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Archive for July, 2008
Good news! The Videodefunct research project has been accepted into the X-Media Lab (XML) being held in Melbourne soon. VD is one of 12 projects that have been chosen from around Australia within the theme of “DIY TV”: Video, UGC, Mobile and IP TV content and services. The blurb:
X|Media|Lab is the internationally acclaimed digital media event: a unique meeting place designed to help people get their own ideas to market through creative development, business matching, and access to world-class networks of digital media professionals.
Video-on-Demand is the third wave of the ascendency of internet protocol (IP) over traditional media – first there was text, then graphics, and now the moving image.
Whole new opportunities are opening up for creative ideas in the creation, production, distribution, syndication, platforms, brands, and new business models in video content and services.
XML “DIY TV” is designed to assist everyone involved in traditional TV, and those creating its mutant forms, which are now emerging across the three screens, to achieve business success.
I managed to catch at the RMIT design research hub, some of the ‘Studying the European cultural intermediaries of new technologies’, a seminar and workshop led by the INCITE research group, Goldsmiths College, University of London. Presented by Nina Wakeford (Director, INCITE) Britt Hatzius (Lead Researcher).
INCITE mission statement:
The mission of INCITE is to provide a creative interdisciplinary space for research projects which explore the socio-cultural dimensions of technology use and design.
Members of INCITE work on subjects such as the links between new media and landscape, technology as a means of sensing place and identifying community, performativity and design, gender, sexuality and mobility, cultures of access and non-access, urban knowledge-making, Internet and digital subjectivities and material culture. Researchers and students draw on a range of disciplinary traditions, not just sociology, but cultural anthropology, art history and design.
In the part of the presentation that I saw by Britt, she covered an analysis of new media artists in Finland. Locations included the medialab at the University of Art and Design Helsinki; also Pixelache. I was intrigued with the way Britt used user-generated techniques to document the artists activities, like for example providing a number of disposal cameras embedded within an installation.
The term ‘critical design’ came up in a discussion of how some new media artists see themselves more as critical designers that artists.
The final future observations for this research as follows:
newness and progress
newness and critique
newness and innovation
newness and slowness
This collection of ideas made me think of how my own research project title could be developed over time.
other references:
Ubiquitous computing
Anthony Dunne, Hertzian Tales, Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design
The concept of Relational Aesthetics was also discussed with reference to writing by Claire Bishop. Interview reference.
Participation, Edited by Claire Bishop
I went to a talk ‘Up Against the Wall: Thinking Jeff Wall’ at CCP the other night given by David Bate on the photographer Jeff Wall. I had a look through a book of collected essays on Jeff Wall which made me think about the obvious idea of a correlation between this style of writing and documenting project-based research. In the talk Bates did a incredibly close analysis on one of Wall’s photographs. It was great to see so much analysis flow out of one image. Bates experimented with the concept of bringing an iconographic and psychoanalysis analysis together. In his preamble to the talk I was reminded of Roland Barthes seminal writing on photography as one of the few types of theoretical writing that focuses in-depth on practice. In a discussion of Barthes writing on authorship Bates also mentioned Focault’s ‘What is an author?’. An online reference on these two points of view The Differences between Barthes and Foucault on Authorship, Monica Lancini. Finally, Bates also mentioned the “decisive moment” where in his example a still is taken from a cinematic (moving-image) work. I recognised a connection here with the thumbnails and posters used in Videodefunct.
Next week we give PIM (Post-Industrial Media) an airing at the Australian Screen Production Education & Research Association (ASPERA 2008) conference being held here at RMIT.
Some notes on wiki about the presentation which is currently a work-in-progress.
The conference schedule.
Intergrated Media 2 students this semester are being asked to produce moving-image (time-based) content for mobile phone distribution through an engagement with second life. The mobile platform asks for differing approaches to this type of content that possibly moves away from the real-life recordings that are prolific on YouTube. Here is one response to the flickr video platform, ‘Zoom through some of my pics’ by Timo Arnall (Timo ironically is involved in mobile research), which I found through the Creativity Machine post, WHAT IS FLICKR VIDEO FOR?.
An extensive Snurblog post that examines social networking aspects of Ning and Facebook.
So in essence, Facebook’s enforced flattening of the complexities of social relationships into a binary yes/no choice dilutes the salience of its social network to the point of uselessness…And indeed, I guess, ultimately that’s what it is: a vortex, a maelstrom, a sinkhole - an insidious system for luring as many users as possible into taking up Facebook membership, for ensnaring their data trails, and for monetising their online activities.
Additional resource: Axel Bruns - Who controls the means of produsage?
Some Flickr users are protesting against Flickr (Yahoo) adding video to their services. “We Say NO to Videos on Flickr”
The book Media Work by Mark Deuze has surfaced again. I got the reference initially back in January in Amsterdam from Geert and yes it is in the RMIT Library. Review ‘Mark Deuze on Media Work’, by Michael Stevenson on the Masters of Media blog that covered Video Vortex outcomes. A blog post ‘Building New Media Organisations’, by Axel Bruns on Deuze’s presentation at the CCI Conference. Mark Deuze interviewed on ABC Radio National this morning as a podcast.
Form the book summary:
The media are home to an eclectic bunch of people. This book is about who they are, what they do, and what their work means to them. Based on interviews with media professionals in the United States, New Zealand, South Africa, and The Netherlands, and drawing from both scholarly and professional literatures in a wide variety of disciplines, it offers an account of what it is like to work in the media today.
Media professionals face tough choices. Boundaries are drawn and erased: between commerce and creativity, between individualism and teamwork, between security and independence. Digital media supercharge these dilemmas, as industries merge and media converge, as audiences become co-creators of content online.
The media industries are the pioneers of the digital age. This book is a critical primer on how media workers manage to survive, and is essential reading for anyone considering a career in the media, or who wishes to understand how the media are made.
The Infoscape Research Lab hosts research projects that focus on the cultural impact of digital code. The lab engages in software and other new media tool development, code mapping, interface design, and new media content analysis. The lab is funded in part with grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Media Research Consortium.