Tag Archives: symposium

Symposium 04 Questions

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  1. Bordwell and Thompson state that after watching Rail Road Turnbridge a person “cannot see bridges in the same way” thus experimental films are not just art for arts sake. Can/are Korsakow projects art for arts sake, or can they effect the way people see things? Or like Rail Road Turnbridge are they both at once?
  2. Bordwell and Thompson devote a lot of attention to the formal structure and sequence order to deconstruct films, yet through some i-Docs the individual creates their own unique structure. What other methods can we employ to deconstruct i-Docs, and does this interactive structure take some creative control away from the author/filmmaker?
  3. Do the readings of experimental films rely on the audience that is observing them? And if so to what extent is experimental film an interpretation?
  4. Can you present a persuasive argument using rhetorical form with a Korsakow type film?

Symposium 02 Examples

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The two excellent examples Seth raised today in the lecture:

MIT’s Moment’s of Innovation, which is about how documentary has always innovated around technology and showcases some recent digital examples.

And then the rather lovely The Johnny Cash Project.

For my money Moments of Innovation is really interesting if you think of it, in itself, as a documentary, rather than something that is just reporting about documentary. And again while you might think The Johnny Cash Project is about participation it is also remix, data visualisation, interactive. Trying to fit it into a primary ‘type’ commits what we call a category error.

On a related note, think about what Seth said about Google, YouTube, and analytics (tracking and analysing all the use data around a video or user). This is an example of YouTube paying attention to what a video does, rather than what it means. In spite of themselves this is a system that sort of ‘gets’ that meaning is secondary to what these things do, and that their data driven approach is not about what these things mean, but, in the small specific language of a network, what they do. Just interesting.

Perhaps.

Symposium Notes 02

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Today’s discussion about taxonomy and classification and analysis. And that weird botany example. Let’s rewind and do it all again. In botany we have species. Species are different types of plants, so for example we have over 700 species of gum tree in Australia. What defines a gum tree as belonging to one species or another generally consists of differences amongst bark, leaves, and most importantly flowers and gum nuts – the reproductive parts. Historically someone comes along, reckons that plant there is new, grabs a specimen, writes a very detailed description of it, and that becomes the benchmark for that species. Once another one is sufficiently different, it is a new species. What counts as ‘sufficiently different’ is, though, a point of debate. What the debate is doesn’t matter. What matters is that it is debated because there is not this simple ‘flick’ or ‘difference’ between species, but that there will always be examples where an individual will have some of the qualities of one, and some of the qualities of others. It is a graduated scale, analogue, not discrete and digital. Now, what matters is not whether this is a new species or not, what matters is to recognise that gum trees all vary and so what matters is the extent of the variation, not the fact of variation.

All classification schemes have to do this. They have to invent a boundary or rule that says ‘these qualities or attributes mean you are a part of this group’, and so by definition if you don’t have these then you’re either out, or in another group. Where that boundary sits is always an argument informed by power (whether this be politics, authority, evidence), so it isn’t neutral (which means it isn’t only about the things we are classifying). But this system also creates for us an understanding of the world where things live in particular categories, whether gum trees, dogs, gender, bodies, or interactive documentaries.

The risk and danger then with a taxonomy is that when you build your system what you take to be the ‘specimen’ becomes a centre, and distance from this centre comes to define difference, but why is that specimen (that particular documentary) the centre rather than another one? Similarly, what comes to matter is how that documentary is like what the taxonomy identifies, which risks not seeing, or noticing all the ways in which that particular documentary has other qualities, attributes and abilities too. It creates a world of boxes, when the world isn’t actually boxes. Of course everyone who uses these classifications will tell you that this isn’t the case, that of course the world is complicated and messy, but, well, this is useful as a method and what else can we do? It might be useful as a method, but a method, not the method. As I said today a more interesting approach, certainly right now, is to look at individual works and systems and software platforms and services individually and specifically in relation to what they are. ‘What they are’ is code for what they can do and what they do do. Not what they mean, that comes after, but what they do.

Why? Well as I outlined in the symposium, if I look at a person I can use large scale things (taxonomies) to make some crude assumptions, but that’s not a good way to understand who that person is. To understand the person I need to pay attention to them, to what they do, and then I can worry about or try and work out what that might mean (for you me). If I don’t then I fall into large categories that at best become stereotypes. The difference is significant and lets me build things (arguments, ideas, even taxonomies) from the bottom up. What things do is right now more interesting than what things mean, if only because when we go straight to what they mean we risk missing, not being able to see, what the things are – which surely is the point of classifying them in the first place. So the method I’m proposing is to begin from the understanding that everything varies, and to make that a first principle, rather than identifying what things have in common and making that our first principle. It’s about recognising a world of difference, change, movement, and variation as given and that taxonomies are (false) moments of imagined stillness.