creativity/machine

I’ve been ranting on and on about mobile phones as media production tools for ages - luckily, I never have to actually develop products to back up my rants, because time after time someone else has been doing it in the background all along…witness HP StoryCast: Simple, digital storytelling with photos and narration

StoryCast is an experimental digital storytelling service that lets people use their camera phones and other mobile devices to easily create and instantly share stories with friends and family. Each story consists of a sort of narrated slide show of photos accompanied by the storyteller’s voice.

As usual, the idea is interpersonal communication (’friends and family’) but if this gets taken up with any momentum, we’ll probably see public online platforms for sharing too…

Anne has passed the musical baton to me, so…

Total volume of music on my computer

I haven’t put much on the iBook, so: 1.6GB (pathetic). But the external hard drive with legacy MP3s from my desktop PC has in the region of 10GB (still pathetic). There is some of absolutely everything in there, trust me.

The last CDs I bought

I actually don’t buy many CDs for myself - people give them to me, and I give them to other people. The last two I was given were:

Damien Rice / O - the soundtrack to my life for the last few months
Ward / It Might Be Useful for Us to Know - which is fantastic and I am going to tell you why when I get round to it (promise!)

Song playing right now
The Slits - Typical Girls
(This is kind of only half cheating cos I wasn’t playing any music when I started this post, so deleted everything I had preprogrammed into party shuffle and this is what came up first - really)

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me

Only five? Geez…

Soft Cell - Say Hello, Wave Goodbye
Neil Diamond - Love on the Rocks
Damien Rice - Delicate The Blower’s Daughter
Leonard Cohen - Hallelujah (Jeff Buckley’s version is magic too)
Ben Harper - Walk Away

[if I was trying harder to be cool, this list would have been very different - but it’s an honest and contextually appropriate list! At least it has thematic coherence, right?]

Next on the list: Christian, MC Gregg, Trine, Glen and Ben. In your blogs, ploise. Oh, but leave the permalink in comments here, kay?

[update] Geez, I wish Sigur Ros’s Staralfur had been playing while I wrote this post. It’s my New Favourite Song in the Whole World.

Leaving aside for a moment the utterly barren and bimboesque human landscape that is this year’s Australian series of Big Brother, those of us in cultural and media studies will be more than familiar with the arguments for and against viewing reality TV shows like Big Brother as spaces for the exploration of everyday ethics and/or as interactive spaces for audience engagement. This engagement and exploration occurs not only crudely and explicitly through the voting process, but in an ongoing distributed manner, through loungeroom, watercooler, and online discussions about the relative moral (or aesthetic) worth of the characters onscreen, debates about right actions and human values, and so on. So in some very specific ways, the argument goes, BB inherits and remediates the traditions of the premodern theatre of Shakespeare’s time - a mediated space that was equally robust, unmannered, and interactive. In response, the outraged, ignorant, and/or deliberately obtuse have been heard to cry, “Cultural studies academic argues Big Brother is as good as Shakespeare!!!!!!” .

In stark contrast, this article in The Age by Dirk den Hartog (no, not the explorer, people) is the most lucid critique of the pro-BB media studies position I’ve heard. It’s still a bit snipy towards cultural studies in parts (calling CS researchers ‘enthusiasts’, and ‘populists’, and not in the celebratory way I might employ those terms!). But I am quite convinced by the elegant calls to engage with ethics and historicity in a less one-sided way (eg the comparison with darker forms of premodern entertainments like public hangings and not only the relatively benign Shakespearian comedy as metaphor).

The 60 Second Story Competition is an excellent idea, especially in encouraging people to use the video recording capabilities of mobile phones. Reminds me of my MMS haiku idea (3 images, 3 captions with correct no. of syllables and all - voila!) Anyway….

We need more stories in our lives, yet we don’t have much time for them. Most digital cameras and webcams allow you to take one minute of video and audio at resolutions suitable for the web. The solution: 60 second stories, of course.

We are pleased to announce the 60 second story competition. 60 second stories are works of fiction recorded by their authors as digital videos, less than one minute in duration. Files size must be less than 5MB, and work must be submitted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Entries are being accepted from now until June 8th, 2005.

Some of the submissions are already online.

’scan’: an upcoming issue of M/C Journal of Media and Culture

The scan is both the quick glance and the measured study, it is a survey of the exterior and an interrogation of hidden interiors. Practices of scanning are a response to the increased number of things to consider and the reduced amount of time to consider them. Scanning demarcates that which is seen as relevant, interesting and important into ever increasing ‘to do’ lists, at the same time dismissing that which is not. These questions of importance or relevance are often decided through cursory glances and greater consideration is regularly left for ‘later’. Scanning engages questions about surveillance, about the way in which we surveil our self and our surrounds, and about the way we submit our self and our surrounds to surveillance by others. In many ways scanning has an impact on the way in which authority is practiced, in creative practice, scholarship and daily life.

This edition invites reflections on the ’scan’, on the activities of watching, surveilling, reporting and recording. We invite creative interpretations of the act of scanning and contributions from a wide
variety of fields to explore its practices, limitations and potentials.

Details
o Article deadline: 1 July 2005
o Release date: 24 August 2005
o Editors: Joshua Green and Adam Swift

Send any enquiries, and complete articles, to scan at journal.media-
culture.org.au.

Ever since MIT4 last week, I’ve been exploring a recent epiphany to do with the sonic characteristics, and not only the visual ‘construction’ of digital stories In this article from 1997, performance theorist and archaeologist Mike Pearson reflects on some of the issues raised by the Centre for Performance Research, Aberystwyth’s (then) recent conference on ‘An Archaeology of the Voice’. Archeology + Performance Studies - cool:

First, we might consider the voice as itself an artifact, manufactured through social practice. Its utterance is its raw material but as with a stone tool it is worked by hammering, splitting, trimming, polishing; as with a pot it is thrown, glazed, decorated, embellished, fired; as with a metal axe it is smelted, cast, moulded, alloyed. The processes of its fabrication are social, cultural, personal, artistic. It attains the deep patina of usage. Yet it is susceptible to wear, corrosion, mutation, decay; it displays marks of time and experience.

I’ve been quiet because we have all been derailed by this for the last two days.

Thankfully, I get to leave that headspace this afternoon when I get to help a handful of Creative Writing students begin the process of constructing their digital stories out of an assemblage of voices, images, and lived experiences.

I have copious session notes to blog from the conference, but I can’t cope with rewriting them right now (Axel, you are the master of conference blogging - I will have to just sit at your feet and learn). Plus, this is not really a laptops-out-during-sessions type crowd, and having an iBook makes you look even more like a pretentious geek.

But anyway, on my second night here I caught up with my friend Colin who I met at the OII last year. We started at this pub in Harvard, then we wandered through Boston’s mansion district, stopping for a fancy martini at the Oak Bar (Michelle, you are the best waitress ever), before mac’n'cheese and a beer at cafe delux (which was, indeed, delux) and finally catching the last two sets of a great trio of (I think) Berklee College of Music students at Wally’s cafe - a jazz bar that has been in the same family since the 1940s. Outside of Wally’s I was accosted by another Berklee student flogging a really quite awesome hip hop CD on which he goes by the name of Black Swan (no URL for this dude).

FYI, everything in Boston shuts at 1.00 am, and there is not really a street culture to speak of…but I feel I’ve been privileged to see the best of it.

Needless to say there is no hope for the sleep patterns to stabilise by the time I fly out tomorrow…

Thanks, Colin!

I’m off to the States for MIT4 tomorrow, but I’ll be back next Tuesday - I think I’m spending more time in airports and planes than on the ground, but it will be worth it. I’m gonna try a bit of live blogging from the conference, since there is apparently good wireless coverage.