creativity/machine

I’ve just caught up with the 2006 Australian Snapshots exhibition:

The Australian Snapshots initiative began in August 2004, when 150 disposable cameras were sent to Local Radio listeners across regional Australia with a request to photograph sports, leisure and daily activities that connected their communities.

The rationale behind using disposable cameras was to create an equal playing field for all - no-one could crop, filter or manipulate their photos to achieve more dramatic results. I

There’s a weird politics of Australianness that reflects the idea that regional and rural Australia are the locus of genteel, folksy creativity (as opposed to the rawness or digital sophistication of urban Australia) but I like the imposition of technological constraints by using disposable film cameras a _lot_. And I love this year’s theme of course:

We’re hoping to once again capture the essence of life in Australia - this time through the variety of creative endeavours undertaken in regional Australia.

This could vary from hobbies and leisure activities like art, theatre groups, craft, cooking etc, to unique work environments - gardens, nurseries, teaching, fund raising etc. How you interpret the theme is up to you

If you get the chance, use your photos to tell us a story of your chosen creative pursuit.

And of course, there are quilts. Woo!

M/C Journal
Call for Papers: ‘mobile’
Edited by Larissa Hjorth & Olivia Khoo

Convergence has become part of burgeoning mobile media. The mobile phone
has come of age. As an integral component of visual media cultures, camera
phone practices are arguably both extending and creating emerging ways of
seeing and representing. In media footage of late, camera phones have been
heralded as providing everyday users with the possibility of self-
expression and voice in the once unidirectional model of mass media. In
addition, the “exchange” and gift-giving economy underpinning mobile phone
practices (Taylor and Harper 2003) is further enunciated by the camera
phone’s ability to “share” moments between intimates (and strangers)
through various contextual frameworks and archives from MMS, blogs, virtual
community sites to actual face-to-face digital storytelling.

This is particularly the case in the Asia-Pacific region, where mobile
practices in locations such as Tokyo and Seoul have brought about new forms
of media use; for example, mobile phones are increasing being deployed to
connect to, among other things, Web 2.0’s burgeoning landscape of social
software. In much of the rhetoric of current media criticism, users are
being interpellated as prosumers (producers plus consumers), but what is
the reality behind this so-called agency? Do users really feel empowered by
the structures of immediacy connected to user-generated content (UGC)? Are
they ‘liberated’ by the multi-media functions of the mobile phone or is the
increasing convergence of mobile media causing more complications than
pleasures?

This issue of M/C Journal seeks papers exploring the role of convergent
mobile technologies in the Asia-Pacific region. The issue aims to explore
the socio-cultural particularities of various adaptations of mobile media,
from case studies on mobile communication in the Asia Pacific, to cross-
cultural analyses of the transborder flows of mobile media production,
representation and consumption. Topics may include:

- Convergent mobile technologies
- The use of mobile technologies in the construction, regulation and upkeep
of social software and virtual communities
- Pervasive mobile gaming
- Mobile communication case studies in the region
- The role of co-presence and maintenance of intimacy and community through
mobile communication
- The “future” of mobile media
- Creativity and mobile media; the aesthetics of mobile media
- Critiques of prosumer rhetoric in mass media
- Emerging forms of techno-nationalism and governmental policies around
‘mobility’ and digital convergent cultures
- The changing role of temporality and spatiality in contemporary case
studies of mobile telephony

Submit your essays of 3000 words in length to the editors at
mobile@journal.media-culture.org.au

Article deadline: 17 January 2007
Issue release date: 14 March 2007

PS, yes I am still alive, but as my supervisor says, I am ‘great with thesis’ so no time for whimsical blog entries just now. Expect a Big Announcement in the next few weeks.

what a cool idea:

This is a project about the 8mm film format. But 8mm is dead, you say? On the contrary! Not only is the format alive with innovation by filmmakers around the world, but hours and hours of Super 8 and regular 8mm film exist in attics and basements the world over—as home movies, educational films, works of art—that is slowly fading from the historical record.

We’re here to preserve that record before these films are lost, and to make those films available for viewing by the public and for use by artists seeking new, compelling footage. Lost in Light is a project devoted to preserving, showcasing, and celebrating films created on the small-gauge 8mm film format.

To that end, we provide free Super 8 and 8mm to video transfers to anyone who asks, in exchange for posting their video to the Lost in Light site and on the Internet Archive with their choice of Creative Commons licenses. In addition, Lost in Light includes articles and features by members of the filmmaking and film preservation communities, video tutorials for making 8mm films, as well as creative work, all with the goal of preserving and championing this important film format.

check out the project’s proposal video at Have Money Will Vlog

via copy culture

Via the AoIR list this morning, I heard that Clifford Geertz has died of heart surgery complications at the age of 80.

I’ll never forget the epiphanic moment I had when I was introduced to ‘thick description’ as an undergraduate via Geertz’s essay Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight, which opens like this:

Early in April of 1958, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village we intended, as anthropologists, to study. A small place, about five hundred people, and relatively remote, it was its own world. We were intruders, professional ones, and the villagers dealt with us as Balinese seem always to deal with people not part of their life who yet press themselves upon them: as though we were not there.

‘Malarial and diffident’ - I always thought it was just brilliant to drop that in there.

But then you get stuff like this:

This crosswise doubleness of an event which, taken as a fact of nature, is rage untrammeled and, taken as a fact of culture, is form perfected, defines the cockfight as a sociological entity. A cockfight is what, searching for a name for something not vertebrate enough to be called a group and not structureless enough to be called a crowd, Erving Goffman has called a “focused gathering”-a set of persons engrossed in a common flow of activity and relating to one another in terms of that flow. Such gatherings meet and disperse; the participants in them fluctuate; the activity that focuses them is discreet-a particulate process that reoccurs rather than a continuous one that endures. They take their form from the situation that evokes them, the floor on which they are placed, as Goffman puts it; but it is a form, and an articulate one, nonetheless. For the situation, the floor is itself created, in jury deliberations, surgical operations, block meetings, sitins, cockfights, by the cultural preoccupations-here, as we shall see, the celebration of status rivalry-which not only specify the focus but, assembling actors and arranging scenery, bring it actually into being.

Brilliant. Reading it again, I realise how influenced I’ve been by Geertz, especially in the very long sentence department, which maybe isn’t such a great thing given the contemporary aesthetics of academic writing–we seem to have banished parenthesis of all kinds: commas; complex clauses chained together, like so; brackets, and dashes.

More on remembering Geertz all over the place, but see especially space and culture, which links to a good post with lots of links at savage minds.