Development:

Entangled Media: What I’ve learnt so far:

Two Short Media Works:

Entangled Media: What I’ve produced

Reflection:

Entangled Media: Reflection

I’ve come away from this assignment thinking:

“Man this turned out weird”  

I remember looking over the work my classmates had produced and noticing how unusual mine were in comparison to theirs…

I produced 3 writings for people to read:

1. Betty Botter bought some butter but she said the butter’s bitter. If I put it in my batter it will make my batter bitter. But a bit of better butter will make my batter better So ‘twas better Betty Botter bought a bit of better butter

2. I stand alone in an empty hallway, despondent and dispirited. Unbeknownst to my confidents, it’s not the first time I’ve been absconded to isolation. An extensive time hadn’t progressed when I detected that I’d received a message on my telephone from my father to notify me of my mothers’ death. I expelled an exhausted exhale, and resided back to the living room couch.

3. As I look across a field of green, I dream. I look to the stars and wonder just how far, and I dream. I dream of worlds beyond where peace and love are one, and so I dream. If worlds like that exist and can live in heavenly bliss, why can’t we?

The first was meant to make them stutter and laugh, the second was also meant to make them stutter, but it was more sombre. I wasn’t initially sure what I wanted to do with the third poem. If I had stuck to my initial plan, it would’ve been pretty pointless, but luckily I made it part of the soundscape as an example of agreement or coming together.

My sound piece went in a different direction than I had originally planned. I found that after I had sifted through around 15 minutes of audio of people reciting the 3 paragraphs, I only had about 15 seconds of the hesitant sound I was looking for. I managed to overlay them and it worked quite well, but I still had little sound bites to work with. After I had communicated my initial idea, I wanted to further demonstrate the way that people would display the expressions that other people had conveyed to them. I had the paragraph I wrote spoken by different people slowly overlapped to create what sounded like a chatter, which comes to a stop when everybody says the word “death”. I added this to symbolise a “moment of silence”. I think the silence works effectively, because it communicates the way that people often come to a mutual agreement to be silent because of something that’s communicated throughout a group. Overall, I don’t think I changed the idea I had for my soundscape; but rather developed and added to it.

My film on the other hand was really quite close to the idea that I had in mind. This is pretty unusual for me, often my finished piece differs dramatically from the idea I had in my head. My goal was to showcase the small idiosyncrasies that people subconsciously display, and I feel like I effectively communicated that.

I decided to play a few simple chords on my electric keyboard to accompany the video, but I wanted to leave the majority of it it silence. I mostly just wanted the warm chords to accompany the smiles, to really hammer in the feeling that it conveys.

There are a few technical faults that I made that I would like to highlight now so that I don’t make them in future projects:

• The ISO was too high, it made a lot of the footage look grainy
• The colour temperate was off, I forgot to change it from 3000K which made it look warm.
• The focus was off for some of the people
• I forgot to click record for some of the audio pieces

Despite the fact that I did quite like the way my film turned out, I feel like I could’ve related it to entanglement better somehow. I wanted to highlight the way that people silently communicate, but to do this more effectively I might have needed to have more actual communication, or the way they would act differently depending on the audience, group or space. It would be very difficult to do, but I’d like to explore the way that people body language behaves differently with contrasting personalities and various audiences. The way we interact as humans in a meshwork in itself, with an array of things that influences the minor decisions we make in day to day life, and I would love to have the opportunity to explore this idea in future assignments.

Thanks to Leah Hawkins and Jeevan Sidhu, without their help I couldn’t have produced this assignment.

It’s difficult to decipher exactly what Entangled Media is. An example we discussed is in Ingold’s journal “Rethinking the animate, reanimating thought” (2007): He refers to this concept of a “meshwork” rather than a network, because networks are more coherent and traceable. A distinctive part of meshwork is the way that parts of it work with and support each other, while being interconnected with other significant and insignificant features. This gives meaning to the insignificant features, an example of this in film could be the quiet sound of coffee spilt after being placed down during an argument. Despite it being in the background, and just a small sound effect inserted into the film, it contributes to a meshwork of different modalities that contribute to the overall immersion and narrative of the film.

I’m not 100% sure that this concept of entangled media is correct, but that’s what I’m thinking so far.

After watching “Dead stuff: The secret ingredient in our food chain by John C. Moore” I wrote that I felt Entanglement was “the interwoven layers of a video.”

My idea:

I want my piece to be about social meshwork: the way that people communicate how they’re feeling through small idiosyncrasies and sounds. People would be mimicking each other, it would start off with a stutter, an “uh…” or an awkward laugh. I want to create this uncomfortable sound scape, of people making nervous noises and hesitant contributions, until a powerful voice comes in to change the dynamic, the soundscape would then be filled up with loud noises and powerful discussion. I want to convey a range of emotions without coherent words, but instead noises like grunts and laughter and sighs. If I pull it off, I think it would have the potential to be really cool.

Though this idea works well for sound, for film I’m considering making it about the facial movements you make when you’re thinking, or upset, or uncomfortable: the slight move of mouth when you’re nervous, or the twitch in your eye when you’re upset. I think it would be a large uncomfortable but cool experience. The sound to go with the visual piece could be anxiety inducing noises, sounds like alarms and sirens. I would like to do close ups of facial expressions, only show one part of the face at a time, a nose scrunch or an eyebrow raised or a mouth smiling or frowning. But only that. I don’t want the whole screen to ever be consumed unless for a short-term dramatic effect. I think this visual piece could make people think about the way they interpret expressions of emotions. What if we’re misinterpreting the emotion that people are intending to give off? Ingold says, “…it encourages us to focus, in the first place, not on elements but on the connections between them, and thereby to adopt what is often called a relational perspective”. Ingolds theory overlaps when discussing social meshwork, we’ve adopted the connections between a raise of an eyebrow to convey a particular feeling or emotion. I hope my film will convey a different feeling for every viewer.

UPDATE: To record the footage, I’m going to write something uncomfortable to read and have people read it off of something similar to a teleprompter. The writing will be difficult to read, and it will force them to stutter, and probably laugh awkwardly. If I can capture this with a camera and microphone, I think it would only take a single take for me to get all the media I need.