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‘defining’ vernacular creativity
Time to publicly update my working definition of vernacular creativity – for the record. The paragraph below will go in my thesis – either right up front in the abstract or as part of the introduction. It should be read as what we might call a heuristic definition, boiled down as far as possible in…
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Urchin box
This image (in context on flickr and in a personal blog) is a nice example of time-binding, remediated vernacular creativity – a grandmother’s shell collection repurposed and introduced to new publics through a granddaughter’s daily photographic practice. Heaps more at the department of me, where the dignity of ordinary specificity is everything.
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found and homemade and other things
Around the traps lately: Feeding my growing and almost-totally-phd-related obsession with the seductive mystery of vernacular photography and the curation and exhibition of the found photograph (not always the same thing, but both concepts that have begun to operate as magnets for popular enthusiasm and interest lately): the abandoned photo museum, BigHappyFunHouse (‘found photos. free…
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HobbyPrincess: Draft Craft Manifesto
Make the distinctions between “purchased” and “homemade”, and between material and immaterial artefacts a little muddier, and I clap my hands and jump up and down for the HobbyPrincess’s Draft Craft Manifesto 1. People get satisfaction for being able to create/craft things because they can see themselves in the objects they make. This is not…
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eggs
I am sitting in our digital storytelling masterclass, where Daniel is showing us some of the work of the Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players – this is a bona fide family of three who scavenge boxes of slides from garage sales, make up wacky suburban post-folk punk 3 chord rock songs to go with them, and…
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T-Shirt Stoushing
Have I invented a meme? Will fame and fortune finally be mine? We all know that’s less than likely, but my slightly childish (and little-understood) substitution of a t-shirt design in the place of rational debate about identities and television prompted Mark to appropriate the idea as a new weapon in “blog stoushing”, and it…
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personal media: the view from the Beeb
J.D. Lasica has posted the video of his interview with BBC technology reporter Jo Twist about the personal media revolution. Here are my notes on the interview, trying to pull out the way Twist characterises the relations between technology, creativity, and cultural participation (I am such a broken record, thanks to this damn PhD, oh…
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Give the people a voice…
…and they tend to use it. One Free Minute is “a mobile sculpture designed to allow for instances of anonymous public speech. When you call the cellphone inside One Free Minute, you get connected for exactly a minute to a 200 watt amplifier and speaker. The speech produced by the speaker can be heard clearly…
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home-made historiography
Found this buried in an old draft entry: it comes from Historiographic Axioms of Home Movies by Patricia R. Zimmermann and Karen I. Ishizuka. It’s good stuff: Patricia Zimmerman is the most right-on writer on home movies I’ve encountered so far. “1. Hollywood films are the home movies of global capital. 2. Home movies provide…
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the bubbling up
Richard Powers on the blindness of (1950s) American high culture to American music puts me in mind of De Certeau’s “bubbling up” of creativity: …this country had a music – spectacularly reinventing itself every three years, the bastard of chanted hymns, spirit hollers, cabin songs, field calls and coded escape plans, funeral rowdiness gathered by…