Seth Keen

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.

Great example of using social networking as a form of collective design.

Geert Lovink speaking at New School on publishing initiatives and innovative approaches at Institute of Network Cultures.

Geert Lovink, Hogeschool van Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam from The Politics of Digital Culture on Vimeo.

Do-It-Together: Digital Publishing Experiments at the Institute of Network Cultures

A riff written for a post-industrial media e-publication in a public google doc which is open for additions.

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The rumblings ramblings of a Post-industrial Media Producer Maker

Reflexivity is the norm, rumblings came from the ipad autocorrect feature
This riff is written in the cloud, on a blog, google doc, ipad, powerbook, scribled in a notebook… morning, day and night

Wear amateur shoes, drop the formal training, seek uninhibited creativity

Think everyday technologies, everyday practices, everyday routines, everyday experiences, everyday life, everyday places, everyday languages, vernacular

Making starts in post-production and is stuck in post-production
There is no script. A scoping document, a hunch, a probe perhaps?

The recording device can be a webcam, a mobile phone, a (?)
Sketch with anything that will write, an iphone, ipad, point-in-shoot, DSLR, a video camera
Sketch in the format being used
Develop tactics for recording and making, rather than strategies

A social media tool is a content producing and storytelling device
Systems are the foundation to creation
Interactive systems, content management systems, social media systems, storytelling systems

Make lots of works often to discover something special
Sketch, sample, test, experiment, a prototype
Remix, mash-up, appropriate, reappropriate
Reverse engineer
Riff… @#$%^*&

The in-between counts, accidents are the aim
NOISE, DIRT, GRUNGE

A post-industrial narrative is distributed, fragmented, networked
Designing media elements, story units, micro-narratives, bits
The trick is connecting/reninventing social media services and tools

Reflect, reflect, reflect, material thinking needs to be articulated
Iterative design and production, a progressive process
Production is design, design is production

Artefacts, unfinished soft in a perpetual state of BETA

What do I call the digtial artefacts made? Multimedia, new media, multi-platform, cross-media, networked, integrated. These terms are evolving, shifting, fashionable, unfinished, fly by night, tied to personal preference, the changing context

Roles are undefined, fluid, amorphous
Peer production, collaboration, the collective
There is no director, the auteur is null and void
Coordinator, facilitator seem more apt
The DOP becomes a coder, interaction designer, information architect

Who am I? A screen producer, digital media producer, transmedia producer, social media producer, media artist, new media artist, media designer… cross-dresser

Copyright is not protected, sharing produces a different type of economy

Is crafting code more important than the creative vision?
Is innovation the new cultural capital?

Yes, I have ordered these ramblings into themes, tagging and categorising are part of the repertoire

This is an open document, comments please…

NO END

Bibliography:

Amerika, M 2011, Remixthecontext: The transmedia artist in network culture, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Public Lecture.

Buxton, B 2007, Sketching User Experiences, Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco.

Carter, P 2004, Material thinking: the theory and practice of creative research, Melbourne University Publishing, Carlton, Vic.

Certeau, Md 1984, The practice of everyday life, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Gane, N & Beer, D 2008, New Media: The Key Concepts, Berg, New York.

Maslin, S 2011, Rekindling Venus: Transmedia Practices, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Public Lecture.

Moggridge, B 2010, Designing Media, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Moulthrop, S 2011, Make a Better Door: Or, How Does Digital Humanism Humanize?, State Library of Victoria, Public Lecture.

Schon, D 1983, The Reflective Practitioner, Ashgate, London.
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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.

A book ‘Survival Guide‘ being brought together on making documentaries on the Internet.

This “survival guide” was designed to provide filmmakers, producers and journalists with some tools required to develop their own web-documentaries. How to include interactivity in your projects? How to reach a bigger audience? How to develop a creative funding strategy? How does the web affect storytelling? How to pitch or crowdsource your webdocs? To answer all these questions, this unique book brings together interviews with 30 world-known cross-media experts, producers or authors.

Interactive documentary event, i-Docs 2012, Digital Cultures Research Centre (http://dcrc.org.uk) Looks at tagging, locative and HTML5 video. Names to add to my word cloud ‘web-docs, cross-media docs, cross-platform docs, locative docs, docu-games, installations, digital performative docs…’.From the about on the website:

This is a space for people that want to know more about interactive documentaries (that we have called “i-docs”). You will find academic and blog references (link to resources), an archive of existing i-docs (link to archive) and a forum open to discussions about all the possible forms of i-docs you can think of (link to discussions). A team of experts (link to team) have decided to join forces to open the discussion on what is interesting and/or new in this emergent field, and on the ethical, aesthetic, political and financial consequences of the i-doc genre. We welcome your participation! Feel free to mail your papers and ideas to the co-editors of our discussion section (link), or simply comment on their posts.

From the emailed callout:

This year’s symposium will be organized around four topical questions that emerged from i-Docs 2011.

1. User participation in i-docs: how can the act of participating change the meaning of an i-doc?

• Where is the participation happening: within the i-doc or around it?
• When and why do people want to participate? Is participation an inherently good thing?
• What are the ethics of participation: where to stop and where to push?
• How do strategies of participation affect the creation of meaning within an i-doc?

2. Layered experience, augmented reality games and pervasive media: are locative i-docs changing our notion of physical experience and space?

• Is pervasive technology an effective way to layer the experience of reality?
• How does our perception of space change in locative and augmented reality i-docs?
• What are the consequences and ethics of tagging content to a place?
• How do user experience and design issues effect the planning of a “real world” experience?

3. Activism and ethics: how can i-docs be used to develop new strategies for activism?

• Is combining information with role-play opening activism to a younger audience?
• Is implicating the user in moral dilemmas an ethical /effective strategy?
• Where does an i-doc end and social media activism begin?
• How does activism fit with emerging business models for i-docs?

4. Open source and the semantic web: how are tagging video, HTML5 and the semantic web opening up new routes for i-docs?

• What new relationships are being created between documentary recordings and live data feeds?
• Where does the role of the author lie in an open source i-doc? Are producers becoming curators?
• What is the production cycle of an open source i-doc? Is it a finite or continuously evolving entity?
• Are users browsers or co-creators of meaning? How can deep engagement be encouraged?

Sue Maslin presented the Lynette Wallworth‘s, ReKindling Venus: In Plain Sight project last night.(full description below) I found the presentation really useful. Points I noted on the ipad. (Date: RMIT Media and Communication, Thursday, November 3, 2011)

Sue referred to herself as a screen producer with this move into working on new media projects with ‘screen artists’. Also this was described as reaction to changing evolving terms for these types of projects ‘new media, multi-platform, cross-media…’…’a nonlinear convergent environment’. Seen as (quote) ‘building a practice around convergence‘, convergence practices that cross boundaries of screen practitioners. Working as a ‘digital media developer’ outside in this case a practice history of film and television producing.

One of the aims of the ReKindling Venus project was to explore how Lynette Wallworth’s work could be taken out of the gallery or extended into a global experience.

ReKindling Venus was described as a transmedia work…augmented reality. Connecting viewers to coral reef systems worldwide. The mobile phone was chosen as the device to achieve this aim. The participant downloads an app. Described as an ‘online interactive environment’ that uses google earth, google maps NOAA (data feeds) uses different platforms for engaging with the artworks. These works are nto seen as being documentary, Wallworth uses technology to connect with people emotionally. A description of the project from the website:

ReKindling Venus is a colony of artworks using digital platforms to connect us to the world’s coral reefs and the ecological urgency of climate change. Devised by immersive installation artist Lynette Wallworth, ReKindling Venus: In Plain Sight is the first stage of this work planned to culminate with the next Transit of Venus in June 2012. It is an augmented reality (AR) project triggered by a series of images and delivered to mobile phones and webcam, opening a virtual porthole to coral reefs and connected to real-time data.

An affinity for me in the presentation (in regards to my own projects) was the process involved in designing and producing works with cutting edge new media technologies. The need to develop an RnD relationship with collaborators. They planned what they wanted to achieve then went out into world of designers to see what was possible. Described as a ‘convergent issue’ the collaborative model is not the same in film and television production (heritage media). The directors’ vison is not a sacrosanct in the commercial world of developers. This is a domain of business models that do not operate necessarily on a collaborative film and tv model, but more on a service model. The client company service relationship.

In this domain a script is not the pivotal document. Instead it is a matter of refining a brief and scoping document with the company. The end result can be a compromise when you are (quote) ‘pushing the boundaries of technology, working with constraints, the constraints of production technology…’

With this project they ended back up at the university in the RnD department at Canterbury University, in a lab situation. Here there was much more of supported sense of creative innovative vision. A luxury environment compared to the commercial world. The notion of bottom-draw university research documented earlier.

This project was seen as being part of a a paradigm shift in production approach. There are very high rates of pay in comparsion with less interest in (quote) ‘cultural capital’.

A developer in the audience described the process for coders (new media developers) as being more like a craft with the excitement being in designing new things. On the flip side the willingness to experiment in the commercial world is not encouraged.

Finally, Maslin identified a new media role, a training area for a digital project manager, someone like a line producer in film and tv who can work with both sides and motivations. These people are hard to find, currently like ‘hen’s teeth’.

The goal of reaching convergence (developing these hybrid cross-platform projects) is hard to obtain with this impasse.

From the mail out summary:

In this Public Lecture, award-winning screen producer and RMIT Adjunct Professor Sue Maslin will discuss the ReKindling Venus transmedia project on which she is collaborating with immersive installation artist Lynette Wallworth. Sue will reflect on changing modes and practices of screen production. She will explore how authorship and creativity are impacted by the opportunities, demands and limitations of working in cross-platform or transmedia production contexts as well as arguing for the need to bridge the parallel and separate cultures between ‘heritage’ and ‘new’ media.