Q3. “D’Est” – Chantal Akerman
I was interested in Chantal Akerman’s D’Est and the way the filmmaking process and what is being represented on screen become one through the participant’s reactions to the camera as it pans across them. Their reactions (e.g. whether they look at or away from the camera, follow it, or ignore its presence altogether) is very telling of the situation and the people being represented. I think it captures the essence of why we call them participants – it is arguably impossible to objectively capture or document the behaviour of someone, so instead, it can be a better and a more honest representation if the viewer can see how the participants interact and adapt to the filmmaking process. This style and technique might have been useless if documenting the state of living in a different part of the world, or at a different time, or during a certain event. If I were to employ the same approach in an attempt to document what it is like to live in Collingwood, for example, people would interact differently with the camera, perhaps be more self-conscious, or showy, or questioning of the filmmakers.

Q4. “The Idea of the North” – Glenn Gould
I listened to this with the question in mind of “does it give you an idea of being there?” and I think it does. The first 3 minutes, of overlayed dialogue, does well to draw you in to personal stories, revealing the variations in people’s experiences and perceptions of ‘the North’. I think the sound is layered and the focus shifted to shed light on each person’s story. After the official introduction, I think the background sound of the train which underpins the dialogue is an effective way of making the listener feel as though they’re on their way to the North, taking them on the journey as well, so to speak. Although, I do think this dragged on a little and becomes a bit too comfortable – cutting out that background train-on-the-tracks sound effect could give more emphasis to particular points of the participant’s stories. But overall, yes, I think it gives the listener an impression of being there, or at least the feeling of making their way.

Q5. W1 Tutorial Sound Recordings
The first of Molly’s and my recordings is a little too undirected to really evoke any kind of location. There are some mutterings of conversation, and some very faint tapping sounds but the microphone wasn’t directed enough to really capture this and create any sense of story or location. The only thing that really comes through is the announcement of the PA – an automated female voice that echoes. This offers some association with a clinical environment, like a waiting room with cold tiles and bland, monochrome surrounds. To emphasise this, we could record other sounds found in that kind of environment such as typing noises, doors opening and closing, a clock ticking, people coughing etc.

The next two recordings could be coupled together as they both sound sort of youthful, because they include recordings of pop music, and people playing pool and speaking casually with one another. This sounds like a canteen hall, or bar – something kind of run-down because the music is sort of scratchy and stops at intervals. This evokes images of dirty bar rooms, with vintage music posters and splattered beer around – the kinds of things you’d find in an old, local pub. To enhance this sense of place, I would suggest recording sounds like that of beers being poured, more background chatter, laughter, maybe some more directed sounds such as sports commentary coming through a TV and cheers.

This week’s reading was Steve Dietz on the Ten Dreams of Technology.

Dietz describes ten ideals shared amongst authors/curators when using technology as it intersects with artistic practice. These are: symbiosis, emergence, immersion, world peace, transparency, flows, open work, other, new art and hacking.

As we near the end of the semester and thus the end of the Networked Media course, it seems as good a time as any to reflect on how we may have tried to achieve some of these ideals, and how close we’ve gotten.

I feel that through the niki we’ve tried to achieve flow and a sense of openness. The setup of the niki as an assessment task certainly invites both of these, and I feel that through my collaborations in creating the Geocities page we’ve achieved both. However, as a collective, we are still entrenched in the habit of holding onto our work until we feel it is completely polished.

This may be a force of habit, after years of only ever submitting our best drafts of essays and projects. However, it may also be due to the nature of the internet and how it arguably fosters or enables a culture of hostility and aggression towards people’s work and opinion. Although this usually relates to forums, it does instill a fear of being judged when publishing rough or unfinished work online.

But, at the end of the day, even the most polished work can, does and should provoke a response from it’s audience (flow) – which is usually a sign of thoughtful, progressive or innovative thinking and/or practice.

The thing we probably haven’t quite yet achieved or even started to achieve is new art, as I’m yet to see a student in the NM course produce something truly new and innovative. Though it’s early days.

The ideas I took away from this weeks unsymposium were mostly to do with the idea of the web being democratic…

Elliott said he thought the difference between democratic and not is mediation vs. protocol. He claims everyone has access to protocol so yes, in that sense it is democratic. A mediator would have to exist for it not to be democratic, such as the Great Firewall of China, but that’s not what Galloway is referring to.

Jasmine thought Galloway was trying to say that the internet isn’t as chaotic as people think it is, it’s organised through protocols and if these protocols were centralised and hierarchised they would fail. But they’re not and thus they are adaptable and that’s how things work.

Adrian thinks the web has never been democratic, because it was made by a bunch of wealthy white peeps in Cali (first world), but it is flat e.g. you can send emails to anyone, any time, anywhere.

I think there’s something in both arguments. The internet is designed as sort of a ‘people’s medium’ in that we can access it – but I agree with Adrian that this is more about flat-ness rather than democracy, as there are still issues of accessibility that link to privilege which keep it from being truly democratic or non-hierarchical.

Some key take away ideas from this week’s lecture:

Jasmine said that her takeaway idea from the Galloway reading was that more powerful hubs can disintegrate and others proliferate – I agree this was one of the key ideas in the reading. Elliot stated that it was important to determine the limitations of a network as well as the opportunities for growth.

There was a lot of talk about technological determinism – Adrian said that you need to understand that the thing you think you’re in charge of has agency, before arguing that technology develops technique. He stated that technique is a response to technology, and a technical apparatus defines what we do.

I think this  is a fair call, however I think it is more cyclical than that.

I was watching a documentary a while back on Pixar and animation (which one it was I can’t quite remember, but I’ll try to recall it later) and one of the animators explained that “Art inspires technology, and technology challenges the art”. I think this is a truer statement of how we engage with technology and use it creatively – afterall why would we develop technology if we hadn’t been trying to get it to do something it wasn’t able to do?

This week’s unsymposium focused closely on the idea of constrained vs. unlimited networks, and scale-free networks.

Elliot touched on Barabasi and the comparisons between unlimited vs. unlimited networks in answering our question “does the network have a centre? Or do we create centres for our own networks?”. Jasmine agreed in saying that “the network” doesn’t necessarily have a centre, but there are more heavily weighted nodes. For example there are some sites we visit more than others.

Brian sort of extrapolated from this to emphasise networks as being dynamic – growing and evolving all the time. This linked into Adrian’s reminder that in the Networked Media course we are looking at scale-free networks like the internet which do not have constraints. They’re limitless and are always growing and shifting, unfixed by ultimate powers (nodes).

Adrian went into the idea of ‘heritage’ media e.g. newspapers, TV, which are centralised media – they stem from TV towers, printing presses etc whereas the internet doesn’t come from any such centralised source. There is no main server – there are ‘hubs’, and if any of these fail, the others will route around the failed one to overcome its failure. It’s designed to avoid such problems inherent to centralised media networks. Ahh, the glories of the internet…

This fed into some ideas we were considering in class today, relating to the Galloway reading, that despite the ideological idea that the internet is this wonderfully open, free, non-hierarchical network, it’s users do not support the democratic affordances of the web as a network as most of us still flock to the same search engines, link to the same websites that we feel are most popular and notable, and connect via the same platforms. That’s a bit of a generalisation, but I feel it’s a warranted one, and Jasmine sort of touched on this in the lecture today as well. Through this, the network of the web then serves to give power to the big players of the internet e.g. Google, Facebook which become very powerful as informational hubs.

The good news here is that it isn’t concrete and the network isn’t necessarily monopolised by these key players/powers. As Brian said, the network is always growing and evolving, and so the power still shifts around somewhat. I think ultimately, the common idea that the internet is a democratised platform for its users is flawed in that there are still powers at play and ‘consumers’ of the internet serve as nodes which feed into other, more heavily connected nodes such that they become more powerful.

Adrian also mentioned that all you need is something like 3 heavily weighted hubs in a network and it becomes 6 degrees of separation. Wonder if he’s ever played The Wiki Game?

This week’s reading was on Manovich’s “Database as Symbolic Form”.

He suggests that we have moved away from old media objects such as the novel, the cinema etc. which have some sort of romanticism tied to it and are the quintessential expression of a cultural narrative. The new age, modern equivalent: the database. Manovich argues that we undoubtedly want to “develop the poetics, aesthetics and ethics of this database” such that it isn’t just a cold, culture-less proliferation of texts, images and other data that are void of structure.

I think it’s interesting how as a society of people we feel compelled to do this in order to determine and appoint a cultural value to something. It’s not enough for it to exist in an unstructured way, things have to have solid meaning and cultural value.

It sort of links back to what Adrian was saying the lecture in Week 7, about how publishing as an industry will not die. It will become governemnt-subsidised like all  other industries that have some kind of cultural value yet are seemingly less commercially viable e.g. the theatre, opera. At the time I though well sure, that’s true for things like books and theatre and opera which have a romantic sort of past. But then in class (that same day if I’m right), we took a look at CowBird. This site was particularly unique in that it preserved the open web format for sharing stories and doesn’t have an app (shock! horror!). The site claims that Apps are destined for obsolescence and will be the CD-ROMs of tomorrow.

But why? Why does one form of new technology (CD-ROMs being relatively new) cultivate less cultural importance than others? Why are open web formats more culturally important or romantic than apps and CD-ROMs. And why do we feel we need to arrange databases in an attempt to adorn it with such meaning?

I’ve been thinking about it over the last couple of weeks and I can’t think of an answer just yet. It may be one of those “only time will tell matters” or I may need to sharpen my ‘speculative think’ tools :/