Lucas is thinking about materiality and ideas. This was talked about in the studio, what or how can an idea be something material? The more provocative, and maybe useful (I don’t know) proposition is that ideas only matter when they are material. In that sentence material means they are seen or can be described as something that is doing something. That is, they have agency. In this conception even if the idea is thought to be immaterial they only come to matter when they do things, and by definition (in the sorts of things we’re reading) doing something means it acts and if it acts it will always leave a trail, evidence if like, of this acting. No evidence, no trail (of whatever type), then there has been no action. No action, means no actor. No actor, nothing has happened. Lucas is thinking about just what sort of agency and thing an idea has, and how that might influence what and how you make. They’re good problems.
Lydia has ideas sketched for the next part of the project. These are ideas becoming actions and leaving trails. IN this case a mind map.
Louis takes up the idea of constraint. Constraint in this sense is simply a way to make an idea an action. A thing. It becomes concrete and real or actual through its performance. He offers a bullet point list too.
Nora thinks about convivial making. Yes, enjoy your projects (surely), but also what is it to be convivial toward your unseen Offenburg partners? Convivial toward the topic or theme, the thing, you are looking at, and convivial toward your media, your practice?
In a similar vein Jack thinks about what happens if the world really is clamouring and unruly, and what (if any) obligations documentary might then have toward this. (Keeping in mind documentary might decide it has none.) How to make with, not about? That’s such a hard one isn’t it?
Ideas are Things
Lucas is thinking about materiality and ideas. This was talked about in the studio, what or how can an idea be something material? The more provocative, and maybe useful (I don’t know) proposition is that ideas only matter when they are material. In that sentence material means they are seen or can be described as something that is doing something. That is, they have agency. In this conception even if the idea is thought to be immaterial they only come to matter when they do things, and by definition (in the sorts of things we’re reading) doing something means it acts and if it acts it will always leave a trail, evidence if like, of this acting. No evidence, no trail (of whatever type), then there has been no action. No action, means no actor. No actor, nothing has happened. Lucas is thinking about just what sort of agency and thing an idea has, and how that might influence what and how you make. They’re good problems.
Lydia has ideas sketched for the next part of the project. These are ideas becoming actions and leaving trails. IN this case a mind map.
Louis takes up the idea of constraint. Constraint in this sense is simply a way to make an idea an action. A thing. It becomes concrete and real or actual through its performance. He offers a bullet point list too.
Nora thinks about convivial making. Yes, enjoy your projects (surely), but also what is it to be convivial toward your unseen Offenburg partners? Convivial toward the topic or theme, the thing, you are looking at, and convivial toward your media, your practice?
In a similar vein Jack thinks about what happens if the world really is clamouring and unruly, and what (if any) obligations documentary might then have toward this. (Keeping in mind documentary might decide it has none.) How to make with, not about? That’s such a hard one isn’t it?
Related
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.
April 18, 2017
Commentary
actors, materiality