Throughout Week 9 we looked at Comedy as a form of Immersion. Both understanding it as a narrative and how we can engage with it on both an emotional and intellectual level.  When asked to think of a comedian whom we found to be particularly engaging, Bill Hicks was the first to come into my mind. Hicks’ routines always felt fairly premeditated in nature, especially in the awareness through subversion of the crowd in the transgressive style of comedy he was so apt at performing. In the routine linked below, Hicks would play to the entirety of the crowd, then … Continue reading The Mechanics of Immersion – Blog 9 (Comedy)

Takeaways from watching Kwaidan (1964) dir. Masaki Kobayashi During week 8 we were presented with the 1964 film; Kwaidan (literal translation, Ghost Stories) directed by Masaki Kobayashi (We were only presented with a segment of “The Woman Of The Snow.”). As I have been studying Japanese for the past year, I knew watching from the outset there would be some literal meanings lost to me, however the semblance of ghosts within Japanese folklore are a widespread recognisable phenomenon that many Japanese still believe to this day. The overall aesthetic qualities within the film are highly theatrical in nature, from the … Continue reading The Mechanics of Immersion – Blog 8 (Immersion in Writing)

During week 7 we were visited by 3 guest lecturers, all of which were actively engaging with various forms of immersive media, albeit in different ways. I found this highly beneficial, as coming into the studio I wished to pursue the creation of VR/360 related videos. Looking past the current buzz and kitchiness of the medium, and exploring something which may extend with broader societal effects in the future.   Dr. Joshi’s main focus was through VR, but took upon a much more cognitive scientific approach. Looking at each individual having an incomplete model of reality and the importance of … Continue reading The Mechanics of Immersion – Blog 7 (Immersive Media)

During Week 6 we continued to explore elements within the Horror genre to aid with our understanding of immersion. Especially unpacking the notion of Economies of Film or the Film Economic Model transposed against the genre of horror. We also further examined the importance of sound (if not more valuable than vision) and how the contrastive valence of music can either add or detract from the overall immersive experience. At the start of the class we were prompted to create a 50 word synopsis/poem/creative definition of Visceral in relation to horror. Horror has the ability to elicit the multisensorial response … Continue reading The Mechanics of Immersion – Blog 6 (Visceral)

“The raw style of the film also impacted on the sensory responses elicited from the spectator both to the narrative action and to shocking acts, which more often than not centered on the living dead munching hungrily away at still-living humans as well as not so living corpses.” (Ndalianis, 2012) The Evil Dead (1981) During Week 5 we started to explore the genre of Horror and it’s impact on the viewer as a form of immersion. Generally looking at the sensory responsiveness of the individual to gore and blood-splatter experiences which was pioneered within the Night of the Living Dead (1968) … Continue reading The Mechanics Of Immersion – Blog 5 (Horror)

The following Immersion Audit essay will be looking into the notions of immersion within Spiritual Places. The location that was explored was the St. Patrick’s Cathedral: Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne, Situated at the Eastern Side of the Melbourne’s Central Business District. The determining factor of choosing this location was predominantly due to the richness in examining a Gothic Revival building transposed within a modern city environment, primarily in the hopes it would give me a broad variety in interpretation which other spaces may not be able to present. Throughout my adolescence I was brought up in a Catholic Salesian schooling … Continue reading Project Brief 3 : Immersion Audit – Spiritual Places

For my brief i’d like to audit various forms of spaces which facilitate religious and spiritual practices. Either from the perspective of eastern and western based religions, from small and large scale, or old and new facilities.      

For Project 2, I utilised Ece Yavuz’s piece of vision as I felt it displayed the highest exploration of space, texture, architecture and the discordancy of the images. As this was my first piece after beginning Media, I wanted there to be a wide variation in the representation of sounds within spaces to give myself the greatest opportunity to learn and experiment. However I also wanted a degree of fluidity and succinctness. Conceptually I was drawing on the meditative experience.   The opening shot allowed for engagement of a syncretic relationship between vision and sound with the flashing of the … Continue reading Project Brief 2 : Audio Visual Response

During Week 4 we explored the notion of texture within film. Moving away for the standardised subjective syncratic relationship of Sound and Vision. The required reading for this week was three separate clips of films which were considered highly textual in nature. They consisted of Stoker (2013), The Duke of Burgundy (2014) and Arrival (2016). As I have not seen any I decided to disseminate one of the films and try to understand the textual nature within them. Throughout this film I found that I was generally focusing within the Texture IN Film, in which Mediated objects of Environment, Architecture … Continue reading The Mechanics of Immersion – Blog 4 (Texture)

During week 3 the reading specified took on understanding the mechanics of immersion through a psychophysiological perspective. Also the notion of objectivity through the principle of umwelt was explored. The first practical demonstration mentioned within the piece was Steve Reich’s Tape Loop in which the phrase “It’s gonna rain” is looped various times, in which the phrase gets shorter and the listener subconsciously makes adaptations to their listening style in order make sense of what they are hearing. Once the loop gets so fragmented many will attest to musical qualities of the phrase. The next practical demonstration of Diana Deutsch’s … Continue reading The Mechanics of Immersion – Blog 3 (Perception)