Category: Readings notes

I-DOCS: Who are you, where did you come from and what will you become?

A definition of i-docs comes from the reading Interactive documentary: setting the field by Judith Aston and Sandra Gaudenzi: any project that starts with an intention to document the ‘real’ and that uses digital interactive technology to realize this intention.

I agree that the definition should be purposely left broad, however I’m interested in the fact that authors have put ‘real’ in quotation marks. This begs the question of what is ‘real‘, a whole other philosophical discussion.

Artwork by Naomi Reid – http://www.naomireid.com

“Interactivity is seen as a means through which the viewer is positioned within the artefact itself, to play an active role in the negotiation of the ‘reality’ being conveyed through the i-doc… it involves going beyond the act of interpretation to create feedback loops with the digital system itself.”

The article mentions that “different understandings of interactivity have led to different types of digital artefacts“. The importance of different perceptions and perspectives I’ve never really seen discussed, but it is essential as it comprises our eccentric and endless world-view.

Guadenzi proposes four interactive modes: the conversational, the hypertext, the experiential and the participative.

The conversational mode “positions the use as if ‘in conversation’ with the computer“, eg ‘factual games’ or ‘docu-games’.

The Hypertext mode “links assets within a closed video archive and gives the user an exploratory role, normally enacted by clicking on pre-existing options.”

The Participatory mode “counts on the participation of the user to create an open and evolving database“.

The Experiential mode “brings users into physical space, and creates an experience that challenges their senses and their enacted perception of the world“.

Aston proposes that “the most interesting work in i-docs often arises when genre is transcended and boundaries are blurred“, which based on my previously mentioned obsession with contrast and conflict I agree with this statement wholeheartedly for any creative work.

The 90-9-1 principle is mentioned in the reading, which suggests “there is a participation inequality on the Internet with only 1% of people creating content, 9% editing or modifying that content, and 90% viewing content without actively contributing“. The simplest way I imagine this rule is through YouTube, with 1 per cent of people making videos, 9 per cent of viewers commenting on videos, and 90 per cent watching without interacting at all. Because of this rule, whenever I see a YouTube video with 10 per cent or more of views translated into ‘likes’, it is pretty clear to me that the audience of this video has enjoyed the content.

The 90-9-1 rule

Reading all these facets regarding i-docs from the symposium I do find myself wondering if this need and want for interactivity is misguided. I’ve never once felt inclined to comment on a YouTube video, tweet a TV show or send a photo to a news broadcaster, and I think the 90-9-1 principle is valid for a reason. When I turn on a Louis Theroux doco, I lean back and watch what has been neatly packaged for me, no input necessary. I think the creation of these different modes is endlessly inspiring for creativity, but I do wonder at the success of these projects in a world where only 9 per cent of us contribute.

In the reading The field of digital documentary: a challenge to documentary theorists by Craig Hight, ‘digital documentary’ is suggested as offering “the potential to change the nature of documentary practices, aesthetics, forms of political engagement and the wider relationship of documentary culture as a whole to the social-historical world.”

Hight permits that the “digital transformation suggests a radical shift in the basis of documentary culture“, with remediation and the appropriation of cultural forms coming into play. Studying Studio Art in high school I was very interested in this idea of re-appropriation, with themes of conflict and contrast being explored, as well as the spaces between all things and what they mean. The following video Simmons & Burke (Repute Re-Appropriation) from Gabriel Sunday on Vimeo demonstrates this reappropriation in art in the form of a mini documentary, so I think it’s… appropriate.

Hight asks the question: “what effect on film-making practice will follow from the inclusion within iMovie of a preset selection for something that is labelled the ‘Ken Burns effect’, which mimics that director’s trademark panning of photographic material as a central device for the construction of historical narrative?” Similarly, why couldn’t someone create a Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino effect in order to create new possibilities such as trailer re-imaginings, and why shouldn’t they? I think it’s imperative for new media to maintain a sense of playfulness, and these options may spawn a million mediocre mashups, but they also provide new avenues to creativity.

“The possibilities that derive from the ability of desktop computer software to merge existing traditions of photography, information design, and the varieties of moving image production into an expanded palette for motion graphics. The result is a distinctive ‘hybrid, intricate, complex and rich visual language’, one that is becoming more and more accessible to amateur media producers.”

DVD has allowed for the rise of specialist distributors, while online distribution has created opportunities for distribution of independent documentary productions, not to mention the proliferation of user-created material such as YouTube. “This kind of online environment provides for bother the flowering of the work of new documentary auteurs, and also their swamping within an ocean of more mediocre offerings.” This makes me question how we find the good things: do we depend on others to share things with us, whether that is our friends on their Facebook walls, advertisements or suggestions from YouTube based on other videos we’ve watched?

Hight also brings up computer games in talking about new digital forms of media, which I previously haven’t considered as a type of documentary, but based on the number of games revolving around real historical events, it does open doors for what interactive documentary is and could be.

 

 

The future is disorder

It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

Ten Dreams of Technology starts with a number of quotes such as “predict the future by inventing it” that remind me somehow of Chuck Palahniuk’s transgressive fiction, particularly Invisible Monsters where the main character invents personas and basically her entire existence based on how she sees fit. In this novel it’s done in a disturbing and enthralling way, but this idea of inventing your own future is interesting in an “everyday” kind of way: what is stopping us from inventing the future, particularly in this era of technology as king where really the possibilities are endless. I only have to look through the plethora of links I’ve posted here during the semester to realise that the way we do things and the way we look at the world has been changed by these inventions, and more importantly, that we all have this power to create change.

I enjoyed this reading for its commentary on technological art, again, a new way to look at the world and the things we can create.

‘Irises-in-Monet’s-Garden.jpg’

This ‘glitch art’ appropriation of Irises in Monet’s Garden is an example of what can be created through new techniques: The role of the network in these projects is essentially to create an open system of input to promote adaptation.

I also enjoyed the take away idea of not criticizing a work too early:

Criticizing a new idea because it is not yet fully realized seems unreasonably impatient. On that basis, the caves at Lascaux would never have been painted because we did not have a full palette and could not animate in three dimensions. Give us a few centuries and then revisit this complaint.

This rings true of ‘process’ type mediums, such as our blogs. Everyone starts as an amateur, so to criticize someone for not yet knowing how to achieve a certain technique… this doesn’t make sense to me. Criticism in general I don’t understand, but that’s another issue altogether.

Also from this reading was the concept of file sharing = life sharing. I think about this a lot with the sharing-centric ideas of social media. We post where we are, photos of what we ate, we tag who we are with. I had a conversation with my best friend a few days ago who was feeling disheartened that her own life wasn’t as interesting as all of her Facebook friends’ who post ‘cheery’ photos doing ‘interesting’ things. I put these words in quote marks because, as I told her, sometimes I feel like if people were having that much fun they wouldn’t be on Facebook ‘bragging’ to the rest of us. It comes down to that idea of enjoying the moment, which I’m starting to believe more and more that social media and sharing our every movement is impacting.

In another sense though: I did watch Miley’s most recent appearance on Ellen, in which she spoke about asking creative people around her, such as designers, musicians, etc, for a list of their favourite and most influential films, artists, musicians, books and so on. These may not be files so to speak, but this is another form of life sharing I think… sharing with someone those things that inspire and have changed you the most.

Some other takeaways from the reading:

  • Every reception of a work of art is both an interpretation and a performance of it, because in every reception the work takes on a fresh perspective
  • One of the most persistent tropes of the intersection of technology and art is that it will lead to a whole new art form, just as moving images eventually created cinema.

 

“I hope it’s not sporadically!”

Researchers have discovered that the seemingly erratic behavior of the “Rostov Ripper,” a prolific serial killer active in the 1980s, conformed to the same mathematical pattern obeyed by earthquakes, avalanches, stock market crashes and many other sporadic events. The finding suggests an explanation for why serial killers kill.

Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury, electrical engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles, modeled the behavior of Andrei Chikatilo, a gruesome murderer who took the lives of 53 people in Rostov, Russia between 1978 and 1990. Though Chikatilo sometimes went nearly three years without committing murder, on other occasions, he went just three days. The researchers found that the seemingly random spacing of his murders followed a mathematical distribution known as a power law.

When the number of days between Chikatilo’s murders is plotted against the number of times he waited that number of days, the relationship forms a near-straight line on a type of graph called a log-log plot. It’s the same result scientists get when they plot the magnitude of earthquakes against the number of times each magnitude has occurred — and the same goes for a variety of natural phenomena. The power law outcome suggests that there was an underlying natural process driving the serial killer’s behavior.

Read More: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46045497/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/math-formula-may-explain-why-serial-killers-kill/

Between a thing and a concept

musicfortorching: Actor-Network Theory “can more technically be described as a “material-semiotic” method. This means that it maps relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and semiotic (between concepts). It assumes that many relations are both material and semiotic. For example, the interactions in a school involve children, teachers, their ideas, and technologies (such as tables, chairs, computers and stationery). Together these form a single network. Actor-network theory tries to explain how material–semiotic networks come together to act as a whole (for example, a school is both a network and an actor that hangs together, and for certain purposes acts as a single entity). As a part of this it may look at explicit strategies for relating different elements together into a network so that they form an apparently coherent whole. According to actor-network theory, such actor-networks are potentially transient, existing in a constant making and re-making. This means that relations need to be repeatedly “performed” or the network will dissolve. (The teachers need to come to work each day, and the computers need to keep on running.) They also assume that networks of relations are not intrinsically coherent, and may indeed contain conflicts (there may be adversarial relations between teachers/children, or computer software may be incompatible). Social relations, in other words, are only ever in process, and must be performed continuously.” - Wiki. More at Actor-Network Theory and Communication Networks: Toward Convergence by Felix Stalder.

Actor-Network Theory “can more technically be described as a “material-semiotic” method. This means that it maps relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and semiotic (between concepts). It assumes that many relations are both material and semiotic. For example, the interactions in a school involve children, teachers, their ideas, and technologies (such as tables, chairs, computers and stationery). Together these form a single network.

Actor-network theory tries to explain how material–semiotic networks come together to act as a whole (for example, a school is both a network and an actor that hangs together, and for certain purposes acts as a single entity). As a part of this it may look at explicit strategies for relating different elements together into a network so that they form an apparently coherent whole.

According to actor-network theory, such actor-networks are potentially transient, existing in a constant making and re-making. This means that relations need to be repeatedly “performed” or the network will dissolve. (The teachers need to come to work each day, and the computers need to keep on running.) They also assume that networks of relations are not intrinsically coherent, and may indeed contain conflicts (there may be adversarial relations between teachers/children, or computer software may be incompatible). Social relations, in other words, are only ever in process, and must be performed continuously.” – Wiki.

More at Actor-Network Theory and Communication Networks: Toward Convergence by Felix Stalder

Kevin Bacon has a Bacon number of 0

I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation. Between us and everybody else on this planet. The president of the United States. A gondolier in Venice. fill in the names. I find that A) tremendously comforting that we’re so close and B) like Chinese water torture that we’re so close. Because you have to find the right six people to make the connection. It’s not just big names. It’s anyone. A native in a rain forest. A Tierra del Fuegan. An Eskimo. I am bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people. It’s a profound thought. How Paul found us. How to find the man whose son he pretends to be. Or perhaps is his son, although I doubt it. How every person is a new door, opening up into other worlds. Six degrees of separation between me and everyone else on this planet. But to find the right six people.

– Six Degrees of Separation

The small-world experiment comprised several experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram and other researchers examining the average path length for social networks of people in the United States. The research was groundbreaking in that it suggested that human society is a small-world-type network characterized by short path-lengths. The experiments are often associated with the phrase “six degrees of separation“, although Milgram did not use this term himself.

– Small-world Experiment