Tag: university

• Conjuring to a brief

  

  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.

• Inertia

  

  Since the interminable Melbourne lockdowns and their horrific effect on the population of the city, my place of work has implemented ‘slow-down’ periods. These are usually timed around the usual holiday periods, e.g. Christmas, Easter, but there’s usually also a slowdown scheduled around mid-semester and mid-year breaks. The idea isn’t exactly to stop work (in this economy? ahahahaha no, peasant.) but rather to skip or postpone any non-essential meetings and spend time on focused work. Most often for teacher-researchers like myself, this constitutes catching up on marking assignments or prepping for the coming weeks of classes, though sometimes we can scrape up some time to think about long-gestating research projects or creative work. That’s the theory, anyway.

  I will say it’s nice to pause meetings for a week or two. The nature of academic work is (and should be) collaborative, dependent on bouncing ideas off others, working together to solve gnarly pedagogical issues, pooling resources to compile rich and nuanced ciritical work. But if you’re balancing teaching or coordination along with administrative or managerial duties, plus postgraduate supervisions and research stuff, it can be a lot of being on, a lot of just… people work. I’ll throw in a quick disclaimer here that I’m very lucky to have a bunch of lovely colleagues, and the vast majority of my students have been almost saccharinely delightful to work with. It can still be a lot, though, if you’re pretty woeful at scheduling around your energy levels, as I often am. Hashtag high achiever, hashtag people pleaser, hashtag burnout, hashtag hashtag etc etc etc.

  Academics are notorious for keeping weird hours, or for working too much, or for not having any boundaries around work and life. And I say this as someone who has embodied that stereotype with aplomb for years (even pre-academia, to be honest). I’ve had many conversations with colleagues where we bemoan working late into the evening, or over the weekend, or around other commitments. I’ve often been hard-pressed to find anyone who has any hard boundaries around work and not-work.

  Taking extended leave last year was the first time I’ve ever properly stopped working. No sneaky finishing of research projects, no brainstorming the next media class, no cheeky research reading, no emails. It showed me many things, but primarily how insidious work can be for someone with my disposition and approach to life in general. It is also insidious when you are passionate, and when you care. I care deeply about media education and research, and have become familiar with its rhythms and contours, its stresses and its delights, its (many) foibles and much deeper issues. I care about students and ensuring they feel not just ‘delivered to’ or ‘spoken at’, but rather that they’re exposed to new ways of thinking; inspired to learn well beyond graduation, indeed, to never stop learning; enabled and empowered to tell their stories, and whatever stories they want to tell. I care about producing research, e.g. journal articles, video essays, presentations and events, that is not tired, stale, staid, boring, dense, conventional, but rather is experimental, vibrant, connected, open-ended, and appeals broadly across multiple disciplines and outside the academy.

  I’m not alone here. As mentioned above, I have colleagues who almost universally feel exactly the same way. And I’ve built a local and international research network who share these passions and questions and concerns. A global support group. I’m very lucky and privileged in this way.

  But yeah: all this shit is fucking exhausting. The environment, the sector, the period, certainly doesn’t help. The current model of academia, university management, tertiary education, the industry/academy nexus, capitalism (in summary: neoliberalism), all of it is quite happy to capitalise on passion, on modern productivity dicta around never-being-done, irons-in-the-fire, publish or perish, manage it all or die, no life for you, hang the consequences and anyone you’re dealing with who isn’t work (e.g. partners, kids, friends, families). To anyone who says academics have a cushy job and get paid too much: kindly take yourself into the sea, thanks. That may have been true in the past, but we’re living on the other side of whatever spectrum you’re looking at.

  Suffice to say, slowdowns are nice. Taking proper breaks and/or having an executive echelon that genuinely supports and structures wellbeing and balance would be ideal, but beggars can’t be choosers.

• New research published: Inscribing and encoding

  

  A long-gestating piece of research has just been published in the Global Media Journal — Australian Edition. This piece emerged from a day of field-work conducted with the Posthumanities Reading Group from RMIT, under the stewardship of the late and much-missed Adrian Miles. The day was held in February 2017 at Pound Bend on the Yarra River, about 45 minutes north-east of the Melbourne CBD. Almost exactly a year later, on 5 February 2018, Adrian passed away while riding his beloved bike in the bush near Kinglake.

  This piece is dedicated to Adrian, and his short but enormous influence on my thinking and approach to academic life.

  You can read the piece here.

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  Abstract

  How does it feel to make media? What goes through the filmmaker’s head right at the moment they hit ‘record’? What are the processes – mechanical, digital, physical, psychological – that occur before, during, and after the recording of sound or vision? Building on the recent embodied turn in screen production research and taking inspiration from core ideas of the new materialists, this experimental piece unfolds in two parts.

  Part one takes the form of stream of consciousness writing in retort to quotes or ideas from new materialist thinkers like Andrew Pickering and Kathleen Stewart, and a reflection on one’s own media practice. The result of this is two recipes for a kind of embodied making, which were then put into practice with two pieces of media, The Yarra & I and Pieces of Pound Bend. An extended second part connects reflections on this practice to writing on cinema and time, primarily Gilles Deleuze and Jean Epstein.

  This work examines where the maker fits in the nebula of media texts, tools, and technologies. What is the point of making media or – perhaps more aptly – when?

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  Here’s the reading list I put together to remember Adrian, and my colleague Adrian Danks’ touching tribute.

• one day more

  

  I shared on the weekend that I had been working, and how rare that was (working on the weekend, not working full stop!). I’m now further into that particular grind, working through Day 8 of a nine-day stretch.

  I’m very much feeling it now. At times through a stretch like this you’re in the zone, you find your flow. But then there are times like now, when you feel like there’s nothing left.

  It’s like a day after a rough night’s sleep; but just lengthened over a period of days.

  One more day tomorrow – a full day, but away from the office. A time to discuss, to reflect, to plan.

  Then two perfectly-planned research days, to get my head back into reading and thinking mode.

  Then a long weekend.

  I can do this.

• The Adrian Miles Reading List

  

  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.

   

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  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.