There are three things that matter in relation to a networked specific practice and media production. These three terms apply to the formal attributes of digital media, and so address the qualities that practice requires, and how we participate, use, and engage with networked media. There is no hierarchy amongst these three terms, and they may prove to be insufficient. The terms are porousness, granularity, and facets. The list does not include database, user, or interactivity, as these are not causes but consequences of this triumvirate of terms.
2. questions
What do we need to know, or understand, to shift from treating the internet as a
place of publication and dissemination to being the site of practice?
What are the formal qualities to consider for a network specific mode of making?
What are the formal qualities to consider for a network specific form of media?
This presentation is premised on treating the internet as a particular place and
event for media practice. It does this not by thinking about tools, platforms, or
systems, but by the attributes these need, and express.
3. a triumvirate
There are three things that matter in relation to a networked specific practice and
media production. These three terms apply to the formal attributes of digital
media, and so address the qualities that practice requires, and how we
participate, use, and engage with networked media. There is no hierarchy
amongst these three terms, and they may prove to be insufficient.
5. a triumvirate
The terms are
porousness, granularity, and facets. The list does not include database, user, or
interactivity, as these are not causes but consequences of this triumvirate of
terms.
7. porousness
Porousness describes the way in which the objects within networked media need
to be open to each other internally, and externally. They are open internally to
the extent that its constituent parts are available to its other constituent parts
through what Weinberger has rather informally defined as 'small pieces loosely
joined". Similarly, the work itself, as an assemblage of constituent parts, needs
to be available to other systems and objects externally, out on the network. This
allows them to be shared, curated, and used otherwise. Porous media does not
want or need to monopolise my attention, screen, or hardware.
9. granularity
Granularity describes the smallest constitutive unit in a work that provides
closure and coherence by itself. It is a meaningful whole, as is. This unit does
not need to be narrative. A work that is highly granular can be regarded as very
porous.
11. A “basic unit” is the smallest fragment within a medium
that can be taken out or isolated and still be enjoyed or
understood as a complete work; that is, a fragment
possessing closure.
12. facets
When a thing is porous and granular they have a multitude of possible
connections with each other. These possible connections are the facets that
things present to each other, or which other things cause to be presented. As
there are a multiplicity of such facets, in any networked practice only some of
this set of facets are 'realised', however the more facets that are enabled and
available, then the more possibilities for connections between parts exist.
15. montaged, mediated
Where the units within networked media are granular and porous then these
qualities remain during, and after, publication and distribution. This means these
small parts still make some sort of sense, even if shifted elsewhere and into
other contexts. This makes it easy to remix material, and the more facets that
can be provided to search, find, connect, and identify these elements then the
easier and more successfully things can be mediated and montaged.
16. cinema (an aside)
Cinema has always existed in such a condition, and it is the shot’s granularity
and porousness to other shots that has made cinema possible. A shot, has, in
the terms used here, many facets available to other shots to form a sequence.
This means that the shift heralded by networked practice and media may not be
as large as many believe, so that it is not so much the formal attributes as others
that need addressing as media making moves even more substantially into
networked modes.
26. so
However, by considering and adopting porousness, granularity, and facets as
significant formal attributes makers and audiences are able to curate work into
collections. Here the audience is no longer only an audience but slides from the
user who engages, reuses, and remixes, to the curator who collects, self
managing those things that matter for them, to the viewer who simply likes to
watch.
27. the change
If film and video is granular and porous then the shift heralded by networked
practice and media may not be as large as many believe.
This means it is not the formal attributes of film and video in themselves that
need reconsideration for film and video as media making moves even more
substantially into networked modes.
What needs consideration (reconsideration) are the implications of granularity
and facets for possible forms (and forms possible).
The shift is in the preservation of these relations after the event of the works
making. Which is simply a question, or problem, of facets.
28. a relational media
This is a relational media.
Relational media is media that effects qualitative changes in its whole by virtue
of the varying relations it enables between its parts.
Relational media is media that has multiple possible wholes.
29. and so?
As practitioners do these become the formal or ontological qualities to build
with?
As teachers are these the concepts to be employed, used, embraced and played
with?
As researchers what problems do facets and porousness ask of us?
