Treske’s reading discusses the everyday nature of video, how it has become one of the most universal mediums ever, with its ability to define and expose our emotions (2015,  18). “The beauty of video is that it is uncontrolled and unstructured, it does not underline a system of narrative dictatorship” (Treske 2015, pg. 19). I really like this quote because I feel it truly sums up how our group wants to explore the idea of a narrativeless artefact for our Assignment 4 submission. This idea that video, specifically new media and online video, has no hard or fast restrictions or boundaries, you capture what you want and use it to express your intentions, you don’t need to flesh it out like in words, it can be as simple and bare as you choose, allowing a viewer to decide what they want of it without any narrative ‘dictator’.

McVeigh speaks to a similar degree about how new media and video changes the way we think about narrative. They speak about factors “affecting the changing nature of narrative” in new media is “the nature of the text itself” (McVeigh 2011, pg. 78). While this quote does not directly apply to video, it speaks again to this idea that new media is forever changing the narrative landscape, even to the point where there is no narrative, no intended story, its just raw emotion and feeling embodied by video.

A creative work that accompanied these ideas and influenced by contribution to both the presentation pitch we had on Wednesday, as well as our overall idea formation and development, is Charli XCX’s music video for her song Forever. Made during this quarantine, the video is compiled by user-submitted content under prompts such as people/places/thing that you cherish. It culminated into this montage of emotion and feeling, as the clips really don’t say anything narratively, or connect that smoothly. We want to create the same feeling of drawing emotion out from the viewer, purely based on what they see. We won’t be using an absolute bop to aid with that as she has though.

Reflection References

McVeigh, K., 2011. Making the connection: Lev Manovich’sTexasand the challenges of interactive new media narrative. Digital Creativity, 22(2), pp.78-90.

Treske, A., 2015. Static-Ocean Blue, in: Video Theory: Online Video Aesthetics or the Afterlife of Video (Links to an external site.), Media Studies. Transcript-Verl, Bielefeld, pp. 11–24.

Creative Reference

XCX, C., 2020. Charli XCX – Forever [Official Video]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbJE-KVZvTA