-
some new developments in web video
Caught in my tech news net over the last week: Via Boing Boing, another new ‘meta’ service launches into public beta: Dabble, a site that makes it possible to search, recommend, rate, discuss and be sociable about video hosted anywhere on the the net, has come out of private beta and launched for public use. […]
-
vernacular literacy
I don’t want ‘vernacular’ to become another ubiquitous adjective that I just stick in front of every ‘traditional’ cultural category, just like ‘e’ went in front of every Foucauldian discourse/institution 10 years ago (e-education, e-medicine, e-government). Especially considering that I’ve only recently added Nava’s ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism‘ to the pile of readings for my thesis on […]
-
In my letterbox today
This is the second time I’ve seen this ad, the first time was on a traffic light pole near my house. I have always been intrigued by the stories behind the ads and notices people put up in public places. I remember one at UQ that was scrawled in big felt pen lettering and said […]
-
Web 2.0 crowdsourcers tossing coins to the crowds
Via CNet via Rachel’s del.icio.us:
Saturday saw the launch of eefoof.com, a site that promises to share a percentage of the site’s revenue depending on how many viewers a video clip attracts.
CNet positions this as a ‘challenge’ to youtube. Read the full article for the rest of the hot air and vapours. Now, because I am very old, I remember the late-1990s, before any talk of Web 2.0, when user-contributed music websites like mp3.com were ‘the future of the music industry’, because they would allow undiscovered talent to bypass the gatekeeping mechanisms of the record industry. (Bearing in mind that conventional wisdom also suggested that these sites were really a workaround – a way for the companies concerned to stake out marketshare for digital music sevices without having to wait until the copyright mess was cleared up). -
CSAA Abstract
Following the more timely examples of the two Mels (here is one, and here is the other) I (somewhat belatedly) have just submitted an abstract for this year’s CSAA conference, which will be held in sunny Canberra. I had the idea months ago but couldn’t wrangle it into a pithy enough form until now, plus […]
-
seductive mistake-ography
I’ve just uploaded some of the images from my very first rolls of medium format film, which I butchered in a Holga ‘toy’ camera and a Lubitel (a bit less of a toy, but still plastic). I shot off the first few rolls pretty much just as I wandered around the house. I love the […]
-
grappling with cultural citizenship
I have hit the books again, and I’m alternately working out ideas and culling stuff from my draft, so no more word counts for a while. When they do return they’ll just show how many words I’ve written that day, too, no more of this mythical ‘total’ word count business. Like much of my writing, […]
-
Vernacular photography
Geoffrey Batchen defines vernacular photography like this: The term ‘vernacular’ literally means the ordinary and ubiquitous but it also refers to qualities specific to particular regions or cultures. Its attachment to the word ‘photography’ allows historians like myself to argue for the need to devise a way of representing photography’s history that can incorporate all […]
-
no cinematic equivalent to autobiography?
In this videoblog remix, I think Trine begs to differ. Lovely stuff. I’ve been thinking as well that perhaps ‘the everyday’ is the currency of videoblogging in a way that is more muted for (personal) text-based blogging. Not that everydayness is more or less present, but that it is more important in creating whatever affective […]
-
folk/art/vernacular border dispute
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, […]