vogwurk + werdwurk
glimpsed: [] melbourne time

[brief outline of notes for a lecture to third year media studies students about online aesthetics]

• pick up your biro
• find a clean page
• write down the three things you think are important to a good web project
• call this list one

most of you have some familiarity with the 'aesthetics' of radio and television. perhaps a bit with cinema. what i mean by aesthetics in this context is simply the sorts of creative (and other) assumptions that we make when we think about tv and radio. since i don't know a thing about radio i'll use tv and cinema (i figure most of us have some familiarity with tv and cinema so the points will make a bit of sense).

most of the cinema that we know is narrative, and probably realist. this means it conceals how it is made, or its own processes of production. whether this is the technology used, acting methods, actors, locations, continuity editing, and so on. it hides from us (and itself) that it is a manufactured thing. this is sort of diluted in our late postmodern times with a very high degree of self reflexiveness, but essentially narrative rules.

the same can be said for tv. however, there are big differences between tv and cinema. cinema is, principally, an art or medium that is about time, tv on the other hand is primarily a medium about space. there is no such thing as live cinema, but there is certainly live today. and tv's 'liveness' isn't about manipulating time, it is about the erasure of space (for instance distance).

this is probably one of the major differences between video art and film art (and why tv is much more akin to cinema than video).

so, from your point of view, and experience, cinema is something that is about narrative that wants, loves, craves immense screens. dark rooms. audiences that surrender themselves to these rules and rituals.

tv on the other hand is a familial and domestic experience. the screen is smaller, the light is on, conversation is common, and tv is contituted by regularity and flow. (many of the qualities of popular radio.) tv in many ways recognises that the space of reception is social and domestic. (this is also strongly expressed in how tv's look.)

so when we come to the web, the most common thing we do is use these standards or assumptions to think about what we ought to do on the web. now we all know that the web is a different thing (just remembering for the moment that the web is not the internet, just one part) to books and cinema and tv and so on, but we don't really know how different.

this isn't just a problem for this class, it is a problem for most people who think they're designing content for the web most of the time. this is very much the case in video and audio, which i'll talk about more specifically next lecture, where existing assumptions of televisual content and style are still the dominant form of audiovisual content online.

and it is hardly surprising that we're not sure what to do online here, because most of you, most of the time, use 'industry practice' as your benchmark. so you sort of work backwards when it comes to new media online, which makes it rather hard to be creative or inventive.

so, the web. well, a good way to start is to just pay attention to what a computer is and how you use it (what would my list for tv look like?):

• pick up your biro
• find your no longer clean page
• write down all the things you think are important in relation to what you do on and with a networked computer

these are the things on my list:

• screen based
• mutliple windows
• many activities at once
• requires user action
• multiple activities
• domestic
• small scale
• limited bandwidth (screen, network, time)
• usually a location of work and other activities
• outside of gaming is probably never used for one thing at a time
• requires literacy about computers
• requires literacy about networks
• the whole is greater than the sum of its parts
• multivocal or polyvocal
• personal
• distributed
• acentred
• rhizomatic
• rapid change
• users have a lot of authority (that's why they get a special name)
• multilinear

and just as in film and sound work there is an immense range of styles, practices, and experiments. everything from the web equivalent of nobudget independent production work through to high end big budget productions. and just as in your own practice, you need to be able to recognise these differences and know where and why your work is located.