jenny weight, RMIT

Getting started in Second Life

You need to establish an account before you come to the tutorial in week 3 . Don’t rely on being able to do it in the tutorial, it won’t work. It is free. You can use Second Life from home if you have broadband. Go to http://secondlife.com to establish an account and download the Second Life client to your desktop at home. You can use it on PC or Mac.

There are a number of very basic skills that you will need to conquer in your own time. When you first enter SL, your avatar is on the SL tutorial island. You should go through the tutorial, which includes how to change your appearance, how to fly, how to get from place to place. Dean and I will be assuming you have these skills for the tute next week.

‘Monsters’

Last week everyone got off to a good start getting ideas. Everyone seems to understand we are working with a non-naturalistic mode of production, which means that we can tell non-naturalistic stories. Everyone seems to have come up with some idea or other. This week in the tute we expect you, as a group, to settle on the scenario you are going to produce. (Not the narrative specifics–you need to properly consider the two versions you are going to be producing before you can do that. We will consider the 2 versions more closely next week.)

This week, in your group, you need to develop your concept in interesting ways. Many of you are thinking of a scenario with some sort of monster. I want to pose the questions, ‘What is this monster about? What does it stand for? Why is it an interesting monster? I’m asking you to think metaphorically or analagously about your monster.

EG: My monster is a psychic phenomenon resulting from the bourgeois family’s obsession with acquisition at the expense of living a meaningful life. EG, Boris Vian’s absurdist play, Les Bâtisseurs d’Empire, (also known as Le Smurz (1957), see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Vian. He is also the author of The Big Sleep). Your monsters will be much more interesting if they are saying something about home or street.

Similarly, if you are going to use an aesthetic, such as surrealism or expressionism, you need to make it meaningful. I want to know, Why is surrealism or expressionism an approrpiate aesthetic for your work? What is it saying about home or street?

EG: you’ve chosen to go noir, and you’re telling a story about a murderer hiding in somebody’s basement. That, to me, is just the start. It’s the easy part. Next, you need to have a significant reason why this murderer, this basement, this aesthetic. EG, it turns out this is his childhood home and he was abused here, it’s where he learned how to be evil, home is not as nice as it seems, Etc Etc.

A warning about monsters: do not go too far into determining how your monster looks at this stage. You’ll want to have a fairly good idea of the limitations of character design in SL before you do that.

A warning about noir and expressionism: you’re going to need to research the extent to which you can make shadows in SL: Second Life Shadows Demonstration

More examples

I’ll continue to pepper the lectures with examples from last year, but you can look at them yourselves, it’s all publicly available on the Pool.

Your reflective journal

Most of you haven’t don’t much in your blogs, remember it’s meant to be several entries per week, and that included last week.

Here’s a potential thing you could do: look at a couple of last year’s projects and write a critical review–consider the narrative, the set, the character design, the camerawork, the editing, the audio… all the things you’re going to have to do yourselves.

Theory as ‘probe’

In this lecture we start to look at the readings. The readings are meant to serve as inspiration for your project concept on home and street. They are ways to help you make your monster/aesthetic ‘interesting’. I truly believe that research is the difference between a hackneyed project and a project that says something different. Your reaction to the readings should also be present in your reflective journal. Another reminder: several entries a week, every week. The journal is 40% of the final mark, and the tute in week 6 will be dedicated to looking at what you’ve been doing in your journal. As you’ll see below, we’re very open to you doing a variety of media practices in your journal, including video, creative writing, still image, audio work.

What you need to do is find some aspect in the journal articles and make it your own. This aspect is unlikely to be a summary of the theorists’ whole argument. You just need to find something that the theorist has said that you respond to, then weave it into your own thinking.

The theory need not (even should not–after all, you should be developing your own ideas, reactions, vision etc) dominate your journal entries and your project. But what you need to show is that you really have thought about some aspect of the theory and responded to it.

Article 1: Home as experience

Probyn, Elspeth (2005). Extract from ‘Thinking habits and the ordering of life’, In (Bell, D and Hollows, J, Eds) Ordinary lifestyles—popular media, consumption and taste. Maidenhead: Open University Press/Mcgraw-Hill, pp 243-248
http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=XCRbSP0Wbm8C&oi=fnd&pg=PP8&dq=thinking+habits+and+the+ordering+of+life&ots=aSl6Jnghqt&sig=V4qlRsVTjhUyqwtIuau3j4pbZww#PPA243,M1

There are two ways to analyse this piece, firstly as content, and secondly as a style of writing. It’s somewhat superficial to separate them, all good work features the most wonderful inter-twining of form and content–that’s why, for example, I’m arguing that radically digital types of form, like SL, are suited to non-naturalistic content, like horror or fantasy.

Probyn is concern with the experience of being home. She’s writing about the distractive nature of being home. She regales us with details of her everyday experience, starting from first thing in the morning. On one level her structure is pretty transparent and time-based. Her morning is pretty much laden with interactions with technology and media–she’s a writer/academic and she’s working from home. Although she goes into her mediated experience we’re never able to forget that this experience is framed by her being at home. EG, at one point she gets up to mop the floor, but she’s thinking about her research at the same time, and about how impressed she’ll be with herself for being able to show off a clean house to her friends.

Probyn goes in and out of a type of personal philosophy–about ‘being ordinary’, for example. This too is triggered by her experience of working from home. It’s a very digressive style of writing, and the ‘trick’ of it is to control the digressions, or perhaps channel them.

It’s also a style of writing that is diegetic and extra-diegetic at the same time. This is a very complex trick. The diegesis is the story you’re telling, and the extra-diegetic part is when you, the narrator, comment on the story you are telling. Probyn also weaves in academic theory about gender. This plays an extra-diegetic role in the narrative about her morning, but she makes it closely relevant to that narrative.

But the theory is interwoven with real life– a phone call. She describes how she does the housework while she’s thinking thought complex arguments. She’s also destracted by the gossip surrounding the authors she’s reading about.

Finally she explains the analogy that underlines her approach to this piece of writing–that ‘feminist cultural criticism [is] as never ending as housework’ (p. 247) and ‘the rhythm, pace and spacing of everyday life constitute the stuff in which we think’ (p.247)

How could you make a non-naturalistic story about being at home, having an ‘ordinary’ morning? What is ordinary, anyway. If you really think about it, the way we all live is already quite fantastic. What would a caveman make of it?

Fictocriticism

This the name of Probyn’s style of writing. The theoretical is made personal. You are showing how theory is relevant to your own life and your own experience and to the media you are making.

The trick is often to find the balance between the theory and your own experience. You don’t want the theory to dominate, but you do need to engage with it. Show that the theory is broadening your own horizons.

Interesting blogs are fictocritical, regardless of whether you put there a podcast or a little video or a photo essay. Good writing and clear thinking about what you want to say is core. Here’s a fictocritical video blog entry I made last year. You could also describe it as a mini-thesis film:

Click To Play

There are several things we can note about this:

• the production is crude. We are talking about blog entries, and you only have to do something of this quality for your blog (of course if you want to do better quality, don’t let us stop you!)
• but technical crudeness doesn’t mean the writing has to be bad
• although I’m referring to Bachelard, he’s not centre stage. Nor I am trying to take on the whole of his argument. What struck me most when I read this piece was the idea that home was about/for solitude. That’s the bit I’m running with.
• I’m relating it to my own experience. It’s personal (but not intimate; everyone makes their own call about what sort of stuff to make public)
• Fourth, the writing is so important. It holds it together. When you write something you’ve got to strike the right combination of familiarity and strangeness. You’ve got to bear your audience in mind: what will be strange, but not too strange, to the people you want to communicate with?
• it explores issues, paints a picture. It doesn’t strive too hard to mount an argument or reach a conclusion.
• it’s moody. It has emotion. A number of 2008 students were saying that they wanted to write light-heartedly in their blogs. That’s a great approach. It will certainly make a more engaging piece. However that’s not the only emotion you could explore. Like me, you could perhaps go dark. Or whatever. If you bring in emotion and drama, it is more engaging.
• what I’m doing is experimental—for me. I’m not traditionally a video-maker, I’ve always been more of a writer. You need to find a way to make your blogging a significant learning experience. Another way to say it—do an experiment. If you do something that you entirely understand, you won’t learn anything from it. Hopefully that will be in terms of creativity and also in terms of theoretical engagement. At a conference I went to, one of the speakers said ‘you’ve got to use conventions, but not be used by them’. You can do those two things at the same time, and I think the results can be interesting, creative and experimental. And that’s when you learn.
• What is not good is starting your blog entry something like: ‘This blog entry is about virtual space because …. Bachelard says that ….’ Well, I know you won’t do anything as crude as that. You need to weave your points subtly together. Focus on the writing. Make drafts. Be poetic, or funny, or dark, or dramatic. Don’t write an essay.

Article 2: Home as memory

Bachelard, Gaston (1997) Poetics of space. In Neil Leach (ed). Rethinking architecture : a reader in cultural theory, (p. 85-97). New York : Routledge.

Bachelard is concerned with subjective experience, and here he is concentrating on the subjective experience of being at home. Bachelard is a very poetic writer. One way you could respond to Bachelard is by writing in a similar poetic style. He says you have to take a poetic approach to writing about home (Bachelard, 87).

Bachelard is also a fictocritical writer, in that he is (or at least seems to be) talking about his own personal experience of home. Do you agree or disagree with him about what is important about home? What is your experience of the relationship between home and your street?

For Bachelard, home as a space of daydreams and memories. ‘Our house is our corner of the world’… our first universe (Bachelard, p. 86). Memory and childhood are integral to experience of home:

Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
(Bachelard, p 87)

And

…if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamers, the house allows one to dream in peace.
(Bachelard, p. 88)

Bachelard believes that our emotional life is deeply tied to our notion of home. Without the house ‘man would be a dispersed being’ (Bachelard p. 88). ‘A house constituted a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability’ (Bachelard p. 94). ‘The house is a large cradle’ (Bachelard, p. 88).

An aspect of Bachelard which I explored in my blog entry (above) that particularly struck me is his thoughts about the importance of solitude (Bachelard, p. 90).

Bachelard mentions the relationship of house and street. The road, he says, goes with the house (Bachelard, p. 91):

Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows. (Bachelard, 90)

You could use Bachelard not by referring to specific points he makes, but by taking on board his general idea about how important home is to our own experience. Taking off from this starting point, develop your own example of what we could call ‘a personal phenomenology of home’.

I think ‘Panda memories’ from last year’s projects takes inspiration from some of Bachelard’s ideas about memory and home. Panda memories

Article 3: Home is where the TV is

Spigel, L. 2001. ‘Media Homes: then and now’, International Journal of cultural studies, 4(4). Available from the library e-journal database (Sagepub)

What we think of as ‘home’ changes, quite regularly, for many reasons–our wealth, our interests, who lives there, etc. Lynn Spigel looks at one way in which the concept of home changes–with regard to the media technologies we put in them, and what we use those technologies for.

Like Probyn, she starts by reflecting on the impact of media technologies in her home and on her life, this time with reference to power supplies–what happens when it becomes faulty. However Spigel is working in the tradition of history and media studies, not fictocriticism, so her paper is more traditionally academic.

…since the advent of modern communications media, domesticity has largely been defined by the transport of data in and out the home. From Edward Bellamy’s pneumonic tubes in Looking Backward to Le Corbusier’s ‘machine for living’ to Bill Gates’ digitally powered Seattle fortress, the media-saturated ‘home of tomorrow’ is a constituent and recurring theme in modern ideals of progress. Whether for leisure, labor, or surveillance, the media home is ‘a whole way of life’ for privileged populations. (p 386)

She’s focusing on the role of TV in ideologies about home. She approaches it via three ‘cultural metaphors’:

1. Theatricality and the home theater

During the period of its early installation after the Second World War, popular literature, intellectuals, and corporate executives spoke of television as a ‘home theater’ that brought spectator amusements into the living room. It was inspired by Victorian theatrical amusements (p.387) and was often ‘guided by theatrical principles of set decoration and optimal audience pleasure, and television itself was often promoted as a substitute for theater-going’ (387)

2. mobility and the mobile home

By the end of the 1950’s, the

metaphor for domesticity and domestic communications began to make way for a new set of metaphors that pictured the house as a vehicle for transport, or what I am calling a ‘mobile home’. At a time when Americans were obsessed with the possibility of satellite technologies and outer space travel, this mobile model of domesticity was especially realized in images that depicted the home as a rocket. (389)

In the 1960’s

… this new and improved family home validated itself through appeals to progress; no longer a place of insular stasis, the home was now a motor for change. This new space-age imagery must have been particularly appealing in the midst of the widespread attacks on the suburbs that were increasingly launched by both intellectual and popular culture. (390)

Mobility as lifestyle was reflected in the development of the portable TV in the 1960’s.

Advertisers insisted that unlike the old console models, the new portable sets would transport viewers to exciting, even ‘taboo’, spaces outside the confines of 1950s domesticity. Indeed, portability opened up a whole new set of cultural fantasies about television and the pleasure to be derived from watching TV – fantasies based on the imaginary possibility of leaving, rather than staying, home. (391)

It was accompanied by an ‘indoor-outdoor idealised domestic lifestyle (392). Nevertheless, there were still distinctions made on gender.

3. sentience and the smart home

This is the rhetoric surrounding home and media that we are still largely ‘in’. This imagery still trades upon the 1960’s “ideals of mobility, freedom, and progress – and related anxieties about sexual difference and family life” (398). However, the current telecommunications fantasy offers “a new emphasis on sentient spaces, or what we now call the ‘smart home’. Filled with remote control digital technologies, the smart home promises to anticipate your needs and fulfill them on command (398).”

… these ‘smart skinned’ homes of tomorrow develop fantasies about media, mobility, and domesticity that I have previously discussed in relation to the cultural fantasies surrounding domestic architecture and portable television in the 1960s. Just as advertisers promised consumers that portable TV would allow them to imaginatively liberate themselves from domestic doldrums while remaining in the safe space of the home, the new ‘smart skinned’ homes of the digital age negotiate a dual impulse for domesticity on the one hand and the escape from it on the other. According to Hariri and Hariri, ‘In the Digital House, the comfort, safety, and stability of home can coexist with the possibility of flight’ (cited in Riley, 1999: 56). In this sense, the home of tomorrow allows residents to have it both ways. Nostalgic appeals to domestic comfort and stability exist alongside a futuristic fantasy of liberation and escape. (400)

‘Smart skinned’ homes ‘also speak to the parallel modernist fantasy of the merging of home and work (400). Spigel points to a paradox in which home has become the ultimate place for work; you are never simply to ‘waste time’ (401).

Let’s look at the 3D plan for Bill Gates smart home

Despite the embededness of all this sensing technology and screens etc, in Gates’ book he clings to traditional family values. The technology in the house is meant to serve them (402) and environmental harmony. Thus Gates’ house is very nostalgic, made possible by social and class privilege (403).

These traditional values have been translated to the middle classes in magazines such as Mac Home, Home Office, and Home PC. Gadgets can conserve – rather than transform – middle class values of family life and home and gender divisions (403).

There is no clear sense of ‘progress’ between these three visions of home, and the role of media devices in the home (407). Spigel concludes that:

…this curious blend of baby boom nostalgia and ‘gee whiz’ futurism that runs through contemporary discourses on media homes is actually a disavowal of the present. In other words, nostalgia and futurism are both symptoms of a more prevailing anxiety and confusion about the contemporary world. (407)

play: ‘The vidiot’ by Ken Nordine, Word Jazz (1990) MCA records

References

Bachelard, Gaston. Poetics of space. In Neil Leach (ed). Rethinking architecture : a reader in cultural theory, (p. 85-97). New York: Routledge, 1997.

Probyn, Elspeth (2005). Extract from ‘Thinking habits and the ordering of life’, In (Bell, D and Hollows, J, Eds) Ordinary lifestyles—popular media, consumption and taste. Maidenhead: Open University Press/Mcgraw-Hill, pp 243-248

Spigel, L. 2001. ‘Media Homes: then and now’, International Journal of cultural studies, 4(4).