Filed under: Networked Media
Ok, so I’ve been incredibly slack over the last week in terms of blog posts, but I have an excuse! My Dad came back from England the other weekend, and I haven’t seen him in almost two years, and so there were various family engagements, and speaking of engagements, my sisters finally came to an end last weekend, but not in a bad way! It was her wedding last Saturday, hence the reason my father returned, and I, as bridesmaid, was not really given much opportunity to do uni work of any kind!
So, the hypertext essay…
I have some ideas. The first of which is to take images like this one…
And using iMovie edit them into a short sequence with frames of black inbetween, so there is the impression of movement, although somewhat jerky. This will be used in the essay as an example of gesture and meaning, and how hands are a large part of body language and communication. The other plan is to film a person from varying angles, but never have their entire body in the frame. I will be filming their eyes, hands, legs, torso etc seperately and then, assuming I can figure them out, use one of Adrians rhizomes to create one video made up of nine seperate ones. This will be used to indicate the idea of each individual movement and gesture we make, our posture and stance, can effect a strangers interpretation of us, and that the overall image projected by one human being to another is based not on one central form of communication, but the body’s language as a WHOLE.
I haven’t yet fleshed out an essay and detailed arguments to explore and base my hypertext project on yet, I still have ideas that will, at some point, be formed into something that can then be explored and applied to the internet. Unfortunately it seems to be that time in the semester where there is so much to do and absoloutely no time! I hate the end of semester!
Filed under: Networked Media
I’ve read through the readings and extracts that we are required to base our final hypertext assignments on and I’ve decided to explore the first one – Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology.
The extract explores the idea of centrality in a hypertext environment, and how through linking and a networked format the importance of centrality is lessened and ‘the marginal has as much to offer as does the central’.
I have chosen to explore this idea, using a hypertext format, using the topic of body language and communication. Typically when we think of speach and sound as the main form of physical communication between humans. (When I say physical I mean ways of communicating that entail the use of the body, and are not aided by technology). But what about the rest of the body? Something like 80% of physical human communication isn’t based in voice and speach, but in the rest of the body. This is what I’m interested in. Similar to hypertext, communication isn’t based in the central, but the mariginal and minor signals that we portray through our stance, posture, gesture and general carriage.
I intend to use the hypertext format to explore these types of communication, focusing on body language and appearance, but also (if there’s time) the traditional forms of communication, and the newer formats, like email and blogging/video blogging. Even ways that people with limited communication skills, or those who lack the basics of communication, such as sight or sound, cope with their environment and how they communicate with those around them.
Filed under: Networked Media
Seth was talking about Rhizome templates that Adrian has created that we can experiment with and possibl use in our final assesment pieces. I managed to sort my wa through various networked media related sites and Adrians blog to find this. They’re downloadable!
Am hoping to get off my but in the next few weeks and start experimenting with them, but first I must read the extracts and decide which one I want to use as a basis for my idea. I’m torn between the first extract, that ‘the marginal has as much to offer as does the central’ or the third one about ‘spatial montage’. There are also some examples of last years finals up on Seth’s blog.
Embedding audio today, shall be taking notes as I go:
- For free audio download sites check out ccMixter and freesound (Will be keeping these sights in mind for the final assignment)
Extracting Audio from Video
- Open video in quick time
- Use the edit menu to select the part of the clip you want
- Select trim to selection to shorten the clip to just the required part
- In the file menu select export
- Export as an AIFF file, which takes only the audio
For a more detailed account go, Sean has posted some info about it on his blog.
Embedding Audio into a Webpage
- Take the MP3 file created and upload it into your sound folder on Fugu
- Open a new html page
- To LINK to the sound (creating a blank page with simply the controller) simply create a tag with URL of the file
- To EMBED the sound, open PAGEotX and write the URL into the top window. Chane the height to 0 and tick the controller box. If you do not wish the sound file to play automatically upon loading the site, DESELECT autoplay. Click the code button, copy and paste into html document.
- To EMBED and HIDE the sound file, follow the steps above, but select hidden. If you want the sound to loop select loop.
- You can also adjust the volume setting etc.
Seth made several points in the lecture today which I think are relevant, particularly to the looming final project.
As was stated most blogs and vlogs are linear in nature. I know that I myself think in a very linear fashion and it is something that I am aware of in the work that I produce for networked media and is something I am trying to steer away from. Altough there is nothing wrong with a linear format, the web is a tool that allows, to a much greater degree than other mediums, a networked approach to media. One of the problems with my hypertext essay, as I believe (we haven’t recieved marks as yet) is that despite it being broken into various chunks that could be viewed in any particular order, the layout of the page and navigation through them was still too linear. As Adrain Miles said in the clips featured in todays lecture, if something can be lifted from the web and put into another medium, say projected in some format or screened in another way, without qualative change to the piece it is essentially television or cinema. It is the very nature of the web that makes it perfect for a networked approach, and allows choices that are just not possible in other formats.
Having watched Seths examples I now realise the improtance of fragmenting, or experimenting with ideas. How can we turn a linear idea into a fragmented one that lends itself better to networked media? What will work best in my final project? What’s the relationship between the fragments? Does audio now play a more important role, especially in regards to video logging of a non linear nature?
These are all questions I will have to keep in mind when approaching the next assesment task.
Filed under: Networked Media
Well I have to admit that initially I was freaking out, because everyone had a video clip to play around with, and I was stuck looking for one as they progressed without me.
Luckily Sean came to the rescue and showed me how to save a clip to the desktop, and then using the outline on Seth’s blog he showed me how to compress the video, create a poster clip for it and upload it onto the schools server. I also know how to use PAGEotX now to create coding and paste that coding into a new html document to create a video on a blank page. I am one step closer to being ready to create the final hypertext assesment, although its only six weeks away, so I better get hopping. Will have to sit down and have a ponder over the holidays and think about what direction I want to take.
Anyways, feeling much more confident about video, I wouldn’t be able to do this stuff by myself, but once you know how, it’s so easy!
Filed under: Networked Media
WEll, maybe not finished, it’ll never really be finished, that being the nature of the project, but also there are always ways that I could improve it. BUT… I would feel confident handing it in now.
Today I spent another few hours hard at work and changed the list of links at the side of the pages to a group of linked images. Meaning that I created a number of images that I believed were relevant to each particular topic (which took up a large chunk of the day), and made them links to the various pages of the site. Now, instead of a very much linear list of links that a viewer would be autmoatically inclined to read in order, there is a pretty group of pictures that encourage the reader to view the essay in a much more random order, making it networked, rather than linear.
I could have made it even less linear by using simply the images as links and not writing the topic of that particular page beneath it, but I don’t believe that was necessary. However I did have to make some changes to the essay itself so that it lent itself better to hypertext.
Originally it was very much a text essay; introduction, body, conclusion. So I took out or changed phrases that indicated some sort of order amongst each page, including the conclusion (which now could be read as an intro as well). Also I had did originally have a page with a link stating ‘Introduction’ however I thought this wasn’t fitting, and although the URL contains the word intro, the link itself now stands as ‘Bodies As Text’.
Filed under: Networked Media
Here’s a link to Charlotte’s blog that Seth posted. It seems to cover some good points.
