Category Archives: On class content

Money and the Greeks, GELD.GR

This Korsakow documentary was mentioned in the lecture and so I decided to watch it.  Adrian, in the lecture at the time that this i-doc was mentioned, was discussing user interaction and the different ways that documentaries interacted with the user. He said that this documentary was  different in user interaction to another documentary that the creator has made. I decided to watch and explore the documentaries in what they do and user interaction and compare two.

The documentary was created by Florian Thalhofer, he is an interesting guy, an artist, film maker and creative who explores the possibilities and limitations of creative technological mediums, he also created Planet Galata, another Kosakow i-doc and I used that to compare to Money for the Greeks.

In terms of design and content, Money for the Greeks, was brilliant. These things contribute to the meaning of the documentary. In terms of what it does, the documentary allows the user to explore different aspects of the economic situation of Greece, in a very personal way, from the voices of 32 protagonists.

It is non-linear, and the pathways are all equally important and the user interacts with the content by deciding what they want to watch next. It is exploratory and the user is external, looking in. They are given options based on relevance and aided in choosing by being shown which demographics of Greek people liked that clip. In the pyramid of user, reality and artefact, the three interact very closely. The artefact, different aspects of money and wealth in Greece are explored in a real way, and are presented by real people in a real setting. The user navigates this content.

In Planet Galata, these specifics are very similar. The user navigates content, it is explorative, and all those specifics etc etc. However the user interaction is different, they options are limited and based on time, and other times the options are always available. It’s just a small change that doesn’t change the specifics of how the user interacts, but it does change the way that the story is told to the user and the ways that the user is able to navigate through the story.

 

 

Notes on the Week 3 Integrated Media Lecture

Here are the most important points that I took from the lecture and my thoughts on them:

Don’t seek to define by what it means, define by what it does

Taxonomy is dangerous. It limits and it doesn’t include variations and options. These days everything is messy, entangled, connected and complicated. The distinctions between different categories and groups and definitions are dissolving with the progression of social media. Adrian used the dissolution of the distinctions between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ as an example, and it’s a great one.

Increasingly definitions to common terms and ideas are broadening, this is breaking down barriers and limitations and changing the world around us constantly.

This means that increasingly we need to think of things (and in the case of this class, media) as all-encompassing and enormous, and when we seek to understand and define things, we need to look at what they ‘do’ and not what they ‘mean’. So when you go about making something, start with, “What can it do, not what does it mean.”

This I think is a great point, because in life we are taught to seek to categorise and organise things. I in particular am constantly trying to organise things neatly, but I find this difficult because everything is connected, entangled and messy. Attempting to categorise it has so far been too difficult and so perhaps accepting it and working within the world with this knowledge is the most effective way to work, live and create.

In interactive documentaries there is a relationship between reality, the user and the artefact

These are the three main engagers with the project and should be taken into consideration when planning or analysing a project.

The relationship is there and is irrelevant to the category of i-doc, (experiential, participatory etc).

Users are internal or external to the work

Participatory, the user is internal, and this is an ontological work.

Exploratory, the user is external and is an active observer. (Korsakow works are exploratory.)

First Kiss

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This video intrigues me because (other than the fact that I’m a hopeless romantic) as far as the content goes, it’s kind of like a list. There isn’t really a story there, the creator has taken twenty strangers and asked them to pash, and recorded it.

There you have a list of twenty identical situations using different subjects, with no hierarchy- as is the nature of lists as we discussed in yesterdays Media class.

The  different elements on the list, the videos, the chunks of media, have been cut up and structured, so that they do have a narrative.

There’s a clear beginning, middle and end.  Nervous introductions, a build up of anticipation, the climax: the kiss, multiple of them, and the resolution, breaking up and remembering that the intimate kissers are total strangers.

So here we have a list that has been given a linear narrative.

It’s interesting because it works so well, of course because visually it’s beautiful (the guy at the start please marry me) and also it is emotionally engaging and it appeals to people’s genitalia, and things that do always win.

This is a method that could be applied to other movie making. Documenting actions, events etc, in a list like manner, creating a database, and creating a narrative from this.

Lava’d it.

Integrated Media 1, my first impression

This has been an extremely interesting class for me. Mainly because I’ve come into the second tute with no prior knowledge of the class. I wasn’t expecting Adrian Miles to be my tutor, and I had no idea what he was going on about when I walked in and he was talking about squares and circles and mobile phones and video clips.

After ten minutes I had a little insight into the class content and I want ahead and looked at Korsakow and the Adrian Miles interview on the Korsakow blog, as well as checking out some interactive videos made by past students.

I’m now extremely excited for this course. Possibly more excited than I have been for any other course that I’ve entered into at university. This is for a few major reasons.

One is to spend time in a classroom with Adrian Miles. I’ve read a few of his RMIT blog posts and I knew from the moment I read the word ‘fuck’ in one of them I knew that I would like the guy; then he went and started talking about “flirting” with scale and “the elegant indifference of lists” and the deal was cemented.

All attitude aside, through everything that I have read and the brief amount of time that I’ve spent listening to the man, I can see that he believes in what he teaches, and because of that so do I. It’s inspiring and motivating and you just don’t see it enough in Australian and I daresay global classrooms.

I’m also intrigued and admiring of the way that he utilises constantly developing technologies and apps, in the practice of everyday life. I naively held the view that relying on technology to navigate life, my career, my relationships and my work,  was cheating.  I’ve since changed my views dramatically and it is fantastic to see someone who validates the use of arising technologies with theory and academia, but is more practice based.

Of course there’s also the fact that he’s extremely and extensively knowledgeable about the subject, due to the fact that he’s passionate about it. I can tell that this guy reads about media and interactive film and practices it outside of an environment where he’s getting paid for it. I can also see that he’s genuinely hoping to ignite this passion, or fascination perhaps, through to his students.

The second reason is that I have always thought that interactive film is highly under-rated and under-utilized. I think that this medium would be extremely useful in advertising and I’m not sure why more companies haven’t exploited it as a medium yet. I also think, as a professional events filmmaker and also as a person who makes abstract creative films, often lacking of an obvious narrative, it would be an extremely interesting and engaging way of creative films.

I also am really interested in the nature of lists, of databases and non-linear pathways, which leads me to the third reason that I’m excited for this coming course.

I really liked Networked Media in a weird way that I’m looking forward to expanding on.

This hasn’t been a good blog post in that I’m merely stating what I like, which is simply not enough. So here are a few ways in which I can expand on the things raised in this blog post:

  • Integrating modern technologies is more than just practicality for life, technology is both an art form and an art medium. But it’s practicality is also an extremely cool thing and I should look at facilitating my life more with technologies and keeping myself up to date with digital skills and apps etc.
  • The theme for this course is relations, this is really just another way of saying “connections”, and making connections is something I’ve already blogged on, and something that I think is extremely important and useful as a pedagogic practice. I can already see a lot of connections forming in this class.
  •  As this class is something I’ve become interested in at the outset, I should be making an effort to engage with the course, and material outside of the course, in an insightful and analytical way. This is something that I can document on my blog and I have made this one of my 5 weekly goals for this course.
  • Self analysis and reflection is again coming into play as a major element of a uni course and it is something that I should be taking more seriously.
  • Make notes of the differences in informed making and naive making. Practice informed making, even in documentation.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Shapes of Stories

Having just studied narratives for my media class, I stumbled across this today and found it quite interesting in the way that it is a visual exploration of story structure and plot.

kurt-vonnegut--the-shapes-of-stories_502918a226d9a_w479.png

The article where I found this is here.

This could be an interesting way to visualise the complexity or style of story structure whilst planning or analysing a narrative. I have to admit that I haven’t read any of Vonnegut’s work but I really admire this anthropological concept.

The last networked class, tying everything up.

So the stroke of genius that I had last night and sassily wrote about in my last post is now defunct.

During today’s discussion I had several epitomes about how the content of this course, although it wasn’t thrilling, is going to be useful in the course of my education and also my personal and professional life.

  • Design fiction is a total babe. It can be used in conjunction with the knowledge gained from studying other theories in this course in order to prepare myself for the rapidly developing future, prepare and adapt to the failure or success of my ideas and assist in my learning. The speculative model of the wiki assignments is an awesome way to gain a deeper understanding of a particular topic in relation to other theories. By speculatively attaching a previously, seemingly unrelated, theory to a topic it becomes easier to find connections through a speculative scenario, and then form a perspective that might otherwise have not been so obvious.
  • Hypertext and non-linear narratives are the shin-diggity. I’ve finally realised that when I study and explore concepts, I generally do this online. I start somewhere and follow through links and end up finding different media that relates in different ways. It is the best way to expand knowledge and to discover the areas of a theory of a topic that are most interesting and likely to engage you. I put this into play when researching Jonathan Harris and I didn’t even realise it, but it’s the reason that my research was so successful and then I applied it well to a sort of design fiction which expanded my understanding further.
  • Protocol on the internet is less useful for my education, but having an understanding of the frameworks which develop naturally through societies to develop conventions and technological limitations and possibilities on the internet is an important grounding for a career in media. As someone who wants to work on innovative ideas, I should know how these affect and are affected by the people using the internet and also the people developing it. By thinking deeply on online protocols and also the power structures of the decentralised network, the internet, and also potentially mapping these using actor-network theory, I might be able to create more innovative and relevant work. I might also better gain a better understanding of my place within specific online communities and their protocols, in order to create work that pushes some boundaries, which is always fun to do.
  • The stuff on databases was enlightening and has broadened my ideas on what can and cannot be deemed as art or narrative. Previously I would not have thought batches of data as anywhere near the realm of films and literature and photography and art. Now I understand that films and literature and art have become data, and also that data and the interface that is used to organise and display it can be an art form or method of story telling in itself. This has opened up doors to possibilities that I didn’t know existed, and will really practically apply to the way that I approach UX or User Experience design in my ideas for online advertising, portfolios and more general stuff too.
  • As explained in my previous and excruciatingly arrogant post, actor-network theory is a methodology which might aid in my understanding of many different networks and relationships. I won’t go into it again as I’ll probably end up repeating myself but here is a link to the post.
  • And, going back to the very start, all of this stuff will integrate together toward the pedagogic practice of blogging. This post is a great example, I’ve been able to organise my ideas in a single post, I’ll tag each of the theories mentioned for future reference and I’ll also link to relevant posts and information on the things covered in order to create an informative and relevant non-linear narrative.

 

Institutionalised Education, Actor-Network Theory and Elliot.

This is something that I don’t think I’m supposed to say on an academic blog, particularly one made for and by the people at RMIT; I am not hoping nor aiming for anything above a pass in this course or in many of my courses. And I don’t think that that should reflect badly on me.

My intelligence (what ever of it there is) is more insightful and creative than academic. I’m forgetful. I will remember the names of theorists and their theories but not together. I can describe the painting and make an educated guessplanation of what the painter was thinking when he painted it but I won’t be able to name the painter; I’ll give you a deep analysis on the themes behind a poem, but I won’t be able to cite a single line.

More importantly though, I’ll remember the idea. I will apply that to my work and to my own ideas. The things I’m learning are constantly influencing my opinions, my philosophies and the work that I do. I make connections and I apply them, and I think that that is more important than being able to name-drop Baudrillard and Nietzshe over dinner.

I wholly believe that studying topics which bore you is of very little purpose at all, because if it won’t aid in your personal happiness, even in the very long term, what good is it to you at all? And so of course I study; but the study I do out of class is very infrequently on class content. I study the things that I am passionate about: advertising campaigns, innovative ideas, contemporary ethical social ideas, new philosophical realms. And then I write and I design and I conceptualize, outside of class. The work I do that interests me seems to always happen out of class.

This course in particular hasn’t interested me all that much. And so I have allowed myself to give it low priority. There is obviously something in the content that our tutor, Elliot, is passionate about and that makes me want to be passionate about it as well. I’m caught between wanting to understand what he sees in the content and my own boredom. There’s nothing quite like seeing a person in their element, someone who has an interest in something that most people overlook, and is dedicated to it and knowledgeable on it and good at it. I don’t think that networked media is exactly that thing for Elliot, maybe this all has something to do with games or film and the ideas underlying them or what ever it is that he is passionate about, but I can’t see it. I did make my own connections though, and I am happy about that. Actor-network theory and design fiction have made some sort of impression.

Actor-network theory is one of the first things that I have found of interest and practical use in this course, personally. I wish I’d had the guts to stand up for it in the class symposium, but I didn’t.

Actor-network theory makes it possible to trace broad relationships between people and things, and things (actors) could be anything, to understand perfectly what effect different actors have on each other and how they act in connection to one another. It’s an exciting proposition. It would be difficult to map out, considering the amount of actors in any given scenario, but when done efficiently it would be an effective way of understanding and explaining relationships. You could understand the functionality of every actor within a network, eliminate the defunct ones, reinforce and strengthen the effective connections.

This might be practically applied to advertising, one area that I am passionate about, and it might also be used in conjunction with design fiction, another topic that I found practical and interesting. Design fiction and actor-network theory are both related to strategizing, and I think they’d compliment each other extra-ordinarily well.

Imagine understanding relationships and the actors within a network so well that when adding another actor to this network, a speculative one, a design, you could anticipate the reactions of the other actors.

Actor-network theory could be a method of realizing the attitude and complexity of the relationships of individuals, within a particular society, most applicably in our case to online communities and people who share interests online. Target groups, if you will. It’s an open prospect, and one that could be used to better understand people for more effective manipulation of individuals within societies, which of course is the role advertising plays in supply and demand, isn’t it?

I have found something that I could be passionate about within a stream of content that I didn’t think could offer me anything, but something which Elliot made to seem like a golden pool of opportunity.

I am paying terrifying amounts of money to study this course at RMIT, and it is a very highly esteemed course that I was surprised and proud to be accepted into; and I look forward to working in media and to work in media a “Bachelor of Communications (Media)” ought to come in handy. And I didn’t only sign up for the piece of paper, I wouldn’t let myself put in so much time and effort just for a qualification, I do want the knowledge, and knowledge such as actor-network theory and design fiction is exactly what I want.

What I’m trying to say with this post is that I may have purposely only scraped the surface of this subject, and perhaps I should feel irresponsible, perhaps, to quote Adrian Miles himself, I should wonder “what the fuck am I doing wasting my time here?” as I did ask myself when I read this post, but I don’t. Instead I am glad because even if this isn’t my thing like it is or relates to Elliot’s thing, I found some things from it that are my thing.

It’s nearly 2am now. I think we’ll put this tired and irrational writer to rest for the night. This may be my last post on networked media, but it won’t be my last academic blog post, because the use of this blog is another thing from this course that I hope will become my thing, and I’ll be glad if this post is my last, because it’s my favourite.

Actor-Network Theory

ANT has been developped by students of science and technology and their claim is that it is utterly impossible to understand what holds the society together without reinjecting in its fabric the facts manufactured by natural and social sciences and the artefacts designed by engineers. As a second approximation, ANT is thus the claim that the only way to achieve this reinjection of the things into our understanding of the social fabrics is through a network-like ontology and social theory.

Quote from the reading here

Actor-network theory has been mentioned a few times in class, generally with the association that it was a complex oncoming topic that would be difficult to understand, but one which would usefully be related to the topics which we have already covered.

The definition above, from the reading, was the best that i could grasp but the concept is still one that I’m having trouble understanding.

I do agree with certain aspects of ANT according to the reading.

I agree that objects and theories should be included in networks.

I do believe there should be nothing in the connections but the connections themselves.

I do not see how understanding these networks helps to understand the world better or to make life easier at all.

Yes it eliminates the concept of distance as connections cannot be measured by length, but what does this accomplish?

And as for eliminating scale, I disagree. All networks seem to me to be bigger or smaller depending on the amount of nodes in the network. How do networks in ANT differ?

These are things which I will have to explore in the workshop tomorrow morning.

Independence and power of the online network

In class discussion we covered the readings as usual, covering mainly the dependence (or lack thereof) of the internet on humans.

A few points were made, such as the fact that these days programs make decisions on their own, that no matter what the internet might do on its own it was originally made by people, that people were brought up by their parents but they are still independent when they leave home and therefore the internet can be too, and also the fact that all of nature is determined by pre-existing factors and a great butterfly effect, and therefore neither humans or the internet are independent.

My opinion is that, no, the internet is not currently independent and for as long as human beings use it, it never will be. As long as there are the ‘makers’ out there writing scripts and protocols that develop the internet, and as long as there are ‘users’ out there whose needs and wants are shaping the way that the internet develops, it can not be independent of people. (I’m also a determinist philosophy-wise but I really think we went of track with that tangent so I’m not going to comment on it.)

This brings us to the power play within the internet. It is very interesting that, as the reading points out, the development of the internet has destabilised former societal power structures and instead this technology that doesn’t have a central power is the focus of so many lives and indeed is fundamentally entangled with our day to day beings. I agree with the reading in that there still is power in the internet, however the fact is, the internet is developed by the people who use it. It is an extremely democratic network because there is not central power, the needs and desires of every person lead to new technologies and processes on the internet. I think this is a great thing, politicians and global leaders may not. The issue it does lead to though is that people with great programming skills have an advantage over the average user on the internet and therefore have more power than them. They could use this power to do the wrong thing, as has happened in the past with viruses and online scams, but for the most part people with developing skills use it for good, and progress the internet into new and promising waters.

Live narrating my reading

I personally find readings intolerably boring, so in order to make it more interesting for myself I’m going to live blog it. Kind of. What I’ll do is read the thing and take breaks to comment on the content as I read.

For the first few sentences into the Galloway Protocol reading I just didn’t know what the guy was talking about. Then ‘Boom’. Got it. He’s wondering how there is still a power play in a network that is “decentralised”. Which I’m assuming means a network that doesn’t have a central power. LIKE THE INTERNET, BAM! I’m thinking that this is going to lead to a discussion of how power is spread out over the nodes in the network.

Ok so he’s not just talking about the internet, he’s talking about society as a whole and how some of the power has shifted from “factories”-capitalisation, the “sovereign”-the government and the “prison”-laws, onto digital technologies.

I hope I’m getting this right, it would be really embarrassing to be live blogging my thought process if it was an incorrect interpretation.

Cool yep I think I’m on the right track. So basically if you look back into history you’ll see that power was enforced through violence. Then as you travel along to the modern era more civilised and procedural procedures are used to control people’s behaviour. New technologies assist in the whole thing.

Ok now he’s finally mentioned the internet. It’s the big one. The big new technology that has created a huge shift in control.

Well that’s interesting, apparently the Internet was intentionally created as a result of the Cold War to have no central power so that if attacked the whole thing wouldn’t come to pieces. I kinda thought the whole, no-central-power thing would be an accident. So they intentionally broke up information into packets and invented a way to send them somewhere and reassemble. Cool.

What is “BSD”? Sounds like a weird sexual fetish. Nope they don’t explain that, next.

Ok this is just a history of the development of the internet, not bothering to write on this anymore. Now the internet is really big. Done.

At the centre of the internet lies protocols, by the Request For Commons. I did not know this. Where are these protocols and who writes them? Is this like the global constitution for the internet or like a big manual saying that if you press A, B will happen?

Holy Crap! There is an Internet Engineering Task Force! The modern day equivalent of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen! Literally people that try to protect and guide users of the internet on a peaceful and ethical path into the future.

HTML and CSS are protocols, so it is more of a manual than a constitution.

Oh god, I’m not even a quarter of the way through. I’m skimming.

Protocols on the internet are all about etiquette and coding. They determine how the internet will progress and which technologies that are developed will be implemented and used by the masses. Kinda like real world governing but technology.

Voluntary regulation. I like that. The thing about the internet though is that a lot of people volunteer not to regulate protocol and instead go around it with their hacking brains and use the power to their advantage. How does that come into it?

New technologies no longer come from one hierarchal control point, but this guy doesn’t believe that this means that control is disappearing altogether.

Oh noooo he’s talking about IPs and DNSs now. Those are my topics. I need a break.