Ben asks “Is it even worth pretending that the journey is present without a destination, narrative or purpose but just because?”. Of course it is. It is a wander, or a stroll, rather than the walk to work. Or a reverie, sitting by a river waiting for whatever might be, rather than walking along the river cataloguing steps, trees, birds, mammals, fish. And semantics? What knowledges do we (humans) have that are non linguistic? Let alone all the knowledges that are not human?
Another way, all traditional media has a end (this is a material fact), and perhaps this is why they feel obligated to seem like they know where they are going? But if our media doesn’t have an end, what then, would you do in/with it? What if instead of the linearity of the page we had circular books? Looping movies? (This is not actually very complicated, music has been comfortable with this for a very long time.)
Circles, Not Lines
Ben asks “Is it even worth pretending that the journey is present without a destination, narrative or purpose but just because?”. Of course it is. It is a wander, or a stroll, rather than the walk to work. Or a reverie, sitting by a river waiting for whatever might be, rather than walking along the river cataloguing steps, trees, birds, mammals, fish. And semantics? What knowledges do we (humans) have that are non linguistic? Let alone all the knowledges that are not human?
Another way, all traditional media has a end (this is a material fact), and perhaps this is why they feel obligated to seem like they know where they are going? But if our media doesn’t have an end, what then, would you do in/with it? What if instead of the linearity of the page we had circular books? Looping movies? (This is not actually very complicated, music has been comfortable with this for a very long time.)
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Adrian Miles
Adrian Miles is a Senior Lecturer in New Media and currently the Program Director of the Bachelor of Media and Communication Honours research studio at RMIT, in Melbourne, Australia. He has also been a senior new media researcher in the InterMedia Lab at the University of Bergen, Norway. His academic research on hypertext and networked interactive video has been widely published and his applied digital projects have been exhibited internationally. Adrian's research interests include hypertext and hypermedia, appropriate pedagogies for new media education, digital video poetics, and the use of Deleuzean philosophy in the context of digital poetics. He was the first or second person in the world to videoblog.
March 6, 2017
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