Neimeyer’s Lecture
As some colleagues have commented, this listening event – the webcast lecture – invites some difficulty. We can’t see Neimeyer or the class. The peak of such difficulty might be in last third/quarter of the second lecture when the class screens films and as listeners to the webcasts we are (at least) doubly removed – we have only the film soundtrack de/re-contextualized by Neimeyer for his lecture; we may have no memory reference of the (total) film itself. Have we all seen Tron or Ghost in the Shell?
I would suggest that these webcasts/listening events are in many ways suited for the ‘new media’ label as defined by Wysocki – that new media texts are those that foreground materiality. And I would argue that these “texts” can even fit this definition without a high degree of intent/purpose because of a high ambient capacity.
While maybe Neimeyer hasn’t produced the webcast version of these lectures to “make as overtly visible as possible the values they embody” (Wysocki), they do, in not accounting for the “vision” of the listener, make the listener aware, to varying degrees, of “the range of materialities of texts” (ex. sound, apparatus, finding a way to ask a question in 50-person lecture class, etc.) and the ever present possibilities/limits of both literal and virtual classroom space.
I wonder about the ideas of purpose and intention in working with new media texts. Maybe the possibilities of material awareness become radically possible in digital ‘new media’ because, in working digitally, materiality can be foregrounded simultaneously (in- and un -) intentionally via the presence of large spaces of “textual” ambience. Even “failed” texts, then, seem ripe with space and possibility for reading and further invention.
Or at least we have to be careful in how we define “failed” new media texts.
(My mind wanders here to how much advertising has come to understand the possibilities of ambience – to simultaneously foreground/vanish the product, or maybe better said – to foreground the product (and its infinite “possibilities”) by utilizing ambience as a site for invention.)
Ambience as site of invention.
I found myself mesmerized by the ambience of Neimeyer’s lectures. Voices creeping in to offer suggestions for troubleshooting the DVD player.
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I too find Niemeyer’s disembodied voice problematic and I hadn’t seen the films he was referring to. I understand that the podcast isn’t supposed to replace the course, but I have liked a little more consideration for the podcast listeners (i.e. microphone volume). It’s pretty awesome though that we have access to these distant classrooms.
I guess I would clarify – the “problematic” elements of the webcast, I think in the context of our course the tag “listening event” is appropriate, the disembodied voice, etc.made the text incredibly rich, although in ways that wouldn’t meet a standard “distance learning” criteria. I think our experiences of such a “listening event” invite some speculation about the kinds of readers/listeners and consequently writers that ‘new media’ deployments, even maybe unintentionally create. Although, how do we design learning spaces that encourage people to be generous readers of the ambient?
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