Documenting Dogs Running Free, Dubber-style
Last week I wrote a post about Dogs Running Free, a collaborative musical project that I’m doing next weekend with Nick and Spence. Since then I’ve recorded demos of a few song ideas and thought about how best to present the project online.
Part of the idea is to finish as much as possible within the 3-day recording session, and not to spend weeks afterwards editing video and mixing tunes. But I don’t think it’s going to lend itself to a live broadcast (most of the time we’ll probably be plugging things in and thinking). What we need is a curated archive of video and audio footage, without having to do too much curation…
Associative vernacular whuh?!
It just so happens that I was reading a blog post by Andrew Dubber the other day called Music and associative vernacular media, in which he describes an event at which he did exactly this. A bunch of musicians were brought together to write, rehearse and perform some music over a few days, and it was all documented online by giving the performers Flip cameras and asking them to “point them at whatever they thought was interesting”. Their short video clips (between 30 seconds and 3 minutes each) were uploaded to a blog throughout the day, given a title and tagged with roughly predefined keywords. In this way you can build a simple video archive that the audience can explore:
Because what’s interesting is not the video itself, but the way in which that video potentially links to other, related videos from within the same context – and makes connections from which narrative meaning can be constructed.
Call it associative vernacular mediation.
So you might see a short video of me talking about an idea for a Hammond riff, and when it’s finished you could follow a number of links – to other videos of me talking, other videos featuring the Hammond, or other videos related to that song. There’s no fixed way of exploring, you just watch whatever catches your eye. Like Dubber says, it’s an interesting way of “making internet”.
Rather than make a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the project, or subject the musicians to a Big Brother-style reality show production, the aim was to use the more conversational, rough-and-ready ‘vernacular’ attributes of the world wide web – and, for that matter, allow them to select what should and shouldn’t be filmed.
Wait a minute – who’s dream are we in?
I’m using Dubber’s idea to solve a practical problem, but it’s very interesting to think about it from a higher, more academic, level. If you’re at all interested in this sort of conversation, you should definitely follow Dubber. He’s a clever dude:
This project is, in part, intended as a provocation and exploration toward what a natively ‘read-write’ form of music mediation might be in the digital environment. And while it could be argued (and often is) that this sort of technological intervention ‘devalues’ music, or that the deprioritisation of a controlled, ordered, finished and idealised definitive product constitutes a form of cultural net loss, that proposition does have an air of nostalgia to it, and also asserts an ideal form of mediation that is always problematic and conservative.
I would argue, as a form of media communication itself, rather than simply something that requires mediation, music (and the activity of making music) is not simply a fixed artistic expression, but a very human activity – a set of practices, shared symbolic meanings and discourses that connect people: the people making the music as well as the people for whom the music is performed.
I’m getting excited about this project now (can you tell? ;), and it’s going to be great fun seeing how (and if) Nick and Spence get into the online side of things. Xander is coming along in his usual role as genius behind-the-scenes producer, which should ease the pressure. After all, we are there to make music!
There will be a Tumblr to collect all the videos, and follow me, Nick and Spence for the inside scoop. I imagine we’ll be hashtagging everything #dogsrunningfree too.
Tagged with: dogsrunningfree, internet, narrative, online, recording, video
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