The Murder Mystery

I really liked this one; it stood out to me immediately due to the interactivity with the audience, and I always love a good murder mystery, so I was intrigued and wanted to try it out. The story was pretty straightforward, but I think that was the point: to illustrate the genres and tropes within the murder mystery form and to put a greater emphasis on solving the mystery. Still, it was easy to get immersed and in the mood to solve the mystery thanks to the great set design and ambiance, which I really liked. The mystery itself was quite well-thought out and planned; each section flowed into the next quite well, and solving the whole mystery required you to think about the clues from past sections you had already completed — to think about the mystery as a whole instead of just thinking about the last puzzle — which tied the whole thing together and made it a nice mystery to solve. It was full of multiple suspects, red herrings, motive, and multiple ways of getting the puzzles wrong: all tropes and cliches of the murder mystery form, which I think aided in trying to deconstruct what a murder mystery is and how to tell one using the physical medium and audience participation. 

Alienation

I think that this exhibit was really good, and really showed how a personal story could be told through metaphor or through the guise of being something else. Similarly to The Rise and Fall of the Codans — which used an alien culture to reflect how we tell stories — Alienation uses an alien culture to depict the experience of international students studying abroad. It was a really nice and well-thought out project, and the booklet with the story of Rae felt extremely personal and endearing, making the reveal at the end that it was all about the struggles and experiences of international students all the more touching and emotional. I also liked the additional real-world elements used; the alien origami was a nice way to involve audience members and draw parallels to the first class in that ‘anything can be real world media’ sort of way. I really liked the overall project, and it definitely succeeds in drawing out emotions and making the audience reflect on the struggles and experiences of others.

The Festival Experience

For this exhibit, I attended both the Trivial Fundraiser, as well as the opening night, where students organised, funded, and presented a festival which showed debut films of many well-known, as well as user submitted, films. It was a really nice and impressive thing from start to finish, from raising funds through a film trivia to watching a film in that festival atmosphere.

The main thing that separated DIFF from other film festivals was that it focused entirely on debut films, showing some from well known directors (I attended a showing of The Hunger by Tony Scott) as well as some submitted by up-and-coming filmmakers to embrace both the known and the unknown when it comes to celebrating film. It was quite a unique theme to present a film festival around, and one that I quite appreciated, as it shone a light on film’s past, in the form of debut films from established directors, as well as film’s future, in the form of audience-submitted works. 

I cannot even begin to imagine the amount of work and planning that must have gone into organising and staging a multi-day event, let alone the fundraiser projects and organising which films to show, and that effort really shows in the festival experience. The amount of talent, both on the screen as well as behind it, and the amount of organisation on display impressed me to no end, and I hope that the students who organised this were as proud of the festival experience as I was attending it.

Now that the exhibition is done, it’s time to reflect on how it (as well as the assignment as a whole) went. 

I’m pretty pleased with how my group and I worked both as a team and on the assignment. I don’t think we could have done any better, and I believe that our method of telling a real-world story — a museum exhibition of a long-dead alien race — was a great idea and a novel way of telling a story that let us flex our world-building and art muscles. I hope it’s received well by the audience (who wouldn’t), but I also hope that they try and piece together the whole story based on the small fragments we gave them, using the clues from the didactics and artefacts we created to figure out what exactly happened between the Codons and the Arbors. The whole exhibition was meant to resemble a walkthrough of a museum’s gallery of old art from societies long-gone, and how they can narrate and depict a story of that civilisation, and I hope it was successfully recreated by us on that day. 

Preparing for the exhibition was easy enough (Olivia and Dani had the worst job of bringing the huge sandbox to present on exhibition day) and mainly consisted of setting everything up where we thought it matched best. It was somewhat surreal having people walk through and view it, however. Seeing people view physical pieces we had created, and try and figure out what happened to this alien society that we made up, almost falling into the narrative of the Codans being a real society, was nice to see and something that I had never really experienced before. I had shown videos and things I had created to people in the past, but I suppose that having all the media be primarily physical and the context of our exhibit changed the relationship people had with them, essentially fulfilling the role we wanted them to play in terms of the museum narrative we were trying to set up. 

In terms of our collaboration as a group, I was really happy with how our group worked together and collaborated to get everything done. We split up the overall exhibition into smaller artefacts: ones that could be completed individually on our own time before reconvening in class to check in and see how everyone was progressing. Parts that we did work on together were the worldbuilding of the Codans and didactics, as well as the general planning of the exhibit and what everyone was making.  Doing the exhibit in this way broke up the whole workload into manageable chunks, and made the time we spent together as a group much more efficient and progressive since many of the artefacts themselves were already being worked on outside of class time, and we didn’t need to meet up and have to work around scheduling conflicts. It also catered to everybody’s strengths; people got to work on what they could do best — whether that be painting or sculpting — leading to a greater final product at the end.  

Overall, I’m thrilled with how our final exhibit went. I hope that the viewers and audience managed to find the story we were trying to tell about the Codans, as well as the story we were trying to tell about the narrativization of museums as a whole, and I’m glad my team and I worked together to the best of our abilities to pull it off.

One of the major aims of our exhibition was to invite audience participation: both in a more physical sense with the sandbox, letting audiences literally uncover the artefacts left behind, as well as the more mental case of trying to figure out what happened between the Codans and the Arbors. Burke and Tattersdill describe museums as inviting viewers to “deploy their own imaginative processes, building a wider world on the basis of both the material on display and their prior experience with museums and fiction.” (2022:314), which is exactly what we wanted to achieve, and to do so we needed to figure out what needed to be withheld for them — elements of the story that our group would know, but ones the audience would have to figure out — essentially giving them a puzzle that needed to be solved. 

This was primarily done through the didactics created this week, describing what the museum speculated and theorised as to what happened, refraining from outright stating that the Codans and Arbors went to war over chemical engineering of the Arbors. The main goal was to, as Burke and Tattersdill describe, create an experience for the audience — even if not 100% accurate to the actual story — based on the artefacts recovered at the time. Deciding what to show or not show, especially in the didactics, which bore the brunt of explaining the artefacts to the audience, was the major challenge this week in the construction of our museum’s narrative, and one that I hope we’ve put enough thought and planning into where it elevates the final experience on exhibition day.

Burke, V & Tattersdill, W 2022, ‘Science Fiction Worldbuilding in Museum Displays of Extinct Life’, Configurations, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 313–340.

Similarly to last week’s reflection, the main thing I want to talk about this week is more worldbuilding — specifically, iconography. 

The main contribution to the exhibition for me is propaganda posters: ones from both for and against the Codans use of chemical engineering to bend nature to their whim. The posters had to feel familiar enough so that the audience could understand what was being communicated, but alien enough so that it still felt like it was created by the Codan society. 

Sobchack discusses this when talking about iconography in science fiction (2005). Unlike other established genres like the western or the noir, sci-fi is so expansive and has less ties to our world, meaning concepts and icons present are much harder for the audience to relate to. In a western, the saloon is always tied to shootouts, drinking and seediness, sci-fi icons are much broader in meaning and are less automatically recognisable to the audience; a spaceship may be representative of a home, invading force, or travel vehicle, for example.

As such, meaning in sci-fi must be attached through pre-established audience connotations and connections to icons in our world, especially for visual in-universe elements like the Codans propaganda posters. 

For example, figure 1 shows a Star Wars warning sign. While not looking like one from Earth, audiences automatically know it as a warning sign due to the general colours and shapes that, although slightly tweaked, give off the feel of a warning sign. 

Fig 1. A Star Wars Warning Sign 

In that same vein, the propaganda posters use similar, yet not exact, iconography to Earth symbols to elicit meaning and connotations in the audience: The classic ‘circle with a line through it’ became an elliptical oval with two lines bisecting it to make it feel like the former, but yet feel alien enough to where the audience can both recognise its meaning and understand its extra-terrestrial nature. 

Figure 1. ‘Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Warning Sign Replica’, viewed 20 May 2023, <https://www.yourprops.com/Warning-sign-replica-replica-movie-prop-Star-Wars-The-Empire-Strikes-Back-1980-YP803551.html>.

Redmond, S. (2005). Images of Wonder: the look of science fiction: Iconography, by Vivian Sobchack. In Liquid Metal. Columbia University Press.

This week was primarily dedicated to fleshing out the world of Codae; what did we want to say? How did we want the Codans to be a reflection of us? 

Sci-fi is usually used as a reflection of cultures, societies, and events that happen in the real world; seeing those events play out in an unfamiliar environment can both let the audience latch onto elements that they do recognise, as well as be able to draw parallels to their own values in the process. It’s the main reason many alien cultures in sci-fi are mono-cultured: the Klingons from Star Trek are all honourable warriors, and the Vulcans are all logic-bound and intelligence-driven. They help serve as focal points for those elements in our own culture and society. 

Zaidi mentions that “Science fiction gives us a world and story at once, depicting the broader context and implications of that context through plot and characters.” (2019:20), meaning that when developing a sci-fi world and culture, it is not only important, but necessary, to utilise shortcuts and elements that the audience can latch onto before fully exploring the universe created. 

In this vein, we decided to make the Codan story one of self-inflicted destruction, with the Codans relying on their environment for home and shelter, eventually bending it to their whim and leading to their destruction once nature rebelled against them. Not only did it draw parallels to climate issues in our modern world, but full reliance on nature — such as using trees for houses and structures — felt alien enough to properly distinguish them from humans as a different species. 

Leah Zaidi 2019, ‘Worldbuilding in Science Fiction, Foresight and Design’, Journal of Futures Studies, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 15-26

This week was primarily researching for the presentation, and a particular aspect of it I found interesting was the research into transmedia; specifically the way transmedia tries to keep audiences entertained and intrigued enough to keep engaging with the piece of transmedia, even across forms of media. 

In the reading for week 8, Rutledge (2019) describes multiple ways to do so; primarily, the audience member needs to want and enjoy delving into other forms of media. They need to feel challenged enough to transcend forms to continue the story, but the media needs to be accessible and easy enough for it to still be enjoyable. A fine balance needs to be struck for the audience to feel both entertained and challenged when consuming the story. 

Scolari (2009) also delves into the semiotics of transmedia storytelling with the multilayer text: media that is able to be enjoyed on multiple levels and can be read in different ways. I think this is important to our exhibition, especially if we want to properly depict the ‘narrative’ compared to the ‘actual history’ the museum is producing with the artefacts they’ve uncovered. 

I think the form that our final piece is taking really helps with this; the fact that it’s a museum walkthrough enables an easy transference between one piece of media to another, as audience members walk through one ‘artefact’ to another. I’m unsure whether it will be ‘challenging’ enough for the audience to feel challenged and enjoy the process of moving from one piece of media to another as Rutledge states, but I think it will be easy enough for them to enjoy the whole story. 

Freeman, M & Gambarato, RR (eds) 2019, ‘The Routledge companion to transmedia studies’, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, New York. pp 350-363.

Scolari C.A. (2009). ‘Transmedia storytelling: implicit consumers, narrative worlds, and branding in contemporary media production.’ International Journal of Communication. pp. 586-606.

What is Craft?

As a term, ‘craft’ has existed for hundreds of years, enduring many evolutions of the English language and prevailing to this day. Originally, to craft meant to be skilled, or have a skilled occupation — usually in woodworking or smithing — which would be seen in the professional level of quality in what was made (Risatti, 2004). However I believe that in more modern times, it has broadened its definition to describe the process of making itself, and the agency and individuality of the crafter when making something: whatever that may be. 

Craft used to symbolise the skill of a professional ‘maker’. One that uses their knowledge and skills to create a product with high quality and utility, such as a table or a chair. Every item crafted was individual: made by hand and made in such a way that no one else could have made it the same way, from the small imperfections in the final product, to the methods of creating that the maker chose. 

However, as Hickney (2015:144) states, “The fossilised definition of craft as a survival skill or something one’s ancestors did is finally changing”. Machines are now in charge of producing many of our ‘utility’ items, now turning the utilitarian aspect of ‘craft’ into a mass-produced production line of assembly; every item is built to the exact same dimensions, and the methods of creation are exactly the same in every one. The individuality and uniqueness of each item are now gone, and the human makers of the past are now made of metal and wire. 

I believe this is why craft has undergone a slight shift in definition in recent times, broadening from items made by skilled crafters to defining the process of making by any crafter: one that puts their knowledge and methods of crafting to use in creating the object, which then becomes a reflection of the creator in itself. The maker has to have some level of agency when making the item, either when designing or producing, otherwise it would not be emblematic of themselves and simply be another ‘mass produced’ craft. Pollanen (2009) delves deeper: defining a term called ‘hostilic craft’, which takes into account all levels of craft, in which the maker must affect the designer phase in some way for it to be considered as such, lest it simply fall under ‘creation’ and not ‘craft’. Joubert also states “What people now seek is the meaning, the story and history behind a well handmade object” (2022:9), valuing the story and intention of the object as much as the object itself — how the creator has put themselves into their craft, using their knowledge and skills to produce it. Not all craft today even has to be of professional quality: the term ‘sloppy craft’ (Patterson & Surette, 2015) is a form of craft that is explicitly not so, yet is still considered craft due to the relationship between the creator and object.

As times and methods of production have changed, craft has had to change with it. No longer is it solely defined by professional quality and make, but it now refers to the process of making and the display of individuality, agency, and proficiency by the creator, making sure the process is just as important as the object. 

REFERENCES:

Hickey, G 2015, Chapter 6: Why is sloppy and postdisciplinary craft significant and what are its historical precedents?  in Paterson, EC & Surette, S (eds) 2015, Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts, 1st edn, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. pp. 109-124

Joubert, L (ed.) 2022, Craft Shaping Society: Educating in the Crafts—The Global Experience. Book One, Springer Nature Singapore, Singapore.

Paterson, EC & Surette, S (eds) 2015, Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts, 1st edn, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. pp.1-23

Pöllänen, S 2009, ‘Contextualising Craft: Pedagogical Models for Craft Education’, International Journal of Art & Design Education, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 249–260.

Risatti, H 2007, A theory of craft: function and aesthetic expression, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.

The activity that stuck out to me the most this week was the activity where we did nothing. Absolutely nothing at all, turning off all our devices and going stimulus free for 10 minutes. It was very introspective, looking back on it, helping us properly see how linked we are with digital technology, and how we’ve been trained to constantly be surrounded and observing stimuli (usually digital) all the time. 

Taking away all those digital vices and ways of keeping us constantly entertained was an intriguing prospect; and one that highlights just how reliant we are on digital technologies and media — not just for entertainment, but in all aspects of life. It drove home to me just how often we’re using our phones and tech, and the fact that it was an abnormal challenge to go without any of them for a short 10 minute timespan.

The activity also relates heavily to the reading for the week; Paasonen (2020) describes current media as decreasing our collective attention spans, bombarding us with short videos and content that try and grab our attention at all costs, leading us to become accustomed to said level of stimulus and eventually depend on it, lest we fall into boredom. 

However, shutting off our devices and existing without the barrage of notifications and media was somewhat calming. It slowed the pace of life and allowed me to revel in the mundane, something that Paasonen advocates for, and might be something that I continue on the future (if I ever get ‘bored’ enough).

Susanna Paasonen (2020) Distracted Present, Golden Past? Media Theory. 4 (2), 11–32. https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/117.

Week 2:

One of the  more significant activities in class today was discussing the topic of nostalgia, specifically delving into our own past and creating a timeline of technology: when we first encountered it and how our relationship with it had changed over the years. I reflected on the topic, and why exactly I had felt nostalgic about old forms of media from my childhood, be they old video games, or antiquated ways of watching videos and media. 

It also got me thinking about ways to try and feel like that again. Like in Johnny Harris’ The Nostalgia Theory video (2020), I had recently undergone a phase where I sought nostalgia through old objects (although nowhere near the extent that he depicted), and bought old collectables and games that I had wanted as a kid. Fulfilling the dreams of a 7-year-old me by buying a LEGO Star Wars set I had always wanted was a nice full-circle moment, but didn’t feel the same as ‘the old days’ I was chasing, and I think that comes down to the context. Back then I was a kid with no worries about the world, and that simply isn’t replicable as an adult, and I think that’s why nostalgia is so powerful. Our collective “obsession with the past” (2021:3) as described by Matthew Leggatt has led to countless nostalgia chasing, both by individuals and by media corporations at large, trying to cash in on how people felt as kids. It’s why old classics are constantly being remade and 20-year-old properties being revived, all to chase that feeling of being carefree again and to chase that nostalgia. 

Harris, Johnny, ‘THE NOSTALGIA THEORY’ 2020, Youtube, viewed 10 March 2023, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvN7GxrRtNA>.

Leggatt, M (ed.) 2021, Was it yesterday? nostalgia in contemporary film and television, State University of New York Press, Albany.