A Flounder on the Floor
Peter van der Sluijs
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_flounder_on_the_floor.JPG)
As a teacher I feel like I’m really floundering around in this studio at the moment. I’ve realised that the Offenburg collaboration is interesting, and provocative in all sorts of ways (around ownership, authorship, collaboration, and what Timothy Morton calls the ‘strange stranger’ (read the wikiededia page), the pragmatics of sharing across institutions, time zones, countries, university schedules, languages, pedagogical variations), but it has also diverted the studio in ways I haven’t been able to wrangle. What I mean by that is the work we are making through the collaboration is scattered, a meshwork, and so on. I’m realising this very much now, but my approach and what I’d describe as my framing narrative for the studio was to use making of poetic observational documentaries as a way to learn how to find and begin to understand the interconnectedness of things. Of things in meshworks. However, since my framing narrative was about refining this iteratively and progressively and the project is not this, it is flat and meshy, what I’ve been trying to do has sat sideways and not really grokked with the practice.
This, I could say, is a beautiful failure. Beautiful because it makes apparent the role (the imperial or colonising manner and nature) of narrative. Because I had my internal ‘framing narrative’ this, like most stories, took precedence over the day to day lived experience of the studio. Instead of noticing that and shifting my narrative I kept trying to find ways to bring our lived learning experience back into the narrative. (I realise I have talked endlessly in our studio about not doing this, and about the ‘black box of practice’, and the ‘black box of learning’, but clearly I am not immune to the solicitations of narrative. I also know enough about myself that while I am a lateral and associative thinker who is comfortable and adept at disrupting assumptions I get very stuck and flummoxed by unexpected change or variation.)
Where’s the beauty? In recognising and beginning to understand (to learn from) this. I know it seems a cliche, but learning really is about the process and eventfulness of the activity (to learn, it is active), rather than what you have learned. To have risked sharing work in the manner that you all are doing. To surrender some of your agency and desire to control and, how ever which way it might happen, to have learnt something for and about yourself in that experience.
But the floundering. I’m at a bit of a loss. This week I’m happy to admit the reflective drawings did not do a lot. Sometimes they reveal a lot, this time not much. The first series was an effort to make visible in different ways (we as a group generally write, not draw, so changing our material of practice often causes a ‘making strange’ that shows things that writing doesn’t) what the studio has been, the second explicitly wanted to use the idea of actors and networks. What is evident in the drawings is that specificity matters. These should have been influenced by the writing that we started with, what needed to happen for what you wanted to learn to occur. This was to be shared via blogs, but it seems five people have done this. We have spent a crazy amount of time discussing and I thought realising that you can only learn (only learn) by doing. Since none of this is shared I have no way of knowing if it has been done, or of what you think you need to do. This means I have no way of knowing what could, might, ought to happen in the studio to help with this. The frustration, or floundering and confusion is the gap between asking you to do and it not happening. I honestly do not know how or where your learning will happen if you do not do acts of making concrete, of making real, what you think. This is the essence of ‘to make’, homo faber.
Taras wants to reconsider and deepen her knowledge of editing. This is such an immense skill, and one that is so easy to achieve. Draft early, edit all the way to the end, repeat. Pay close attention to what your bits are doing, both by themselves and in relation to each other (editing is a deeply, intimately, relational practice). There are books that help but in my experience those that are good have just done a lot, and I mean a lot, of editing. Here there is no magic bullet, it is earned by hard deep experience.
Similarly Jack picks up two key things from the studio. The first is about how to bring things into new constellations, new relations. This is, like Taras, a variety of editing, or collage, or montage. You can do this deliberately, make machines/systems that do it for you, or just rely on happenstance. The second is for your media to become a medium. To be as comfortable in audio or video or both as you are with words. How often to do you make with it? For what ends? (How many of us make a ten second film just because, versus doodle or write a shopping list? How many of us are happy to cross out or delete words and write them again, yet are happy with one take of a view?) Make, and then write about what you make. Review your own work in your blog. This is the way to accelerate this (because like making writing forces you to externalise what you think).
Ellie, eventually, arrives at the elegant “think, blog, meditate“. What happens if this is not a sequence or three different things but three variations on one thing? (I certainly think writing is thinking and so why not do that in a blog? I also think you can meditate on things in writing.)
Louis has developed a complex, troubling, sophisticated, and probably (hopefully) life long question and project. (I’m serious. This is a big agenda.) The deep beauty of this is concealed in the distance between “cinematically coded and one that is just me trying to tell it as it is”, at some point or moment this becomes a distance that no longer matters. Why or how it no longer matters, that’s a profound experience. It could be because just telling it how it is deeply cinematic because you now think in this medium. It could be that you understand that telling it as it is trumps cinematic conceit. It could be something else. But it seriously matters.
Lucas has a list, a too long list. My advice. Don’t decide importance first. Do, then decide what matters.
Homo Faber
A Flounder on the Floor Peter van der Sluijs
A Flounder on the Floor
Peter van der Sluijs
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_flounder_on_the_floor.JPG)
As a teacher I feel like I’m really floundering around in this studio at the moment. I’ve realised that the Offenburg collaboration is interesting, and provocative in all sorts of ways (around ownership, authorship, collaboration, and what Timothy Morton calls the ‘strange stranger’ (read the wikiededia page), the pragmatics of sharing across institutions, time zones, countries, university schedules, languages, pedagogical variations), but it has also diverted the studio in ways I haven’t been able to wrangle. What I mean by that is the work we are making through the collaboration is scattered, a meshwork, and so on. I’m realising this very much now, but my approach and what I’d describe as my framing narrative for the studio was to use making of poetic observational documentaries as a way to learn how to find and begin to understand the interconnectedness of things. Of things in meshworks. However, since my framing narrative was about refining this iteratively and progressively and the project is not this, it is flat and meshy, what I’ve been trying to do has sat sideways and not really grokked with the practice.
This, I could say, is a beautiful failure. Beautiful because it makes apparent the role (the imperial or colonising manner and nature) of narrative. Because I had my internal ‘framing narrative’ this, like most stories, took precedence over the day to day lived experience of the studio. Instead of noticing that and shifting my narrative I kept trying to find ways to bring our lived learning experience back into the narrative. (I realise I have talked endlessly in our studio about not doing this, and about the ‘black box of practice’, and the ‘black box of learning’, but clearly I am not immune to the solicitations of narrative. I also know enough about myself that while I am a lateral and associative thinker who is comfortable and adept at disrupting assumptions I get very stuck and flummoxed by unexpected change or variation.)
Where’s the beauty? In recognising and beginning to understand (to learn from) this. I know it seems a cliche, but learning really is about the process and eventfulness of the activity (to learn, it is active), rather than what you have learned. To have risked sharing work in the manner that you all are doing. To surrender some of your agency and desire to control and, how ever which way it might happen, to have learnt something for and about yourself in that experience.
But the floundering. I’m at a bit of a loss. This week I’m happy to admit the reflective drawings did not do a lot. Sometimes they reveal a lot, this time not much. The first series was an effort to make visible in different ways (we as a group generally write, not draw, so changing our material of practice often causes a ‘making strange’ that shows things that writing doesn’t) what the studio has been, the second explicitly wanted to use the idea of actors and networks. What is evident in the drawings is that specificity matters. These should have been influenced by the writing that we started with, what needed to happen for what you wanted to learn to occur. This was to be shared via blogs, but it seems five people have done this. We have spent a crazy amount of time discussing and I thought realising that you can only learn (only learn) by doing. Since none of this is shared I have no way of knowing if it has been done, or of what you think you need to do. This means I have no way of knowing what could, might, ought to happen in the studio to help with this. The frustration, or floundering and confusion is the gap between asking you to do and it not happening. I honestly do not know how or where your learning will happen if you do not do acts of making concrete, of making real, what you think. This is the essence of ‘to make’, homo faber.
Taras wants to reconsider and deepen her knowledge of editing. This is such an immense skill, and one that is so easy to achieve. Draft early, edit all the way to the end, repeat. Pay close attention to what your bits are doing, both by themselves and in relation to each other (editing is a deeply, intimately, relational practice). There are books that help but in my experience those that are good have just done a lot, and I mean a lot, of editing. Here there is no magic bullet, it is earned by hard deep experience.
Similarly Jack picks up two key things from the studio. The first is about how to bring things into new constellations, new relations. This is, like Taras, a variety of editing, or collage, or montage. You can do this deliberately, make machines/systems that do it for you, or just rely on happenstance. The second is for your media to become a medium. To be as comfortable in audio or video or both as you are with words. How often to do you make with it? For what ends? (How many of us make a ten second film just because, versus doodle or write a shopping list? How many of us are happy to cross out or delete words and write them again, yet are happy with one take of a view?) Make, and then write about what you make. Review your own work in your blog. This is the way to accelerate this (because like making writing forces you to externalise what you think).
Ellie, eventually, arrives at the elegant “think, blog, meditate“. What happens if this is not a sequence or three different things but three variations on one thing? (I certainly think writing is thinking and so why not do that in a blog? I also think you can meditate on things in writing.)
Louis has developed a complex, troubling, sophisticated, and probably (hopefully) life long question and project. (I’m serious. This is a big agenda.) The deep beauty of this is concealed in the distance between “cinematically coded and one that is just me trying to tell it as it is”, at some point or moment this becomes a distance that no longer matters. Why or how it no longer matters, that’s a profound experience. It could be because just telling it how it is deeply cinematic because you now think in this medium. It could be that you understand that telling it as it is trumps cinematic conceit. It could be something else. But it seriously matters.
Lucas has a list, a too long list. My advice. Don’t decide importance first. Do, then decide what matters.
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.
May 17, 2017
Commentary
learning