Unspun thoughts
A few half-formed thoughts from the last week or two:
Mixing up categories of form and content. Eg, poetic documentary
– I like this idea because I’ve been thinking a lot about contrast, conflict and duality, and how we can make meaning out of deconstruction and appropriation.
Genre – relies on audience formation, so what is interesting about interactive documentary is that its not fixed in terms of audience expectation.
Media literacies around genres and media forms. Are these learnt behaviours? Rap example of “What is this?” and “why would I enjoy this” and “where is the artistry” – the literacies for pleasure and judgement weren’t yet learnt. How can ____ be judged, and why?
Storytelling makes truth claims, either about a world (fiction) or the world (non-fiction)
–> doesn’t all fiction allude to the human condition in some way, hence documentary?
Interactive documentary: Wikipedia = participatory non-fiction
Authorial intention and purpose. Plurality of the ways that texts are engaged with.
Authors can never control the interpretation of their writing
–> books belong to their readers
– eg, example of the Bible, what does it mean!
We can interpret texts, but we can’t have access to the author’s mind. How can we have access to Shakespeare’s mind if he is dead? This is magical thinking. What we interpret is a text, not the author’s mind. Treat the text as the thing with the personality, not the creator.
Author’s cannot control their texts or the interpretations of their texts.
Chop/stop example. We think that reason is in charge of everything that we do, but a trivial childish rhyme can completely subvert what we think is the privilege of reason. If that’s so easy to do, how can we think author’s are in charge of anything, and if we read anything we can get magical access to the author’s mind.
Plot and story. Plot is the order of the things that happen, story is the order in which the things are narrated. Eg, flashbacks, etc.
How does communication work at all if there are no guarantees?
Idea of encoding and decoding – trying to work out the different codes the author/composer may have in the text, they may be thematic, visual, etc, and they use those to construct the story, and the audience can decode that to find meaning in the story.
The difference between understanding the author and the author’s mind, and understanding the author’s composition and strategies.
– Psychoanalytical theory?
The unconscious by definition cannot be known. We analyse the text over the person.
No context can be attached to the text.
Intent cannot survive. We can’t say what we mean because we can’t guarantee the audience will take the meaning away.
We assume there are intentions in the message, but we can’t guarantee we will take the intended message away.
We can’t help but find patterns.
Context cannot survive the text, eg, 1950s film being racist/sexist, or Adrian’s teacher explaining Aboriginals would soon be extinct.
For interactive media, authorial control needs to be surrendered.