Monthly Archive for October, 2004

This is Not Art Day Two

Published
by
David Wolf
on October 25, 2004
in Modes of analyzing new media and Note to self
. 1 Comment

Next day I chaired Christy Dena’s paper at Critical Animals: Towards a Poetics of Multi-Channel Storytelling.

“Transmedia storytelling is, simply put, franchises: a movie is followed by a game, then perhaps a comic, website and so on. This paper outlines the poetics being developed for multi-channel storytelling; suggesting narrative schema intended to guide story creation and literary criticism.”

A couple of weeks before I was a little scared about chairing and running out of things to say or ask but once I read the paper I realised that it would be no problem at all - I had a million questions to ask. Christy began her current research topic when she was writing a novel and thought it would be interesting to let the reader chat online with a character (a bot) from the book as they read. When she looked into what had been written and done before she found quite a gap. While much had been written about spin offs and franchises such as Star Wars, there was very little on multi-channel storytelling whereby a single story is told across multiple media.

Some interesting research in this area (referenced in Dena’s paper) is Jane McGonical’s Avant Game and her paper from melbourneDAC. McGonical looks at alternate and mixed reality gaming whereby the use of multiple media such as websites, email, faxes, telephone answering machines and posters are required to traverse and piece together a story. (After I saw McGonical’s presentation at DAC I really wanted to produce an alternate reality game for my MA along the lines of The Beast. I soon realised how massively complex and time consuming its production it must have been.)

Christy’s paper can be found here: Star of Dena: Multi-channel Poetics paper

Later that day was Michelle Phillipov’s presentation on Death Metal vocality. It drew by far the largest crowd of all the Critical Animals sessions I saw. I wrote a little bit about it back here

I headed over to the Cambridge Hotel to help set up the video projectors etc for the weekend’s gigs. I brought my laptop with me just in case there was a need for an emergency VJ. Sure enough, I ended up playing a set in the main room with a band who’s name I never found out. It was quite good, with guitars and beats played live with a MIDI drumkit I think (it all happened very fast). I continued to play through until the next band and VJ were set up. Again, I used the Vidget.

On the Friday night I also documented Ben Frost (sound) and Khalid Abdullahi’s (video) School of Emotional Engineering set. It was cool to watch and listen intensely as I focused, framing shots. I got some really nice silhouetted images of Ben and Khalid with the video projections behind them. I also got some good closeups of their faces which were softly lit by their laptop screens. Hopefully some excerpts will show up online at some point soon.

This is Not Art Day One

Published
by
David Wolf
on October 24, 2004
in Gigs, Modes of analyzing new media, Note to self and Tech
. Closed

THIS IS NOT ART 2004

I arrived in Newcastle late on the Wednesday night, its was a very long drive from Melbourne.

I stayed at an Irish themed pub called the Northern Star Hotel. The room was clean, fairly big (bigger than my room at home!), had two desks for me to set up all my equipment on and a tv with Channel V (doubled as a handy preview monitor too).

On Thursday morning I finished preparation for my Critical Animals presentation. I brought my printer/scanner/multifunction thing with me so I could scan in some last minute images from books (I still need to find some video of John Whitney’s films) and print out some notes to refer to.

I decided to use the Finder as my presentation tool after a bad experience a few months ago trying to use Keynote on the 2nd monitor output of my laptop with the notes on my own screen. It was very messy and the audience couldn’t see what I was doing properly. This time I set up a series of folders for each of my main points. Within each of these folders I had either examples (Quicktime files, jpegs etc) or sub-folders with sub-points. This worked very well, letting me keep track of where I was up to and letting the audience see exactly what I was doing.

Finder as presentation tool screenshot

I just caught the end of Keir Smith’s presentation From Transmission to Multiplicity: Interactive Art Installations as a Site for Research which looked very interesting. Keir is a Phd candidate from iCinema at UNSW in Sydney. He is studying as part of both the Collage of Fine Arts (COFA) and the Computer Science department.

“Keir Smith explores the changing methods with which interactive art installations are being designed, built and experienced, and the shift from singular author/creators, to groups of collaborators and multiple users.”

I look forward to reading his full paper when it is published in New Media Poetics.

Later that night I headed over to the QuantaCrib, an all-in improvised AV jam space. If I expanded the collection of computer and music bits and pieces that fill my tiny room to fill a hall sized venue this is what it would look like. Great fun. They had two video projectors going so I plugged into one and Tim plugged into the other. While he played with video feedback off his laptop monitor with Universal Access effects, I played with Vidget 3. Later another guy (who’s name I forget) played with a MAX patch he had written. I continued to play, matching some of his dark and heavily masked imagery. I tried to keep up but after a while I couldn’t stand to look at my low frame rate / low resolution video next to his super-fast, super-smooth lovely images. It was all good fun anyway.

Faxed Head & Critical Animals

Published
by
David Wolf
on October 23, 2004
in Music, Note to self and Research Methods
. 0 Comments

It has been deathly quiet around dpwolf/blog land lately so I thought I’d bring some deathly noise.

Faxed Head are an extreme / death / black / noise / metal band from Coalinga USA with an excellent (very dark) sense of humor. See their bio on the site for their complete mythology and read how the members’ group suicide pact went horribly wrong leaving Mc Patrick Head confined to a wheelchair and permanently covered in plaid, Neck Head with no head at all and LaBreya Tar Pits Head with his face covered in tar.

The site also features mp3s and some video of their 1997 tour of Australia. I remember seeing them on Channel 31 way back then, hilarious ;-) Their most recent album features a ‘re-imagining’ of the 2pac/Dr Dre classic California Love as Coalinga Love. It looks like their site hasn’t been updated in a couple of years (maintained by ASCII Head!) so I wonder if they are still around.

Listening to Faxed Head also reminds me of Michelle Phillipov’s presentation at Critical Animals in Newcastle: ‘Septic vomit of chyme’: Death metal vocality and the disavowal of identification.

“Rock’s “authenticity” has long been predicated on its ability to “represent” the everyday lives of its audience, with the singing voice functioning as the primary identificatory locus of listening. Michelle Phillipov explores how death metal troubles this literal reading of the power of rock and voice.”

While I missed most of the actual paper, I caught the discussion which followed in a room full of lively metal enthusiasts. Christy Dena has posted a a full rundown of the Critical Animals Papers (including my presentaion) at the ANU underthesun collaborative weblog.