Finishing the essay and thinking about interface design

http://mariacamilleri.com/moira/

I haven't really been updating my blog so often because basically I have been immersed in the essay. I am find it so difficult to stick to 3,000 words. So many details are being left out- although perhaps this is my fault for finding a wide subject to write about. Nonetheless, I still think I have a good argument and I still think there are plenty of things I can afford to remove.

In the meantime, my developer is finding ways of how to display multiple videos at one go. A couple of things we're discussing:

• I want this to be online so loading too many videos will be slow, therefore I have to restrict the number.
• For the show, for bigger impact I will host the website on my laptop and load a greater number of videos.
• If I display this on a touch screen, the area where the user will drag to make the videos bigger or smaller, or just move them about, will have to be better suited to fingers.
• The borders look bad so we will use a black background, black / transparent borders and when the user hovers, these will be highlighted.

The project is basically "An impossible quest for closure" and it reflects what I am writing about. There will be text on the interface which will give the user the illusion that it is trying to help them find a meaning. Instead this will simply play disjointed recordings, pieces of music, or refresh the page to reveal new videos. Maria, the developer also told me to consider changing the actions of the buttons (text) every time the page is refreshed. Therefore the user might see "What does this mean?" and click on it - only to refresh the page. "What does this mean" might not be there when he/she refreshes, but if it is - this time it might trigger a recording.

I will be compiling a reading list (because I'm afraid I will lose track if I don't!) and also update my Abstract.

Reflective writing on chat with Paul Coldwell

Festen - Thomas Vinterberg, Dogme 95

So yesterday I had a half an hour audio chat session with Professor Paul Coldwell about my research paper. It started alright - midway I got distracted and confused (the screaming kitten didn't help :)), and I think it ended OK. So here is where I got stuck:

Prof. Coldwell suggested that Cinema is growing and so is the sense of escapism. I wasn't sure about this but didn't know exactly how to back it up. By Chance! yesterday I found a lecture by Professor Jesse Schell about the rise of the need for realism. Some points I observed: In the midst of all this technological breakthrough, people are feeling that they are living in a 'fake' world, therefore yearning for "real" food, "reality" tv, "reality" in games and adverts. (Yet I still think that escapism seems to still be lurking in through all of this realism. It is an interesting mix of both. The safety of going back to something genuine and natural, and the excitement of the surreal. A technological representation of the natural perhaps.)

I then also looked at other points in time when this happened, in art especially - Pre-Raphaelites, the 60's Psychedelia. I still need to see what happened exactly in the film world but essentially it was pretty much the same pendulum style activity. From one extreme to another. Stretching something to the max and returning to something else.

I suppose then that it is in this day and age that going back to the natural seems to make so much sense, since we were never so far away from reality as we are now.

The more technological and virtual/digital we become, the more we want to get back to our roots (It's natural :)).

Jesse Schell specifies that this factor is called the concept of Authenticity, and if it is true, then there was never a better time for chance and database to combine and create filmmaking structures that are more relevant to today's culture.

So... currently updating my arguments, but moreso the conclusion which I still wasn't sure about up until yesterday.

More points to think about (as discussed with Paul Coldwell)
Sophie Calle - Figure to research
Max Ernst series - A woman with a thousand heads
Early cinema - Duchamp
Surrealism
Are people still going to the cinema & escapism

Experimentation with students

Today I did what you could call a "mini case study." I am currently working with BA Fine Arts students where they are encouraged to destruct and reconstruct their own style, and in the meantime work on a unit called "Prevent, Provoke, Parade". Since a large part of my research is about Chance and one of the students is writing her dissertation on Chance, I decided to give them a brief exercise on Chance and closure.

The Class is comprised of only three students, however since today one of them was sick I decided to contribute to the exercise. This is what we did; Each one of us created an impromptu painting/collage using acrylics, found magazines, newspapers, charcoals, pens, tape etc... I told them to think about a concept concerning "Prevent, Provoke, Parade" but to keep their ideas secret, so to not influence once another.

When the pieces of work were done, I told them to exchange it with someone else's. We 'destroyed' each other's work by cutting it up or tearing it. Once we had all the pieces, we exchanged these once again and threw them randomly onto a large piece of white paper. We taped them together exactly in the way they landed:

This was the result.

We then needed to test how the montage looked so I asked two other fine art students to comment about composition, colour, texture and perhaps significance. We got very positive results and a variety of theories regarding composition, negative space and the "illusion of three dimensionality". I have to admit I was scared that the final composition would look bad aesthetically and perhaps lack in composition and colour. This was not the case however, in fact I think applying Chance let the students work without fear that their work would look bad, because they knew it would be destroyed anyway - so they knew anything that looked bad could look good later, and of course vice versa.

So from this exercise I concluded that: Chance = great freedom and less restrictions in the work + a fresh result. I think I knew this already but wanted to try it out for myself and let my students experience it as well.

Updated Structure

Man With a Movie Camera - Dziga Vertov

Now that I have started writing the essay, I have had to restructure several times, this is the one I'm working with at the moment: (based on the structure suggested by Kevin Fox during the chats)

IDEA: Chance & Database VS Traditional Narrative

Introduction

|

General Background of Traditional narratives VS General Background of Chance

Order/Regulated VS Disorder/Nature

|

Main Argument. Traditional Narratives VS Database Structures

(Various types, what database (modular/puzzle) offer that traditional don't. Are they a new species? Temporality. Examples, etc...)

|

Does the audience want meaning or chance?

|

Conclusion

Reflective writing on chat & lots of writing to do...

How I feel right now, pic source 

After the brief discussion with Ed Kelly, I think I am on the right track when it comes to the essay, although I have to admit I am very much all over the place. I have started from chaos and now the order seems so difficult to achieve. No doubt this is the worst part of the essay - trying to mash everything together into an argument.

The problem was that the reading got slightly out of hand. I kept finding more and more material and just reading and underlining, and now I'm not sure if I have enough time to log it all. I still have a couple of journals I need to log and see if they fit with the rest of the research.

Amid all the confusion however, yesterday I came up with a structure which would involve three chapters in the essay:

The first part will deal with an intro on classical Narrative which will then lead to a discussion on Modular and Database Narrative and how it is perceived by the audience. Most of the disadvantages of new narratives seem to be the lack of meaning, therefore I will link this to Chapter 2 which deals with Chance, meaning and the author. Chapter three will continue from a discussion on the open-ended nature of chance and lack of meaning, and will lead to new interactive narratives, games, and contemporary modular films.

This is likely to change, however I think it should be a good starting point. Chapter one will have to be written this week.

An inspirational quote

Came across this today....

"Cinema, which was the key method to represent the world throughout the twentieth century, is destined to be replaced by digital media: the numeric, the computable, the simulated. This was the historical role played by cinema: to prepare us to live comfortably in the world of two-dimensional moving simulations. Having played this role well, cinema exits the stage. Enters the computer."

From Cinema and Digital Media - Lev Manovich

Tests and logging

So my developer, Maria has just put up some tests (which I will post soon hopefully) of three videos of different sizes playing, and four audio pieces playing simultaneously on command. I am in the process of editing another video however the logging of the reading material is slow, plus my reading list seems like it will never end.

I am currently logging Umberto Eco's "The Role of the Reader" as well as Lev Manovich's "Database as a symbolic form". It feels like the more I read - the more there is to know, however I cannot keep reading forever so this week or next week latest I will finally start putting my essay together. This week I will also email Antoine Beuger with some questions regarding John Cage and works of Chance.

Today a student presented an HP video where they launched some kind of touch technology back in 2007; it reminded me of my project in its database presentation, as in one could move and scale videos up and down, as well as turn music on and off at any desired time. The difference is that I want mine to be more of a whole than just an abstract representation of multimedia. and rather than having random videos, these will be based on stories since of course the whole exercise is a quest for meaning. In general, this HP project got me excited to work on my own, however made me long for a large touch screen which would made the experience so much more exciting! I still have to discuss these options with Maria to see what is possible.