Life, Stories, Narrative

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Edward has good notes about the ‘my life is a narrative’ thread. Koston has good things too. No idea where this up after last week’s discussion of hammers, cause and effect, and stories are machines to narrate stories so if that’s the machine you use, then everything will look like a story. It’s a good post. It is trivial to narrate things after they have happened, but if my life is a story, (and a story is a thing narrated, that has cause and effect understandable within the story world, with sentient agents), could someone let me know how it ends please? The point is that as it is happening it is not a story, but after it’s happened, it is simple to make it a story. They are two different things.

Korsakow: Text Insert

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Dear Adrian,

I have trouble with inserting text to my Korksakov movie. I tried putting the text in both the “insert text” and “preview text” in SNU Editor but when I exported the movie nothing comes up

confused?

Dear Confused

The one you need is insert text, and you add the text in the SNU editor. To have it appear you need to edit the interface/s you are using, and place the insert text widget into the interface/s of your film. Where you put that widget is where your text will appear. You can also modify some of the features of the text using this widget (font size, colour).

Korsakow on Windows

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Can be a pain. (Welcome to windows.) Three simple rules. Do not run the installer from the desktop, it won’t install properly (apparently a known windows issue). Secondly if you’ve installed it and you’ve got problems, try running:

http://korsakow.net/tools/qtjavahelp.jar

Thirdly, when you install QuickTime on Windows the default is to not install QuickTime for Java, so when you install it tick the install Java option (or go back and reinstall and tick this option). This solves the generic “Korsakow won’t run on windows” problems. Often helps. After that, we need to get into specifics, these are two known generic issues.

Uploading to the Web Server

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What is being uploaded to the web server is a folder that is named firstname.lastname and inside that folder is the index.html and data folder that Korsakow export. Do not export your .krw file (the Korsakow project file) or your original video and thumbnails. They are not needed, and potentially a 10 or 20 minute upload will become a 2 hour wait if there is lots of high definition images and videos being uploaded.

ALL YOUR PROJECT NEEDS TO RUN IS THE INDEX.HTML FILE AND ALL THE STUFF THAT KORSAKOW PUTS IN THE DATA FOLDER.

On Ryan (1)

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Grace finds the reading tough (welcome the realm of narratology), but remains unsure if, as Ryan argues, the best definition of narrative requires the context of its receivers as that which trumps anything else. Interesting problem. Is that mountain there a ‘narrative’ in this sense? If I’m a geologist? No. I can explain its presence, but explaining isn’t a narrative or story. However, if I’m indigenous and there is a story about how and why that mountain got there, and is what it is, then yes, it’s a story. In Ryan’s sense. Imogen discusses the Ryan stuff on narrative and Bogost on lists.

Symposium 05 Catch Ups

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Emily on thumbnail points from the questions. Sam discusses, positively, Thalhofer’s The and the Greeks example that was touched upon. Troy muses about what experimental films might offer, and I’d suggest more broadly being able to develop ways of ‘experimenting’ – however that might be – is a simple and valuable way to develop a creative practice (it is hard to be genuinely creative if a return on investment is the primary motivating factor to what you do). Tony has a well considered post about interpretation and the experimental, and nicely considers that in a Korsakow film is a way to build different things from the same footage.

Reading 06

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The next reading is hot off the press (the book came out about two months ago) and is by Korsakow research leader Matt Soar about Korsakow. The reference is:

Soar, Matt. “Making (with) the Korsakow System: Database Documentaries as Articulation and Assemblage.” New Documentary Ecologies Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses. Ed. Kate Nash, Craig Hight, and Catherine Summerhayes. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 154–73. Print. (Get the PDF.)

Symposium 06

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Intriguing list of questions from the Thursday 4:30 class:

From Ryan reading:

  1. What is the point in redefining narrative as anything more than ‘cause and effect’?
  2. Ryan notes ‘we can never be sure that sender and receiver have the same story in mind.’ Korsakow films allow for greater freedom of interpretation. Do you see this as a positive or negative? How can the filmmaker control interpretations?
  3. Ryan argues that sender and receiver will always have a different story in mind. Would this be a negative for us when trying to convey a story or meaning with Korsakow?
  4. Do you believe the meaning of narrative has been diluted through its descriptive use in society?
  5. What is the difference between the components of story and discourse?
  6. When considering non-linear narrative, how important is Ryan’s sixth criteria for identifying narrative; the notion of ‘closure’?

From Bogost reading:

  1. Apart from reminding us that narrative is made up of ‘everyday stuff,’ what can lists achieve as a literary device?
  2. Why and to what end are we to be freed from the ‘tyranny of representation’?
  3. Bogost writes ‘lists do not just rebuff the connecting parts of language but rebuff the connecting of being itself.’ How do lists do this?
  4. If a list was to be created through a random non-human selection is a narrative still created?