loft

I’m preparing for my doctoral assessment seminar, the objective of which is “to ensure that the student has the necessary knowledge and skills to enable successful and timely completion of the research project” Handout from last semester’s round of assessments

I’m thinking of invoking this bit of Massumi at the outset to ward off a scary, frosty reception. All in the spirit of a community of scholars, what hey?

It is not that critique is wrong. As usual, it is not a question of right and wrong (nothing important ever is). It is a question of dosage. It is simply that when you are busy critiquing you are less busy augmenting. You are that much less fostering. There are times when debunking is necessary. But if applied in a blanket manner, adopted as a general operating principle, it is counterproductive.

Massumi 2002: 12-13

So, here’s to keeping it friendly, oh esteemed learned ones.

Yeah, that seems about right.

Only just caught up with the news of Peter’s sad passing.
You can read his obituary here.
Sitting at home trying to get on with my work but need to express something of the impact he had on me.
He gave me my first tertiary teaching gig, tutoring in his Media and Society first year subject at the University of Western Sydney in 2001. An amazing opportunity and a wake up to my social conscience. He did much to engage us all, students and fellow tutors, with many issues on a local and global scale. At the time I don’t think I properly realised just what an amazing time this was. Here’s a wish that ripples from the stones he threw into the ponds of our consciousness will continue to wash up on the shores of causes that need our attention for many years to come. (A laboured metaphor perhaps but there feels to be an urgency to keep his legacy {is that the right word?} alive)
Out of Fear was, in many ways, a result of the trajectory that started through exposure to his commitment to social justice. Equally, the trajectory that has me at home working towards my PhD can be traced to conversations with him and a comment that encouraged me to do further study so that I could be seen as a “real academic”. The two are so closely intertwined - Out of Fear was a response of my needing to do something of substance in response to the SIEV X tragedy - an honours year at UTS was the vehicle that let me achieve it.
Peter, you are sadly missed but you’ve left us much work to get on with, with you in mind.
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Explore. Dream. Discover.”
– Mark Twain

I’ve fallen for this song in a musical crush kind of way. Not new, I know, but love the lyric and particularly the use of stills in this version of the film clip. Don’t know if I’ll get to see her in concert but I can always dream

Here’s a little bit of video that I took with my digital still camera on a magical mystery tour to a pretty park in the Illawarra.

the bubble,
originally uploaded by junkado.

This shot got me thinking about the idea of ‘affective connection’ that I’m messin’ around with for my research project. It made me realise how you can use post-pro effects to represent an embodied experience of a place, a situation. Part of the process of creating such a connection (in documentary/experimental works) might be to first think about what you were feeling at the particular time (or in this case what you might imagine the subjects to be feeling at the particular time) - recalling the embodied, affective experience of being there. Whether on an instinctive level or consciously, Junkado used post-pro in a way that conjured something of the ‘running under an umbrella in the rain’ feeling layered with a ’safe and dry watching the rain’ kind of mood that I was able to connect with.
This might seem to be stating the bleeding obvious but I guess for me it is an important point…In post-pro it can be easy to get caught up with the trickery and the beauty-for-its-own-sake kind of approach without engaging with the feeling possibilities of sound and image. Recalling something of the original, affective experience and finding ways to represent that visually, aurally before sliding into a more head based, intellectualised approach is perhaps the way to forge affective connection. A viewer does not have access to the store of memories, knowledge of context or particular frame of reference that background the creator’s work, so the material alone (untouched, unaccompanied) is often not enough. Similarly directing people to what they should feel through voice over (poetic phrasing, adjective and adverb rich) can be inadequate to the task with some viewers feeling hostility to such a didactic presence. Good filmed works, visual works, sound works, written works achieve such connections but often through subtle means and true enough, sometimes not so subtle.
Nonetheless, this pic brought me back to the importance of feeling and remembering myself as an embodied presence behind the camera with motives and responses and emotions, existing in a certain time and a particular place. And perhaps, for me, therein lies a way through to what I’m trying to achieve with the documentary works for this project.

I dug out my dad’s old camera (a Voigtländer) last week, inspired to run it through its paces. When I went to put in a new film I found it was still loaded with a partially exposed roll. Quickly closed the back and wound the film back into its case. Sent it off for processing and these six shots came back…






Dad died 19 years ago and mum 9 years ago.
When I sent my sister copies of the photos she commented that “It’s just as if they have been away on holidays for ages and it’s still time for them to come back - as it has been for many years now.”
It was eery finding the film still in the camera and bittersweet getting the prints back from processing.
I’m still trying to work out where and when they might have been taken.
It’s sad that this isn’t a holiday that they’ll just come back from but if this is where they are then it looks like a nice place and it seems that they are enjoying themselves too.
I think I’m getting maudlin now, time to stop before too many tears.

We took up the SMH’s suggestion for our family magical mystery a couple of weeks ago and went walking around Beauty Point. Little fella in the papoose we ventured on to the bush track and even scrambled down the embankment to dip our toes in the water. Some more pics from the day are on my Flickr page but the pic of the day (in my eye) was taken by Reid. Ahhh, adventures in Holga cross processing. See what you think…

I’d been planning to take some footage of the dandelions opening for a few days. Thought I’d have the luxury of a few goes in order to get the frame, exposure etc just right. Set up my camera the evening before planning to get a pretty 24 hours in the life of my backyard. Was glad for once that my landlord was behind in his property maintenance. And then I heard the fateful sound…Ahhh well, I’m sure there’s a moral to the story in there somewhere.

…we cut off his mullet…

…and enjoyed a celebratory feast of rice cereal and breastmilk.
Ahhhh solids, opens up a whole new world of adventure!