week updates | Seeing the Unseen

some things to think about when writing your final reflection…

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:

How do you develop the skill of purposefully noticing?
Is noticing a negative thing?
Different people notice different things, so what influences people to be selective of different things?
Can noticing be personal and circumstantial?

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 –

How well have I grasped noticing as an experimental approach to making nonfiction?
How well have I explored the creative possibilities of making media outside of traditional linear production methods?
How do the media artefacts I have made (particularly task four) come close to performing the complexity of the changing world around me?

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?

October 5, 2017
week updates
consultations, form, noticing, questions, reflection, week 11

week 11 – some thing that came out of today’s consultations

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:

What does the work you’re creating allow you to notice?
Why does noticing these things matter?
How are you going to allow an audience to notice unseen things through the form your work takes?
How does the wide shot and the extreme closeup allow you to see unseen qualities?
How much are you controlling what is noticed through the technologies you are using?

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.

your portfolio of blog posts

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!

Week 10 – what do your projects allow you to do…

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.

what we did: week nine

Week nine was all about task four. If you haven’t read through the task please do so now.

Some things to note about task four –

Your portfolio of blog posts should document the development of your project and refer to other media, readings and materials which help you think about what you’re doing.
Your final project does not need to be one media piece it can be a collection of smaller media pieces, an interactive work or something else. The important thing is that you can justify why your work is in the particular form it is.
You will be marked on the creative and technical quality of your project in relation to content (what the work shows) and form (how you’ve assembled your media together).
The form of your project can evolve iteratively in response to the media you collect (just make sure you leave yourself enough time to think through this)
Make sure you give yourself enough time at the end (after you’ve completed your task) to write a comprehensive reflection on the task and your progression through the studio.

After going through task four we discussed some different creative possibilities for the form of your task. We looked and listened to a series of forms including: video art, sound collage, new media art, installation art and mobile media works. Our discussion revolved around considering what natural and unnatural might mean, how our works might create sensory experiences as opposed to meaning and how showing your work as a mobile media piece might create a more intimate experience with noticing media.

You can find the slides and examples of these different creative possibilities on these slides, as well as a timeline for the rest of the semester.

Thursday’s workshop was all about planning your task four through the following exercise (which everyone is required to do):

BIGGEST THING – What do I want to know through doing task four?
BIG THINGS – What do I need to do to know what I want to know?
SMALL THINGS – How can I break these things I need to do into doable tasks?
Locate the risks in these doable tasks by marking them in someway and then prioritise these in your head (what don’t I know how to do already – these tasks will probably take the most time)
In your list of “small things” number these in the order you need to do them
From your numbered list of “small things” create a timeline which clearly indicates what you need to do each week leading up to submission on the 20th of October
Write a list or brainstorm of all the things which matter to your project (think of this as hash-tagging your project)
Use a combination of some of these terms to do some initial research: what readings/artworks will youlook at over the following weeks to help you think about the making of your project?
As this is a large scale project you will need to incorporate research into your portfolio of blog posts, where you might want to set yourself a set amount of readings and/or media pieces to look at over the next four weeks. Add this to your timeline.
A guideline for talking about this research might be:
- What was the research about?
- What did you find interesting?
- How might you use ideas in this research to think about your project?

For an example of what to do see Mia’s post on planning.

Everyone made themselves accountable for next week by telling me what they will bring to next Thursday’s workshop to show and get feedback on. For those that didn’t attend please add what you will bring as a comment.

Next week reminders:

Wednesday’s class will be a practical workshop in using a piece of software that allows you to make interactive media work. Make sure you bring your laptop along with some pieces of media to work with.
I will talk about the Tsing reading next week to get you thinking about the last aim of the studio which is “to create media artefacts which come closer to performing the complexity of the changing world around us”

week seven: what we did

Week seven was about thinking a little more deeply about what you’re making and allowing this to guide your refining post for your task three experiments.

Ways of thinking about what you’re making

In Wednesday’s class I gave you some prompts to respond to as a way of doing this. In pairs you discussed these questions in relation to your task three experiments. An interesting point which came through this discussion related to how much control we have over the media we produce in terms of guiding what attention is drawn to in the video or photograph. A close-up with a shallow focus guides an audience’s attention to one particular thing, whereas a wide shot allows an audience to scan a photo or video image to notice themselves. One group suggested that video allows a great degree of audience noticing because it is less selective than photography.

Essay films as experimental nonfiction

As you’ve been using noticing as a prompt to guide and inform processes of making iteratively, the essay form might be a way for you to think through noticing in the creation of the media itself.

Writing reflections

The main thing with your reflections is to show a trajectory of thought. So, your reflection is really about asking yourself “what did I learn through doing this making.” Have a look at the iterative cycle diagram in this reading or in my slides for this week. Your reflection should demonstrate that you’ve learnt through the process of doing this experiment and what is left to still learn.

Reminders

We drew numbers from a hat to decide on the running order for the pitches next week (for those who weren’t there I chose them randomly). You can find the running order here. Pitches will run from 1pm-2:20pm in our Wednesday workshop and from 8:30am-11am in our Thursday workshop. You each have 3 minutes each (no longer!). All pitches should be uploaded to this folder, where we will use the first half hour of our Wednesday class to check that everything works.

Paul Ritchard and Sophie Langley will be joining me on the panel for your pitches.

Slides that elaborate on each of these points further can be found here.

Thursday’s workshop was for student consultations. Some things that came out of these consultations…

Really try to articulate what you want to find out through doing your task four project. This is more important than knowing what your task four project will be
Think of your task four prompt as emerging out of what is left over out of your task three experiments – what do you want to build upon?

August 24, 2017
week updates
avant-doc, experiments, ivens, noticing, task 3, week 6

what we did: week six

On Wednesday, I answered your questions from week five with this lecture.

Then, I went through some of the specifics of task three. Some things to note…

You need to do three iterative cycles of prompt > making > reflecting
These cycles need to be documented on your blog and become the portfolio of posts for task three
In these posts you should be making connections between your own making and the course’s content (readings, discussion, lectures)
A good structure for your week eight pitch is then, now, next:
- then – what I did in my experiments
- now – what I have learnt about noticing through these experiments
- next – how I am going to develop these experiments into a large-scale project about noticing
Week seven’s Thursday class will be for individual group consultations. You’ll need to book into a time here.

On Thursday, I talked to you all individually about the development of your recipes. The main thing now is to do your experiments giving yourself enough time to reflect and move iteratively towards ideas for your final project.

We then discussed MacDonald’s Avant-doc reading. We discussed how there is very little difference between what is documentary and what is avant-garde and that this distinction mainly happens in the edit. For instance, H20 becomes a more contemplative exploration of the patterns water makes as opposed to a documentary that might make water its subject matter.

Finally, we did this study of movement exercised based off Ivens’s The Camera and I reading, where he obsessively captures the movements of things.

what we did: week five

In Wednesday’s class I used the questions you posed from week 4’s reading by Bettina Frankham to shape an open-form lecture unpacking relational aesthetics, categorical documentary and web documentaries.

If you missed out and/or want to find out more here is a list of articles/works I showed/referred to:
–Anika D’s article on relational aesthetics
–Lorenzo Pereira’s article on conceptual art
–Gap Toothed Women as example of categorical documentary
–Are you Happy Project? as an example of how web docs might erase the line between spectator and maker (a relational documentary)
–The Quipu Project as an example of why we might make web docs – as places to elicit participation
-This excerpt from High School as an example of mosaic structure because it accumulates facets to draw an image of high school as an institution

I then introduced Task Three where you have to use one of your questions from your refining post in task two as a prompt to conduct an experiment in noticing.

In Thursday’s class you shared your refining questions from task two and started thinking about how you might respond to this question by making. You then developed recipes for practice, which might look something like this (as an example). For Task Three you will do three iterative cycles of question > making > reflecting > from week’s 5-7 that will then lead you to developing a large scale noticing project which you will pitch in week 8 to an external panel.

I then introduced the films of James Benning, showing clips from Ten Skies and 13 Lakes. We then posed these questions in response to Panse’s “Ten Skies, 13 Lakes, 15 Pools – Structure, Immanence and Eco-Aesthetics in The Swimmer and James Benning’s Land Films.”

Finally, in pairs we did this long-take exercise based off Panse’s reading. Due in class next week.

Some reminders:

– Make sure you create a tag/category that you use for your portfolio of posts that will make up task three. If you don’t know what this means there are tutorials on Lynda in WordPress Essential Training. While your at it make a task 3 media folder in your Google submission folder.
– You get to decide how many posts you’re going to do for your portfolio based on your experiment. These posts need to cover (at minimum) your question, recipe, media you make and reflection.
– Your portfolio posts need to engage with ideas from readings and discussions.
– I will go through the criteria for task three next week, where we will look at each other’s blog posts and give feedback.

See you next week 🙂

what we did: week four

This week in Seeing the Unseen we focused on workshopping the completion of Task Two along with wrapping up the first four weeks by linking back to documentary with Bettina Frankham’s A Poetic Approach to Documentary.

In our Wednesday workshop everyone worked in their Task Two pairs to think about the differences between what we notice when we experience a place and what we notice when we go in as filmmakers. As filmmakers we often notice the rhythms, colours, patterns and movements of places that differ from what we notice when we experience a place to do something – buy groceries, catch a train. We focus in on something which creates blind spots everywhere else.

In our second workshop we discussed week four’s reading by unpacking what a poetic approach to documentary is – opening spaces for interpretation because the glue between elements is left looser. We looked at this part of Koyaanisqatsi as an example of a non-narrative poetic documentary and Attenborough’s Galapagos Islands as a more explicit documentary. In Koyaanisqatsi we are asked to contemplate the visual quality of the images, whereas in Galapagos Islands the visuals explicate the voice-over for us, not giving us space for contemplation. We talked about how we’re tempted to make stories even though we’re not given them by the film itself.

In pairs we then unpacked some of the ideas Frankham introduces; relational aesthetics, categorical structure, mosaic structure, non-narrative, narrative and webdoc. The job here was to summarise how Frankham uses the idea, find two extra sources to help expand upon that idea, find an example of that idea and provide a question. The questions which came out these discussions were:

Would the conceptual artist consider the audience when creating relational art works?
How do we apply relational aesthetics in making documentary and can these documentaries be narrative?
Does category have to be explicit?
What is the purpose of a web documentary?
What kind of audience would a webdoc attract?
In mosaic structure how do we make connections so the audience can see the bigger picture?
Does non-narrative confuse audiences?
Can noticing be non-narrative?

These will definitely be some questions we respond to next week after we have made a narrative and non-narrative piece with our media that we collected as part of Task Two. So, as a way to understand through doing the task set at the end of the workshop was this Glueing together exercise, where each of you have to construct a narrative and non-narrative out of your raw documents collected in each other’s locations.

These two one minute videos are due in Week 5’s Thursday workshop.

the glue between parts

In a poetic approach to documentary, the issue becomes one of finding the balance between offering a definitive, unquestionable single pathway at one extreme and presenting a loose collection of raw documents at the other – Frankham (145)

Based off the above quote from Bettina Frankham we will be doing an exercise based on how much glue we need between parts to make narrative and non-narrative nonfiction.

This exercise can be viewed here.