0.
guide 1.
introduction 2.
method as field of discussion
3. practice
4. theory
5. conclusion and further discussions
| 4.
theory |
4.1 the dialectic of “reading” and “writing” Media Education 4.2 the novelty and distinctiveness of digital media forms Digital Media Research |
4.2.1 Developers discourse When we started the production process, neither I nor my fellow media-student, Kjelling, knew the difference between a “phono”, a “mini-jack” or a “BMC”. Among the multitude of technical details to learn, knowing the difference between these made us capable of physically rigging the technical set, remodelling it between the pieces in customised ways and, most importantly, knowing the potential and limitations of the technical set during the creative process. It should be noted that the technical potential and limitations were not static. The collaborative, artistic process drove the commodity of the technical set and the technical solutions - to refer back to the framework of activity theory, and my diagram of interacting activity systems, the experimental community had an impact on the mediating artifacts of the performance activity. The dynamism between the collaborative, creative process of media- and choreography-students and the swelling technical set is evident in the amount of applied hardware. The various artistic expressions developed throughout the process required five monitors, three video cameras, one mixer, one distributor, four projectors in the ceiling, three on the ground, two DVD players and a vast number of cables that needed to be custom made for staging due to the considerable distances. Set in a traditional stage space, in a student production with limited time, a limited budget and limited number of people to operate the hardware, one might argue that the technical commodity was driven beyond its reasonable confines. However, our high level of, perhaps contradictive, artistic ambition and interests of exploring digital media meant that we also came face to face with many of the core challenges and concepts of present media practice and analytical writings. In a less collaborative production, in which rising problems would have been few and solutions to rising problems would have been less pressing, this might not have been the case. Collaboratively generated and developed, technical solutions The main indispensable, technical solution implemented to realise the ambitions, the diversity of expressions and the vast amount of hardware to display it, was the interplay between a distributor and DVD as format of the displayed material (DVD-disc as shared storage and DVD-player as shared player). A shared format made various materials easily accessible and controllable in the stressful live setting of the performance series. The distributor enabled us to channel the same material to several projectors. Two DVD players represented two sources of material playing simultaneously, meaning two types of material could be played from several projectors, simultaneously. The indispensable, and for the production group at least, inventive solution, was developed collaboratively by the technical competences at InterMedia, but generated and driven by an artistic aim in an experimental context. Introducing the possibility to store and control all the prepared digital material on customised DVDs, and to distribute the same digital material through multiple channels, enabled the diversity of modes throughout the four different pieces (animations, video, stills, live video feed-back) and open up for alternative ways todisplay digital media in multimedia performance (e.g. multiple display of material into an installation-like, 3-dimensional, audience-driven space as in Duskalplasjon ). The opportunity to utilise a distributor and DVD-format was a significant development in comparison to the technical premises of Ballectro, a much similar and interlinked collaborative, multimedia performance project held only one year earlier. In this production the material was stored and played as DV on video cameras (which had to be rewinded/forwarded) and as PowerPoint-presentations on computer. The number of simultaneously controlled projections was limited to the two distribution channels that the image-mixer allowed without the distributor. |
4.3 multimodal digital media and visualised culture A matter of method? 4.4 “artifacts of expression” and “expressive artifacts” Exploring theory through practice |
| |
Practice-based Method. Exploring Digital Media through
the Dynamics of Practice, Theory, and Collaborative, Multimedia Performance
Hovedoppgave i mediavitenskap for cand.filol
graden, Universitetet i Oslo, Institutt for medier og kommunikasjon, Mai
2006, Idunn Sem
