Category: Reading Responses

Soar Korskow 06 reading Class Discussion + Generating Questions

Korsakow films rely on the maker to download the korsakow software from the web and then create film from the makers hard drive. The maker cannot embed online media into their film  and must rely on video from their own hard drive. This is a big weakness for korsakow as a lot of videos made for the web use video they themselves have not created.  If one want to share their korsakow film they need to do so through technology that is interactive such as a laptop. Thus posing the question: Is there any point to choosing korsakow as a way of creating film if it can only be viewed through limited interactive technology, which limits audience participation?

This brings me to the question, isn’t film made for viewing? We create film to portray something in a certain way for audience to see. Korsakow is interactive and forces the audience to choose the direction of the story. Thus limiting the type of technology that an audience can view it on. Someone cannot watch a korsakow film on a TV screen or an iPad, thus limiting audience interaction.

Another question we have created was that of Soar arguing that we should choose keywords based on meaning rather than visual appearance. Does this contradict the way that we’ve been using korsakow? When we create our korsakow we create pattern through the visual imagery in the video footage that we have such as ‘day’, ‘night’, ‘exterior’, ‘interior’. How do we create pattern within the footage without following what we see?

Technology is constantly changing around us. New and better ways of viewing media take over the last and korsakow is definitely not exempt from change. What is the point of having a technology that might soon become obsolete? Is there any way authors of korsakow films can preserve their works without fear that they may not function? (e.g. if adobe ceases to exist). Korsakow needs to develop a way to keep up with the ever changing media programs. Korsakow is already limited in the ways that we view it, so is there any reason to learn korsakow and use it to portray your ideas and expressions, if there is the possibility of it becoming obsolete?

Another question that the class came up with was that of korsakow’s use. Is korsakow a place purely for artistic expression, or is there any potential for it to be used commercially?  If korsakow wants to remain as a platform for making work, then it needs to consider the possibility for commercial use. At the moment korsakow is purely a platform that people use for artistic expression. Will it become more important if it takes a commercial turn? If korsakow wants to make money, I feel commercial business use would be a positive way to turn, however, if it wants to remain as a way of solely expressing artisitc meaning, then they should just keep going the way they have been.

Analysis/Reflection No. 2 (Question 2)

Question 2.
Select from one of the readings, up to but not including Week 5, and briefly describe two points that you have taken from it. Points that excite you, something that was completely new to you.

The reading that I have chosen is that of Week 3’s ‘Creating the Sound Design’

  • Firstly, I did not realise how important Sound Design was in film. The effort that goes into sound design is astronomical. For every genre of film, different sound plays a varied role. In horror films, sound is used to build suspense, scare and dramatisise events. For every scene, one must consider the scene itself when deciding on recording sound.The Sound director must match the sound to the ambiance in the scene. ‘In this scene a mic that made the couple’s voices sound sharper or harsher would convey an emotiona edge to their dialogue, regardless of it’s content’ (Wadsworth, 1994 p.6). As Wadsworth explains, ‘a sound designer must be sensitive to all sound, pleasant and unpleasant’  (Wadsworth, 1994 p.7).
  • Secondly, the discussion on ‘What Listening Is and Is Not’. Wadsworth explains that if you are not listening, sound remains a part of the environment around you. ‘It can be argued that most sounds are a part of the environment and many offer so little aesthetic satisfaction that they are not worth listening to’ (Wadworth 1994, p.7). Listening is selective, you must pay attention to properly listen to something. ‘Sound in speech conveys such qualities as confidence, fear, anxiety, arrogance, humour and concern’ (Wadworth 1994 p.8).

Today’s lecture: Taxonomy

Today’s lecture revolved around taxonomy and classification. So what makes two things that have very similar properties different? Adrian discusses gum trees and how there are 700 types of gum trees. Any average on looker could look at two different gum trees that stand side by side and consider them the same, yet they are not because one tree has a  darker shade of bark. What can be confusing is, not one gum tree is the same, naturally they will not all have the same colour. So how does one establish that they are different?

Thus begins the discussion of the ‘boundary rule’. Classifying species to be in the same group, but different. An easy classification would be that of ‘fish’. What makes them the same? Well, all fish swim and breath in water, but you have an estimated 28000 different classifications of fish. It’s when you start to go deeper into classifying something that it get’s more difficult to establish that these two very similar things are not the same.

The basic classification of living things that I learnt in school started off with that of Biology but this made me think of all other things you can classify.

What is Culture?

As soon as I read this I laughed as I thought of the questions I was asked for my job interview at Crown. I had three sets of interviews and the very last had two sections, the first mathematical questions, and the second with the one question: What is culture? My first reaction was pffft easy, I went to write and I got stuck. How does one define culture?

There are so many variations of culture that are so broad. I’m pretty sure I wrote a whole bunch of nonsense about all the variations of culture, I got the job so I must of made some sort of sense… Culture is defined as ‘The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively’. I think this is a short definition of an otherwise very dynamic and diverse word.

Potts reading discusses the internet as cultural technology and how it ‘produced an extraordinary volume of cultural expression, while confronting legal and political frame works around the world’. Technology and culture have revolutionised social media, public forums such as Twitter and Facebook have motivated development in all technology systems. These new developments of technology revolve around how our society communicates and is all based on making everything easier, faster and more entertaining.

Potts-The development of the definition of Technology

Murphie Potts’ reading discusses technology, technique and culture.
Potts discusses the development of the word Technology and its definition, how the Greeks definition of technology tekhne was ‘art’ or ‘craft’. And how the current range of meanings arose with the new modern area. The new definition of technology arose with the growth of the ‘Industrial Revolution’.

The meaning of words such as ‘technology’ and ‘culture’ change as the social world changes. The definition of technology originally stuck to its Greek roots, but changed by the 1860s with the shift in modern usage, the word has come to mean the system of mechanical and industrial arts. This shift occurred with the rise of science, thus technology became to be understood as the application of scientific production in the form of engineering and the design of industrial systems. Over the succeeding decades this meaning became dominant.

The now more common definition of technology refers to its artificial character. How technology is not natural production, but one made by humans. Lorenzo Simpson defines technology as processes and skills that aim to control and transform. Technology has become so central to so many societies that it needs to be considered as much more than a collection of tools and machines. It involves cultural values, ideologies, ethical concerns and most importantly is shaped by political and economic determinants.

 

TECHNOLOGY TIMES

Ahhh the vast world of technology… Our lives revolve around it, we rely on it, we practically are technology. In todays tutorial we discussed Facebook and its inevitable end, the only question is when will it die out and when its new replacement will come in. The interesting topic that came up was how the recent updates in technology all revolve around social media.

Our phones are more compatible with social media in hope to make us choose to buy that phone. The iPhone let us use Facebook and Youtube without having to go on our computer which was revolutionary and thus all other companies followed by developing smart phones allowing us to do the same on their products. All new and most known technology companies revolve around social media. Not just companies like Facebook, but Skype and Face Time, instant messaging have become better so we can communicate better with one another. The new programs that have grown in popularity such as instagram, tumblr and blogger are all social media platforms where we can connect and share with one another.

I am very interested to see what new form of technology will replace our current devices that we use. For instance, the google glasses (stupid product, but won’t go into that now) have developed showing a new way to experience technology other than just on our phones and computers. The iPad came out and that was a new way to experience technology.

Technology is all about improvement on reliability and making everything easier for the public. It will be interesting to see what the new products will be like and how everyone will react.

The Rich Get Richer- Barabási Albert

The rich get richer and the law of increasing poverty relates to the The New science of Networks which shows how the biological food chain, business and commerce, the growth of cities share the same properties, which means they can be quantified and described with mathematical laws.
The Barabási- Albert (BA) model is an algorithm for generating random scale free networks (scale free networks are widely observed in natural and human- made systems, such as the Internet) using a preferential attachment mechanism. Barabási’s model is one of several proposed models that generates scale-free networks.

The 80-20 rule Pareto’s Principle

Vilfredo Pareto an Italian economist devoted his life to turning economics into an exact science, describable by laws comparable to those formulated by Isaac Newton. In the early 1900’s Pareto noticed a trend of relation between 80% and 20%. For instance he noticed that 80% of Italy’s land was owned by only 20% of its population. Another similar ratio is how 80% of customer service problems are created by only 20% of consumers. These instances from Pareto’s Law have been turned into Murphy’s Law of Management. These Principles help with the management of customer service businesses and how ‘four-fifths of our efforts are irrelevant’ and how in order to run a successful business, one needs to understand these principles. As well as this, however, one needs to be careful not to assume this 80-20 rule relates to everything.

The reading also discusses the bel curve and how most quantities in nature follow a peaked distribution. Connected with the 80-20 rule and the bel curve, is that of power law distribution. A power law distribution does not have a peak unlike that of the bel curve. The Power law suggests that many small events coexist with a few large events. This is a lot of new information to wrap my head around, however I feel it is very important to know in regards to learning the tactics of business progress.

Vilfredo’s discoveries:

  • 20% of landowners own 80% of the land.
  • 20% of workers do 80% of the work.
  • 20% of salespeople make 80% of sales.
  • 20% of criminals carry out 80% of crime.
  • 20% of websites get 80% of the traffic.
  • 20% of the customers create 80% of the calls to techsupport.

Wired 12.10 The Long Tail

This reading discussed demand and keep and the part that interested me the most was that of companies only supplying content that will generate income that will balance out the cost of rent and purchasing. A movie theatre will only show films they believe will want to be seen by the public which will make revenue and balance the cost of renting the screen. In particular how a film that was nominated for an Oscar was only opened to six theatres nationwide, similar to the popular Indian film Once upon a time in India which only opened in two theatres. This interestingly creates a desire for people to go out of their way to see a film as  a limited amount of people can fit into a theatre.

Some productions need a high amount of viewers to watch their work as they need the high revenue and return of money in order to break even on their expensive production, however productions with little expenditure can limit to a smaller audience as their return isn’t as high as for example a Hollywood film. If the production is good it will generate a bigger audience thus making more money. Interestingly there are many Hollywood films that made plenty of money but are not particularly remembered in future years as they weren’t the best. They may have been advertised and viewed in a wide spread of theatres which is why they have made money, however it does not mean the movie was good. The reading then went into how a product or production does not need to be the best in order to generate money.

“The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsody’s top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it’s just a few people a month, somewhere in the country”. This is the Long Tail.

 

Watts Six Degrees

Watts talks about the connection between events and how everything plays its part in shaping the world. He uses the analogy of how a simple accidental spark from a sagged transmission line can start a raging bushfire and how every action leads to another. Watts talks about what a Network actually is and how it is nothing more than a collection of objects connected to each other in some fashion. He says that all systems are networks but are distinct in their own sense.

This weeks reading got me thinking on the Butterfly effect and how everything is connected. I thought of the film the butterfly effect and how the main character went back in time over and over again to achieve an outcome he wanted, however little actions in the past affected the future in which he went into.
There is a pattern of interaction and the synchronisation of communities which affects all people differently. He discusses the six degrees of separation and the small world that we live in and how everyone is connected to each other by some form or another.

 

Week 6- Reading Response- Hypertext

This weeks reading Hypertext 3.0 ‘Reconfiguring Narrative’ by George Landow discusses the way in which we view modern stories and narrative media.  Landow puts forward web fiction and how Sanford adds colour and images to add motion to the narrative, however the HTML link functions solely to provide sequence. The cinematic effects the Sanford uses, appear not as a full motion video, but as a ‘film script’. Landow assures that he is not using Landow’s project “not to criticise it’s lack of hypertextuality but to remind us that the digital word and image, even on the World Wide web, does not inevitably produce hyper textual narrative”.
Landow then goes on using Michael Joyce’s afternoon as an example to say that there can be a “desire to create multiple stories out of a relatively small amount of alphanumeric text”.

This reading made me think of the Goosebumps series that I read in middle school. Goosebumps are children’s horror fiction novels where the reader has the ability to choose the outcome of the story depending on which ‘option’ they chose. Do they open the door and walk into the hallway, or do they get the knife from the kitchen? Depending on which option they chose, they follow through to an outcome which then gives them more options to choose, thus leading to different endings of the story.

Technically Goosebumps are not Hypertext fiction as it is not a form of  electronic literature, there are links that the reader can choose to move from one node of text to the next, however one can read a Goosebumps book from cover to cover without needing to follow the electronic links to go to the next narrative. Goosebumps are quasi-hypertext realities as there is more freedom for the reader to move and choose which links they follow. I remember as a child, If I made a mistake and found I chose the wrong option, I would go back to the first page and try and figure out the right option so that I would I ‘win’.

An example of an actual Hypertext fiction that comes to mind, the only one that I actually know of is Robert Coover’s ‘The babysitter’, where he presents the reader with multiple possibilities with multiple endings. Allowing the reader to somewhat choose the direction in which the story goes.

Click this link to read an interesting article titled ‘Why the book’s future never happened’ which discusses how no work of hypertext fiction has been published since 2001 and the futuristic style of reading never took off.