After the Burn

I was homeless several years ago when I had my last severe injury. I was newly separated, sad, unemployed and unable to work, I was waiting for back surgery. I found places to stay in Murrindindi Shire and this was one of them: The Taggerty Pioneer Settlement it was decimated in the Black Saturday Fires I went back this year after Black Saturday to do research in to the possibility of making a documentary about communities affected by the fires. This is one image from a photo essay I have generated about the rural communities both affected by the fire and not.

I have found it so hard in the last few weeks – I haven’t done a thing until now and my assistant and I have worked on footage my sister filmed about 5 weekends ago in an area between Marysville and Warburton Victoria. I am posting a rough draft that has been generated from that footage Bianca (my sister) shot. She is not a camerawoman and that is evident but I like the images anyway as the film making process is very transparent. With the help of my assistant who has done all the hard work I hoped to generate a forked loop of a road travelled, that neither ends or begins. 

The landsacape that day was beautiful – the trees were coming alive again and the earth was regnenerating. We saw four different wombats that weren’t road kill and that was fantastic. It was fantastic to see that not every creature in the region had died in the fires.

Anywaay the project continues, we’ll keep you posted.

 

Good Things

Hi Everyone

Sorry, I havn’t blogged for a long time. I have been in hell, as I have been diagnosed with a frozen shoulder. Simply, that means you can’t even put your undies on without screaming or crying in pain. Anyway, its been a fun journey of isolation, frustration, loneliness, agony, boredom, depression, and thousands of hours of lying on my back watching dramas you cant get either legally or on free-to-air stations in Australia.

So here’s what I recommend for anyone who needs to get over themselves:

Well-written Independent  Television Series

1. Madmen
2. True Blood
3. The Shield
4. Californication
5. The Wire
6. Deadwood
7. Gossip Girl
8. Skins
9. Six Feet Under

Strangely enough, as my assistant writes my blog for me, I now realise that all these good shows are in fact about Communities, large, small, wealthy, old, new, urban, literate, illiterate, criminal, and very very human. These stories have kept me from sinking.

Now that I have an assistant, my blogging is going to speed up and we will bring you updates on communities, through images  and anecdotes from the countryside.

COMMUNITIES – Creative Maintenance

My Blog is being established in line with a subject I am doing in my Masters degree. The subject is Transient Spaces and the focus of this subject is Social Software and Community.

I am in the process of developing a strategy for the content of my blog and I am researching methods to promote it within the online community and from without.

The subject: Transient Spaces has a theoretical basis and in the last few weeks we have read Tonnies and considered his ideas about Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Gemeinschaft is a definition or a description of the nature of a small community whilst Gesellschaft is a concept that Tonnies has develped in relation to “the wider community”.

Earlier in the subject we looked at a Theorist called Delanty, whose ideas pertained to myths and contemporary culture. Our subject Transient Spaces appears to leading us through or into the arena of the tension between Society and Community, and consideration of how these to organising forces operate together and separately.

We will be assessed through the content of our Blogs. These Blogs are required to reference Theorists and I have choosen to work in a Post Modernist manner and expose the form with the content and the concept.

The Blogs are to explore community and to investigate the nature of community in relation to ourselves and to a key media theorist. The media theorists that have influenced me the most are Lev Manovich and Marshall McLuhan, Donna Harraway and Maragret Werthheim.

The questions I am trying to deal with at present pertain to the content of my Blog. I have been encouraged to do a Blog about the recent Bushfires in Victoria as I was present at Black Saturday and in the countryside in the aftermath. However I was a visitor to the area – not a landowner but a city person – who lost no house or family .

But I did lose many important and valued things –  importantly  9 Foolscape folders of my Masters research!!!!!!

The difficulty is that I know no one in the area and Marysville, the township I was staying in, is all but incinerated by the fires – there is nothing left. I have gone back to the area – which was a fantastic experience which I will wrtie about later – and I have taken some photos of a place I lived in a few years ago when I was homeless – yes homeless – life is interesting.

I want to talk about hope and fear and the difference between the city and the country and link these ideas to representation and story telling and expose forms and avenues of expreeeion that allow for  understanding and assistance to be generated – I guess I am talking about generating and maintaing communities within communities. Like the analogy that Manovich makes from the Dziga Vertov movies, Man with a Movie Camera, which  exposes the process of movie creation whilst it itself is playing, evolving, moving and concluding.

There are many questions to resolve and I look forward to sharing them with you.

Communities and Creativity and Communication

The lecture today encompassed the ideas of Anomie and Ennui in relation to community. Jenny Weight showed us theoretical concepts via You Tube videos and texts which was really cool. Whilst the Tutorial with Dean Keep asked the really important question of: What is a Documentary??

It was a very good question and something I am considering in relation to this Blog. How do I construct a documentary a Blogumentary that is interesting and incorporates social networking media and media effectively?

I know that I want to use Social Software efficiently and make connections from within my Blog using Images that are both  Still and Moving. I want to use Text in a range of formats: found, hand written and digital. I want to include drawings and found objects and guide my readers around with maps.

In terms of creating depth to my Blog, I have been doing research on audio possibilities. I have been looking into sound services on the internet and to that end I have been listening to Marriane Willamson’s  Newsletter, which is just a sound newsletter – though it is beautifully produced – I believe Marianne’s Newsletter originates from Oprah’s Radio Network, and the production has a rich and smooth quality. Whereas the sound I have been recording with my Mobile Phone has a rough and hollow quality to it. I like the sounds I have recorded on it, for differing reasons than the high production values of Williamson’s work.

I am researching how to make the most of the resources I have so as to make my Blogumentary be reflexive of both its construction and of its subject. I know I want to assemble and construct a landscape within the Blog and have the structure of the Blog reinforce the landscape of the Community metonymically and literally. Ideally I would like to document the readers interaction with my documentary in an attempt to understand how social media influence and shape information exchange and interaction.

I have been researching how to link and create a wide readership for my Blog and I have found a book on Blogging that I am finding useful. The book is called Blogging and Podcasting – What no one ever tells you about …… by Ted Demopoulos

The central organizing body for this blogumentary – is me. Thus, today/ tonight I am going to attempt to add to my post, images that I have taken that reflect my life. I have a couple of images of Maryville that I took two weeks ago and they are difficult to look at for me – as they make clear the devastation that occurred in the area of the Bush fires. In fact I have selected some images of a home I used to live in eight years ago. The place was the Taggerty Pioneer Settlement and when I went back to face my fears I had the opportunity to walk around the property and look around and while I taking these photos exactly 1 month after the fires the ground on which I was standing on at the Pioneer Settlement was still hot.

images —- media, war and cinema

I was doing research – looking at a variety of theoretical concepts that I could incorporate and respond to in my current projects.

I found a book in the Library yesterday – its old and tatty but for some reason I wnated to look at it. Late,  late last night I was very tired  and I opened the book up and read the title for the first time:

WAR AND CINEMA by Paul Virilio

I looked at the book and thought– why did I borrow it? I am not looking in to war imagery, I have enough to do and read. Then, I looked again and realised I’d taken the book out – gambling on a vague memory about the author being important and influential. Still unsure of the books relevance to my research I again questioned my selection.

However, within my mind, a quiet voice spoke up and said –  trust yourself and just open a page and read it and I did. – As they say – let the pages fall where they lie – in listening to myself in doing so,  the first words I read, I found what I needed. It is a brilliant quote from 1916. It has already begun to reshape my thinking and I am going to write it out here….. because it is formative.

PAGE 30

”  In cinema there is no longer such a thing as an ‘accurate’ reflection. ‘Everything’, Wegener said in 1916, ‘depends on a certain flow in which the fantastic world of the past rejoins the world of the present.’ The chaos of the non- sensory order installed itself alongside the quiet visible order of the senses. Delirious new ghostly images, having been stolen, touched up and invoked anew, could be taken and sold as the enthralling

object of a profitable trade in appearances, or could be projected in every direction in time and space. ‘

“Already,’ Duhamel remarked around 1930, ‘I can no longer think what I like. Moving images substitute themselves for my own thoughts.’ “

These ideas are important and link in with Mc Luhan’s notion of the medium is the message and Manovich’s concerns for the structuring of the interface as its’ action orders and shapes communication. Images are powerful and are inherently linked to ideas and sharing. Images communicate and moving images are part of the wallpaper of contemporary culture and social exchange.

These quotes led me to question my thinking about:

What structuring order will I apply to the content of my Blog and why? What questions can I pose?

How is past and present cojoined in within the text and imagery?

What can I reveal?

How is the content and structre working in relation to accuracy and revelation?

To be ACCURATE and to REVEAL are founding concepts, dare I say tenents for documentary – for it is in these concepts that documentary differentiates itself from FICTION AND FANTASY- Movies – so I believe.
What am I trying to convey and what relationship to ‘accuracy or the accurate’, does my work have?

City, Country, Business, Media and Theoretical Communities

The Bush fires have affected many many Australians and influenced media mechanisms from print, to radio, to blogs, television, txt and in turn the fires and their destructive expanse have sculpted the content of these mechanisms and their delivery.

This image is a copy of a page from The Herald Sun in which the power brokers of the business and media communities are juxtaposed in both the format and in the content of the page I have added to the my Blog.

The article is a accompanied by an image of recovery and regeneration and the article talks about the power of the belief in regeneration as well as revealing that regeneration requires investment. I believe this image encapsulates the idea of hope and that in turn the article talks about the power of regeneration that this image symbolizes. This image is a document of growth and change an image of the future.

Somehow the signs of hope are important to us humans to the our ability to continue to invest and to develop. The image and the article are hopeful and well intended which I thoroughly enjoyed as it wasn’t about tragedy but rather about the possibilities of the future. I do hope that the power of this image encourages more investment and  encourages the broader community to continue to support the communities directly affected by the fires.

This image is a collage of

a map I collected on the day of the fires – so that I could do some walking and exploring whilst doing my Masters work. These are the keys to the house I was staying in and I’ve included a card with an address from a lady that I talk with who works in the city near where I live but lives in the Kinglake and she and I talk about the experience of the fires and about the differences between the experiences and understanding of the fires within the city and the country.

This image  is a collage and reflects the layers and the textures and the approach I am taking to planning and generating my documentary/blogumentary

I watched the film by Dziga Vertov today that Lev Manovich references and more importantly deconstructs in his theoretical work  The Language of New Media and watching this film helped me understand Manovich’s ideas more clearly and what I took from Vertov’s ideas that are really important to social software and my project is – “capture fragments of actuality”

Documentary Content for Marysville Documentary

Size Matters

My Dcoumentary has been on my mind these holidays – I have been watching movies I have made –  Art Works  and a documentary called St Kilda Lives. The documntary I am going to link to my blog because there are aspects of it that I really like that are relevant to my current work- the humour and the texture. I am in the proces of uploading St Kilda Lives to You Tube, however I am having problems with the file being to large. They say size matters and it does  - Oh well – What’s technology without hours and hours of commitment?

I have been trying to find music  for my Marysville Documentary that fits well with images of regeneration and devestation. To that end I have been listening to my tape collection – I’d forgotten what was there- I knew it was valuable to me – but to start listening again for work is great.

I have found some obscure Jazz and Reggae tracks. Some of the songs make my hair stand on end. That’s a good thing. There some Soul, Funk and Hip Hop that makes me dance – Lucky Me. I am going to have to digitise some of these tapes. It has been great listening to them – but I think only a few beats and instrumental sections could be used – looped to create what I want to achieve.

I am not sure what’s going to work with the images I have filmed. But in my quest to marry image and sound I was duly impressed with a sequence in the Swedish film,  LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, towards the end of the film some beautiful classical – orchestral – music is included in the soundtrack and  it is was very moving – powerful, in an emotional way. That’s what I am after – for my work – something that adds beautifully and enhances the meaning of my work.

These holidays I have seen REDBELT, in the special features section David Mamet was being interviewed about writing and directing the film. Mamet’s responses about the soundtrack, the editing process, the locations and much more was helpful in my thinking about the work that I am doing.

Since listening to Mamet and after seeing THE MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA, Oh and listening to the making of CALIFORNICATION, I have thought a lot about the fact that I want to work with someone –  Mamet talked a lot about collaboration and working with people in creating REDBELT and that notion appealed to me – I want to work with people and collaborate.

Sydney, Deadwood, True Blood, Redbelt and Woolloomooloo

I am in Sydney for a few days doing research on contemporary art, contemporary culture and to do some filming for my documentary.

Sydney is a city constructed around its geography, the structure of the harbour landscape determined and defined the architectural and social environment of the emerging city as passages of water separated communities and their ability to connect the city of Sydney appears to be a collection of pockets of communities for example Sydney siders talk about the North Shore – in some kind of defintion of not only geographical space but also in of a cultural, economic and social space that makes it distinct. It almost sounds like a different breed lives there. The landscape of the city organises the populace into groups of “likemindedness”.

Today, I was thinking about communities and the concept of heterogeneity as expoused by Kiferlilly and to some extent I do believe that nature of community is to be engaged in a degree of ‘sameness’, of a familiarity within, as that ‘sameness’ is what makes it, it, as opposed to something other and that very ‘sameness’ is a connective device or to put it another way, an identification device, that can work on many levels, one being, you belong, or you do not.

I was in Woolloomooloo today – Woolloomooloo is an inner city suburbnext door to the gallery of New South Wales and I saw within Woolloomooloo that there were distinct communities coexisting closely. With  group on one side of the street to the other.

Woolloomoolo is a place where there is - an intensive, sociopolitical and architectural manifestation of a community, a ghettoesque area of community housing, that is flushed straight up against an intensive display of emblems of success of a free market economy a luxury mooring for private sea vessels, beautiful yachts and the like which is in turn adjacent to a naval military community who look on to the friends of the botannical gardens who on the the surface of it are a community defined by age and gender – women of a certain age. In my observation Woolloomooloo is a gumbo, a tapas, an antipasto of communities.

Within one small inner city suburb there are all sorts of communities operating and functioning next to each other, interacting with each other and yet simultaneously remaining domains unto themselves – distinctive and distinct.

My life is continually informed by the landscape that surounds me and part of that landscape is fim and television. A great influence on my thoughts and ideas about what is good and valuable in screen story telling is Deadwood, it is a work I greatly admire. The structure, the characters, the sets, the relationship it has to fact and history, the acting the script – more and more and more. I was thinking today as I was working in the sun at the Andrew Boy Pool also in Woolloomoolo, that, Deadwood is, about a community, it is the story of a developing community and a developing community identity and of how the community constructed and thus defined itself.

A television series that I have recently seen is, True Blood, in which we share a journey with Souki the main protagonist as she lives within in small Southern American rural community. The series explores the community and the differing groups with in it – in this case Vampires and Humans two distinct communities trying to intergrate.

I saw a film called Redbelt and really enjoyed it. In this film the scriptwriter and director David Mamet takes us on a journey in to the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Hollywood communities to takes in to the good and the bad that lies within.

You Tube and Hany Armanious

I have been trying to upload a documentary I made on to You Tube.

I am s pleased that I have been doing this work because the process has been extended and frustrating to be engaged in. Firstly, the size of the project was an issue,  compression is tied up with the uploading process.  A You Tube video cannot be larger than 1G and my video documentary was  1.12G  so, then I had to investigate the most successful methods of compression to keep the work in scale thus looking good still and that process took some time. Now, the uploading of the video is taking its time two failed attempts thus far. The video file is now about the third of its size and the file has twice encountered probelms whilst uploading and failed. This process of failed uploads and files sizing is boring and frustrating I must say,  as I just want to embed the work in You Tube and link it in to Salon.com. It will be exciting to have my documentary as part of my Blog and to see how I like the work published for the world to watch.

Talking about sharing things with the world, I went to see a beautiful and humor filed exhibition yesterday by an artist called Hany Armanious at the Roxlyn Oxley Gallery. The show was of sculptures and these works were in the main cast assemblages of modern and everyday objects. Hany cast objecs such as chairs, polystryrene boxes, engine parts, furniture, blow up toys and more and co joined these casts to assemble beautiful sculptures with titles such as Spinx and Temple.

The hang was simple, sparse, elegant, understated and this simplicity created movement for the eye within the exhibition a rhythm  of form, texture, colour and scale. The works were beautiful and tender and full of layered jokes – both art and otherwise. Hany was quietly taking the piss out of how we value things, nudging us to ask us questions of ourselves of our what we value in a materialist culture by showing us the beauty of the unseen and disgarded in the process of our economic heirarchy and ordering.