14 thoughts on “MSCEDC Visual Artefact

  1. Great video Anne! It’s incredibly unsettling. The disorientation and repetition you manage to convey so well is often evident when navigating new digital spaces. Sneaking skating in there, making it relevant to your own teaching, was interesting, perhaps that disorientation is exactly how I would feel on a pair of skates.

    I really love how you manage to incorporate bodily functions like a heart beating and breathing connecting the body to the digital.

    1. Hey Chenée! Thank you!
      It was meant to be unsettling – glad that message came through. I tried to combine ‘digital’ and ‘human’…

  2. Wow! This is more like an ‘Art House Movie’ than an end of block artefact. Great production quality, particularly the soundtrack, which I think is the hardest element to get right.

    As Chenee observed it is unsettling. I did find myself wondering why the moments of skating weren’t oases of calm amongst the frenetic activity of the day.

    1. Thanks! The soundtrack (if I can call it that) consists of a simple piece I composed and played on the piano combined with various sound effects.
      Your observation about how the moments of skating weren’t “oases of calm” – so interesting – Although I sometimes feel like skating is a place of refuge, it is (one of) my places of work…so not always a calm environment 🙂

  3. I liked the way you reduced the times between the jumps to different images and overlays. This combined well with the shots of you clicking through the browser tabs that gradually got more frantic.

    Some questions:

    Is the piano part played by yourself?
    I am noticing that most of the EDC artefacts are mainly presenting digital cultures as unsettling and negative rather than positive. Would you say that you artefact reflects your general attitude towards digital technologies? Or is the tone an aesthetic decision decided by the artefact?

    1. Hi Daniel ,
      Thank you for your kind words. Yes, I played the piano in this – it is a very simple composition, meant to be somewhat sad and monotonous.
      I agree that my artefact is unsettling and somewhat negative – this reflects my struggle with trying to keep up with life rather than my general attitude towards digital technologies 🙂

  4. This is outstanding Anne, the images are brilliant and I love the heartbeat.

    It feels like yo are being taken on a journey,
    Eli

  5. Sorry, Im only getting to review your artifact now Anne, I’ve been travelling and in an area with really bad connectivity so I couldn’t even watch one of the artifacts this week!.

    This is a brilliant visual journey and one I was hoping to replicate somewhat but ran out of time. I enjoy how the pace of your implied experience becomes evermore frantic and disjointed. I think we all felt this way to some degree as the pressure to be both responsive, creative and relevant weighed on us in week 3.

    The music combined with the ever increasing hear rate is also an excellent compliment to the hyped tempo, particularly at the end.

    Nice work!

    1. Thank you!
      ‘Frantic’ is an accurate word to describe my feelings lately! I guess this really came through in my artefact.

  6. Really superb artefact Anne! As Nigel commented above, this feels like a film – rich themes, and expert combinations of visuals, sound effects and music, really fantastic work!

    The sense of disorientation has already been commented on, and this seems to build throughout the piece – I wondered if this was a reflection on your lifestream blog and participation in the course much more than it was on the ‘cyberculutres’ theme itself. It certainly seemed as if your flickering digital interactions were tangling themselves into the rest of your (analogue) life.

    I also noticed the breathing sound effects, which added to the tension, but also seemed to situate you, or at least a human subject, at the centre of all this digital / analogue chaos. Was that perhaps a comment on some of the ideas around the postman?

    I loved the coffee making too! Aside from making me want a coffee, it also seemed to be making a comment on the use of stimulants, in the sense that one needs some kind of ‘artificial’ help to get on with our ‘normal’ lives. Just as one accepts a pair of glasses as a necessary prosthetic, we also accept the ingesting of things that make us function better – a interesting comment on the ‘authentic’ human perhaps?

    So much going on here Anne, a really rich multimodal artefact, well done!

  7. Thank you, Jeremy!
    I feel a sense of disorientation in this course – not in a negative way (because I find the content very interesting) but because I am struggling to find the time to stay on top of everything.
    My artefact is both a reflection on my struggle with course participation and the lifestream blog and my take on cybercultures. As most people would guess, my artefact is a personal reflection of my own (crazy) life…but…it could also be a interpreted from a machine’s point of view, of a machine wanting to be human – reviewing memories of his/her/its past human life…? I also wanted to convey the theme of ‘memory’ through flashes of a frantic life moments.
    And the coffee! Too funny! I didn’t think of it being representative of a stimulant, but you are absolutely correct! I definitely rely on coffee to help me – I need that caffeine kick in the morning! 🙂

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