Seth Keen

A TED video presentation titled Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world – sourced via the book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal. I can see connections here with online interactive video. But, more more importantly what is useful is the reverse psychology approach towards the attitude taken towards gaming.

Cowbird From the website about (big plans):

Cowbird is a simple tool for telling stories
 and a public library of human experience.

We are a small community of storytellers, interested in telling deeper, longer-lasting, more nourishing stories than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web.Cowbird allows you to keep a beautiful audio-visual diary of your life, and to collaborate in documenting the overarching “sagas” that shape our world today. Sagas are things like the Japanese earthquake, the war in Iraq, and the Occupy Wall Street movement — things that touch millions of lives and define the human story.

Our short-term goal is to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events and universal themes. Our long-term goal is to build a public library of human experience, so the knowledge and wisdom we accumulate as individuals may live on as part of the commons, available for this and future generations to look to for guidance.

Alexander Galloway Video Lecture on Deleuze and Computers, Dec 2011

Revolution of Everyday Life – Interesting used of tumblr and blog.

From a review:

Cinema is no longer monumental. Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, making a film no longer demands millions of dollars, booms, grips, lights, and cameras. We don’t need theaters. We don’t need studios. All we need is a mobile phone. Cinema has become everyday.

Marc Lafia has taken to making films that embrace the everyday cinema machine. He has an idea; puts together a cast (he has started working with the same actors); and films on the streets of New York with digital cameras. In his latest, ‘Revolution of Everyday Life’, he gives HD Flip video cameras to the cast and has them film themselves alone.

CHARTING A COURSE FOR A SUCCESSFUL RESEARCH CAREER A Guide for Early Career Researchers 2nd Edition (download pdf) – by Professor Alan M Johnson AM M.A. (Hons), M.Ed.Mgmt., B.App.Sc., Ph.D., D.Sc. Went to a presentation by this author the other day. This pdf is useful in a pragmatic, broad research kind of way. From the forward:

Being a researcher today is a bit of a dichotomy. On one hand, researchers now have easier and quicker access to an unprecedented amount of information from around the world, through tools such as Elsevier’s Scopus and ScienceDirect databases. Global communications technology allows collaboration on the individual, national, and international levels like never before, which facilitates the research process as a whole from the funding stages through discovery and publication. On the other hand, they are working in the most competitive research environment ever known.

A great prezi presentation titled ‘Write that journal article in 7 days’. by Inger Mewburn linked off the Thesis Whisperer blog in the Learn with Whisperer section in the sidebar. An extended article on this topic by Inger.

‘Ass backwards’ is quoted from a lecture given by Professor Stuart Moulthrop here in Melbourne recently. (Public Lecture 10th October, 2011, State Library of Victoria) Abstract from the lecture publicity:

Make a Better Door: Or, How Does Digital Humanism Humanize? An interesting image for 2011. A player/character in the most recent Portal game is literally locked out of her workplace and replaced by a pair of robots. From this resonant image of the human-computer interface a discussion will emerge to do with broader understandings of the digital humanities, media scholarship, and electronic literature. The focus for this approach will be the question famously posed by Richard Lanham’s: “how do the humanities humanize?”

‘Ass backward’ referred to a Lip Dub video Shoreward Lip Dub – YouTube as part of a discussion around reverse engineering in reference to open source and Richard Stallman. In this video clip the singer is recorded lip synching in reverse which is then played forwards. An interesting point with this video clip is the idea that the use of technology is reduced to the use of choreography and non-professional video. No post-production in this work. This idea interested me in relation to online video aesthetics. Using performance as the major part of an online video work. The connection between performing in reverse and reverse engineering needs more exploration on my part.

But, I like the idea of analysing an artifact in practice-based research using a reverse engineering approach. From wikipedia:

Reverse engineering is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device, object, or system through analysis of its structure, function, and operation. It often involves taking something (e.g., a mechanical device, electronic component, software program, or biological, chemical, or organic matter) apart and analyzing its workings in detail to be used in maintenance, or to try to make a new device or program that does the same thing without using or simply duplicating (without understanding) the original.

Quotes:

“Steve Jobs invented the user’ – reference to quote by Belinda Barnet
“Anxious elites” – referring to academics, scholars
“Inverse videographers”
“Information resists information”
Circular reasoning – “Consumer driven reverse engineering”
Network driven research – Google driven writing (I had a thought this could be wikipedia driven writing)

Terms:
Nodal Screen – Darren Toft’s introduction
Electric Literature Pioneer – reference to Stuart Moulthrop
Gibson Phrase ‘the colour of television…’ – The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

References:
Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information, Alan Liu
Portal 2 - video game
Reverse engineering - Richard Stallman, Open Source
Douglas Hofstadter writing (I made a connection here with the idea of connecting sci-fi fiction with theoretical writing like Steven Shaviro, Connected for example)
THE ANALOG EXPERIENCE OF DIGITAL CULTURE, Stuart Moulthrop (pdf), article

A different use of video in relation to the everyday and place. The context here is more pure anthropology research.

Presentation RMIT University, Researching through place: video, the senses and movement, Sarah Pink… pdf absract

Introduction: Start with a place in this case a community garden space. Walking through the space. Four tours of the garden over two years. The position is that a place is made by movements through a space.

Theories of Place: Place written as being theoretical. Abbreviated from a slide: (Sensory perception; movement of people and things; changing environment; everday practices – materialities, socialities, biography, discourses) This lead to the idea of ‘emplacement’ – in this concept the person/people becomes central the foci for that place. Video captures these aspects…

Movement: ‘To understand everyday life we need to…follow people…everyday life practices as those people encounter them…Laundry as an example in a house, the flow movement of laundry and the relation to energy…Video (visual research) enables these movements to be followed documented…

Sensory experience: Recent anthropology theory suggesting that the senses ‘are not separable’…In everyday life learning happens in ‘non-verbal ways that are embodied, tacit and empathetic’ – (e.g performing, touching, inhaling).

Video and photography: Camera as an instrument…A frame, window, ‘prism’ – records the experience of the environment they are in – including behind the camera which is not seen the recorders experience. The notion of using video to get people to come on a journey, travel through a space. ‘Playing video back’…odd description as ironically it is ‘played forward’…

LEEDR project: In this project the word ‘tour’ is used in ‘home video tour’ a process of documenting energy use in a house. Working out how to make a room feel right, ‘sensory aesthetics’ – making a toddlers room feel right…The tour looks at how those everyday practices weave together. There is an interesting cross-over here in the WVA project in regards to touring a house, going on a tour of the location.

Slow City Movement, Cittlaslow: Promoting sustainable practices in cities. A transferable model across cultures, cities globally – seen as being experiential . Local uniqueness, what is validated in terms of each city, location. ‘Urban tour method’ using video, photos to record the tour. The guides are left to create that tour.

Quotes/terms from the presentation:

Visual research – Video, photos
making places
research through places
experience of place
a place to walk through
how people engage with their environments
research knowledge
sensory aesthetics of place
digital interventions
theoretical and applied knowledge

References:

LEEDR project
Slow City Movement, Cittlaslow – Spain
Doreen Massey, For Space (2005) – Geographer (constellation)
Nigel Thrift – geographer, place
Tim Ingold, Perception of the Environment, Being Human (2007, 2008) – (meshwork and entanglement, ‘making lines through the environment)
Mark Harris 2007 Perception of the Environment
J.J. Gibson (affordances and movement)
Gathering in relation to video recording – Edward Casey, Essay in book Senses of Place, edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, 1996 – Edward Casey The Fate of Place
Situating Everyday Life (Sarah’s book)
Introduction book – Space of Place Eds. Gill Valentine, Rob Kitchin , Phil Hubbard ,
‘Disappearing World’, documentary Granada
Book – Visual Interventions, Sarah Pink (2007) – Note some of the applied research projects in this book have similarities with the WVA project
Lok out for ‘Redrawing Anthropology’, Sarah Pink (inscribing, writing with a video camera)
Criticism everyday – Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, Mark Auge

Zeega

Found this HTML5 interactive documentary platform via the Sensate Journal.

Zeega is an open-source HTML5 platform for creating interactive documentaries and inventing new forms of storytelling.

Zeega will make it easy to collaboratively produce, curate and publish participatory multimedia projects online, on mobile devices and in physical spaces.