Adrain was away today and left us with a bunch of instructions to follow in the studio, we were to have a self-guided class.

‘What I would like to have happen in the studio is:

General discussion (can be in groups, or as a class) that is an explaining to yourselves what you understand ontography, ‘materialism’ and the various ideas in the readings (Bogost, Frankham, Latour) to be, questions you have (any and all questions, this is an open gathering of all questions) about what it is, their purpose, point, what to do with them. The emphasis here is on discussing and defining amongst yourselves to find all the gaps (which become questions). 

These questions are to be documented (just write them out as a list in a GoogleDoc that you share with me or on a blog post). This should take at most an hour.

Then everyone is to take one of these questions (they can be different questions, it does not matter if several people want to use the same question) and use that as an interview question (what we call a prompt) and interview everybody else in the room to get their answer. Do not include the question/prompt in the interview. The interview will be video or audio. This should be done quickly (pair up, I interview you, then you interview me, then next person, repeat).

This is quick sketch media making. Edit all the material together into a single audio or video piece. Upload to vimeo.com or soundclound. Embed in your blog.  This is an exercise in a) knowledge mapping, b) problem discovery, c) vernacular media practice, d) sketching, e) listing, f) using what we call a pattern language, g) how to make a microdoc.’

• There were a total of nine students in the studio: nice and intimate
• Sitting in the circle as a class, we discussed the task set upon us.
• Each person were asked whether or not they have any questions about what an ontograph,
• Monique noted that ‘the things only exist because we see it that way’.
• Using the Alien Phenomenology reading task as a reference point to complete our tasks, we went around and spoked about the three quotes that: what we enjoy, what troubled us and what intrigued us.
• Brainstorming the concepts and the questions that will be use as a prompt for the final product of the studio to upload to a website video or audio service provided such as SoundCloud or Vimeo, various ideas were explored.
• We went around in a circle using an iPhone to capture each person’s answer’s to the question. The question that we all chose to answer was “How do all things ‘equally exist’ but yet, ‘do not exist equally’, which was based on the quote, ‘All things exist equally, but some things exists equally.’
• My answer for the question was,
  • In George Orwell’s novel, Animal Farm, one of the seven commandments that the pigs come up with is that ‘all animals are equal’, but what they actually meant was that ‘all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.”
•  An audio recording lasting around 7 minutes was recorded on Andrea’s phone, she will be uploading the audio file to the studio’s Facebook group.

In the studio today, all students were required to be present and present their ontograph that was due in week 4. Each poster were randomly hung onto the wall and each student took turns to present depending on the order of how the poster was hung.

Everyone had a maximum of 5 minutes to discuss their ontograph, there were five questions that were could use as guide to address the ontograph, those questions were:

1. What is it about?
2. What is it doing?
3. What do you think it shows?
4. What has your thing now become?
5. Is it different to what it was before? How?

After each presentation from the student, Adrian gave a clear and brief feedback in regards to the ontograph and the presentation, providing his own perspective of the ontograph.

Unfortunately due to either time constraints or forgetfulness, Ren did not present his ontograph to the class, he may possibly present his ontograph in week 6.

Adrian noted that he will be unavailable in the Friday studio in week 5, he will be away at a symposium in Canberra. During the studio on Friday, the class will be producing a media product of an interview and must post it online to Vimeo.

From the Documentary Ontography blog, Adrian asked us to work on these tasks:

‘From the Alien Phenomenology reading (Chapter One) please bring three quotes that:

• you enjoy
• trouble you
• intrigue you’

Here are my quotes:

What I enjoyed reading:

• ‘Quentin Mellassoux has coined the term correlationism to described this view, one that holds that being exists only as a correlate between mind and world. If things exist, they do so only for us.’
• ‘The second ontological system operation of our time, social relativism, descends from the humanistic and social scientifuc traditions.’
• ‘Can machines think?’

What troubled me:

• ‘From the perspective of cultural theory instead of philosophy, the OOO strain of speculative realism might bear some resemblance to more familiar arguments against anthropocentrism (such as post-humanism).’
• ‘Posthumanism, we might conclude, is not posthuman enough.’
• ‘Bryant has suggested that flat ontology can unite the two worlds, synthesizing the human and the nonhuman into a common collective. An ontology is flat if it makes no distinction between the types of things that exist but treats all equally, the spirit behind the name Bryant gives his OOO theory, the ‘democracy of objects’. In a flat ontology, the bubbling skin of  the culinary history of the enchilada it is destined to top.’

What intrigued me:

•  ‘To proceed as a philosopher today demands the rejection of correlationism. To be a speculative realist, one must abandon the belief that human access sits at the center of being, organising and regulating it like an ontological watchmaker.’
• ‘If ontology is the philosophical study of existence, then from Harman we can derive an object-orientated ontology (or OOO for short call it ‘triple O’ for style’s sake). OOO puts things at the center of being. We humans are elements, but not the sole elements, of philosophical interest. OOO contends that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally.’
• ‘Computers often do entail human experience and perception. The human operator views words and images rendered on a display, applies physical forces to a mouse, seats memory chips into motherboard sockets.’

These are some of the images from my brainstorming session this past Saturday night. With Adrian’s get go, I was able to change the idea of my media thing. I had previously wanted to do my media thing project on the Apple’s iPhone’s application, focusing on one of those photo editing apps. I’ve realised that I couldn’t find anything on ‘what is an app?’, maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough or that I couldn’t be bothered or I wasn’t looking in the right places. I believe it’s a combination of both. I’ve decided to work on the fMRI scan for my project instead. Funny eh. I’m more interested in the fMRI scan than I am with iPhone apps. I’ve been researching more about the fMRI scan these couple of days, and have been jolting down notes.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to write down a summary of my notes in the poster by tomorrow. Well… I sort of have to… It’s due so soon!

In the studio today, everyone had to present the poster of a “thing” that they worked on during week 2. All students in my class focused on their own individual “thing”. Some “things” that were explored were light boxes, magazines, specific cameras, and screenwriting. I focused my “thing” on Apple iPhone Applications. My presentation was short and sharp, or at least I thought it was. Turns out I was wrong. There was too much generalisations around my poster. I didn’t specialise anything in my poster, that’s certainly something I got to work on in the next poster. There’s so many aspects to iPhone apps than I had originally thought.

Rocked up to class and learnt a lot about sugar. Sugar, you ask? Yes, sugar. The class had a practical exercise about the thing called “sugar”. Exploration of the word sugar was probed… What sugar is, what does it do, how does it effect us – health wise. Although it was such an everyday food item, we were asked to expand on the word sugar. For example, what does it mean, what can it do, what are the limitations, what are the ideas behind sugar, where does sugar come from?