Dead giveaway title heh.

I used to think about time the same way I understood how a clock worked, because that’s how I was raised to look at time: divided into 12 segments, each of those into another 60 mini subsections, so on and so forth. This was a very practical way to utilise and work with time as all my daily activities seemed to depend largely on what the clock dictated: 7am school, 5pm play in the park, 10pm bed. Of course I would argue when I wasn’t actually feeling tired but there seemed to be no reasoning with the clock. It was doctrine, one I never understood and hated very much, because of how systematic and unwavering it was and mostly how it seemed I couldn’t reason with it.

I come from the tropics and we have one season, hot wetness; and you could always rely on the sun going down and coming up at roughly the same time all year round, which really reflected this understanding of time that the world seems to share. However, that’s hardly how I would describe my experience of time. I doubt anyone ever truly experiences time in such a uniformed and unvaried way. They say time flies when you’re having fun but it slows down when you’re bored, and I think that has a lot to do with how time actually works. The way I see it, on some level, time flies when we don’t pay attention to it and thats when it actually behaves erratically or is relative to what we’re doing or rather our perception of what we’re doing and whether it’s something that does(nt) require strict attention. However when you start paying attention, time begins to move slowly. In a way, if you wanted to slow down time, all you’d have to do is stare at a clock all day and suddenly you’ll realise you’re living some seriously long days.

The standard way of looking at time.. it can’t be measured and standardized because each of us experiences it differently, whereas a clock is more of a measurement of Earths’ position relative to the sun, can be measured and is something we all share simultaneously. But why call it time? Isn’t it a measurement of place? Shouldn’t we be asking “where are we?” instead of “what time is it?”? We tend to look at this individual perception of time as something arbitrary or a silly notion but consider if we were taken and put on another planet where the rotation and orbit of the planet takes ten times as long as our own, would we have to adjust time to suit that yearly cycle? Does that make the average lifespan of the average person only 5-7 years? I’m just 24 cycles around the sun from the earth old. I mean there are countless examples of how our clock based understanding of time is not really good enough as there have been many experiments [for instance] where people deprive themselves of light and they lose all track of time, hours turn into days and it’s entirely disorienting. Time, I think, has a more fundamental connection to quantum mechanics. I’m not a physicist and obviously don’t have the credibility to talk about any of it but I am a science enthusiast, and the way I see it time reminded very much of the double slit experiment; when we don’t observe it, it’s just a wave of possibilities and the moment we pay attention it becomes more rigid. The way we experience time is relative to how much attention we give it.

When you quickly glance at a clock you’ll notice that the first second hand actually takes a while longer than the preceeding one. This is actually constantly happening and watching a clock is simply an easy way to observe this effect. The reason this happens is that in that quick glance our eyes still see everything that happens in-between and it takes a moment for our brains to quickly analyse the information. The more information we process in a shorter period of time, affects our perception of time. The quicker we can process all this information may well have a direct correlation to how much control we can have over time, if you can for arguments sake process information at or near the brains processing equivalent of the speed of light, you could potentially exist in your own little time bubble where everything around you becomes extremely slow. Clearly the human brain can’t actually process things instantaneously, but perhaps there are ways to speed it up exponentially. I believe that “the zone” is a very real example of how humans are able to harness this idea of having some diction over time, by processing so much information in such a small windows of time that they perform tasks to their full potential almost seamlessly.

I reckon it’d be pretty sweet if we could have that kind of control over time wilfully. Or maybe I just spend too much time thinking and need to get out more.

This thought has been bugging me more than I like, might be worth looking into some ideas to test this huhu

I noticed the word justice appear a fair amount in the last couple of weeks in my life. The new JLA movie came out, we did a documentary/comic about it for The Art of Persuasion, and it’s deeply embedded in social democracy which I have to read about in my Global Political Economy class. Justice is a pretty strange thing.. it gives the impression of purity and goodwill, but justice isn’t the same around the world. Justice varies from society to society and from one situation to the other and what you might find as an injustice here is commonplace in another. Can there really be a sort of universal code? Why hasn’t one been written that can exist in the contemporary world that can be accepted by all? But perhaps thats is a line of thought for another day.

My process through the Art of Persuasion this semester has been rough. I understand the value of a collective mind in creation, I know it’s where the stuff of creation happens and I do want to be able to engage in creating amazing things with amazing individuals but I just keep hitting a wall when I try to engage with other people. I dreaded the group process from the start because practically every semester here I’ve had difficulty with interacting with other human beings.

The little voice in my head right before I try talking to someone new
.

I got into a group with a pretty cool comic loving dude named Aravindha and we were joined later by Dominic who was my groupmate for this classes first assessment. This was our prompt: –

“What do we want?”
Working in small groups you are to produce a short documentary film that offers a social critique or raises a political demand.
This film is to comply with any three of the following formal constraints:

• no interviews
• no voice-over
• only found-footage or other appropriated material
• is non-photorealistic

Aravindha already had a cool idea to make a video that panned over a comic strip which would tell the story through dialog boxes like in a comic book (that we would have to then create)- so basically no interviews, no voice-overs (this was decided later), we only used found/appropriated material and it was most definitely non-photorealistic. So we kinda went the extra mile with this one.

The story centers around The Justice League and in particular Wonder Woman and Cyborg who feel that they are an oppressed minority. They hope to find more diverse/non-stereotypical heroes but in their search discover something far more sinister – their entire existence is a facade and they are mere puppets who have no control over their decisions. They discover the existence of the very editors who make and dictate their lives and decide to take the fight to them head on. Our comic itself doesn’t actually depict anything fighting but rather brings up a small bio of the editors at the end and a snippet of the kinds of motivations behind their writing, and ideally that will be what is enough to convince the viewer that there is certainly some injustice in the comic book world thats worth discussing.

I don’t know if this project was tough or just tedious, there were a lot of walls we were confronted with, but it looks like we’ve managed to pull through with a somewhat watchable 10 minutes of radicalized opposition to white male dominance, where we make some prominent comic book writers out as evil fascists. I mean in the last comic panel scene you can’t help but feel a swastika wouldn’t be out of place. Although the stance taken against them is so very harsh, I love a lot of the stuff they make, even things like the shooting of Batgirl in the Killing Joke <–| shhhh | particularly because I didn’t look at it in a sexist way, I just saw the Joker fitting his role. When the hero always wins and people get bored, what else do you expect to happen?

Any shitt you want to hear

I think we could have definitely worked much better as a team, but I blame myself mostly just for not really being a proactive teammate on account of being a self indulged depressed douche. We basically took turns in not showing for classes and being late on our own deadlines for each other and that resulted in everything being crunched in the last two weeks, which was in some aspects ample time, but we didn’t really take into consideration how difficult animating the text into the video would be. Needless to say it was tiresome, but we managed to make some decent comic pages, edit them into a movie clip, add animations and finish off with a decent soundtrack (I wonder if anyone will notice Wilhlem). I think this was a fun project towards the end, I didn’t really share the vision at the start but once things started coming together I started to like the way it was going, but I know deep down inside I probably could have done a lot more t make it better. I noticed this time around, even though I wasn’t there for a lot of the classes, that we didn’t really talk theory which was kinda sad because it would have been really interesting to look into things that people have discovered in their attempts at persuading the masses through creative means a little more, but you know.. maybe if I went to class and was proactive and confident and awesome that might have been exactly what went down.

The video itself came up to about 11 minutes, which was a little longer than we would have liked, and we could have probably done something to cut bits out but at this point we were just going for the finish line (we liked our comic pages a little too much to break them apart again). I suppose the main thing I’d try to track back to is my first post in this semester about this subject, where I point out that a documentary is sort of like a rhetorical argument of sorts that I can use to convince people to a desired outcome using what I’ve learnt from people like Adam Curtis and Noam Chomsky who kind of step outside of society and talk about how everyone is basically insane and needs to be controlled against their will, and never knowing they are either of the two.

As I spent my last year at RMIT doing radio, it was a little choppy getting back to the Premiere screen, but editing this, I still find I enjoy the process of creating meaning from two seemingly unconnected things. I may just try to build up some of my own personal projects to see what I can come up with hopefully with the aid of a decent camera.

 

Here’s a tracklist in our vid in case anybody was wondering:

Ajeet

Akov – Retribution | First page

Massive Attack ft Mos Def – I against I | Apache Chief and friends (vid is NSFW)

Meta – Phoenix Down |Final comic page and editor bios

Hot Blooded – Foreigner | Starfire scene – because obviously.

Jimi Hendrix – Foxy Lady | Captain America intro scene

 

 

Aravindha

Superman Man of Steel OST – (Hans Zimmer – I will find him) | Second page, Wonder Woman and Cyborg discuss

Transformers – Autobots score – Wonder Woman complains about Starfire

Superman Man of Steel OST – (Hans Zimmer & Junkie XL – Arcade ) | Call to action, second last page

Superman Man of Steel OST – (Hans Zimmer – Flight)| Wonder Woman reflects

Justice League Unlimited Opening Title

Dominic

Incredible Bongo Band – Apache | Apache introduction scene (also because.. obviously)