Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Planet New Media: The Final Project
More than any other project this semester, our "Planet New Media" final product hides all the hard work and critical thought that went into it. And that makes me overjoyed.
By hard work and critical thought, I mean starting with Lev Manovich's "New Media" -- a book as dense as it is brilliant -- and trying not only to decipher just what he means, but also how we can visually represent the theory with the limited tools we've been trained to use this semester.
I think that was the hardest part of the project. Proof lies in the messy brainstorming sheets we produced. The difficulty reinforced the gap between theory and practice. There's the old saying: "Do as I say, not as I do." The point is it's very easy to say something intelligent and enlightened. Turning an idea into a productive visual output is a whole new ball game -- literally. Preaching versus practice is the difference between telling someone how to play baseball and actually playing the game. The two are alike only in premise. But nothing can compare with being brushed off with a 95 mph fastball, or the meaty thwack of connecting for scorching home run.
Thus, back to my original uber-satisfaction of our final product: it emphasizes the "practice," the "do" over the "say." We show rather than tell. And we use photoshop, video editing, and audio not because we want to make the ultimate project or show that we can blend different presentation techniques, but because we had to use all of the styles to make the project. I mean that honestly. And this interdisciplinary approach had a two-way-street effect. That is, the different mediums of representation allowed for a cohesion that helped us tie together the four main parts of our slideshow/video. But the cohesive story that this interdisciplinary approach furthered rebounded to help blend the the different representation techniques. What I mean is that the use of audio to narrate the photoshopped images seemed not only natural, but the only way to tell the story and by far the best way to represent new media.
The practice vs. preaching contrast was no the only binary that energized our project. Our presentation spawned from a fundamental contradiction: the decision to juxtapose the atom with the pixel. We rename planet earth as planet new media to point out that while physical earth is made of atoms, our digital earth is made of pixels. I found this contrast convincing and fascinating. The pixel really does create whole new worlds we inhabit. Look at online gaming communities. I wanted the video to focus on Manovich's principle of customization through the pixel.
This discussion of the pixel bled over into our very method of showcasing the project. Beneath all the pretentious philosophy and half-sensible connections to the nineteenth, Manovich writes that New Media is highly customizable and, because of this, can reach everyone in unique ways. It provides reams and reams of freedom for everyone. So why not practice what he preaches, I reasoned? Why not put his theory to use not only in the substance, but in our modes of representation? I think, more than any other project I've done, the connection between the rhetoric and the representation is most seamless. It's strange, but the theory is so homogenously integrated into our presentation that it doesn't get in the way.
Which was awesome, by the way.
Getting there was a million directions and redirections. We had lots of ideas that got canned, usually for being too ambitious for our tech skill and materials. But I'm extremely happy with the powerful symbolic compression of our video. We did Manovich justice while managing to eliminate his stuffiness.
Chalk one up for the good guys.
