Today, I talked a little bit about how you might want to display your photography projects and I just saw this site called issuu that allows you to create digital books with photographs. The students in Brian’s studio on photography used it last semester to display their work, which you can look at here.
When you have finished your task four project can everyone please submit a thirty second preview in video format to be used for the studio presentation on the 26th of October.
Please clearly label your file with your name and the name of your project and place in the FINAL PROJECT PREVIEWS FOR EXHIBITION folder by midnight on Friday the 20th of October.
Mia, Molly, Chloe and Michael as our exhibition and website team will edit these together for our presentation.
As part of your submission for task four you need to write a final reflection which is:
A substantial blog post which considers and reflects on what you’ve learnt throughout the semester. You should critically assesses your studio experience, your own performance and, the success of your final project in relation to the noticing process(es) you employed. This post should make connections between research, project and practice.
This reflection is substantial because you need to combine a reflection on your experience of the studio as a whole and your final task four project. So, really it should be at least double the length of the reflections you have written so far throughout the semester.
In today’s Wednesday workshop we will return to the questions we posed at the beginning of the semester about noticing to see how far we have come, and this might provide a starting point for you to start drafting your reflection on your experience throughout the semester. These questions were posed in response to the John Mason reading:
The first question should be something you can all answer now through your projects, where your final reflection will really be about articulating, and answering –
How do the ways of making media you have developed throughout the semester allow you to see the unseen?
A nice thing to come out of this studio and semester is a way of making media which allows you and those viewing your work to see the unseen. So, how well does your work allow this to happen?
Please remember that a reflection allows you to be critical of your work and if you know there are things not quite working it’s great to reflect on that – we rarely make perfect work. So, what does your work not do so well? Why? How could you improve it, or think about it differently?
In response to the studio’s aims you might want to ask yourself –
And lastly in terms of reflecting on task four return to your “biggest thing” that you wanted to know or learn through doing this task. Has making this project allowed you to know what you wanted to know? How? What else did you learn through the process?
It was great to see where your task four projects are up to today, where I think you’re all doing some really excellent explorations in noticing. The main thing for you to do is keep writing and reflecting on moments of discovery and shifts in the progression of your project for your portfolio of blog posts that is part of the assessment for task four.
So, a quick reminder, from the task four submission guidelines that you must submit:
A portfolio of blog posts from weeks 9-13 which include documentation of your project, including, although not limited to; recipes, media, tests and sketches, and reflections on studio discussions, readings, and feedback received. The amount of blog posts will be decided by you in response to the feedback you received for Task One, Two and Three.
So, as we are two to three weeks into this task, there should be lots of thinking documented on your blog, where responding to feedback received today and in next Thursdays workshop should make up posts in your portfolio.
Some other things to reflect on that came out of today’s consultations are thinking about:
Another thing that came up regarded thinking about the form your task four project will take as one of the assessment criteria points is:
How well you project creatively and technically responds to noticing as a media idea in form
A lot of you talked about doing different edits of your work which I would highly encourage, as it will allow you to see how different ways of ordering or positioning media influences what we notice. Please note that you can submit multiple final projects that allow you and your audience to notice unseen things.
In today’s workshop (week 11 Wednesday) I will introduce you to a piece of software called Korsakow. Korsakow is a piece of software that authors interactive video pieces, yet can provide a tool to notice.
We will be completing this exercise using Korsakow.
Unlike, other editing programs such as Premiere or Final Cut, where you create fixed sequences between video parts, in Korsakow you create possible relations between video parts. What I mean by possible relations is that while you create rules, through a tagging system, which constrains what video parts can possibly connect to each other, there is an unpredictable quality to the software which allows you to notice visual resonances between parts which you may not have noticed.
The exercise we will be doing in class today will be downloading this demo version of Korsakow.
From here, we will import in some media we have (preferably from our task four projects) and export a random Korsakow film to see what we notice when the software creates relations between parts.
Some of you might find Korsakow a suitable tool for you to use for your final projects, while for the rest of you it might allow you to notice new things in your media objects.
Here are examples of some Korsakow films that have been made (you made to download and/or enable the Adobe Flash Plugin in your browsers):
My film Sometimes I See Palm Trees
Matt Soar’s Ceci N’est Pas Embres
Matt Soar’s Fibonacci Film
Florian Thalhofer’s Forgotton Flags
Florian Thalhofer’s Planet Galata
Adrian Miles’s Fragments
And there are more to find on the showcase page of the Korsakow 6 site here and the Korsakow 5 site here.
We’ll see how much we get through today and might continue in next Wednesday’s workshop.
In last week’s Thursday class I introduced some ideas from some theorists who think about the world as precarious, changing and indeterminate. What I would like you to think about as you draw closer to the end of task four is how your way of noticing might allow you to see some of the complexities of the world. This is the final aim of the studio so it’s important for you to reflect on this on your blogs.
Here are some questions which we’ll talk about in today’s class that might give you some direction:
How might your project evolve in concert with the dynamic environment around you? (Gibson, Changescapes)
What do you think “patchy landscapes,” “multiple temporalities” and “shifting assemblages of humans and nonhumans” might mean? (Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World)
Does what you’re doing for task four allow you to look around rather than ahead? (Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World)
Will your task four allow you notice neglected things? What do you think they might be? (Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World)
If your task four, is about inhabiting a space or noticing in a particular environment, what are the particular qualities of that environment you come to be aware of through simply being there? (Stewart, Atmospheric Attunements)
What will you be tuning into through the making of your project? (Pickering, The Mangle of Practice)
If you tune into something unexpected does your project have the flexibility to adjust? (Pickering, The Mangle of Practice)
There were lots of questions in Wednesday’s studio class on what the portfolio of blog posts should be and how much it should contain.
For one, your first post should document the exercise we did in last Thursday’s workshop, as you will need to come back to your biggest thing in your end of studio reflection.
Following this post, think of using your timeline as a guide to writing your blog posts. Every time you do one of your smaller things reflect on it by describing what you did, what you learnt through doing this and how this will lead you on to your next thing smaller thing. Treat last Thursday’s exercise as your guide which leads you to finishing your project.
Use your blog to document and reflect on the decisions you’ve made and any shifts in your project – what led you from one idea to another? You need to show that you’re thinking about your making and there shouldn’t be any complete changes in your project that aren’t justified.
Along the way find research which relates to what your doing, embed your media in your blog and include any screenshots of your progress.
Remember that your blogs are yours to think through what you’re doing and what you’re making – make them useful to you!
In today’s Thursday workshop we talked about the relationship the projects we are making might have with the world. Here are some slides which reference what we talked about. The main thing to be thinking about is if the world is messy, indeterminate, precarious and entangled how do these ways of noticing better attend to this world? This should be a question that you ask yourselves and explore on your blog.
This question reflects the final aim of the studio which is:
to create media artefacts which come closer to performing the complexity of the changing world around us.
To think about this try not attributing a meaning to your work but leaving it open for someone to experience, sense or embody. The media you make might allow someone to sense and notice new things in the world around them that far exceed meaning.
While there are no readings from week 10-12, here is a list of readings that you might want to consider to think about the relationship between what you’re making and the world:
Gibson, Ross. “Changescapes – An Introduction.” Changescapes: Complexity, Mutability, Aesthetics. UWA Publishing, 2015. Pp. 1-20.
Miles, Adrian. The Gentleness of the Comma and the Violence of Story. Adrian Miles – Academia.edu, 2017, https://www.academia.edu/19067331/The_Gentleness_of_the_Comma_and_the_Violence_of_Story.
Pickering, Andrew. “The Mangle of Practice” The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. University of Chicago Press, 1995. Pp. 1-27.
Stewart, Kathleen. “Atmospheric Attunements.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 29, no. 3, 2011, pp. 445–453.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. “Arts of Noticing.” The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. 2015. Pp. 11-26.
Most of these are available at the RMIT library or via the links provided. I will make a photocopy of Changescapes for you shortly.
For the week 11 consultations you should bring in a “rough cut” of your task four assessment. As noted your projects might take various forms so bring what you consider to be a “rough cut” of what you’re making.
You will also need to show where you’re up to on your timeline and how your work is responding to the biggest, big, and small things you wrote out in week 9.
You will need to show where your portfolio of blog posts is up to and what research is informing your making.
Like our week 7 consultations these will be done in small groups.
Please book into a consultation time via this form.
As noted in Wednesday’s workshop Chloe, Mia, Michael and Molly will be working on the end of year studio presentation & website. I’ve given you all access to update the studio exhibition blog, which you can find here.
Some info from Paul Ritchard…
Presentation
Each studio will put together an 8 minute (no more) presentation summing up the journey of the studio over the semester. The exact nature of the presentation will be developed by the students. It could contain:
Website
