creativity/machine

Via Tama’s del.icio.us , a new Demos report:

Logging On: Culture, Participation and the Web

In the brief history of the internet, the cultural sector has followed two related paths: on the one hand, the digitisation of content and provision of information and, on the other, interactivity and opportunities for expression. Some have seen these as in binary opposition.

The truth is that they are inexorably merging. But the big question is where do we go next? How can policy intervention best meet with technology to achieve the aim of bringing about a more democratic culture? What will be the role, opportunities and limitations of online culture in a rapidly changing world?

As thinktank publications go, Demos reports are usually very good, so check this out if only to get a sense of where the smarter policy wonks are likely to head in the near future. On a quick skim, the report is clearly largely a reflection on the Culture Online initiative funded by the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport. In that context, it should be of interest to people working in cultural institutions (museums, libraries, festivals) or anyone seeking to develop models of online cultural participation based on what is actually going right now. UK-centric, of course, but that’s precisely what allows for the focus on what cultural institutions, governments and organisations should be doing, rather than merely what consumers are doing and how marketers can best reach them, which is too often the implication of work coming out of US thinktanks (good as it is, even the Pew Internet & American Life project suffers from this a little bit).

Although I haven’t actually had my thesis bound yet, I thought I’d celebrate just a little anyway. So I made a video that I hope does a better job of thanking the people who cheered me up, listened to me whinge, or made me laugh while I was doing my PhD than the ‘official’ acknowledgements ever could.

If you had even the tiniest bit of co-present fun with me at any point in the last three years, chances are you’re in here somewhere. If not, it’s only because I didn’t have a photo of you.

alternative link.

Oh, and the music is for Jules and Jaz (who both quite like Missy Higgins), and also Anne (who hates positive, jangly-guitar folk-inspired pop music like this with a passion). Besides, the song is getting so much mainstream radio airplay right now that the day I submitted my thesis will be forever linked to this moment in the history of popular culture. (or, i just like the jangly guitars).

Via BoingBoing, LOL Presidents:

Via Barry, LOL Theorists:

Here’s one I made earlier:

(Raymond Williams, btw)

And then of course i started making meta-loltheory. Neil Postman sez:

lolcat builder here.

kthxbai

I know I’ve come to it a bit late, but I’ve just spent several minutes watching the Zimmers’ video over and over again, and smiling all the way.

At one level, I like it because it is a much-needed demonstration of one way in which we might think about how to connect “expertise” with “amateur” participation so that it is ethical, non-exploitative and (if you look at the comments) genuinely popular.
Plus, as many of you know, I’m not all that keen on the young folk today–so watching this was even more fun than seeing Paris Hilton get jailtime.

I just got my PhD examiners reports via email after a long day at work. Both of the examiners say that no corrections are required in order for the degree to be awarded (although there are lots of productive comments and suggestions about what I might extend/improve on for publication, pretty much all of which I agree with). The long and the short of it is that once I’ve printed my thesis and bound it and had the research office sign off, I’ll be a Doctor. I am in serious shock.

Refer to the previous post for the appropriate soundtrack to this moment. And without wanting to intrude, I can’t help but note that Trine’s video of David’s PhD submission used the same song as I wrote that post about. Perhaps it was a good omen?

Leave your requests for drug prescriptions in the comments.

I’ve been thinking again about relational aesthetics thanks to Kris Cohen who has been shooting me some of the discussions occurring around it and related matters in art theory, and generally hurting my brain, in a really good way. Being the intellectual dilettante I am, I’m just genuinely interested, but as before, I’m also trying to think through whether there’s any mileage in reworking art or literary theory concepts for popular culture and/or “vernacular creativity”. Not just whether I could do it, but whether I should bother.

Because maybe I’ve just got it back to front. Not for the first time, it’s crossed my mind that maybe cultural studies approaches to the active audience in relation to both television and music already has me where I need to go. I’m really just talking about identifying media that constitutes the relationship between the ‘producer’, the ‘text’, and the ‘audience’ in a particular way - a way that respects the audiences’ intelligence, demonstrates an understanding of the dynamics of engagement as social practice, and constitutes textuality as a vehicle for that engagement, and not the other way round. That is the juice that participatory popular culture runs on, and this beautiful video does just that, with grace, warmth and a sense of humility. It represents audienceing quite literally as the practice of folding music into individual but shared social experience.

And hey, it helps that it’s one of my favourite love songs.

Direct link for RSS readers.

Plus, it’s the best acting performance I’ve ever seen from Daniela Sea.

Meanwhile, I will persist with my book larnin’ about relational aesthetics and art theory.

The day after arriving back in Brisbane from MIT5 I hopped a plane to Adelaide for the CRN masterclass with John Urry on complexity theory and mobilities. As an ‘event’ it wasn’t exactly buzzing with dynamic engagement, but of course it improved once we got to dinner, and it was great to meet John in persona and discuss some of my ideas about complexity and cultural studies. If nothing else it forced me to dive into some of the theory I’m trying to get across for my postdoctoral research on YouTube and media change. Anyway, there was a significant pile of Urry readings we had to do in preparation - Glen has already blogged notes on them here and here while he was preparing for the Sydney masterclass, if anyone’s interested. I just wanted to share a little moment I had while doing these readings on the plane to Adelaide, feeling very much in between places and states of mind.

In Social Networks, Travel and Talk, Urry discusses the way that David Lodge’s novel Small World ‘reveals the complex, multi-layered and richly gossipy nature of conferences’ and especially the special qualities of what Urry calls ‘meetingness’ - where ‘meetingness’ is constituted by virtue of the need to travel to the conference, making it a somewhat extraordinary ‘occasion’.

Lodge describes the conference experience like this:

You journey to new and interesting places, meet new and interesting people, and form new and interesting relationships with them; exchange gossip and confidences…, eat, drink and make merry in their company every evening; and yet…return home with an enhanced seriousness of mind.

That’s always exactly how I feel, unless the conference was crap, but I’d never heard it put quite that well before. Of course, the irony of having this epiphany while being stuck in my seat on the plane with a sore back and a developing cold, burning human and mineral energy (not to mention cash) to engage in co-present talk on the topic of mobilities, co-presence, travel and talk didn’t escape me.

In the ‘questions and comments’ section of the final plenary at MIT5, David Silver made two comments about how the conference might be improved next time. He presented us with two problems:

1. The incongruity of the conference theme and the conference format. That is, should a conference that was investigating collaborative forms of cultural production and questioning the figures of the cultural ‘expert’ and the author be organised around the traditional ’sage on the stage’ model of discourse, or should it become more like the thing it studies?

2. Taking advantage of the free wireless, the ‘audience’ was twittering, blogging and surfing too much during sessions and suffering from continuous partial attention, and maybe we needed to learn how to unplug.

Leaving aside the fact that being ‘plugged in’ and in a state of ‘continuous partial attention’ seems an entirely apt description of any good conference I’ve ever been to…

It seemed quite clear to me that the second ‘problem’ is an emergent and entirely rational response to the first one as well as an instantiation of precisely the kinds of ‘media transformation’ we were all busy discussing, describing and questioning. As far as I could see over people’s shoulders, and certainly in my own case, most of the time the twitterers were using their laptops and the internet to annotate, share, get background on, critique, and fact-check the papers they were listening to - and yes, they were also sometimes ‘playing around’ and socialising.

So as far as I’m concerned, on the one hand conferencing twittering, IM-ing, surfing and blogging is a user-led innovation that *amplifies* what is good about an academic conference - massive downloads of information, the collision of perspectives, and the intensive social engagement. On the other, such behaviour represents a material critique of what is not so great - the parallel sessions, the non-interactivity, and the dominance of particular top-down modes of engagement.

Of course, as with any emergent phenomenon, the ethics and most effective applications of these practices are still being worked out, but where they get worked out is in practice.

Why am I blogging this now instead of marching down to the microphone on the day? Well, I was twitching to say all of that at the time, but had an attack of girlish shyness. Which is funny, given that the next comment was from someone (didn’t catch the name) who thought the conference might have been a bit masculinist and that we needed to think about innovative ways of creating access to voice for those who didn’t necessarily have the bravado to engage in antagonistic modes of discourse.

So what I’ve done here is to take advantage of the opportunity afforded by alternative modes of communication to respond without having to stand at the microphone with my heart beating in terror, as she did.