iPhone test
I’m on the M1 travelling back up North. Just thought I’d try a test post from my iPhone. Got a lot of work to do over the next 2 weeks as the first assignment for my MA is due in on 12th Jan!
change is the only constant
The first assignment on the MA in Creative Media Practice is about change in your own discipline/industry and critical incidents that defined them.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and thinking….and thinking….and researching….and thinking, and procrastinating, and suddenly I’m miles behind and the first draft is due in soon. Full-on madness at work hasn’t helped, so I’m going to have to cut my hours after Xmas, in order to be able to give this course more attention.
Firstly, it’s hard to define exactly what my industry is. At the moment, I’m teaching TV & Film production full-time, but teaching is not my industry. My discipline is moving image production, or film production, or video production, or whatever you want to call it. Factual stuff mainly, so I guess documentary, but also some music stuff.
I’ve got loads of ideas, but that’s the problem; I need a specific issue/theme/burning question to follow up and research, not vague notions/areas.
Potential areas in no particular order are: Independent film/video, amateurism, super 8, Convergence, User Generated Content, film/video for the web, low-fi, low budget, new ways of viewing/screening/exhibiting etc., flip cameras etc. etc.
I’m speaking to my tutor tomorrow, so hopefully he can give me some guidance and focus!
bullshit detector: truth & knowledge
The first couple of weeks of the MA were spent pondering truth and knowledge in our particular areas of the media.
First up, we looked at the concepts of ontology (the study of the nature of ‘being’, or ‘reality’) and epistemology (the theory of knowledge), and were encouraged to question what we thought of as truth, and how we know what we know.
Keeping it Real
What is truth can be perceived differently by different people, and can often be opinion, rather than truth. My own truths tend to be based on a gut reaction, and in my creative work I often go on ‘feel’, but these are not very tangible concepts, and I may have to find more definitive answers!
We also looked at ethics, which is an issue close to my heart; I try to live in an ethical way and therefore produce work in an ethical way. When working independently, this is often easy to achieve, but for some of the others on the course, who work in advertising and design, this might not always be the case.
A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing
One of the issues that was raised was how reliable sources of knowledge are. Is a teacher an expert? If it’s in a book, then is it right? And the most contentious issue: how trustworthy is information on the internet? I used the example of a noted Media Reader’s wikipedia page being doctored by some (my?) students to re-invent him as a ‘dogging’ expert and practitioner!
Obviously, I haven’t reached any concrete conclusions on truth and knowledge yet (after all, people have been debating some of these issues for centuries!), but it’s given us plenty of food for thought in the exploration of our own practices.
