at static objects they don’t understand."

Adrian mentioned this article in te lecture on Monday and I just LOVE reading a good old fashioned published whinge. Nothing amuses me more than so called ‘commentators’ taking it upon themselves to tell everyone what the ‘problems’ with todays society are. I love the way they attempt to ‘point out’ what everyone else is too timid or polite to say, and that in doing so, they have made some kind of grand contribution to society. On ya Jaqueline Maley, you tell those goddam kids where they do and don’t belong.

Because there is a list of places children should not go, and the art gallery is at the top of it. Children, at least up to a certain age, don’t enjoy art galleries. There are about ten thousand things children would rather do than traipse around a place where they have to be quiet and look at static objects they don’t understand.

As Adrian said, this whole article is based on the general assumption that a child’s role in society is predetermined – they simply don’t belong in the context of art galleries, and never can. This is about totalising discourses, which means an all encompassing idea which excludes any possibility of alternative thought. Children are, by definition, disruptive, noisy and question everything. Duh, thats their nature. We shouldn’t see this as something that they deliberately ‘do’ as a modality of action, it’s what Freud describes as ‘unconscious’ Freud’s ideas disrupts our self conscious because we have to accept that a fundamental pat of our selves is defined something which is unknowable (because it is unconscious)and comes from outside

 

 

 

Like, Omg, your so Alternative Doll…

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I guess everything does come full circle huh? I found it kind of amusing, this image totally visually fuses the whole concept of creating a traditional text with hypertext…

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Korsakow Review Session.

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This morning I had my Korsakow review with Adrian, I think it was really worthwhile to sit down, with the moving work in front of us and examine it in the process of watching/exploring it.

Major points Adrian made:

  • The work was too busy. He said most people have this tendency to want to fill the entire page with ‘stuff’. For me, this is definitely an unconscious tendency and something I have to really become aware of. To me, it’s just a natural thing to fill the screen because I feel like it makes the viewer comfortable. But when works are too crowded, viewers can become overwhelmed and get into a frenzy of attempting to understand all the elements in conjunction rather than having space to view each one separately.
  • Working in a grid – This is a important design element and is all about being visually/aesthetically coherent. The bottom of the last thumbnail should align with the bottom of the SNU screen, because the amount of text changes throughout the project, yet the size of the thumbnails and SNU remain consistent throughout.

 

  • Use of Text – I think Adrian is right, I did definitely get too caught up in the textual side. It’s funny, I kind of forgot that each video had thematic connections to others before I even started using Korsakow. Like the theme of family, of introspection and of experience. I could have used these as 3 key words to connect similar videos rather than overcomplicating the work by attempting to find patterns in abstract ideas I applied to them. If i had just been able to see the patterns that were already there and work with them, I think I could have made a more accessible project.
This session was great, because it will really set me up well to approaching the final task. This subject is not anchored in my strengths, but i’m really enjoying the learning experience, and today has been another one which is quite affirming. Trust the patterns that exist, have faith in your ideas and dont be afraid of simplicity!