hannahbrasier

[hannahbrasier]

If you crossed paths with Adrian Miles and have a story to share, we have set up this website to collect memories about Adrian to be passed on to his family. 

[hannahbrasier]

Adrian Miles

I have been meaning to write this for days, although have not quite had the words, finally I heard this voice in my head saying just “write, just get it all on paper, the real work is in the edit.” This was one of the many things Adrian taught me, not just a whole breadth of knowledge on networked media, new materialism and posthumanism, what Adrian called “computational nonfiction,” but how to learn, write, read, and research (there would be a red stroke through that “but”  if he was editing this. He always said there was no use for “but” and “also”.) Summarising all of the things Adrian has passed on to me over the past eight years is really hard and immense, so I’ve set myself a 25 minute timer to write this - to keep it succinct. I will probably ramble and I think it’s only best that it’s in fragments.

I remember the very first time Adrian taught me - I think the subject was called Integrated Media 1. His lecture began with a blog post filled with links which he followed haphazardly to structure his talk on how writing online is integrally different from writing on paper. A lot of students walked out confused, I walked out excited by this multilinear way of thinking about media - something that I am carrying through in my PhD now. I will fill this post with links. 

There’s so much Adrian introduced me to: blogs, Scrivener, links, pomodoros, networks, Korsakow, threads, bullet journals, media recipes, editing on paper, post-it note brainstorming, progress timelines, Evernote. He was adamant these techniques and pieces of software were the only way to do research, and would run workshops on which programs you should have on your computer for the various things we do as researchers: take notes, write, collect quotes, hold readings, and house citations. All these programs should be networked and not freestanding on your computer.

As we walked through the streets of Buenos Aires last year, he looked up, amazed at all the tangled cables stringing from one building to the next - “what do they all power he asked?” Apparently, photos of these cables reflected Adrian’s time in Buenos Aires on his Instagram. Everything is knotted and mesh-like.

My timer is telling me I have 3 minutes left and I’ve barely written enough. I will end by saying that I will sorely miss Adrian’s generosity, wisdom, quirkiness, reading and making groups, and unwavering support of my research as a supervisor and mentor. 

[hannahbrasier]

Digital Media and Documentary: Antipodean Approaches (ed. Adrian Miles) includes a chapter by me on my Korsakow Film I See You entitled Moments of Noticing: ‘I See You’ as a Speculative Work Towards an Essayistic List Practice for Interactive Documentary (pp. 13-28). The other authors contributing to this anthology are Adrian Miles, Bettina Frankham, Seth Keen, Cathie Payne and Max Schleser. 

Book can be purchased from Palgrave here.

[hannahbrasier]

I have recently completed teaching a studio called Seeing the Unseen. This studio was based on my own research interests in RMIT’s School of Media & Communication undergraduate program. I encouraged my students to develop ways of noticing with media through various experiments in content and form. This blog shows the major projects of my students this semester.

[hannahbrasier]

a nice sentence on a nice day

As I move towards the end of a significant edit and restructure of my PhD I find that I am slowly able to articulate what I want to be saying into words that make sense. Here is one such sentence that I feel quite pleased with today:

“Archie’s movements through the bush, the way the sun creates humidity, mosquitoes and shadows, and the circular patterns which make up this bush environment describe some of the precarious qualities of the hour or so I am there, where what I notice and film responds to how movements, elements and objects precariously operate to create shifting aesthetics of landscape.”

Although, it may be a little long. After Friday last week being a day of feeling quite stuck, it is nice to come in on a Monday with hope rather than despair. Small moments of happiness about a sentence or finding a little momentum make this PhD journey worth it really. 

IT FEELS GOOD TO BE BACK!

[hannahbrasier]

At 9am down a weaving corridor Docuverse held our Behind the Interface: assessing technological implications in expanded documentary practices workshop at the Centro Cultural Borges in Buenos Aires. Franziska Weidle hosted the workshop where she along with Helen Gaynor, Hannah Brasier, Kim Munro, Georgia Wallace-Crabbe and Pauline Anastasiou all presented short five minute provocations about expanded documentary practices. The format was each person presented three slides; the first addressing what we were trying to do, the second what we did and the third what question emerges for us out of this. At the end of the presentation we posed each of our questions back to the audience to be workshopped hoping to find some potential ways in which to navigate these problems. The workshop was broken down into three topics: limitations of existing tools, pedagogical implications and questions of agency.

[hannahbrasier]

on Pound’s “The Great Exhibiton”

Accidentally I stumbled across Patrick Pound’s The Great Exhibition when I was looking for John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea. I didn’t even get a chance to look for Vertigo Sea, and later found out that the video multi-screen installation is at Ian Potter not NGV. The point being is that Pound’s The Great Exhibition caught my attention as an exhibition which collects, and orders through listing, photographs, objects, and paintings bought from the Internet and housed in the NGV’s collection. I was immediately taken by the first room which was filled with collected photographs grouped together via what they showed or the materiality of the photographs themselves. I liked this room because each photograph reminded me of a SNU in Korsakow and how I often cluster things together. As I wandered through the various rooms I was constantly making connections to my own ways of listing, clustering, sorting and making connections between things that may only loosely be held together. 

This first room of photographs consisted of the following lists: music, lamps, the body in pieces, photographs of photographs, miracles of photography, alphabetical, self portraits, photographers and their subjects, resistors, interruptions, near misses, photography and air, the readers, the photographer’s shadow, people holding cameras, people holding photographs, rear vision, the hand of the photographer, absent mothers, messages (on the back of photographs), the addict, not quite there, empty photo-booths, on television, the case of the camera, damaged, people from behind.

There were a dozen to hundreds of photographs grouped into these clusters, sometimes as a horizontal list one photograph after another, sometimes as a circular sort of cluster displayed on a wall and sometimes simply as a pile stacked haphazardly on one another. In another room photographs zig-zagged across the walls - cross sections offering a point of similarity. 

Further, there were lots of quotes from Pound displayed on the walls which tapped into my research interests especially around how the Vine video application cannot create anything more than a glimpse or glance at the world and in doing so reduces the world to these moments. In one of Pound’s quotes he notes how “the camera reduces the world to a list of things to photograph. When I click BUY on eBay - for me that’s the equivalent of taking a photograph. The mouse is my camera.” While I still record most of my Vine videos I have been thinking a lot about how curation creates new objects, particularly online in spaces such as Tumblr, where reposting something on your wall in combination with other collected things is like taking a photograph or making art. So, in Pound’s exhibition I saw a similarity in how the whole thing was displayed that mimics the type of accumulation and curation of items online, physically in the gallery space. 

Another idea, which Pound presents is that collecting allows a “thinking through things.” In that collecting allows one to gather their thoughts through the things themselves. I like this idea as a response to how a user may interact with my experimental nonfiction, where the individual clips are things which the user uses to think with and through. 

One last thing was that their was a video data algorithm piece called Things of sorts which you can find online. A collaboration between Patrick Pound and Rowan McNaught which is described as am ‘internet sorting machine.’ What happens is an image appears on the screen from Pounds pairing room (basically a room filled with pairs of things) and then the internet seeks out a pair and generates another image and then these two images are combined to search for a new pair. This continues until exhausted in which a new image from Pound’s exhibition starts the chain again. At the same as the pairing takes place a caption is algorithmically generated to describe or contextualise it. I have been reading a lot about algorithms and the generation of meaning and sense making, especially in consideration of Craig Hight’s special edition of Studies in Documentary Film. In Hight’s article he poses the question of whether these digital documentaries could be considered “as the ‘creative treatment of data structures’?” (246). I think this relationship between humans, technology and automation really intriguing when we think of how documentaries make sense of or negotiate the world, especially in light of these automated systems which are essentially constantly making documentaries about everything all the time. 

[hannahbrasier]

In recent scholarship across various fields there has been a push toward posthumanist thinking which de-centres the human in order to notice, attend to, account for, or perform the inherent immensity of the fluxing world. For Law, in the field of social science, practices are too orderly, methodological, regulatory or standardising to capture the "vague, diffuse or unspecific, slippery, emotional, ephemeral, elusive and indistinct” qualities of the world (2). Likewise, in the field of documentary film, one can argue that practice tends to negate the unseen as a documentary is negotiated through a filmmaker’s idea. In documentary film what is selected to be filmed and edited together is about re-creating an idea which existed before the act of filming, generating what Miles argues as a “much smaller and more limited account of the world than the world is.” Through my PhD research I develop an ethics of attending for documentary film which attempts to make the unseen seen. For this paper I will discuss how this practice of attending de-centres the human in order to attend to the unseen through two documentaries I made called Sunny, Rainy, Foggy and Sometimes I See Palm Trees. Through this project-based research I use the list as a device to explode discrete moments of noticing into their multiple forms using my phone, the Vine video application and the Korsakow authoring software. What this practice configures is a way of attending which de-centres myself in order for my documentary images to be multiple, unpredictable and always in flux. This ethics of documentary attending potentially provides a theory and model of documentary film as a posthumanist practice. Works Cited: Law, John. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. Routledge, 2004. Miles, Adrian. The Gentleness of the Comma and the Violence of Story. Adrian Miles - Academia, 2017, https://www.academia.edu/19067331/The_Gentleness_of_the_Comma_and_the_Violence_of_Story.

Most recent conference talk at New Directions in Screen Studies at Monash University now on my academia page. 

[hannahbrasier]

Franzi Weidle has posted a summary of the Docuverse Symposium we hosted in early February on Expanded Documentary practices in Australia. 

[hannahbrasier]

If you’re in Melbourne Docuverse is hosting our first Snapshots event of the year with Patricia Aufderheide on the 2nd of March.

[hannahbrasier]

refined recipe with theoretical context

At today’s 2nd posthumanism lab I refined the recipe I came up with yesterday through a process of providing a theoretical context, testing out my recipe in practice and reflecting upon what was not quite working. 

Theoretical context

A speculative method for a practice of noticing, attending, attuning, and tuning that keeps recurring for me lies somewhere I think between Bennett’s “anticipatory readiness” “onto an eccentric out-side” (5) and Pickering’s “delicate material positioning or tuning” to the material agency of things (14). For Bennett it seems to be about developing an attentiveness which can see how things are intricately related in a complex web which includes oneself and the particular assemblages things make with each other. The glinting sun, glove, rat, bottle cap create an assemblage which draw Bennett’s attention toward them, although only because she has a certain sensibility to notice, see, attend, and tune in to the environment around her. For Pickering there is a similarity, although from a science perspective––that we need to attend to how the tools of our practice are shaping and re-shaping what we are doing towards an unknown end. The end emerges through an entanglement between the scientist, the world and the tools used. So, Pickering focuses on the tools used as well as the world.

A question emerging for me is how can I develop a sort of “anticipatory readiness” or “delicate material positioning” for documentary film? A documentary film emerging through an attentiveness towards how the practice is emerging through myself, world, and tools of practice towards an unknown documentary text. So far there are two rules; that you should not start with a pre-conceived idea of what the film will be about and secondly that in someway or another you have to find a way to allow what the tools of you practice notice prompt the project forward into the unknown. No pre-conceived idea and a way to densely attend to the tools of your practice.

Documentary film: the world out there “doing things” (Pickering), yourself as the one who must always look, frame and press record, a camera and it’s particular affordances––zoom, focus, exposure, quality, a tripod maybe to keep the camera still, although not necessary, the raw documentary images you collect, a device to load up your documentary images generally a computer, an editing program. There’s definitely more.

Refined recipe

Title: Listing as Tuning

Ok, so a speculative recipe which might develop an “anticipatory readiness” through a “delicate material positioning or tuning” into for documentary film:

Ingredients:

a camera that can record video, your phone is fine

tripod

something to write on

something to write with

Method:

Film for a minute

Decide whether you will film in portrait or landscape

From where you are siting or standing look around until something stands out more so than anything else. Take as long as something becomes more prominent than others

Without moving film this thing that stands out with your camera for the length you decided

Find somewhere to comfortably write

Watch this video receptively for as many times as it takes you to write a list of every quality you notice in the frame. Once you feel like you’ve exhausted all possible qualities while watching stop

Use each item on this list as a prompt for another video filming each video for the duration decided. Stop and film when you first notice something that responds to a listed item

Repeat steps 4-7 for as much time as you have

Rules:

Use your camera/phone automatically. Do not zoom into things. Simply use it to press record and to stop recording.

Do not move your camera while filming by Keeping your hand still while filming, rest your camera on something still, or use a tripod.

[hannahbrasier]

potential recipe for documentary attunement

Ingredients

Camera which can film video or phone or other device

Something to write on

Something to write with

Method

Decide on a length of time you will film for. Make this time less than minute.

Decide whether you will film in portrait or landscape.

In the location where you are film what stands out to you the most for the length of time you have selected. Only film once and do not edit in camera. In other words film continuously for the set amount of time you have selected.

Watch this video either in your phone or uploaded to a computer 10 times. As you watch write a list of every quality you can see within the frame. Try not to edit, so preferably use pen & paper as opposed to a computer.

Use an item on this written list as a prompt for your next video.

Film another video based on that prompt using the same technical constraints.

Repeat steps 4-6 until you have five videos.