A home is a place where people live, often with family or loved ones, it’s the place where you grow, learn, discover and express yourself. In a sense this degree functions like a home, but before we were let inside the home, we were asked this question: “What are 10 things you want to be better at by the completion of this degree?”  Here’s the list for my future self:

1. Filming
2. Cinematography
3. Editing
4. Textual analysis
5. Music video production
6. Networking
7. Social Media
8. Up-to-the-minute media knowledge
9. Defined media identity
10. Sound Engineering

With our future goals guiding us we walked through the front door, where we were met with the house rules:

1. Don’t be late.
2. Each lectorial, workshop, reading and activity is important.
3. Catch up on anything you miss.
4. Keep in touch, with the appropriate email etiquette.
5. Be familiar with the course guide.
6. Be familiar with the fine print regarding the blog and project briefs.

As we looked around at the soft furnishings (the yellow lamp was a nice touch) we got to learn that media & communication studies co-exists and overlaps with media production & practice and that these fields of knowledge both sit within humanities as a broader disciplinary formation.

Meaghan Morris, a famous Australian scholar in the field of cultural studies gives us a broader overview of the notion of a home: “I use these text here to create what Deleuze and Guattari call a home. In their sense of the term,  “home does not pre-exist”; it is the product of an effort “to organise a limited space”, and the limit involved is not a figure of containment but of provisional (or working) definition. This kind of home is always made of mixed components, and the interior space it creates is a filter or a sieve rather than a sealed-in consistency; it is not a place of origin, but an “aspect” of a process which it enables […] but does not precede-and so it is not an enclosure, but a way of going outside.” (Morris, 1992).

This offers us an interesting interpretation of the place/s we know as home; this place does not pre-exist, it is the result of an effort to organise limited space, not a representation of containment, but of the mixed components making up our everyday life, that we have chosen from the outside world. It is a space where  chosen aspects of the outside world exist inside our own chosen, organised world.

Overall this suggests, that home is a place which people create and define, through a process of filtration,  encouraged by inherent and pre-existing human motives. In a sense this same process of filtration is what defines our personalities, constructs films or other forms of media and is what will allow us to push forth in this degree. Media is the home for our practise and theory, a place of experimentation, individual customisation and inherent filtration and workshopping of all that is presented to us.

Catch you later, Louise Alice Wilson

References:

Morris, M. (1992) Ecstasy and Economics (A Portrait of Paul Keating). Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture: Vol. 14: Iss. 3, Article 1.
Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/discourse/vol14/iss3/1