Network Culture Video Essay
Our group video for Network Cultures was based on the theme of, 'What are the most important memories you would like to remember?’ It was based around the idea of an Estonian play called ‘The End’, which was about the world coming to an end and the people were given a small amount of data to save their information they would like to pass onto the future generation and what they would like to remember about themselves. On the website in English it gives a brief description. 'My memory must fit onto an 8 gigabyte the state has allocated to me'. This connected very well to our concept as we only have one minute to talk about what we wanted to remember, even if we are interrupted by the video cutting out, this is why it is so important to get as much as possible into our own individual minute, hypothetically when the body has passed away, this information that has been recorded and could be found or passed onto generations of people, but also the video for each individual was more comforting than anything.
We started to investigate and research different aspects of memory in the digital age, looking at Baudrillard as one of the inspirations to our video. Baudrillard, best known as a social critic and social theorist particularly studied subject matters like, cloning, aids, gender relations, The Gulf War, Rushdie Affair. Immediately they are obvious strong and controversial subjects. 'Simulacra and Simulation', this was about seeking to interrogate the relationship among reality, symbols and society. I found that this quote reflected our video.
“Contemporary media including: television, film, print and the Internet which are responsible for blurring the line between goods that we need and goods for which a need is created by commercial images.”
Have our minds become too caught up in technology that we will now remember more about what we had, not what we should remember such as family, friends and nature.
Baudrillard believed that there was not a difference between fantasy and reality, now people care and react more to TV programmes, which is their fantasy rather than their real life happenings. The song by Stanton Warriors called Machine is a good example of how much people now rely on technology so much that when it is slow they get annoyed, when it stops working and breaks down they can't live without it, most people would not even know their home phone number off by heart. If the world was ending in a similar case to ours but this was before all this technology had arrived we would be writing it in a book.
Marshall McLulan’s concept of 'Medium is the Message'. “Meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences now the message is perceived.”
The video contains a lot of mystery, as a group we thought it would be hard for some of us to tell our personal stories, this makes it more interesting for the viewer as they do not know whether these emotions are put on.
The idea of the video was to reach out to what people value when it comes to memories and what memories most arise whether it is bad or good. The most obvious things to pop up are memories with family, friends, money, succession, animals, love, times of trouble, different relationships.
For myself I wanted to talk about my family, friends and talk about memories that link with an emotion. My minute went surprisingly slow and I finished what I was saying 10 seconds early, this was primarily because I talked so fast while nerves and pressure kicked in. In the group we had many contrasts of each individual minutes.
Hanna Laura’s minute was more of a love letter, she talked about feelings but not about people or things that had happened to her. This was very intriguing because of how the audience were not given any emotional outcome. She remarked that she found strangers amazing and that she wondered whether they thought the same as her or whether they are happy to stay in their world and not dream about another perspectives on life.
Declan’s one minute was filled with memories about people close to him. He made a list of people that he wanted to remember and made a quick description about what they were like, giving the viewer more. He said what made him happy and even smiled and laughed at what he was talking about.
Olga completely contrasted everyone’s, she wanted to have a part of her or who she was in the video, and coming from Italy she said a poem that was written in Italian about a man who was slightly lost. This was very touching and a strong part of our video, she said that she wanted to use her brain as a machine and wanted to remember it off by heart, she was the only one reading from memory rather than a piece of paper.
We wanted to keep it simple, making the video in a plain classroom with white backgrounds to make everyone’s video equal, the group thought that this would give more of a dramatic feel, with the quote, 'less is more', keeping in mind McLulan's and Baudrillard's theories of the memory subject. We found a blue projection on the wall in the room which explained a few of our concepts, the blue background was a symbol of a digital world, something that could not be described as anything close to reality which made it have no environment feel, this made the concept of everyone being equal and that there time was equal to tell there memories. The fact that this could be a projection of a digital world, then it is a video within a video, a game within a game.
To make it more interesting for the group and for the viewer/ audience we would not discuss within the group what each of us were going to talk about, this caused an element of surprise and secret.
To give a pre digital feel of how valuable and precious technology was/ is the one minute was crucial to fit in as much as we could.
When we made our video we only had one shot, in our designated minute, we were not allowed to stop or pause and start again. This made our idea and concept so interesting because if the world was to end and this was a real event, then you would not be able to chop and change. It gave a sense of pressure to get it write the first time making the video better because our interviews were not perfect.
Before we separately went into the room and took turns to record ourselves we all felt nervous, almost as if we were just about to go on stage.
Word Count: 1111
Below is a link to our video:
Reference List:
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