W/Here: Contesting Knowledge in the 21st Century

W/Here is a symposium organized by Emily Carr University of Art and Design and the European League of Institutes of Art. The conference will be taking place from December 7-9th, 2011. 

Programme

“W/Here: Contesting Knowledge in the 21st Century?” will include perspectives from artists, designers, musicians, educators, administrators and cultural workers who have deep commitments to the role of Higher Arts Education. Over the three days at both emily carr university and other cultural locations around Vancouver the Symposium will address the following themes:

Have We Ever Been Modern | The Institutions of the 21st Century

Dispersed Learning | The Students of the 21st Century 

DIY Open Source Culture and Learning Cultures | Leadership in the 21st Century

MOBILE WORKSHOPS A series of mobile workshops have been planned, with groups of 20 participants visiting a range of Vancouver’s cultural organisations, to experience how these themes manifest in the configurations of arts organisations today.

New Approaches to Applied Masters Degrees | Masters in Digital Media, Great Northern Way

First Nations Culture and the Digital Turn | Museum of Anthropology

A Creative Commons for the City | W2 Community Media Centre

Alternative Models of Creation | Progress Lab 1422

Wim Wenders in 3 Dimensions

There was a wonderful conference in Toronto that began on Saturday, June 11 and ended on the 14^th of June. Entitled 3D FLIC or Toronto International Stereoscopic 3D Conference the conference was centred on new developments in Stereoscopic 3D Cinema. Wim Wenders kicked off the meeting and among other things gave the speech of his life about his new 3D film on Pina Bausch the great dance choreographer who died in 2009. 

The speech was filled with his profound reaction to Bausch’s dances and dancers, to her theatre as he put it. His decision to translate those feelings into 3D was monumental largely because what he has done is reinvent the medium. Stereoscopic 3D has never looked like this with depth, added volume and most importantly the primacy of the dancing body coming to life. Wender’s film marks the dawn of a new era in the cinema and the people who attended the conference from IMAX pioneer Graeme Ferguson to Peter Anderson who has worked in mainstream 3D production for decades to Emily Carr University’s Maria Lantin whose research into 3D is leading the way to new forms of expression, all contributed to an exciting discussion of this new age of image creation.

Ocean breath from Maria Lantin on Vimeo.

There were many other presentations including one from Catherine Owens who was responsible for bringing U23D to the screen in 2008. This amazing film of a U2 concert in Argentina produced in both IMAX 3D and 3D Digital was path breaking. Her presentation about the making of the film revealed not only the challenges but also the kind of detail in production that is necessary to achieve a creative outcome.

3D is not easy and requires a profound rethink of conventional moviemaking methods. 3D changes not only how viewers interact with screens but also how stories are told. We are at the cusp of a transformative moment in the history of the cinema.

A Utilitarian World (2)

Imagine a world in which the daily experience of attending school does not exist. Take that a bit further and imagine learning as an experience that is both lifelong and not constrained by institutions, not necessarily located within institutions, but fundamental to everyday life.

In a utilitarian world, learning is sequestered to one place or one time.

Learning, in my opinion is by definition never finished. Of course there is a narrative to the learning experience — a beginning and an end, but the entire process of learning is always temporary and crucially, contingent.

In a utilitarian world, learning is first of all ‘located’ to some place and then given a particular time, fit into a schedule.

Even online education which should be open and less linear has in many instances been structured into a sequential process. If the digital age has so far taught us anything, it is that sequence should be based on multiple pathways and diverse strategies to learning. Learners want to map their direction based on a vast number of factors from state of mind, to the demands of everyday life.

This need to take control — manifested most fully in the rise of social media — has its own problems. For example, given the wealth of information that now suffuses everything that we do, how can we distinguish between good and bad information? This is a major issue for parents whose children are exposed to any number of questionable web sites and problematic claims from many different sources. But, the need to take control is also essential to the learning experience. After all, learning if it is to be valuable must also be seen to have value. Value is gained when learners feel some degree of empowerment from the process.

In this context, teachers have become curators as well as mentors and guardians of history. The word curator is derived from the Latin, “curator” which means overseer, manager and of importance to this discussion, guardian. Curator also comes from the word, to cure. The challenge is that curators have to be able to teach critical thinking.

In a utilitarian space, there is less and less time for historical and critical engagement with ideas. The rush is on to achieve a great deal as quickly as possible and the notion that for example, it might be important to spend some time on areas of study that seem peripheral to a set of pragmatic goals becomes less and less attractive.

In my next post in this series, I will explore contemplation which marks out a territory that is far more speculative than an overly utilitarian approach could ever permit.

Part 1 can be found here.

Distractions, distractions……

I love the angst of commentators who deal with YOUTH in the digital age. They always seem to find the most negative things to say about contemporary culture and in particular anything to do with young people and their digital habits. Take as an example, David Carr of the New York Times. In a recent article Paying for Times at SXSW Carr talks about the multi-tasking and often disturbing young person who glances at their iPhone or Blackberry while engaging in conversations with others. I had a visit once from an individual who glanced at his Blackberry for the entire duration of our one hour meeting. Sure, this is disturbing but not because of the technology. Anyone who cannot maintain their connection with an interlocutor (daydreaming incessantly while I say important things!!), is saying as much about themselves as they are about the person they are not listening to. 

Conversations are by their very nature rather elliptical and fluid. This is after all why so much of what we say to each other goes off in many different directions, our words and sentences are often misinterpreted and more often than not we misunderstand each other. Distractions are at the core of the communications process. No one is ever fully attuned to an other and part of the challenge is to wend our way through this repetitive conundrum with some dignity and self-awareness. We need to stop blaming technology for modifying or creating habits that already exist! Perhaps then, we will actually take fuller control of our conversations and try and understand the inherent distortions as wonderful opportunities for further exploration and not as dead ends. Conversations, discussions and presentations gain their strength from our struggle to make ourselves understood which is why from time to time we are actually a little less distracted than usual!

Smule, Eye-Pad :) and Pachelbel

Boston Med, Social Media and Reality Television

In 1999, the television show, Big Brother began airing in the Netherlands. Within a year it had spread to ten other countries and within five years to seventy countries. The title of the show comes from George Orwell’s novel, 1984. This article however is neither about Big Brother nor about Survivor, which began a year later although both are fascinating phenomena and worthy of discussion, but rather is about Boston Med a documentary television show with a difference.

Is it a coincidence that so-called reality television gained notoriety at the same time as the Internet and Social Media became more and more ubiquitous? And, to what degree have the combination of reality TV and traditional documentary practices become interdependent? The Internet has also expanded the ground and breadth of narrative television by creating an interface between “real” life and storytelling particularly through the use of social media. Let me explore these points a bit further.

Clearly, the nomenclature is contradictory here. From the start, reality television has been a sophisticated cover for a carefully planned process built on the foundations of the documentary, fictional cinema and TV. The editing is as intense as conventional narratives, and the shooting is never as spontaneous as it looks. The brilliance of reality television is that it has managed to create an aura of truth about what happens to its characters. From marriage to food to fashion design, using contests and conflict, reality TV has become the cheapest way to tell stories about people, their lives and their aspirations. It also exploits both the audiences and the characters that are central to its success. 

The word reality refers to what appears to be spontaneous activities and events that even in real life are never as spontaneous as the shows make them appear.  Reality TV is a combination of candid camera, news type editing and gossip. Think of Entourage as reality TV, and if you resist that, ask yourself why?

The confusion here between artifice and real life is the same as the artificial distinction between online and offline life. There is as much storytelling to everyday life as there is reality, tragedy and happiness. Fiction and truth are bedfellows. The relationships are fuzzy and sometimes infuriating, but always mixed. In other words, there is no such thing as truth without fiction. This is a broader argument; suffice to say that a show like Boston Med takes the medical drama of ER or Grey’s Anatomy to another and far more important level, blatantly using the devices, locales and narrative structure of those shows to far greater effect.

A crucial distinguishing feature of Boston Med is its use of music both during and after very serious medical events: this is combined with first person narratives sometimes by doctors and other times by nurses and patients and family. All the characters talk to the camera and thus to the audience. Their spontaneity has been carefully constructed both through editing and some terrific camera work. This is all done in a present tense sort of way to make it feel as if events are unfolding in real time, even if the histories we witness have been compressed into a few minutes.

The brilliance of the show is the seamless manner in which the stories link together over the length of the series and the interconnected sets of relations that we witness between all the characters irrespective of their status. The camera work, sometimes handheld and sometimes not, is carefully paced between close-ups and traveling shots but never to the point of distraction.

Every hour of this eight-hour series was punctuated by helicopter shots of patients arriving for treatment. These were combined with exterior shots of Boston both from the ground and from the air. Metaphors of urgency were built into the fabric of every sequence. Everything is normal in this world, but nothing can ever really be normal in medicine.

The template for each show is similar: bring doctors and patients into the foreground through interviews that appear to be spontaneous and frame their experiences of medical care from crisis to cure, or in some instances to failure; cover cases of great complexity where the doctors become natural heroes as they struggle with what seem to be overwhelming odds; intercut some carefully constructed operating room footage to give the experiences an air of reality, and add the drama of personal conflict, as well as the human elements necessary to identify with the characters.

If all of this seems mechanical, Boston Med for the most part pulls it off largely because so many of the characters are really interesting and also because it is impossible not to feel the pain and fear of various patients as they struggle with their bodies and their mortality. It is also fascinating to peer into the lives of physicians and nurses and to recognize their humanity and the sacrifices they make for their profession and their patients.

The fact that this carefully constructed show seems to be “real” is because most of Boston Med tells genuine stories through a highly sophisticated use of artifice. Fabrication is at the core of the documentary impulse, and this is not meant as a pejorative comment. This brings me back to the Internet.

The Internet is really a vast network of story pages told for the most part in the first person with Facebook as the primary interface among people seeking information about each other, as well as providing a context for the exchange of ideas and fantasies. Facebook and Twitter are built on narrative principles. On Facebook you have your main page, which is your home. This is a place where you can list what you like and show everything from your photo album to your furniture. Facebook pages unfold synchronously and asynchronously. And for many, Facebook allows the personal to be public. Your Facebook home is your environment and your diary, a visual, oral, chat and game space, the living room or basement of your house.

Twitter augments all of this by increasing the pace of connection and varying the density and purpose of the stories people tell each other. The overlay of first person and third person perspectives opens the news and personal events to constant comment. In other words, social media takes private lives and makes them public even if you limit your “friends” to a few hundred. Imagine trying to do what Facebook does over the phone.

This intermingling of the private and the public is at the core of the storytelling on Boston Med and, in fact, all of forms of television and film. Our identities are being shaped by these interactions, by the interfaces between the stories we tell each other and their transposition into the broadcast and social media context. The media in general are making it possible to be unashamedly voyeuristic under the cover of truth.

Watch Boston Med and you will understand why. 

Photography Shifts to Data

(Please see comments link below. Two very interesting responses to this entry.)

The average digital camera owner has over 5,000 photos in various libraries, which in the digital age is a rather quaint name for data that cannot be cataloged using conventional means. Even a Flickr library is about editing time, that is organizing sequences, blocking out events and arranging photographs so that some sort of story can be told. But, this is a different activity from creating a photo album and is closer to a scrapbook.

All this material is grist and fodder for even more complex social networks that can be accessed through mobile means and at home. Links become a crucial part of all this, but where does aesthetics end up? That perhaps is the key question because networks are only partially visible to those who use them and data is only that, information. The raw nature of information means that "editing" is now an activity of time management — the time needed to organize material and content — the development of typologies and catalogs to organize content, not only when photos were taken but superimposed Google maps to show location even though geography may not be that significant to the photograph and its look.

Photos are defined more by connections than by their individual nature, more by their virtual location on Facebook than by their links to events in real time. Photos move along a continuum from events to their classification and from there to screen-based albums, folders and projects. They are rarely printed.