Listening to Dirty Three while considering recent discussions of the apocalypse isn’t the most cheerful thing to do on a Tuesday afternoon. Dan’s lecture was interesting but today I’m heavily needing a caffeine fix and I’m pretty much typing for the sake of it.

OKAY

Technological Determinism vs. Social Constructivism

What I took from this segment of the lecture was that technological determinism is technology advancing automatically, determining its own path and traction, and humans following, their path predetermined, technological advancement.
I don’t know if I agree with this theory. Though my coffee-deprivation makes it hard to really understand this theory, if I assume my wilted recollections of this ideology is correct, it sounds much too science-fiction.

Reminds me of The Simpsons treehouse of horror episode:

The other contrasting ideology is that of social constructivism, that technology is not sentient, but it is up to us (humanity) how it is used, regulation, etc. I think I’d lean more towards this theory out of the two – but I’d say I need to go back over this once I’ve had my coffee fix to understand it.

Today I went on the set of the new Biscotti video clip. I love being in curved wall studio rooms; they’re so disorientating. The clip was inspired by fierce warrior cultures and the androgyny styles of the late 1980’s.

Interviewing your best m8 is definitely a treat.

A photo of Louis from his home studio in Northcote, where I interviewed him as he worked on some new tracks.

I’ve got a music video shoot coming up which I’m helping out on. I haven’t worked on a video in AAAAGES and I’m really looking forward to it. Especially because for once I don’t have to be in front of the camera so I don’t have to worry about looking like a QT.

This is a composite of the stuff I’ll be working with, doing makeup and styling. We’ve got a really really cool team on board and have gotten clothes gifted from the designer Utter Rutter. The director and I have been exchanging lots of emails with inspiration pictures, this is one with some of the clothes we’ll use from Utter Rutter too.

Today I feel great about the project. It was an exhausting and long day, but I’m very happy with my group and what we’re all accomplishing. First we met in the morning and compiled our script, I went through everyone’s additions and put in appropriate grammar for reading aloud. Patrick sorted out all the recording gear with the tech guys and we proceeded to a studio downstairs, set up mics and recording devices and let ‘er rip. Ultimately it was me narrating the whole piece, which was a lot of pressure, but I’m flattered my group think I have the most tonal voice and could give the best delivery. I don’t know if their opinion is founded, but it’s flattering non-the-less. This is a photo of me in the studio.

In today’s lecture we looked at the art of the remix. I thoroughly enjoyed this lecture as it is was dealing with a topic that I have a particular interest in. There were many aspects of the lecture Dan gave that I enjoyed – the analysis of Eduardo Navas’s work, the documentary clip on remixing and sampling we watched, the Girl Talk activity (my ability to pick snippets of popular songs was not was sharp as I thought it would be, but at least I was able to guess around 5-7 songs), the history of disk-jockeys through the 1960’s and 1970’s, in particular Francis Greco and the rise of beat-matching, slip-queuing, the mash-up etc., and the information about glitch art. I find all this very interesting as I have been a participant in this culture as both a facilitator and audience member.
The segment on glitch I found particularly interesting, because I commissioned an art piece once that was purely glitch and data moshing. I commissioned my friend and film-maker Lee to edit a piece for me to project on the wall as a performance installation at a gig I organised.
I love this piece of work, and still have it on my computer. Occasionally I still watch it while listening to music and relaxing, the patterns in the footage and edits are really special. I’ve included some screenshots in this blog post.

I found this lecture very interesting, and enjoyed dissecting the notion of creative ownership, and whether there are any original ideas, and if the act of sampling a snippet of someone else’s work is grounds for intellectual property theft.

I have to agree with what Dan was leaning towards when he spoke of the act of recontextualising other people’s work, and that it was what you did what content not necessarily who created the initial content that matters.

Putting music and sound effects under our documentary is a vital part of the process, as we need to creatively engage the audience. Seeing as we’re interviewing two friends and colleagues of mine from my music days, We’ve decided to put their music under our project. I can think of no one better – as they’re both wildly talented people who I have utmost respect and love for.

Here’s the sound-cloud account for one, Louis Oliver Roach, aka. B Deep

https://soundcloud.com/bdeep/dropout

And here’s a photograph I took of him onset at his last music video shoot.

The music Louis makes under the handle B.Deep is expansive, developmental hip hop. It’s thoroughly layered like an electronic song, but catchy and hooky like a rock and roll song. It has a progressive quality – it goes in the direction you think it will go in and you’re satisfied when it does. I think it will be very good under our audio documentary because it adds emotional intensity; both celebratory, fun songs, and pensive, brooding tracks. Ideally the mood changes will keep the listeners focused, not drawing on for too long in the one atmosphere.

So far at this juncture I’m happy with the project I’ve endeavoured upon with my group members. I’m content with the amount of work each of us has contributed and think we’re onto the right track with this assessment. I feel like I’ve been on the right track so far and it’s put me at ease for how the rest of the project will shape up. Gloria and Pat are great teammates and we work together cohesively.

So far I’ve done the following tasks:
– Research audio technology forms from 1970 to approximately 2010
– Put these facts into a script
– Written an interview for two people who work in the field of music recording technology (Nic McKenzie and Louis Rocketeer/B.Deep)
– Found music to play under the documentary

Here’s my To-Do for the rest of the assessment

In today’s lecture we learnt about media institutions with Brian. It was interesting to critically analyse the scope of particular institutions, their overall mission statements, their centralised concepts, their reach, etc.

Gloria and I were seated next to each other again and completed this mind-map of Google as an institution. I’d like to think we were able to grasp what Brian was attempting to communicate through this lecture, and gave a susinct but also expansive examination of this particular institution.