cinema[1|2]blog::clog
glimpsed: [] melbourne time

First post to a new blog. A new project. Always a tricky one. I guess a big bold programmatic statement needs to happen.

Of course since it is a blog come hypertext (more on that over where I talk a bit more about hypertext and method) this post, though chronologically the first (well, not quite, the blurb snuck in first, but you know what I mean), will. . .

Will, what is the word? Chirographically? No, that's to do with writing. Spatially? Definitely not. No space on my screen, just x and y co-ordinates pretending that they hang out with a z.

Well, this post, though first, will very quickly become last because it is the first to be replaced, displaced, by the second. It temporally announces itself as the first of the series, but of course since it is a blog, and the canonical order of a blog is most recent post to the fore (I mean the top) then it is the first to be lost, shoved down the hierarchy of newness or currency, of the latest. And as the first, it will always be found at the bottom. The oldest post on the oldest archive page. That's what happens to the first.

Some years ago (many years ago? I guess so) I read Cinema One and Cinema Two and they stuck to me. Fly paper. I was the fly and I found them and now I'm stuck with it (or in their case, them). They thrill, intimidate, excite, and threaten me. They taught or made me revision what I think cinema is, what it does, how it does, and why it does it.

I teach Deleuze and cinema (sometimes), I use Deleuze to theorise interactivity in hypertext, Deleuze strongly informs my understanding of hypertext as a post-cinematic writing event, and the ways I have come to conceive of networked desktop interactive video (vogs) is largely via Deleuze.

But these knowledges have remained largely implicit, in my practice, my teaching, and my published research. I can now begin to make this explicit. With blogs, my digital multiliteracy, tools like Tinderbox, and of course my QuickTime authoring skills, I have the resources and the environment I need to develop the project I always imagined. A hypertextual writing space (with all of the assumptions of hypertext literacy as a writing practice that that entails) that supports complex linking, the dynamic recontextualisation of content through agents (Tinderbox), defining the attributes or properties of each node in an ongoing manner, and so a writing space that is able to support emergent knowledges rather than a system to merely annotate my already known. A hypertextual publishing space (blogs) that eschews the monumentality of the essay and other forms of representation that so easily conflate the representation of the already known as the production of knowledge, rather than the performative construction and engagement, the little flurries and stutters, that writing and thought is. Finally, a writing and publishing space that does allow for the inclusion (not incorporation) of image and video alongside writing, of interactive video, that will allow an engagement with and by Deleuze's concepts and problems inside a common discursive domain.

[Sat 23 Nov 2002]