The Clockwork Penguin

Daniel Binns is a media theorist and filmmaker tinkering with the weird edges of technology, storytelling, and screen culture. He is the author of Material Media-Making in the Digital Age and currently writes about posthuman poetics, glitchy machines, and speculative media worlds.

Category: Teaching

  • Conjuring to a brief

    Generated by me with Leonardo.Ai.

    This semester I’m running a Media studio called ‘Augmenting Creativity’. The basic goal is to develop best practices for working with generative AI tools not just in creative workflows, but as part of university assignments, academic research, and in everyday routines. My motivation or philosophy for this studio is that so much attention is being focused on the outputs of tools like Midjourney and Leonardo.Ai (as well as outputs from textbots like ChatGPT); what I guess I’m interested in is exploring more precisely where in workflows, jobs, and daily life that these tools might actually be helpful.

    In class last week we held a Leonardo.Ai hackathon, inspired by one of the workshops that was run at the Re/Framing AI event I convened a month or so ago. Leonardo.Ai generously donated some credits for students to play around with the platform. Students were given a brief around what they should try to generate:

    • an AI Self-Portrait (using text only; no image guidance!)
    • three images to envision the studio as a whole (one conceptual, a poster, and a social media tile)
    • three square icons to represent one task in their daily workflow (home, work, or study-related)

    For the Hackathon proper, students were only able to adjust the text prompt and the Preset Style; all other controls had to remain unchanged, including the Model (Phoenix), Generation Mode (Fast), Prompt Enhance (off), and all others.

    Students were curious and excited, but also faced some challenges straight away with the underlying mechanics of image generators; they had to play around with word choice in prompts to get close to desired results. The biases and constraints of the Phoenix model quickly became apparent as the students tested its limitations. For some students this was more cosmetic, such as requesting that Leonardo.Ai generate a face with no jewelry or facial hair. This produced mixed results, in that sometimes explicitly negative prompts seemed to encourage the model to produce what wasn’t wanted. Other students encountered difficulties around race or gender presentation: the model struggles a lot with nuances in race, e.g. mixed-race or specific racial subsets, and also often depicts sexualised presentations of female-presenting people (male-presenting too, but much less frequently).

    This session last week proved a solid test of Leonardo.Ai’s utility and capacity in generating assets and content (we sent some general feedback to Leonardo.Ai on platform useability and potential for improvement), but also was useful for figuring out how and where the students might use the tool in their forthcoming creative projects.

    This week we’ve spent a little time on the status of AI imagery as art, some of the ethical considerations around generative AI, and where some of the supposed impacts of these tools may most keenly be felt. In class this morning, the students were challenged to deliver lightning talks on recent AI news, developing their presentation and media analysis skills. From here, we move a little more deeply into where creativity lies in the AI process, and how human/machine collaboration might produce innovative content. The best bit, as always, will be seeing where the students go with these ideas and concepts.

  • What makes good academic writing?

    Photo by Pixabay from Pexels, 21 December 2016.

    I’m often asked by students for samples of writing that align with what’s required for assessment tasks. This semester is no different, so I actually spent some time digging through old courses and studios I’ve run, finding a few good examples that I can share with the students.

    Very often my feedback on student reflections tends towards hoping they’ll integrate or synthesise research, ideas, and thoughts on their making. I usually find myself saying ‘take a position and argue it’, by which I mean that reflective writing — at least in an academic context — shouldn’t be about a summary of everything achieved, every decision made. Rather, choose a single point — be it a creative choice, or a quote from a journal article, or something watched — and then unpack that single point to make connections to other researchers and scholars, other makers, other reflections/insights the student generated in the class.

    This is difficult to achieve, even for seasoned researchers. Add to this that the accepted conventions of academic writing — the vast majority of it in many fields — are so restrictive in terms of expression as to be incomprehensible. This means that students become terrified of approaching any academic writing. It’s seen as boring, or dense, or difficult. This greatly stifles their curiosity, or their interest in finding the connections I try to encourage.

    If only, I hear them say or imply, academic writing was easier to engage with. Which reminds me that there are some truly wonderful, writerly, scholars out there. You just have to look. This is far from an exhaustive bibliography, but here are a handful of scholars that I read for the joy of experiencing good writing as much as for research.

    • Ingold, Tim. 2011. “The Textility of Making.” In Being Alive, 219–28. Milton Park: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203818336-28.
    • Jagoda, Patrick. 2016. Network Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rmit/detail.action?docID=4427890.
    • Miles, Adrian, Bruno Lessard, Hannah Brasier, and Franziska Weidle. 2018. “From Critical Distance to Critical Intimacy: Interactive Documentary and Relational Media.” In Critical Distance in Documentary Media, edited by Gerda Cammaer, Blake Fitzpatrick, and Bruno Lessard, 301–19. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
    • Murray, Janet Horowitz. 2017. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Updated edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
    • Peters, John Durham. 2015. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226253978.001.0001.
    • Pomerance, Murray. 2008. The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film Experience beyond Narrative and Theory. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
    • Stewart, Kathleen. 2011. “Atmospheric Attunements.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (3): 445–53. https://doi.org/10.1068/d9109.

  • The Adrian Miles Reading List

    Screen Shot 2018-02-09 at 2.05.34 pm

    I and many others in the RMIT community are struggling to find ways to deal with the loss of our dear colleague and friend Adrian Miles. Adrian had a profound impact on me in a very short space of time. My current book project has a foundation in many of the challenging ideas he threw at me; so much so that picking up work on it again will be tough.

    Finding words is something Adrian never struggled with. I thought I’d collate some of the hundreds upon thousands he foisted on colleagues, students, and friends. Suggestions welcome in the comments: I’ll update the post with any additions.

    If you’re wondering how best to remember Adrian, maybe pick up one of the following, or take 25 minutes’ silence, with a 5-minute break.

     

     

    Bogost, Ian. (2012). Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to be a Thing. University of Minnesota Press.

    Ingold, Tim. (2011). “Rethinking the Animate, Reanimating Thought.” Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Routledge.

    Latour, Bruno. (1987). Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Harvard University Press.

    Pickering, Andrew. (1995). The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. University Of Chicago Press.

    Stewart, Kathleen. “Atmospheric Attunements.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011): 445–453.

    Vannini, Phillip. (2015). Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research. Routledge.

  • Priorities

    I am lucky to have a job that I love. But in the eighteen months of settling into full-time academia, I seem to have lost sight of the ‘love’ and become fixated on the ‘job’. A weird thing has happened in recent weeks, in that I’ve tried to become more focused on what is actually important about my work — and what feels the most rewarding.

    There are two main strands to the workload of an academic at my level: teaching and research. Research covers the writing and publication of scholarly work — be it journal articles, book chapters, conference presentations, monographs. Teaching is what it says on the tin.

    In 2011, mid-PhD, I took my first class at Western Sydney University (then UWS). It was a boring compulsory course, but I caught the bug, and have loved teaching ever since. With the transition to full-time employment, I’ve always tried to have time for my students, time to sink into my pedagogy, but that time has always felt sapped by other commitments. I say felt, because I’ve realised that the sapping of time has only occurred because I’ve let it.

    This semester, I’ve turned a corner. The most important commitments I have, during semester time, are my students. Everything else is secondary. To be clear, I don’t think the time I spend on teaching or research will change this semester (I have a book chapter to finish, a presentation to write, and a monograph to approve all by September). Rather what has changed is where my head is at most of the time: ensuring my students are, if not blissfully happy, then at least reasonably clear about what I’m trying to teach them, and the experience I would — ideally — like them to have.

  • Pomodoro ramblings

    In my first classes this week, I introduced first-year students to the Pomodoro technique. I’ve had a mixed relationship with the technique, but sometimes find it useful in terms of getting my head fully into a project during its opening stages. In solidarity, I too typed non-stop for 15 minutes (a reduced pomodoro — usually they run for 25). The results were… well, they were a glimpse into the chaos of my brain. I’ve edited them slightly (ditched typos and some of the more bizarre tangents), added links and some editorial notes, and re-posted here. The unit is a foundational media subject, and is a blend of theory and practice.

     

    Prompt: What would you like to get out of the class?

    I would like to hone my pedagogy — in particular getting students engaged during workshop and lecture time. I am actively working to fill the lecture time not only with content, clips, and relevant examples, but also with activities that break the monotonous delivery.

    I have already run out of ideas but I’m going to keep typing because this is what the Pomodoro technique is all about. Look if I’m honest I think the introduction of the Pomodoro technique into the classroom situation is an interesting thing for me and the students. It gets them thinking about writing as a practice and as a discipline, not this far-off thing that’s unobtainable and difficult. The Pomodoro technique is all about quantity rather than quality — which explains quite a bit about this piece I’m writing at the moment. (more…)