MediaCity: Neighborhood Narratives

BLOG HERE in response to the reading, "The Neighborhood Narratives Project: Dialogues with/in the Mediated City," by Hana Iverson & Rickie Sanders, from MediaCity: Situations, Practices, Encounters,

Locative Narrative and the Landscape

I found this article to be interesting although, like most of the other articles, still beyond my vocabulary. I liked Jeremy Hight's ideas, especially the idea of creating something that will never be finished, and how through a local narrative he was able to create a kind of scattered or non-linear narrative.

-max hull

The Story Engine - Erin Fitzgerald

The Story Engine sounds like a worthwhile project. On one hand, as an experiment, it would be interesting to watch the

narratives develop because of the controlled factors of participators and base story. It could be noted how different people interact

with each other, as well as to whatever the story in focus is. On the other hand, as a literary endeavor, the end result of a narrative

might be fun to read, or even present an entirely new way of reading and writing stories. It definitely breaks some of the confines

put on Wikipedia, because of the editing and control, and Coover's workshop, allowing several writers/artists to participate in one

narrative. The comparison to Game Theory is definitely topical, as the internet and online networking are playing such a large role

in society. As for ideas of defining the self and one's role in the world, I think it's hard to determine what effect this will have on

them without studying the process and end result of a narrative created by the Story Engine.

Sal Hamid

Response to Andrea Grover:Phantom Captain

I couldn't find any posts on the blog for this reading and I have no idea who was supposed to do the responses to the reading. Anyway, I thought the idea of crowd sourcing was pretty interesting. It kind of reminded me of how the little people tied up Gulliver in Gulliver's Travels, and about how even though they were so little their combined power was enough to incapacitate the giant. The sketches from swarmsketch were interesting, but some of them were just gobbledygook and hard to tell exactly what you were looking at unless you read the title.
This article reminded me about the kind of stuff they used to talk about on the cable channel called "Tech TV" before it became "G4TV" and their programming changed.

Rob Bell

I enjoyed this reading. I think that what MAdV did was amazing. I think examples like this is what makes YouTube great. At the end of the day, this medium of film/video is just another way of self expression. A way to get people to feel something about the world around them and thats exactly what he did. I don't think it needs to be classified as a documntary or an experiental video. I think when you try to classiify something like this, it takes away from the range of things it could be. The fact that most people in this age have some form of video equipment and a computer, and we have a platform like youtube, people who would never express themselves or make statements about the world are now doing so and its adding to popular culture. Me and my friends talk about youtube videos more now than we do about the mainstream movies and tv shows we see.

Rob Bell

Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative Fields

I would like to start this off by saying that I completely regret volunteering to write about this article. I also would like to apologize for posting late, but to be honest it took me a long time to KIND OF understand this. Basically what I got out of this was Marsha Kinder's explanation of the methods used by, filmmaker, Luis BuÒuel. Kinder talks about "surrealistic jolts" which seems to be when something random appears or happens in the film that takes the viewer out of reality. While I find this experimental technique to be appealing and interesting, that may just be due to my fascination for the weird and creative. Most of the time I also don't quite understand the meaning behind BuÒuel's aesthetics descisions, unless I am told. For example, in one of his films there is a cow laying on a bed for, what appears to be, no real reason, but apparently as Kinder explains: "The cow on the bed in L'Age d'or is one of Bunuel's most notorious incongruous objects, helping to transform the heroine's bedroom into a warp zone that transports her directly into the realm of desire." Maybe I'm just being ignorant, or perhaps if I saw the film i would understand it more, but I would never think of a cow as a symbol of desire. What I found most interesting about the whole article was the relation between BuÒuel's techniques and dreams. Because dreams are so spontaneous and are a mix between reality and subconsciousness I find BuÒuel's methods accurate in a depiction of a dreamworld.

-Max Hull

pat white

It seems that it should be easy to discern the difference between the definition of "myth" and its synonyms after reading this selected work, but these answers remain elusive and hard to decode. Sal does a great job at breaking down the culturally selective attributes of myths, using the example of a Christmas tree. It seems relevant to keep in mind culture when speaking of mythology; interpretations may vary.