Well, I went to see Ohio State's Black Student Theatre Network performance of The Colored Museum. Lousy space for theatre but, man, that cast pulled it together. I've caught a little too much sun walking around and I think I am beginning to feel it. Ran into some folks from DMAC just bumbing around. Came home and started finishing up my one minute video. Took about four hours to finish because I had to redo all the audio tracks to get rid of the crew (us) laughing. *sigh*
"Quiet on the set" isn't just irony. Anyway, here it is. There is an explanation for the piece that I am going to post as a comment so you can have some time to think to yourself just what the mop is doing.
*SPOILER WARNING IN THE COMMENTS SECTION*
About Me
- Douglas Walls, PhD
- Orlando, FL, United States
- Douglas Walls is an assistant professor in department of Writing and Rhetoric and core faculty member of Text and Technology program at the University of Central Florida. Here are some blogs I used to have.
4 comments:
One answer is that the mop does different things on different levels of contextualization. At the macro level the mop does nothing. It doesn’t move an inch. It certainly isn’t doing what it was designed to do. In each scene, what I am going to call the mezo level, the mop is anthropomorphized (anthropoMOPhized?) into doing other things: drinking from a water fountain, engaged in a conversation, and reading. Of course, at the macro level, the mop is doing a great deal. It is the object that is consistant through the film and is being used as evidence. It is the prop that the film is built around. No mop. No film. I made the film this way to point to the ways that tools, like mops, can be used to do activities that they were not intended or designed to do. Sometimes they can be successful, you can be the judge of whether the mop was a successful prop, or sometimes they can be unsuccessful (mops make lousy conversation partners) based on the activity that they are designed for, their affordances, and the context they are being used in. This, in my mind, is a sort of grounding for Actor-Network Theory and new media.
Mops can't read! Mops can't drink!
THIS IS ANARCHY!!1!!!!
Rather than what is the mop doing, wouldn't a more interesting Latourian conceit have been the mop making *others* do things? What does the mop make Doug do?
This was Doug trying to make the mop do things and the mop, like Bartleby, preferring not to...however politely.
Do mops do things, or could I argue that mops no more "do things" than apples "do pies"? (That simile works for anything.)
Mops are nodes in networks. Networks "do things", though this is only a fiction of convenience; a more nuanced model would be that networks dynamically affect other networks, and "doing" is just shorthand for describing the effects.
The mop-Doug-fountain-book-crew-film network impinges on the Doug-audience-film-meaning-production network. (The two are connected by the Doug-blog-reader network, through edges that connect the Doug and film nodes.) The Dafmp network transmits force from the mDfbcf network, which distorts our individual meaning-production networks.
You can imagine this as an infinite number of N-dimensional rubber sheets of infinite size, connected by numerous springs of varying force. But don't try to imagine folding them and putting the in an infinitely-large linen closet.
So when we say "X does Y", don't we really just mean "a network A featuring X as a highly-visible node, produced discernable effect Y in the structure of a network B"? And if we all talked like that, wouldn't it creep people out?
Excellent film, though. And at one minute, it's really usable to make your point. I'd be inclined to discuss the various interpretations of the mop as "contexts" rather than "levels", though, because I don't see a hierarchy. In the mop-as-cleaning-tool context, the mop isn't doing anything. In the mop-as-character context... and so on.
Post a Comment