Reflection and Link to Media Work, EM Assessment 3

Just incase Sophie here’s a link to our film, The Memories Music Holds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk5-P_ivNCM

 

Creating entangled media is a very involved process. We took our original idea’s from assignment 2 and watched them evolve by simply changing our subjects from friends who are strangers, to family members who love one another. The development and change from our assessment 2 project was very interesting as as new themes were introduced. We also changed our media practises slightly. We kept paper, but turned into a way of displaying information, we changed sound from a storytelling device into an emotional device, we introduced space as a way of immersion and changed from photography to film.

With film as a medium it was interesting to see how people use film, in our case we were focusing on film used in home video. Although our finished product was more of a modern take of the VCR family film, it might have been nice to have explored how much we could have imitated a VCR look through LUT’s and Adobe After Effects. In future it might be interesting to explore not only how far we could push a VCR look but maybe try to imagine how people will use film in the future or what that would look like. Looking at how film has changed over time it’s also interesting to think about how memory changes over time, not only as an individual but maybe how memory and the human mind changes over the span of a century or two. These ideas started brewing when I was reading about “…the performance of older adults in memory tasks can be modulated not only by mood but also by the emotional content of the to-be-recalled material….recent studies found that aging does not seem to hamper the encoding and retrieval of emotional events.….In particular, it has been shown that age-related differences between young and older with positive words were no longer significant, and age-related differences were nullified with negative ones….” (Borella, Carretti, Grassi, Nucci and Sciore 2014)

With memory it’s also interesting to think about how memory is moldable and what it means to harness a memory to cheer ourselves up or make ourselves sad. I feel like these ideas of moldability, change could be explored more fluidly with an animation as I feel film needs some form of grounding while an animation has more power in the realm of imagination and absurdity, it would have been nice to see how the entanglement of film and animation would have worked in this project to further explore our ideas of childhood and growing up. When doing research I read about how “….The spatial abilities of a large sample of 10 and 11 year olds were tested after they listened to contemporary pop music, music composed by Mozart, or a discussion about the present experiment. After being assigned at random to one of the three listening experiences, each child completed two tests of spatial abilities. Performance on one of the tests (square completion) did not differ as a function of the listening experience, but performance on the other test (paper folding) was superior for children who listened to popular music compared to the other two groups. These findings are consistent with the view that positive benefits of music listening on cognitive abilities are most likely to be evident when the music is enjoyed by the listener…” (Schellenberg, Hallam 2005)

So it’s interesting to think about how our minds change when listening to music and how that could be explored through media making, it also really reinforces to me that our minds and memories are incredibly entangled with music. A academic piece I found that looked at this entanglement explained “…the role of memory in subjective practical human becoming, in its particular relation given by action. Bergson and Blondel have both paid particular attention to action, conceived as a sphere of emerging of the conscience of the passing of time. Nonetheless, their analyses differ in the meaning attributed to action: while Bergson considers it as a limited part of human life, requiring a homogeneous and “spatial” approach to reality, Blondel enlarges the meaning of the term “action” to reach what, even in cosmic becoming, represents the radical spring of ontological novelty and tendency to fulfilment. According to a different evaluation of action in the context of human life, their works also offer a different conceptualisation of becoming and of the role of memory, as a deeper concept than a simple collection of memories….” (Mandolini 2009)

With such a broad topic I feel like we could have done more with our core medium of film, however we set out to create a “home movie” so we did achieve our goal. In future though I would like to explore how the laying of animation or sound immersion can change a piece of film. When creating “….Our aim is to construct a framework from which to analyse the interconnection between filmmaking, as a mode of aesthetic engagement, and the system of domination that shapes the parameters of qualitative research. A key insight that emerges from this analysis is that the practice of filmmaking can be a highly affective form of qualitative research in itself, with its own distinctive mode of communicating thoughts and feelings together….” (Wood, Brown 2012). I feel that we could have utilized sound better to make our film more immersive. Due to this I feel like anyone watching it on their phone won’t enjoy it was much as the exhibition because our exhibition space became a extension of our work because it was an immersive space. In future works I would like to see how far I could push an immersive space but I was really happy with how our exhibition space formed.

Our space became so immersive because when we went to the exhibition “I Sense You But I Cannot See You” by Rosslynd Piggott I wasn’t just paying attention to the art, the space, the lighting and the messages the artists had. I also was paying attention to how my other classmates interacted with the works and the space.

I lost almost all of them within the first five minutes of being in the room, they had done the circuit and were quickly going off to explore the next room. I observed some classmates standing in front of a few pieces at the same distance. I saw other classmates joking around or talking while walking past pieces not really engaging or giving thought into all the pieces in a room and why they were all there. These observations didn’t irritate me, we’re all different and absorb information differently, however it made me realise the disengagement of others so I decided I wanted to sort of force our audience to engage with our exhibition space.

When I went to the Nelson Mandela exhibition they had set up little jail cells and you would walk from jail cell to jail cell learning about Mandela’s imprisonment. I like this idea of creating a space which matches your work as the audience gets entangled in the piece and becomes more involved in the information and/or story. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to turn our exhibition space into a cozy family-like space. Also our work had developed from just music and memories into new elements of family, age, fatherhood, childhood, love and growing up.

When I went to the Andy Warhol and Ai WeiWei exhibition I sat on the ground in front of “S.A.C.R.E.D Maquettes” and “Blossom” for a large amount of time, both times I went to the exhibition. I also observed the guard telling people off multiple times as they dangerously hang their phones over the works before scattering to the next room. From my observations I feel like people are more likely to stop and engage with a work if they have an option to sit down on a chair. So we had chairs in our exhibition space so people would sit and stay stationary. The headphones and the small amount of space worked well with this also as our audience sort of couldn’t take the headphones off and leave. So not only was our space an extension of our work but also a bit of a honey pot.

So overall we intended to use paper to display information, film to share a story and sound/space to create an immersive experience. I do feel there were certain things that didn’t work too well such as our groups practice due to the imbalance of workload, which was and wasn’t avoidable. Because of this imbalance of workload, last minute creation and miscommunications other problems arose such as the setup of our exhibition space. Also the pamphlets and the sound within the film could have been utilized more efficiently to be stronger modes of media. If I could change things I would have insisted on a different work balance and that our full team be there to set up. I would have also insisted on stronger deadlines and I would have also liked the academic research displayed more engagingly as it was ignored. Although our project displayed entanglement I feel like it didn’t showcase my concepts of entanglement.

At the start of this course I understood entanglement as big, messy and knotted. That being a media maker meant we need to create as a means to explain and explore but now it’s different, things are still big, messy and knotted, and we do still need to explain and explore, but. I look at entanglement now like a spider’s web it’s small and its delicate, it takes patience and time but it’s powerful. Before media making was to me like I have this idea, I’m making this idea, I’m done. With entangled media making, it’s a lot slower and requires more patience’s, the steps are more so as followed:

I have an idea….               but also I have a smaller idea                        ..….And THIS BIG IDEA.

                          .…………..but how do they connect?……………..                              And do they even connect?

 

And who else has had these ideas? And what do they do? And how to they think?

 

After research you start asking yourself:

Which ideas fit? Which ideas need to be put in a draw for later? What idea needs more watering?

And after you’ve asked yourself a million questions about your ideas as well as other people’s ideas and have settled on a (lets face it) clay like concept that you’re very likely to keep moulding, then you can start thinking about creating.

 

And thinking about creating is another couple hundred questions, because we need to explore the capabilities and possibilities of using multimodal media as a language to explain our ideas and what we mean.

 

So creating becomes delicate, it’s like stitching embroidery, it’s like layering a cake, it’s like making a stone stack.

And eventually you’re done, but not really, because by the time you’re finished you’ve sewn a little piece of your thread into it and it’s apart of you now.

When I started I thought the world was big, messy and knotted, but maybe the world makes sense (or at least maybe it used to) and we’re the big, messy, knotted thing trying to make sense out of the world because we can’t make sense of ourselves (and maybe in the process we’ve sewn the world to ourselves). But I’ve learnt that entanglement isn’t always knots and it also sometimes has various life spans, because some entanglement’s don’t last forever, so maybe as media makers we shouldn’t always explore and explain, but also sit and appreciate the relationships entanglement has and also the ones it leaves behind.

 

Bibliography

Brown and Wood (2012) “Film-based Creative Arts Enquiry: Qualitative Researchers as Auteurs.” Qualitative Research Journal 12.1: 130-47. Web.

Borella, Carretti, Grassi, Nucci and Sciore (2014) “Are Age-related Differences between Young and Older Adults in an Affective Working Memory Test Sensitive to the Music Effects?” Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience 6, 298. Web.

Hallam and Schellenberg (2005) “Music Listening and Cognitive Abilities in 10‐ and 11‐Year‐Olds: The Blur Effect.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1060.1: 202-09. Web.

Mandolini (2009) Memory and Action: The Conscience of Time in Personal Becoming in Bergson and Blondel. Pg 25 In: Tymieniecka AT. (eds) Memory in the Ontopoiesis of Life. Analecta Husserliana (The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research), vol 101. Springer, Dordrecht