Before coming to Melbourne for my Degree, I did my Diploma in a Malaysian college that placed a lot of emphasis on practice-based learning. This meant a lot of hands-on work when it came to our assignments, plenty of planning for events, and a whole lot of being placed in real-world circumstances. Over my two and a half years in college, I grew to be very attached to any roles that involved PR or design, and that is precisely why I chose to be in the PR team for our SIGNAL exhibition.

I did my best to take the initiative to ensure that we had a clear list of things that had to be done, so that everyone knew what had to be accomplished. By working on checklists and also formatting a calendar of various events and deadlines, I did this in hopes that as a team, we would be able to help each other out when it came to completing the tasks that we were assigned to. I also worked towards getting conversations going within our Facebook group chat, monitoring and checking up on my teammates every now and then. One thing I’ve learnt is that communication within the group is extremely important, as that is how you keep each other accountable, making certain that everybody is in the loop and knows what is going on.

Being in college taught me how to make physical press kits that were attractive in design and precise in information. Rose did a great job with the poster and flyer designs, and the website was set up very nicely by my group mates. I worked on writing the press release and compiling the press kit, as most of them were unsure of how it was done. I’m glad that I had the opportunity to bring this knowledge to uni, and I worked with my PR team to create a press kit that we could look back and be proud of. I enjoyed how cohesive the group was and the individual efforts that they put into making it work. It got a little stressful at some points, especially when not everyone had settled their thumbnails and blurbs – this meant a delay in the biographies for our website, and that also caused a minor hold up in the completion and delivery of the press kit. However, it was all the more comforting knowing that we were in this as a team.

Once the posters and flyers were confirmed, I got them printed with Robbie and found a day to put them up around uni. Getting some help from my PR team, a few of us got moving and had all 40+ posters up in less than an hour. Many hands make light work, and the evident teamwork was tremendously encouraging. I also divided and distributed the flyers among ourselves so that we could go back and cut them up in our own free time. The booklets, on the other hand, were printed a day before the exhibition. However, due to some technical difficulties with the printer, the double-sided pages were not aligned and the entire stack could not be saved.

It was then that Nicolette asked if anybody could come in earlier, before our exhibition’s opening night, to reprint and settle the new booklets. In that crucial moment, it was heartening to see some of my classmates offering to lend a hand. I, too, decided to help out with the booklets, because I know exactly what it’s like to have to mend a mistake. I remember once having over 500 flyers printed with a minor mistake, and the work was only made lighter – and possible – with help from fellow teammates. The students in this Media studio have taught me that is so essential to have a sort of urgency and care towards the projects that you work on, for things will only be made difficult without cooperation.

In terms of our RMIT exhibition, I must be honest and say that I did not do much except contribute all my previous semester work, as well as a short edited video of our dinner party at Testing Grounds some weeks ago. What I’ve learnt throughout this ‘Specific to Site’ studio is not solely dependent on what I’ve achieved as a student studying Media, but the experience I’ve gained from my fellow classmates. Truly, they are inspirations – not only through what I’ve iterated regarding their excellent teamwork, but through the work that each of them have produced. Artistic in scale and rich in ideas, I can say that the past semester has ignited within me the drive to give my very best. Also, of course, none of this would be true if we didn’t have an excellent studio coordinator, Robbie. He pushed us out of our comfort zones, what with having to interact with the artists from Testing Grounds (all of which we previously have never said a word to); encouraging us to take matters into our own hands by taking up various roles for our exhibition(s); all while guiding us through and assisting us in producing exceptional content for all our projects.

As I reflect on the past semester and consider the various things that we have accomplished and attained as a class, I can say that I’ve learnt a lot as a student and practitioner, and I’m thankful that I scored my first choice when I balloted for this studio. I look forward to the adventures ahead, and am positive that this was a uni experience I am unlikely to forget.

“Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.” — Karl Marx

Working on this final project, one thing that I was led to think about was the topic of Marxism, specifically the idea of dialectical materialism. This reflective essay will focus not on Karl Marx’s principal belief on the development of society, but more on several ideas and thought processes from Alexander Spirkin’s Dialectical Materialism, a published piece transcribed by Marxist, Robert Cymbala. There are many fundamental concepts emphasised in his writing that reflect on the growth and maturing of society, focusing on their associations with particular objects and various social relationships. I found that his thoughts and propositions, though are beliefs reworked into no more than words on a page guiding conceptual and theoretical ways of life, were also sentient and relatable in nature.

As I began to construct ideas for this project, I looked at the topic of ‘obsession’ as deeply studying a particular thing or entity – in this case, lines – and breaking it down into little pieces; an idea where those experiencing it would be prescribed to think of it through dialectics, intensifying yet directing the production of meaning. Utilising footages that encircled four central themes, I wanted to create interlinked ideas and connections between two individual elements that had a sort of parallel tie-in. The four main themes I had were: relationship, future, humanity, and passion. With each theme, I had two separate videos playing on each side of SIGNAL’s building. Both videos were different in nature, but similar and connected in idea; mutual in understanding. Spirkin (1983) believes that harmony exists in the world for the reason that materiality is present, signifying that it is the ‘carrier of multiform properties and relations’. Having that said, one can almost associate objects and elements of the world around us with one’s daily interactions and life in general – this is what I mean when I talk about the two individual aspects that I wanted to make respective to my themes.

Drawing on the concept of universal connection, it is stated that ‘every object is a link in an endless chain … [uniting] all objects and processes in a single whole and thus has a universal character’ (Spirkin 1983). The overall existence and narrative of the universe in which we reside is said to be dependent on an ‘infinite web of connections’. My audiovisual project was inspired by that idea of connecting one thing to another – I generated a story that told about the purpose and interrelations between Man and World, through my obsession with lines. In fact, considering the SIGNAL site as inspiration, I chose elements for my videos that had some form of association with the building’s physical surroundings – such as trees, train lines, people, and art.

Now, going deeper into dialectical materialism, Spirkin (1983) also talks about the principle of universal connection and development. ’Investigation of the various forms of connections is the primary task of cognition.’ Here, he emphasises the importance of careful reasoning and exploration, and how it guides our thought processes and ideas regarding universal connections. For instance, when I associated lines with the theme of humanity, I chose to think about it from two perspectives: the first being the ‘human barcode’, referring to the controversy revolving around the idea of having electronic chips assigned to every person upon birth; and the latter as a signifier of humanity, whereby the laughter lines from a person’s face were obliterated as a result of the occurring disorder. With two narratives simultaneously transpiring, it stirs the mental process by which one can acquire a deeper understanding of the given theme.

The playful behaviour between sound and visuals is another thing to explore in itself. ’Interaction is a process by which various objects influence each other, their mutual conditioning or transmutation and also their generation of one another’ (Spirkin 1983). As I watched my eight-second footages concurrently with the spontaneous sounds that emerged from SIGNAL’s sound system, it is likely to generate different understandings as art itself is subjective. After all, as Spirkin (1983) remarks, ‘interaction is causal’ and leads to what he believes is ‘development’, which is the notion that every form of connection or interaction will take a particular direction. As I ended each eight-second clip with a single word that iterated the theme, in a sense, I challenged that direction, orchestrating a specific course. There were many factors that could have influenced the audience’s perceptions, be it the visuals and/or the sounds; whether or not the text was successful in its efforts, is a question whose answers will remain a mystery.

By concocting pairs of videos for every theme, I fabricated a narrative that held universal connections with and within one another. My audio, in itself, was also a piece that contained bits of meaning and information that revolved around the brevity of human life, almost an epilogue to the four main themes. All in all, this project was an interesting exploration, and I am glad to have had the thrill of producing audiovisual works that were rich in both expression and obsession.

REFERENCES

Spirkin, A 1983, ‘The System of Categories in Philosophical Thought’, in Dialectical Materialism, Progress Publishers, Moscow, viewed 30 October 2015, <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-materialism/>.