creativity/machine

I know I’ve been quiet here lately, but that is because life is so noisy everywhere else. Here are the headlines:

teaching
It was with great trepidation that I introduced my undergraduate music/media studies students to research blogging this week. I was dumbfounded in some cases when I realised the size of the conceptual leap I was asking some people to make - from occasional email, chat and random googling to genuine network literacy. I guess it brings home the fact that “young people” are never, or at least not all, as wired as we “older people” think. Some of them are doing such cool things, though, that it warms the cockles of your heart.

I have also been and/or should now be:

coughing
and generally having the flu.

marking
All the essays by the above brilliant people…

thesising
I have my formal thesis proposal thingy due, well, imminently. ‘nuf said

travelling
Off to Perth for a couple of days on Sunday. Oooh, I forgot to announce, I’m also off to Oxford in July!

editing
The “porn” issue of M/C is jointly parented by me. we are snowed under with articles…

reviewing
3 books and an article, some already more overdue than others….
Listing things like this only makes it worse. I might go back to doing some of it now, instead of…

blogging, which often feels suspiciously like

procrastinating

I’ve just blogrolled Alex Halavais - for a couple of reasons. Firstly, he just went and whipped up a little script that scoops out the 8th-to-last sentences of blog posts, generating a collective stream of consciousness mimetic literature much like the wee bibliomancy craze of last week does. The results are intriguing and nifty. Secondly, he’s gone out and tried to aggregate the various lists of phd/academic bloggers that exist on various websites and blogs - the result is the publicly editable Scholars who Blog list.

In an unrelated epiphany, I realised that there has to be a word for the terrible feeling of discomfort I get when I realise that a third of my site visitors are search engine refugees who come here in the Googlejuice induced belief that I have some sort of insights to impart in the areas of postmodern architecture or swarm theory. The name for this uneasy feeling has to be… Googleguilt, does it not?

I’m wondering if experiencing guilt on this score is an academic thing - or is it just me? Any thoughts?

Remix Fight: download cool remixes and read about ‘em too. Thanks Jonathan.

25 April is Amateur Film Day at the University of Brighton

A fun diversion indeed.

It appears my QUT colleague Axel Bruns has a blog which he has been quite secretive about with me. Gotcha!

I’m now also blogging a bit about amateurism and digital culture at Corante.com’s Amateur Hour. creativity/machine will still be my main outboard brain.

We all felt a sense of occasion in the air yesterday at the launch of the Australian bit of the International Creative Commons Project. The Faculty of Law at QUT has had a big hand in translating the creative commons licenses into Australian legal-speak, and there are some exciting cultural applications and initiatives happening around the place. One of the funkiest is the Australian Creative Resources Archive - a kind of recycling plant for digital, or digitised, content.

ACRO is a Federally funded archive of video, music and other creative material built to provide creative raw materials that help stimulate the production of new broadband content.

ACRO is designed to fulfil an important role in the new creative environment offered by broadband technologies. Artists, educators, and researchers are becoming more restricted in the material they can use because of changes to copyright law. ACRO will reverse this trend by providing access to large amounts of high quality multimedia material.

Using Creative Commons licenses, content contributors can maintain more flexible control over their material than that offered by traditional copyright. If you provide content to ACRO, you decide what you want to happen with it. You can, for example, provide free use for education and non-commercial purposes while also allowing commercial use of your materials under circumstances that you are comfortable with. You decide what can happen with your content.

Extra gravitas was provided at the launch by the virtual presence of Larry Lessig, whose presentation involved, without a doubt, the funkiest use of powerpoint (I think it was powerpoint) I have ever seen.

Apologies for the unexplained absence of late. But I do have a good excuse: I’ve been immersed (and I mean, immersed!) in Digital Storytelling for the last two weeks. Which is to say, I’ve been kind of off the planet.

Thanks to the Faculty of Creative Industries here at QUT, 7 postgrads and research staff were lucky enough to work with Daniel Meadows in a “training the trainers” digital storytelling workshop, which involved, in part, producing our own digital stories. The level of personal engagement that came with this experience was a bit of a surprise…a nice surprise, as it turned out in the end.

But even more than I was before doing the workshop, I am deeply interested in and excited about the possibilites of digital storytelling (i.e. as an enabling tool of…you guessed it, vernacular creativity).

But I’m probably still too caught up in the post-workshop emotive state to say anything useful about it yet.

I like the chutry experiment