SOS: Media – Spring Quarter Week 01

I was just falling asleep a moment ago when I realized that I hadn’t written a blog post yet this week about my progress and activities for SOS: Media. I have a bit of a little exigetic thought process on this topic. It seems that all of my classes this quarter are melding into this one giant tangled delightful hectic challenging boring stimulating mess of learning.

At the end of last quarter, I decided that it would be a good idea for me to take New Media in addition to SOS: Media and Hybrid Music. I thought “great! robotics and physical interfacing! the one area i am completely deficient in! with a hefty dose of the media theory with a specific emphasis in technology! the perfect academic learning that i have been missing in SOS Media! it’s better to be too busy than not busy enough!” After starting my day with a very sleep-deprived music technology lab-time, a hallucinogenic meeting with my former faculty Ruth Hayes about creating a poster for a series of speakers on the intersection of scientific research and artistic endeavors, (which I haven’t really gotten a chance to look into yet), and one test car-ride in preparation for the picking up of experimental filmmaker Peter Rose, I sat down with fading sunlight outside of my covered window, in the comforting darkness of my room, and read Man-Computer Symbiosis and Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and realized that it was all worth while.

It seems that the two extra evening and weekend classes are complementing the subjects I’m exploring in sos media nicely. In fact I’m not sure where one class begins and the other ends. Fuzzy boundaries encourage additional exploration. The challenge is finding enough time to do everything I promised myself I would.

I have also been reading this book called Sight Sound Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics. It is textbook-style writing on the aesthetic construction of the moving image, and how our perception of media is intrinsically linked to how it looks and sounds. I feel like this book fills in a subject area that was not developed as well as it could have been in Mediaworks. Sure, we had lighting workshops, and readings in The Filmmaker’s Handbook, but no really detailed cogent discussions of the structuring of images, and how this affects how people perceive the images in their process of decoding meaning. This book talks about what the author has determined to be the 5 major aesthetic fields of television and film: light and color, two-dimensional space, three dimensional space, time/motion, and sound. Some of the information is presented in a classical context — that is, narrative film, but you have to learn the rules before you can break them properly, right? I wish I had read this a year ago; I think my work would have been at least a tiny bit better because of it.