What does home really mean? Some images from flickr, and thoughts for my new ethnographic documentary project, ‘Wherever I lay my hat’.
Home can be quite nebulous, quite abstract, I think – but these images tend to be about things.

Into smithereens is an experiment in animated concrete poetry. It’s inspiration is a series of nursery rhymes, which seemed to call for a surreal approach. In keeping with the nursery theme, the artwork is niave.

Anyway, it reminded me of this video essay by Matthias Stork.

Stork argues that the techniques of ‘chaos cinema’ extend beyond the editing into camerawork and CGI integration.

It’s a shotgun aesthetic, firing a wide swath of sensationalistic technique that tears the old classical film-making style to bits.

These directors’ bi-word is spectator disorientation, to the extent of narrative break-down. “The only art here is the art of confusion”, Stork argues. Intelligibility – such as it is – is derived from the soundtrack. The sound design saved these movies.

Stork goes on to illustrate how the techniques of chaos cinema extend to other genres, and inhibit the actor’s ability to communicate. I’m wondering whether a lot of the transmedia phenomenon is an extension fo chaos cinema – a profusion of media in which order is threatened, the spectator is meant to piece it together, sometimes rather impressionistically.

Narrative will never be threatened, only projects that fail to strike a balance between the chaos aesthetic and narrative convention. What drives people to wade through the chaos to make sense? It must be the core narrative values of character, drama, location, etc.

If you can grow tomatoes you can probably grow chia, treat ‘em similarly – down to staking them and tying them up. Like tomatoes, the stalks get dry and brittle long before you’ll be ready to harvest. Although they’re meant to be an arid climate plant, they want plenty of water (again: just like tomatoes).

However, you’ll want to plant your chia earlier than tomatoes, because they take longer to mature.

Anyway, like everything in life, the problem occurs deep into the process. Here are my dried chia seeds still on the stem. I expect it took me 50 hours to separate the chaff from the seeds. There must be a machine, a small scale thresher – but I don’t even know what it’s called. I’ll tell you now, having several gauges of strainer will only get you so far. And then there’s the old school ‘blow across the top of the mess, and the chaff will blow off’ theory. Nope. These seeds are light and small.

So I painstakingly sorted them with a knife on my kitchen bench. At least I understand why chia is so expensive…. except I’m sure the big boys have a better way. Just not me and my backyard.

Anyway, I have a fine second crop well on the way to maturing now. Only three more seasons before I can call them organic! And after that, panning for gold. I’ll be able to use my strainers for that, too. There’s a certain creek I have in mind.

….but one that is so relevant to transmedia storytelling, argues Peter Usagi in Modern Mythology: Modern Mythology and the Transmedia Revolution, a broad-ranging post with wonderful media. I think the reason why archetypal storytelling might be important to transmedia is that these complex projects must have such a strong story to bring them together, to motivate the user and to given them coherence, given that users will access bits and pieces of the project unpredictably, that their knowledge will only be partial most of the time … what will keep them going? A narrative that gives them a hero, or a quest, or an obsession …

I’ve always loved mythology. Right now I’m reading a rather horrid old Victorian redaction of Greek and Roman mythology called The Age of Fable by Thomas Bulfinch (c. 1855) – all the sex and rape obfuscated under layers of seamliness. Nevertheless, the stories sing… passions and conundrums, the difference between the human and the inhuman, sex and power. Bulfinch ends each chapter by quoting the turgid verses of some romantic poet who has been thus inspired.

The wonderful thing about reading such a book is that you distill the essential stuff of the myth from the shifting sands of fashion and morality. For a text to entertain the myth, the writer needs to have more of the former and less of the latter. It’s the difference between the story of Cupid and Psyche and some Mills and Boons bodice-ripper.

You can watch The Power of Myth, a TV series featuring American mythologist Joseph Campbell online (6 eps).

Tom Zaniello proposes a number of new genres of digital documentary including what is an essentially marketing video like the one, which I include mainly as an excuse to listen to Sigur Ros. Tom gives himself an out, by saying that

hybrids are the rule, not the exception.

Well, OK: but i’m a little dubious that this makes the grade. It’s been quite a few years since we’ve been happy with propaganda (ie marketing) as documentary, but I’m beginning to feel that if it’s digital and online, people will call marketing a doco. Criticality, guys! And where have all out sophisticated engagements with the nature of non-fiction gone? They seem to have stayed in the cinema. I don’t think videos such as this would make the grade in any documentary festival anywhere – and while it might sneak in on some commercial TV stations, surely some programming exec somewhere would be sitting uncomfortable on his/her plush seat?

More interesting are Zanielli’s other new categories, Remixes/Mashups and Faux Docs

To me, a remix is always likely to be some sort of satire. This genre can conceivably be traced back to A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, by Jonathan Swift (1729), in which the form and style of a political pamphlet is mashed up to satirical end. The Faux doc is similarly satirical. Also known as a mockumentary, as far as I can see.

Tom also mentions some great early participatory UGC documentary making by guerillavision. These docs are early examples – albiet more highly edited – of what Kate Nash has called collaborative webdocs. The beauty of editing the UGC is that you can still have an authorial voice and present an argument. Unedited collaborative webdocs suffer from the randomness of the content that is submitted to them. It can’t be ‘massaged’ into any sort of shape, and whether you have a progression of ideas, or 10 people saying the same thing, is entirely whimsical. While it might be valuable to sift through similar statements looking for contrasts and agreements in the style of a categorial argument (Nichols/Nash), it might also be plain boring…. At least to the outsider. Maybe collaborative webdocs are designed for insiders, and then they become a celebration of a community.

Reference

Nash, Kate (2012). ‘Modes of Interactivity: Analysing the webdoc’ Media, Culture & Society, 34(2), 195-210.