Tag Archives: readings

gone in a flash – week 7

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this weeks reading gave us some nice info about korsakow itself from someone who has worked with the created of the program (and adrian,who is even quoted in it).it brought up points that were discussed in the lecture about interactivity and narrative in regards to how much control the audience has over interpretation. for example, here’s this quote from the article: “the juxtaposition by itself of course does not result in montage, it is up to the filmmaker to construct a logic that determines which images appear together, when they appear and what kind of relationships they enter into with one another”. this discusses the actual style of korsakow itself as a non-linear interface that is not about what is the content but more about how the content is put together to create connections and relations.

one of the smaller points of the article that i found really interesting was the stuff about the difference between older programs such as korsakow compared to new stuff like a done, java and flash. adobe may become obsolete in the future and so any films uploaded online using flash or other adobe software may cease to exist, negating the whole idea of internet films and things being accessible. not even accessible on certain mobile devices such as iPads- backwards thinking. older films from 1900 may have longer lasting rate than more current films produced and distributed using software like adobe. can the older adobe files still be accessible once software is updated?

 

can movies be essays? – week 6

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this weeks reading was a hefty one and i have to be honest, i didn’t get through all of it. a lot of skimming was done. but it was just so long. i was finding it impossible to focus and figured off i was better off reading parts and taking them in than reading the whole thing but absorbing nothing. not that it wasn’t interesting. because the concept of film essays is a new and interesting one. it was just a very long, very wordy article that had a lot of foreign examples that meant nothing to me because i don’t watch those kind’s of films.

Laura Rascaroli tells us all about the concept of the “film essay”. a concept which i am assuming is related in some degree to Korsakow. otherwise, why would we be reading it. it’s about making and seeing films in a new and different way. not just pure narrative anymore, film essays are more biographical. the director and scriptwriter merge together. most importantly, it’s the voice of the filmmaker which comes across through the essay. like korsakow, it’s not so much about what is being said but about how ideas are being represented or delivered and what the audience can gain from that. a literary essay is a means for someone to try and communicate their ideas and opinions to an audience and thus a film essay is the same. it sits between fiction and non fiction cinema, blurring the boundaries between the two as it can be either, both or neither. from the article, “an essay is neither fiction nor fact, but a personal investigation involving both the passion and intellect of the author”, the film essay is an exploration of ideas, led by the filmmaker. 

this is what korsakow is. it’s what we’ve been discussing. that’s it’s not about the content but rather how the content is delivered and how it can be interpreted. and this is how we have to look at our k-films. right now i’m still unsure about putting the whole thing together. but i just have to think about how i want to express myself and the clips that i have taken. importantly, it’s the relationships between the clips, not the clips themselves.

if the literary essay is a device for saying almost everything about almost everything, then the film essay can do exactly the same, only even more because it can show it too. this is where the benefit of cinema comes in. it is visual and audial (is that a word?) the viewers can see, watch, read and listen to the essay and the different elements combine to produce a far more cohesive and enriched work.

like korsakow, the essay shows the process of thinking, how the filmmaker goes about getting to the point they are trying to communicate. it is a reflective form, practically auto-biographical. the k-films show the inner workings of the filmmaker’s mind as they put the film itself together.

i only have two question coming out of this reading.

1. if our k-film is a film essay, why do we need a written essay to accompany it?

2. the article mentioned someone named Georg Lukács. are we sure this isn’t George Lucas trying to get his hands on another type of cinema?

 

stories, narratives or discourse? – week 5

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the reading. first off, let me say how wide my eyes went in pleasant surprise when i saw how short this reading was! like seriously… why can’t they all be like this? it would give me so much more time to do the actual proper and important work for each subject. then i actually started reading it and realised that if it was any longer i may never get through it. ok, it wasn’t that bad. the start was ok, but a lot of the last half just went straight over my head, i had no idea what was going on.

from what i got, Ryan was discussing narrative and what it is that really makes up or defines a narrative, especially in regards to the rise of transmedia stories and storytelling that don’t conform to the to the norm of narrative storytelling. however, Ryan suggests that while the current definition of narrative must be broadened to allow for the new types of media, it must also be constrained, otherwise every text across every medium will be regarded as narrative.

Ryan provides a description of narrative as the combination of story and discourse. story being the sequence of events and discourse as the events being represented. thus, narrative is the textual actualisation of th story while the story is the virtual form of the narrative. so many words twisted in and upon themselves, i started to lose track of what was what and what was doing what in regards to what. this is where the study of narrative become very confusing. sadly, it didn’t end there. because then we moved on to other ways we can have narrative which can be  representation which are “medium free”. Ryan claims we cannot confine narrative to one medium but that it can transcend across all mediums, it is not simply verbal anymore.

expanding on the previous stuff, Ryan explains that story is not events, it consists of events. thus story is not found naturally in the world. story is a representation of events as a cognitive construction, a mental image rather than physical as discourse is. so story, and in a further sense, narrative, does not really exist anywhere, it is constructed in the minds of the reader as they are reading and interpreting texts or events. Ryan states that the ability to evoke stories to the mind distinguishes narrative discourse from other text types. any text can create a narrative in the mind of the reader. thus we can never be sure that sender and the receiver have the same story in mind.

there was also a big list about what defines a narrative and then a list following that about why that first list doesn’t always work. although that was probably there to help us understand more, it kinda just made everything slightly more confusion. but i was not a huge fan of the first list because it gave definitions that were too rigid. narrative and stories can and should be about anything and everything. they do not need to be bound by set rules, otherwise they’d all be the same. the good thing about stories is that they can all be different. i guess what it’s saying is, they can’t just be life. or about a rock that just is. that’s not a narrative. that’s just a rock. however, one of my favourite pints from the article was describing narrative as “world construction”. the idea of every story being it’s own world is interesting. everything that occurs, all the events and characters and reactions, are within a world that is solely confined to that story or narrative. again, it’s all looping back in on each other. but for me the idea is to create a world and then put everything in it.

but where does that leave us with our korsakow films? i rested each video i made separately, with no connection or bigger picture in mind. so, will they automatically form their own narrative world when i put them together. because these last two readings focused heavily on narrative, i still can’t tell whether they want our korsakow films to follow narrative structure or to be random and abstract. i guess what we learned from last weeks reading is that even abstract experimental films can have a narrative sooty. and form this we learn that narrative is really the ability for the mind to create a story out of the events that occur. so really, it doesn’t matter what we make, it will always be possible for someone to connect the events and create a story.

readings upon readings – week 4

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somehow this week, the readings for each of our subjects all seemed to interconnect. while this was kinda helpful in that they were all discussing similar topics, it did get a but confusing where they kinda all blurred together into one and i wasn’t sure which reading was for which subject and needed to be used to answer which question. and it didn’t help that the reading for this subject was the same as one we did for cinema studies this time last year and both it and the reading for cinema studies this week were covering documentaries of some form or another. luckily, my brain is completely fried and i managed to get through them all without a complete and total meltdown. and here’s what i gathered.

at first glance, i wasn’t really to sure where the connections were between boardwell and thompsons “film art, an introduction” excerpts and our course. but i think i got it (i’m prob wrong so feel free anyone to comment and give your own opinions). this reading began with narrative and the construction and functions of narrative and it’s effect on it’s audience. it then moved on to experimental films before finishing at the different types of documentary. these three sections can be combined to create what we are doing in integrated media this year with our korsakow films and the little sketch tasks.

we were given a simple task to make a 6 second video. but we still needed to make them. and that is where all of these topics come in. do we try and make a story when we film them? do we try and simply document something? or do we want to make them abstract and random, with no meaning? and yet, each of these are linked. when we choose what it is we want to film, we must then choose where we film it from, for how long, how close in, what it does, if we move the camera and why we are choosing that. and every one of these influences the film as a whole. and then, as an audience, we seem to immediately and subconsciously try to associate a meaning to whatever we watch. as the reading stated, as viewers,  “We often infer events that are not explicitly presented”, that is, we try and make connections out of what we see, even if nothing is explicitly shown. the reading claims that “In general, the spectator actively seeks to connect events by means of cause and effect.” but what if there is no discernible cause and effect?

this is where the experimental film joins the conversation. are our films experimental? are they abstract? are they associational? certainly when i filmed a painting on my wall, i was not trying to tell a story. there was no cause for filming it and no effect that occurred from it being there or bing filmed. and yet, can connections be made between that film of  my painting and say my other film of a wallet being opened and closed? again, when i took those films, i had no connection in mind, just trying to fill  the “something square” criteria. and yet, there may be abstract connections made. or even connections through causality, space and time. yes, both were square items, both were filmed during the day, both films were 6 seconds long. but perhaps the film of the wallet opening and closing following that of the painting insinuates purchasing the painting and now having no money? i don’t know. i just thought of that now. and i made these videos 2 weeks ago. and this make me realise how all the different elements of this reading fit together. that nothing is accidental, we all set out to make something when we film. even if we don’t know what that something is. but there’s another element to that, that the viewer can take what it is that we have made, whether there was an intended meaning or not, and create a narrative, or a story, or simply a meaning or set of connections.

and this is just with 6 second clips. imagine what it will be like when we actually make our korsakow films.

 

 

 

Blogging success

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so, we’ve been doing this course for about 3 weeks now (feels like less coz of that missed Monday) but it’s gong fairly well. been taking weird random videos that make my family think i’m insane (ok, more insane, than i normally am) and we got the chance to revisit our childhood with those lovely debono (is that how you spell it?) hats when critiquing each others weird random videos. still not too sure how we’re gonna use them.

on the plus side, i made it back into adrian’s commentary blog so woohoo to that! on an ever better plus side, one of my blog posts about the readings got a comment on it!! at first i thought it was from adrian, until i check it out and realised it was the author of the article that i was discussing as part of the reading!!! Bjørn Sørenssen, in the flesh. well, not really in the flesh coz it’s online so it’s more like in the code, but still!!!.

as you can imagine i freaked out. but it’s pretty awesome. i’m proud of myself anyways. if you wanna see, check out the post here.

WWW – why, why, why? – week 3

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another week, another reading. another 5 hours down the drain. i’m not saying it’s a waste of time (well, not explicitly saying it’s a waste of time) but its the extra 4.5 hours that it took me to read it that felt like a waste of time. it shouldn’t take anyone so long to read so little. i can read entire books in that amount of time. the problem that i’m reading, just not absorbing. i can get to the end of the paragraph and realise i didn’t take in a single word. and that’s on the 6th try. and so by the end of the article i feel so emotionally drained, i can barely remember any of it anyhow. let alone enough to make a cohesive blog entry about it.

with that out of the way, lets get into the reading itself.  despite all the crazy foreign words like “Lageröffentlichkeit”, “plebeian Öffentlichkeit” and  “Gegenöffentlichkeit”, there was some interesting stuff in here. i liked most the discussion about the progression of the film/tv medium over the decades, starting with the earliest and very inaccessible film medium and ending with the highly accessible World Wide Web (WWW). Sørenssen discussed Astruc’s foretelling of the evolution of the various mediums that they would become more accessible, widespread and interactive. But it was interesting to read how this progression moved slowly through the 1900’s as film gradually found its way onto television yet was still not accessible to those without buckets of cash, and then to see how quickly it did evolve once we hit the 21st century and the internet made everything available, accessible and editable as the world moved from analogue to digital. it’s insane to think the amount of things that we can do with the tiny phones in our pockets compared to what people had to spend, do and use just to make a film 100 years ago. and insane to think how it’s going to be in 20-50 years from now. will everything interact or will we just have one big, new overarching medium that will be used for everything? guess we’ll have to wait and see.

i dream of machine

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this weeks reading, which can be found here, is an interesting one but seems pretty fitting for our final reading as it is look towards the future of technologies and machinery and science in general really. all the work of smart people and how it can affect and assist the not so smart people. but, that first dream, “the dream of symbiosis”, is pretty much the cause of the worlds destruction every sci-fi movie to do with machines or robots or technology. and so i couldn’t really get past that. have you ever

found a book or movie about machines that can think for themselves, on the level of humans, that didn’t result in some world altering disaster? no.. because it just couldn’t happen. maybe i’m being small minded here. i don’t know i’ve probably just seen too many robot movie. but it happen, they all turn evil. and with their super robot strength, we humans don’t stand a chance. i believe that the more advanced we make our technology, the closer we are bringing ourselves to our own destruction. but, thats just me. maybe i’m overreacting a bit. lets see what those other dreams were…

so, apart from the dream of having the world taken over by robots, we have the dream of emergence. this again links back into my robots theory where with such advanced technology, intelligence must inevitably emerge. (and destroy us all. ok, maybe i’m getting a bit carried away). then there was the dream of emergence, which i only understood because it said something about virtual reality systems. which would be cool. you know, kinda like in the matrix, where the robots control us all by keeping us in a virtual reality of the world while they pretty much eat us.

next came the dream of world peace. and now you’re thinking “how is she gonna turn this one into a doomsday situation?”. well, i can’t. world peace would be great but, i don’t think it’s technology that’s going to get us there.

the dream of transparency didn’t give much definition. i guess it’s kinda just like what adrian discussed in the lecture about everything being out there. once its online, its there for anyone to read so the dream is that eventually everything will be shared equally with everyone.

on the other hand, i have no idea what the dream of flows was about, especially because i kept thinking it said dream of flowers, which i think is much nicer and less likely to lead to our destruction by robots.

next is the dream of the open work. this one also seemed kinda confusing but i understood as similar to another one of adrian’s point from earlier this semester. this was about “content is not king” but rather its the services that provide content or allow users to create their own. the reading says that one of the “Strongest shifts of emphasis in the digital age is movement from creating finished works of art to creating systems of productions of art”. this makes sense because in society today, consumers are now creators too and so a more successful technology would be one that allows for more to be created rather than one that simply is.

no idea what the dream of the other was about and i’m guessing that the dream of new art is pretty much just that, the belief that the future of technology will create more advanced technology and the hopes that that new art won’t one day rise up against us.

the final dream was “hacking the dream” which i can only imagine involves hacking into the internet and changing it to suit your needs or what you want to create, but that one was also a bit confusing. from all of this, i have learnt that i am pretty sure that machines will one day defeat the human race but hopefully i will not be around to see it. before that time happens however, we have a lot of awesome new technologies to look forward to 😀

 

 

ANTs in my brain

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so this weeks reading by Bruno Latour was called “On Actor Network Theory: A Few Clarifications 1/2.” or, as i liked to call it, “pure evil”. if you wish to torture yourself, you can find it here.

as i’m sure you’ve gathered from those first two sentences, i did not like this reading. it just made no sense. and never really seemed to tell us what actor network theory was. all i did learn was what it wasn’t. for one, it wasn’t about actors. 2, it’s not even about networks. or, not in the traditional sense of networks, or even other senses of the term, such as social networks or train networks. so, if it’s not a network, what is it?

well, there was this sentence: “Put too simply ANT is a change of methaphors to describe essences: instead of surfaces one gets filaments”. but what on earth does that even mean? all just seems like a lot of hoopla over nothing. and don’t get me wrong, i tried re-reading this a bunch of times, it just refused to sink in. so much of this was over complicated jargon that just left me frustrated.

you know what… i give up. you want my interpretation of actor-network theory (or ANT)? here it is:

technologies and cultures

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so, one of this week’s readings, “Culture and Technology” by potts and murphie seems very familiar in the topic it is discussing. however, this familiarity does not stem from anything we’ve done in networked media so far but is pretty much a summary of everything we’ve done these last 9 weeks in the communication strand, “communication histories and technologies”.  nevertheless, it was an intersting read but i’ve yet to find the link between it and the network, other than that one reference to the internet. and i guess technologies in general because you couldn’t really have the network without technology.

what was interesting was the way the reading revealed how the word technology originated. “technology” is such a commonplace word nowadays, especially when doing a media degree, that it doesn’t feel like this word could have ever not been a part of our vocabulary (sorry for that weird double negative there, but you know what i’m saying. i hope). the fact that these new words were pretty much created to accommodate the changing ways of society in the 18th and 19th century. that and all the disputes over the exact meanings of the different words… “culture”, “technique”  and “technology”. can’t we just accept those words for what they are. they only have meaning in our society because we give them meaning.

i don’t know, i wasn’t a huge fan of this reading. it was also difficult because the pages were scanned in on the side (on i was too lazy go to downstairs to print it) so i had to do the whole reading with my laptop on its side. made it very hard to concentrate. 

laws lost, networks or physics?

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so this week’s reading, “the 80/20 rule” is pretty heavy. i mean, it started off all well and good, tlaking about networks and links and nodes and hubs. but then it turned sciencey. and when i say sciencey, i mean physics. and i hate physics. and this is coming from a science student (well, i used to be, believe it or not, in high school i did chemistry, biology and psychology) but i could not stand physics.

now, the problem i found with this reading is that we were never given a really clearly defined definition of what this incredible “power law” was. i mean, it seemed like Barabási started trying to explain it then got carried away in his own thoughts and never got around to finishing that explanation. and that left me very lost for the rest of the article because a substantial amount of the content was about power laws and atoms and freezing water. and i’m not really sure what any of that had to do with the network. so instead i’ll discuss the actually interesting “80/20” rule.

the 80/20 is kind of like the opposite of the bell curve, where very few of whatever it is that your measuring have a large amount of whatever the other thing that you’re measuring is. well, that was a terrible explanation. sorry. i guess an example would help. ok. so the 80/20 rule is saying, as per an example from the reading, that 80% of the world’s money is earned by only 20% of the population. so, in slightly simpler terms, a very small part of the population earn a very large amount and vice versa (a very large part of the population earn very little money).

so, how does this work in relation to networks? well, i guess the whole point is like links on the internet. just a few of the vast number of pages or “nodes” have a lot of links connecting to them and the majority of pages will just have one or two connections. in that way, im kinda picturing google as like the king of the internet. one huge page with a million links going out, but each of the pages that google will link to will only have one, maybe two other links out. so google is what connects them all and creates the network, without which it would just be a bunch of pages that no one sees because nothing is connected.

like that nice little picture, which is a very simplified version, you can see that one person is linked to a lot of people while most of those are only linked to one or two. so that one guy would be the 20 and everyone else the 80 (not in exact figures obviously) but you can see that the smaller amount of people have more links out than the larger amount of people. and i think that’s the power rule. but, you know, when physics and maths become involved, you never know what’s really going on.