My “Take-aways” After Composing Digital Media

For this blog post, I intend to reflect on my own digital compositions as well as discussing some of the ideas about storytelling that we read and discussed in class. Throughout this course I have found a particular interest in the wide variety of methods we can use to alter objects – particularly entities of media – to make them tell completely different stories. The mini-workshops we did in class were especially thought-provoking, being that we took the same video, music and sound clips and turned them into new media, with each piece telling a new and different story. However, looking at my own work critically was what really got me thinking.

In our video projects we took a person, learned about them, and told a story about them by taking a particular angle. I made my video portrait about Lauren Kennedy, in which I highlighted her sense of adventure and eagerness to explore the world. I used my available means of persuasion (Lauren’s quirks and body language, as well as camera angles, music, etc.) to convince my audience that she is a fun and exciting individual, and everyone should love her for it. I am quite pleased with the outcome of this project, but looking back on it after this semester I realize that I could have used storytelling elements to provoke greater interest in Lauren and her travels by withholding information instead of presenting it up front. Rather than telling the audience that Lauren likes to travel and exposing her personality gradually throughout the piece, I could have reversed the order to make the audience curious about Lauren. I could have used my available means to persuade the audience to love her even before finding out how adventurous she is. However, I do feel I mixed different effects well, including lighting, camera angles, and music choices. In mixing these elements I was able to portray Lauren in exactly the way I intended to tell the story.

In my recovery story, I learned even more. By limiting the available means of persuasion to a still image, without sound or movement, I had to open my mind to the possibility of creating effects in place of the movement/sound. Instead of using body language, I captured tiny details in extreme close-ups, and I replaced sound with ambiguous written word. This time I managed to withhold information and remain ambiguous about the people, while focusing on the hands to tell their stories. In the recovery story I used withholding information and the means of persuasion to tell a lot of different stories within a single plot (a typical Monday), and I think I used the withheld information and ambiguity to my favor. In this way I was able to give the hands character and life, but also allow us to relate to them – the hands became our hands in a way.

My sound piece, however, was by far my most thought-provoking composition. Limiting myself once again in my means of persuasion I was allowed only two elements: sound and silence. In my project the most fascinating discovery I made was a discovery of the power of silence. Silence did not mean much to me before. Silence had just been time in which the audience might get bored, so I had previously dedicated myself to ensuring the audience’s constant stimulation and entertainment. But as we discussed in class, sound can be altered, stretched, and bent in different directions (it is a vector). To me, silence is the same. Silence is what we use to make the audience hear and feel our stories beyond what sound can provide us with. Silence can be stretched or altered to give different affect to our compositions, and this made me think.

If silence is used in audio to create a different story, could visuals do the same? In my recovery piece, when I was limited to still images, was there a different story being told for each face that was not seen with the hands? In my video portrait, could I have presented a different affect by using a lack of sound (or keeping sound, but lacking visual)? The greatest lesson I have learned in this class was that everything matters. Every element of persuasion you choose to compose media makes a difference by telling a different story, or creating a new affect. Every sound, visual, or silence (of sound or visual) generates something new from something familiar – and that is what I find so beautiful about composing digital media.

Engineering Digital Media

Technology is tool that is invaluable and unavoidable to our society today. You can’t really do anything without it anymore. This is one of the reasons why I chose to major in Computer Engineering, well that, and my love of coding and computer systems.  I think that unknowingly, this class has a lot to do with my major. It’s not obvious how, but I’ve drawn some conclusions that I want to remember throughout both my college and future career.

Conclusion #1: Change

We talked a lot about change in this class. Whether it was during the “Remix Manefesto” movie or about how the way we archive things has changed. It’s something that’s inevitable, but it’s also something that everybody hates. We talked about this at my sororities meeting last week and how the alumni always have something negative to say when they come back because we changed something “that was perfect the way it was.” When it comes down to it, nothing is perfect and everything can use a little bit of improvement here and there, but people, including me sometimes, don’t like seeing their hard work and ideas turned into something different—just like remixed music. However, if we didn’t build off of other people’s ideas and improve upon things already begun, we would still be using dial up internet and Myspace (just like the good old days). Creating software is just like creating music in a sense. All of the commands and codes are out there (like all of the sounds or colors in the world), but the way we arrange and manipulate them are what will create something new and innovative.

Conclusion #2: Affectiveness

All of our projects that we did this semester had a central purpose to them, and it was to make the audience feel something about what they just watched, read, or listened to. We called this affect. This is something that I really need to remember because keeping the affect in mind throughout the developing process actually helped me to know what direction to go in. I always end up knowing how to start a project but not how to finish it; by knowing what I want my audience to feel or remember, I have a concrete, attainable goal to aim for, from which I can base my ending off of. The idea of an affective perspective should be applied to everything we produce. For example, when presenting a design idea to a future employer, do I want them to feel amazed? Impressed? Excited? Depending on how I want my boss to react, I’ll have to sway my presentation in a certain direction. Things such as suspense, reflection, tone of voice, and empathy are all different means of persuasion that can change the affect of my piece. I feel as though I have become more aware of this and want to use it while becoming even more fluent with it.

Conclusion #3: Adaptation

Within just a few weeks of being in the class, I was introduced to several types of new software I’d never used before (PremierePro, Photoshop, CSS, ect.). By not being taught exactly how to use them, rather having them introduced then being sent off to delve into them more on our own, I got a lot better at adapting to new things. This class dealt with a lot of self-learning, something that I do a lot of in my engineering classes. A program like Photoshop can’t simply be taught because the amount of things you can do with it are endless. You can be given the resources, but you need to develop the skills yourself. This is something that can not only be applied to programming or engineering in general, but to life. I don’t know how many times this can be reiterated, but nothing in life is handed to you; usually you have to work for it and build off of the means that have been provided in order to be successful.

Overall, I feel like this class opened my eyes to new world of technology in the media. Understanding how the things we produce and create can be beneficial or completely useless to certain people really effects how we make something. What I really want to remember most from this class is that everything that I produce should be something worthy of being archived. I want people to be able to use what I create to make something even better, that way, I can say that something I created was meaningful to someone other than me.

Blog 5: Jaime the Arrogant

I chose an image from the photo essay “Where Children Sleep” by James Mollison. The image I chose was the photo of Jaime, age 9, from New York. This particular image caught my eye in a way I did not expect. It seems that as I clicked my way through the images of “Where Children Sleep,” I expected to feel very sad when I looked at photos of poor children, and relieved when I saw images of kids who had a decent place to sleep. Unfortunately, when I looked at this picture, I felt the distinct feelings of judgment and frustration. Now, I do not think my reaction was a result of the boy’s apparent wealth; I believe it was a result of the framing in the image.

First, our eye is drawn to the all-white furniture against the horrifying pattern of the carpet. My eyes actually felt strained when I looked at that carpet. Then the lines of the photo point us towards the boy’s desk. On this desk, there are a number of very neatly placed objects. Above the desk, on two perfectly mounted shelves, were a globe, what seem to be miniature versions of tourist spots (the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State building, the statue of liberty), and a surprising number of trophies, as well as medals dangling from the bottom shelf. The busyness of the carpet, the wallpaper which mismatches with the uniform all-white furniture, and the child’s belongings all seem so out of place, so I might consider that as a hook for this photo (rather than the whole essay). While everything in the room seems to have a place, something seems off – possibly a result of the angle of the picture, since I always thought pictures of a bedroom tend to be taken from a front or side view of the bed (with the bed as the focus point in the room). Instead, we get the whole essence of Jaime’s room.

The story conveyed seems to be the story of a boy in New York, who is heavily involved in sports (signified by the trophies, as well as the golf clubs in the corner) and music (the cello). We can also see that this boy is wealthy enough to have a decent-sized room in New York – which is impressive in itself. However, I think my frustration came from the juxtaposition of the picture of Jaime with the contents of his room. It seems that Jaime must be wealthy – given his belongings, his awful carpet, and the suit that he is wearing (seriously, that kid is 9) – and yet his facial expression indicates that he could not care less. He looks bored and that struck me, as I looked at this image in contrast with the rest of the photo essay. It was hard to take in a boy with nice things, who had such an unconcerned look on his face, as I tried to understand the hardships of young children who slept on dirty tires, or on a barren hill. My sadness for the poor children was juxtaposed awkwardly with the image of Jaime, which resulted in my overall angry response to the photo. While I wish I could say this picture makes me happy because Jaime has a place to sleep, the elements that James Mollison used in this picture just force my opinion of Jaime as an arrogant little boy who should be more grateful for what he has, when some people do not even have a bed to sleep on. It’s fascinating how quick we are to judge the characters in the images set before us. It makes me wonder if our digital age is making us more or less prone to assuming things about people we do not know. Has an image become the new “first impression”?

This is a blog post about John Baledessari…

In this documentary, the director goes about describing the life of John Baledessari in a very fast paced and artistic way. I was immediately intrigued at the start of the video due to the straightforward approach the narrator took towards documenting the belongings of John Baledessari rather than introducing him right away. I think that there was a lot of purpose behind the fact that the narrator continuously said John Baledessari’s name rather than using “his”, “him”, or “he”. This purpose most likely goes along with the argument or goal for the entire documentary which was to remember the name of John Baledessari. I don’t think that there would be any other reason for his name to be not only said aloud so often, but also to be plastered all over the screen visually. By targeting two different senses, the director of this documentary is able to more adequately ingrain the information into the audiences mind.

Not only does the director use the dualism of audio and visual stimulation for “John Baledessari”, but throughout most of the video, pretty much all of what the narrator was saying was flashed across the screen in print as well. The words weren’t in normal print either; because a lot of the words were flashed across the screen as completely different fonts, colors, patterns, and styles, it led me to believe that the director was trying to portray the words as art themselves. By making the audience have to constantly change their focus due to the very rapid text swap, a lot of attention must be paid to the words themselves, and I think this was one of the main points of the short.

Another visual strategy that I noticed the director using was the grainy filter that was put on any of the footage of the past, however when he cuts to the interviews with Baledessari, the image is very clear and hi-def. I think the idea behind this strategy is to see Baledessari in his current age as very modern and to see his works in the past (that were shown through the grainy filter) as classical and timeless. Another way that this “classicalness” is portrayed is through the music in the background. By playing the classical music and showing examples of Baledessari’s art to the beat of it, it executes the director’s goal to portray the art at classic.

The affect that documentary creates with me is a reason to remember John Baledessari. Through the constant and rapid use of his name, mentions of his awards, and the combination of the sensory effects, I think the director really strives for this and executes it in a strong way. It really makes me want to use a combination of visual and auditory media in my own documentary to really get my point across.

The Abilities of the Archive

Derrida explains an archive to be something that has happened in the past, which will continue to affect us in the future. He states that this must be a “psychic archive distinct from spontaneous memory,” meaning that the archive from the past must be a tangible thing that one is remembering. In the opening of his book, the passage assigned, he claims that the printer was an invention that gives the ability to leave marks on the past, which then translate, into the future.

Derrida’s ideas somewhat coincide with the thinking of Misty Keasler and the idea of “the picture not taken.” On one hand the ideas are a match in that Keasler saw the physical object of a man and that is what she reminisces about on a daily basis. Which goes along with what Derrida says about needing a concrete memory. However, he also claims that these memories find a way to resurface in our lives eventually, such as the ink on paper; clearly this is untrue in Keasler’s case and most of the personal stories that people shared in class.

From my understanding, Derrida intends to state that the past and future are always connected in some way by the concrete memories that we have in our mind. I only find this true in the case that some things are so memorable that we can never forget about that. However, our past experiences in our lives will not always make a reappearance down the road, nonetheless this does not mean that they do not have a lasting impact on us.

Technology has only further increased the permanence of the archive. In Derrida’s time this was done so by the printer. I think he would be wowed to see how much further things have come today with cameras and video recorders on just about every single thing that we own giving us the capability to relive moments over and over. In this case the past really is a part of the future. I wonder if this is a good thing though, would it be better to just leave the past in the past?