Here, you can find everything we’ve discussed about the submission of task three next Friday.
week seven: what we did
Week seven was about thinking a little more deeply about what you’re making and allowing this to guide your refining post for your task three experiments.
Ways of thinking about what you’re making
In Wednesday’s class I gave you some prompts to respond to as a way of doing this. In pairs you discussed these questions in relation to your task three experiments. An interesting point which came through this discussion related to how much control we have over the media we produce in terms of guiding what attention is drawn to in the video or photograph. A close-up with a shallow focus guides an audience’s attention to one particular thing, whereas a wide shot allows an audience to scan a photo or video image to notice themselves. One group suggested that video allows a great degree of audience noticing because it is less selective than photography.
Essay films as experimental nonfiction
As you’ve been using noticing as a prompt to guide and inform processes of making iteratively, the essay form might be a way for you to think through noticing in the creation of the media itself.
Writing reflections
The main thing with your reflections is to show a trajectory of thought. So, your reflection is really about asking yourself “what did I learn through doing this making.” Have a look at the iterative cycle diagram in this reading or in my slides for this week. Your reflection should demonstrate that you’ve learnt through the process of doing this experiment and what is left to still learn.
Reminders
We drew numbers from a hat to decide on the running order for the pitches next week (for those who weren’t there I chose them randomly). You can find the running order here. Pitches will run from 1pm-2:20pm in our Wednesday workshop and from 8:30am-11am in our Thursday workshop. You each have 3 minutes each (no longer!). All pitches should be uploaded to this folder, where we will use the first half hour of our Wednesday class to check that everything works.
Paul Ritchard and Sophie Langley will be joining me on the panel for your pitches.
Slides that elaborate on each of these points further can be found here.
Thursday’s workshop was for student consultations. Some things that came out of these consultations…
- Really try to articulate what you want to find out through doing your task four project. This is more important than knowing what your task four project will be
- Think of your task four prompt as emerging out of what is left over out of your task three experiments – what do you want to build upon?
week seven & eight
Just a quick reminder about what’s happening in week seven and eight.
Week 7
Wednesday 6th September – Discussion on some ways to think about what you’re making + workshop on reflective writing to get us thinking a little deeper about what we’re doing for task 3. We’ll also work out the running order for the pitches.
Thursday 7th September – Individual group consultations, which you booked into here. This is to get some constructive feedback on your task 3 experiments and what you’re planning on pitching as your task 4 project.
Week 8
Wednesday 13th September – Pitches to panel.
Thursday 14th September – Pitches to panel, with some time to write-up your reflection to Part II of Task three.
Friday 15th September – Task three due at midnight.
what we did: week five
In Wednesday’s class I used the questions you posed from week 4’s reading by Bettina Frankham to shape an open-form lecture unpacking relational aesthetics, categorical documentary and web documentaries.
If you missed out and/or want to find out more here is a list of articles/works I showed/referred to:
–Anika D’s article on relational aesthetics
–Lorenzo Pereira’s article on conceptual art
–Gap Toothed Women as example of categorical documentary
–Are you Happy Project? as an example of how web docs might erase the line between spectator and maker (a relational documentary)
–The Quipu Project as an example of why we might make web docs – as places to elicit participation
-This excerpt from High School as an example of mosaic structure because it accumulates facets to draw an image of high school as an institution
I then introduced Task Three where you have to use one of your questions from your refining post in task two as a prompt to conduct an experiment in noticing.
In Thursday’s class you shared your refining questions from task two and started thinking about how you might respond to this question by making. You then developed recipes for practice, which might look something like this (as an example). For Task Three you will do three iterative cycles of question > making > reflecting > from week’s 5-7 that will then lead you to developing a large scale noticing project which you will pitch in week 8 to an external panel.
I then introduced the films of James Benning, showing clips from Ten Skies and 13 Lakes. We then posed these questions in response to Panse’s “Ten Skies, 13 Lakes, 15 Pools – Structure, Immanence and Eco-Aesthetics in The Swimmer and James Benning’s Land Films.”
Finally, in pairs we did this long-take exercise based off Panse’s reading. Due in class next week.
Some reminders:
– Make sure you create a tag/category that you use for your portfolio of posts that will make up task three. If you don’t know what this means there are tutorials on Lynda in WordPress Essential Training. While your at it make a task 3 media folder in your Google submission folder.
– You get to decide how many posts you’re going to do for your portfolio based on your experiment. These posts need to cover (at minimum) your question, recipe, media you make and reflection.
– Your portfolio posts need to engage with ideas from readings and discussions.
– I will go through the criteria for task three next week, where we will look at each other’s blog posts and give feedback.
See you next week 