Archive for May, 2006
flickrtags
May 18th
Last (but hopefully not best) sentence of the day:
The ‘most popular tags’ cloud is characterised by the convergence of the most predictable subjects of vernacular photography – places, family, birthdays, weddings – with muted versions of the structurating categories of capital ‘P’ photography – technology (canon, film, black&white) and genre (art, portrait).
Current thesis word count: 25,041
craft, thesis, update
May 16th
I just can’t seem to avoid the craft at the moment.
Current thesis word count: 24,017
The refusal at work in these DIY communities is not only a refusal of the affluent Western individual’s interpelletation as the consumer of inauthentic, technologised and mass-produced artifacts; it is also avowedly a recuperation of everyday domestic labour and productive leisure – knitting, sewing – from their undervalued status in contemporary regimes of cultural value. However, these practices are very often recuperated for hipness via the (sometimes post-feminist) differentiation of ‘indie craft’ from the middlebrow aesthetic of the mainstream ‘craft store’.
word count obsession
May 15th
Current thesis word count: 22545
Which makes it around 3,000 in the last 24 hours. (Although admittedly I did find about 5 pages that I had forgotten to paste in from early chapter drafts).
Inspired by Jane McGonigal via Anne’s online writer’s retreat, here is one of the newly minted sentences:
Texts and their meanings matter less than practices, relationships and contexts.
I’m quite pleased, considering the word count occasionally goes in completely the wrong direction when I’m writing. Also, I think that is the shortest sentence I have ever written.
‘more than a mere assemblage of moviemaking information’
May 15th
Thank you Glen for sending me this little treasure which I found in my in-tray this morning – for that you are a prince among men.
I’ve also uploaded the first two pages of one of the many fabulous example storyboards that the book includes in glossy colour. It’s called ‘Laura’s Seventh Birthday’, and it’s all about making the cake with Mother, playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and having girlish chit-chat. In a very pretty frock.
Going beyond the frocks – Kodak teaches us that in home movies the ‘in-between’ quotidian spaces and practices of everyday life are interesting and camera-worthy. But at the same time, the aesthetics of home movies are to be distinguished from professional movie-and television production; and the home-movie maker is not to aspire to those.
There’s a lot here I can use in my ‘history’ chapter on amateur creativity, new technology and the construction/teaching of new media literacy.
Current thesis word count: 20,724
folk/art/vernacular border dispute
May 14th
From Tom Lubbock’s review of last year’s exhibition Folk Archive: Contemporary Popular Art from the UK, which discusses the politics of determining which forms of folk culture get to be art (among other things), and actually uses the term ‘vernacular creativity’, this is a great list:
I write about things that appear in art galleries, and other bona fide art contexts. I do not write about crop circles. I do not write about the kind of sculptures that people make from junk and put in their front gardens. I do not write about painted eggs, decorated cakes, floral arrangements, sandcastles, snowmen, guys, scarecrows, fairground signs, trade-union banners, demonstrators’ placards, houses covered in Christmas decorations, shop displays, roadside memorials to car victims, carnival floats, community murals, drawings on the backs of dirty vans, graffiti, tattoos, ornamented crash helmets, home-made shrines to Elvis and Di, topiary, bottle-top mosaics, or lost-cat notices pinned to trees. I do not write about these things, however well they are done. But now, for one week only, I will.
[update 15/05]
In photography, see also Kodak and the Rise of Amateur Photography:
In 1998, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized the exhibition Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life, 1888 to the Present, and in 2000 the Metropolitan Museum presented Other Pictures: Anonymous Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection. Both exhibitions featured a myriad of photographs that, through some technical error—a tilted horizon, an amputated head, a looming shadow, or inadvertent double-exposure—achieved a strange and unexpected visual charm. Removed from their original context in the family album, these anonymous vernacular photographs take on new meanings, inviting interpretation as a uniquely modern form of folk art.
‘defining’ vernacular creativity
May 10th
Time to publicly update my working definition of vernacular creativity – for the record. The paragraph below will go in my thesis – either right up front in the abstract or as part of the introduction. It should be read as what we might call a heuristic definition, boiled down as far as possible in order to orient the reader. It isn’t a normative definition (an exercise in drawing boundaries); the ‘real’ vernacular creativity chapter is more like an etymological map, if that makes sense. [a very early sketch of that map is here]
By vernacular creativity I mean a wide range of everyday creative practices (from scrapbooking to family photography to the storytelling that forms part of casual chat). The term ‘vernacular’ – as with language, where it means colloquial – signifies the ways in which everyday creativity is practiced outside the cultural value systems of either high culture (art) or commercial creative practice (television, say). Further, and again as with language, ‘vernacular’ signifies the local specificity of such creative practices, and the need to pay attention to the material, cultural, and geographic contexts in which they occur. Finally, I emphasise the need to remember that vernacular creativity predates any particular innovation in technologies by centuries, and that at the same time its forms and social functions are transformed by cultural and technological shifts.
[live thesis update in response to comments below]
The various ‘others’ of ‘ordinary’ vernacular creativity discussed above – punk-influenced DIY culture, creative activism, fandom, and game cultures – are in different ways very attractive to cultural studies (either for their spectacularly creative uses of mass popular culture, or for their apparent demonstration of an evidential base for spectacular ‘resistance’). This dissertation certainly keeps those fields of vernacular creativity in the frame, recognising the ways in which they are positioned as the seductive leading edge of a potential paradigm shift in the media ecology. However, because it aims to understand whether new media allows the populace ‘at large’ to participate more meaningfully in public culture through vernacular creativity, the study deals most centrally with the most apparently accessible, mainstream and ordinary forms, practices and technologies of ‘consumer-created’ new media.
thankyou, spam karma
May 5th
My life since the last wordpress upgrade, which was only about 6 weeks ago i think:
# Total Spam Caught: 9212 (average karma: -969.9)
# Total Comments Approved: 77 (average karma: 15.18)
# Total Comments Moderated: 130
My life before the upgrade was pretty much like:
#Total Spam Caught: 0 (nothing to catch them with that worked with our php installation, or that I could make work)
# Total Comments Approved: 77 (after moderation, see below)
# Total Comments Moderated By Hand and With the Aid of Every Swear Word in English and Some Other Languages as Well: 9212
Happy now.
the gendered act of reading
May 5th
There is much to enjoy at Kristine Steenbergh’s blog Earmarks in Early Modern Culture, but today I especially noticed the gender of reading (lots of great images, too). It draws out in longhand what Jeanette Winterson sketches in breathtaking shorthand for Marylin, reading Ulysses in the sun. But I wonder how this other image of Marilyn reading (the same book?) works – are we still spying on a “moment of mind”? Or is it just the frisson of “brains + boobs” – Marilyn is so immersed that she is unaware of the camera, allowing the voyeur access to her cleavage?
post-humanism and the phonograph
May 4th
I won’t even bother to pretend to rehearse the endless determinism vs. agency debate problem, but here is Nicholas Gane on Kittler on technology:
Gane, Nicholas. Radical Post-humanism:
Friedrich Kittler and the Primacy of Technology, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 22, No. 3, 25-41 (2005)(citations removed for the sake of nice clean copy)
Kittler observes that around 1800 a general shift took place from the closed world
of the ‘Republic of Scholars’, ‘a system in which knowledge was defined in terms of authority and erudition’ and ‘in which patterns of communication followed the lines of social stratification’, to a more open system of reading and writing based on the practice of alphabetization, which involves the translation of visible into audible language, or the oralization of culture. In the midst of this shift, the book emerged as a universal medium, one that, for a short time, remained closed to competition from rival media. Kittler explains: ‘Aside from mechanical automatons and toys, there was nothing. The discourse network of 1800 functioned without phonographs, gramophones, or cinematographs. Only books could provide serial storage of data’. This situation soon changed, however, and by 1900 the book’s position as the chief storage medium was placed under threat by ‘new’ technologies such as the gramophone, phonograph and film.
monthly MACS tomorrow
May 4th
Monthly MACS is a cross-institutional network of early career researchers, postgraduate students, postdocs, RAs and sessional staff working in Media and Cultural Studies across Brisbane. We meet regularly during semester to discuss issues which relate to these roles, debate wider trends in the field and have a few drinks afterwards. You can read more about past MACS events here: http://cccs.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=22640&pid=21774
The next MACS meet will be held tomorrow, Friday May 5 in the seminar room of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, UQ.Professor Stuart Cunningham (QUT) and Professor Graeme Turner (UQ) will lead a discussion on “collaboration” – how to do it, who to do it with, and why.
Collaborating with peers, colleagues and mentors can be a great way to establish a research profile at the beginning of your career as well as sharing expertise, resources and labour. At a time when the pressure to publish is real, and imaginative cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional links are encouraged, what skills are needed and what challenges are worth knowing about in the process of carrying out joint research? Experienced researchers in media and cultural studies will discuss these issues and we invite other academics, postdocs, postgrads and sessional staff to come along to share tips from their own past, current and future adventures in collaboration.
When: 2.00- 3.45pm, Friday 5th May
Where: CCCS Seminar Room, Level 4, Forgan Smith Tower, St Lucia Campus, University of Queensland, followed by drinks at the UQ staff club.