creativity/machine

I’ve been having a great time working as a digital storytelling trainer at Visible Ink (see below) and have been inspired by the creativity of the young participants, and the diversity of their approaches to what a digital story can be about and for.

So while I’m on the show and tell kick, and to explain my inconsistent blogging over the last weeks, I thought I’d be brave and make my own recently completed digital story (which is about music, a changing Brisbane and dodgy chinese food) available for download:
Watch it here (RealMedia, 10 MB).

I’ve finally gotten around to submitting my Masters thesis for permanent binding. It’s now online for your reading pleasure. If you find typos, don’t tell me! But any other feedback or comments would be hugely appreciated.

Here’s the abstract:

High Culture as Subculture: Brisbane’s Contemporary Chamber Music Scene

The aim of the dissertation is to discover the extent to which methodologies and conceptual frameworks used to understand popular culture may also be useful in the attempt to understand contemporary high culture. The dissertation addresses this question through the application of subculture theory to Brisbane’s contemporary chamber music scene, drawing on a detailed case study of the contemporary chamber ensemble Topology and its audiences. The dissertation begins by establishing the logic and necessity of applying cultural studies methodologies to contemporary high culture. This argument is supported by a discussion of the conceptual relationships between cultural studies, high culture, and popular culture, and the methodological consequences of these relationships.

In Chapter 2, a brief overview of interdisciplinary approaches to music reveals the central importance of subculture theory, and a detailed survey of the history of cultural studies research into music subcultures follows. Five investigative themes are identified as being crucial to all forms of contemporary subculture theory: the symbolic; the spatial; the social; the temporal; the ideological and political. Chapters 3 and 4 present the findings of the case study as they relate to these five investigative themes of contemporary subculture theory. Chapter 5 synthesises the findings of the previous two chapters, and argues that while participation in contemporary chamber music is not as intense or pervasive as is the case with the most researched street-based youth subcultures, it is nevertheless possible to describe Brisbane?s contemporary chamber music scene as a subculture.

The dissertation closes by reflecting on the ways in which the subcultural analysis of contemporary chamber music has yielded some insight into the lived practices of high culture in contemporary urban contexts.

Now I just have to find time to write the articles that are supposed to come out of it.

Tomorrow I start to put my money where my mouth is, as part of a team of QUT trainers conducting a digital storytelling workshop with young people at Invisible Ink in Fortitude Valley. It’s part of the Youth Internet Radio Network project as well as research for my PhD. I’m very excited about putting my training to work and my theories of vernacular creativity and cultural participation to the test.

Does the world need yet another social networking website? Mine probably doesn’t, as I’ve joined and ditched just about every one of them so far (for research purposes, don’t you know). But I do feel obliged to encourage initiatives that attempt to form interest communities rather than provide icky dating services. So after finding a Lucy’s link to my site from FolkLikeMe.com, I joined up.

The name is disturbing (reminds me of the recent television ads for a designed “community” called Forest Lake here in Brisbane, where the happy residents proclaimed proudly, “The neighbours here, well - they’re just like us!”). I also have a deep horror of the term “folk” (although don’t believe this means I am immune to the charms of jangly acoustic guitars and the odd rainstick).

But I am interested in the possibility of communities that form on the basis of shared interests and yet paradoxically enable connections across interests and cultural identities - because nobody puts together exactly the same portfolio of interests, cultural competences and life experiences. Secondly, the “my world my mind” section is specifically designed to allow the development of an online portfolio of each member’s cultural production habits, and not only bare lists of their consumer “tastes” (which has always annoyed me - not because cultural consumption isn’t active, rich and important, but precisely because it is all of those things).

Plus, this is a chance to get revenge on the friends who guilted me into joining friendster or orkut for them. You can find my profile here.

At the last lecture of MSTU2000 Music Subcultures and the Media, I administered a student questionnaire as one way of evaluating the usefulness of the research weblog assessment task I had implemented for the first time this semester. Here are the results (apologies in advance to any stats junkies - bare frequency tables only, I’m afraid). Generally, it’s a thumbs up.

There has also been some dissent - but paradoxically, an exercise like the weblog task actually enables the public voicing of such dissent and has encouraged me to think more about participatory course design.

This morning we received the sad news that three QUT Creative Industries students lost their lives in a tragic car accident over the weekend. Among them was Gerard Cutcheon. I only met him once or twice, but I am touched to see that the comments section of Gerard’s photography website has become the focus of tributes by the grieving. His creativity continues to inspire.

While logging into the QUT server just now, I suddenly realized that my new student number is easier to remember than my old one. Are these the moments that let us know we have finally passed over to the other side?

update: fixed the links (they don’t make it easy at Taylor and Francis).

Cultural Studies has a special double issue on everyday life, which has lots and lots of goodies in it, including an article called Intimations of everyday life: Ubiquitous computing and the city by one of my favourite research bloggers, Anne Galloway, and A Mundane Voice, by fellow CSAA panellist and fledgling blogger Mel Gregg. If you or your library has a subscription, check them out.

Australia’s suavest soundart festival/collective, liquid architecture, has a suitably suave new website, including sound and video, news, articles and interviews.

Together with three brilliant people, Mel Gregg, Jane Simon and Kris Cohen, I’m putting together a panel proposal for this year’s Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Conference, Everyday Transformations. We are tossing around ideas about amateurism, the banal and mundane, and problematising the default hipness of new media and digital technologies. Here are some of my latest thoughts on what I might contribute to this (copied and pasted from our email discussions).

“I’m also really interested in the “hipness” problem, i.e. the way that hipness is currently being rearticulated to highly self-aware (sometimes camp) lofi, daggy, DIY, *and* “experimental”/avant-garde aesthetics and practices - this is something I’ve explored in relation to music subcultures, and has become an unavoidable issue when looking at amateur digital production (who do I include in that? Indymedia? The lomographers? Web designers turned photobloggers? People who make hip hop beats using a Sony playstation?). But the *reason* I’m interested in this is that I’m trying to find a way to talk about digital amateurism in terms of cultural democracy and public communication. Deep down I reckon that one of the best ways to enable this is through more bottom-up cultural production: i.e. when “ordinary” people (i.e. not just hip people, young people, gamers and fans) make culture, pay attention to each other, and form learning/interest communities. When and how and whether any of this happens or happens in a meaningful way is what I need to find out.

So what I want to do for this panel is look at one of my major case studies, Digital Storytelling, ala BBC Capture Wales, which [probably] isn’t hip (too institutional, too conservative aesthetically, too sentimental). I’m looking at it not as a cultural form but as a cultural field, encompassing its conditions of production (technologies, tools, education i.e. the training workshops), its textual forms, and its distribution and reception”

Which has since developed into a brilliant discussion on coolness, hipness, dagginess, and tracksuits. Excellent.