Seraphina Samet (or Anderson)

Today's guest speaker showed a selection of her screen based work, short films made using super8 cameras and montage effects. It seemed as if she was using the digital medium as a therapeutic process, all the work is about herself, filmed, edited and starring herself, and by displaying it to the audience, its gives her the opportunity to exorcise her demons. Whether or not the audience are willing to play counsellor is debatable, i found the images presented on screen lacked substance, there was nothing engaging about the work, and she had nothing interesting or important to say. There were some nice ideas in there, but it did seem way to self indulgent for my tastes, its all very well making films about yourself if your have an interesting story to tell, but if the content is dull and uninspiring, then i wonder if it worth the time and effort. I accept that all experience is personal, and everything you experience in life shapes how you are and what you produce, but there's a whole would out there that can be explored and commented on, to base all your work totally on yourself seems to be self obsessed- you can produce work and develop your take on the world without you being the total focus of attention.

John Gilhooly

Dissertation feedback

The feedback from John on my dissertation proposal was positive and encouraging, with some useful recommendations on both refining by plan and books for research material. I plan to write about the photographic image, and how new technology has changed the way we acquire and consume those images, from image capture and development through to distribution and public display. John suggested i focus the idea to discussing it form either the practitioners point of view, highlighting the differences in digital capture and manipulation, or write it with regard to the viewers/consumers point of view, which could cover issues of image quality and distribution, display format, mobile phone cameras etc. I'll probably use this latter line of approach, as it relates to a more cultural use of the medium and less technical aspects of it. It also has direct parallels to the issues we've recently been discussing about the advent of digital cinema and how it has effected both the film industry and how we watch movies.

John recommended reading 'Moving Image Technology - from Zeotrope to Digital' by Leo Enticknap., a theory and history of moving images .

'Suspension of Perception' and 'Techniques of the Observer' by Jonathan Crary

and 'Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image.' a collection of essays by photography and film theorists.

Life in the Army

Bullying, Torture, Killology, and shoot to miss.

the science of creating killers discusses how the human desire not to kill can be trained and conditioned out of the soldier, by a method called 'killology'. During the heat of battle, normal responses and decision making has changed and a more animal instinct takes over. The basic animal instinct is not to kill another - animals in the wild will rarely kill another animal they are in a confrontation with - disputes are usually resolved by displays intended to intimidate the opponent so he will back down. Fighting can be very costly to both parties, so actual fights to the death are extremely rare. Exact figures are difficult to calculate, but the amount of combatants who actually shoot to kill are low, during the second world war, men would consistently 'shoot to miss' and the number of soldiers who shoot to kill was thought to be very low, with a low percentage of soldiers doing a majority of the killing.

so just when your faith in humanity has started to be restored, some files on abu ghrarib are published, with a collection of images collected from the cameras of soldiers posted at the infamous prison. Some of the image require a strong stomach

wired article about the abuse and torture of prisoners, and what turns ordinary people to commit acts of evil. Psychologist Philip Zimardo conducted an experiment for the Stanford University in 1971, which involved students who posed as prisoners and guards. The experiment was was stopped after five days when the student guards began abusing the prisoners, forcing them to strip naked and simulate sex acts.

43% of soldiers questioned say bullying is a problem in the army in this article Battling Bullying in the British Army 1987 – 2004 which shows incidents of bullying are not isolated cases, but that there is an extreme culture of bullying,casual violence and sexual harassment, epically with newer recruits. figures of the number of victims could be wildly underestimated from the reluctance of victims to report incidents.

Another article in the telegraph about the suicide rate of returning servicemen after conflict. Many cannot cope afterwards from all the experiences of violence, and life in a constant state of alertness. Here is an official report into suicide rates of those in the forces

First Person Shooter

RPGs.
from Role Playing Games to Rocket Propelled Grenades

The idea for the D&AD project is coming along well. We've been developing the concept of the video game aesthetic for army recruitment posters. Heres what we've been working on so far.

Andreas made the figures in 'Poser', and i photoshopped them to look like computer game packaging. The idea is to also produce a 'back cover', with screen shots of army life -also created in 3d, covering various aspects of army life, from initiation ceremonies, the torture of locals in the countries the army 'visit', to being denied help or compensation for P.S.T.D you'll get after witnessing all the violence and death. The age 7 ranking relates to a news story from earlier in the year about the army targeting youngsters as young as 7 in recruitment campaigns. (maybe this too).

Here's one of Andreas's 3d rendering of the initiation fun mentioned in an earlier post.

I mentioned several other propaganda computer games in an earlier post, and I've also been looking at other forms of propaganda with children as a primary target audience, in the war there was quite a lot of animations and cartoons used as public (mis)information films. Walt Disney made many , like this 'education for death', with it anti German theme.