creativity/machine

From scratch video, via Trine:

The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary. The young filmmakers will express themselves in the first person and will relate what has happened to them: it may be the story of their first love or their most recent; of their political awakening; the story of a trip, a sickness, their military service, their marriage, their last vacation…and it will be enjoyable because it will be true and new…The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure. The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it, and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has. The film of tomorrow will be an act of love.

-Francois Truffaut
published in Arts magazine, May 1957; see also this article.

I wonder if “tomorrow” will ever arrive? I know I’ll leap out of bed full of joie de vivre (and, apparently, speaking in an outrageous French accent) if it ever does.

Anyway, an appropriate quotation to bear in mind as I head into a 10 day interdisciplinary digital storytelling masterclass led by Daniel Meadows.

Daniel Meadows is a world leader in the Digital Storytelling movement and is here at QUT to offer a master-class workshop on new directions for digital storytelling.

Come and join us…

Public Lecture: Digital Storytelling: the journey from ‘doing media to people’ to ‘enabling people to do media’.

When: Tuesday 1st November (THIS COMING TUESDAY) from 4.30pm -6.00pm

Where: QUT Creative Industries Precinct, The Hall (Z2-226), Kelvin Grove.

Lilia Efimova has been thinking about the academic’s desire to explore and hunt down treasures deep in “theory land”, and how best to reconcile that with the ethics of research - by which both she and I mean something much more than the functional applied ethics that are represented by the hoop-jumping processes of getting “ethical clearance” from your university. Rather, the ethics at the core of our research practice have serious implications for how we go about engaging research “subjects”, the relationship theory has to methodology, and how our research is fed back into the world ‘out there’.:

For me research is about impact. Of course, intellectual curiosity, contribution to a theory and rigor should be there, but for me my own research makes sense only if it makes a difference in the lives of people. People who may or may not understand the language of theory […] It’s only now I’m starting to articulate my implicit beliefs in [the] researcher’s accountability to the broader community than his or her research peers, the responsibility to bring the research results back from the theory land to where most people live, either by translating them into everyday words, teaching the language of theory or even involving them as co-researchers…

Amen to that. Back here, there has been a bit of a discussion going around lately about the place of theory in Australian cultural studies.

What I would say about it is that cultural studies as research practice, at least in the tradition that I identify with most (OK, mostly ‘British’), has traditionally integrated and built cultural and critical theory in symbiosis with various kinds of empirical work, with both ‘theory’ and ‘praxis’ emphasised to greater or lesser extent. But if work that is happy to march under the banner of cultural studies loses its core ethics - which I might articulate variously as popular empathy, ‘critical’ engagement, and a commitment to building agency - then for me it just becomes the egocentric performance of theory. Really, although it can be seductive and mesmerising and intimidating, some of these modes of performance are not too much more than an exercise in theoretical and cultural omnivorousness and competetive aesthetic virtuosity.

More seriously, when the main game of theory is the performance of theory, it implicitly disavows any need on its own behalf to achieve material outcomes, or even material relevance, because Theory is supposed to be somehow inherently, transcendently, transformative. I didn’t leave classical music for more of that.

I’ve been aware of David Gauntlett’s ArtLab project at Bournemouth Media School’s Centre for Creative Media Research for a while, and keep meaning to post briefly on it.

The ArtLab studies represent a new type of research in which media consumers’ own creativity, reflexivity and knowingness is harnessed, rather than ignored. In these studies, individuals are asked to produce media or visual material themselves, as a way of exploring their relationship with particular issues or dimensions of media. Examples, which appear in the projects section, include research where children made videos to consider their relationship with the environment; where young men designed covers for imaginary men’s magazines, enabling an exploration of contemporary masculinities; and where people drew pictures of celebrities as part of an examination of their aspirations and identifications with stars.

It’s an innovative approach to media “consumption” research, and one which in many ways is the natural next step for cultural and media studies’ researchers who really believe in the active audience tradition and want to stop treating audiences as research ’subjects’ and start treating them as research participants.

Two comparisons occur to me: one is to art therapy, where, through self expression, the subject both “works out” psychological/affective issues and makes them visible to the therapist - similarly, in the artlab projects, the participants “work out” some of their relationships between culture, media and identity through creative practice. These relationships can then be harvested as data, apparently providing some answer to the longstanding problem of how to ‘get at’ media audiences and consumers in something approaching a naturalistic, or at least organic, way.

The other comparison that springs to mind is with “action research”, or ethnographic action research, methods, where the process is designed to have some positive outcome for the participants, and the research is around the process of achieving that outcome. In both the art therapy and action research approaches, there is the assumption that the subject or participant benefits somehow. Likewise, I think it would be interesting for the artlab projects to articulate more explicitly whatever the outcomes (especially unintended ones) seem to be for their participants. There certainly seems to be something implied in the rationale as well as the project descriptions and reports about creative and critical media literacies - if there’s something more elaborated on the website and I’ve missed it, I apologise.

Anyway, these issues are interesting to me because of the important but problematic place that “practice” has in my predominantly cultural studies-oriented research. That is, the small amount of work I do as a digital storytelling trainer and creative practitioner functions not only as an ethnographic instrument, but also as a direct intervention into the field I’m studying. In conducting digital storytelling workshops in the community, I’m not only “observing”, I’m trying to collaborate with the participants to contribute directly and practically, not polemically, to cultural change. This is a challenge that, to be honest, my formal research training in English departments hasn’t really prepared me for at all, but which I welcome as a chance to contribute to the development of a cultural studies praxis that can effectively combine “critical” analysis, participatory research methods, and (yes, I said it) instrumentality.

Back to the writing deadlines…

J.D. Lasica has posted the video of an interview he did with Daniel Meadows at the Digital Storytelling Festival at KQED in San Francisco. In the interview, Daniel - who started it all here at QUT with a “train the trainers” workshop back in April 2004 - talks with characteristic passion about the social power of digital storytelling - where “empowerment” and aesthetic elegance meet the public sphere - as well as his own practice as a digital storyteller and trainer (see Daniel’s website http://www.photobus.co.uk and BBC’s Capture Wales for examples).

If you’re in Sydney next Wednesday and you’re interested in the history of new media technologies in relation to cities, space or place, try to get along to hear Scott McQuire talk about his current research:

Public Space in the Media City

University of New South Wales Media, Film and Theatre Seminars
5pm, Wednesday 26 October 2005
Robert Webster building, Room 327

Scott McQuire’s research explores the social effects of media technologies, with particular attention to their impact on the social relations of space and time, and the formation of identity. He is currently writing a book, The Media City, that traces the way in which cities have become increasingly media-dense environments, transforming previous conceptions of public and private space. What happens to the place we call ‘home’ when the transnational networks of both embedded and mobile media have become ubiquitous? How do they reconstruct public urban space as more interactive and performative?

Scott McQuire teaches in the Media and Communication Program at the University of Melbourne. Among his books are Crossing the Digital Threshold (1997), Visions of Modernity (1998), The Look of Love (with Peter Lyssiotis, ,1998), Maximum Vision (1999) and Empires, Ruins + Networks: The Transcultural Agenda in Art (ed. with Nikos Papastergiadis, 2005).

I also highly recommend Scott’s book Visions of Modernity to anyone interested in the cultural history of photography and visual technologies.

So I guess this is my first videoblog post, but it’s also my first entirely non-verbal (i.e. not just oral rather than written) one. Oh, guess I just stuffed that up.

Update: If I really knew what I was doing, this is how I would do it.

Have I invented a meme? Will fame and fortune finally be mine? We all know that’s less than likely, but my slightly childish (and little-understood) substitution of a t-shirt design in the place of rational debate about identities and television prompted Mark to appropriate the idea as a new weapon in “blog stoushing”, and it has caught on….once, and then been recuperated for the market as a mere exercise in t-shirt design and shameless self-promotion.

More seriously, I am actually thinking about experimenting with completely non-discursive, if not non-verbal blogging (video posts of me lying in the park listening to birds, audio posts of my brain ticking over, and zany t-shirt designs), because sometimes I wish the whole internet, especially me, would just shut up for 5 minutes. We could try listening.

Even more seriously, am quite hot on DIY t-shirt design websites like spreadshirt, cafe press, et al as platforms for wearable vernacular creativity.

And, beyond seriousness and heading towards sheer terror, I have a very, very, very scary publication and general things-to-do timeline leading up to Christmas.

First: It is too hot - no, not in the good way, and not with two Ts. Brisbane has apparently decided to do away with the season in between winter and summer entirely this year, and it doesn’t look like it will ever, ever rain again. I am writing up a storm, but in my heart of hearts I am dreaming of large swimming pools filled with freezing sparkling mineral water, and my inner child is whimpering.

Second: Shuffle mode is great for moments of joy and catharsis that hit you over the head while you’re walking around minding your own business. I’ve become quite enamoured with it, particularly as I have several gigs of mistagged or untagged music floating around on my iPod, and tend to hit the same old playlists if left to my own devices. Favourite sonic surprises this week:

1. Bright Eyes - Lover I Don’t Have to Love (which is good for defiantly stomping out the Ks from the bus stop to my office)
2. Leonard Cohen - That Don’t Make it Junk (which prompted a wistfully enigmatic smile - or possibly just a general aura of mental disturbance - on the 372 bus)
3. Brahms 4 (made me say “oh” and sit down quickly)

And third: Welcome home from your World Domination Tour, Mel!

J.D. Lasica has posted the video of his interview with BBC technology reporter Jo Twist about the personal media revolution.

Here are my notes on the interview, trying to pull out the way Twist characterises the relations between technology, creativity, and cultural participation (I am such a broken record, thanks to this damn PhD, oh well). The ways in which these relations are understood by Twist are getting very, very, familiar to me by now - which is good in that I have obviously got the “dominant” construction of this stuff right, but kind of wearying in some ways as well (the new media fatigue has, if anything, gotten worse lately). But in an effort to be a positive, proactive theory-builder rather than a whining, reactive theory-spouter in my own conceptual work, I have banned myself from using the word “hype” for the time being.

So, the notes:

Technology: “tools” [for production] marked by ease-of-use (eg blogger); platforms for networking and distribution (eg flickr)

Creativity: people need compelling motivations to engage in personal media creation (in Twist’s case, flickr led to blogging, and not the other way around)

Community: powerful distribution and connectivity, articulated to personal media creation, may deliver on the promise of online community, where community is understood by Twist as some configuration of: connectivity, relationships, and (I prick up my ears ever so slightly) difference.

Then there’s a whole lot of stuff about the contribution of citizen’s media to Big Media, podcasting, grassroots newsgathering, etc etc, all of which the BBC is leading the television industry in, but isn’t exactly what I’m into.

It disturbs me slightly just how weightless and effortless, how transparent and non-specific, these characterisations of the practice of “consumer” content creation are; I guess I am trying to do a little something about that, in my humble and painfully slow fashion. Tally ho, then.