creativity/machine

The Mobile Phone Photo Show - it was only a matter of time…

Although I did indulge in a small sms frenzy at the time, I completely forgot to blog the fact that the examiners’ reports on my MPhil dissertation came in last week. They were very kind, and the thesis was officially passed with no corrections. I’ll put the .pdf online in the next week or so.

way fun ear candy: sound toys

At Horizon 0, my new favourite online journal (at least for the next five minutes) is an evocative piece on the forms and future of remix culture.

Samples from the Heap: Notes on Recycling the Detritus of a Remixed Culture by Bernard Schutze:

Mix, mix again, remix: copyleft, cut ‘n’ paste, digital jumble, cross-fade, dub, tweak the knob, drop the needle, spin, merge, morph, bootleg, pirate, plagiarize, enrich, sample, break down, reassemble, multiply input source, merge output, decompose, recompose, erase borders, remix again. These are among many of the possible actions involved in what can be broadly labeled ‘remix culture’ - an umbrella term which covers a wide array of creative stances and initiatives, such as: plunderphonics, detritus.net, recombinant culture, open source, compostmodernism, mash-ups, cut-ups, bastard pop, covers, mixology, peer to peer, creative commons, ’surf, sample, manipulate’, and uploadphonix.

continue reading…

urgh. Sometimes I feel almost as frustrated about ICTs as my students do.

Overnight I’ve been hit with a wave of (i.e. nearly a hundred) spam comments. I’m thinking of closing off comments to older entries, but I don’t really like the implications of this. I know that Tom from Plastic Bag changed the names of comment tags to hide them to spambots, so I might have a hunt through his archives and see how he did it.

Plus for some reason pings have stopped working.

Update:
So I got all brave and installed the upgrade to the free version of Movable Type 3.0 so that I could use TypeKey to require comment authentication. Except the server is missing some modules, and I can’t use the TypeKey authentication system without them. Pffft. It’s Friday and I still have more work to do.

Oh, and in a non-technical aside: if you’re here to leave a rant in the comments section of my post linking back to Steven Shaviro’s “Sympathy for Lynndie England”, I’ve taken it down. I know this move is totally against the dominant ideology of blogging (a dominant ideology that thinks blogging is always trying to be journalism), but I don’t want to be a war blogger.

There is plenty of stuff to unpack and plug in embedded in Adrian Miles and Jeremy Yuille’s Creative Computing manifesto. TBC…

Saatchi and Saatchi “discover” the affective dimensions of consumption and give it a brandname: they propose the term Lovemarks to describe brands to which consumers remain loyal “beyond reason”:

Brands have run out of juice. More and more people in the world have grown to expect great performance from products, services and experiences. And most often, we get it. Cars start first time, the fries are always crisp, dishes shine.

Five years ago Saatchi & Saatchi looked closely at the question: What makes some brands inspirational, while others struggle?

And we came up with the answer: Lovemarks. A future beyond brands.

Which comes as no surprise to Deadheads, Mac users, and Zippo owners, I’d imagine. via Paul Holland.

The top 10 “lovemarks” as submitted by site visitors:

1. Rebecca St. James
2. Jesus Christ
3. Apple computers
4. iPod
5. Superman
6. REMO General Store
7. Bike Friday
8. Television Without Pity
9. Barcelona
10. Google

Um…

1. I wonder how Jesus feels about being beaten by one of his musical missionaries, and further to that…
2. I bet Steve Jobs is miffed at not being bigger than Jesus, and…
3. Is it just me, or are all the votes coming from the Bible Belt?

raccoon wonders whether Internet publishing can be a de-commercialised zone, and whether that would be a good thing.

Fellow QUT Creative Industries doctoral candidate Paul Holland reflects on the challenge of finding a common language to communicate to people in other areas of the creative industries - a challenge that still frustrates more than stimulates me in academia - where there is a kind of anti-pidgin at work (can someone tell me “the” meaning of discourse, affect, or even methodology, please?). But, being a CI professional type, and not a crusty curmudgeon, Paul is more positive, and carries the linguistic metaphor further:

History tells us that when cultures meet (for peaceful purposes at least) they try and find a method for dialogue. […] This produces a lingua franca or first contact language. During extended contact these few breakthrough words and phrases can become a rudimentary trade language - a pidgin - that provides a common ground for commerce of all types.

[…]

Whatever the form that may be developed out of a collaboration between (say) games developers, fashion designers and theatre directors, it may be framed in terms that do not yet exist as the collaborators find ways to describe their current practice to each other and then attempt to define this new thing they’ve built.

CI pidgins should be one of the more fascinating developments of this potential combination of disciplines, as will the creoles which I expect the next generation of CI professionals to speak.

I’ve had this little question in my head for a while about the distinction between various kinds of amateurism - on the one hand, there are “hobbies” - stamp collecting, gardening, cooking - and on the other there are capital “C” creative leisure pursuits - being in a band, exploring photography, going to life drawing classes, or writing erotic fiction.

I’m finding it useful at the moment to think of these two fields as “high” and “low” amateurism - because they remind me in various ways of the ways modernity was characterised by a split between “high” and “low” culture - a split that survives in mutant form.

The distinction seems to be mapped onto a couple of different fields - both High Amateurism and Low Amateurism (hobbies) are often unpaid practices, but their professional or elite counterparts occupy very different positions in terms of cultural value. A “real” photographer or novelist is considered authentically part of the arts or creative industries in ways that professional gardeners and cooks are not - despite the recent development of articulations between these “service” professions and the creative industries, i.e. the rise and rise of the funky celebrity chef (pukka!). Secondly, there is the matter of distribution and reception - across most fields of amateurism, the “hobby” or non-professional pursuit is most often carried out and is restricted to the individual domestic sphere - in the twentieth century amateurism was articulated closely to domesticity and the family: amateur film, for most of us, conjures images of capering children in sunny backyards caught on grainy Super 8.

So anyway, it is collecting that most sharply brings this distinction into relief for me. By which I mean filling up the lounge room cabinet, the bedroom cupboard, or the garage with rocks, or bits of dead cars, or obsolete electronic musical instruments, or beanie babies, or barbies, or whatever. On the other hand, there is the legitimized and professionalized practice of curating - the reasoned custodianship, selection, arrangement and/or exhibition of objects for public consumption. And the ability to explain the reasoning behind the choices made.

I’m with Henry Jenkins when he says that the point about digital technologies isn’t so much what new forms of, or access to, production they enable (cool as that is), as it is the radically expanded forms of distribution, communication and networking they enable. So it isn’t making the home movie that is important; it’s being able to exhibit it online, being able to discuss it with like-minded people, being able to participate in learning communities and creative networks that counts in terms of the impact of new media.

Going back to the hobbies: web publishing and networking give all the amateur cooks, and gardeners, and quilters, and rock collectors, and genealogists, the opportunity to shift their domestic hobbies into public, networked space.

Which is all a really longwinded way of saying how absolutely bloody fascinating I find Heavy Little Objects, a new-ish blog (or, should I say, online exhibition?) cataloguing, exhibiting and providing expert commentary on a personal collection of junk, art, pop ephemera, and, well, stuff:

I collect heavy little things.

Tools, parts, toys, instruments, tchotchkes - the weight of some new thing in my hand, often small, metallic and well machined, compels me to add it to my life.

It’s instinct by now. I can’t say why these things are important, or why I haven’t bothered cataloguing them until this day - they almost litter my office, my pockets, my car, my home. But this is as good a place to start as any.

If this isn’t public curating, then what is?

Oh, and I really, really want the theremin for myself. Thanks to Anne for the link.