Together with three brilliant people, Mel Gregg, Jane Simon and Kris Cohen, I’m putting together a panel proposal for this year’s Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Conference, Everyday Transformations. We are tossing around ideas about amateurism, the banal and mundane, and problematising the default hipness of new media and digital technologies. Here are some of my latest thoughts on what I might contribute to this (copied and pasted from our email discussions).
“I’m also really interested in the “hipness” problem, i.e. the way that hipness is currently being rearticulated to highly self-aware (sometimes camp) lofi, daggy, DIY, *and* “experimental”/avant-garde aesthetics and practices – this is something I’ve explored in relation to music subcultures, and has become an unavoidable issue when looking at amateur digital production (who do I include in that? Indymedia? The lomographers? Web designers turned photobloggers? People who make hip hop beats using a Sony playstation?). But the *reason* I’m interested in this is that I’m trying to find a way to talk about digital amateurism in terms of cultural democracy and public communication. Deep down I reckon that one of the best ways to enable this is through more bottom-up cultural production: i.e. when “ordinary” people (i.e. not just hip people, young people, gamers and fans) make culture, pay attention to each other, and form learning/interest communities. When and how and whether any of this happens or happens in a meaningful way is what I need to find out.
So what I want to do for this panel is look at one of my major case studies, Digital Storytelling, ala BBC Capture Wales, which [probably] isn’t hip (too institutional, too conservative aesthetically, too sentimental). I’m looking at it not as a cultural form but as a cultural field, encompassing its conditions of production (technologies, tools, education i.e. the training workshops), its textual forms, and its distribution and reception”
Which has since developed into a brilliant discussion on coolness, hipness, dagginess, and tracksuits. Excellent.
2 responses to “Digital Storytelling and the aesthetics of the deeply uncool”
What is “meaningful” to the chef, the MFA-ed painter hip to the latest gallery trends, the weekend gardener, the accordian player in a garage punk-polka band, the accidental filmmaker who gets his best results from unintentionally dropping the camera into a flushing toilet, the beer can cozy knitter, the old woman who glues bottlecaps to her airstream trailer …
… what’s “meaningful” to these individuals might not always be what is “meaningful” to the critics, the theorists and the arbiters of culture. And what’s meaningful to the critics and theorists … is that particularly meaningful to the general public?
Who gets to choose what is meaningful? Why is your determination of cultural value, your classification and segmentation of cultural production … why is that meaningful?
Well, yeah. Thanks for your comment – that’s pretty much exactly what I’m asking, too. The only segmentation that I can’t help but notice is the segmentation created economically (between corporate and autonomous producers) or ideologically (between “art” and “amateur” production, a segmentation with which I particularly take issue).
BTW When I say “meaningful” I don’t mean “valuable” or “artistically worthy”; I mean meaningful to the producers themselves, and meaningful in terms of creating sustainable bottom-up production, consumption, distribution and evaluation networks.