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A last thought

My research assignment has been well informed by blogging.

Neil Gaiman suggests that it is only by imagining that things can be different that we can actually enact change. The A.B. Original song is an example of this imperative.

“Everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it might be easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on. This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, in this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things. They daydreamed, they pondered, they made things that didn’t quite work, they described things that didn’t yet exist to people who laughed at them. And then, in time, they succeeded. Political movements, personal movements, all begin with people imagining another way of existing.”

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/08/03/neil-gaiman-view-from-the-cheap-seats-reading/

The Life is Strange review I posted here after several failed attempts to post it to the Steam site as an official review. I’d taken the time to write it and wasn’t going to let it go to waste. Interestingly, I found while reading up on the game that the majority of the budget was spent on the story. Writing comes in all shapes and sizes, and each variety and method is important. I have always been convinced of the potential art form that exists within video games.

The Bendigo Writers Festival featured representatives from a diverse range of writing. Songwriters, poets, journalists, crossword creators, academics, playwrights, writers for screen, storytellers, illustrators, translators, editors and speechwriters are all represented. Funnily enough, the festival’s main draw card (Julian Assange) is best known for publishing work written by others.

Why do we write? We write because there are worlds contained within our heads. We write because some of these worlds are better than the one we see before us. We write because maybe that which is good about our imaginary worlds can be brought forth into reality. We write because we can, but more than that, because we must.

#wiabendigo #bwf2016

A celebration of vocal cords, ink and pixels

I mentioned in a previous post that the festival seems to exist within an inherently political world space. The thing that I find interesting is that a large number of the presentations didn’t seem to focus specifically on the writers’ writing. The festival is called the Bendigo Writers Festival, not Writing, and this realisation has made me see what is actually being celebrated.

A festival shares its root with the word festive, which a google search defines as “cheerful and jovially celebratory” as well as relating to a festival. The festival in Bendigo in August was a celebration, and it celebrated writers. The focus was not on their craft so much as it was on the writers themselves. Who are they? Why do they write? What interests them? What motivates them? Why are they the people that they are?

The celebrity aspect (once again, the root of that word implies celebration) of the festival is seen as cause for celebration. Celebrity also shares its root with the word celestial, which is why we also call some stars. Celebrities inspire us, and in a digital world, one can view them as easily as if they were to simply look up into the night sky. Perhaps they are more visible in a city with enough light pollution. We look up into the sky (or across at a screen) in wonder and awe, we marvel at their achievements and place of honour and we get a kick out of gossiping about Brangelinas.

A friend of mine when I was studying at Bundoora was doing her PHD in history and loved to get into heated academic debates. I remember she once said to me that man is a political being. I have heard it said more commonly that man is a social creature, but these two ideas are not mutually exclusive. The festival is a political world, but it is a social world as well. So much of the information we glean from the festival is gathered outside of the lecture halls. We converse with our peers after the events, we compare notes and opinions on the subjects discussed and we follow a paper trail of sorts which guides us inevitably back to the literature.

For centuries since the invention of the printing press, books (and later newspapers) were how information was absorbed. It is a tradition that is as prevalent, though not as old, as oral transmission of history. The printing press changed communication in a way that can perhaps be underestimated, leading to a sharp increase in literacy as the cost of the mass production of literature decreased. This huge change did not destroy oral traditions, but it changed them. We are seeing a similar change now with the beginning digital age. Books will not become obsolete, but our relationship with the written word is already shifting.

The literary festival seems to be a beautiful cross section of performative oral story-telling, traditional and tangible literature and modern technological innovation. Part of the course I am enrolled in involved acquiring a basic understanding of hashtags and handles, and fostering the festival’s online presence. It is important for any festival to keep abreast of the myriad ways in which people communicate (see my previous post of an image of a coffee shop’s sign as one example of an extremely common trend in society; you can’t walk past a coffee shop without seeing a pun these days) and that it offer a broad and inclusive program, in an easily absorbed format.

#wiabendigo #BWF2016

Robyn Archer, Strategic Advisor for Arts and Culture on the Gold Coast speaking at the recent Bendigo Writers Festival on the importance of the arts. The question she was asked (edited for lack of clarity) pertained specifically to her role on the Gold Coast but she ended up speaking far more broadly on the importance of the arts to society as a whole.

#wiabendigo #bwf2016

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Life is Strange - Review

This game does something original. It introduces a novel mechanic, but this is not just a gimmick. The way that the developers have stitched all of the elements of this game together draws the focus away from Max's time rewind ability, even if this is what primarily attracts gamers to the game. Every aspect of this game seems to fit.

The soundtrack has an acoustic surfer/stoner vibe, and this is rarely abandoned. Even in a crucial scene dealing with death, the music does not turn dark. This scene, I belive in episode 4, left me feeling quite moved, and also glad that the devs had not scored it with some sombre song or ominous (Max's fave word) metal. Even the party level, which includes an 'appropos' edm backing track, manages to feature one of Max's asides where she sits and reflects, simply by diminishing the music to a dull background thud.

As we are introduced to Max's power, we are given various ways to implement it. The game requires us to solve problems by thinking outside the box, and I found this to be true right through to ep5. The mechanic is handled well throughout, with a handy display in the corner which helps the player get their head around how to play the game and 'play with' the game. Sometimes the rewind can seem to take forever, and the skip function will only skip you halfway through a conversation, but this is no game-breaker.

Nor is it a game breaker when we are given some choices that seem limited. I found myself sometimes thinking of other options, other things I would do with Max's power. However, in these situations I found myself willing to give the devs the benefit of the doubt. This game is one that seems to recognise video games as a potential art form, and takes this idea seriously. The game is a pastiche of pop culture references, and is story driven, and these two factors weave a rich world. We feel the character's emotions and these are only heightened by the inclusion of a favourite band or movie. In light of this, when I found myself faced with a choice in which I didn't love either option, I remembered that the game was trying to tell me a story. This seemed to be something I felt from very early on, that the game was sharing something real and powerful with me and that I owed it to the artists involved to go along for the ride.

I respect the game's marketing strategy, though I don't like it. Ep1 is offered for free, while eps 2 to 5 are not. Ep1 is clearly the most polished of the five, both in terms of plot and narrative and also gameplay. The first episode got me hooked and so I bought the others.

Don't get me wrong. The rest of the game is not a let down. Narrative does seem to remain strong throughout the game and there are powerful scenes in every episode. Plot remains fairly strong too, though some sections of the game feel a bit contrived. It almost felt like the creators of the game were saying "we're here, and we know our ending already, but how do we move the plot along?" There were little bugs in the subsequent episodes, but like I said, none of this is a game breaker and other games can certainly be criticised for the same things.

My main criticism was with the ending. Spoiler alert.

To me the ending was a cop out. I wasn't too upset that I as a player was forced to make one final choice that ultimately gave one of two very different endings. Two endings could have worked fine. When I say that the end was a cop out, I mean that I feel that everything the first four and a half episodes had set up, all of the carefully laid groundwork, was wasted.

A quick side note. And seriously, spoilers. The nightmare sequence gave me the creeps. It really worked in what it was going for. I've seen other games that have levels where a character is on drugs or having a bad dream, and I feel that this game nailed it. Other games have tried to play with the level design so that it felt like reality was being manipulated, but this game did it in such a clever way that I actually started to fear that Mark Jefferson had figured out how to rewind time as well and had made it his mission to torture Max as revenge. I started looking forward to a final confrontation where some of Max's more noble qualities would see her through. or something like when Max tried to save Kate and could not rely on her ability. But I digress...

The final choice was, I felt, another time that I didn't really like either option. OK seriously, you've been warned about the spoilers. My first playthrough, I chose to sacrifice Chloe. I didn't want to, but I did want to go back in time. I had other ideas about what would happen and I was all too aware that the one or two word descriptor for a choice did not always give the full story on what would be the result of that decision. So I went back in time and was frustrated to find that it was just a cutscene. Max sat there and cried while Chloe died and then returned to the future with no memory of the week that had transpired (as per the narrative's rules on photo time travel) and also possibly retained her power opening up the whole possibility of something similar or worse happening. Ambiguity in endings is fine, if the questions posed are deep and philosophical. When they just pose more problems, it can be edgy, or it can just be a symptom of laziness.

In this ending, Chloe is the hero. She demanded that Max go back and let her die. Unlike when she asked Max to give her an overdose, she acted with no selfishness or self pity, but rather thanked Max for an amazing week.

So I went back and I hoped. I hoped that by choosing to "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" I was in fact choosing to sacrifice Max's new start in Arcadia Bay and everything that went with it. My hopes were dashed when she tore up the photograph.

In this ending, no one acts the hero, and this left me feeling even more disappointment.

Gamers want to be the hero. It's often why we play games. We want to be brave, because in most of our lives the stakes never get that high. Throughout the game, there are references to the Bible, especially in scenes dealing with Kate, though sometimes in darker parts of the game (and all the "end of the world" talk) scriptural imagery is used for tone. I don't know my Bible that well, but I'm pretty sure it suggests that there is no greater love someone can have for another than to lay down their life for them. That's what Jesus did yo!

I may be unfair in labeling the ending a cop out. I've had some time to reflect. In reality, the whole chain of events that form the story is sparked by a school shooting. I am from Australia where this is not an everyday reality, but the game is set in America where it sadly is. The thought occurs that perhaps the developers acted out of fear, censoring what they originally intended. I found at http://life-is-strange.wikia.com/wiki/Hospital_Ending a suggestion of

"a third ending where Max ended up in the hospital probably shot by Nathan after intervening in his and Chloe's confrontation in the bathroom, and so preventing both Arcadia Bay's destruction and Chloe's death"

but to me the only possible ending is that Max should have died. I feel like it was all for nothing. Max learned nothing. She wasn't inspired to act heroically. She probably would have made the same mistake again.

I don't regret my purchase. The game made its point somewhere around ep3-4, and Max is continually a shining light in the darkness that is Arcadia Bay. I can only surmise that the game devs didn't want to inspire any students to be an "everyday hero" when a gun is involved, as their own life is valuable. I just hope that the "value" they were concerned with wasn't that of their own stock prices. To me they diluted their message and missed the point. Art can be so much more than this, but not when we are ruled by fear.

Even though I felt let down by the ending, I would recommend this game because of how it made me think about choices and consequences, and the memorable characters.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/319630/

Used to be in a music industry VET class with Briggs. We weren’t great friends or anything (he used to make fun of my admittedly terrible hairstyle) but seeing how well he’s doing now shows that humble origins are no barrier to success. What matters is the work you put in.

Hot topic? Brainstorm...

Jan26

Pros

· Convenience – Australia Day is a public holiday, which ensures maximum listenership; the hottest 100 is the biggest listener voted music poll in the world and triple j would be all too aware of the potential change of date jeopardising this. January 1 is also a public holiday near to the start of the year. However, this date poses problems related to compiling votes. If the countdown were held on New Year’s Day, the cut off would need to be a sufficient number of days before this to ensure that the votes are counted properly before the countdown. This possibly excludes songs released late in the year from a realistic chance of inclusion. The countdown has traditionally been a compilation of the songs from a specific calendar year, and so January 26 is a convenient date to ensure both adequate vote counting time and the (potential) inclusion of all songs released in the previous calendar year.

· Culture – As mentioned in the previous point, a public holiday is ideal for the countdown, but those in January aren’t our only options. In terms of National Public Holidays (see previous point on maximising listenership) we also have Anzac Day, Christmas Day and a couple of holidays during Easter. These fail in terms of the culture that triple j has built around its countdown. In recent years the station has put a huge emphasis on ‘official’ hottest 100 parties which can be registered online and are crossed to through the day via phone call. The countdown usually ends with a triple j personality crashing one of the parties to deliver a prize. This tradition, of delivering content based around these parties has created a culture that suggests what a hottest 100 party ought to be. The vast majority will feature any combination of the following; a pool, a barbeque, cold beers/drinks in the sun, anything that has to do with Australian summer (which is hot, hence hottest 100) and particularly those ideas related to our summer that have persisted in recent decades.

· Both of these points seem to be mostly concerned with maintaining the prestige the event has built over many successful years.

Cons

· Exclusivity – When celebrating, the date chosen matters. January 26 in particular is a date that does not foster a celebratory attitude in many indigenous Australians. Arguments that changing the date excludes some groups does not diminish that keeping the date excludes as well and as much. No other date in the Australian calendar excludes specific members of society by the very nature of the celebration/commemoration associated with it. To change the date may annoy some people who don’t understand the big deal, or don’t care, and feel they are having a political ideal forced upon them due to their pre-existing involvement with the countdown. I say annoy because I can’t imagine a genuine claim to being offended. If the choice is between excluding some because of indifference to their pain, or others excluding themselves because of annoyance, one seems to clearly be the lesser of two evils.

Some points I made in my pros section may have been reworked into the cons section fairly easily, and this was just written off the top of my head, but when I looked at my list and saw only one con, the list still didn’t seem to be unbalanced. These points could be fleshed out into a larger number of more specific points rather than the general ones I have outlined, but it seems to me that triple j aren’t telling us everything.

#January26

My experience

I am supposed to be writing about my own engagement with the Bendigo Writers Festival. I feel compelled to write something true, something authentic and personal. I do not want to simply write something general about festivals or how the Bendigo festival fits the general mould or breaks convention. This has resulted in my last few posts being fairly superficial, but this was not out of a reluctance to engage with the festival content, but rather it was the result of wanting to meditate awhile on my understanding of the festival as a whole.

My experience, and indeed enjoyment, of the festival was somewhat marred by financial difficulty. The inevitable delays in accessing funds from the government in the form of basic welfare benefits via Centrelink had me arriving in Bendigo on Thursday morning in a sorry state. I was under-rested, possibly slightly malnourished and unsure of where I would be sleeping that night, though I suspected it would be in my car. Even after obtaining more suitable accommodation, by the end of the second day these stresses had begun to manifest in the form of a headache which affected my ability to sleep that night. My mind has since wandered through association to the story I heard discussed recently on national youth broadcaster Triple J’s current affairs radio programme Hack. The story discussed the same Centrelink delays I am experiencing and reported that these were sometimes cited as a reason for some students feeling they had no choice other than to discontinue their studies. I, however, though still waiting, am determined to apply myself, be patient, and persist with studious endeavour, despite a growing feeling of anger towards the current parliamentary administration and a subsequent feeling of despair about my future.

The festival exists and operates within a fundamentally political space. This space is not confined to the auditoriums and lecture theatres in which the bulk of the content is delivered, but flows out onto the streets. This is especially true in between sessions when patrons walk between venues digesting the informative feast they have just been served. Nor is it necessarily confined to space literal, as one stray comment delivered by a speaker may cause the listener’s imagination to travel through space and indeed time to another location entirely. Also the subject matter of many of the presentations are works of fiction which exist in their own space, spaces that may include strange non-existent kingdoms or rooms in houses never built. I say this space, inclusive of all possible associated spaces, is political because it seems that the political is unavoidable in artistic congregational gatherings. Some sessions I attended were openly political, but even writers primarily creating works with no explicitly political content were asked questions, with each session opening the last five to ten minutes to the audience for this purpose, and these questions often related to issues such as censorship, gender equality and the struggle of the working class to name but a few. Additionally, openly political sessions, of course, had their question times devoted to discussion of the state of local and global politics at present; ‘Why did we get the Brexit result we got?’, ‘Why is there support for Trump?’, ‘Why was there such a narrow victory in our own recent election?’

The headline act for the festival was Julian Assange, one of the biggest names on the global political stage from the last decade. His image was beamed into Bendigo and displayed (in somewhat low resolution) as a huge projection which instantly increased the festival space to include a nondescript room in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Tim Flannery’s passionate speech about global warming transported me, through imagination, to the Agora at La Trobe’s Bundoora campus (I studied there in 2007-08 and again in 2013-14) where one may not pass through the space without being offered, insistently, the opportunity to acquire any number of pamphlets and enter into dialogue demanding political action. Be it an invitation to an organised peaceful protest, or the opportunity to add a name to a growing petition, one of the biggest and most recurrent issues was that of global warming; another I remembered was the close-to-home hitting topic of the federal government’s proposal to deregulate university fees. The latter brought me back to my own studies, which brought me back to the theatre seat I occupied. I also listened to Kerry O’Brien, who was openly critical of Malcolm Turnbull on the matter of policy, and also censured Bill Shorten’s leadership qualities and general sense of purpose and direction. When compared to great leaders of the past he found these two, to his mind, came up short.

This last example highlights a major point I want to make, which is that it seems any space which is inherently political, is also intensely critical. Openly or otherwise, the speakers constantly spoke on subjects that upset or angered them. One of my favourite speakers was Gabrielle Tozer; leaving the talk she contributed to I felt an overwhelming sense of positivity and optimism, which is why I gave her my nomination for my group’s Ayye Plus Award. She offered real advice for aspiring young writers and real support for the idea of following your heart and chasing ‘the dream’ which was backed up with evidence in the form of her own life story. This sanguinity seemed to be in stark contrast to the overwhelming disgruntled nature of the festival’s general programme, and perhaps was due to its inclusion in the Schools Day Program.

To label the festival’s vibe as disgruntled may be unfair, and possibly threatens to undermine the positive impact such festivals have on a local community. I will post a video here soon that I recorded outlining this positive impact. However, I wanted to write genuinely, and to include my own experience of the festival, and while there were many laughs had during my weekend, both in official and unofficial assemblages, and plenty of inspiring snippets suggesting reasons for hope for a brighter future, this idea of being disgruntled actually mirrored my own mindset and seems to be the first thing I feel a desire to discuss.

#bwf2016 #wiabendigo

7 points and 3 comments so far on reddit

This was the piece I wrote the morning I drove to the festival

Just around the corner from the Captial was a shop with weird hyroglyphic style carvings above the door. I think it was an accounting firm.

I use this sometimes to get around the daunting freedom available to a writer. I can write about anything, but where to begin can sometimes be a challenge. Thursday morning before driving to Bendigo I wrote a piece to prepare myself for the writers festival experience, I will post a link to my piece here soon.

One of my favourite types of writing is the pun.

#wiabendigo #bwf2016 #dadjoke

Bendigo Writers Festival

My next few posts will be about the Bendigo Writers Festival. I am attending as part of the La Trobe subject Writers in Action: Writing the Festival.

#BWF2016 #WIAbendigo

Project audiences and process

I have now decided on the form my project will take. In the same way that modern musicians will usually create a CD with audio tracks for a radio audience (this also is related to digital downloads and the use of ipods, CD players and the like for a personal and portable consumption) and a video for television and online audiences (Youtube, Vimeo, etc.) I plan to create two versions of a song, one video and one CD single. These will serve as two modes of release imitating the 'single' which is commonly used to promote an album and potentially an album tour in the media while also generating revenue in its own right. A three and a half minute song is an easily digestible advertisement for an artist that is marketable on commercial radio and Pay TV music channels.

While the CD single is going out of fashion with digital downloads on the rise, unsigned and independent artists still make use of CDs and other merchandise to supplement income. I have decided to record myself in the field so to speak, whilst busking. I will extract the audio of a few songs from the video and burn this to a CD in an attempt to imitate a CD single which will often feature multiple tracks. These are sometimes remixes of the main song, or live versions of previous hits, and some bands even include studio or demo recordings that didn't make the album. I will also edit together a video of the main song (I have selected Radiohead's Creep) in order to mimic the trend of accompanying a single release with a video. My video will be fairly simple, but sometimes these videos will be considered as works of art for the artists themselves.

Two small setbacks worth mentioning. First my own camera has battery issues. It is quite old, and the battery life is now down to about 10 minutes (from the original 45) and so recording without a power supply proved difficult. Then Norie suggested I obtain a camera from the media office. The camera I got records in a strange format and my software didn't recognise it, so I had to download a file converter. The free converter I obtained is a trial version and so it puts a watermark (it says watermark, I always thought a watermark was supposed to be semi-transparent) in the centre of the footage. My video will therefore contain an ad for the software.

Exercise 3

We chose as our assemblage the Melbourne Zoo. We imagined the voice of the zoo would be an amalgamation of animal noises, but we found that the ‘voice’ in the sounds we recorded were dominantly human. Sounds of construction work dominated some areas of the zoo, while the voices and laughter of children seemed ever present.

Our method was perhaps not perfect, and this led to another voice being present. Instead of being silent observers, our own voices and laughter formed the majority of our sound recordings.

Bird noises also featured predominantly, and we managed to happen upon the relocated lion enclosure just as they decided to roar in chorus for a minute or so, but we were for the most part left underwhelmed by the animals and it was the people that made the biggest impression on us.

Exercise 4

My original idea for this exercise was to take some photographs of my Mother’s shed, once the site of raging parties with noisy music and underage drinking, now just a storage space. I wasn’t sure beyond that what I was going to do.

I went to my hometown over the break to have a much needed break, but I found that life got in the way of doing the required work. I returned to Melbourne with no documentation.

After reflecting on my failed attempt at capturing the essence of the now abandoned shed, I began to question why places become abandoned. I realised that sometimes life does in fact get in the way, and that places become abandoned because other more relevant places demand more of our time and so these places get forgotten.

Like Smithson in the lead up to building his spiral jetty, I didn’t know what form my work would take. When I went to class and saw some of my classmates’ work (my work was able to be presented the following week fortunately) I found their presentations to have a certain style akin to a presentation in a board room or before potential investors. My idea started to form.

In Smithson’s tour of New Jersey, he talked about taking a photograph of a bridge and feeling like the bridge itself were a photograph. I thought perhaps I could present my place (the shed) as if it were something else, a pub.

Smithson had decided to let the site dictate the form, and I began picturing myself giving a moving speech about the obvious tragedy that was the loss of such an important live music venue to a room of sympathetic shareholders. Sherlock’s presentation moved me toward this idea, when she spoke of how her place had once been the site of music festivals.

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