In this blog, I will discuss what I feel I have learned, how I learn, the challenges that emerged through the course and what I discovered about my own creative practice.
With the ever expanding digital universe, I feel it is imperative to keep up to date with all IT related mediums. From the moment I began constructing my blog page right up to this minute, I am learning new ways of navigation around online digital platforms. The necessity to remain digitally well groomed has brought upon new organisational skills; for example, Google Drive. This information ‘cloud’ model has opened up new opportunities for me already, for example, I have used Google Drive for other Uni subjects and spread the word to my peers who haven’t yet discovered this resource, and further to this, I now plan to implement it on a future production that I have been considered for.
My learning has also been extended through a conscious effort in calculating my personal media consumption. What this has revealed is that my media intake has evolved through the years, not only because of the available technology at hand, but due to my constant flux in desired platforms; for example, back when Facebook had its explosion in 2009, it was a primary tool for my media receiving and dissemination, but now, FB has receded in importance as my priorities have shifted.
Marshall McLuhan’s work has been a great discovery, since I read a passage in an art reference book about “the media being the message” this lightbulb moment has remained with me as a media metric. This notion is relevant to many contemporary examples and it is a testament to McLuhan’s prophetic foresight.
The way I learn is through repetition and association. Nowadays, I’m normally fine in remembering people’s names as I had struggled with this in the past therefore had to overcame this deficiency. To remember names, I repeat the aural sound of the name and then put an image or separate person to the face. Rhyming words have been useful when recalling names, for example, Mike is the guy who owns the bike, but even if Mike does not have a bike, I endeavour to remember him as ‘the bloke who could benefit from owning a bike’. Through my time in the Media One course, I have had the opportunity to exercise these methods of learning and memory.
As classes and lectures can feel as though they are running at a breakneck pace sometimes, I often turn to my peers for there views, however I must remain aware that all advice should be received as a subjective remark rather than a factive statement.
I closely follow peer blogs to try to gain a clearer understanding of what was expected, though admittedly, I feel as though I have let this challenge get the better of me, I appreciate having the opportunity to implement this practice but I feel as though I may have fallen behind. It was however refreshing to have lecturer Dan insist that we scrawl a 15 minute stream of consciousness blog in a lectorial. I had conjured up some poignant thoughts about ‘the significants of dust’ though, WordPress (I’ll withhold the profanities that I used at the time) ‘checked-out’… it was an error that, had it been a person, was staring me in the eye with its middle finger raised, all the while blowing me disingenuous kisses. I was lucky to have had empathic friends sitting next to me whose work at some stage in the past had similarly failed to save ending up in a million pieces above the room.
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) – Mel Stuart
With regard to my own practice, chiefly audio, I have been fascinated by archaeological acousticians Trevor Cox and Rupert Till’s work in uncovering sophisticated acoustic methods employed by prehistorical humans. For me, this was conformation that societal preferences in communicative forms sometimes favoured quality over gratuitous hyperbole.
A Train Trip To Our Ancient Roots (2010)