this was done in a single swift motion and I regret it. Just pretend the coordinates are off. I’m somewhat above the line.

• Think bigger. Aim to be higher up the food chain. Find where value matters in your professional practice.
• Autonomy of reasoning
• Kuleshov effect
  • significance: relationality
  • hunger, grief, lust: audience imposes an emotion/expression on the actor’s face
  • “what something means is not what is in it”: meaning is not in the shot, where is the meaning? the meaning is in the relation between things.
• Adrian is a self-professed 3 year old: he “asks naive questions seriously”
• Friends: a reciprocal relation. If you wanted to go see Moonlight with your friends, how much say in this decision do you have? How much effect do you have in this chain of events?
• “We are beholding to it.” We are just a punching bag in the middle of the gym of existence.
• Next step: recognise that we are not the centre. It’s a shared agency.
• We were interested in what things mean, and think that meaning is the centre of the universe. We’re now interested in recognising the agency of things.
• Modes of knowing: intuitive, affective, non-linguistic
• Performative knowledge (agency, what things do is what matters)
• (Agency: what things do)
• Species privilege. Why do we think humans have any special privilege? Where does this knowledge come from?
• What other ways of making AV material about the world are there that might not need to rely on story?
• (Story: 
  • plot
  • events
    • cause and effect
    • chains
  • characters
  • journey
  • arc
    • B/M/E
      • BEGINNING
      • MIDDLE
      • END: resolution
        • restoration of equilibrium
          • new/old equilibrium
  • rational: makes sense in its own storyworld
• Technological determinism (opposite: cultural relativism). Adrian/the studio’s view sits in between the two.
• Rushkoff: stories don’t work in such a dense technological environment.
• Teleology: the idea of doctrine of final causes
• There is no such thing as an accident in a story. People don’t sneeze in a movie for no reason. They will become sick soon enough.
• Story shoehorns the world into its shape, and in turn we think this is the shape of our lives.
• Our stories finish because the media we put them on is finite.
• Teleological, causal, constrained.
• Adrian suggests that nothing has the shape of stories in your life. Most of the world doesn’t think that this is the shape of the world.

I felt good about class today.

ontology: the philosophical study of existence

• what in the world is object-oriented ontology?
  • Google: ‘a school of thought that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects.‘
  • Bogost:
    • ‘puts things at the centre of being’,
    • ‘that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally’

• what in the world is flat ontology?
  • Google: ‘a model for reality that says that all object, even those that are imagined, have the same degree of being-ness as any other object. No object is more a subject than any other. All subjects are simply objects.’ 

• what in the world is tiny ontology? why does Bogost seek to expand flat ontology?
  • instead of the ‘plane of flat ontology’, Bogost suggests the ‘point of tiny ontology’: ‘a dense mass of everything contained entirely—even as it’s spread about haphazardly like a mess or organised logically like a network’

• how is it possible for one to wrap their head around this high concept talk? where does one start?
  • Bogost brushes over so many individual philosophers’ works that it makes my head spin

nonetheless, I am interested in the class discussion that will follow all this. At this point I’m dying for any drop of clarification.

extra notes:

• Bogost proposes that in our current age, two system operations are dominant: ‘scientific naturalism’ and ‘social relativism’
• Turing Test: how do I delete The Imitation Game from my mind?

I don’t like writing from scratch. I like having a plan. Notes. Direction.

I know I will struggle with this studio in that department. I always hated rocket writing in primary school, and a few versions of my younger self rebelled at the notion and set their sights on turning the activity against itself (if I tried, I’m sure I could find multiple word docs on old hard drives entitled ‘I hate rocket writing’ with like 20 words in them acting as a sorry excuse for classwork). I’m a new person now.

Project brief 1 is always daunting. I wonder if I’m doing this right.

• maths and electricity
  • EDIT Friday: got home (Bendigo!) and my girlfriend told me about how they were doing work on the power lines near her house so she was without power for the day (truly powerless). She said she went to do so many things (eg. boil the kettle (can’t), watch Netflix (can’t), watch a DVD instead (can’t)) and it lead her down a ridiculous path of ‘oh wait’ moments. Appreciate electricity my dudes.
• exquisite corpse? but with documentary
• tacit knowledge: we’re all good at something, hard to verbalise. VCE: it’s not the content of the exam, it’s about the process. Know how vs know what.
• Adrian never finishes anything – 80%. I can relate. “Excruciating” last 20%.
• “Thoughts have to become actions in the world. Write”.
• Black box.
• MATERIALITY, RELATIONALITY, AGENCY – 3 main ideas we will engage with with what we make
• Turn theories into tools. Closing the divide between theory and practice, ‘Venus and Mars’.
• I have never written a shopping list alongside my lecture notes.
• anthropocentrism.
• constructivist view.
• rabbit warren of relationality
• Adrian hates generalisations and loves Sun Kil Moon.
• Look at specifics.
• Inter-species communication
• Somethings agency is defined by its relation to other things, eg. DNA, money

key words mostly. Need to kick this laziness in the shins and get back into writing. Expanding.

Done well:

• the reading! Rushkoff has very interesting thoughts on TV’s part in ‘narrative collapse’. Notes were made. +5 points.
• socialise! I’m glad I’m not the only one on my table still trying to comprehend the studio. Gotta keep an open mind though, early days.

Do differently:

• the reading! Do the reading, again. Reread. Spend more time writing notes, thinking about notes, processing notes.

That’s a good 2/5 on the checklist (haven’t had the chance to do anything about they others as they concern assignments, practical work, etc).