Archive for July, 2005
Ears before eyes
Jul 22nd
Among the very few good books (cultural/film theory-wise) on the auditory in “audiovisual” media, is Michel Chion’s Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, which I just flogged off a friend’s desk. The book’s lyrical foreword by Walter Murch is a more than sufficient antidote to my recent frustrated conviction that media and cultural studies are almost profoundly deaf:
We begin to hear before we are born, four and a half months after conception. From then on, we develop in a continuous and luxurious bath of sounds: the song of our mother’s voice, the swash of her breathing, the trumpeting of her intestines, the timpani of her heart. Throughout the second four-and-a-half months, Sound rules as solitary Queen of our senses: the close and liquid world of uterine darkness makes Sight and Smell impossible, Taste monchromatic, and Touch a dim and generalized hint of what is to come.
Birth brings with it the sudden and simultaneous ignition of the other four senses, and an intense competition for the throne that Sound had claimed as hers. The most notable pretender is the darting and insistent Sight, who dubs himself King as if the throne had been standing vacant, waiting for him.
Ever discreet, Sound pulls a veil of oblivion across her reign and withdraws into the shadows, keeping a watchful eye on the braggart Sight. If she gives up her throne, it is doubtful that she gives up her crown.
The opening point being, of course, that cinema reversed this ordering of the senses – cinema “gestated in Sight, and was born into Sound”; further, Sound is often effaced but sooooooooooooooooooo very important and constitutive of the experience of cinema. Interesting (but maybe not surprising) that Sound is primal, submerged, visceral, feminine; Sight is insistently apparent, mercurial, masculine. Looking forward to reading on.
Damn it!!!!!!!!
Jul 4th
It looks very much like someone else just published my honours thesis! I was getting around to it, honest. Bugger, bugger, bugger. No pun intended.
On the upside, I like that the Magnetic Fields have a song called The Death of Ferdinand Saussure. Past victims of “Introduction to Communication and Cultural Studies” at UQ must have it on their crying-into-my-cask-wine playlists, for sure. Although, I admit, getting the whole signifier/signified thing sorted out was an epiphanic moment for me as an undergrad. Poor beleaguered linguists, they really deserve more credit than they get.
Welcome back, brain
Jul 4th
Now that my latest stint as degree-factory slave is over (for 2005 at least), I’m slowly finding my passion again…and most definitely feeling the full effects of the new media fatigue that has been haunting me all year – is this a problem for someone doing a PhD called Vernacular Creativity and New Media? I don’t think so, because it means I’m historicising more and better, and engaging with the cultural theory and cultural practices parts much more, in relation to a much more nuanced and catholic theory of technology, thank the gods for all of that. It may, however, be a problem for someone who is supposed to turn in a book chapter called ‘Blogging and Critical Literacies: Using Blogs as Formative Assessment’ in a matter of weeks. Ahem. [waves cheerfully to Axel].
So, I kinda wish I was going to be at the Writing Across Cultures conference with Ben, but am happy to be spending some time (without the pressure of giving a paper) at the Sites of Cosmopolitanism conference (cosmo for short, yo).
Also, I really really need a haircut, looking a little too David Cassidy at the moment. Self-flattering though the comparison may be.
I drew a pig
Jul 2nd
With the trackpad, give me a break…apparently, the pig drawing says a whole lot about me. Like that I’m a good listener, a traditionalist, and have a great sex life. Duh.
But I cannot resist these internet quizzes and personality tests! God, someone save me from the memes. Someone other than trine, who constantly encourages others’ bad behaviour.
Bits
Jul 2nd
Birthday greetings to Herman Hesse, wherever he is.
From my favourite agent provocateur and radical hacker, David Berry, come the libre commons licenses:
This is a project to develop non-legal licenses that will operate in the shared space that can non-bureaucratically and non-instrumentally be formed resisting law, the intellectual property regime and state violence. These licenses are written explicitly against the presuppositions and caveats of the Creative Commons licenses which (un)consciously seek to use culture as purely a resource. Instead these licenses are anti-licenses; ethical frameworks or chromosomes of social practices.
The licenses come in two flavours:
Libre Commons Res Communes License
This license declares your work to a common that is shared between us as human beings. It is therefore owned in common with others.
Libre Commons Res Divini Juris License
This license declares your work to the realm of the gods. Where as a moment of clearing it contributes to a permanent state of exception rejecting state law and liberal conceptions of the nation state.
You have to love all that latin, it’s so hot 
