Screen Culture – Week 12

I certainly haven’t saved the best of 2009 for last. Screen Culture didn’t deliver me marks as high as my other subjects, but I’m not really sure why.

I’m not a fan of complaining about lecturers/tutors through a one-way forum like my blog, but the lack of feedback (even when requested, all semester) from this teacher was pretty diabolical. Therefore, I can’t really tell you where I went wrong – or even right for that matter.

I chose Immersion as my paper topic, for obvious reasons. Using this Media Art Net article, as well as Rokeby’s Very Nervous System and Kreuger’s VideoPlace as kicking-off points, here’s the result. Let’s move right along…

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Screen Culture – Week 08

Process

Our presentation topic for Screen Culture was ‘Immersion’. In short, immersion seems to be the Holy Grail for many artists and in particular, those working within interaction. I have vague memories of Virtual Reality machines being toured around my local area when I was a kid, being touted as a computer environment that was completely immersive and would remove the user entirely from the real world. Of course, they were pretty terrible and something akin to being trapped inside the equally awful Lawnmower Man, but with a few pterodactyls flying clumsily around you.

Gaming in particular still puts a great deal of effort into getting as close as possible to an immersive environment. Surround sound, super-slick graphics engines and almost limitless gameplay are the frontiers upon which this battle is fought. However, they’re still limited by the interface. Both the screen and the controller create a barrier between gamers and the gaming environment. The best developers can hope for at the moment, is to create software that is so engaging, that the user simply ‘blocks out’ the world around them.

This idea of enveloping, rather than complete immersion, has been around for a long time. Once mathematics found its way into visual art, perspective methods like ‘Alberti’s system‘ attempted to draw the viewer into the image surface, or the pictorial space. The concept of ‘enveloping’ was what I chose to focus my part of the presentation on.

Outcome

My suggestion that ‘total immersion’ is not yet possible was based on the idea that we’re unable to remove the body and therefore our conscious connection to the world. We may experience brief moments of being transported to another place, as was the case in the early days of panoramas, but it is generally not long before we are again aware of our surroundings.

For the presentation, we also discussed the different types of immersion by definition, to break down the idea of total immersion and suggest that whilst we may not be able to remove the body entirely, we can achieve varying degrees of immersion through art and technology.

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Screen Culture – Week 07

Research

As with all my subjects this semester, ‘Week 07′ is really a week of our mid-semester break. Yes, they decided to call it ‘Research Week’, where we’re able to come in and arrange meetings with our tutors/lecturers, but as anyone who’s ever been to uni knows – academics are hard to pin down at the best of times. Let alone when there aren’t any annoying students around to get in the way of ‘research’.

So, what’s Research Week in reality? It’s another week that UNSW (from now on, referred to on this blog as ‘University Ltd’) has chopped off our ever-shortening semester, to further cut costs. No doubt, I’m sounding like my usual, cranky self, but when you have a look back a few years to see semesters that were 14 weeks in length, are now cut down to just 12 (with a ‘Research Week’, that makes 11) – you can see where I’m coming from. Oh, and before you tell me to stop whining about Uni Ltd, because I’m just getting more holidays – don’t bother. I’m one of those nerds that would rather spend another 6 weeks there, putting all those killer resources to use, than sitting around on my arse for 4 months, waiting for the next session to roll around.

And now, back to the show…

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Screen Culture – Week 06

Research

Bit of a strategic sickie this week for Screen Culture. So unfortunately I missed watching excerpts of the brilliant Dr. Strangelove, as part of the topic of ‘Military History of the Computer Screen’. So instead of doing any of these readings, I took a look at what was on offer for the final essay.

Kubrick using hand-lettered fonts, long before the General Pants cool-set decided it was trendy

Although tempted by the prospect of commentating on Dr. Strangelove, I decided that I should spend time researching in the direction of most of my other university work – Interactivity.

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Screen Culture – Week 04

Classwork

Digital Cinema was the focus for Screen Culture this week. Obviously, the term itself immediately connects with an image of contemporary cinema: theatres showing Hollywood-style, narrative film. However, as we stepped warily down the path of Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media, it was suggested that perhaps in this age, ‘cinema’ should embrace far broader concepts.

Lev Manovich - his entertainment system is better than yours

Manovich’s book is one that I really should pick up on day, as it’s highly regarded as a seminal work in the world of new [cough] media. Not having read it did not dissuade me from passing judgement on the concepts we were presented in the lecture though. My issue with Manovich is that he seems determined to repackage a number of different technologies and force them under the umbrella of ‘cinema’. To do this, he argues that cinema isn’t a narrative form at all, and in fact what we think of as cinema now is actually an anomaly within the evolution of a form that began long before the age of Hollywood.

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Uni Journal – Week 03

My post-rate over the past week or so resembles the Global Financial Crisis

Life (work + uni + Concrete) has killed my Uni Journal for Week 3. Which is a shame, because it was looking like I could really overachieve well into Week 5, or even Week 6.

So instead of trying to cover everything from a week or so back, I’m posting an apology by way of a hastily downloaded image and a promise that I’ll get back on track in the next few days, with some Week 4 madness. Prepare yourselves, because it’s all unbelievably amazing stuff.

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Screen Culture – Week 02

Classwork

It was interesting this week to hear the responses to McLuhan’s theories. After some clarification in the lecture, we entered a tutorial-wide discussion surrounding what was mostly a question of “do you agree that the medium is the message?” Of course, this is one of the cornerstones of McLuhan’s work and a turn of phrase that many people have heard, even if they don’t know of its source.

What was interesting to discover was that most people assume message = content and therefore don’t agree with McLuhan’s catch-cry. In fact, McLuhan is referring to the effect of the medium on our culture at large. It was the introduction of new technologies that altered the way we function as society and that is the message McLuhan is trying to express – the content is almost irrelevant. Of course, the message of every medium is another medium and that’s where we started talking ourselves around in circles.

One powerful point made by the tutor which supports McLuhan’s phrase, was a reference to Twitter. We find that many people sign up to follow the Twitter updates of hundreds of celebrities, but what important information are we getting from these tweets? It’s hardly life changing to know that Barack Obama just enjoyed his plane trip. It’s in fact the technology that we are embracing, not its content. We want the illusion of connection to these people, perhaps in the same way that shopping aisle tabloid magazines shout about the latest ‘baby bump pics’ of Angelina Jollie. Do we really care? Probably not, but we feel as though we are sharing a part of their life, just by reading the magazine.

There were also those that leant more toward Williams’ viewpoint (which seems to be more accepted by those studying Communications, whilst us art school nerds are often more drawn to McLuhan). Williams states that without human decision, new technologies will not emerge. He suggests that we are the God-like selector of our own technological destinies, whereas McLuhan thinks that technologies will appear, with or without our choosing.

More widely though, most people sat somewhere between these opposing views. In fact, they couldn’t understand why anyone would want to take such a hard-line stance. I was pretty much in agreement, when I picked up Understanding Media again and read the following…

“Even specialist learning in higher education proceeds by ignoring interrelationships; for such complex awareness slows down the achieving of expertness.” (p. 110)

…it’s a quote that not only went some of the way to explaining why these men take such a strong point of view, but also made me realise that the vast majority of people passionate about any topic (philosophy, politics, art, and so on) can seem to lose sight of the bigger picture. They’re too focused on achieving ultimate knowledge in their field, that all else fades into the background.

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Screen Culture – Week 01

Classwork

I was encouraged by the broad scope of the introductory lecture and tutorial for Screen Culture this week. It will be the first – and only – strictly theory subject I’ve taken this year and probably a nice break from the weight of project based work.

I had expected Screen Culture to look primarily at film works and to talk about the ideas and philosophy behind important cinema. However, the subject takes a far more broad approach, and looks at all kinds of screens: interfaces for devices (mobiles, MP3 players, ATMs); the way we monitor and observe both individuals and data via screens; distribution and consumption on screen (film, television); and the way the screen impacts how we see the world – particularly the way it compresses time and space (think of the internet).

It will also look at the term ‘media’ and what this actually means. Obviously it can represent both the medium of communication as well as the institutions and organisations controlling the flow of (mis)information. Of course we’ll be touching on McLuhan’s work, which fits in nicely for me, as I’m bumbling through Understanding Media right now. Mostly I’m really enjoying the book, but there are some parts that I feel as though a few crib notes would go a long way.

Marshall McLuhan

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