Author: Ajeet

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Posted on by Ajeet

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

The Art of Justice

Posted on by Ajeet

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)

Track Listing

Posted on by Ajeet

I didn’t really get to pick out all the tracks I really enjoyed from the last performances [too busy enjoying the sets] of DJ class at RMIT.

but I thought it would be nice to post up the few tracks I did save and enjoy =)

from the awkward but awesome Mr Huang, gotta say I loved his set

from Mitch and Gemma the music students who were really cool. I wonder I’ll ever be that cool.

from Michael and Jessica

I kinda did make the suggestion in one of our classes for a space where students of the DJ course could get together to talk shop, exchange ideas, maybe form connections with people outside of the tutes. Something like a RMIT DJ forum hahah. I mean I get that the objective of the course isn’t just about DJ’ing, it’s about the study of the culture and effects on society the whole scene has on people. But why not make a culture while we’re at it, it’d be great to see how under supervision from those wiser than us, can create a booming dance music culture. Maybe even a sorta student held festival of sorts at the end of it, maybe even a years worth project for the willing! Hopefully the course continues to run with all serious amendments taken into consideration. Especially after the talk by Graham St George we had today, I see that people will continue to gravitate towards these kinds of events as they have in the past to large congregations in search of themselves. Having a place where they can be with people on the same wavelengths to grasp a better understanding of it will be invaluable. But I think I’ll save blabbering about this all in another post.

Peace

The Culture Nomad

Posted on by Ajeet

Repost from my other blog, thought it would be relevant here too

At DJ class today we had Graham St John come by to talk to us about his research into rave/music cultures and festivals. What an awesome job, honestly, just going around partying everywhere and taking notes on how awesome each party was. I did look a little into him before he came by, just so I could be prepared this time with questions instead of sitting there like a useless lump, and I was actually quite interested in how he made a connection between these kinda big rave cultures and the Matrix.

Feel free not to watch the whole thing

Basically the idea that within a festival [and perhaps for the sake of this argument a specifically non-mainstream festival] most people are confronted by the idea of the blue pill vs. red pill in the form of actual mind/body altering substances. The kinds of substances in particular that change your perception and make you see the world in a different light. Depending on the individual that could range easily from MDMA for seratonin boosts right up to DMT for the ultimate spiritual experience, but the end result is to leave the festival a changed person. For the veteran however it’s not so much about revelation but about reveling in that atmosphere of discovery and freedom of judgement and oppression. There’s this comparison.. no more like a connection with these festivals and a form of religious enlightenment that seems deeply rooted in what I believe their purpose is for people today. I don’t mean religious in a contemporary sense because those religions haven’t really served the people and if anything have caused more strife.

The prosumer, popup city of Burning Man
The prosumer, popup city of Burning Man

My own personal experience with psychedelics was, as labeled, completely life altering. I can’t really remember what I was like before that point but I do recall simply being ignorant and very unwilling to accept anything outside myself. However I lacked the guidance that everyone should have when taking substances like it and that resulted in [essentially] what seemed to me like the collapse of the fabric of reality or you know.. a psychotic episode that didn’t end. I was basically stuck in the trip even after it wore off and there was no way out. It took me a good year or two before I was able to piece things back together to some degree and was able to start a degree here at RMIT. Even after all of that I still find that psychedelics hold great power and are somehow imperative for us to understand each other and our place in this world, just because I had a bad experience whilst I was on it, it taught me a lot about what I needed to do to keep moving forwards. If it wasn’t for my bad experience I’d probably have simply gone down a spiral of drug abuse and ended up a deadbeat junkie, instead I’m studying for a degree and trying to make my life count for something maybe bigger than myself.

In a sense it was like a right of passage into reality, and in that way I think he was right to point out the Matrixness of the festival scene. It’s a place where this kind of thing goes down, where people go to learn that there’s more to life than what we see on it’s surface but that means confronting the fact that it’s not all roses and butterflies, and thats what makes it both invigorating and terrifying. I hate that my mind is broken, that everything I once was is dead and gone, but I wouldn’t give up what I am today to take it back.

Also here’s a track I’m listening to now

Just a side note, Graham is publishing a book soon on DMT that looks pretty exciting.

 

Thinking too much

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Often I wonder..

what happens to an idea once it is fully expressed. When you look into something for too long, for instance, you keep repeating a word you’re very familiar with until it starts to become alien and strange, and at first its all kind of bizarre and fascinating, then it becomes watered down and loses its meaning. Maybe thats the same with life, the more we try to figure out what it is, the less meaning it has [at least that we can associate with]. Would that mean discovering the meaning of life, would result in a meaningless life? Or does it mean that that particular meaning is no longer functional -[((I’m not sure if I can get this point across well enough) Then the meaning, if found [and turned meaningless] would mean that the working knowledge up to that point no longer serves a purpose)] – and a new idea must be explored instead?

Would that mean that the meaning of life, if any, is constantly changing. How are we supposed to find it then?

Animal Farm!

Posted on by Ajeet

So with Art of Persuasions documentary, Dom and myself basically split the work to a video each. We had to make one clip purely out of found footage and one out of stuff we filmed ourselves but with no interviews in either as a cool limitation to work with. I decided to make the found footage one cuz I dunno how to work a camera fo shit. But like I mentioned in my previous post we had the problem of trying to tackle a very large issue in a small frame of time (3minutes) which resulted in the overall idea changing two more times from the initial one.

My first attempt was simply too factual and wordy, which is precisely what I was trying to ebb away from, as I may or may not have mentioned in the past; explaining things to people isn’t how to convince them of anything. You need to somehow reach their inner feelings and desires.  With this initial idea we wanted to put propaganda in a place where it [although sinister] served a higher and greater purpose to maintain a stable society – as the alternative was complete and utter chaos. I acquired a vast cornucopia of knowledgeable clips and snippets to demonstrate the actuality that humanity was incapable of itself and required the leash, however the deeper I dug the more I found this to be the case only because humanity has been under the leash for so long in the first place. This research helped solidify some of my own world views which was great, but like any good apocalypse – in the original Greek sense of the word – brought more questions than before. If anything, my objective was now further from sight.

Knowing I had a long way to go, I made a contingency video which heavily featured themes from The Matrix, particularly the scene where Morpheus offers Neo the red and blue pill as an analogy to choosing between accepting the propaganda and to believe the lie or to realize that you’re just a cog in a system who has no say whatsoever in the direction of your life. But it was just too much of the Matrix in the end and I hated it for being so gross and cheap.

In the end I decided to make something I thought about when I was younger – a documentary, where the narrator talks about human beings the same way he would talk about animals in wildlife.

“This is a wild human mother in her natural habitat” – and you just stalk mothers in malls or wherever it is mothers spend their time. (pardon my ignorance, I thought Dubai was in India, I’m not perfect)

Gahah it’d be brilliant.

Recently I even saw something extremely close to it. An Aussie show called Bogan Hunters, where the hosts are blatantly capitalising on getting people to self proclaim their Boganism with or without them realising they’ve basically turned into circus animals for the entertainment of people higher social class. Heck the Bogans probably even watch it themselves believing they’ve attained a greater place in life by acting a fool on TV. Sigh.

anyway

I didn’t really explain why I thought this was appropriate to the theme of propaganda. You see in my research I’ve found that people are so well under control that we’re basically being shuffled around and made to do things to the same extent that livestock are, all without realising whats going on. It’s the greatest damned illusion ever blanketed over humanity, and if it’s not, it’s definitely up there. You know how you hear about those farms where nobody really gives a shit about the animals and treats them like they weren’t living beings (I don’t wanna post vids but you can find em if you look really fast)? Yeah thats what the people in control of your lives are probably like <<assumption>but a pretty strong one>. You’re just the oil for the cog in their machine of money.

You’re born and raised through a factory process, where you’re sorted by age, and shuffled down two potential paths of life |ARTS| and |SCIENCES| or Sir Ken Robinson puts it –

Since the arts don’t generally produce much wealth you’re immediately considered second rate, but regardless of which line of work you end up in, it’ll always be for someone elses benefit. You’ll be squeezed for every last bit of potential you have like chicks in a macerator. I say ‘you’re’ because if anybody reading this is most likely not in that wondrous “1%”. This affects and has to do with basically everybody. We’re so content with this complacency which might be fine if the situation merited it, but as a species that has such an immense capacity to learn, we seem to be going more and more backwards with each day that passes. I mean.. seriously.. Bogan Hunters.. how is that a thing.. religious beheadings and killing of civilians.. how is that still a thing? Civil war and discontent.. how is any of this still a fucking thing?
It just doesn’t make sense, I don’t think it’s possible for people to be this horrible if there wasn’t something or some force that desired or even required this kind of pain and unrest. It’s almost like the only reason people are horrible to each other, is so that they remember to cherish the times and appreciate when they are good to each other.  Like some kinda dualic Yin and Yang system we truly can’t seem to step out of. Does that mean we’re condemned to repeat mistakes? What’s the point of learning anything if you don’t adapt from the mistakes?

ANYWAY, I feel like I get so lost in these rants the point I try to make loses itself. THE POINT here is that I wanted to make a clip that would make people think for a moment that they are a part of a farm, not as farmer, but as farmed. What resulted, or rather was intended, is a clip, almost like an infomercial for the 1% to look into the lives of the 99% of their livestock. Three minutes, still isn’t enough, and I might like to expand further on this in bigger projects for greater reach, but I hope that at least I got some people in my own class to think about this. Even if only one person. Because the truth is, this is something nobody will want to accept or face. It’s like taking off the blindfold to see a meat cleaver, and I don’t have the solution, but I think it’s worth thinking and talking about, because “nothing strengthens authority so much as silence” – DaVinci.

 

EDIT: Here is the final vid I made. Hope you enjoy.

Complexed?

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Week three is over, holy cow the that was fast. So much to do so little time! So with Liams’ class my groupmate Dominic and myself are planning on creating a piece on how the masses have been controlled but to question if that’s really a bad thing. The problem clearly is how to fit that into a 3 minute video using only found footage. We’re depending heavily on clips like Adam Curtis’s stuff, Chomsky and his Manufacturing of Consent, some films here and there with similar motives not unlike stuff I have talked about or made reference to here before.

I’ve mostly been finding it difficult to really find new things to watch that fit the criteria, but maybe it’s because I’m trying to be too definitional.. Like I pointed out Rage Against the Machine’s Sleep Now in the Fire and it “ticked the right boxes”. I thought about a song I heard some time back which is starting to look like it may just be a timeless piece as the message that motivated it then is probably more present now than it has ever been. The satirical approach to it just makes it all the more fun to actually pay attention to his advice and realise that he’s actually making sense and not telling you bullshit like what you’re seeing. The XX Teens and their track How to Reduce the Chances of Being a Terror Victim. Sorry I couldn’t embed the video property properly and this was the only link up there that supports mobile play.

http://www.videodetective.com/music/how-to-reduce-the-chances-of-being-a-terror-victim/403668

I guess we’ll just have to see what we can do with the preliminary footage. 

Another day in the West part of the East

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Day one, first semester and last year of my education at RMIT. I’m pretty excited and also scared to see how shit plays out. In my time here I’ve got to say I’ve loved every moment of it, but I’ve struggled badly with doing and retaining the readings, and also making any real connections with people. Already in our first classes we have to forge our own groups and I’m dreading this process and I have a feeling I’m going to be just chucked into whatever raggidy bunch is left at the end. I’m back in the class with activist Liam Ward leading the way, kinda exciting as the subject is trying to turn political documentaries into an art form but staying true to being a documentary. Whatever that means? I mean I only took up one semester of film study so I can’t really pull quotes or examples out of my ass, but the problem with documentaries, at least from what I picked up in the first class, seems to mainly be about definition. You have your purists who say things need to be only a certain kind of way and then you kinda have a mixture of everyone else who treat it more as.. (for lack of a better phrase I’ll quote a quote I heard Liam use by John Grierson)”the creative treatment of actuality”. I don’t know if this approach to something is really the best way to do things, where you pick a set definition for what you’re setting out to do and try to make sure it fits in your little box of definitions. Particularly with a political documentary, I believe what you’re trying to posit is a rhetorical argument of sorts, so it’s not so much like a wildlife documentary where your focus really is on the images and videos you see on the screen “oooh look at the pretty zebra getting mauled by that cheetah, nature such beauty, much love, so bloods”. It’s the visual aid that really pulls you in, but with a political documentary, you’re not showing people things they can’t catch a glimpse of, you’re trying to incept an idea into their minds. It’s not about the visuals, it’s about the message they carry. Thats not saying the visuals aren’t important, but they are a means to an end.

From watching the Adam Curtis documentary “Century of the self”, I found some clarity in how I would ideally tackle the task. He points out how giving people factual information and telling them what something does as well as how and why it will benefit them,  simply isn’t effective. The way to sell an idea, I feel, is like selling a product; it’s not about trying to appeal to peoples intellect, but to their selfish inner desires, that they will feel better knowing they’ve experienced it. It’s not that you think you need this knowledge, but you’ll feel better knowing you have it. How that will help me at the moment? I really have no fucking idea, but it’s the groundwork I hope to use to realise any work I do.

And then on the way out of uni I stopped by the Socialists little hut outside building 8 to sign a petition and ended up arguing with the lady about the role of capitalism. I argued that for it to be the dominant form of social structure today, there had to be some valid points in it’s prevalence. She simply refused to see what I was trying to ask and told me to go and figure it out on my own.. well the thing is I already know the plus points of capitalism (it’s just a shoddy list but the basic ideas are there) but noting how she had that biased opinion and disregarded the benefits whatsoever kinda helped me understand a little more why socialists are hard pressed to really get their message spread. They’re almost like the religious extremists of the political world, and they shun the thought of any system outside of their own. Much like making a documentary by defining what it is first and then trying to squeeze the real world into that criteria, isn’t really a conducive way to disseminate your message. The socialists today remind me of the capitalists against the monarchs. They faced similar issues, except perhaps this time on a global scale; a rich ruling class that basically owns most of wealth and run how the world works, a class that you mostly had to be born or married into – then you have the people who feel like they’re being unfairly treated and are demanding change. If anything the actual history of socialism is evidence enough to show that  it’s a terrible idea because it eventually just turning back into that “monarchy” type situation where the country is run by a ruling class or family that can never be voted or kicked out, one that abuses it’s people just the same, if not worse than any capitalistic democracy. Just like the barons who fought the monarchs for the magna carta, the rich and powerful eventually formed a new kind of kingdom, this time, it’s just a little more invisible, and now history looks like it’s attempting to repeat itself.

I know this is sensitive stuff, and I’m not exactly the best versed in any of these areas or topics, but this is just my opinion from what I’ve managed to see thus far. The consensus..

Everyone is nuts.

Maybe Freud was right, we’re all just a bunch of crazy mafakkas and we’re just going to kill each other dead. Argue with me if you want, but don’t be dumbass and don’t waste my time with definitions or be all like capitalism is evil because it’s ‘exploits the people man!!’. People are evil, and they do bad things. It doesn’t matter what political affiliation or style of life they choose to lead, if a rich dick wants to be a dick, he’s going to be a dick. And not all rich people are dicks.

Peace. Seriously.