As a quick summary of our Korsakow project; we have made 6 videos with modulating music in each with the same visual content in each, which focuses on how different music alters how we perceive visuals, which specifically in our project is the city of Melbourne and exploring how our audiences connect to their city emotionally through sound.

How does your interactive screen media project respond to modularity and variability?

The characteristics of my group’s Korsakow project “How Does the City Make you Feel?” that respond to the ideas of modularity as addressed in the book, “The Language of New Media” by Lev Manovich are the changing elements of music and sound over the course of the 6 videos.  Firstly, each one minute video is modular as it can easily exist as a seperate piece of media as a montage of the city of Melbourne and our emotional connection to it. The actual visual content of the videos are constant throughout the whole project whereas the music have been drastically changed over each video, as the idea of our project is to ask the audience how do they emotionally connect with the city, and do these different styles of music impact how they perceive the content they are currently viewing, and the content that they previously watched.

This is where the variability aspects of our project come in. One of the most powerful elements of Korsakow and interactive media content is giving the reins of control over to the audience, which in turn forces them to more deeply ponder what they have viewed previously, are currently viewing, and what they will decide to view next. Our project is a very stripped back version of what is capable in interactive screen media, as the only elements of the project the audience will get to decide on is the order of videos they watch, which for the purposes of our project I felt was the right amount of interactivity, as it stripped back a lot of the excessive options available to an audience and really makes them ponder and reflect on the project they are watching, not focusing purely on what they will switch over to next.

In our project the videos also only last for one play, as after the audience views them they disappear and they are left with fewer options, which our group felt was important also to help focus the audiences attention on what is in front of them, while also giving them time to deeply consider the connection between the videos.

One way that we will definitely look to improve on this project in the future is to create a larger collection to choose from, possibly diversifying the exploratory nature of the project, as that could possible improve how the audience engages with the project if the way it is currently designed falls flat.

What did you learn about online screen production through making your project?

The thing I learnt most while making this project is the amount of options available and it is crucial to have your ideas of theme set early on and what you want to achieve, as I felt that once we nailed down what we wanted the audience to experience emotionally, it was a lot easier to structure all of the creative elements of the project, especially the smaller parameters to be set within Korsakow, as we could keep asking ourselves during the making of the project if this assists or detracts from our original intentions with the work.

Options like changing the colours of the thumbnails for instance was something we thought about pretty deeply about whether it was going to improve our project or not, where on one hand an argument was made that we shouldn’t have any outside forces besides the music influence how the audience interprets each individual video, while on the other hand we thought it was important to not have the audience blindly clicking on each video and not soak in and reflect on the differences in the videos. I believe we made the right choice, and the coloured thumbnails also increase the aesthetic look of the project as a whole.

How does this making expand upon what you learnt through your development posts?

This project has definitely made me adapt my way of thinking from thinking in a linear, progress based manner, to becoming a lot more exploratory, but still staying within a set of self-created constraints. Being able to explore a lot of these ideas of modularity, and variability in the world of music was not just a challenging and rewarding experience , but it really did help me understand the sort of ethos of online media creation, as I was able to steer into a more improvisational, structurally loose way or writing even though the pieces of music were actually in an incredibly tight, restrictive set of constraints.

What questions remain for you in terms of thinking about and making online screen works?

For me, I’ve always had a pretty traditional understanding of media creation, and I had a pretty linear path for what I wanted to explore and achieve in the next project, but after presenting this project to the panel and the class, the ideas that were offered for ways of developing and expanding on our ideas were in a completely different universe to where my mind was at! This was really an eye opening experience for me as I had previously thought that my mindset towards making online content was right and I was exploring the creative elements available, but I was really just putting a new cover over fairly linear ideas. The panel said something that really stuck with me, that I was too mindful of everything making sense, to be coherent, whereas if I explored in a wider spectrum of creative ideas, I’d create something a lot more interesting and engaging, which is actually a lot like writing music through improvisation.

 

“The thing about improvisation is that it’s not about what you say. It’s listening to what other people say. It’s about what you hear.” – Paul Merton.