How I wish I could say I had been frantically busy, thus excusing myself from the lack of posts, but to be perfectly honest I have been whiling away the hours before I begin my new job/career at GPYR with a mixture of boredom, excitement and pure terror.
This has, however, allowed me plenty of time to catch up on cleaning, reading and web browsing. Today’s treats are brought to you by the letter C. Keeping me entertained has been:
The beautiful creations of Heidi Kenney, as found on her My Paper Crane blog, have given me endless hours of giddiness. Discovered after I purchased some new kidrobot toys (a dire addiction, with no known cure).
Slightly sillier but just as giddy-inducing are the adventures of the Middleman by Bayat. Ejecting matter from the stomach thru the mouth (previewed below) has to be my personal fav.
Jewellery that looks like tasty tasty food (yes, it is an ongoing theme. Food + cute = smitten)
Fresh and beautiful music by new russian producer Oak. His lush tune Mongoose has him being compared to the likes of ASC, Electrosoul System and Mav, all regular features on my personal soundtrack.
Thank you to Science and Progress for bringing this track (released free of charge and hosted by etiket) to my attention. I have thoroughly rinsed and can also recommend this fine mix by Electrosoul System.
(Interesting also to me that all of these artists are using Myspace as their main websites. I thought myspace was so yesterday. I should really pay more attention.)
And finally, just for lols, the official ranking of offensive words. As the friend who directed me to it said, it’s science. So it must be real.
mmm-mmm. My favourite things. And brought to you by the letter M.
We have completed!! I would say we have conquered, but I am not quite convinced we have come that far. Still, we have miraculously managed (all about the mmmm I tell you) to edit, finish and compress our tiny film. You can watch it above (be forgiving on quality, as this has been compressed for the mobile phone size), or locate it in Second Life here (coordinates: 238, 87, 25), or on the pool here.
If you prefer, you can also download the video here, with slightly better sound and picture, and you can also download the .3gp version here.
While it is not the most sophisticated work, it is our exploratory journey of a completely new genre and media, constrained by extensive time and skill limitations. And yet we produced something, which is always some kind of wonderful.
Please enjoy (even if you don’t, please try) and I look forward to repo-ing my blog very soon. It’s been real, university. Adios.
oh, the perils, the pain, the pure pleasures of group work. Now that we are closing on the semester, I shall reflect upon my final group assignment for this subject, for my entire degree in fact, and hopefully can provide some insight into the experience and what I have taken away from it.
Group work is such a delicate flower. Nurture it, and it will grow. Ignore it, and it will quickly fade. Burn the ground where it is planted, and it is unlikely to ever grow again. I have had a difficult last couple of weeks, as, unluckily for me, three of four of my subjects have had extensive group projects as final assignments. Trying to negotiate the numerous meetings, productions, reworkings and finalisations of assignments has been exhausting to say the least, and some have left a bitter taste in my mouth, inevitably having an influence on others. It is not that I dislike group work – I have had some amazing collaborative experiences – but it takes only one where you are left to do the work of an entire group to leave you less inclined to give yourself over to the next.
Group work in Integrated Media has been tricky. The project has been challenging, and has had different levels of engagement from all parties. Two members of the group, including myself, are here by choice – this is not a compulsory subject, while it is for media students. The same two of us are also graduating, and for me that has meant trying to do my absolute best to get the best marks I can on my way out of university. But other members of the group have other priorities, and Integrated Media and machinima isn’t necessarily one of them. Attempting to hold together other groups in subjects where their enthusiasm is more focussed can distract and deter, not to mention the numerous external influences that we all have to manage while trying to coordinate around each other as we try to master new skills and produce a polished finished piece that we are all happy with.
We are often told that group work is thrust upon us as students as rehearsal for ‘what goes on in the real world’. Of course, in the real world you are not trying to negotiate your time between three other subjects simultaneously, and in the real world most people you work with will be there because they want to be, not because they have to. At the same time, in the real world it is inevitable that you will also work with colleagues who will prioritise differently to you, who will care more or less, who will have different work ethics. You will, at some stage, work with people who are (as one tutor so eloquently put it) ‘downright lazy bastards’, and so the trick is not to focus on the negative, but how you can learn to navigate even the most challenging of these situations.
Group work in Integrated Media has taught me many things this semester. It is an excellent exercise in diplomacy, in sharing of ideas and concerns – learning to speak up – and it can be a hell of a lot of fun. The rewarding sensation of having the synergy to create something better than you yourself could do on your own is fabulous. At the same time, it has taught me to let go of my somewhat rigid ideals, to learn to compromise, and to just relax. It is not the end of the world if it doesn’t go my way, although I like to stamp my foot and frown as if it is.
It is such a delicate balance between compromise and tenacity, between compliancy and being adamant, persistent in your ideas. Give and take. Involving yourself in such collaboration can teach you eons about what is important to you – and more vitally, what really matters. I want so bad to control my space, to control the outcome of everything, to CONTROL THE WORLD, yet I learn also that I am sometimes too diplomatic, too quiet, too afraid of confrontation and compromise.
I am learning, through group work, that alternatives are possible, and that everything doesn’t need to be perfect. That nothing can ever be perfect, no matter how much of a perfectionist you are. I am learning to let go. If I love my values, my ideas, I must set them free.
Yes, I am a slow learner, but an attentive one. I look forward to my next collaboration. This time in the real world.
When we talk about new media, we talk a lot about collaboration, about sharing and building together. It’s a new creative space, one that lends itself to remix culture. It is democratisation of the media, creating a whole new world offering the opportunity to improve upon, change, integrate, or otherwise remix the work of others. With new media, the increasing ubiquity of the network, the chance to share, to rework and to collaborate ideas and visions is no longer limited by cost, space and time.
Online creations can be shared immediately, instantaneously, and their digital format allows such data to be presented, copied, modified and transmitted with just the click of a mouse button. The network capabilities of the internet allow for vast accessibility, leading to vast involvement and, if we were to be idealistic, vast synergy – an environment where the whole truly is greater than the sum of its parts. With such a resource at our fingertips, such a complex relationship developing between previously unknown parties, it seems inevitable that at best synergy will occur, and at the least we will see an emergence of the finest media. It is like the whole world is having a conversation, and not only are you having a say in it, but you can choose which bits you think are most deserving of your attention.
The very nature of the internet, its conversational qualities and huge web of networks, lends itself beautifully to an environment of collaboration – of sharing, copying, remixxing, reworking. While this creates a nightmare for copyrighters, it also signifies a new era for media production. We are no longer just consumers of media, we are prosumers – consumers who also produce media – and we are demanding to be heard. And we are not the rich, the elite, the trained and the qualified. We are the public, the average, the unskilled but the passionate, and we are creating the media of tomorrow.
Second Life is one example of our attempts at collaboration – the idea of a world created and modified by all those who exist within it. ‘Existing’ in Second Life has offered us the opportunity to explore some of the benefits, and the disadvantages, that online collaboration offers. Together we have built far more than any of us could have on our own, and in addition we have learnt from each others work and have been inspired by others’ creations. The space (as I have mentioned before) is a safe one, one in which we can explore the possibilities of collaborating in an online environment, with the freedom to do it in our own time, in our own space, from anywhere. But it can also be threatening….surrendering your Second Life-long work to the mercy of others can leave you feeling slightly vulnerable.
Using the web to collaborate can work in a variety of different ways, but its power is undeniable. You might want to arrange a public event or spectacle, and can use the power of the internet to organise, orchestrate and then record and distribute, such as these outstanding flash mobs. More technically, you can use the combined power of your resources. Projects that utilise distributed computing, such as Folding@home, use the network to access the collective computing power of thousands of computers all over the world, which they can then use to calculate anything from a cure to Alzheimer’s disease to the whereabouts of extra terrestrial beings. Then there is online media collaboration, which can range from collaborative blogs and wikis, such as lolcats or wikipedia, through to the more serious and sophisticated productions, such as open source programing and new and revolutionary collaborative media productions, such as swarm of angels, an outstanding exercise in remixing cinema.
Now this is where it starts getting interesting… where we start to see media created, used and shared in ways we have never seen before. The amount of information out there is vast and ever-increasing, and as a result, from online collaboration so too has spawned an environment of emergence. With so many parties involved in creating, selecting, sharing and choosing the media available, we begin to see an emergent media culture arise – one in which the best quality productions, those with the most currency, the most influence, will emerge on top. The organic spread of viral videos and the continuing ability of wikipedia to remain astoundingly accurate are both examples of emergent media – the ability for the highest quality media to rise to the top of the heap.
There are many tributes to this, to the amazing changes the net has brought about in collaborating. This video puts it quite nicely…
Now, in this new creative space, it’s time to start seriously considering copyleft, a new concept in sharing, developing and producing our ideas.
People [and their productions] can have many different goals and values; fame, profit, love, survival, fun, and freedom, are just some of the goals that a good person might have. When the goal is to help others as well as oneself, we call that idealism.
Think about it. It’s an exciting time to start sharing. And this is what’s so exciting about new media, and the collaboration it brings.
There have been numerous philosophical issues that have arisen during the building of our Second Life set, it’s just that I have been so busy building that I seem to have forgotten what they are… I’ve touched on a few of them when discussing the differences between my own street and my second life street – a pertinent comparison, as in building I endeavoured to model my Second Life street closely on my real street. In doing so I carefully considered aspects of my controlled, social space in comparison to the limitless spatial possibilities available when shaping a virtual street.
In a way, the Second Life environment began as quite threatening and alienating. I didn’t really like that I could terraform the land with the touch of the mouse, that I could ‘build’ a tree, that people could move and manipulate my objects, and mostly I didn’t like the concept of blocks floating in the air. That didn’t fly with me at all. If this was my Second Life, why was everything so uncontrollable? It lacked the order, the stability, the normality, the banality of the real world. A creature of habit and routine am I.
But over the course of building, my attitude changed, and the philosophical challenges became benefits, attributes to the experience. Terraforming the land and the ability to build, copy and modify (described to me by a seasoned SL inhabitant as the key functions of Second Life) meant responsibility, but also freedom, sharing objects meant letting go of my controlling side and learning that collaboration can mean incredible synergy, and floating blocks in the sky…. well, i still grapple slightly with this, but have also learnt to tolerate it.
Ethically, Second Life is an excellent sounding ground. It is about people, places and experiences, and although we have practiced our time there in a relatively controlled environment, it is easy to be aware of the limitations, the challenges and the possibilities. More experienced SL’rs would have a different relationship to the space than I do – more time inhabiting the virtual space would allow for a more engaged response and a different perspective… To me my set was just a street I built in a computer game, but to another inhabitant it is an new environment, unexplored territory, a potential demonstration of values and ideals.
Building the set in Second Life forced me to consider some of my own spatial relationships, my perception of space and narrative. What did a space mean to me? What did it have to look like to convey the sensations I wanted it to? Why did I choose a conventional environment, rather than a castle in the sky? While some of the perimeters set responded to the brief, others were personal – my own preference of order and stability. But this is all about learning to relate to space and narrative, representation and communication, in a completely new and different environment. This video introduces it nicely:
It’s only as i dig deeper and deeper into machinima, and start understanding what can make it amazing, that I am learning to treat the space in Second Life in a different way, view it differently, see it from another angle. It is the capability of machinima to use these environments in imaginative and innovative ways that is exciting – the reworking of existing characters and spaces to create new and unprecedented narrative devices.
We talk about remediation; understanding the relationship between old and new media. I think this is similar in a sense to learning to understand the relationship between old (actual, traditional, conventional) and new (virtual) space. Only after understanding and practicing this virtual space can we break away from conventions, utilise it innovatively and effectively, and produce fantastic and amazing media. Recognising the limitations of real space allows us to recognise the limitless possibilities of the virtual world.
I’ve already posted about Ignis Solus, a machinima that inherently changed the way I considered the genre. Yesterday guest lecturer Leo Berkeley came and discussed machinima with us further. As he spoke about why he liked it, why it intrigued him, I felt more and more excited by the possibilities it presented…
It’s fascinating how machinima evolved – from gamers wanting to be able to record their gaming accomplishments to people using the engines in amazingly innovative ways to produce sophisticated cinematic experiences.
Anyone can do it. Use the capabilities (or powers, as I like to call them) of these games to fulfill your wildest fantasies… Your characters can be anywhere, do anything. Shape environments and situations to cater to your every whim. For you are the most powerful person in the world. And that, my friend, is exciting.
You will have to excuse my rather study-centric posts at the moment. I tend to put on my academic speak when I respond to course readings and assessments, and so feel like I lose my voice somewhat. It all gets very serious and formal :yawn:. This will hopefully be the last of these type of posts, as I reflect on a final prescribed reading, Walking in the City by Michel de Certeau.
Certeau’s piece, written in 1980, is a study of everyday life in the context of the city, and, more poignantly, the streets which we inhabit and traverse in our day to day existence. In examining the city from different viewpoints, angles and representations, Certeau demonstrates how its attributes – repetition, control, boundaries – become semiotics of this ‘everyday life’, a bureaucratic society of controlled consumption, one that is both extraordinary and extraordinary simultaneously. The modern street, as a representation of public space, develops social codes to manage social encounters and make the city function and create a ‘civil behaviour’.
In thinking about the city and its streets, we may recognise them as a ‘text’ that can be both read and practiced, but one that is only activated when this occurs – when it is inhabited, used, travelled. Space becomes a practiced place, one that is socially constructed by both physical and social boundaries, in which walking becomes a metaphor, a ‘spatial creation’ referring to an external environment. The very angle from which we view these streets defines our relationship with them. A view from above allows you to see all, a view of the whole that gives a sense of mastery, control over the space; it is a feeling of power. On the other hand, viewed from street level the representation of the city alters drastically, overflowing with the multiplicity of different individuals, a close up view of the millions of fragments that comprise the city. The very view itself allows for different types of production of social space, and this in turn activates the the urban space in different ways. How, we might ask when considering different representations of a city, is a space occupied, practiced, lived?
These themes are very interesting when contextualised in a spatial environment such as Second Life, one in which we have the power not only to view from a vast array of angles (literally a birdseye view or from street level) but also the power to produce, control and inhabit a social space. While Second Life is devoid of some of the limitations of normal space, so too does is it constrained by some of the same limitations. The most obvious of these is the need to be inhabited, practiced, in order to mean anything, to actually exist. Without participants, Second Life itself is quite literally non-existent, meaningless without social interaction to give it currency.
At the same time, other limitations still apply, although can be circumvented in the context of a virtual environment. Virtual reality = virtual rules, one might say, and so we have demonstrations of rebellion, anarchy even, that, while impossible in the real world, become quite feasible in a virtual world. The ability to steal, hack, modify and ‘grief‘ without retribution can only be accomplished in a constructed, carefully contained space such as virtual reality. In this way, Second Life itself becomes no more than a representation of social space – a birdseye view over which each user ultimately has control and power. It is a safe and wonderful place to be, and preferable to the comparitive wild uncontrollability of the real life city street.
Our very view of a space can define the way we feel about it. From afar, from above, we fulfill the role of voyeur allowing us to create a whole other definition of spatiality. In describing the viewer’s sensations, Certeau puts it beautifully:
It places him at a distance. It changes an enchanting world into text. It allows him to read it; to become a solar Eye, a god’s regard. The exaltation of a scopic or gnostic drive. Just to be this seeing point creates the fiction of knowledge.
The ability to utilise this voyeuristic power in Second Life – a secluded, separate, detached, alleviated view of the city – allows the empowerment of an objective perspective uninfluenced by the practices and processes of the ‘everyday’ of our real life streets. In Second Life we are able to create an ‘original spatial structure’, one influenced only by our own narrative and imagination.
Not only can we create our dream street, our ideal social space, but we can inhabit it too. The only limitations are ourselves. Oh, and in my case, the power of my CPU.
City from above (aka could I be god??)
Courtesy of Dom Dada
Script has been revised – the closer we get to shooting, the more I am realising how tight our time will be – 90 seconds is nothing, and I hadn’t accounted for placing a title screen and credits at either end. Based on that, we decided to keep our particular script sections down to about two sentences. We also discussed using sound effects to help set the mood – a child laughing for when our character was ten years old, perhaps city noises for when she is thirty and lives in the city. On Wednesday we are going to try and capture some footage, so we are coming prepared with our script and storyboards, and so…. voila! It seems a little meaningless here, but hopefully in its entirity will flow well…
“When I was thirty I moved to the city and lived in a street of bricks and concrete, where nobody spoke to anybody else. One day, someone left their bike in my street, and never returned to collect it. It sat there for months, rusting sadly, until one day it was collected by the garbage men.”
The focus of the story is on the bike, so after using a mid-shot to establish the street, I plan to slowly pan down the street before the camera comes to rest on the bike. It will only be two or three shots in total, although there may also be a lead in and lead out shot – from and to the streets before and after. Here are my planned shots (may need reconsidering after seeing them so small):
These will be even more tightly framed in the final shooting (i.e. get even closer to the bike) and I may stick to just one wideshot, as they are the trickiest on the small screen. I was surprised also to find that after originally being pretty against just using stills, I am now leaning more and more towards it – I think with the use of narration, just fading between these shots could be quite affective. I am not sure if movement in the frame will add to the story (not much action is going on anyway). I will push for this, but it will depend on the overall style of the entire piece also. I’ll let you know after recording on Wednesday.
Oh, and check out my backdrop – it’s Melbourne!! That’s probably about the coolest thing I’ve done thus far. Ha.
We are developing our scripts this week. The structure of our machinima means that we have four short sections, each with their own short VO outlining the story of that location. Thus, with only one and a half minutes to film our entire piece, we each have only 23 seconds each – not a lot of time to include extensive dialogue, so it will need to be short and concise, and as minimal as possible in order to translate successfully to the mobile medium. We must consider that people will be watching and listening to our machinima while on the move or in public, busy, noisy spaces (think on public transport, outside, public spaces) and so wont want to have to concentrate on complex, detailed audio.
My story, which takes place when our character is 30 years old, is about her life in the inner city. While the city is noisy, busy, crowded and urban, she is surprised by the isolation she feels in this space, one that is inhabited by so many others. She lives in an back alley in the city, and a poignant reminder of the lonliness experienced in the city is an abandoned bike that sits in her laneway, untouched for months. To her, it is a symbol of the disconnectedness of the city life, where neighbourhoods exist for years with no sense of community, no sense of belonging. This bike, left unclaimed to rust in the alley, is like a representation of an discarded dream, an abandoned childhood, a happier time when the street had a sense of community.
A voice over will outline this, but will need to be very concise to fit into the 23 seconds. It might go something like this:
“When I was thirty, I lived in an apartment in the city. The city was always busy, but I always felt like it was also lonely, isolated. No one in my street knew anyone else, and kept to their own concrete boxes.
One day, someone left their bicycle in my laneway. It sat there for weeks, slowly rusting, with no one to claim it. For months it sat there, like a lonely reminder of someone’s life, someone’s happier times.
No one in the neighbourhood ever claimed it. Everyone kept their eyes averted, minding their own business, secluding themselves behind closed doors, until one day the garbos collected it, another piece of trash discarded from someone’s life.”
This is too long, but I will refine it. A work in process!!
After examining my real life street a little more carefully, I have been considering the differences and similarities between my real life and Second Life environments. As I mentioned in my previous post, both are constructed spaces (i.e not wild nature), and both show the relationship between space and power, the defining of public and private space and the increasing relevance of geopolitics. As Dalby points out in his paper, Environmental Geopolitics – Nature, Culture, Urbanity, by understanding the cultural categories which are defined by geopolitics, we can then garner more understanding about the culture and politics of an area. Definition, shaping and usage of space can give vital clues into understanding other cultural aspects of a community.
In real life we have worked hard to subdivide, control and shape the wildness of nature into spaces we can maintain, access and utilise for our own purposes. This in turn has aided the division between nature and our own artificially created spaces, and this application of orderliness has been applied consistently by humans to their real life environment over history. As Dalby notes, ‘the urban aesthetic of orderliness and the necessity to civilise wilderness have had…powerful manifestations in recent history’, even at the cost of the natural environment. As humans, we seem intent on recreating our environment to adhere to our cultural and spatial desires.
Nowhere better to do this, then, than in a virtual world. But with the ability to terraform, shape and build, potentially without the limitations imposed by real life such as cost, building permits, time and expertise, geopolitics in Second Life seems to evolve in a completely different way – almost backwards. Every individual has the opportunity to shape and define their space to their liking, starting from scratch. Hence we have a whole lot of incredibly messy, unrefined, unplanned (dare I say) environments, but also some outstanding ones, possible only in a virtual world free from the contstraints listed above.
One might consider the effects of globalisation in real life, the merging of spaces and spatial identities, as a reflection of the happenings of Second Life. Second Life creates an environment devoid of ‘the obvious distinctions between local and distant, large and small, us and them’ (Dalby, pg 501). The conventional physical and economical spatial boundaries we are accustomed to dissapear in a virtual world where land is essentially limitless and its value is not determined by the resources it houses or how developed it is. Globalisation points towards the idea of a global village, and this exactly the concept we are witnessing in SL.
So if space equates to power in Real Life, what does space mean in Second Life? As culture and nature become more matters of geopolitics and spatiality, Second Life provides the perfect place to play out a kind of spatial democracy. While in Real Life the powerful – i.e. those that make the political and economic decisions – are effectively redesigning the planet, Second Life allows us all to.
So… what does this mean for my laneway? It can be whatever I want, hold whatever I want and be shaped in the space exactly as I see fit. I can control virtually any aspect of it, including who can enter it, what time of day it is and what might be lying around. It allows me to reflect on the urban culture of my street and redefine it, increasingly understanding the environment and space as I go. And, as again noted by Dalby in reference to science fiction, this make-believe environment is extremely effective in facilitating a ‘critique of the ontological categories of modern culture, and in the process raises questions of how to rethink environmental geopolitics’.
I am starting to realise just how isolated our lives, contained within these constructed spaces, really are.
Photo: Lonely street, courtesy of Bondidwhat on Flickr.
