Media Materialism

Media Materialism is a way of looking at technology from the past, now and the future and how it relates to culture.

Technology, Technique and Culture

‘Technology is the consolidation of knowledge, processes, skills and products whose aim is to control and transform’. Murphy and Potts

Technology

• Consolidation – tools, hammers, iphones, steps
• Processes – microwaves, text messages, code in computer.
• Skills – bricklaying, piloting, programming

Therefore technology is not just a tool, ‘it involves cultural values, ideologies and eithical concerns and it also shaped by political and economic developments.’

Technique

These are skills that are uniquely human like using a screw driver, mental process like mathematics. It is traditional in that it can be passed down through the generations.

Culture

• Identifying subgroups with the main culture eg. Youth culture, Italian culture, hackers etc.
• Characterising humanity. How we operate as a species.
• Creative expression such as art, film, books, music.

Does technology dictate culture and society as it progress?

Technology determines its own path. Eg. Bronze Age, Steam Age, Technology Age. It also it affects our destiny and the way we engage with the world.

With the invention of the camera, one film maker, Dziga Verto, saw it as a natural extension of thought it was an extension of his eye, brain and body. Here we have his film ‘Man with the Movie Camera’ by Dziga Verto

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z97Pa0ICpn8

Competing view is cultural materialism, in that we determine how we use technology. For example, the NRA claims that ‘people kill people, guns don’t kill people.’

Here is a video of technological materialism being re-determined by ‘culture’ (humanity).

TASK – BLOG O’CLOCK

Dan asked us to have a moment of stream of consciousness and ‘blog away’ by choosing a topic. I chose ‘Humanity is in charge of its own future…’

Not really. Look at the planet. It is going to hell in a hand basket despite knowing the consequences of our anthropogenic pollution that is melting icecaps, fouling the water, warming the planet, killing what we so need – life.

We’re too diverse. We are beset by short term needs and goals, those few in power fight and destroy humanity and the environment, countries, governments, social cohesion all for the bottom line. Nothing is going to change while we have governments being corrupted by big business and the selfishness that goes with it.

It could, however, if humanity could unify and agree it could be a wonderful future. Imagine, free renewable energy for everyone, integrated transportation, off the grid systems, companies that gave back to the community, built better worlds or mandated that the environment was a number one priority.

The rest of the lecture was about our final semester submission. We must talk about our top five posts and provide a final reflection.

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989).

 REFLECTION

I’d never thought of technology in this way and its forms. I’ve always taken the view that technology will determine our future, in particular, the militarisation of artificial intelligence. That may be another argument to explore because we’re not far off from having a consolidated tool being able to use its skills and processes to determine our culture as well as its own. I was moved by the video Kara (above) ‘I want to live.’  Perhaps we will have a symbiotic relationship where we become part of technology and it becomes part of us.
I do relate to the above quote by Beckett. It is something I’ve been doing all my life with all my new art projects.

THE REMIX & THE GLITCH

Lecturer Dan Bins

‘There is no such thing as an original idea.’
Walter Benjamin, Work of Art in Mechanical Reproductio

Walter Benjamin was a German academic and escaped the Nazi’s only to commit suicide later. He has written the seminal book, Work of Art in Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin raises the issue that with the emergence of changing technologies (film, sound) it popularised ideas and spread them around the world. Benjamin considered how reproducing something changes it.

‘Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be… The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.’ Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Without the source the copy loses all meaning and authenticity.

‘… the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.’ Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Today we have a multitude of ‘authentic’ media experiences, particularly social media. It adds another layer to our experience of the world to perhaps a pure ‘Pure Aurora’ as Dan proposed, a more authentic space than the real world, that we get a sense of someone through their engagement with social media. Is this a more pure mode of engagement?

REMIX THEORY

The aesthetic of sampling by Eduardo Navas is a seamless music such as experience ‘Beat Matching’ a high hat beat. DJ was the true remixer and sampler, using two turntables, slip cueing and amplifying. Then home computers changed the mashup experience. Girl Talk music, is an artist who samples and remixes to form a totally new music track.

TASK

Listen to the Girl Talk mix and guess as many samples as possible:

• DMC
• The Cure
• Duran Duran
• Jackson 5
• Salt and Pepper
• Sonic Youth
• Led Zepplin
• Beatles
• INXS
• Mash up Break downs.
• Pop Art

Glitch Art

The digital fragmentation that occurs in digital forms are accentuated and/or exploited to find their own form or protocol.

‘Glitch art is often about relaying the membrane of the normal, to create a new protocol after shattering an earlier one. The perfect glitch shows how destruction can change into the creation of something original. Once the glitch is understood as an alternative mode of representation or a new language, its tipping point has passed and the essence of its glitch-being is vanished. The glitch is no longer an art of rejection, but a shape or appearance that is recognized as a novel form (of art). Artists that work with glitch processes are therefore often hunting for a fragile equilibrium; they search for the point when a new form is born from the blazed ashes of its precursor.’  Video Vortex Reader 2, p.341

REFLECTION

I didn’t realise the extent of mixing and sampling or how much you could change something into a completely new sounding track. It’s an interesting proposition that Benjamin raises about the authenticity of a something that has been reproduced. For example, listening to a recording of a live band is not really the same as attending the event. So, have you had a less authentic experience? I would counter what you haven’t experienced you can’t miss and with the reproduction you can project or find meaning to the music.

Institutions. What are they?

We can see institutions in a number of ways. For example, the police drama The Wire is comprised of institutions such as police, gangs, unions, city council and journalism. But there is also a well known institution that is used all around the world. That is the institution of marriage. Or ‘marri-arge’ to quote Little Britain. It is:

• governed by rules and expectations – faithful, values, loyalty
• Framed by a legal document and regulation
• Religion – another institution enmeshed with it.
• Widely accepted and practiced
• Cultural norms and rules
• Ceremony/rituals/symbols – rings
• Witnessing
• Government intervening, eclipsing the church’s role.
• Symbology – blue dress, white dress, tossing of bouquet
• Performed in cultural narratives – romantic love, kinship – family starts, extended with relatives and reproducing
• Wedding Industry – Commercial industry – photography, reception centres.

Apart from this relationship contract, there are the more obvious examples like Media Institutions.  These can include:

• ABC
• The News
• Journalism
• Newscorp
• Cinema
• Broadcast TV
• Community Radio
• PBS, RRR

Then there’s the Contemporary Institutions like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, Newscorp, and other social networking sites.

REFLECTIONS

It was interesting to note that schools were noted as institutions by Michel Foucault, so this idea that institutions are about social control is a salient point. Do people act better or worse once the context is removed? It can be, as much as control, the glue that keeps people together eg. work friends.
Institutions also carry status like the BBC or Guardian or a low status like The Herald Sun or The Courier. Institutions give a legitimacy/illegitimacy and authority/no authority depending on how they are perceived by people outside and inside them. For example, Harvard University as opposed to going to Footscray University. One carries more academic status than the other.

AUDIENCE

In this lecture, Brian Morris outlines different types of audience: Television Audiences – from broadcast to Post Broadcast,  Active Audience theories,  Thinking about Taste Cultures, Fans and Fandom and New Media audience.

A way of looking at media changed in the eighties thanks to semiotics, representations of women, particularly the Madonna phenomena and the reflexiveness of the viewer back and narrative. This is shown in a scene in Simple Men, Hal Hartley (1991) where the main character discuss Madonna, objectification of women and whether it has been reclaimed by women.

‘I CAN’T STAND THE QUIET!’ Martin Donovan, Simple Men.

In reality, while scholars considered these issues, teenage girls had a completely different experience and instead mimicked their idol. Here we can the gamble of communication where the intended viewer has re-coded the message.

Post Broadcast Era

Advertisers are particularly interested in audience for obvious reasons in that they need to know who is their target audience to sell products to. Because media now is so diffuse, post broadcast, it is difficult for advertisers to target their brands to specific groups.

Here is a basic chart of the ‘MEDIA EFFECTS’ THEORY’:

•anxiety/suspicion re TV’s power • audience is passive / manipulated/ brainwashed • lab experiments, focus groups, playground observations

The Passive Audience

The audience are complicit in their own inactivity or questioning of content.

IDEAS OF ‘MASS CULTURE’ & ‘MASS AUDIENCES ’ -T. ADORNO & M. HORKHEIMER, THE CULTURE INDUSTRY (1963)
‘Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality. The stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves, especially to the most characteristic of them, the sound film. They are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts.’

IDEAS OF ‘MASS CULTURE’ & ‘MASS AUDIENCES ’
‘There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses … a way of seeing people which has become characteristic of our kind of society … [a way of seeing that] has been capitalised for the purposes of cultural or political exploitation’. R. WILLIAMS, CULTURE AND SOCIETY (1963)

This quote is best exemplified in The Network (1976) where the audience is being commented on, projected to while the protagonist, why trying to be an agent of change, is exploited by the very thing he represents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-umBOdafbs

Online fan communities in particular have had a reflexive effect where they have been able to lobby a series to come back on (Doctor Who) or to keep it on air (Joss Wheedon’s Firefly). They have become ‘prosumers’ – blurring the line between producers and consumers with user generated content.

The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not we want you to know we’re here.
Jay Rosen (2006),’The People Formerly Known as the Audience’, PressThink blog, June 27G

 Fans, in short, recreate are another narrative, each either adhering to the new norms of narrative imposed by the status quo of their group or appropriating characters and then authoring their own fandom. They are also no longer a marginal socially inept group but have become mainstreamed.

REFLECTION

This lecture was invaluable to myself and my collaborators as our project is Audience, choosing Cosplayer fandom as our subject. What Henry Jenkin’s has talked about in Textual Poaching is relevant to us as we explore the expression of fans: from cosplaying, online communities and trolling.

I quite enjoyed seeing ‘Simple Men’ as I remember seeing it when it first came out and recall that reflecting the discussions at the time was something that was echoed in films, especially in Tarantino’s work. Like the fandom we have set to explore, fans will appropriate content for their own means and police those who do not fall into the rigidity of imposed codes. An example of this is with cosplaying and their attention to an authentic costume.

Below is another idea that fandom can actually infantilise people, in the documentary below, ‘The Men Who Made Us Spend’.

NARRATIVE

‘A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.’

Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, p. 23′

When I studied Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT we studied, ‘The hero with a thousand faces’ by Joseph Campbell. It covered the archetypal journey of the hero or causality: protagonist’s call to action, overcoming obstacles to a final resolution – a classic three act structure that you see in nearly every Hollywood movie (you can view a summary of the archetype structure in my Other Readings file blog).

And read by every aspiring screenwriter of course is the eponymous Robert McKee – ‘Everything is story, story is everything’.

Yes, narrative is everywhere. Even people not normally associated with discussing it like the renowned neurologist, Oliver Sacks. ‘Humans naturally create stories and narratives’. (http://bigthink.com/videos/oliver-sacks-on-humans-and-myth-making). This echoes what Adrian Miles was addressing his lecture that ‘humans are the only animals that create story’ (Ah, if only we could understand ‘whale’).

TASK
As activity, in pairs we were to map out a story of a well-known movie or story.

1. Think of a story both know
2. Map the story according to emotional highs/lows
3. Map the story according to character prominence.

Lion King

Non-narrative

Whenever I hear this term ‘non-narrative’ I can’t but help think of some tedious French film where two lovers are sitting at a distressed wooden kitchen table, and with long faces are shoving plates of camembert at each other in between interminably long pauses and then, after two hours the credits roll.  Or instead watch Andy Warhol’s Empire State Building to get the same feeling.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Andy+Warhol+made+a+film+called+Empire+in+1964+

Yes, not a lot happens and often non-narrative is typified by bucking the conventions of narrative ie there maybe a hero, they may not overcome obstacles, there maybe no end and they maybe even on hero.Even so, so-called non-narrative forms do use elements. As this video by Daniel Askil ‘We decided not to die’ shows.

REFLECTION

As a published writer of a travel narrative, short story and scriptwriter, I didn’t find in today’s lecture much that I didn’t already know. Still, it was, like seeing an old lover, pleasurable. Watching the video ‘We decided not to die’ despite so-called non-narrative style of it each vignette had journey of the protagonist and resolution. So still they were following the classic three act structure.

TEXTS

Lecturer: Brian Morris.

Textual Analysis covers film, audio doco, policy documents, fiction, non-fiction etc. It can be hard to define. As Morris said about a U.S. Supreme Court Case, the judge exclaimed, ‘Porn. I don’t know what it is but I know it when I see it.’

Where does ‘textual analysis come from? It comes from content such as films, articles, topics and has a quantitive focus. For example, the Bobo Doll Experiment looked at the effects of child violence. Parents were given a Bobo doll and hit it. Their children watched this on a television screen. They were then told to entre the room and play with the Bobo Doll. They immediately began beating the doll. This mimicking of adult behaviour led researchers to believe there was a connection between onscreen violence and children’s violence. It’s a debate that is still being raged over today with uptake of video games.

Coming out of the Structuralist era of academia in post World War II to the mid 20^th Century, there was a turn against a particular idea of culture. Namely this was the consumerist culture or Pop Culture. Academics took a moral position that some culture was higher than others. For example, James Joyce Ulysses would’ve been regarded higher than say a Spiderman comic, which was seen as a lower culture. This brings us to our next topic, semiotics.

Semiotics

What is it?

‘Semiotics is the study of sign systems. It explores how words and other signs make meaning. It is anything that stands in for something other than itself. This lesson focuses primarily on linguistic signs. The word ‘semiotics’ dates back to ancient Greece, but its use in modern linguistics was propelled in the 19th century with the research of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure was a Swiss linguist who contributed greatly to the study of semiotics, also sometimes referred to as semiology.’ (http://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-semiotics-definition-examples.html)

What is a ‘text’?

Texts are the materials traces that are left of the practice of sense-making – the only empirical evidence we have of how other people make sense of the world. This is done by:

• vehicles for the production of cultural meaning (Sign systems)
• ‘texts’ in media, coummunications and cultural studies include cultural products, images, policy documents, social practices, institutions…
• Sites where we can see the social production of ideas
• Alan McKee ‘Textual analysis: a beginner’s guide (2003) – p12. ‘This , then, is why….make sense of the world.’ See (http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~sbenus/Teaching/APTD/McKee_Ch1.pdf)

SOME PREVIOUS ACADEMIC MOTIVES FOR TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

‘textual analysis is an educated guess at some of the most likely interpretations that might be made of text’  Alan McKee.

Communication, academics argue, is a gamble. There is the possibility that the reader may not get the encoded meaning or understand it.  An example is ‘re-coding’. Ronald Reagan appropriated Bruce Springsteen ‘Born in the USA’ which was originally to communicate the working-man for his election campaign.

SEMIOTIC TRADITION OF ANALYSIS

Key starting terms:

• Sign, signifier, signified (referent)
• Denotation, connotation
• Codes
• ‘Myth’/ Ideology
  (See Daniel Chandler, semiotics for beginnershttp://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/)

A ‘sign’ can be visual, linguistic, aural, combination etc.

Signifier ‘a dog’ is a label.

Signified  what comes with that, associated with that label.

Connotation The colour ‘red’ connotes passion, anger, sexuality, communism, economic loss.

As example of constructing meaning, Morris showed a picture of children of different ages, a man and a woman and a dog sitting together picture. We immediately said ‘this is a family’. They maybe individuals but because they’re sitting close we imagine that they are a family. The dog is something that is part of the equation that we have constructed that is the ‘typical family’. We have attached meaning to these images.

When shown another image of people together all of similar age we knew immediately it was perhaps a band. We make these meanings through the use of labels we assign to each object and what it signifiers to us.

Commercials often use semiotics to sell an idea like the advertisement for cotton we see a father throwing a child into pool. While it emphasised pleasure it also sold the idea of white privilege, an exclusivity.

LIMITATIONS OF SEMIOTICS ANALYSES

‘…different modes allow to you to do different kinds of things, and not only allow you to do different kinds of things, but insist that different things are done.’ Gunther Kress, Social Semiotics: Key Figures, New Directions (79)

While we can separate images we can’t separate semitic elements when it comes to sound. Because sound is:

• Pervasive – can’t control what comes into our ears.
• Multidirectional – comes from everywhere
• Complexly layered –
• Prioritized by the ear – Janke Schaefer ‘Audio and Image’. Someone saying your name on the street.
• Sound is intimate and subjective.

These can be affect by Aural Semiotics, as Theo Van Leeuwen describes as  ‘Perspective’. The meaning of sound depends on the closeness. For example if the figure in the foreground the figure is the focus of interest. The ground sets the context or setting and the field is the background or ambient space. So we judge something based on a ‘Social Distance’.  For instance whispering (intimate relationship) to say using a microphone (public distance). If we look at broader sounds this takes us to looking at soundscape.

SOUNDSCAPE

It is a representation of a place or an environment that can be heard rather than what can be seen. Tony Gibbs, ‘The Fundamentals of Sonic Art and Sound Design’. These are made up of ‘sonic components’ such as technical, emotional, pitch, volume. Looking below as this disturbing image we can already imagine the ‘soundscape’ here. The girl we might hear screaming above the other children’s cries (figure sound), the sound of footsteps, guns, radio chatter (ground sound) and sounds helicopters, explosions in the distance (field).

REFLECTIONS

Thinking about textual analysis and semiotics we do it on a daily basis without realising it. I make choices all the time if I’m going to read something based on whether it is ‘worthy’ (high culture) or not like a graphic novel (low culture). I deliberately eschew commercial television because I see it as low culture and feel morally superior when I engage in watching documentaries on enslavement of iphone workers in China a rather than my neighbour who wants to talk about My Kitchen rules.

In regards to semiotics I thought immediately of advertising as they are highly constructed images. I studied copywriting and it was always a challenge to seize an arresting image that maybe neutral to look at but then connate it with a tag line. I think this Evian ad best exemplifies what I mean.

Also, I thought about the last time I was at the pool. People leave their towels on a sun lounge to denote that this is their space. The towel is no longer a towel but a form of signifying ownership. I thought, as a funny video, I could go around town putting towels on things and saying they’re mine. Put the towel on somebody’s bike – ‘That’s mine now, thanks!’ or, upping the ante, on somebody – ‘You’re coming with me.’ I guess that’s not that far from the truth with wedding bands. ‘This maybe just a piece of round metal but once I put this on your finger…your life is over.’

Media is a form of research

This week Amy Saunders RMIT Media Librarian was our guest speaker. She illuminated us to the possibilities of research in the RMIT library and its online resources. For example, here is a list of resources to peruse:

• http://rmit.libguides.com/mjsm is an extensive online training library that helps anyone learn software, creative and business skills.  It contains a wide variety of video tutorials from experts with subject coverage including 3D + animation, audio, design, video, web and more. 
  (Not indexed by LibrarySearch)
• Referencing La Trobe has good referencing
• iSearch
• http://emedia.rmit.edu.au/isearch/search-process
• Moving Image
• World Cat
• Google Scholar
• Or ask a librarian

One of the lecturers, Brian Morris, emphasised the need for good research skills.

COLLABORATION

Here is a great example of collaboration:

Interestingly, employers are advising above most other skills is the ability to be able to collaborate. They are looking for people who can work with other people and enjoy working as part of a team.

The advantages of collaborating are that it can: develop your skills for your professional life; learn more effectively and retain knowledge longer by talking to others and teach you how to participate in group discussions.

GOOD vs BAD EXPERIENCES of Collaboration

The Good

• get great ideas
• cross pollination
• new ways of looking at things
• share ideas
• support
• more responsible
• share work load
• rigour – strong vetting process to evaluate ideas and approaches
• you can tackle bigger projects
• solve problems together

The Bad

• Working with people who are difficult
• Dominate the group
• Want things their way
• Uncomfortable expression your opinion
• Can’t reach a compromise
• People are unreliable
• Do all the work

Taking in both the good and the bad experiences this can help you:

• Develop leadership
• Gain experience
• Resolve conflict
• Negotiate for a win/win outcome
• Professional communication
• Establish peer relationships
• Deepen your knowledge
• HAVE FUN

POSITIVE COLLABORATIONS

See the lecture slides that Rachael prepared: http://www.mediafactory.org.au/2015-media-one/files/2015/04/Collaboration-SLIDES-1z0gh6m.pdf

Resources

• http://emedia.rmit.edu.au/workinginteams/

REFLECTIONS

I’ve worked in various capacities from team sales, building sites, film locations, markets and working with groups. I can say that yes, collaborations are an intrinsic part of getting things done, certainly getting big projects off the ground. You need a lot of people. I hadn’t though, considered the positive elements before; that you can learn from others, that you can have an expanding experience. I mean, I knew it afterwards but my perception of collaborating is ‘Oh, God! I’ll have to deal with someone who is going to be annoying, lazy or dominate the group with their ego.’ And yes, this has happened! But it’s good to see there are strategies out there to cope with the inevitable hiccups. I wonder how it will go with our next project? Bit daunting not being ‘in the young team.’
Also, it was good to have Amy’s lecture about the library resources. I had no idea of the breadth and scope of this resource (particularly the online books and journals) and shall visit the library in due course.

This week in lectures the focus was combining two ‘traditions’ of Portrait+Found Footage.

WHAT IS ‘FOUND FOOTAGE’?

Firstly ignore the wikipedia definition of found footage which often cites genre films like Cloverfield, Quarantine, etc. Here are some points to consider:

• Pre-existing film footage appropriated by a filmmaker and used in a way that was not originally intended. Eg. Bruce Cronner as listed below.
• Earilest examples are avant-garde experimental (1920s); revival in 1950s New American cinema.
• Affected by technological developments – eg. video then digitalisation…means that ‘found footage’ has an evolving meaning. (A.Kuhn and G.Westwell, A Dictionary of Film Studies (2012) )

Found footage for our project has to be royalty free footage and can’t be stock footage. Below is a Bruce Conner movie where he has used clips of movies to form a story.

BRUCE CONNER movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FMjBtvsx2o

Some suggestions for project 3 was to try and show a contrast between found footage and portrait and to take risks with our work like speeding up the frame or slowing it down. Even to source animation or footage to add meaning to the work.

Some suggested websites are:

• Oneminutewonder.tv/episodes/matilda-tristram/
• shot of the week.com/channels/documentary/

One documentary from Gemma Green-Hope ‘Wreck this Journal’ shows the possibility of experimenting with form by using a real journal, animating within it and ultimately destroying it.

ON READING (AND WRITING)

What is an ‘academic’ publication?

Reading an academic employs a different range of skills than say reading a novel or a newspaper. You have to read for gist, scan, look for key phrases and evaluate structure and content. Here are some suggested ways of doing just that:

1. Download and print the article
2. Write notes and highlight as you go
3. Don’t just start reading the beginning…to ‘read’ academic writing requires a different strategy ie. Reading key sections (abstract,intro, conclusion)’ looking at structure…before plunging into a beginning to end read.
4. Skimming is a legitimate part of doing it ‘properly’.

GOALS IN TERMS OF ‘SUCCESSFUL’ READING

Write a brief summary of the main ideas of the text then evaluate the text considering the strengths and limitations of it. Comment on its relevance for your purpose (e.g. background research on an essay topic OR creative inspiration for a creative/technical skill you are developing). Why am I reading this? How does it apply for the topic of the week and how does it inform your practice? You can be critical – talk about the difficulty.

 REFLECTION

Even though I teach academic English to foreign students, this academic reading part of the lecture was in part useful, particularly about summarising the text. Seems like quite a bit of work.
Conner’s work on using found footage was illuminating though I do wonder how much footage I’ll be able to get for my project. I fear I’ll be stepping into a copyright conundrum as my subject is an artist.

MEDIA INTEGRATES THEORY AND PRACTICE

Adrian Miles proposed ‘What is the difference between thinking about what things are?’ Like a dog, a bat and snake are things but do they think? Well, they do but humans are set apart because we tell stories.

As Descarte said, ‘I think, therefore I am.’

Our job, argues Miles, is to narrate the world, to give it meaning, or put it another way, to document ontography, that is, to be concerned with  the relationship between the environment and organic beings.

He posed this line of enquiry:

• What do we know?
• What we don’t we know?
• Of what we don’t know what do we need to find out that matters
• How will we find this?

This does read a bit like a snake eating its own tail and it would be interesting how he would apply this. It was like a friend of mine saying to his girlfriend in a bid to get closer to her, ‘Tell me something about me that I don’t know.’ They broke up.

Miles went on to say that ideas arrive yet he has no idea from where. ‘Ideas are things. There’s High Art and Low Art but when thinking is translated into action it becomes a ‘thing’.

This reminded me of the shows that I’ve put on like, ‘The Portrait of John Howard’. It was a reverse storytelling of the Dorian Gray version where the portrait got better looking and John Howard became more evil and disfigured. I have no idea where that idea came from or why that happened. Yet, I took this idea and formed it into a thing.

Mile raised a provocative thought that the media industry needs ‘in betweeners’. In other words, people who are able to function in a variety of roles or as he coined them, pejoratively, as ‘bottom feeders’. He explained that technology has changed so much that anyone can be an editor, cameramen. You need to specialise.

I don’t necessary agree with Miles on this point. Like any tool, it’s how well you use it. A good cameraman is a good cameraman and excellent editor is an excellent editor. But I will anchor the idea of uniqueness (I don’t, anyway, intend to be an editor rather a writer).

STORY

Lecturer, Liam Ward looked at narrative and non-narrative stories. ‘It’s the kernels that makes story important.’ So with that in mind he provided a set of ‘kernels’, cards in fact and told to make a sequence.

These were the questions in regards to our story.

What are the difference between the three sequences? What qualities, as a narrative, do they have? What sorts of content or fragments/sentences/paragraphs seem to work best as ‘movable’ parts? Why? What characteristics do these parts tend to have?

Then we were told to re-order and reduce the information on the cards. So it looked like this:

1st Sequence

1. She woke up far to early
2. She ate free food
3. She spoke at parliament
4. She went to media 1 lecture
5. She went to bed and work up in a spaceship.

2nd Sequence

1. She work up far to early
2. She ate free food
3. Turning point card – ‘She lost her voice’
4. She spoke at parliament
5. She went to bed and work up in a spaceship.

3rd Sequence

1. She ate free food
2. Turning point card – ‘She lost her voice’
3. She spoke at parliament
4. She went to bed and work up in a spaceship.
5. Accidentally walked into a media conference

This was challenging but its easy to see how you can totally change the outcome of the story just by moving the sequence around.

WHAT IS EDITING? 

Editing, Ward instructed, is deliberately smashing things, filling gaps with meaning. A classic example of this is Stanley Kubricks, 2001: A Space Odyssey where the dawn of man throws a bone to the sky it fades to that of a satelite, thus condensing the evolution of humankind in a moment. This, Ward says, is the power of editing, taking us on a journey by showing us two images vastly separated by time leaving our brains to fill in the rest with meaning i.e. story.

Another good example is the 1920s film is the Kuleshov Effect. An actor looks to camera then follows a girl in a coffin. Ah, he must be grieving. But then, back to his face, same expression and it changes to soup. Now, is he hungry. So what happens here is that there is meaning here is meaning outside the shot, before and after.

Thus, we project a meaning for ourselves. This is something I will consider when I attempt the second project.

Furthermore, Ward went on to explain that things only have meaning because we give it to them. Take the Game of Thrones Chair.  If it wasn’t for the TV series (ie. given meaning) it would be…well, the most uncomfortable chair in the world! Instead, it is a symbol of power and authority.

Furthermore, its also how often something is broken up can be culturally specific. For example, European films tend to have less edited frames than do American films, and less is explained in them, allowing the viewer to assemble their own story.

REFLECTIVE PORTFOLIO WRITE UP TIME

What stand out for me is:

• the idea that story is dead. That we are the only species that tell stories (well, apart from Klingons).
• images are connected depending on cultural relevance otherwise they’re just an ’empty’ image.
• Space between images – the large the more artistic they can seem eg. Hollywood explains much more. Art films less.
• Lastly, here’s a link which reminded of what Miles was saying about being not being a ‘bottom feeder’ (or inbetweener) in the contracted skills on Blade Runner http://io9.com/142-behind-the-scenes-photos-reveal-blade-runners-minia-1691950942 

MEDIA IS A PUBLIC PRACTICE

I was absent for this lecture thus I will make my comments based on the reading The ethical stance and its representation in the expressive techniques of documentary filming: a case study of Tagged Kay Donovan a Centre for Creative Practice and Cultural Economy, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology , Sydney.

This paper discusses the ethics of documentary film making. The writer, Kay Donovan,  uses her own film as an example: the 60 minute documentary Tagged about four young people over three years as they transition into adulthood. Donovan states that ‘we expect a documentary to represent in a fair and honest way somebody’s experience of reality’ and that ‘In doing this, documentarians make judgements about inherent right or wrong, goodness or badness, and they also contribute to our social discourse about what we value in our society and how we deal with it.’
Therefore, filmmaking becomes reflexive, that it is ‘checking in on itself’ as it tries to follow an ethical path. However, the portrayl of the subjects comes with the director’s own set of values and so can not be considered authentic but rather a subjective examination. There are dilemmas that the film maker must encounter from omissions of material, editing out truths to portray one that suits the narrative and the consent of the subject become a blurred proposition (i.e. how much are they consenting to?).
‘According to Nichols (1991), the key purpose of documentary is to create a representation of the historical world, which is focused around an argument that is being made about it and within that argument there is an ethical perspective.’ (Donovan)

Donovan goes on to describe that axiographic space that is ‘the Gaze’, ‘the observer and the observed’. When does the filmmaker intervene? We have seen this recently on the SBS program Struggle Street when neither the crew nor other subjects intervened to stop a pregnant woman smoking. Whereas, John Pilger in Land of Fear, actually stopped filming to help a boy that had become trapped in a trench he was digging. Pilger appears to be acting within his own and widely accepted set of ethics as opposed to the SBS filmmakers who were roundly criticised for their lack of theirs.
For Donovan, on her making of Tagged, concludes that it was reflexive one, that she took into her account her ethical standards and reflected those in her work with her subjects.

REFLECTION

Having made short documentaries, it is all too tempting to make subtle changes of ‘a truth’ of the subject in the filming and editing process. You can portray your subject positively or negatively simply with taking what they’ve said out of context or through gross omissions. I’ve always tried to make my subject to be put into a position to be judged unfairly. This aside, if we examine the famous documentary maker, Michael Moore, we can see that he has manipulated events and people to tell and push his own agenda. In a Canadian documentary Manufacturing Dissent: Uncovering Michael Moore (2007) about him, it was exposed that he had indeed had meetings with the head of General Motors when he had claimed in his own documentary Roger and Me (1989) that he had been continually rebuffed. Furthermore, there were scenes he had staged such as when he was at a shareholders meeting and the lights were turned off on him as he tried to speak. Apparently this never happened.
Anyway, it’s something to keep in mind when approaching a documentary making project in the future for we assume that if it is this genre then we assume it is documenting reality.