This PhD research is being undertaken at RMIT University in the Media Department, School of Media and Communication. The research on this blog forms part of my doctoral research and may be referred to in the final submission.
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Seth Keen: RMIT Media Research Portal
Research Interests
Innovative approaches towards the development of web technologies that facilitate interactive online video production and distribution. I am in candidature on a project-based PhD (Communication) at RMIT University, which examines online video practice. In my Masters research I analysed the effect the Internet is having on moving-image narratives. With a background of twelve years writing and directing television documentaries, I am interested in exploring new approaches towards the creation of documentary knowledge on the Internet. Currently, I am integrating design and media practices to develop web systems that facilitate documentary modes of communication online. I see this research into video and web technologies, as being used broadly, to develop teaching and learning methodologies for Media students and post-graduate researchers.
PhD (in candidature)
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Networked Environmental Portraiture: Designing a production framework for a multilinear documentary
Abstract: In my documentary practice, I work with video to make environmental portraits. A term I borrow from the visual arts, which is used loosely to describe the documentation of the interaction between people and place. In this practice, I detected formal issues around the constraints of a linear narrative. The fixed nature of this narrative structure did not allow viewers to access separate shots and sequences. Viewers could not actively participate in the construction of multiple narratives, on a documentary subject. I needed more freedom to document the varying perspectives of an environmental portrait and present them as a multilinear narrative. A structure that made it possible to fragment video content into parts and create multiple associations between those parts. Looking for solutions within the networked structure of the Internet, I progressed to collaborating on the design of a video system that facilitated storage, indexing, access, navigation and varying modes of visual representation. I propose that the spatial distribution of multiple video clips within the screen, in combination with annotating the video clips into informal taxonomies using keywords, provides the means to create multilinear narratives. Making documentaries with this type of video system changed my approach towards scripting, recording and editing an environmental portrait. Reflecting on the changes occurring in my own practice, I provide broader theoretical perspectives on the implications for documentary production and the creation of audiovisual knowledge.
Question: How can digital technologies including the Internet be used to create a multilinear documentary?
Argument: In this exegesis, I argue that the projects produced demonstrate that spatial montage and informal taxonomies in combination with the networked structure of the Internet provide a viable means to create multilinear documentaries.
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The Post Industrial Media (PIM) project that I am working on in collaboration with colleagues in the Media department at RMIT. Description from the PIM wiki:
Post industrial media is a term that we have adopted to refers to the changes in media production, use, consumption, distribution and design that are the consequence of distributed networks, digitisation, and soft social systems. The project specifically deals with media education in the tertiary sector and describes teaching and learning experiments and probes undertaken within the media program to develop appropriate curriculum content and methods for teaching graduates who intend to enter the post industrial media landscape.
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Master of Arts (by Thesis), Seth Keen
Media Arts and Production, University of Technology, Sydney (2005)
Video Chaos: Multilinear narrative structuration in New Media video practice.
Abstract: The presentation of the thesis comprises the Dissertation component (66%) along with the Practice Component and the Practice Report (33%). In this Video Chaos dissertation, through an examination of current video practices, I note an emerging trend towards disseminating audio-visual content simultaneously in the form of poly-sequential narrative structures. I argue that this is a significant development within the video medium, and that this is an effect of video new media artist-practitioners’ engagement with the relationships between art and technology. Two extensive case studies are investigated and, whilst a number of issues come to the fore in this research, exploring the issue of narrative structuration is the primary focus and exploration of this dissertation.
The written components can also be downloaded from the Australian Digital Theses Program.