Seth Keen

IMG_0019, a photo by keen_seth on Flickr.

‘Remixthecontext: the transmedia artist in network culture’ presentation by Mark Amerika at the State Library on the 15th November. Organised by The Centre for Creative Arts, La Trobe University.

Keynote notes of the lecture on Mark’s blog.

The blurb sent out to describe the presentation:

Remix is a widespread practice of recombining existing material to make something new —including covers, sampling, mash-ups, smash-ups, cut-ups. Mark Amerika looks at how new media artists, many of whom identify with the historical avant-garde, are expanding the forms of remix art to foreground an anti-disciplinary [anti-authoritarian + interdisciplinary] approach to both contemporary practice and theory. Amerika will discuss his experimental art, theory, and pedagogy, including his recent projects Immobilité and remixthebook.

The presentation was followed by a conversation between Dan Angeloro (Soda_Jerk) and Mark Amerika.

remixthebook.com

Comment:
Amerika used the term ‘transmedia producer’ – then critiqued transmedia as term used for marketing – what (quote) ‘…commercially minded academics have called convergence’
Thought: Social media networking is a form of remixing a message passing on bits, re-appropriated the original…

Norie quotes from introduction:
Art making machine
Social media networking culture

Mark Amerika quotes from presentation:
Remixology
Remix the remix into self-contained parts
Data of everyday life
Performance art practice
Digital fields of distribution
Applied remixology
Riff reading
Situate our practices into everyday life
Novel togetherness
Social network media performance
Open source practice
Socially relevant aesthetic effect
Transmedia Narrative
Social media performance
Hybridised social media performance practice
DIY amateurism
Being in production is a ruse
We are always in post-production
Manipulate the data of everyday life
Intuitive medium engaged in creative media act
Subtitles are the interior monologue
Mobile phone video recording technology – lens brush
Hand-held choreography
Painterly rhythms
Institutional straight jackets
Meta-media mystik
Port my sensibility through it
Lost your flow

IMG_0020, a photo by keen_seth on Flickr.

Soda jerk notes:
Audiovisual samples
Space idea – Sun Ra, Astro Boy, Kraftwerk
After rainbow – video work
Post-production set
(quote) ‘Remix is the new LSD’
Role of the accident

References:
Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker
Duchamp 1957 speech ‘The Creative Act’
Subtitles
On the Foreignness of Film, edited by Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour
Streaming Museum, Director, Nina Colosi
koja essen sonic book (? need correct spelling)
Situationist film
Craig Baldwin found footage movement

PIM Post-industrial Media are holding a roundtable next week with Professor Stuart Moulthrop.

Came across this recent article The Mosaic-Screen: Exploration and Definition by Sergio Dias Branco , 27 Dec, 2008 on the refractory blog on the concept of the mosaic screen, which provides another way to define the use of spatial montage in the creation of moving-image narratives, in addition to the term split-screen. From the article:

This essay arises from these introductory ideas and aims to explore and define a new term that can be contrasted with split-screen: that is, mosaic-screen. In this stylistic device, used in regular moments of the television series 24 (Fox Network, 2001-), images that commonly vary in characteristics are arranged on screen.

This article is one of a number of artilces in the ‘Double Trouble – Special Issue on Split and Double Screens’

other links:
24 wikipedia
fox 24 website

I learnt about the The ADA Digital Arts Network from Janine Randerson from the master class run at Melbourne University by Geert Lovink. Janine’s video work on engage media. About ADA:

Aotearoa Digital Arts is New Zealand/Aotearoa’s only digital artists’ network, The list was launched in 2003 by Stella Brennan and Sean Cubitt during Brennan’s stint as inaugural Digital Artist in Residence at Waikato University’s Screen and Media Department. ADA was born of the observation that although new media artists were often highly networked in terms of both their own practice and their professional relationships, there was no national organization drawing together those with a common interest in digital art. This recognition suggested the irreversible importance of place against the frictionless communication enabled, in theory, by network technologies.

My one-minute rant for the Open Spectrum Quality/Control symposium held at the Melbourne State Library today. I lined up with 10 others and raced the clock to open the event. Documentation was done using a live blogging tool Cover it Live.

There is no content on the web!
on the web, content is a king (stripped naked)
content is everybody, content is communities…
content is creating accounts
sign in, sign out, log in, log out
passwords, more passwords…
content is social, content is friends, fans
content is connecting, networking, linking, traffic…
sharing, embedding, uploading, downloading…
content is comments…
searching, searching, searching
content is naming, tagging, categorising
favourites…love this track!
content is channels, playlists, slideshows, sets
organising…content is management…
content is piracy, bootlegging, plagiarism
copy, copy, copy
all rights reserved, attribution, non-commercial, no derivative works, share-alike, public domain…open…copyright…
content is dirty, noisy, messy
cheap, amateur, trash
content is remixing, cut n’ paste
content is user-generated
on the web, content is no king, it is a pawn (in virtual drag)

Started thinking about a one-minute presentation for the Open Spectrum symposium coming up at next week. Ellie Rennie is one of the key people behind the event and has written this supporting argument ‘Quality control: a new system for ethical media’. This article by Tim Berners_Lee Warning sounded on web’s future was circulated as coming from similar directions.

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.

I had chat with AD about environmental portraiture as a concept of practice within cinema theory. He put me onto some great references:

John Smith (Regeneration?)
Article – On the Street where You Live: The Films of John Smith by Adrian Danks
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/29/john_smith.htm

Film/Video
John Smith, Lost Sound
Stan Brakhage, The Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea,
Ross McElwee, Sherman’s March
Ross McElwee, Bright Leaves (family background in Tobacco)
Ross McElwee, Time and Definate (extends Sherman’s March)
Andrew Kötting, Gallivant (observational essay)
Nick Broomfield

Melbourne Cinematheque, Experimental Landscapes 2008
Peter Forgacs, The Land of Nothing
James Benning, Landscape Suicide

Book
Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine (review on Screening the Past)
Cantrills Filmnotes nos 63,64
Arthur and Corrinne Cantrill

One perspective from the mediamatic website titled Select and Combine, The Rise of Database Narratives

Database narrative refers to narratives whose structure exposes or thematizes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories, Kinder explains, particular data – characters, images, sounds, events – are selected from a series of databases or paradigms, which are then combined to generate specific tales.

The BBC Innovation Labs 2007 covers amongst other things some valid questions on online documentary production. Note ‘UGC’ is an acronym for User-Generated Content.

Cross Platform Documentary: The growth of social media services had led to an explosion of new and innovative ways of realising and delivering documentary online. How can films be made, presented, shared, augmented, annotated, located, classified and discovered using these new tools? What impact does this have on the craft of documentary and what models should be explored in the future? How can we discover what constitutes documentary in the digital space? Does it have to be ‘snackable’? Can it be modular and episodic? Is it possible to be an auteur and simultaneouslly incorporate UGC content?