Tag Archives: Lecture

Lecture Wk#1

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  • What does media do in the world, and how does it relate to the world/pressing issues/problems in society. How we can provide solutions and understand the nature of these problems?
  • What are the broad research issues we can focus on?
  • Think about how you will structure your research and make it engaging to the reader.
  • Come up with a kind of breakdown/parts of the problems/aspects of the debate you are going to explore. EG) Broadcast VS Network.
  • Consider the role of crowdsourcing and how we can people involved in making media.
  • Make sure you unpack the complexities of the area and find different angles you can explore.

GETTING STARTED//

  • Find an idea/topic and start looking at the literature surrounding it. formulate a research question /problem/issue.
  • You choice of topic should be informed by your knowledge of what other people have done in the field and what is feasible for you to investigate. See what is current in the field, who are the important commentators and what the issues they are debating. What terminology and methodologies are being used, what rationales are prevalent around why things are important?
  • Think about gaps in knowledge and where you can build on it.
  • GET SAVVY ON DOCUMENTING IMPORTANT INFORMATION!
  • Your reference list should be comprehensive and inclusive of everything.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY//

  • authority (who is the author), currency (when was it published and to what degree is it relevant in your use of ideas or information), purpose (is the information free from obvious bias) and the assumptions the piece of research makes.
  • What is the motivation of the study?
  • What are the imperatives of author and what kind of language are they using – what lens are they looking through? Keep a filter and think about maintaining a neutral balance.

RESEARCH//

  • There is no set way to begin researching, it can be a dialogue.
  • Think about finding a coherent narrative.
  • How do ethics influence how we research/write – what biases do we inherently have?

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//

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.

A Family Affair.

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Make a video about your family without showing them. I think a lot of people will have approached this in a similar way that I have – by depicting the environments of the family members and overlaying sounds from the family home. I did this early on in the week, but now i’m kind of re-thinking different ways you can ‘show’ people.

- People are not defined only by where they exist or what they say

- We can portray thoughts by portraying situations/dreams/potential imaginings

- Someone could be defined as by their interest or even their lack of interest

- Someone could feel defined by their job.

Okay, i’ll stop making lists, but what I guess i’m saying is that this process of making videos is making me think, but often i’m realising things I could have done better AFTER I have made my work, I think I should start actually thinking less in terms of “okay what am I going to do” and more in terms of “HOW can I do this, what set of affordances am I working with and how I can best ‘make do’ with them.

Its kind of like what Adrian said in the Lecture this morning – Qualitative VS Quantitative knowledge/thought.

Potatoes, Rhizomes and Bricks.

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I found yesterday’s lecture to be extremely interesting as a lecture just about knowledge; it’s great to feel like i’m being challenged to think in so many different ways and consider things I had never considered before, or even thought of, I’m loving that this course simply refuses to allow us to make generic work or churn out carbon copies.

Here are he main points of the lecture that I found to be particularly interesting…

1. Institutional expressions of power and authority that let some things ‘matter’ and other things not.

Adrian spoke about this in terms of both ‘value’ and ‘affordances’ and used journalism as an example, suggesting that journalists decide what is good journalism. This means that we as media makers have the same power, we decide the mediums affordances (what we can do with what we have/what our media allows us to do) and decide how we can use these affordances to create. We craft our own ‘grammar’.

Adrian then went on to speak about the de Certeau reading, and stuff got pretty philosophical…

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2. What does knowledge ‘look like’ in this subject?

This was a key question we explored throughout the lecture in relation to our own media practice –  knowing ‘how to’ is trivial in relation to other ways of doing or knowing – Anyone can learn how to ‘drive’ Final Cut, it’s what you do with it that you should spend time thinking about it.

Immersion- being guided by some ideas not ‘content’ (what is it to work in the network? What is the network? What counts as knowledge NOW and how do I make and recognise it?

3. Rhizomes and Tree’s

Adrian made what seemed like an abstract connection between knowledge and tree’s but after his explanation, I see the relationship between knowledge and the light and height that tree’s suggest. The ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’ in bible suggests:

God tells the man that he may eat the fruit of any of the trees in the garden except that of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Genesis 2 ends with a note that the man and woman “were naked and felt no shame”. A talking snake subsequently tempts the woman to eat the fruit with the promise of knowledge. The woman and the man both eat, become aware of their nakedness and make coverings for themselves. God, aware that the first humans now have knowledge, banishes them from the garden lest they eat from the Tree of Life and become like the gods.

It is not clear what kind of knowledge is involved, but the three major candidates are: (1) knowledge of everything, through the mental capacities which lead to human culture; (2) moral capacity; and (3) sexual knowledge, since the man and woman recognise their nakedness on eating the fruit.

Metaphors of tree’s – light, height, seeds of an idea, hierarchy, branching off – what does this mean about knowledge?

Rhizome - a continuously growing horizontal underground stem that puts out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals.

If a rhizome is separated into pieces, each piece may be able to give rise to a new plant. Think of it like a potato, it doesn’t have a centre. Underground, in the dark, tumours. There is no seed, it ‘makes do’ – its not flat, its about passage and associations, and relations between the parts. There are peaks and intensities.

What did I learn, or more fittingly, how will I apply this to my practice?

Be ephemeral, noisy and tactical in my approach to creativity, throw ‘reason’ and ‘rules’ away and start to take risks that break the ‘rules’ because the rules are made to be broken and breaking them means doing something different, its not about a privileged centre but about thinking about whole bits and how they relate to each other. 

DUSTKIDS

Also, another interesting question to marinate over…

What would the world be like without Google? Has Google made everything to easy?