September 2013

There were 7 posts published in September 2013.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Broadway and 103rd Street, New York, 1955 by William Klein

Candy Store, New York, 1955 by William Klein

 

Photographs can be a source of information; photographs communicate information in visual form. It has been a while that the camera records everything at everywhere, at wars, at home and on streets; in different society and environment. A collection of photographs become visual documents; for examples, images preserved in family albums, in government records, in historic scrapbooks, etc. Yet at first I think each photograph captures only that one instant moment in an event, it actually tells more than the freeze action but a story, cultural values and attitudes.  To appreciate a photograph, we should also try to consider the motives of the photographer and the subject.

 

I found a link to give you three tips to help your photos tell a story.

 

Photographs do what our eye itself cannot, to preserve the appearance of an event. Photographs will “continue to exist in time instead of being arrested moments”. Photographs also construct a context, to construct it with words.

 

“A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an         interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.”

Berger, J. (1978). Uses of Photography. Vintage International: New York.

 

“Looking for my father” is Russian photographer Natalya Reznik constructed time capsule. She last saw her father when she was at three. She was fascinated by the thought of him; the idea of his presence and the reality of his absence. She uses photographs to look for the father she never knew.

I do not remember how he looked, I do not have any image of him in my memory. I try to find him by means of photography, to create memories which i never had—memories about family with my father. My mother was always dreaming of an ideal man. She met my father in Sochi, which soon ended up with a marriage. She did not know much of him, only that he was a captain and worked somewhere in North Russia.

They never lived together. He usually came for a few weeks and then dissapeared. At some point my mother found out that he had another wife and a child. She could never forgive him and soon they divorced. In her albums there was almost no photo left of my father—not only she divorced with him, but also destroyed all the photos of him including those from the wedding day. This project is very personal, somewhere in between documentary and fiction—where the dreams of my mother are real, but the memory I created for myself based on them, is fictional.—Natalya Reznik

week 9 reading – Culture and Technology

New media art, also called multimedia, cyberculture and digital media, shows a revealing and creative engagement with rapidly developing technologies.

Widely used words such as “technology” and “culture” carry the traces of social changes, which have operated around and through those words.

 

What is Technology

  • The word “technology” components are ancient; the greek tekhne meant art or craft; logos had a range of meanings from ‘word’ to ‘system’ or ‘study’
  • The word “technocrat” remains today to describe people who value highly the potential of technology
  • the meaning of technology has shifted from referring of arts to mean the system of mechanical and industrial arts with the rise of science
  • a technology is not a natural object but one made by humans

What is Technique

  • it is defined as the use of skill to accomplish something
  • Marcel Mauss (1992) notes that techniques are as crucial to culture and to the transmission of culture as technologies
  • a technique is that which is effective (it works) and traditional (it can be passed on through culture)

What is Culture

  • self- contained cultures or, ‘culture’ which embraces all human activity around the world
  • it is multiple because it contains the activities of different classes, of different races, of different age groups; is conditioned by political and economic forces
  • subculture means that culture accommodates various forms of dissent

 

Culture incorporates human activities such as art, music and building, also relating to the everydayness of culture – what people do, beyond the basic necessities of survival and bodily function. Advertising, merchandising, marketing and other aspects of the consumer society take their place as shaping forces of contemporary culture. Technology changes our living environment; civilizations and cultural activities are based on technologies.

random

 

When the world starts to get you down and nothing seems to get your way.

And it’s here to begin my story………….CHEERS

08 Unlecture

Can video games be considered hypertext narratives? How? Why?

  • games is not about storytelling; a story is not needed to be a game
  • the intention of a text, which is a narrative, is to communicate; yet it does not really have to be interactive in a game
  • gaming is just a technology to get played with
  • gaming does not involved win and lose; while we don’t have to win story

 How do you actually write a hypertext narrative?

  • Hypertext is an emerging structure
  • When you write a hypertext narrative, each part is individual and they make sense by themselves. We don’t have to read all to understand one part.

A very short sum up of the reading this week – “The Long Tail”

  • Anderson mentioned that “unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service”. It is true that we are in a world of abundance instead of scarcity because of the rise of online distribution and retail.
  • Anderson brings out the point that we actually have no sense of what we want. We usually find out more in the catalogues which we like more than the mainstream one.”The more we explore alternatives, the more we’re drawn to them”.

 

  • According to the 80-20 rule (Pareto’s principle), people assumed that only 20 percent of major studio films, TV shows, games and mass-market books will be hits. We think that “only hits deserve to exist”. However, Anderson argues that the 21st century is not only about hits but equally about misses. Since digital services have “no shelf space to pay for”, a hit and a miss become equally economic footing. “Popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability”.

 

  • The Long Tail is about the idea that the media “will find an audience, even if it’s just a few people a month. somewhere in the country”.

 

  • “The biggest money is in the smallest sales.” There is a market bigger than the hits in the Long Tail by getting over the economics of scarcity.

07 Unlecture

It is the first lecture back since the mid-semester break.

Adrian took the examples of “a Hundred Thousand Million Poems”  and a children’s book, with 10 pages and 3 flaps on each page which can make like around 1000 combinations. As for the poems, there is a set of ten sonnets, which are printed on the card with each line on a separated strip. Any lines from a sonnet can be combined with any from the nine others. Adrian used these examples to explain the idea that hypertext has endless possibilities, more than only in the way of “creating your own adventure”, which actually has limited routes.

Brian said that genre is a kind of classification. A genre in the industry is for audience formation; let audience be familiar with certain type of stuff. It relates to the media literacy – the ability of people to analyse, evaluate and create media in a variety of forms and genres. Documentary is a genre? Or there are different genre of documentaries ? Adrian further mentioned about the difference between fiction and documentary: fiction is talking about a world while documentary is talking about the world.

I took another note of the point that authors can’t control the readers’ minds. Authors cannot control how audience interpret their narratives. “All media is dead”. It is interesting to learn that not the author, but his narrative has the personality. Authors have things to communicate in their narratives; at the same time audience decode in the way they think is reasonable.

Choreography by Bob Fosse

I have been watching a lot of musicals in these few months.

 

Bob Fosse, an innovovative choreographer, once said that, “the time to sing is when your emotional level is too high to just speak anymore, and the time to dance is when your emotions are just too strong to only sing about how you feel.”

 

A Woman is a Woman, Jean-Luc Godard, 1961

There is a scene in which the female character Angela did the little dance, “choreography by Bob Fosse”, then the phone rings while she is frying an egg. She tosses the egg up and it sticks to the ceiling, she runs to the other room to answer the phone, says “just a second,” then she runs back into the kitchen in time to catch the egg, put it in a dish. And she return to the phone to finish her conversation with Alfred, the male character.

 

 

My Sister Eileen, Blake Edwards ,1955

In this movie, Bob Fosse choreographed the dance number featuring himself as Frank and Tommy Rall as Chick. They are rivals for the affections of Janet.