damien

“We tend to see the difference between documentary and fiction as an opposition (one is the negation of the other), but as you can see, the difference between the two is not as clear cut… All documentaries contain some kind of narrative organisation and structure, and certain genres of documentary also efface and disavow the signs of their material production (for example, observational documentaries). This leaves the community of discourse, that is, the audience and the expectations they bring to the film - which suggests that the difference between fiction and documentary is not something in the film, but something in the people watching it…”

from the qu_wiki DocuMentary
http://media.rmit.edu.au/teaching/mmp/
(continuing)
and so:

“The role of the documentary has grown noticeably in the last decades. it has spread in all directions, penetrating even the protected areas of fiction. The borders have become flexible, often blurred. Story has gotten mixed in with direct unprepared recording on the one hand, and, on the other, fictional and directed episodes have slipped into documentaries. As alwayus, this cross-grafting has produced surprising results, with an added interest arising from the undefinability of the new genre. While documentary has the impact of life’s cunning, the soprt of inventiveness “chess-dramaturgy” has long lost, fiction could still offer an organizing coherence and well-defined viewpoint. Both the raw material and the framework–a kind of reduced fiction–openly acknolweded a sober distance inherent in approaching a subject. Ambition took the road of intensification; advances were sought and made not in the imagination but in the very depths of our direct environment. it is understandable that in this strategy each fact appeared to be of equal value, adding up to a new continent to be conquered.” (Biro 1982, page 91)

Hmm … implementing a bit of Joyce/Dirk Gently here and opening(small-ly) into a kind of stream-of-consciousness blog…

The shared thread in our team: visual-spatial thinkers/sentient beings.
I admire R’s controlled effusive prose, and the clarity of K’s physics and animation.. collectively they loosen my ridiculous sense of catholic didactic…

lets consider the Wind Up Bird Chronicle because I really feel Murakami is the writer
of our times
makes magic realism real

draw a connection : potential implementation of soft video as an element of game how/why this may provide a more open multi-linear structure at Mentor-level of game…

RATIONALE FOR USING NED
Collaborative IA Game Project
This game aims to blur reality and fiction, history and imagination.
Well for starters myth and legend are the mainstay of storytelling. This fundamental human Maslowian hierarchical need for communicating and documenting our existence has …led us to the mess we’re in today…
And love him or hate him, poor old Ned is about as iconic a figure as white Australian history has thrown up(sic). So we’re using him as a hook to catch your attention. So Ned is the brand we are trading on.
exploitation? no doubt.
2. The mask. Works as a metaphor for journalism per se- ie what is true, what is fabrication, and how dependant is this on the quality of the sources of information.

3. The legend that surrounds Kelly is divided into two bodies of opinion: the British historical interpretation that Kelly was a common thief and murderer, and the Anglo Celtic interpretation as Kelly as working class hero of the repressed Irish descent immigrants.
this generates a departure/starting point for the game. Ned is iconic, well-known and easily paraphrased for those who don’t know him by those who do.
Immediately topical.
So at the Entry Level… an initial research project to find primary, secondary and tertiary sources on Ned and his exploits and form an opinion.

4. Publish your Opinion. so if you could transcend time, should Ned swing or walk?

feedback on our concepta to…
NedKows blog
http://nedknows.blogsome.com/
or on the wiki

a video clip to be inserted here… cant upload to the server for some reason- will have final attempt today but may have to swap this as a blog submission for

http://damienpierce.blogsome.com/2005/03/17/djembere-kids-1988/

Every now and then web research strikes gold. My discovery of the networked performance blog at turbulance.org blog is one such happy occasion. The site covers the diaspora of every concievable new media theory, experiment and event.

My interest on mobtech is primarily concerned with how it will fundamentally change the way we communicate, rather than an interest in mobile phones per se. In fact I see mobile technologies as they have existed up to this point as being fairly irrelevant. My opinion is changing, however, because of the affordance for new media that mobtech provides.
Take a look at the Mobile Culture Scratching project. What a great concept!
Theie aim was to create a mobile portrait of the city through video and audio sampling of real time events…

Michelle Riel is one of the key bloggers at www.turbulence.org

An excellent directory to mobile art and locative media
( ie mobile art through locative/ mobile/ pervasive/ wearable/ wireless devices)

It is not about digital video, but about what might change if we think
of a video practice that is primarily for networked computational
environments, where for example things like frame rate are meaningless.

Adrian Miles

The following is from my favorite primate blogger, Vangorilla and though I don’t know who or what he (can I assume its a he?) does, I find the mindset a bit disturbing given the current invasions-of-privacy telemarketers embrace…

http://theponderingprimate.blogspot.com/2005/04/wireless-web-analytics.html
see Comments at the bottom of the blog

WaldenAt 6:50 AM, Anonymous said…
I do believe that Google will become one of the most richly valued companies in the world if they carefully mine the data they collect from their mobile searches. With this information, Google will have their fingers in everything connected to the Internet - every industry.

I can’t imagine any brand name that wouldn’t want to know the demographics of their customers - that wouldn’t want to build a longterm, ongoing dialogue.

I believe Google is, as you say, positioning themselves for a Internet out side of the box, a world where a PC and the OS isn’t necessary to gather and search for information.

Your commentary, as always, is thought provoking.

Vangorilla…

http://theponderingprimate.blogspot.com/2005/04/camera-phone-gets-major-upgrade.html
The above blog focuses on emerging mobile technologies (mobtech) by Vangorilla (only the author’s blog name I hope). The author cites Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs- The Next Social Revolution. book as his source of inspiration, and paraphrases Rheingold’s notion of Mobtech as Phase 2 of the internet. The blog currently has interesting posts on
• Carl Zeiss lenses for mobile phones
• the emergence as search engines as the most prominent current key advertising real estate.
Both issues present interesting departure points for my current research. Of equal interest is that the author has no apparent affiliation with a media program, likes to do triathalons and may have some primate attributes…but I digress.

Carl Zeiss is a heavyweight brand in photography and is recognised as a leader in the field of optics by photographers worldwide. In recent years Sony has traded on this brand in its range of one chip and three chip consumer/prosumer cameras and now with its HD prosumer camera the HDR-FX1 HDVcamera.
As an imaging professional it is difficult to dispute the importance of high quality lenses. Great lenses provide advantage through
• high-quality glass elements that increase sharpness throughout the full aperture range, and decrease flaws such as aberrations, coma and astigmatism
• elements made of fluorite glass that eliminate diffraction making for sharper, colour-accurate images
The low f-number prime lenses made by Zeiss are acknowleded as the best. And carry the price tag to match. So when they are to mass produce the tiny optical elements to be used in mobile phones, it is reasonable to expect some filter down technology. I don’t expect these lenses to match up to a four thousand dollar prime lens, but I do expect them to far surpass any existing mobtech currently available.
The convergence of Zeiss with mobtech is significant because of the affordance it provides consumers in capturing high quality images and video. It will allow imaging to become a P2P reality: the quality of the images most people can shoot on digital cameras is of a high enough standard that they feel quite comforable distributing them by email. With these values soon to become available in mobile technology it is reasonable to expect a dramatic increase in the distribution of images because the capture device is the distribution device. Immediacy is a driver of change.

That the practice of softvideo raises significant and productive questions
for traditional cinematic practice and theory ought to be obvious.
One major question revolves around the way in which softvideo problematises
montage as a fundamental mode of time based discourse, for
each of the works discussed shifts the location, role and function of montage
away from the preselection and serial ordering of an eventually fixed
sequence towards other possibilities. Montage as a principal of selection
and organisation can now reside somewhere between the shooting or gathering
of material, a dynamic combinatory system of construction (more or
less automated), and a user who (more or less) knowingly controls and
determines the particular montage event and sequence.
The use of multiple windows further complicates this as the relation of
window to window offers a complex collage practice, whether this be via
a multiwindowed work or, in the case of the vogs, that the works appear in
an always and already multiwindowed environment (the PC screen) so
that a simultaneous visual relationship to other windows is always present.
When time is added to this, so we recognise that the collage that is the
computer screen also varies in time (this window now opens over that
window) then we have a combination of collage and montage that does
appear to be one of the major formal properties of such digital environments
(Landow 1999; Manovich 2001).

Miles, A. (2003). Softvideography, Cybertext Yearbook 2002-2003. Edited by Markku Eselinen and Raine Koskimaa. Vol 77, Research Centre ofr Contemporary Culture
the complete article is available from
http://lists.myspinach.org/pipermail/fibreculture/2004-April/003731.html

The Adrian Miles’ presentation on softvideo and vogging on May 5 provided a prescient counterview to my reading’s of Manovich’s theory. Which is to say I’ve never met Lev and can only approximate his theory from a series of his projects, articles and books, read out of sequence in terms of their creation dates… and I assume his theory is dynamic and evolving.
I’ve always considered that a first hand account where the participants are able to engage in Q&A with the presenter always renders concrete results as opposed to the comparitively slow deconstruction of ideas facilitated by reading the linear narrative of a book/documentary/movie. This is not to discount the validity our history of linearity, but is to reinforce the validity and value-adding of well- constructed lectures that seek to engage in the multi linear. It’s why I like Tarkovski.

My point here is that Miles lecture, driven by a variety of visual presentations of the key ideas presents as a wheel within a wheel: it closely mirrors the theory being discussed; softvideo is a collage of content, a collage of contributors leading to multiple outcomes/interpretations.

What is most valid is that the theory and its dissemination appear to be striving for a shared attribute; to create an open forum for investigation and thought in real time.

of interest…
Miles, A. (2003). Softvideography, Cybertext Yearbook 2002-2003. Edited by Markku Eselinen and Raine Koskimaa. Vol 77, Research Centre ofr Contemporary Culture
This article considers the hypertext of multilinear narrative with respect to interactive video, and presents a model for softvideo. It relates to desktop cinema practice but the relevance to this paper is that the implications are equally pertinent to perceived opportunities in mobile telephony.

Manovich, Lev (2003) Soft cinema: concepts extended version. Softcinema: http://www.softcinema.net/form.htm.
This site presents Manovich’s concepts of Soft Cinema and introduces the concepts of database narrative and macro cinema.

http://www.manovich.net/cinema_future/toc_old.htm

http://www.manovich.net/LNM/Q&A_Manovich.html
a self interview by LM

Earlier this month I worked as Video Split Operator on a 4 day television commercial(TVC) shoot: a Medibank Private ad with high production values and an action adventure script. No dialogue/talking head. Given the size of the crew and the cost of the content I’m estimating that this thirty second ad, with a probable shelf-life of 2-3 months, cost four to five hundred thousand dollars. Which is more than that of many an independant feature. Still, the budget pales against Singleton Ogilvy and Mather’s 10 million dollar Qantas ad, which drips with jingoistic patriotism and has hardly been aired. From a content perspective, TVC advertising is the great imitator: it borrows shot concepts from cinema, takes .. appropriates…
On this shoot examples are the helicopter tracking shot(Apocalypse Now), and extensive use of staight or curved track, car, track and even a grip-rigged monobike track. The camera kept moving except for the occasional fixed longshot, in which the focus puller tracked a precision driving stunt.

TVC’s also feed a great deal of Australia’s feature film production talent, allowing to keep their eye in, skills up between major projects.

She stared absently into the yard. The first hint of the impending winter gathered around the leaves that formed into swirls with each gust of wind. Outside life was closing down. Listen to my heartbeat her inner voice instructed.

a useful resource:

http://www.dvdmadeeasy.com/glossary/g.html