Plugging In

I was fortunate enough to acquire a very very nice new iPhone on Friday, and have since spent most of the week playing with its various features and being generally distracted either by the device itself or envious colleagues.  However, the option to use it as an iPod led me to conduct a previously untried experiment…

 

I often watch people, and have been particularly intrigued by the number and types of people who are plugged in to mp3/portable music devices as they go about their lives in the wider, observable world.  It has always struck me that these people must be experiencing the world in a very different way to those of us with naked eardrums: they effectively have a soundtrack to their movements, like in the films.  Unlike a lot of people I have spoken to on this issue, I have yet to be convinced that this is a bad thing – although I am perfectly sensible to the rudeness it can present under certain circumstances, and the safety risks.  So, armed with my new toy, I decided to try it out for a few days and record my observations.

 

I noticed a variety of things, some of which surprised me and others of which provoked a “Duh! Of course!” reaction.  I shall leave you to distil one from the other:

 

• I prefer to listen to music with my left ear and the world around me with my right, and was often more comfortable with only one earpiece in to this effect

 

• I automatically removed one earpiece (or both) when crossing roads, boarding buses or greeting anyone in passing – no matter how briefly (a standard greeting in this part of the country consisting of: “alright?”… “arr”)

 

• All sorts of visual stimuli seem to sync with the music.  As I type (from the 12:43 London Paddington service from Bath Spa) the clouds of white plumage from the power station funnels at Didcot blend perfectly with In The Bleak Midwinter (arranged by Bob Chilcott), whilst the cows in the fields outside Swindon earlier seemed to walk in time with Defying Gravity from the soundtrack to the musical Wicked, even during tempo changes.  I suspect this is just my brain trying to identify patterns between what I am seeing and what I am hearing, but still interesting…

 

• Outside sounds and the more internal sound of the music create a 2-layer auditory input.  Sorry, I can’t find a better way of phrasing that!  Basically, I mean that the outside sounds around me superimpose over the music (provided the volume is not set too loudly), which creates a strange joint experience of both sound worlds

 

• I am looking around expecting everyone else to hear what I am hearing.  I actually have to visualise a bubble around me to grasp the silence/absence of music around me.  It is quite strange thinking that there are sounds in my ears and head that are not also around my hands or anything else I can see.  This might be getting a bit philosophical, mind.  Actually, now I think about it, I have always had the same issue whilst sitting in a car – particularly on a motorway or busy road in a traffic jam.  I look around me and imagine the chassis of each car acting as the shell of a bubble containing a different mixture of sounds to those I am experiencing.  It seems so odd being close by, but encapsulated in different sounds.  Tangent spotted…

 

• On the more physical side, my eyes hurt a lot more than usual (as I am having to use them to do orientation that I would usually do using my ears) and my ears have a sort of fuzzy skin of ache across them.  This is after only moderate use, on a fairly low volume.

 

Of course, I have focussed on the effects of listening to music so far, so the next step is to test spoken word podcasts.  I’m not sure how easy it will be to concentrate on podcasts whilst going about life on the move, compared to listening to music, but there is one way to find out…

Blogging an Event

The experience of participating in an event, whilst drafting a blog post about it, was an interesting one.  In many ways, I wish I had done it at some of the various events I have attended over the last year of studying New Media as well, but in other ways I found it a difficult thing to do whilst being actively involved.  There is also something that feels very rude about typing whilst someone is talking – no matter how discretely one can do so.

 

The recent posts detailing the events of the CWNM Creative Retreat were written live, as it were, during proceedings.  I started out on the Friday making hand written notes throughout Professor Leahy’s lecture, but ran into difficulties when writing these notes up into cohesive prose.  My scribblings never quite make sense afterwards and my memory for the details of the convoluted arguments and discussions that evolve amongst this particular group of people is not great.  Therefore constructing a blog post as a running commentary as such discussions develop seemed like an obvious way of ensuring that I can capture more detail.  Throughout the remainder of the weekend I was therefore attached to my Mac, clicking away…

 

Summarising key points of discussion into sentences instead of note points whilst people were talking involved starting the sentences, then revising them as my understanding of the point clarified.  Using a computer to do this – with the flexibility to delete and re-jig – made this easier and less destructive in a way than using a note book – where crossings out (and the doodling temptations these inevitably lead to) can be quite an obstruction when reassembling notes in a logical format at a later stage. 

 

Generally I stuck to recording turns in the discussions and any key points/quotes made by specific participants – with very little reference to my personal views or interpretations.  The only account that differed from this method was my account of Christine’s talk, where she showed us a lot of her work.  This was a far more subjective talk to start with (being geared towards viewing art), so my own take on what was going on formed the bulk of this account, as I could hardly interpret it in any other way.  One method is obviously better than the other from an impartial, journalistic point of view, but that raises the question as to whether I was blogging about events at the retreat from a purely journalistic stance to provide information to those unable to participate, or whether I was blogging with more discursive intentions. 

 

As for feeling rude?  Well, I found myself consciously typing very lightly and looking up at the speaker far more than I would normally do whilst sitting with a paper notebook.  There was no doodling to be done.  There also appears to be a culture of multi-tasking with laptops during events surrounding New Media (as was apparent at the Women, Business & Blogging conference in the summer), which seems to be accepted by speakers and other participants without question.  Maybe we all just understand each other’s need to be plugged in?  Anyway, seeing others around who were far less visually engaged with the speaking event at the front (although obviously engaged in terms of content, as they were googling and following links through that were directly related) made me feel a little better about occasionally bashing out a quick sentence, then sitting back to listen again.

 

Maybe this means I am now firmly pacing the road towards becoming a conscious blogger?  Awareness of the process when writing any thing is usually the first step to acquiring the genre’s ice-skakes…

The Day After the Storm

Sunday has been a far more informal and relaxed, with only four of us plus Sue in physical attendance.  We started out testing the technology for our Skype call to Toni, which created some interesting feedback and sound effects as we all logged in to Skype and had a conference call whilst being in the same room.  Unfortunately, Toni did not arrive online, so we progressed by doing a skills exchange looking at both Audacity and Garage Band.

 

The practical use of these programmes to create audio for a range of New Media work seems to be of interest to a lot of people within the MA, although our resident guru Katherine was unable to be present to take us to the next level.  We did manage to establish the basics and some of the possibilities for both of these tools and the effects that can be created in each. 

 

Christine also gave me a personal demonstration of iShowU, a piece of software that can be used to create screencasts or demos from a Mac.  There are equivalent products for PC users – such as Camtasia – which allow you to achieve the same effect.  This tool is extremely useful for e-learning resources, and I think Christine’s use of it for her recent workshop shows how useful a tool it could be for us as collaborative writers.  It seems extremely easy to use, so we may have to play with this as a way of creating resources for each other in online skills exchanges.

 

We discovered that Toni had made it to Skype – an hour early, due to our wonderfully confusing daylight saving time system.  However, she had emailed us a short film that she has been making whilst in Australia.  It was really good to see some of Toni’s work – in her great personal style.  We projected this up onto the main screen for all to enjoy.

 

One of our last exercises with in IOCT space itself was to record a response to Renee’s virtual postcard to us.  We achieved this using the inbuilt iSight on Christine’s laptop and iMovie.   I believe this has since been loaded into BB for Renee and others to see – but we will try to get this visible via the googlegroup so those poor souls like Alison, who have to stand outside the door of BB now, can view this.  We decided to leave in the outtakes, for humorous effect.  However, Chris did take the opportunity to ask Christine for a quick demonstration of basic editing in iMovie, just so we could see how we could have edited this clip to give a more professional impression of our good selves, had we chosen to do so.  This was certainly a useful skill-sharing day for us Mac users, whilst Mary worked to download a clip of a Blondie track on her PC (I am sure the purpose of this will become clear at some point…)

 

We pretty much concluded the day – and indeed the retreat – with a fab roast dinner at the pub across the road from the IOCT.  Sue joined us and gave us all some reassurance about our dissertations and chatted about some of the changes she has made to the course since last year.  She also challenged us to think about what we intend to do once we have completed the MA, and we either pleased her or scared her by our general enthusiasm for continuing study to PhD level. 

 

All that remained to be done was the washing up and the farewells upon return to the IOCT.

Skills Exchange

The main skill everyone really wanted to have a grounding in (however basic) was the use of Flash.  Christine really inspired this with her talk about her work and the demonstrations she gave.  The skills exchange really focused on this, with us all coming up close for a chat through what flash can do and ask questions of Christine.

 

The basic principles we covered were: the use of layers, file sizes (using vector images vs using jpegs), key frames, motion tweens, creating symbols (which can then be animated), buttons, previewing information about the flash project and how to publish them.  We debating pre-loaders and Christine magically obliged Chris in his request to make a green ball “bounce around”.

 

Christine explained how the programme is based on older animation techniques and demonstrated some of the simple (but effective) things one can do with flash.  This was inspiring for those who were really daunted by Flash and felt this was something they should be doing in their work.  However, the overall content of the day actually showed the new students that they do not have to do everything – Claudia in particular noted this whilst we were making cups of tea.  There is such a wide range of tools available, but as writers we need to choose the tools that will facilitate what we want to create.   There was also the general realisation that many of these programmes overlap, so whilst many people were panicking about learning new programmes, they could actually achieve things using programmes with which they were already familiar.

 

Christine’s main tip for those wanting to progress further beyond this session was to visit the W3Schools, as the tutorials offered on this site are free and quite user-friendly. 

Remix

Christine took us on a tour of the remix work in which she has been participating – lead by Randy Adams (runran).

 

The remix basically takes creative work produced by others within the group and remixes it in different ways.  This includes flash work, static pictures and sound.  The remix is based around a blog, which forms a creative conversation in both images and words, showcasing recent work.  Remixers have to reference the sources, so that the audience can trace the evolution of a piece through the history of the blog.

 

She showed us examples of her original work and her remix creations.  The source files are also posted on the blog so that other members of the group can download this material in order to create a remix.  The group ethic towards each others work seems really open and pieces get worked and reworked, producing pieces that include many layers of different people’s work.

 

One piece “Picasso’s Point” was constructed out of code, rather than existing as a picture file, so you can go behind and look at the source code to see how it works.  This harks back to one of the lectures last year in Lab, which lead to my post Code of Ideas.  Christine remixed this image by animating it, which was then in term remixed in several ways.  The whole project hinges on artistic responses to work, rather than critical responses – and this drives the work of the group forward and creates more.  This seems quite an organic process of creation – almost like minimalist music gradually changes with each repetition.  The piece “Machine_Language” actually works in this way as well, so this evolution is both internal to the pieces and external in terms of the structure in which they sit.

 

Chris did lead the discussion into whether this kind of idea might work using Comment Press to create a kind of Frankinstein story – remixing text work in the same way as remix works with artistic images.  Again, we ended up in the monetizing conversation, but that seems to be an important issue that we need to explore further, but that’s the same with artists of all shades… sigh!

 

There was (and is) an awful lot of awe for Christine in terms of her tremendous output and development of her technical skills over the last year – which has been phenomenon.  Her blog, including a showcase of her work, is well worth a look:  crissXcross

IF Book

Chris Meade gave us a talk about his move to the Institute for the Future of the Book (IF Book) and the different psychological reactions of different groups within the industry towards the whole idea of digital fiction – readers, publishers, writers, creators.  He introduced us to the type of background of Bob Stein has been involved in, his meeting with Stein which lead to his new job within IF Book, his move from the very traditional book world and the types of project the Institute is involved in – including Sophie and Comment Press. 

 

Chris gave us a brief background of the evolution of the technologies of publishing, including the introduction of paperbacks, which we heard about last year during campus week.  He also talked about the serendipity and physical space of a library – particularly how this can be retained as libraries can be increasingly stored digitally.  He was in New York last week to discuss these issues, so his description of this event and the ideas that were involved were very interesting.

 

Chris now has the challenge of working for IF Book in the UK, including considering how to monetize digital fiction and conducting experiments in publishing.  The background of the Institute seems to be more academic, so he is bringing a more fiction-orientated approach to this, based on his own work and experience on the MA.  Monetizing our work is a major issue to us as digital writers so ideas about how to achieve produced quite a lot of discussion.  The various commercial models for doing this – with reference to the music industry and Radiohead’s recent ploy, which Janine was able to give interesting insight from her experiences in that industry.  My own dissertation idea about linking a creative piece into a real world commercial project is one example of how this could be achieved – using the online writing as a loss leader in a project that makes its profit in other ways.

 

The issue that technological developments are viewed as “the death of the book” and that there is some how an either/or result to this process is one that we agreed was simply not the case – and that the development will not be just focused on the physical device people use (such as an e-reader).  Actually there are already examples of paperbacks and the internet being used in partnership – either on a marketing or creative level. 

 

Chris showed us a visual piece created by an artist – Orson Whales – who painted on the pages of Moby Dick to create like a flick-book animation with sound, which was another way of reusing the traditional technology of the book in digital way.  This reminded me a lot of Mark Leahy’s work that he discussed yesterday.  This is the type of work that Chris is exploring as part of his work for IF Book.

Looking Back, Moving Forward

Jo and Alison kicked off the student-led element of retreat with a talk about their work and experiences of the course.  Jo took us through her various projects and explained what she is doing beyond the course, whilst Alison talked about the iwritestoriesonline.com project and her experiences with the creative non-fiction module on the course.  The iwritestoriesonline.com website has been designed to give people a platform to write stories or short snippets of life in a blog, in an environment where the blogs are linked to form a community of writers.  Toni is really the driving force behind the tech side of this, but Jo and Alison showed us the page and discussed their ideas for this collaborative project.     

 

The discussion lead on to their experiences collaboration to fill in the gaps in their own skills and how, as writers, we need to think outside the box in terms of what we want to do (or expand the envelope as Michael put it) so that our writing and story ideas can push the technology – even if the technology does not currently allow for an idea to work with the existing tools.  We also talked about Machinima, Alison’s attempts at this in The Sims and the way that Machinima is developing outside of the gaming world to produce more meaningful stories for those outside this culture.

 

Alison discussed the success of Staying Single, how she promoted it and where she wants to take the story now – including a talk she has been asked to give at a conference in New York.  She had a lot to talk about following her research project into the attitude of publishers and the responses she got from publishers when she contacted them to discuss digital fiction.  Jo made a very valid point about the push for literary fiction in the digital realms rather than the more popular fiction and how that is affecting the type of work that is being produced.  Alison’s experience with Staying Single in terms of the cross over between escapism and participation – which is obviously not what those readers come to chick lit for – shows how this cross over is a blurry kind of area.   

 

We then got a bit deep talking about truth – or Truth – and how this relates to fiction – including Alison’s decision to admit that her blog was a fictional story, how she came to that decision and what effects this had on the readership for the project.  This is a pretty central issue for all of us writing all sorts of fiction – whether new media in format or more traditional.  Ultimately we are playing with people’s beliefs and trust when we are writing fiction… asking them to suspend belief either consciously or unconsciously.

 

Interesting stuff! 

One door closes, another opens…

So, the final lecture of Campus Week opens the Creative Retreat for 2007.  Suddenly two distinct groups meet in one place: one group tired from the rigours of a week’s thought and the other raring to go after a year of absence. 

 

This final and first lecture is given by Mark Leahy, the external examiner for the MA.  This hinging point within this live week within the course being especially appropriate, given his topic…

 

Professor Leahy titled his talk Figures and Grounds, introducing several of his ideas and some of his work to us – including many of the questions he still grapples with.  These included: how do we recognise what we read? and how do we know how to read what we see?

 

One of the ways he considers these issues is with comparative terms, such as form/content, creative/critical, things/stuff… but in reality, these terms are constantly shifting in their relationships towards each other.  In particular, the relationship between things and stuff is important.  He asks: what is the point at which something becomes a thing, instead of just stuff.  Leahy argues that this point is different for each member of the audience – what one person views as a completed “thing” may be just a collection of stuff, or parts, to another viewer.

 

One element that determines this point in our judgement is our culture.  We hear or see what we are trained to hear or see.  At this point in Leahy’s talk I was reminded of my music training, where it was explained that we are trained to hear music in a western way – meaning that eastern music (which uses different degrees of tones such as quarter tones) sounds odd to our western ears.  The relationship between things and stuff will be different for different audiences with different conventions of reading/understanding.

 

Leahy then moved on to talk about how is it possible to analyse a piece in two directions – both outwardly and inwardly.  Inward analysis involves turning the microscope onto a piece and examining at ever closer range until you are examining the very atoms or phonemes of the piece.  In the case of more digital works, this might involve looking at the individual frames or pixels of a piece.  Conversely, outward analysis involves looking at a piece in context from an ever greater distance to see its overall place in culture.  Examining a piece to excess in either direction leads the piece to become blurred or distorted in the mind, but illustrates how the different points of view when looking at an object can affect our viewing of it.  Even when one examines the idea of listing as a way of analysing data, we find that as a creative process it can be found in renaissance work and Shakespeare’s Sonnet Number 130 (amazingly remembered by Terry) involves the same process.

 

Leahy showed us several pieces of his own work, including examples in which he was presenting physical printed text as an artefact within a gallery space.  He talked about his curetting and installation work.  Mags got a mention for her piece, which was included in one of the exhibitions Leahy was involved in producing – Public Pages.  This exhibition focused on the difference between public and private reading and how this difference affects the readers’ relationship with a text.  He also talked about other events involving the use of shirts, which seem to a physically reoccurring theme within his work – with specific shirts or elements from them being carried from one piece of creative work to the next.  He was questioned towards the end of his talk about the significance of shirts in his work and cited several reasons for his interest in working with these in a creative sense.  He has experience of making shirts himself, and a family association with the production of shirts – with his mother and grandmother making clothes.  He also explained how a shirt is a physical representation of the body, without the body being present.  He uses the fabric from shirts like a page so words – or elements of words in the case of one piece – are linked with the fabric in a physical sense, rather than the metaphysical sense of their meanings.

 

In other questions, Sue challenged him to answer: “who are you and what do you think you are doing?” (Leahy considers himself a writer, artist and curator) and Jo lead him into a discussion about domesticating fractals.  A bizarre conclusion, but a very interesting talk…