Category: Noticing

murmuration

Interesting thoughts from class:

finding lots of small bits and putting them together to form a work. (exquisite corpse)

Surrendering your work to another – how humbling is it to do that! Wow. It’s so tough because you want a piece of work with your name to be something good. You want it to show like effort’s been put in. You want it to be something you’d be proud of. You have a vision of how it’s going to go, but who knows what the other people are going to do to it? It might end up totally weird and embarrassing AND still has your name on it!!

I think this exercise helps me remember that I’m a member; one of the little birds that contribute to this great phenomenon; I am important, and not. This stresses me out, but also makes me feel liberated. It’s great.

 

bad

This week and last my participation wasn’t too great. I haven’t been blogging and am behind on reading Bogost. It’s been assignment submission week and I’ve had to focus more time on those, and didn’t have time to blog or read. Or rather, I didn’t make time for it.. With only one essay left to complete and hand in (tomorrow!), I can get back on track.

catalyst camera

“the camera was a catalyst and the director should embrace rather than try to hide its presence because it gets things out of people that they wouldn’t normally ever say in real life. You get extraordinary versions of people, things they don’t normally present to the world, when you point a camera at them.”

“And Errol Morris talks about the same thing. He has this three-minute rule; he says if you let anyone talk to a camera for three minutes just about themselves, uninterrupted, you will discover that everyone is mad.”

– An interview with Anna Broinowski, director of Forbidden Lie$ (2007), Monique Rooney

Post

I played a board game over the weekend called Codenames: Pictures by Vlaada Chvátil. One acts a spy master who can see which picture cards belong to your team (and the other), but the rest of your team cannot. But only they can pick the pictures that your team needs. You then have to tell them which pictures they need to pick, but are constrained to saying only one word and one number. Example from picture above: “Medieval 3” which would you choose? (I’m thinking of the castle, the sword, and the weird knightly figure with candles around it)

Amazingly, even with the one word one number description, people do win at this game. Somehow, the human mind can form connections so quickly with so little information. As with the Kuleshov effect, we place meanings and assumptions on things to make sense of them. It reveals a lot about how the person thinks and what they notice in the pictures – and if anyone can notice the same thing as them or not. Sometimes it seems to obvious, just hidden behind that tiny invisible wall that’s in between conscious knowing and “Ohh, I knew thaaaat!” Tiny details in the pictures, relations that we all know but didn’t think of until it was mentioned, patterns… (It was said around our table that married couples played the game best hahah)

I think this is what the quote is saying. That noticing and paying attention is simple; you just have to be reminded.

Ontography

Onto- (Greek root)
to be
being
existence 

-graphy (Greek root: graphein)
indicating a form or process of writing
representing
indicating an art or descriptive science (- systemised knowledge)
process of writing or recording
a writing or representation produced in a specific manner or by a specified process
writing about or a representation of a specific thing.

= the science of representing existence through specific processes such as writing

Shel, cell, shell

Favourite list poem is by Shel Silverstein

Quarks and Leptons are inside a cell

In a shell you can find perfection

 

Math can be seen as an infinite web of relations – the never ending “story” of numbers. If there were no answers to be found, you could start anywhere, and go everywhere with it and you’d only stop because you got tired. But could easily pick it up and carry on again. (unlike a book where you’d either start again or have another form of a beginning-middle-end sequence repeating itself)