creativity/machine

On Friday I’m going to be at the Australian Blogging Conference, which is being held here at the Creative Industries Precinct, QUT Kelvin Grove. A bit of the blurb:

The growth of the Australian blogging community has mirrored the expansion of the blogosphere elsewhere in the developed world. However, there have been only a few opportunities afforded to Australian bloggers to get together and discuss their common interest. This unconference, modelled on the successful BloggerCons in the United States, aims to redress this by providing a forum that will allow Australian bloggers to gather together and talk about blogging and the Australian blogosphere. It aims to be a user-focused conference for the Australian blogging community.

This will not be a conference in the traditional sense. It will be relatively informal. Instead of lengthy presentations, people will be invited lead discussions on various topics throughout the day – some practical, such as how to build a better blog, and some theoretical on the role, influence and future of blogs.

Melissa Gregg, Axel Bruns and I are leading the 10.30 am session ‘Researching Blogging and Blogging Research’. These are some of the questions we hope will provoke some really interesting and dynamic discussion:

* What’s there to research about blogging?
* What research methodologies can be used to research blogging?
* How do blogs support the research process?
* How do blogs contribute to disseminating research?

Looking forward to seeing some of you there, and for those who can’t attend I’m sure there will be video and/or blog entries galore on most of the sessions.

And the day before that, I’m graduating. Looking forward to finally wearing that floppy hat.

The community of quasi-celebrity YouTube vloggers comes to life in this rip-off of the Beatles:

Cute.

On the bus this morning, thanks to the magic of the iPod’s otherwise suspiciously un-random seeming shuffle mode: The Clouds’ song ‘Pocket’, from their 1991 album Penny Century.

This is what it sounds like, and these are the lyrics:

Spending all my long days
Searching for a job to do
Any two-bit job that pays
So I can take good care of you

I’ve got love in my pocket
But I’ve got no money
So much love here in my pocket
All I need’s the dough

What could I be doing wrong?
I’m a fighter through and through
Now I’m singing a loser’s song
Don’t want to lose you, too

I’ve got love in my pocket
But I’ve got no money
So much love here in my pocket
All I need’s the dough

Anyway, as I said on Twitter just now, I really cannot think of a song that better captures what it was like to be a newly graduated Generation X 20-something in Australia the early 1990s, in the depths of the recession we had to have. Especially for people who had graduated with some really useful degree like one in music, or media, or any other arts-related discipline. I know it’s not only me who lived through those long, frustrating days and months dominated by the feeling that ‘Pocket’ conveys; something not quite like angst, and really not ironic. Something like a melancholy desire for the imagined possibility of some kind of beautiful, bohemian life, despite the reality of comparative poverty and a sense that actually it was somehow all our own fault that the successful-yet-nonconformist futures promised by 80s success narratives had evaporated. Tom Cruise, j’accuse!

And I remembered that back in 2003 Ben posted a lovely blog entry in homage to The Clouds, where he characterized their music, particularly the voice of Jodi Phyllis in this song, as a “melancholy indie longing, a long white sigh”.

Back on the bus this morning, the song came on just at the moment when I was daydreaming, partly in response to something Mel said, about past, present and future aspirations and disappointments, and thinking about how it has been my experience that surprisingly decent futures can somehow emerge accretively from the apparently frustrating and pointless minutiae of the endless ‘now’ of the present. That is, all the good things in my life have been just as much a result of bad planning and muddling through as the crap things have. I think that’s what I was thinking. I said it was daydreaming.

As Ben says, the moment that Penny Century represents does seem “so long ago” now.

It feels as though my first blog entry after a long and mysterious absence should be witty, engaging, or revelatory in some way, making my rudely unexplained absence all worthwhile, and giving the impression that my author function is emerging butterfly-like from a cocoon of silence. Sadly, this is not that blog entry, but who knows what future insomniac moments might hold.

In the meantime, I’d like to draw your attention to an interview I did with Georgina Born way back last year, which has now been published as part of M/C’s new initiative M/C Dialogue.

The following dialogue is based on an interview conducted as part of Professor Born’s visit to Brisbane in 2006. In the first of three public seminars she gave at the University of Queensland (UQ) and Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Born argued that post-Habermasian theories of the public sphere and communicative action provide a means to rethink public service communications in conditions of pluralism and inequality, and discussed a range of current BBC initiatives in light of this normative model. In the second lecture, Born outlined the history of the BBC and discussed how the BBC will fare in the future, given the challenges thrown up by its commercial competitors and political antagonists, and the rising stakes for Britain’s pluralist democracy in an era of continuing media expansion. In her third lecture, ‘Musical mediation: ontology, technology and creativity’, Professor Born developed a theoretical analysis of music and mediation, comparing the concept of ‘the work’ across eras and genres - especially jazz and improvised electronic musics—and developing the three concepts of social, distributed and relayed creativity. While in Australia, Professor Born also taught a travelling masterclass on the uses of ethnography in cultural research for postgraduate and early career researchers, sponsored by the ARC Cultural Research Network.

The following dialogue provides a counterpoint to these events and to Born’s work as a whole, drawing together and extending key themes in the cultural politics of both public service broadcasting and new media technologies. It begins by discussing the possibilities of public sphere theory to provide useful models of institutional design. The discussion moves from there to SBS Television – an example of Public Service Broadcasting that provides an interesting contrast to the BBC, especially by virtue of SBS’s relationship with the politics of multiculturalism in Australia. The second half of the interview draws out the issues around cultural value, cultural power and the politics of technology in relation to new media, and concludes by focussing especially on the problems and potentialities of ‘user-generated content’.

I’m quite pleased with how it came out in the end, and I realised last week while writing something on Public Service Broadcasting how much I got out of Georgina’s visit here - I’m sure everyone who attended her masterclass on cultural research remembers it as a really productive experience, as I do.