Monthly Archives: March 2014

The new avant-garde in documentary realized?

The third reading was about how technological advances in media change the ways that media is used and functions within the public sphere.

I would like to go into my own thoughts on this. As much as technology creates possibilities, it always has limitations. As discussed in this weeks class, photographs are constrained by their lack of time. In a less clear way film is limited because it is difficult to negate a point of view. It is easy to show what is, but not what is not.

There’s also the fact that the limitations that create opportunity or enhance creativity. By asking, What can it do? you can really utilise the creativity and possibilities of a media form. Particularly with digital where the answers to ‘what can it do?’ are become more and more vast.

The invention and development of digital technologies in particular has expended the possibilities within media phenomenally in the past decade. It has also made the technology to create and produce content available and easily accessible to the masses. The public sphere connects in social online networks and create and share content. For example the platform Instagram allows users to share their photography withe the world and is used by millions of people.

However this also has its drawbacks when lines are blurred between what is valuable and what isn’t. What is art and what isn’t. Time magazine used Instagram to document Hurricane Sandy and Jeanette Hagglund uses Instagram to create stunning architectural photos, but 90% of the population are using Instagram to take photos of food or their cats, like me.

 

Relations

The over-all theme for our Integrated Media mini-clips is ‘relations’. I feel like this is basically meaning ‘connections’, which comes up in my academic blogs posts all the time. It also came up in today’s Integrated Media lecture, where Adrian Miles commented that everything is related and therefore the world is a mess (obviously paraphrased). It is also discussed on the media blog here.

Everything is related. In the clips we are looking at the relationship between different things and the camera, and the frame, and itself. So far I have made six clips, three are already up and three will be uploaded to the blog tomorrow.

In these I have had to relate light, not light and shadow to the medium of the 6-10 second clip. Here’s a little info on my thought process:

Light: Here the frame is dark and the only parts of the frame that are illuminated are illuminated by the artificial light of an iPad. This is deliberate use of space. It casts light on the user, who is reading the iPad. He doesn’t move, in order to keep the focus on the illumination and the aesthetics of the light in the frame and not on him as the subject. I chose the settings on my phone in order to emphasise relationship between the light and the frame it is within.

Not light: This is similar to the first clip because it also has an illuminated subject but uses time and not space like the first clip. There is only darkness for many seconds until a light flashes revealing the subject for a moment and then flashing back to darkness. The sudden flash of light reveals what is there in the ‘not light’, or darkness. The relationship is between what is in the not light, and the curiosity of the user. It relies on this curiosity to be surprising and interesting.

Shadows: This is relatively simple in that the shadow is large and grows larger until is fills the frame and casts darkness on the entire frame when it becomes engulfed in shadow. The relationship is between the light, the shadow, the frame and the user, as the user is eventually engulfed by the shadow, when the light disappears, as the frame becomes dark.

 

Money and the Greeks, GELD.GR

This Korsakow documentary was mentioned in the lecture and so I decided to watch it.  Adrian, in the lecture at the time that this i-doc was mentioned, was discussing user interaction and the different ways that documentaries interacted with the user. He said that this documentary was  different in user interaction to another documentary that the creator has made. I decided to watch and explore the documentaries in what they do and user interaction and compare two.

The documentary was created by Florian Thalhofer, he is an interesting guy, an artist, film maker and creative who explores the possibilities and limitations of creative technological mediums, he also created Planet Galata, another Kosakow i-doc and I used that to compare to Money for the Greeks.

In terms of design and content, Money for the Greeks, was brilliant. These things contribute to the meaning of the documentary. In terms of what it does, the documentary allows the user to explore different aspects of the economic situation of Greece, in a very personal way, from the voices of 32 protagonists.

It is non-linear, and the pathways are all equally important and the user interacts with the content by deciding what they want to watch next. It is exploratory and the user is external, looking in. They are given options based on relevance and aided in choosing by being shown which demographics of Greek people liked that clip. In the pyramid of user, reality and artefact, the three interact very closely. The artefact, different aspects of money and wealth in Greece are explored in a real way, and are presented by real people in a real setting. The user navigates this content.

In Planet Galata, these specifics are very similar. The user navigates content, it is explorative, and all those specifics etc etc. However the user interaction is different, they options are limited and based on time, and other times the options are always available. It’s just a small change that doesn’t change the specifics of how the user interacts, but it does change the way that the story is told to the user and the ways that the user is able to navigate through the story.

 

 

Notes on the Week 3 Integrated Media Lecture

Here are the most important points that I took from the lecture and my thoughts on them:

Don’t seek to define by what it means, define by what it does

Taxonomy is dangerous. It limits and it doesn’t include variations and options. These days everything is messy, entangled, connected and complicated. The distinctions between different categories and groups and definitions are dissolving with the progression of social media. Adrian used the dissolution of the distinctions between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ as an example, and it’s a great one.

Increasingly definitions to common terms and ideas are broadening, this is breaking down barriers and limitations and changing the world around us constantly.

This means that increasingly we need to think of things (and in the case of this class, media) as all-encompassing and enormous, and when we seek to understand and define things, we need to look at what they ‘do’ and not what they ‘mean’. So when you go about making something, start with, “What can it do, not what does it mean.”

This I think is a great point, because in life we are taught to seek to categorise and organise things. I in particular am constantly trying to organise things neatly, but I find this difficult because everything is connected, entangled and messy. Attempting to categorise it has so far been too difficult and so perhaps accepting it and working within the world with this knowledge is the most effective way to work, live and create.

In interactive documentaries there is a relationship between reality, the user and the artefact

These are the three main engagers with the project and should be taken into consideration when planning or analysing a project.

The relationship is there and is irrelevant to the category of i-doc, (experiential, participatory etc).

Users are internal or external to the work

Participatory, the user is internal, and this is an ontological work.

Exploratory, the user is external and is an active observer. (Korsakow works are exploratory.)

Studies in documentary film

i-docs: hate this name, it makes it sound like an Apple product. I much prefer just Interactive Documentaries. I like the broad nature of the definition. It should be broad. The word documentary is ambiguous and the word interactive is ambiguous.

Conversation: this is a weird way to think about it as it implies two subjects, the media and the person interacting with it. Both subjects are highly complex and conversation relies on language and signs, and we know that this can often be temperamental.

Participative documentaries: this is an interesting idea and I’d love to see how it can be utilised on a small and realistic scale when making a documentary.

LOVE the Experiential mode: This is such an interesting idea, loved the idea of people recording a message at a particular place and other participators who visited the space then listened to the message. This is a strange kind of documentary, documenting human experiences, which might be considered insignificant in comparison to documentation of history. But the idea is very obviously interactive.

Excerpt

 

First Kiss

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This video intrigues me because (other than the fact that I’m a hopeless romantic) as far as the content goes, it’s kind of like a list. There isn’t really a story there, the creator has taken twenty strangers and asked them to pash, and recorded it.

There you have a list of twenty identical situations using different subjects, with no hierarchy- as is the nature of lists as we discussed in yesterdays Media class.

The  different elements on the list, the videos, the chunks of media, have been cut up and structured, so that they do have a narrative.

There’s a clear beginning, middle and end.  Nervous introductions, a build up of anticipation, the climax: the kiss, multiple of them, and the resolution, breaking up and remembering that the intimate kissers are total strangers.

So here we have a list that has been given a linear narrative.

It’s interesting because it works so well, of course because visually it’s beautiful (the guy at the start please marry me) and also it is emotionally engaging and it appeals to people’s genitalia, and things that do always win.

This is a method that could be applied to other movie making. Documenting actions, events etc, in a list like manner, creating a database, and creating a narrative from this.

Lava’d it.

Integrated Media 1, my first impression

This has been an extremely interesting class for me. Mainly because I’ve come into the second tute with no prior knowledge of the class. I wasn’t expecting Adrian Miles to be my tutor, and I had no idea what he was going on about when I walked in and he was talking about squares and circles and mobile phones and video clips.

After ten minutes I had a little insight into the class content and I want ahead and looked at Korsakow and the Adrian Miles interview on the Korsakow blog, as well as checking out some interactive videos made by past students.

I’m now extremely excited for this course. Possibly more excited than I have been for any other course that I’ve entered into at university. This is for a few major reasons.

One is to spend time in a classroom with Adrian Miles. I’ve read a few of his RMIT blog posts and I knew from the moment I read the word ‘fuck’ in one of them I knew that I would like the guy; then he went and started talking about “flirting” with scale and “the elegant indifference of lists” and the deal was cemented.

All attitude aside, through everything that I have read and the brief amount of time that I’ve spent listening to the man, I can see that he believes in what he teaches, and because of that so do I. It’s inspiring and motivating and you just don’t see it enough in Australian and I daresay global classrooms.

I’m also intrigued and admiring of the way that he utilises constantly developing technologies and apps, in the practice of everyday life. I naively held the view that relying on technology to navigate life, my career, my relationships and my work,  was cheating.  I’ve since changed my views dramatically and it is fantastic to see someone who validates the use of arising technologies with theory and academia, but is more practice based.

Of course there’s also the fact that he’s extremely and extensively knowledgeable about the subject, due to the fact that he’s passionate about it. I can tell that this guy reads about media and interactive film and practices it outside of an environment where he’s getting paid for it. I can also see that he’s genuinely hoping to ignite this passion, or fascination perhaps, through to his students.

The second reason is that I have always thought that interactive film is highly under-rated and under-utilized. I think that this medium would be extremely useful in advertising and I’m not sure why more companies haven’t exploited it as a medium yet. I also think, as a professional events filmmaker and also as a person who makes abstract creative films, often lacking of an obvious narrative, it would be an extremely interesting and engaging way of creative films.

I also am really interested in the nature of lists, of databases and non-linear pathways, which leads me to the third reason that I’m excited for this coming course.

I really liked Networked Media in a weird way that I’m looking forward to expanding on.

This hasn’t been a good blog post in that I’m merely stating what I like, which is simply not enough. So here are a few ways in which I can expand on the things raised in this blog post:

  • Integrating modern technologies is more than just practicality for life, technology is both an art form and an art medium. But it’s practicality is also an extremely cool thing and I should look at facilitating my life more with technologies and keeping myself up to date with digital skills and apps etc.
  • The theme for this course is relations, this is really just another way of saying “connections”, and making connections is something I’ve already blogged on, and something that I think is extremely important and useful as a pedagogic practice. I can already see a lot of connections forming in this class.
  •  As this class is something I’ve become interested in at the outset, I should be making an effort to engage with the course, and material outside of the course, in an insightful and analytical way. This is something that I can document on my blog and I have made this one of my 5 weekly goals for this course.
  • Self analysis and reflection is again coming into play as a major element of a uni course and it is something that I should be taking more seriously.
  • Make notes of the differences in informed making and naive making. Practice informed making, even in documentation.