NET ADAPTATION (2018) by Darcy Read, Denise Wang & Sam Harris

An exploration of industry as influenced by the internet.

The term ‘Development Hell’ isn’t necessarily reserved for things like this, but, for the past week, our project has been stuck in wherever that term suggests.

The content is all good — our interviews went well and worked towards achieving modularity (this sounds way too much like reaching singularity) better than previously anticipated. But Korsakow is a tricky beast, and hard to tame, and maybe not ideally meant to be used in the way we’d like. We’ve got a few too many interfaces that aren’t having a great time linking together, but alas, those are the challenges you must overcome when working with this smaller kind of software.

Visually, most of our thumbnails look nice and the project is more or less accessible. It may not pop like Seven Digital Deadly Sins but it’s got the same heart. Last week’s in-class musical chairs of a consultation with all the other groups validated our ideas in the project — everyone seemed to understand where we were going and what it’d look like once we passed around our mindmap-looking plan. After seeing how other groups had branched out into other software, we partially considered making a move to something like eko but a lot of that content looked more conventional (linear??) and appealed more to fiction.

In wrapping things up, I thought a lot about Johnathan Harris’ work and how it pays to have some technical, web-design-based skills when you’re trying to make these projects. I feel like some of the limitations of this stuff involves simply not knowing how to put your ideas into a given software — having a really great idea but being unable to translate it technically. As I’ve previously mentioned, Korsakow seems to work in favour of smaller things (deconstructing certain ideas, films) and other groups (the ~super erotic~ hands!!!!!!!!) have really made strides in using the software to its full potential. When struggling to program our interfaces together, I had the thought of transposing our work to something like a blog, moving everything to hyperlinks. Hypothetically, it’d work — so how much does our project benefit from using Korsakow? Have we done it justice?

Something like Balloons of Bhutan does some part of what our project does in a much more expansive and cleaner way. I think in some way this inspired our work.

That’s the dream.

or: “HOW TO CUT THROUGH THE WEEDS OF THE INTERNET” (our placeholder title)

In week 10, Hannah asked us to consider why we were making our projects. What was our focus? While we making, we should be thinking about why we are making. To inform? To argue? To entertain? Finding a direction ultimately helps provide a purpose which, in turn, will drive the making. What currently sits as “HOW TO CUT THROUGH THE WEEDS OF THE INTERNET” is being made to inform, to generate some (hopefully helpful) knowledge on the new technologies and possibilities of the internet in relation to popular media disciplines. But, it’s being done in a way that breaks from conventional linear documentary.

I’ve been aware of the through-lines between this studio and my studio from semester one last year in a lot of the making. In looking over what we read and made in that studio, I came across one of the readings that I really appreciated then: a chapter from David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.

“342: The main question collage artists face: you’ve found some interesting material–how do you go about arranging it?”

I guess that was us last year, and that’s us again. Removing the linearity from your work opens up an entirely new space of consumption, a new way of looking at things. Our project — as it currently exists — is interesting only because of its non-linearity, because of its ability to cross and move between different parts in a way that is far removed from the linear editing suite. The agency is given back to the user.

Whether or not we can successfully make it work like that is still up for debate — when filming our interviews we found that they went twice, nearly three times as long as we expected so we’ve had to cut them up (hey, modularity!).

This a mindmap, not a storyboard

Interactivity doesn’t come from linearity — we drew a map of what our project (ideally) would look like and it’s far from applicable to something like Premiere. Hopefully Korsakow can house our work.

This week (week 10) we figured out the focus of our project, what we’re applying the structure of Seven Digital Deadly Sins‘ layout to: “online branding”, How To Promote Yourself Online, the discourses around the growth of the internet and how it has affected certain media disciplines — something like that. In that way, I guess the content of SDDS also has some importance, but instead of pseudo-satirical, fake deep interview content (if you can watch SDDS’ ‘Sloth’ interview without cringing, let me know) we’re going to branch out and put to screen(/s) some of the ways that people have dealt with the rise of the internet. We’re thinking of interviewing a range of both students and teachers (mostly RMIT-based) and poses them a set of questions.

As it currently stands, we’re thinking of breaking the project up by discipline (just like each of the sins) and having the viewer navigate through the project and this way — not sure what else we’ve got here. In terms of disciplines, the few currently on the table are: Music, Fine Arts, Architecture, Film, Music and Journalism. We considered the idea of compiling interviews, written stories, audio clips, photos, YouTube clips — sourcing things beyond our own creation — but we considered this a little too broad, and wanted to narrow our focus to a few specifically targeted questions to a few selected people. The content will range from video interviews to written interviews.

Having completed a film criticism-based studio last semester, I began actually using Twitter, and finally saw its worth with regards to journalism and how networking (across networks!) was an integral part to gaining traction in that field. A quick RMIT Library Search around journalism and Twitter and branding turned up the paper Personal Branding on Twitter (2017) [by Cara Brems, Martina Temmerman, Todd Graham & Marcel Broersma] which if nothing else validated (academically) that this was a thing and that at least some aspect of what we’re making this fourth assignment about isn’t some totally ephemeral practice that my Twitter obsession has fictionalised.

This one time, in high school… myself and two friends started noticing — through the proliferation of social media platforms like Instagram (mostly Instagram) and through that phase where you think it’s cool to just “go into town” and hang around the shops for hours — that a lot of girls had begun wearing the same shirt. This shirt (IIRC) was an armless t-shirt that came in either black or white, and had a large outline of a cross taking up the majority of the material with seven words listed down the front. Those words? The seven deadly sins.

It became the crux of my friendship with these two people, the discussion, screenshotting of, and subsequent IRL noticing of this shirt that everyone had started to wear. If you’d asked me why then, I’d have no idea what the purpose of this quest was – now, my memories of it have mostly faded. I guess it was just data collection. For some reason, it temporarily became a thing.

And that’s my preface to the first development post for assignment 4. No, we haven’t decided to focus on data collection (as much as I’d like! I had a great idea that was rejected by the team that I will later talk about and link this post to). The only reason this story got some neurons firing in my brain is because we found a project called Seven Digital Deadly Sins that we think could form the (structural, mostly; content, maybe) basis of our next assignment! Yeehaw.

Seven Digital Deadly Sins presents you initially with an interface stacked with seven different cards – each relating to different deadly sin. Click through to any of these sins and you’re greeted by seven more cards: one of these is a video interview (the digital focal point of the project), three of these are an anonymously contributed stories, and another three are questionnaires/quizzes that allow you to condemn or absolve people on their (antisocial?!??!!?) behaviours. Some of the interviews are absolutely terrible – beyond parody, serious what if phones but too much content. But structurally, it’s what we’re aiming for.

It’s a well formatted layout, easy to navigate, simple to make (hopefully!) and gives you a clear pathway through the project. We’re hoping at this point that this’ll give us a more complex and structured way of going about our next project following our fairly sparse assignment 3 – more content, better use of the software, a more satisfying project. No shirts though.