Seth Keen

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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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?

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

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.

We the pimmers (post-industrial media) meet to do some wiki garderning on the pim wiki. We discussed seeing a wiki as a non-architecture entity that is link driven. Adrian suggested that we needed to think of a “promicious linking” where as you write you think about what could be written into that writing as way to be constantly cross-referencing. Following this process it is OK to have “redundancy and a bit of repetition” occurring. The pim wiki has been skinned and rearranged after our first retreat in Daylesford. There is a ‘all pages in the wiki‘ page which is great for seeing all the content in the wiki. We also re-worked the PIMcategory page which can be accessed via ‘all pages in the wiki.’ These categories can be seen as tags and we aimed to set up a tagging process as we write.

Resources:
http://media.rmit.edu.au/projects/pim/index.php/PIMWikiPattern
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/Wikipatterns
wiki formatting

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