đź’ˇ(*lightbulb emoji)

Thinking about my previous post, what is a platform for a mesh media?

I’m not very technical, so I’m thinking of something quite primitive – print out pictures and put them like dewdrops on a web (if this was the Harry Potter universe, the print outs would be little videos and that would be amazing…)

Perhaps it would be a mobile of sorts, lots of string representing the relation lines, and lots of pictures depicting what each relation was. Or it could even just be a word written on a little tag stuck to the line.

Or, the lines could be made of sticks (?) so that the lines could extend out in all directions instead of down wards – gravity often interferes with art.

?     ?     ?     ?     ?

circle – line – mesh

Across vs through – if we had a boundary around us, relations would go across our outer plane/surface. But we are not ‘circles’ so it goes through us, and likewise we go through other things as well instead.

I think of it as going through one of those aquarium tunnels and being able to see so many fish around us from different perspectives (side, bottom, top views, and moving in all different ways) – we are going through their ‘domain of entanglement’.

 

Compare that experience to looking at fish standing outside of the tank looking in from the top – simply viewing from across the edge of their habitat.

I think Ingold argues that we can’t look at and describe life from the outside looking in. It has to be described from the inside because that is where we are at; we are at the centre of the whole mesh of all our relations and we don’t stop moving or forming more ‘lines’.

So putting that to a media perspective, what’s an example of a work that goes through a particular issue(?) or thing instead of across it? Is there a form of media that can do this difficult task of illustrating or mapping out our complex and intricate entanglements?

 

 

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.

To list or not to list

Q: Does Bogost want to find & identify relations between all things, or take them apart? (i.e. the disjointedness of lists)

  • Both. You can’t ever identify all the possible relations of things and therefore it’s an alien. You can’t know all relations so you can’t know totally, fully what something is. Because you can’t know relations that may or may not happen in the future. (eg. my glasses might be eaten by my dog so it can also be a choking hazard. But I don’t know that that will happen so I can’t say that it’s a relation yet.)
  • He just wants to tell us that this is how the world is; it’s connected yet disjointed?? Every element and part is an individual object. It has it’s own being that has come from other things, that have also come from other things, etc.

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.