‘Scatology’

This student Korsakow film titled ‘Scatology’ (2013) is by students Brenton Spink, Joyce Khoo, Camilla Evani, and Sheilah Ismail. They describe it as a “list work”, concerned with asking men and women their favourite swear word and worst habit. The piece is aware of the format, but overall it didn’t seem to quite reach it’s potential.

The interface is pleasantly simple, with a single main viewing window and two links below. The design of the links are in the shape of a male or female that act as a viewing window of the video clip it links to. They remain unobtrusive, allowing for the main viewing window to dominate, which made it easy to engage with each clip. The male/female shapes also indicate what gender will be speaking over the top of the video clip so a viewer has some choice as to the kind of person they want to hear from next.

However I don’t feel two options per screen fully embraces the potential of the Korsakow format. Two options per step feels limiting in contrast to the numerous options that are possible to include within a Korsakow interface. It would have been nice to have more options, perhaps in the shape of other objects that related to the audio or video clip it linked to, to further accentuate the multi-directional potential of the format.

The audio clips consist very simply of a voice over stating what they think their worst habit is, and what their favourite swear word is. I thought this was a hilarious choice of questions, and it’s amusing to listen to each one. It doesn’t take long to hear them all, so while the selection of audio clips is small, they are still fun to listen to.

Where the audio clips have the obvious overarching theme of favourite swear word and worst habit, I found the video clips to lack continuous fluid pattern making. For the most part there are noticeable patterns between each clip, for example a scene of people praying at a colourful open altar would link to a similar pious scene albeit in the quiet interior of a church. There were also numerous other clips of some sort of culture festival in Melbourne that would link to one another with notable relationships, for example, different areas of federation square with different parts of the same festival exhibition.

There are some clips that appear out of place however. For example, visible in the screenshot above, a shot of a library would link to a couple walking on the streets of Melbourne, or from a fancy cafe to a dress in a clothes shop. These links where the links seemed less relevant felt jarring in comparison to the other sets of clips, and unfortunately I felt they weakened the piece overall. If removed, I feel the piece would benefit overall from having fewer, but more dominant patterns and scene links.

The weakest part of the piece for me however was the lack of relationship between the visual and aural elements. While the video and audio clips were intriguing alone – the former depicting some colourful scenes, the latter being rather provocative – together they did not seem to depict anything greater. Potentially the the contrast between the more cultured environments, and the vulgar statements made by the voices could be the prevailing theme, though this still seems a tenuous link due to the sometimes random nature of the video clips.

Perhaps if the original question were extended on there may have been a stronger basis to shoot relevant video for them, maybe along the lines of why they had a favourite swear word, or where they picked up a bad habit. The video clips could have then been developed into icons, or maybe simply representative, or the bad language and habits in society.

In his article ‘Digital Memory and the Archive’, Wolfgang Ernst states that “Narration assimilates information by recounting it in the synecdochical mode” and this seems particularly relevant to the Korsakow format. The power of Korsakow comes from it’s synecdochical nature; depicting parts of a whole to portray the whole. ‘Scatology’ shows evidence of this; I got the feeling of several distinct scenes, but where the links would sometimes seem more random, the ‘whole’ doesn’t quite come together.

I think going by Ernst’s proposition of narrative, if the ‘parts’ remain more tightly linked through more specific key words, and any irrelevant media removed, an overall, ‘whole’ narrative in this format can be made much stronger.

“Narration assimilates information by recounting it in the synecdochical mode.” Ernst explains, describing the way narrative tells it’s story. Synecdoche is to use parts to depict a whole, or vice versa. This leads me to consider again the form of the interactive documentary. Pertaining to my last ramble on it, I maintain that this form of documentation cannot portray or tell a single narrative as it holds no foundation to deliver one.

The narrative in this form is elucidated on the viewer’s part with exposure to the fragments available to them. As they navigate sporadically through the piece, the order and pacing – decided by them – offers form enough for them to build a narrative out of it, if any at all.

Can YouTube be considered a form of interactive documentary? I realised that it acts a lot like Korsakow for example that recommends videos based on words in the video’s tag list and title. Though there’s no narrative intended between each video, it adheres to the form of interactive documentary; it allows for users to upload their own content which is added to the global pool of content that documents places, people, themes, or ideas.

A Place to Define Myself from Jake Baldwin on Vimeo.

Immediate Family from Jake Baldwin on Vimeo.

Objects That Define Myself from Jake Baldwin on Vimeo.

The extract from Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art book I had already read last year as a part of my Cinema Studies course. Nevertheless, it’s concepts are certainly applicable across many disciplines, though in relation to Integrated Media and the study of Korsakow films we are undertaking at the moment, the ideas are something you have to construe a little bit to grasp in terms of multi-linear media.

The main points in the reading concern the most basic of narrative devices: time, space, the order of both of those, and arguably the most important, cause and effect. The question is how these will translate to films that cannot rely on a single narrative thread to be compelling; where traditional film has concrete motivations to proceed a story, non-linear media relies on the user to decide on these motivations.

A game I referred to much last year in the Networked Media course was Dear Esther, which is exemplary of a kind of non-linear storytelling, where the story is told in fragments, and delivered at random at certain checkpoints. The pace is thus dictated by the player, who can meditate on one area for as long as they like, and then choose where to proceed next. Of course there are many criticisms of the game, most regarding it’s supposed linearity, nevertheless it upholds an ideal of a story that is not reliant on linear time or space.

The extract from Film Art eventually moves onto experimental and abstract film. At a glance of course these hold very little narrative, but the text explores the use of visual and aural relations to create a kind of rhythm, that can be interpreted into a story. It mentions a particular film called Ballet Mecanique that seems to just show random images over several minutes.

Both the traditional techniques and the one shown in Ballet Mecanique showcase how relations are made between shots to help build the narrative, which – provided your aim is to create a narrative – is how multi-linear films such as Korsakow can achieve a narrative.

ACMI is a great example of contemporary non-linear storytelling though, and it’s permanent exhibition Screen Worlds is a more physical form of the non-linear narrative, where participants can explore a mediated history of TV, film, and video games in an open plan space to compose a narrative. The space relies heavily on the relation of space (you can follow a loosely built chronology of media) to give a sense of time passing.

I wrote a thing on how the interactive film works best in terms of what it achieves on my main blog, thought it might be good here too for sharing. The original post is here.

I recommend having a look at this Korsakow film before you go any further, The Border Between Us; of all the ones I’ve watched so far this one is exemplary of how the format can be used. Many others come off as very vague, and don’t seem to grasp as any particular narratives.

I really love the idea of a form of documentary that asks the viewer to navigate through the content themselves, allowing them to choose what or what not to watch, and in which order to watch it. The segmented style of each nugget of media is odd, but it opens the opportunity to play more with sound and photographs rather than straight up video and sync sound.

Continue reading →

One Shot Slow from Jake Baldwin on Vimeo.

Multi Shot Fast from Jake Baldwin on Vimeo.

One Shot Fast from Jake Baldwin on Vimeo.