- School of Media and Communication
RMIT University
GPO Box 2476
Melbourne 3001 - +61 (03) 9925 3157
Adrian Miles
RMIT University, Media, Faculty Member
- Interactive Documentary, New Materialism, Media Studies, New Media, Academic Writing, Interactive and Digital Media, and 26 moreDigital Humanities, Educational Technology, Web 2.0, Media and Cultural Studies, Critical Discourse Studies, Blogs, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Education Innovation and Ventures, Digital Media, Device, and Software Interface Design, Location-based media, Cinema (Celluloid and Digital), Technology (Film Studies), Film & Digital Video, Documentary (Film Studies), Hypertext theory, Database Narrative, Media, Film Studies, Film Theory, Gilles Deleuze, Speculative Realism, Digital Media, Documentary, Media Archaeology, Essay Film, and Hito Steyerledit
- Adrian Miles is a currently co-director of the non/fictionLab research centre, and Deputy Dean Learning and Teaching ... moreAdrian Miles is a currently co-director of the non/fictionLab research centre, and Deputy Dean Learning and Teaching in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT, in Melbourne, Australia. Previously he designed and implemented the consilience honours lab for the Bachelor of Media and Communication (Honours) degree. He has also been a senior new media researcher in the InterMedia Lab at the University of Bergen, Norway. Adrian does research on hypertext, networked interactive video, and interactive documentary. He also has undertaken applied digital projects in interactive video, interactive documentary, and experimental forms of humanities research practice. Most of Adrian's research comes with a Deleuzean cinema and new materialist theoretical inflection, with a particular interest in methodologies that allow thought to be realised in novel forms.edit
[These are the slides from a short conference presentation.] Smart phones and their associated apps form what Levi Bryant would describe as machines. These machines afford, from the point of view of nonfiction, new forms and practices.... more
[These are the slides from a short conference presentation.]
Smart phones and their associated apps form what Levi Bryant would describe as machines. These machines afford, from the point of view of nonfiction, new forms and practices. To explore these new machines as nonfiction this paper considers these machines as particular assemblages that form documenting media machines. Documenting media machines, like other legacy nonfiction practices, rely on deliberate and intentional making. However, these assemblages also allow for a new type of nonfiction machine that is non-deliberate and unintentional. These are ambient media machines. Ambient media machines, in turn have two major varieties. The first are those that simply record, once enabled. Such machines include many of the devices used by the quantified self movement, such as a fitbit, the Moves app on your phone, and the health app of an iWatch. These perform and continue technical media’s indifferent recording of the world. The second variety of ambient media machine collects and curates the material from our documenting media machines, and ambient media machines. Such machines can be thought of as the precursors to a personal nonfiction practice which I currently describe as ‘auto-documentary’. This paper describes some of the parts (the apps, devices, and protocols) that constitute documenting and ambient media machines, and therefore auto–documentary. It then speculates about the agency of the artefacts and events that these machines have in relation to documentary and nonfiction. It concludes with some speculative ideas about these media machines as also being affective machines, or engines, and what these are.
Bryant, Levi R. Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Print.
Smart phones and their associated apps form what Levi Bryant would describe as machines. These machines afford, from the point of view of nonfiction, new forms and practices. To explore these new machines as nonfiction this paper considers these machines as particular assemblages that form documenting media machines. Documenting media machines, like other legacy nonfiction practices, rely on deliberate and intentional making. However, these assemblages also allow for a new type of nonfiction machine that is non-deliberate and unintentional. These are ambient media machines. Ambient media machines, in turn have two major varieties. The first are those that simply record, once enabled. Such machines include many of the devices used by the quantified self movement, such as a fitbit, the Moves app on your phone, and the health app of an iWatch. These perform and continue technical media’s indifferent recording of the world. The second variety of ambient media machine collects and curates the material from our documenting media machines, and ambient media machines. Such machines can be thought of as the precursors to a personal nonfiction practice which I currently describe as ‘auto-documentary’. This paper describes some of the parts (the apps, devices, and protocols) that constitute documenting and ambient media machines, and therefore auto–documentary. It then speculates about the agency of the artefacts and events that these machines have in relation to documentary and nonfiction. It concludes with some speculative ideas about these media machines as also being affective machines, or engines, and what these are.
Bryant, Levi R. Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Print.
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https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-68643-1#toc Antipodean Approaches Brings together new research around interactive documentary theory and practice A timely collection by an emerging group of scholar–practitioners... more
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-68643-1#toc
Antipodean Approaches Brings together new research around interactive documentary theory and practice A timely collection by an emerging group of scholar–practitioners dedicated to pushing the boundaries of documentary using new ideas and new technologies Focuses on recent work by documentary scholar-practitioners who bring a frontier spirit of innovation to bring documentary into the digital landscape.
Antipodean Approaches Brings together new research around interactive documentary theory and practice A timely collection by an emerging group of scholar–practitioners dedicated to pushing the boundaries of documentary using new ideas and new technologies Focuses on recent work by documentary scholar-practitioners who bring a frontier spirit of innovation to bring documentary into the digital landscape.
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This chapter is a consideration of interactive documentary from the point of view of affect. This is based on the use of Bergson's sensory motor schema that Deleuze undertakes in Cinema One (1986) to define the movement image. Within the... more
This chapter is a consideration of interactive documentary from the point of view of affect. This is based on the use of Bergson's sensory motor schema that Deleuze undertakes in Cinema One (1986) to define the movement image. Within the movement image the affect image offers a model for interactivity which I use as the basis from which to speculate about, and advocate for a form of interactive documentary that relies upon what I characterise as 'affective interactivity'.
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NOTE: First 50 can get full access to this via my 50 free online copies provided by publisher. (If your institution provides access, please don't use a free one.) The free one is at... more
NOTE: First 50 can get full access to this via my 50 free online copies provided by publisher. (If your institution provides access, please don't use a free one.) The free one is at http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Iyb6MEbSWK4w86cVM7jj/full
Miles, Adrian. “Matters of Concern and Interactive Documentary: Notes for a Computational Nonfiction.” Studies in Documentary Film 0.0 (2017): 1–17.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17503280.2017.1296404
This essay applies actor–network theory (ANT) and new materialism as a method for the study of interactive documentary. It provides an introduction to aspects of ANT and new materialism, arguing that interactive documentary theory’s ‘matters of concern’ need to be expanded to recognise and discuss the human and nonhuman material actors that make up any interactive documentary. It provides a series of theoretical ‘sketches’ to illustrate what a materialist study of interactive documentary might be, and how this could be enlarged into a broader field of practice and theory tentatively labelled ‘computational nonfiction’. It concludes with a critique of these ‘sketches’ and begins to detail some of the actors present in the online nonfiction work The Whale Hunt.
Miles, Adrian. “Matters of Concern and Interactive Documentary: Notes for a Computational Nonfiction.” Studies in Documentary Film 0.0 (2017): 1–17.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17503280.2017.1296404
This essay applies actor–network theory (ANT) and new materialism as a method for the study of interactive documentary. It provides an introduction to aspects of ANT and new materialism, arguing that interactive documentary theory’s ‘matters of concern’ need to be expanded to recognise and discuss the human and nonhuman material actors that make up any interactive documentary. It provides a series of theoretical ‘sketches’ to illustrate what a materialist study of interactive documentary might be, and how this could be enlarged into a broader field of practice and theory tentatively labelled ‘computational nonfiction’. It concludes with a critique of these ‘sketches’ and begins to detail some of the actors present in the online nonfiction work The Whale Hunt.
Research Interests:
This essay provides an introductory analysis of Alisa Lebow's interactive documentary Filming Revolution. It approaches the work from the point of view of new media, rather than documentary, arguing that the work adopts an important... more
This essay provides an introductory analysis of Alisa Lebow's interactive documentary Filming Revolution. It approaches the work from the point of view of new media, rather than documentary, arguing that the work adopts an important non–narrative form as a way to describe revolution, and to prevent the foreclosure that story enforces. This essay is experimental to the extent that it tries (with mixed fortune) to introduce the essayistic into scholarly writing, and, perhaps, tries to find room for some of the qualities of the essay film in a personal academic practice. I don't know what this is, which is a strange place from which to begin. This is unsettling, for as an academic I am trained and acculturated to displaying a certainty of manner — a certainty that many of my students and conference colleagues would attest I have down pat. It begins from Bristol. It begins from Alisa Lebow's presentation in Bristol at the 2016 i– Docs conference about her interactive documentary Filming Revolution. It begins from what I was reading during my thirty hours of travel between Melbourne and Bristol. It begins from the question that gnawed and nagged at me after Alisa's keynote in Bristol. It begins in my body. Not much of an introduction, is it? This writing reintroduces hypertext as a material way of making and performing knowledge and proposes it as a valuable precursor to interactive documentary and what I am describing as computational nonfiction. What I say here about hypertext, Filming Revolution as an interactive documentary, and story, are a prolegomena toward what computational nonfiction might be as a broader field that might encompass computers, technodigital practice, and networks. Oh, it was originally written as hypertext using Storyspace, and translating it into something more linear and sequential sees its looping rhythms, redundancies, and recursiveness become clumsy stutterings and repetitions.
The entire work is available for free at http://viewjournal.eu/index.php/view/article/view/JETHC113/259
The entire work is available for free at http://viewjournal.eu/index.php/view/article/view/JETHC113/259
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This sketch pamphlet arose from a collective panel discussion during Visible Evidence XXII in Toronto. [NOTE: the iBook version of this pamphlet is available at http://screenworks.org.uk/what-is-and-isnt-screen-media-practice-research,... more
This sketch pamphlet arose from a collective panel discussion during Visible Evidence XXII in Toronto.
[NOTE: the iBook version of this pamphlet is available at http://screenworks.org.uk/what-is-and-isnt-screen-media-practice-research, a less media rich pdf is provided here. AND, this pdf has some video and active links so as far as I know only works with the embedded video within Acrobat Reader....]
The panel was structured around invited participants considering interactive documentary and aesthetics. The strict constraint of 10 slides, with each slide being onscreen for 30 seconds, with an accompanying 5 minute talk, was applied. The ambition was to raise questions, queries, and concerns, seeding ideas and issues to be picked up from the floor to be discussed more broadly — all depending on what might emerge as matters of concern. We were less interested in final positions and answers than in thickening ideas and approaches to interactive documentary.
While we unfortunately — given it was a documentary conference — have no documentary record of the ensuing discussion, as is often the case questions and concerns gravitated toward production and consumption issues from the point of view of existing practice/s. Unsurprising.
We hope, collectively, that we have managed a minor intervention into an expanded reconfiguration of what interactive documentary is, does, and can be.
What follows are the slides and accompanying commentary by their authors. It is hoped they are received and become prompts to further thoughts, arguments, and ideas, rather than answers.
Adrian Miles, Melbourne, 2015.
[NOTE: the iBook version of this pamphlet is available at http://screenworks.org.uk/what-is-and-isnt-screen-media-practice-research, a less media rich pdf is provided here. AND, this pdf has some video and active links so as far as I know only works with the embedded video within Acrobat Reader....]
The panel was structured around invited participants considering interactive documentary and aesthetics. The strict constraint of 10 slides, with each slide being onscreen for 30 seconds, with an accompanying 5 minute talk, was applied. The ambition was to raise questions, queries, and concerns, seeding ideas and issues to be picked up from the floor to be discussed more broadly — all depending on what might emerge as matters of concern. We were less interested in final positions and answers than in thickening ideas and approaches to interactive documentary.
While we unfortunately — given it was a documentary conference — have no documentary record of the ensuing discussion, as is often the case questions and concerns gravitated toward production and consumption issues from the point of view of existing practice/s. Unsurprising.
We hope, collectively, that we have managed a minor intervention into an expanded reconfiguration of what interactive documentary is, does, and can be.
What follows are the slides and accompanying commentary by their authors. It is hoped they are received and become prompts to further thoughts, arguments, and ideas, rather than answers.
Adrian Miles, Melbourne, 2015.
Research Interests:
In trying to engage audiences with cinematographic database narratives there seem to be two dominant modes at play. The first is what I briefly characterise here as the “Encarta” model where large scale productions are undertaken that... more
In trying to engage audiences with cinematographic database narratives there seem to be two dominant modes at play. The first is what I briefly characterise here as the “Encarta” model where large scale productions are undertaken that have all the hallmarks of a major studio production. Such work generally lacks ‘voice’ and in lieu of this emphasise detail, technological spectacle, and high cultural capital. The second mode is more personal. Here projects are smaller scale and rely less on spectacle than the presence of a ‘voice’ within the work. They are intimate, crafted, and in many ways small scale works. If the first mode emphasises information, the second is about experience. These minor works are ambient, associative and affective and this is what constitutes their voice. In this series of observations and reflections I intend to appropriate Deleuze’s application of Bergson’s sensory motor schema to explore a poetics for cinematographic database narratives via the cinematic interval. Here database cinema is understood to be an “assemblage” which is a combinatory system that is, as Anderson and McFarlane describe: “‘a constellation’ of elements that have been selected from a milieu, organised, and stratified.” Such assemblages enable the production of affect via complex forms of media practice suggesting, in turn, that narrative is not a dominant form within such systems. In this chapter Korsakow films are taken to be exemplary instances of such affective assemblages.
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This originally appeared as a book chapter and discussed how softvideo relies on a postliterate conception of practice and discourse. It also outlines the implications of softvideo within the teaching of media studies.
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Through an examination of some current online services, and the Korsakow system, we can see that there are digital nonfiction practices being invented that are facilitated by ready access to means of making and distributing, and that... more
Through an examination of some current online services, and the Korsakow system, we can see that there are digital nonfiction practices being invented that are facilitated by ready access to means of making and distributing, and that these systems leverage the qualities of the minor, curatorial, intimate, distributed and emergent.
From this we can see the attributes that documentary tools need in digital networked contexts. We can also see that such tools can be thought of as systems to allow for the creation of affective assemblages.
My research and practice is around vernacular nonfiction that is video based. So how to develop practices and frameworks that enable everyday documentary and systems to enable this.
From this we can see the attributes that documentary tools need in digital networked contexts. We can also see that such tools can be thought of as systems to allow for the creation of affective assemblages.
My research and practice is around vernacular nonfiction that is video based. So how to develop practices and frameworks that enable everyday documentary and systems to enable this.
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The availability of ready to hand video technologies for recording, editing, and publishing 'everyday ephemera' has seen an explosion of content online, from the low brow populism of YouTube through to the sophisticated observational post... more
The availability of ready to hand video technologies for recording, editing, and publishing 'everyday ephemera' has seen an explosion of content online, from the low brow populism of YouTube through to the sophisticated observational post produced work of Robert Croma. These technologies of recording, editing, and distribution provide documentary practice with an everyday, quotidian apparatus for the creation of informal, reflective, observational and autoethnographic work. This paper will examine the use of ready to hand video technologies in concert with the use of the Korsakow interactive video authoring software, to create small scale, 'ready to hand' or 'dirty media' documentaries. This provides a model to investigate and develop alternative modes of making nonfiction video online material that falls outside of the economy of spectacle that dominates YouTube or the 'personal broadcasting channels’ of Vimeo . The problem investigated is how to contextualise and author in these systems so that work created is outside of the unstructured banality of aggregative platforms and the serialised limitations of the blog. Emerging software models such as Korsakow require a creative practice of making that involves the critical curation of video ephemera into complex, emerging and multilinear constellations and clouds of associated material that let these works lie between the personal documentary, essay film, home movies and broader poetic traditions. More significantly the use of systems such as Korsakow allows for an autoethnographic methodology of personal, informal and everyday observation to produce a ‘soup’ of material that is then structured through the elucidation of emerging or unveiled patterns of relation amongst shots and sequences. These patterns create affective and poetic “lines of flight” for both maker and user and their value lies in the possibility of poesis amongst otherwise unremarkable moments.
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A map intends to be instrumental in its relation to the world and to exhaust itself through this use value - a "good" map is that which most removes the distance between map and use value. Our everyday use of maps is quite distinct from... more
A map intends to be instrumental in its relation to the world and to exhaust itself through this use value - a "good" map is that which most removes the distance between map and use value. Our everyday use of maps is quite distinct from this. Here we annotate maps informally and in these acts introduce affect. This creates a distance and distinction between the production of maps (their imagined uses) and the actual use of maps - a distinction that is compounded with the rise of 'prosumer' map technologies and practices. The affective atlas project intends to develop techniques, tools and theories that allow for the production of maps that bring together the instrumental and the affective through a reconsideration of map making and use.
Affect is the distance and difference between intent and achievable action. In the domain of maps affect is produced as the emotive remainder when maps are used as part of the everyday. When I use a map to walk in the bush, and then pencil in a discovered picnic spot (or even record the same site via my GPS) an excess is introduced where that point upon the map is now marked by memory, pleasure, grass, food, silence, lyrebirds and so on.
Affect is the distance and difference between intent and achievable action. In the domain of maps affect is produced as the emotive remainder when maps are used as part of the everyday. When I use a map to walk in the bush, and then pencil in a discovered picnic spot (or even record the same site via my GPS) an excess is introduced where that point upon the map is now marked by memory, pleasure, grass, food, silence, lyrebirds and so on.
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A conference presentation that looks at recent life journaling apps, and the quantified self, to think about what I characterise as cyborg documentary and autodocumentary.
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A key research problem within the digital humanities has been the digitisation of artefacts contained within existing archives. While much of this research has concentrated on the formal problems of metadata and standards, the rationale... more
A key research problem within the digital humanities has been the digitisation of artefacts contained within existing archives. While much of this research has concentrated on the formal problems of metadata and standards, the rationale for these projects has largely been about access to collections. On the other hand we now find ourselves with enormous online systems that are archive like. These systems, operate and present themselves primarily as service orientated platforms (for example Flickr, YouTube, Instagram), and are exemplary in relation to access. These services appear to be more concerned about standards of exchange and communication than provenance and preservation.
The communicative promiscuity of these platforms is enabled by the high level of facetted granularity that they provide. This simply means that the objects in these services are structured and presented in ways to expose as many ways to address them as possible. This includes not only what is known as facetted search but also the use of APIs that let other, questions and uses of these media artefacts be made.
The Circus Oz Living Archive is a project that straddles the difference between the digital archive and media specific social platforms. The project offers interesting provocations for considering digital archives and their relation to network ‘media archival’ forms. These provocations include a ‘flat’ ontology within the Living Archive that is the same flat ontology that lies within all archives. From this we argue that archival objects gain significance through the external relations they are placed within, therefore a key role for a digital archive is to enable and perform these external relations. This presentation intends to use the Circus Oz Living Archive as a case study to consider these questions and to develop speculative questions about the critical application of networked technologies to cultural objects for future work.
The communicative promiscuity of these platforms is enabled by the high level of facetted granularity that they provide. This simply means that the objects in these services are structured and presented in ways to expose as many ways to address them as possible. This includes not only what is known as facetted search but also the use of APIs that let other, questions and uses of these media artefacts be made.
The Circus Oz Living Archive is a project that straddles the difference between the digital archive and media specific social platforms. The project offers interesting provocations for considering digital archives and their relation to network ‘media archival’ forms. These provocations include a ‘flat’ ontology within the Living Archive that is the same flat ontology that lies within all archives. From this we argue that archival objects gain significance through the external relations they are placed within, therefore a key role for a digital archive is to enable and perform these external relations. This presentation intends to use the Circus Oz Living Archive as a case study to consider these questions and to develop speculative questions about the critical application of networked technologies to cultural objects for future work.
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Interactive documentary finds itself caught, theoretically, by the narratological assumptions that underwrites much cinema and documentary studies. These theories rely, implicitly or explicitly, on the presence of a story that audiences... more
Interactive documentary finds itself caught, theoretically, by the narratological assumptions that underwrites much cinema and documentary studies. These theories rely, implicitly or explicitly, on the presence of a story that audiences are required to interpret or understand in some way. Theoretically we have sophisticated ways to account for the actions of audiences on documentaries, documentaries on audiences, and the relation of documentaries to the world, yet in most instances we do this through the gestalt of story. However, stories as a theoretical model by which to understand interactive documentary are problematic in two ways.
The first is that documentaries are, while obviously complex and sophisticated language machines, resolutely linear, sequential and reliant on linear cause and effect. This is not surprising given that film and video is an insistent time based and sequential medium, yet in spite of our celebration of ambiguity and complexity in stories they struggle to account for, describe, or perform the simple complexity of, well, anything, because of their inherent necessity to be linear, sequential and ordered.
The first is that documentaries are, while obviously complex and sophisticated language machines, resolutely linear, sequential and reliant on linear cause and effect. This is not surprising given that film and video is an insistent time based and sequential medium, yet in spite of our celebration of ambiguity and complexity in stories they struggle to account for, describe, or perform the simple complexity of, well, anything, because of their inherent necessity to be linear, sequential and ordered.
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Over twelve months, with not quite Swiss precision, I would stand in my front yard, raise my phone in salute to the sun, and record the same small view on Vine. Six seconds. Thirty frames per second. One hundred and eighty frames. What... more
Over twelve months, with not quite Swiss precision, I would stand in my front yard, raise my phone in salute to the sun, and record the same small view on Vine. Six seconds. Thirty frames per second. One hundred and eighty frames.
What Friedrich Kittler describes as technical media is, at the beginning, always and only a recording media. It is technical media not because of its technological apparatus, but from its being smeared by the deep indifference of the mechanical. Technical media by definition does not get excited or bored it just does. This is perhaps one of its hallmarks as an indexical apparatus. (It is not so much nonfiction at this point as just is.)
At the moment of recording technical media is a sampling media defined by this indifferent regularity of record. (An aside, writing with technical media happens after the moments of recording. Not during.)
About 7am interrogates and plays with this technicity of sampling by externalising these machine protocols into a human procedure of my morning’s moment. By making myself subject to the simple constraint of being there, around about 7am, and recording, I submit myself into a logic of technicity that makes concrete our audiovisual recording as an indifferent, regular, temporal sampling.
The work that emerges is distributed amongst its informal procedural protocol, the technicity of Vine, WiFi, and the domestic. It is what Ian Bogost would describe as an ontograph, where each clip is part of “a group of items loosely joined not by logic or power or use but by the gentle knot of the comma” (Alien Phenomenology, p.38). In this paper I intend to investigate the gentleness of the comma as an epistemological method that enables a different dialogue with the real, a dialogue that may avoid the epistemological violence of story.
What Friedrich Kittler describes as technical media is, at the beginning, always and only a recording media. It is technical media not because of its technological apparatus, but from its being smeared by the deep indifference of the mechanical. Technical media by definition does not get excited or bored it just does. This is perhaps one of its hallmarks as an indexical apparatus. (It is not so much nonfiction at this point as just is.)
At the moment of recording technical media is a sampling media defined by this indifferent regularity of record. (An aside, writing with technical media happens after the moments of recording. Not during.)
About 7am interrogates and plays with this technicity of sampling by externalising these machine protocols into a human procedure of my morning’s moment. By making myself subject to the simple constraint of being there, around about 7am, and recording, I submit myself into a logic of technicity that makes concrete our audiovisual recording as an indifferent, regular, temporal sampling.
The work that emerges is distributed amongst its informal procedural protocol, the technicity of Vine, WiFi, and the domestic. It is what Ian Bogost would describe as an ontograph, where each clip is part of “a group of items loosely joined not by logic or power or use but by the gentle knot of the comma” (Alien Phenomenology, p.38). In this paper I intend to investigate the gentleness of the comma as an epistemological method that enables a different dialogue with the real, a dialogue that may avoid the epistemological violence of story.
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This is the first essay where I address the concept of sofvideo. Softvideo is what happens to video as a form and an object when the computer is the medium of consumption and not merely the means of production and distribution. The essay... more
This is the first essay where I address the concept of sofvideo. Softvideo is what happens to video as a form and an object when the computer is the medium of consumption and not merely the means of production and distribution. The essay arose from a paper presented at a cybercultures symposium held at the University of Bergen in 2002.
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This is preprint of the essay that appeared in: Studies in Documentary Film, Vol 8, Issue 3. pp. 205-220, 2014.
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The burgeoning theoretical and practical fields of interactive documentary, to borrow a curiously evocative phrase of Bruno Latour’s, take as their ‘matters of concern’ the distance and difference between interactive documentary and... more
The burgeoning theoretical and practical fields of interactive documentary, to borrow a curiously evocative phrase of Bruno Latour’s, take as their ‘matters of concern’ the distance and difference between interactive documentary and traditional documentary theory and practice. However, if we begin from a position within new media studies (as the study of new media and a new way of doing media studies) then different matters of concern arise.
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This essay argues for the role of actor–network theory and other recent manifestations of the ‘new materialism’ in how we undertake interactive documentary theory. It advocates for a new term, computational nonfiction, as a way to broaden... more
This essay argues for the role of actor–network theory and other recent manifestations of the ‘new materialism’ in how we undertake interactive documentary theory. It advocates for a new term, computational nonfiction, as a way to broaden the ways we engage with nonfiction practice on computers.
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This is the prepublication draft of my chapter in: Nash, Kate, Craig Hight, and Catherine Summerhayes, eds. <i>New Documentary Ecologies Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses.</i> Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print. There has... more
This is the prepublication draft of my chapter in:
Nash, Kate, Craig Hight, and Catherine Summerhayes, eds. <i>New Documentary Ecologies Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses.</i> Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.
There has been significant interest in the relation of digital media and the internet for emerging modes of documentary engagement for audiences and makers. This chapter considers the relation of digital media and the internet as a problem of 'uncertainty' and uses Deleuze's concept of the affect image as a productive heuristic to understand interactive documentary. A key value of this approach is its ability to focus attention on the sensory motor schema and its role in affect and interactive documentary. This is a novel way to consider interactivity within online documentary by demonstrating that interactivity revolves around uncertainty and that Deleuze's concept of the movement and time images, though defined specifically for cinema, provides an elegant model by which to understand uncertainty and interactivity. Deleuze's argument relies upon Bergson's sensory motor schema, and I apply this as a framework by which interactive works can be understood. Finally, I will argue that the movement image's tripartite schema of perception, affect, and action images shows how interactive documentary and networked ecologies produce 'affective ecologies'.
Nash, Kate, Craig Hight, and Catherine Summerhayes, eds. <i>New Documentary Ecologies Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses.</i> Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.
There has been significant interest in the relation of digital media and the internet for emerging modes of documentary engagement for audiences and makers. This chapter considers the relation of digital media and the internet as a problem of 'uncertainty' and uses Deleuze's concept of the affect image as a productive heuristic to understand interactive documentary. A key value of this approach is its ability to focus attention on the sensory motor schema and its role in affect and interactive documentary. This is a novel way to consider interactivity within online documentary by demonstrating that interactivity revolves around uncertainty and that Deleuze's concept of the movement and time images, though defined specifically for cinema, provides an elegant model by which to understand uncertainty and interactivity. Deleuze's argument relies upon Bergson's sensory motor schema, and I apply this as a framework by which interactive works can be understood. Finally, I will argue that the movement image's tripartite schema of perception, affect, and action images shows how interactive documentary and networked ecologies produce 'affective ecologies'.
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Introduction to a section of this anthology that I was invited to write.
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This book chapter makes an argument for the specificity of reading required to understand and appreciate hypertextual and multilinear works. It does this by first demonstrating the role of deep literacy to all our reading practices, and... more
This book chapter makes an argument for the specificity of reading required to understand and appreciate hypertextual and multilinear works. It does this by first demonstrating the role of deep literacy to all our reading practices, and that this deep literacy is tighly interwoven with our familiarity with writing. On this basis I argue that to teach how to read hypertext you also need to teach how to write hypertext. What follows is an outline of my old curriculum, its theoretical import, and then an outline for a praxis of hypertextual reading.
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Blogs: Distributed Documentaries of the Everyday: What the Average Citizen Needs Is Not a Steady Stream of Facts, Passed on by Organizations Fearful of Going out on a Limb, but Interpretation, Which Might in Other Arguments Be Caned Editorialising, Persuasion, Orientation, Ideology, Propaganda, o...more
This essay has been written as a hypertext (originally in Eastgate System’s Tinderbox). Such hypertext writing environments encourage a particular writing practice, one that is branching, associative, rhizomatic and intensive. (In some... more
This essay has been written as a hypertext (originally in Eastgate System’s Tinderbox). Such hypertext writing environments encourage a particular writing practice, one that is branching, associative, rhizomatic and intensive. (In some ways a bit like blogging.)
As a consequence this essay ranges broadly across quite a field, including new media, blogs, hypertext and design. It does this not as a consequence of any great speciality in any of these disciplines, but because hypertext affords this ability which is an alternative academic practice to existing forms. It is the production of knowledge that is the connection of parts into more complex wholes, where these connections express or effect qualitative changes amongst the parts (Miles, 1999, 2001).
I recognise that this causes many anxieties for academic and casual readers, where a culture of exhaustive (that is complete) reading is the norm. For such readers a parsed down, single version of this work is available. It’s structure is, approximately, order in which written. The links within this version are identical to the links in the hypertextual version, so following them could well return you to a section you have already read, but now existing as an individual node rather than a subsection of a longer piece. This also accounts for the repetition that appears in the longer work, individual nodes are written to be more or less discrete (much like blog posts) and their collection into a single longer piece introduces some redundancies.
YMMV.
As a consequence this essay ranges broadly across quite a field, including new media, blogs, hypertext and design. It does this not as a consequence of any great speciality in any of these disciplines, but because hypertext affords this ability which is an alternative academic practice to existing forms. It is the production of knowledge that is the connection of parts into more complex wholes, where these connections express or effect qualitative changes amongst the parts (Miles, 1999, 2001).
I recognise that this causes many anxieties for academic and casual readers, where a culture of exhaustive (that is complete) reading is the norm. For such readers a parsed down, single version of this work is available. It’s structure is, approximately, order in which written. The links within this version are identical to the links in the hypertextual version, so following them could well return you to a section you have already read, but now existing as an individual node rather than a subsection of a longer piece. This also accounts for the repetition that appears in the longer work, individual nodes are written to be more or less discrete (much like blog posts) and their collection into a single longer piece introduces some redundancies.
YMMV.
Traditionally, cartographers have produced atlases as ‘composite’ products containing maps, photographs, diagrams and text. They are produced on paper, discrete media and distributed media. They are ‘pre-composed’ or ‘constructed’... more
Traditionally, cartographers have produced atlases as ‘composite’ products containing maps, photographs, diagrams and text. They are produced on paper, discrete media and distributed media. They are ‘pre-composed’ or ‘constructed’ products, whereby the cartographer controls all of the atlas content and how it is delivered to the user. It is a ‘predictable’ product, where the user is only a consumer and
It relies on Netscape version 2 or greater. This is not my usual policy in WWW publication and design, but this site is less about the WWW and much more about hypertext per se. As far as I&amp;#x27;m aware these pages are HTML 3.0... more
It relies on Netscape version 2 or greater. This is not my usual policy in WWW publication and design, but this site is less about the WWW and much more about hypertext per se. As far as I&amp;#x27;m aware these pages are HTML 3.0 compliant, and they make use of gifs and jpegs (depending on which yields the more economical file). Netscape 2 seems to do the best job of the browsers I&amp;#x27;m familiar with of dealing with the HTML elements contained on these pages.
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Page 1. OLD MEDIA AVATARS (aka Throwing the Baby out With the Bath Water) Adrian MilesMCD Studio RMIT University adrian.miles@rmit.edu.au http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vlog/ ABSTRACT Video blogging, and its near relative podcasting, are... more
Page 1. OLD MEDIA AVATARS (aka Throwing the Baby out With the Bath Water) Adrian MilesMCD Studio RMIT University adrian.miles@rmit.edu.au http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vlog/ ABSTRACT Video blogging, and its near relative podcasting, are now well recognised as new ...
Cartwright, W, Arrowsmith, C, Miles, A, Morris, B, Vaughan, L and Yuille, J 2008, 'Geoplaced knowledge: developing a methodology for provisioning stakeholders in natural environments management with integrated media tools', in... more
Cartwright, W, Arrowsmith, C, Miles, A, Morris, B, Vaughan, L and Yuille, J 2008, 'Geoplaced knowledge: developing a methodology for provisioning stakeholders in natural environments management with integrated media tools', in Queensland Spatial Conference 2008. Global Warning: What's Happening in Paradise? Conference Proceedings, Surfers Paradise, Qld, 17-19 July 2008. ... Queensland Spatial Conference 2008. Global Warning: What's Happening in Paradise?
Multimedia as a particular expression of new media easily lends itself to corporate and state patronage. Within the Australian context this has allowed it to occupy centre stage in considerations of cultural and information policy, and to... more
Multimedia as a particular expression of new media easily lends itself to corporate and state patronage. Within the Australian context this has allowed it to occupy centre stage in considerations of cultural and information policy, and to have become the defining object for the'information revolution'. However this has meant that small scale alternative practices have been overlooked, and it is these other practices that will more effectively define and articulate what the new media will be. Through Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the ...
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Miles, Adrian, and Mark Amerika. “Practice-Based Research, Digital Art and Problem-Based Learning: A Dialogue.” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 10.7 (2002). Mark Amerika: By approaching the Internet as a compositional and... more
Miles, Adrian, and Mark Amerika. “Practice-Based Research, Digital Art and Problem-Based Learning: A Dialogue.” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 10.7 (2002).
Mark Amerika: By approaching the Internet as a compositional and publication/exhibition medium, artist researchers are positioning themselves to conduct a network of digital art practices. These networks are formed within and between academic institutions in various locations around the world which are in the process of defining new research agendas. One of the main goals of the TECHNE practice-based research initiative at the University of Colorado at Boulder is to evolve an ongoing R&D platform focused on demonstrating the value of supporting the artist-researcher model as it relates to discovering new forms of knowledge embedded in the creation of digital art. It is generally assumed that these new forms of knowledge, packaged as interactive digital art, will alter the way we socially engage with each other as well as educate ourselves to perform in this dynamic, computer-mediated environment. The Internet is first and foremost a globally distributed network that enables various nodal points an opportunity to bring wider visibility to successful research discoveries made at various intervals throughout the creative process. These discoveries can be immediately published/exhibited on the Internet and, under the right conditions, attract a network of external links that will give the research work a more significant place in the larger attention-economy.
Mark Amerika: By approaching the Internet as a compositional and publication/exhibition medium, artist researchers are positioning themselves to conduct a network of digital art practices. These networks are formed within and between academic institutions in various locations around the world which are in the process of defining new research agendas. One of the main goals of the TECHNE practice-based research initiative at the University of Colorado at Boulder is to evolve an ongoing R&D platform focused on demonstrating the value of supporting the artist-researcher model as it relates to discovering new forms of knowledge embedded in the creation of digital art. It is generally assumed that these new forms of knowledge, packaged as interactive digital art, will alter the way we socially engage with each other as well as educate ourselves to perform in this dynamic, computer-mediated environment. The Internet is first and foremost a globally distributed network that enables various nodal points an opportunity to bring wider visibility to successful research discoveries made at various intervals throughout the creative process. These discoveries can be immediately published/exhibited on the Internet and, under the right conditions, attract a network of external links that will give the research work a more significant place in the larger attention-economy.
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This is a digital interactive 'movie book' that uses embedded QuickTime within PDF. It works on Mac, not sure about Windows. They are interactive QTs which means in most of them you need to mouse in and out of the video's themselves for... more
This is a digital interactive 'movie book' that uses embedded QuickTime within PDF. It works on Mac, not sure about Windows. They are interactive QTs which means in most of them you need to mouse in and out of the video's themselves for them to 'perform'.
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This work presents a hypertextual reading of a key sequence, the song-and-dance number "You Were Meant for Me," from Kelly and Donen's 1956 musical Singin' in the Rain. The sequence is read as characteristic of the film's general semiotic... more
This work presents a hypertextual reading of a key sequence, the song-and-dance number "You Were Meant for Me," from Kelly and Donen's 1956 musical Singin' in the Rain. The sequence is read as characteristic of the film's general semiotic principles, which combine several levels of seduction to establish an aesthetic claim for a properly musical cinema.
This reading represents an experiment or heuristic exercise meant to discover possibilities for interpretation (not just of film but of any complex text) in multi-linear, hypermedia presentation. Forced into an artificially singular sequence, the components of this reading might seem elliptical and repetitive; they are designed to be explored from various perspectives and in differing combinations. Though it has an argument and an interpretive agenda, this is not so much an essay as a text in the deepest sense: a fabric of ideas deeply and multiply connected.
This reading represents an experiment or heuristic exercise meant to discover possibilities for interpretation (not just of film but of any complex text) in multi-linear, hypermedia presentation. Forced into an artificially singular sequence, the components of this reading might seem elliptical and repetitive; they are designed to be explored from various perspectives and in differing combinations. Though it has an argument and an interpretive agenda, this is not so much an essay as a text in the deepest sense: a fabric of ideas deeply and multiply connected.
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-Design/designing is enabling. This seems a fitting key concept for Design Futures. Neal then mentioned how he thinks about design as propositional or provocative, and that was an interesting way of thinking about 'enabling'as well.... more
-Design/designing is enabling. This seems a fitting key concept for Design Futures. Neal then mentioned how he thinks about design as propositional or provocative, and that was an interesting way of thinking about 'enabling'as well. Alongside that, I guess there are many other adjectives too–questioning, reflecting, playing…
Universities are in the business of preparing students for their professional, social and intellectual lives: as such they are also about producing the leaders and innovators for a rapidly changing technological world. It is not entirely... more
Universities are in the business of preparing students for their professional, social and intellectual lives: as such they are also about producing the leaders and innovators for a rapidly changing technological world. It is not entirely clear how well universities are responding to these objectives particularly when it comes to embracing new technologies such as social software. University students face many challenges to their effective participation in and engagement with the university environment.
Universities are in the business of preparing students for their professional, social and intellectual lives: as such they are also about producing the leaders and innovators for a rapidly changing technological world. It is not entirely... more
Universities are in the business of preparing students for their professional, social and intellectual lives: as such they are also about producing the leaders and innovators for a rapidly changing technological world. It is not entirely clear how well universities are responding to these objectives particularly when it comes to embracing new technologies such as social software. University students face many challenges to their effective participation in and engagement with the university environment.
This essay combines hypertext theory and Deleuze and Lévy’s concept of the virtual and the actual to argue for a material practice of hypertextual writing in the humanities.
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NOTE: The link is to a zipped QuickTime Project. It will run in QuickTime 7.x, not 10. This essay, in its original form, was an interactive softvideo essay authored in QuickTime (Figures Seven and Eight). It contained spoken commentary... more
NOTE: The link is to a zipped QuickTime Project. It will run in QuickTime 7.x, not 10.
This essay, in its original form, was an interactive softvideo essay authored in QuickTime (Figures Seven and Eight). It contained spoken commentary and various still images arranged in a multilinear outline. Each image corresponded to one of the section headings below. What is included here is the commentary, arranged according to its sections. The work uses Deleuze’s concept of the “any–instant–whatever” as a theoretical frame to approach video blogging.
This essay, in its original form, was an interactive softvideo essay authored in QuickTime (Figures Seven and Eight). It contained spoken commentary and various still images arranged in a multilinear outline. Each image corresponded to one of the section headings below. What is included here is the commentary, arranged according to its sections. The work uses Deleuze’s concept of the “any–instant–whatever” as a theoretical frame to approach video blogging.
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This essay has an interactive video essay that mirrors the textual content provided here. The interactive video and this essay were accepted for publication. The work was invited by Charlie Breindahl, one of the founding editors of... more
This essay has an interactive video essay that mirrors the textual content provided here. The interactive video and this essay were accepted for publication. The work was invited by Charlie Breindahl, one of the founding editors of Artifact, who was interested in exploring the idea of the ‘soft’ media which he had first heard me raise at an Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference in Maastricht.
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This brief and very accessible essay outlines what print literacy ‘really’ is, and then uses that as a way to understand what network literacy is, and needs to be. This is in many ways a ‘non’ academic paper that was written for media... more
This brief and very accessible essay outlines what print literacy ‘really’ is, and then uses that as a way to understand what network literacy is, and needs to be. This is in many ways a ‘non’ academic paper that was written for media educators as a pedagogical intervention.
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This was originally published as a multilinear hypertext essay online, with one major cluster of nodes collected as a pseudo linear written piece. It provided three interactive QuickTime prototypes to argue for, and demonstrate, how video... more
This was originally published as a multilinear hypertext essay online, with one major cluster of nodes collected as a pseudo linear written piece. It provided three interactive QuickTime prototypes to argue for, and demonstrate, how video could and needed to become porous to the network to become blog like, and that this was a move towards softvideo, and a more genuinely network specific video media form and practice.
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A long presentation where I argue for the actual and virtual as a way to conceive of an alternative video architecture. It's a materialist media approach to video as an object.
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A presentation I gave via Mediamatic in Amsterdam in 2006.
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These are the slides from a brief talk I gave at the docsOnline session at IDFA, 2006.
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Digital resources in humanities computing largely concentrate on critical encoding of content for access and archiving. Such projects often produce applied critical outcomes however, it appears that such work is constrained in its... more
Digital resources in humanities computing largely concentrate on critical encoding of content for access and archiving.
Such projects often produce applied critical outcomes however, it appears that such work is constrained in its applicability to other humanities communities by either a concentration on textual artefacts, or on its emphasis on the quantitative analysis of data.
This paper documents two recent film based digital resource projects that offer low scale 'tactical' encoding with applied research and learning outcomes, and models ways in which such 'middle level' resources may be relevant to a broader conception of computing in the humanities.
Such projects often produce applied critical outcomes however, it appears that such work is constrained in its applicability to other humanities communities by either a concentration on textual artefacts, or on its emphasis on the quantitative analysis of data.
This paper documents two recent film based digital resource projects that offer low scale 'tactical' encoding with applied research and learning outcomes, and models ways in which such 'middle level' resources may be relevant to a broader conception of computing in the humanities.
Much teaching practice that looks to video and blogging, including the examples offered by pod and video casting, confuses the affordances of blogging (what makes blogging successful and qualitatively different to other writing practices)... more
Much teaching practice that looks to video and blogging, including the examples offered by pod and video casting, confuses the affordances of blogging (what makes blogging successful and qualitatively different to other writing practices) with ease of publication, and in doing so replicates old media paradigms of video in new media contexts. However, for video to be successfully integrated in converged online environments it requires similar affordances to those identified and established in educational blogging. Hence, video needs to become granular, fragmentary, and something that is 'written with' rather than just a delivery or publication format.
Such a conception of video recognises that the paradigm shift afforded by the World Wide Web, which blogging and its avatars are the latest expression of, is a revolution in writing. This means the significance of these contemporary information ecologies is in our participation as peers in the system, rather than treating them, or confusing them, with new (bigger, better, faster and so on) publication or delivery systems. To write with video in these learning contexts allows for the development of ‘networked knowledge objects’ . Such practices look towards the televisual and rely upon televisual and popular literacies that may utilise poetic, musical, associative, and metaphoric forms of association and connection. These networked knowledge objects, the result of the convergence of media within the specificity of blogs as a writerly practice, pose particular problems or questions for teaching in terms of pedagogical practice, assessment, and the nature of the knowledges that may be legitimate (or not) and relevant to those working within contemporary media and information economies.
Developing a pedagogy that allows video to become writerly assists the erosion of existing practices that continue to construct students as consumers of knowledge and content. Rather than use new technologies to achieve traditional learning outcomes through the production and assessment of traditional knowledge objects, we are able to help our students author media rich time based artefacts that are network distributed and participate in the fragmentary granularity of blogs, and also support other literacies, making possible alternative knowledge practices.
Such a conception of video recognises that the paradigm shift afforded by the World Wide Web, which blogging and its avatars are the latest expression of, is a revolution in writing. This means the significance of these contemporary information ecologies is in our participation as peers in the system, rather than treating them, or confusing them, with new (bigger, better, faster and so on) publication or delivery systems. To write with video in these learning contexts allows for the development of ‘networked knowledge objects’ . Such practices look towards the televisual and rely upon televisual and popular literacies that may utilise poetic, musical, associative, and metaphoric forms of association and connection. These networked knowledge objects, the result of the convergence of media within the specificity of blogs as a writerly practice, pose particular problems or questions for teaching in terms of pedagogical practice, assessment, and the nature of the knowledges that may be legitimate (or not) and relevant to those working within contemporary media and information economies.
Developing a pedagogy that allows video to become writerly assists the erosion of existing practices that continue to construct students as consumers of knowledge and content. Rather than use new technologies to achieve traditional learning outcomes through the production and assessment of traditional knowledge objects, we are able to help our students author media rich time based artefacts that are network distributed and participate in the fragmentary granularity of blogs, and also support other literacies, making possible alternative knowledge practices.
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Miles, Adrian. “Conversations and Convergence.” First Person: International Digital Storytelling Conference. ACMI, Melbourne. 2006.
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Invited panel on blogging and documentary.
Research Interests: Blogging and Documentary
A sketch around three projects being undertaken at InterMedia UiB around what we call Media Annotation Tools. These are ways of working with media rich objects in creative and critical ways, and emphasise the combination of theory and... more
A sketch around three projects being undertaken at InterMedia UiB around what we call Media Annotation Tools. These are ways of working with media rich objects in creative and critical ways, and emphasise the combination of theory and practice that we’re developing at InterMedia UiB. (Early work from 2001.) They include video blogs, a film markup system using SMIL, and a test of that system that used The Searchers.
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This is just a sketch around work i've been doing for the last 9 months which is practical and theoretical. the vogs are video blogs and are based on low bit rate interactive online video.
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DAC99. This is an incomplete draft only.
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This was presented in Tinderbox and this is a cut and paste dump
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The major impediments to the creation and use of video online have, until recently, been understood to be technical, involving the high computational demands of video and its bandwidth requirements. These are no longer issues, and we have... more
The major impediments to the creation and use of video online have, until recently, been understood to be technical, involving the high computational demands of video and its bandwidth requirements. These are no longer issues, and we have seen, in the last 5 years, an exponential explosion in the presence, role and use of video online. However, the majority of the services, platforms, protocols and uses of video online have retained an industrial model of what video is a format and media object. This has meant that in relation to video what has been emphasised is the making, dissemination and sharing of whole, singular, video objects. In this context Web 2.0 and social media systems and services have been built that have tended to place these services ‘outside’ of and around whole videos without troubling how we or what we think video as a practice, form or object might be as a genuinely digitally defined social media thing. This has possibly hindered the development of new media forms that might develop if the qualities of social media and Web 2.0 became part of the ‘inside’ of video. This paper will be a speculative investigation into what such a ’social video’ might be to propose theoretical prototypes that can then inform critical development of online video services and archives.
TEXT THAT ACCOMPANIED SLIDES: I want to do media philosophy with nonfiction, or nonfiction with media philosophy. I do this using the material specificity of digital, online, video. About 7am is a project that illustrates an idea while... more
TEXT THAT ACCOMPANIED SLIDES:
I want to do media philosophy with nonfiction, or nonfiction with media philosophy. I do this using the material specificity of digital, online, video. About 7am is a project that illustrates an idea while also being an assemblage to think with. I like to imagine that it thinks me as much as I think it.
I open Vine, point my iPhone, touch the screen. Record. Six seconds. Thirty frames per second. One hundred and eighty frames. At the same time sound is recorded. Forty four thousand, one hundred times per second. I won’t bother calculating how many samples that is for six seconds.
What Kittler describes as technical media is, at its beginning, always and only a recording media. It is technical media not so much because of its technological apparatus, as its being smeared by the deep indifference of the mechanical and mechanistic. My camera does not speed up, get closer, pause, because it notices or cares about what it observes. Technical media by definition does not get excited or bored, by what it records, it just does. This is perhaps one of its hallmarks as an indexical apparatus.
Whether still photography, film, video, or sound, technical media at the moment of record is, at heart, a technics of sampling. A camera captures an instant in this fraction of a second. A film camera at a metronomic twenty four frames per second. Video, depending on which technical standard applies, at either twenty five, thirty, or even sixty frames per second. Sound at anything from a very low eight thousand samples per second through to the current professional recording benchmark of five million six hundred and sixty four thousand eight hundred times per second.
Technical media is a sampling media defined by the indifferent regularity of its apparatus of record.
About 7am interrogates and plays with this technicity of sampling by externalising these ‘invisible’ technical protocols into a human procedure for me to adapt to. It still relies on a machinic recording but this is simplified and made explicit through my deliberate use of the domestic technology of a phone camera and a freely available recording app. The ‘sample’ that comes to matter is phenomenologically informal. A more or less specific time — around about 7am — was chosen because my daughter usually rises at six, when the project begun in early May it more or less coincided with sunrise, and it is early enough in the day to become part of my morning without bumping into school, work, family, or a variety of industrial deadlines that enframe the diurnal.
The informality of the time of recording is repeated through its specific location. The six seconds is only filmed if I am at home, and it is, again more or less, from the same location, standing by a bird feeder in the front yard of the family home looking eastwards across a small valley toward a ridge. Near enough in place and time, is, literally, good enough.
I like to think that this grounding of the sample into the domestic, of my home, my family, and me standing there (often in pyjamas) saluting the sun with an iPhone in the front yard is making material the indifferent repeating of the same, regardless of what happens behind and before. A machine recording that with gay indifference samples all that is present to its particular technological view, recording what is with industrial apathy toward meaning and significance.
Ontography is a method of list making that wants the detail of the list and its lack of narrative to suggest and describe how ‘thick’ things are in themselves, their distance from us, and from each other. It is a way to think about the relations between things without making people the conduit of, or for, the world. It is a nonfiction practice to the extent that ‘fiction’ requires, and privileges, our subjectivity.
About 7am and ontography is not a hermeneutics, and anything we may want to understand the work to be ‘about’ is parasitical to the indifference of technical media and this particular work’s procedures of making. This is, of course, a conceit, situated as it is within my accidental life world. The possible frisson between what is observed ‘accidentally’, the series in its own splendour, and the application of gregorian and poetical metadata to structure the series, makes explicit that time based media is a relational media. Relational media recognises that what these videos mean is created by the terms and relations they are placed in, which is quite a different thing to what they are images of. In relational media such terms and relations are outside of, external to, the content of these shots and sequences, and this is the place of online, networked nonfiction.
I want to do media philosophy with nonfiction, or nonfiction with media philosophy. I do this using the material specificity of digital, online, video. About 7am is a project that illustrates an idea while also being an assemblage to think with. I like to imagine that it thinks me as much as I think it.
I open Vine, point my iPhone, touch the screen. Record. Six seconds. Thirty frames per second. One hundred and eighty frames. At the same time sound is recorded. Forty four thousand, one hundred times per second. I won’t bother calculating how many samples that is for six seconds.
What Kittler describes as technical media is, at its beginning, always and only a recording media. It is technical media not so much because of its technological apparatus, as its being smeared by the deep indifference of the mechanical and mechanistic. My camera does not speed up, get closer, pause, because it notices or cares about what it observes. Technical media by definition does not get excited or bored, by what it records, it just does. This is perhaps one of its hallmarks as an indexical apparatus.
Whether still photography, film, video, or sound, technical media at the moment of record is, at heart, a technics of sampling. A camera captures an instant in this fraction of a second. A film camera at a metronomic twenty four frames per second. Video, depending on which technical standard applies, at either twenty five, thirty, or even sixty frames per second. Sound at anything from a very low eight thousand samples per second through to the current professional recording benchmark of five million six hundred and sixty four thousand eight hundred times per second.
Technical media is a sampling media defined by the indifferent regularity of its apparatus of record.
About 7am interrogates and plays with this technicity of sampling by externalising these ‘invisible’ technical protocols into a human procedure for me to adapt to. It still relies on a machinic recording but this is simplified and made explicit through my deliberate use of the domestic technology of a phone camera and a freely available recording app. The ‘sample’ that comes to matter is phenomenologically informal. A more or less specific time — around about 7am — was chosen because my daughter usually rises at six, when the project begun in early May it more or less coincided with sunrise, and it is early enough in the day to become part of my morning without bumping into school, work, family, or a variety of industrial deadlines that enframe the diurnal.
The informality of the time of recording is repeated through its specific location. The six seconds is only filmed if I am at home, and it is, again more or less, from the same location, standing by a bird feeder in the front yard of the family home looking eastwards across a small valley toward a ridge. Near enough in place and time, is, literally, good enough.
I like to think that this grounding of the sample into the domestic, of my home, my family, and me standing there (often in pyjamas) saluting the sun with an iPhone in the front yard is making material the indifferent repeating of the same, regardless of what happens behind and before. A machine recording that with gay indifference samples all that is present to its particular technological view, recording what is with industrial apathy toward meaning and significance.
Ontography is a method of list making that wants the detail of the list and its lack of narrative to suggest and describe how ‘thick’ things are in themselves, their distance from us, and from each other. It is a way to think about the relations between things without making people the conduit of, or for, the world. It is a nonfiction practice to the extent that ‘fiction’ requires, and privileges, our subjectivity.
About 7am and ontography is not a hermeneutics, and anything we may want to understand the work to be ‘about’ is parasitical to the indifference of technical media and this particular work’s procedures of making. This is, of course, a conceit, situated as it is within my accidental life world. The possible frisson between what is observed ‘accidentally’, the series in its own splendour, and the application of gregorian and poetical metadata to structure the series, makes explicit that time based media is a relational media. Relational media recognises that what these videos mean is created by the terms and relations they are placed in, which is quite a different thing to what they are images of. In relational media such terms and relations are outside of, external to, the content of these shots and sequences, and this is the place of online, networked nonfiction.
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There are three things that matter in relation to a networked specific practice and media production. These three terms apply to the formal attributes of digital media, the qualities that practice requires, and how audiences participate,... more
There are three things that matter in relation to a networked specific practice and media production. These three terms apply to the formal attributes of digital media, the qualities that practice requires, and how audiences participate, use, and engage with networked media. There is no hierarchy amongst these three terms, and they move prove to be insufficient. The terms are porousness, granularity, and facets. The list does not include database, user, or interactivity, as these are not causes but consequences of this triumvirate of terms.
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This is a digital anthology co-created with honours students. The project took the symposium ("I Link Therefore I Am") presentations of academics and then translated them into a network specific publication. Their brief was to imagine... more
This is a digital anthology co-created with honours students. The project took the symposium ("I Link Therefore I Am") presentations of academics and then translated them into a network specific publication. Their brief was to imagine that academic publishing had been invented now - what would it be like?
Citation: Tuckwell, Dion et al. “The Violence of Text.” Ed. Adrian Miles. Kairos 8.1 (2003): n. pag. Web.
Citation: Tuckwell, Dion et al. “The Violence of Text.” Ed. Adrian Miles. Kairos 8.1 (2003): n. pag. Web.
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An anthology of work created honours students undertaking nonfiction research. I designed, curated, and edited the publication.
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This is an iBook anthology and there is a non AV media PDF version too: This rezine is the first transitory, possibly ephemeral, quick and dirty research sketch, or field notes, of our work. The intent is to show things in progress, a... more
This is an iBook anthology and there is a non AV media PDF version too:
This rezine is the first transitory, possibly ephemeral, quick and dirty research sketch, or field notes, of our work. The intent is to show things in progress, a snap shot collage list of small bibs and bobs that are all on their way to becoming something else. A chap book come digital pamphlet that is an opportunity to begin to describe and argue for the sorts of theoretical and critically engaged creative nonfiction we do. Let's open the black box of research and scholarship and rethink scale, practice, documentation, the rational and poetic
This rezine is the first transitory, possibly ephemeral, quick and dirty research sketch, or field notes, of our work. The intent is to show things in progress, a snap shot collage list of small bibs and bobs that are all on their way to becoming something else. A chap book come digital pamphlet that is an opportunity to begin to describe and argue for the sorts of theoretical and critically engaged creative nonfiction we do. Let's open the black box of research and scholarship and rethink scale, practice, documentation, the rational and poetic
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Research Interests:
New documentary is a small project that has come out of a conversation to host an email list, (there's an outline about list etiquette) and a public bibliography (with a description about its use), about matters pertaining to the digital,... more
New documentary is a small project that has come out of a conversation to host an email list, (there's an outline about list etiquette) and a public bibliography (with a description about its use), about matters pertaining to the digital, networks, and documentary. The intent is to provide a forum for informal discussions outside of the more formal national and international projects and conferences available. Shoot us an email if you have any questions.
Research Interests:
A curriculum that is about how to 'be' a digital, network only video practitioner, where video is no longer looking backwards to its industrial restrictions of limited access and linear, single broadcast. What I teach, how and why.... more
A curriculum that is about how to 'be' a digital, network only video practitioner, where video is no longer looking backwards to its industrial restrictions of limited access and linear, single broadcast. What I teach, how and why. (Basically online interactive nonfiction course with think description of curriculum, pedagogy, assessments and so on.)
Research Interests:
This work represents the documentation that emerged from a panel at the Visible Evidence XXIV documentary conference, held in Buenos Aires in 2017. The panel consisted of a series of propositions and interrogations of new epistemologies... more
This work represents the documentation that emerged from a panel at the Visible Evidence XXIV documentary conference, held in Buenos Aires in 2017. The panel consisted of a series of propositions and interrogations of new epistemologies and ontologies for understanding interactive documentary through a materialist lens. These have been collected here, and the panel members invited to further develop their thinking in light of the panel. The work, as curated here, is deliberately between the tone of the presentation and a finished article. They are more formal than the former, and shorter and less refined than the latter.
In this manner they are part of an ongoing experiment in alternative academic practices and forms that seek to open, critique, and revision scholarship as a black box.
In this manner they are part of an ongoing experiment in alternative academic practices and forms that seek to open, critique, and revision scholarship as a black box.