On the day of the Real-World Media exhibition, I unfortunately had COVID-19 so I couldn’t attend. However, throughout the semester I had been keeping an eye on two projects in particular: The Rise and Fall of the Cödæns, which chronicled the rise and fall of an alien civilisation through the curation of an interactive museum of crafted objects, as well as Alienation, that follows the life of Rae on Earth (Melbourne) through the use of cross-media like a website, booklet, and origami. These two struck me as fascinating for they both essentially present the same concept from an opposite lens, culminating in something that speaks to the inherently political nature of craft. Although way different in context, tRaFotC reminds me of the Colonial Britain’s efforts to spread the narrative that indigenous Australians were savages through stealing indigenous artifacts, namely weapons, shields, accessories, totems, and artworks, declaring them too primitive for their own good, all in an effort to bolster support for their colonisation of Australia. We’re taking the Cödæns’ artifacts and forming our own narrative based on what we consider advanced or primitive, influencing our conclusion on what type of people they were. In the opposite corner, Alienation brings Rae’s perspective to the forefront of the experience, instead focusing on our planet as a foreign land and how Rae interprets our technology, customs, and crafts, putting ourselves under the spotlight. Although quite different, Alienation reminds me of those genres of videos you find on YouTube like “Isolated indigenous people try McDonalds burger for the first time”, where the appeal, in contrast with tRaFotC, is more modern, exploring the insights, perspectives, and reflections gained from foreigners as they interact with our culture. Ultimately, these two projects speak to the key ideas we explored within the first 6 weeks of our Real-World Media studio, that being the character we imbue into an crafted object through making it with our hands, as well as the value and interpreted arguments we extract through beholding and analysing a crafted object. Stories, ideas, and emotions are caught in between the grooves, as tRaFotC successfully characterizes the culture and anatomy of the Cödæns creatively, and Alienation’s choices in cross-media graphic design and text-use charmingly humanizes Rae as a character, giving her journey emotional weight. Both stories come together to create an experience of cultural exchange as a means of reflecting on our own culture, despite the two being completely unrelated projects. The core function of these projects have given me new ideas for my own personal project, a game about the debates that arise from the interpretation of pieces of media. I’m envious that I didn’t think to make a project about it, so I’m happy that it was, in some part, explored by these groups.

Throughout my study, I’ve seen the studio Ready Camera One pop-up while deciding my semester studio. I have no burning interest in live show production, so I decided to check it out. The two projects I viewed were THE IMPROV GAMES hosted by Jamie Miller, an improve-based comedy gameshow where contestants test their theatrical and comedic skills, as well as Are You Smarter Than a Dumb Infant Child (Who is Also in the Fifth Grade)? also hosted by Jamie Miller, a parody of the 90’s TV show ‘Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?’. Jamie Miller’s work as a host for these two shows made me realize that, unlike my class, this studio’s group projects involves the work of the entire class, each assigned a different role in production. This revelation, as well as the two show’s clear inspiration of famous televised game shows, leads me to conclude that the key ideas gleamed from participating in this studio is less theoretical and more practical. Unlike Real-World Media which focuses heavily on theoretical and psychological aspects of craft, Ready Camera One focuses on what it means to capture liveness, working together, and the roles in live media production. THE IMPROV GAMES captures this key idea effectively as the show relies on the quick thinking of its contestants as they bounce off of each other and the host in order to generate entertainment. AYStaDIC’s highlight reel further reveals what is prioritized within the studio as the graphics, host, and set design all work together timewise in order to draw out interesting answers and banter from the contestants, like reading a runsheet in reverse. While minor mistakes in audio and camera management are visible, you can tell perfection isn’t prioritized, its more about pre-production while everyone individually succeeds in their roles, be it director, AD, or floor manager. Despite what it may seem upon the first watch, Ready Camera One’s core focus of study lies in pre-production, as if engineering liveness itself, like practice at a faux internship at a live studio.

Notes

• Real-World Media Projects

The Rise and Fall of the Cödæns – Danielle Atherton, Olivia Hough, Niamh Mackey, Connor Lee

Alienation – Gloria Ye, Alan Yang, Stella Hirawan, Olivia Nguyen

• Ready Camera One Projects

THE IMPROV GAMES

Are You Smarter Than a Dumb Infant Child (Who is Also in the Fifth Grade)?

Week 9

Real-World Media: Assignment #4: Creative Piece / Research / Reflections – WEEK 9

Week 10

Real-World Media: Assignment #4: Creative Piece / Research / Reflections – WEEK 10

Week 11

Real-World Media: Assignment #4: Creative Piece / Research / Reflections – WEEK 11

Week 12

Real-World Media: Assignment #4: Creative Piece / Research / Reflections – WEEK 12

Week 13

Real-World Media: Assignment #4: Creative Piece / Research / Reflections – WEEK 13

To me, The Ages of Vitae, through three ages, tells a story about the chaotic and sombre circle of life, through the way we eat others, how others eat us, and how we try to break the cycle through playing God. Despite such a reality becoming gamified into a card-game, I hope its audience is able to dig past its simplistic presentation and interact with the extratextual materials, the poster and journal, and really examine the connecting narrative. Our creative pieces should be enough to be interpreted by the audience. While being in a two-man group meant more work, it gave us more creative-control as Ali introduced his card game concept during his introduction email to me, beginning a passion-filled 5 weeks as we worked together ironing out the game-mechanics through a lot of playtesting, graphic design, and professional production. Work ran smoothly between us until week 13 when I became ill, resulting in less time to play-test together, compounded by me catching COVID-19, meaning I couldn’t attend the studio exhibition. To compensate for my illness, I organised ordering the props and devised a floor-plan to guide Ali in prop and poster management, as well as take the role of website manager, making sure everyone’s uploaded their websites on time, giving myself an active exhibition role. Next time, I want to contribute more to the project, as I felt Ali took the brunt of the work with paying for AI to produce the cards. We both couldn’t work on it, so I want to try working on traditional game production directly the next chance I get.

The last extratextual material on my part is the Journal, which Ali and myself have been debating about the inclusion of a interactive narrative mechanic where the player can write within the journal, adding to the narrative themselves. Our discussions of its possible implementation warranted extra research, which is where I found McErlean K’s (2018:123) Interactive Narratives and Transmedia Storytelling, discussing linear texts, ‘followed easily as long as the story does not contradict itself,’ and non-linear texts, which can risk being ‘led down a meandering ‘blind alley’,’ potentially creating a problem of redundancy if the player has no reason to write within the journal. To remedy this possibility, I sought a basic deconstruction of traditional games found in Engelstein G’s Game Production : Prototyping and Producing Your Board Game book that meticulously outlined the basic elements of traditional boardgames, leading me to conclude that card games have no long-term strategy that requires note-taking, leaving our interactive journal idea both mechanically and narratively redundant (Engelstein 2020). However, in class, Dan mentioned the book House of Leaves which uses meta-text manipulation to craft a narrative. While I haven’t read it myself, Hansen M’s (2004:598) The Digital Topography of Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves” lists examples, namely ‘making pseudoserious references to the blue highlighting on hyperlinks on Web pages,’ which struck me as genius, inspiring me to scrap the interactivity for a scientist journal that slowly degrades into tragedy through text-manipulation, appropriately utilizing the journal text format to its proper narrative use.

Reference List

Engelstein G (2020) Game Production : Prototyping and Producing Your Board Game, Taylor & Francis Group, https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003110309.

Hansen M (2004) ‘The Digital Topography of Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves”’, Contemporary Literature, 45(4): 597-636, https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/10.2307/3593543

McErlean K (2018) Interactive Narratives and Transmedia Storytelling : Creating Immersive Stories Across New Media Platforms, Taylor & Francis Group, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315637570

As our TCG project blossomed into a professional product, I’ve been contemplating our extratextual materials do the same, like a social media website. As the one in charge of extratextual materials, I wanted to see if it would fit into our project scope, so I came across Charlesworth A’s An Introduction to Social Media Marketing chapter on ownership and measurement that highlights ‘without a single point of ownership, those initiatives are extremely difficult to control and manage – and so will be unlikely to succeed in their objectives,’ meaning a social media platform may be too out-of-our-scope considering we’re a team of two (Charlesworth 2015:55). The term ‘viral marketing’ came up as a researched, leading me to Petrescue M’s (2014:39) Viral Marketing and Social Networks outlining the effectiveness of ‘viral messages [that] need to have a certain something that makes them different and controversial,’ raising consumer communication. I wanted to exploit this ‘viral’ phenomena through traditional extratextual means, coming to realize that RMIT’s campus is plastered with posters calling for activism and seminars, making a great environment to weave our story into. A case study on ‘design-led activism’ published by RMIT summarizes the general motivations that I’d need to capture like wanting to ‘participate in something exciting and meaningful,’ and ‘to  be  a  part  of pushing things further’ (Franz, Gillet, Hannaford and Wright 2010:78). These motivations will be moulded into two posters fighting for/against animal experimentation, hidden in plain sight amongst actual activist posters, weaving reality and our fictional story together through politics.

Reference List

Charlesworth A (2015) An Introduction to Social Media Marketing, Routledge, London.

Franz J, Gillett C, Hannaford R, Wright N (January 2010) ‘Motivations and Intentions: A Case Study of Design-led Activism’ [Case Study], Alternative Practices in Design: The Collective – Past, Present & Future : Symposium Proceedings 2010, Melbourne, Accessed 21 May 2023, Informit.

Petrescue M (2014) Viral Marketing and Social Networks, Business Expert Press, New York.

One major piece of feedback I received from judge Cat Lew was that I ‘got this’, harking back to my visual art work from my previous class with her, my storyboarding, concept art, and poster work. However, drawing 25+ card art myself isn’t timeline feasible. Ali proposed a solution to me, that being the use of an AI generator, thus prompting a question within myself: ‘what benefits and curses could come out of using AI art as an artist?’ Identity-wise, Make Use Of’s Nanou E highlights a point about the core of all AI art, that being ‘AI art generator learns from existing images,’ hinging the central identity of our project on the works of others without their permission which stings (Nanou 2023).

An article by Aela focuses on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), that generates and discriminates sets of images called ‘training’, an element that has resulted in us changing our animals, as something specific like a ‘bloodworm’ is too obscure to accurately train Stable Diffusion to depict, further changing the identity of our project (Aela 2023). Frontiers in Psychology’s Chatterjee A uniquely identifies AI as a ‘partner for some artists’, a stance I’ve adapted as I researched, picturing AI as the third member of our group in charge of maintaining our project scope (Chatterjee 2022). I criticized AI art for its unethical nature in the first half of this semester, but now I’ve seen an objective use for it for the project’s sake, even if I’m against it artistically.

Reference List

Aela Editorial (1 April 2023) ‘Artificial Intelligence: How AI is Changing Art’, Aelaschool, accessed May 11 2023. https://aelaschool.com/en/art/artificial-intelligence-art-changes/

Chatterjee A (2022) ‘Art in an age of artificial intelligence’, Frontiers in Psychology, 13(n,d.), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1024449

Nanou E (18 January 2023) ‘The Ethical Pros and Cons of AI Art Generation’, Make Use Of, accessed May 11 2023. https://www.makeuseof.com/ai-art-generation-ethical-pros-cons/

As Ali and I honed our trading card game idea for the upcoming pitches, Dan chatted with us about our idea, and, amidst game mechanics and presentations, came a question that struck me as a core point of our project: ‘Is the narrative of the project ethics, awareness, or neither?’ After the chat, we began our research on whether we should pursue a narrative of ethics or awareness. Through researching for our narrative, I came across Tareq A’s (2019:266) Advances in Human Factors in Wearable Technologies and Game Design, which explores ‘The Design of Card Game for Leukemia Children Based on Narrative Design,’ where the study concluded that ‘Participants had a quick recognition [and] could trigger the association with the medical information,’ lending great credence to the notion of a card game’s mechanics fusing well with medical elements, as a ‘search-for-the-cure’ mini-game is planned for our game.

However, Wilson N’s (2019:368) ‘Pokémon-like card game teaches ecology’ called Phylo TCG in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, concluded that, amongst university students ‘players also showed more positive emotions and were more likely to donate to prevent negative environmental effects…instead of protecting species or ecosystems directly,’ arguing for a viable game where ethics and facts inform the world and game results. Ultimately, through the help of these sources, our narrative solidified to become less radical and more sombre, telling the story about animals, where the objective isn’t to win, its to survive. Ethics plays a large factor the story and gameplay.

Reference List

Ren L, Pan H, Zhang J, Sun C (2019) ‘The Design of Card Game for Leukemia Children Based on Narrative Design’, in Tareq A’s Advances in Human Factors in Wearable Technologies and Game Design, Springer Cham, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20476-1

Wilson N (2019) ‘ ‘Pokémon-like card game teaches ecology’, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 17(7):368-368, DOI: 10.1002/fee.2092.

1 What does McKee define as ‘The story problem’? Do you agree? Why/not?

Mckee’s “The Story Problem” asserts that, as a story becomes less involved with human emotions, desires, and perspective, the story risks being less appealing to the human condition, thus serving no real purpose as a film aimed at human audiences. I agree with Mckee as stories, films in particular, rely on symbolism, metaphors, and conventions familiar and natural to humans that allow for concise explanations and understandings with minimal time wasted. This applies strongly to sci-fi and horror films, like, for example, how Event Horizon(1997) by Paul Anderson uses extremely graphic satanic imagery to depict beings from another universe. While it may be tame by today’s standards, in a god-fearing conservative society in 1997, the satanic imagery, gore, and use of suspense cemented it as a cult-classic.

2 Think of two narratives you’ve completed (not abandoned part-way through).Recount the plot of both your chosen narratives / Tell me the story of both narratives.

Perfect Blue (Feature film)– Perfect Blue(1998) follows a Japanese idol as she quites her idol career to pursue film acting who discovers that she is being followed by a violent stalker. As the roles she acquires demand more sexual scenes from her, and the stalker’s attacks become more violent, she slowly becomes unable to discern between reality and her acting roles, leaving us to question what is fiction and what is reaility, and who is the real her?

Mob Psycho 100 (Animated TV show)– Mob Psycho(2016 – 2023) by ONE follows Mob, a student with psychic powers and his employer Reigen, a con-artist psychic who Mob thinks of as his master. Mob and Reigen generally try to lead normal lives, but over the 3 seasons, they face off against psychic supremacists, psychic supremacists again, a power-hungry ghost called Dimple, and Mob’s own destructive powers when his emotions get the better of him.

The immersiveness of Perfect Blue as a film allowed for audiences to become lost with her, joining her in her spiralling sanity, as well as making the more disturbing and dangerous events that happen to her more intimate. The episodic nature of Mob Psycho allowed us to experiencing each obtuse experience Mob and Reigen face weekly, giving us time to grow with the characters and settings so when the going got tough we cared, and when the show’s final episode aired, we felt that we had grown into better people alongside the characters.

3 Think of a story or story-world (different from question b above) that you felt immersed in. Can you relate what about the experience caused this sense of immersion?

The many cities featured in the Yakuza franchise, Kamurocho, Sotenbori, Okinawa, Onomichi, ect, was the game’s defining feature, as the developers went to ludicrous methods to accurately portray the cities in-game with stunning graphics. The sidequests involving people within the city, as well as the ability to eat at all the restaraunts and play at all the game centers all contributed to a game completion % that encouraged you to actively live inside each city. Some games even had photography, first person view, taxi driving, picking up litter, fishing, hunting, and so much more. It is considered by many to be the game series that defined living in Japan for Western audiences.

4 Would you define Forest 404 as transmedia? Why/not?

While the story subject included many forms of media, Forest 404 is an audio soundscape story that only asked for the listener’s imagination. If it were transmedia, it’d have incorporated visuals of forests, glitches, and space, or maybe even some form of interactivity into its story, yet I feel that it would hinder the audio’s purpose if it did.

5 Embed a video in your post from an internet search — this video should be an example of, or work to explain in some way, an aspect of transmedia storytelling. Underneath the video, reflect on why you thought it should be included, with reference to readings and/or your own research into narrative or crossplatform storytelling.

Video

Reflection

Over the past three weeks in my Real-World Media studio, I’ve been asked to consider craft, not only as a personal relationship between me, my tool, and my material, but also in the greater social and cultural contexts. Easy answers like ‘its about expressing yourself’ or ‘it’s a reflection of myself’ come from the school of thought that we express ourselves to varying degrees of fame and change society, while failing to consider how our environments morph us into unique individuals. Many see cultural and social affects in an individual’s work as a tainting, when, personally, a work untouched by society speaks more to ignorance than purity.

Saito (2022:205) notes that ‘where style was once seen as merely a form of embellishment,’ in today’s hyper-consumerist society ‘The design of goods is accordingly geared towards satisfying this aesthetic imperative in today’s economy by putting ‘a major emphasis on product appearance.’ The contemporary modern aesthetic makes our products, architecture, and media hostile to the human condition. Things like furniture and smartphones reveal no personality of its manufacturer because, an unfortunate side-effect of mass-production, most products are outsourced to unethical sweatshops in other countries. This manufacturing cycle imprints an effect on individuals, and that is one of dishonesty and fear. In the past it was more common to see people sporting stitches and patches which, in Wheeler’s (2017:28) words, ‘tell specific stories,’ where through ‘these stories, the physical artifacts of a patch or stitch carry meaning’, allowing for one to be able to discern another’s nature through their physical belongings alone. Presently, everyone’s sporting the same clothes and accessories manufactured perfectly via machinery, and any wear, tear, or crack made is by its wearer, who would be shamed and ridiculed by their peers if they didn’t immediately throw the still usable object and buy a new one. Essentially, we as a society, have been groomed by both corporations and peers to reject our humane aspects, and don materials that hide our true selves in order to project an identity of superiority, wealth, or trendiness.

As technology encroaches on our agency as craftspeople, we have smaller communities that seek authenticity conflated with, in Kettley’s (2016:167) words, ‘the scientific world-view of ‘disenchantment’ promised,’ ‘stripped of all prejudices,’ demonstrating ‘personal responsibility not to others in society but to the emotional state of the inner self.’ These traditionalists, or purists, cling to more traditional art like sculptures and paintings, demonising digital technology and AI art, ignoring changes in social and cultural contexts with tools and art.

Ultimately, the solution to the issues that we as craftspeople face in today’s shifting technological climate isn’t selling our souls to a hyper-consumerist capitalist hell, or to regressing culturally and socially. Ueda (2023:1) and Figoli (2022:97), in their research into human-AI collaboration, discovered how ‘AI could significantly impact the creative phases of the design process,’ concluding that ‘human–AI collaboration will lead to better creativity and that AI’s generative power is comparable to that of humans in creative fields’. Like how one had to understand a hammer to be able to become one with it, we must do our best to understand digital and AI technology as tools of art in order to become one with it, and evolve alongside it, not succumb to it, or regress away from it.

 
Reference List

1. Figoli F, Mattioli F and Rampino L (2022) Artificial intelligence in the design process The Impact on Creativity and Team Collaboration, Milan FrancoAngeli, Milano Italy.
2. Hitsuwari J, Ueda Y, Yun W and Nomura M (2023) ‘Does human–AI collaboration lead to more creative art? Aesthetic evaluation of human-made and AI-generated haiku poetry’, Computers in Human Behaivour, 139(n.d.), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2022.107502
3. Kettley S (2016) ‘You’ve got to keep looking, looking, looking’: Craft thinking and authenticity, Craft Research, 7(2):165-185, https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/10.1386/crre.7.2.165_1
4. Saito Y (2022) Imperfectionist Aesthetics in Art and Everyday Life, Taylor & Francis Group, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003251361
5. Wheeler D (2017) The Design-Build Studio : Crafting Meaningful Work in Architecture Education, Taylor & Francis Group, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315650746

secret door

my Dad

Wood and screws

Techniques: cutting wood, measuring wood, using power tools, polishing wood

No real connections to other economies apart from the trophies and alcohol it houses.