Ponderance

Unlike The Lord of the Rings, I have much fonder memories of C.S. Lewis' The Chronicle's of Narnia from my childhood, so I couldn't help but be very curious as to how my imagined Narnia would compare with director Andrew Adamson's adaptation The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. For the most part, I have to admit, I enjoyed my cinematic visit to a land of witches, warriors and a rather large helping of Englishness. Visually, Narnia is the same combination of amazing landscapes drawn from New Zealand, via the wizardry of digital effects, and is definitely worthy of the landscape of the imagination. The citizens of Narnia are similarly imagined in all their splendor, with Weta Workshop and Weta Digital doing an amazing job bringing everyone from Mr Tumnus and Aslan to the Minotaurs and Centaurs to believable life. (Graeme adds: Most of the effects for this film were not created at WETA, the work was outsourced to a large number of smaller effects studios around the world including Rhythm and Hues who work on Aslan and Sony Imageworks who created Mr Tumnus, The Beavers, The Wolves and The Fox.) The Centaurs, who I was most worried would look like CGI, were among the most convincing characters of all and Mr Tumnus is a wonderful synergy of acting and digital effects, bring a convincing personality to those fawn legs of his!

The strength of Narnia, however, like Lord of the Rings, is in the casting. Everyone is well chosen and Tilda Swinton definitely deserves an Oscar nomination for her take on the White Witch. Swinton is chilling, graceful and captures the anger and envy of her character exactly as I would have imagined in my younger days. While the first words from Aslan--voiced by Liam Neeson--did sound a little like the wisdom of one Qui-Gon Jinn, he quickly owned the voice and gave a regal vocal performance. Also inspired was the double act of Ray Winstone and Dawn French as Mr and Mrs Beaver, who brought both comic timing and heart to their roles. The real stars, though, are definitely Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley and Anna Popplewell as Lucy, Edmund, Peter and Susan respectively. These young actors all give exemplary performances, especially young Georgie Henley whose take on Lucy brings so much heart to her role, while not falling into the too-wise-for-their-age syndrome that so many young actors give in to. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is, after all, Lucy's story and Henley's performance never lets you forget the context of World War Two that surrounds the magical escape Narnia provides.

Narnia, however, is a little hampered simply by being released after The Lord of the Rings (LotR). A couple of shots of Narnia were too much like LotR; one sweeping god's-eye (or helicopter's-eye) shot of the children crossing the snowy hills looked exactly like a shot from LotR, while the Minotaur's rallying call to war looked exactly like a Uruk-hai. Similarly, while the score is impressive, while Howard Shore's work on LotR meshed perfectly with the story, the Narnia score by Harry Gregson-Williams and a number of collaborators lacks subtlety and tries to amplify emotional scenes which would do better with less overt music since the actors have already created a scene which pulls at your heartstrings without the aid of an orchestra.

There has been a lot written about the Christian symbolism of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and it's definitely there, but not to the extent that it dominates the story. While Aslan's resurrection is clearly the story of Jesus Christ, the film is perfectly enjoyable without engaging with the symbolism. Perhaps more dominating is the Englishness of the story, with Peter's Richard-the-Lionheart standard everywhere in the last third of the film. Actually, one of the more clever parts of the adaptation is the increase in the initial scenes of images of World War Two, which lead to Peter's dilemmas in protecting the family but trying, simultaneously, to embrace a heroic masculinity preempted by tales of his father away fighting the for Britain.

Overall, the first Narnia film doesn't quite match Fellowship of the Ring, but is nevertheless an extremely well-acted and engaging experience, with amazing visuals and definitely worthy of a sequel or two.

[Tags: narnia | thelionthewitchandthewardrobe | aslan | GeorgieHenley | lucy | wetadigital | wetaworkshop | newzealand | film]

I found out this morning that my cousin Trudy completely unexpectedly passed away yesterday at her home in Scotland. Trudy did not have the easiest of lives but was a wonderful and creative person. I have not seen Trudy in several years and am deeply saddened that I will never get the opportunity to talk to her ever again. She will be sorely missed. The image is of Trudy and I taken back in 1994 when we were briefly living in the same house and when we first really became close after having spent most of our lives until that point in separate countries. Trudy loved to tell stories and write; I hope before passing she found the elusive time she often sought to write down at least a few of her tales. My sympathies are with Trudy's partner, Mike, her parents, Peter and Wendy, and her sister, Cathleen and brother, Tim. In the last few years Trudy's life was really getting together and I hope that in the end she has found a peace that often alluded her in life. Rest well, my cousin.

Josie Fraser from EdTechUK has just posted a detailed and thoughtful piece on trying to look at and address online Ana/mia (annorexia/bulimic) Communities without the "online communities are a haven for evil/trauma/etc" so often seen in sensationalist media. At the same time, the idea of a communities where anorexia and bulimia are actively promoted is very disturbing not least of all due to the way it so seamlessly meshes into the other aspects of teen angst. Suffice it to say this is a very difficult area that needs careful consideration and many strategies are needed to address it.

On that front I just came across the very simple but extremely effective "Retouch" site which aims to:

The media world is becoming increasingly fixated on appearances. And the number of tricks used to achieve the increasingly exaggerated ideals is growing. Many models have plastic surgery and even more are retouched so they appear to have bigger breasts, smaller stomachs or fuller lips.

We wanted to show how easy it is to change someone's appearance in this campaign.

Retouch is at least one of those avenues where the artificiality of bodily imagery can be visualised in a manner which highlights its constructedness and, hopefully, go some of the way to revealing how entirely mass marketed "idealised" body images are!

[Tags: anorexia | bulimia | eatingdisorder | photoshop | visualisation | onlinecommunities | ethics | representation | angst]

With all the furor and debate over Wikipedia recently, there's an excellent opportunity to discuss what it can do well, what it can't, and how we should approach using Wikipedia. Coversations should be happening. The least useful, most pathetic and childish response is WikipediaClassAction.org who are trying to organise disgruntled people who are unhappy with their entries to sue the Wikipedia Foundation. That achieves nothing and is a sad indication of a culture more inclined to sue than to think.

In happier news, the BBC noted an analysis by Nature comparing Wikipedia and Britannica, finding:

However, an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature ? the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica's coverage of science ? suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule. The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three. [...] Yet Nature's investigation suggests that Britannica's advantage may not be great, at least when it comes to science entries. In the study, entries were chosen from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on a broad range of scientific disciplines and sent to a relevant expert for peer review. Each reviewer examined the entry on a single subject from the two encyclopaedias; they were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia. A total of 42 usable reviews were returned out of 50 sent out, and were then examined by Nature's news team. Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

Nature's mature approach, to investigate and suggest ways of improving Wikipedia is the sensible path. Childish court action against primarily a collection of volunteers is not.

Update: Both Futureman and Leigh Blackall of Teach & Learn Online have had very rude responses from the Wikipedia Class Action website to the extent that I'm wondering if it's actually some sort of spoof or hoax?

Update 2: Danah Boyd's thoughts on the Wikipedia debates are spot on:

I am worried about how academics are treating Wikipedia and i think that it comes from a point of naivety. Wikipedia should never be the sole source for information. It will never have the depth of original sources. It will also always contain bias because society is inherently biased, although its efforts towards neutrality are commendable. These are just realizations we must acknowledge and support. But what it does have is a huge repository of information that is the most accessible for most people. Most of the information is more accurate than found in a typical encyclopedia and yet, we value encyclopedias as a initial point of information gathering. It is also more updated, more inclusive and more in-depth. Plus, it?s searchable and in the hands of everyone with digital access (a much larger population than those with encyclopedias in their homes). It also exists in hundreds of languages and is available to populations who can?t even imagine what a library looks like. Yes, it is open. This means that people can contribute what they do know and that others who know something about that area will try to improve it. Over time, articles with a lot of attention begin to be inclusive and approximating neutral. The more people who contribute, the stronger and more valuable the resource. Boycotting Wikipedia doesn?t make it go away, but it doesn?t make it any better either.

[Cross-posted from my eLearning blog.]

[Tags: wikipedia | encyclopedia | controversy]

I just got the CFP from Machinima.com about the upcoming Machinima Reader. It sounds like a potentially excellent collection:

CfP: The Machinima Reader

Edited by Henry Lowood and Michael Nitsche

The Machinima Reader will assemble the first collection of essays to critically review the phenomenon of Machinima from a wide variety of perspectives.

Machinima is on the verge of stepping beyond its chaotic mix of artistic, ludic and technical conceptions into established traditions and vocabularies of contemporary media. As machinima invents itself, the flexibility of its form poses an interesting challenge to academics as well as artists and critics. We want to offer an inaugural reader for the further development and critical discussion of Machinima, one that charts its growth from several angles and also provides a foundation for critical studies in the future.

The rapid development of Machinima is closely connected to the culture of computer and video games. In a repetition of early cinema’s history, many of Machinima’s milestones are formulated as mixtures of artistic expression and technical achievements. In our organization of The Machinima Reader, we will recognize that the creators of Machinima have been at times just as concerned with demonstrating mastery of technology and gameplay as in artistic expression or narrative performance. At the same time we acknowledge an artistic maturing process that has led to more professional production methods and results of higher quality. Consequently, we are looking for essays that address a range of topics. These include (but are not limited to):

• Culture: History of Machinima – definitions, technology, and context; performance practices; evolving and new presentation platforms, theory

• Technology: Promise and impact of real-time engines for animation; future developments in hard- and software; technical relationship and dependencies among games, technology and machinima

• Communities and Contexts: Machinima as community-based practice and performance; legal issues; use in classroom; relationship to other media; machinima as guerilla film making; Machinima and modding; players as performers; machinima in MMOs

• Art: Aesthetics and poetics of Machinima; Machinima and new media; from game to Machinima – what translates what does not?

Please submit a 500 abstract via email as RTF document to michael.nitsche@lcc.gatech.edu and lowood@stanford.edu by 3 April 2006.
We expect that final essays will not exceed 5000-7000 words and will be due July 2006.

The real question is will I be content to read it late next year or on the back of having taught machinima material in both my Self.Net and iGeneration courses, will I find time to write up a paper on machinima and education 2.0? It would certainly be fun to research!

Dean Gray Tuesday is happening NOW!

From mightnight until midnight, Tuesday 13th December is the day to download The American Edit and support the rights of artists to express themselves through the art of the mashup (and to force the corporate giants to see the desparate need for licensing arrangements that can deal with mashups, not automatically make them illegal!). For Perth folks, the 24 hours runs from 4pm today until 4pm tomorrow (Wed 14th December, 2005). Go, download, enjoy, and mashp. (For more info, click here.)

[Tags: deangray | deangraytuesday | greytuesday | graytuesday | mashup | copyright | fairuse | americanedit | protest | digitalculture | participatoryculture | participatorymedia]

The recent racially motivated (and gang motivated) violence in Sydney has been extremely disheartening and disappointing. Many an article and many an Australian, of whatever cultural or ethnic background, has been looking for answers. Michael Gordon's Making sense of a black day from The Age puts some decent work in thinking the issues through. He asks:

WAS it revenge or racism? Was it a local response to a local problem or the expression of the less tolerant, more ugly country Australia has become since September 11? Was it spontaneous or fuelled by a week-long media build-up and a text message imploring patriots to reclaim their beach? Truth is, the violence that engulfed Cronulla on Sunday was all of those things. It was the explosion Cronulla locals insist they had to have and the wake-up call the wider community will ignore at its peril.

Exactly as the recent violence in France demonstrated, these are complicated events that simple answers won't fix in the long term. More police on the streets this Sunday might stem any immediate repeat of violence, but there are underlying social issues and cultural divides that need to be addressed for a long, long time after that. The rhetoric, though, is something that can be addressed now. Think about these last few quotes from Gordon's article:

The result was the corruption of John Howard's 2001 pre-election slogan that "we decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come". Here were locals, declaring they would decide who would be allowed to visit their beach and on what terms.

Does it mean that Australia is a racist country? Mr Howard thinks not. "I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country," he said, stressing the issue was first and foremost a question of applying the law to those who had broken it.

Labor leader Kim Beazley agreed, insisting multiculturalism was alive and well. "This is just criminal behaviour. That's what it is."

But the response needs to go beyond heeding the call of locals for a stronger police presence. This was recognised yesterday by the calling of meetings with community leaders.

Bruce Baird, the federal Liberal MP who was born in Cronulla, says there needs to be more focus on promoting the values of tolerance among both groups of young men: young alienated Muslims with bad attitudes to women, and locals who have grown up in an overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic environment with little exposure to other cultures.

"I think it shows multiculturalism still has got a way to go in Australia," he told The Age.

Our politicians have been leading the way deploying irresponsibly narrow rhetoric, labelling some citizens of Australia as "unAustralian" to the point that the word is now one of Australia's favourite insults. And tolerance? What is tolerance? I've never found the word tolerance adequate to describe a situation of ethnic or racial harmony because the word presumes we can never understand, never embrace and never accept difference. We simply have to learn to deal with it, "tolerate it". Tolerance is not enough; acceptance has to be the way forward. And to accept one has to at least try to understand and therein lies the jobs of Australians to educate each other, not just from the ivory towers of academia or the school system, but everyone has to take some responsibility for talking about these issues and trying to accept each other as human beings and Australians. Sadly, we need to look for better leaders in our conversations that many of our politicians.

(Oh, and the fact that Australia even has a Hitler Patriotic Youth League makes me very, very sad.)

[Tags: tolerance | acceptance | sydney | australia | violence | racism | cronulla | politics | ethics]

I'm absolutely delighted that the course blog for "iGeneration: Digital Communication and Participatory Culture", the honours unit I coordinated this semester, has been nominated for a 2005 Edublog Award in the "Best example/case study of use of weblogs within teaching and learning". The blog was, of course, a collaborative effort, and it's wonderful so see both blogging and podcasting in tertiary education has got some voting attention! :)

Anyway, voting is open to everyone, so Please VOTE!

PS The nominations are also open for Australian Blog Awards - I'm about to go nominate my favourites - if you enjoy Ponderance you might consider nominating it for "Best West Australian Blog" or "Best Australian Personal Blog" (the categories are quite specific and, well, Ponderance is quite broad in its scope, so that's probably as close to the best fit as you'll get!).

Did you miss the wonderful debate at the New York Public Library last November 17th? I live about 10,000 kilometres away, so couldn't quite get there. However, it's available online now and the debate deserves your ears. This is the future of knowledge being debated here! [MP3] [Quicktime Torrent]

Lawrence Lessig is a fantastic speaker, but, to my great surprise, so is Allan Adler and at times my sympathies were swayed ... if only for a moment. My take is the Lessig take: Google Book Search is fair use and it matters that it is fair use not to promote Google, but so that this right will exist for others in the future.

[Tags: googlebooksearch | googleprint | libraries | knowledge | thefuture | google | print | lessig | nypl]

OMG! Australia, en masse, you have a lot of taste! Australian's Favourite Films just aired on the ABC and I suddenly feel very, very mainstream.
The list:

1. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
2. Amelie
3. Blade Runner
4. The Shawshank Redemption
5. Donnie Darko
6. Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
7. Pulp Fiction
8. The Princess Bride
9. Gone With The Wind
10. Fight Club

I'm so impressed Donnie Darko made the list!

However, should I be proudly Aussie or deeply worried about my banality when I have eight of the top ten films on DVD? Can you figure out which two I don't have?

[Tags: AustraliansFavouriteFilms | LoTR | BladeRunner | DonnieDarko | StarWars | TopTen | Australia]

While I think the Wikipedia is a fantastic resource, I'm often skeptical about its day-to-day reliability. In most cases when students ask, I suggest they use it as a starting point but try to find other sources and references (which, luckily, most Wikipedia articles tend to link to). "Podcasting", though is a tougher question because the Wikipedia defintion is almost always cited as the definition (something that only really happens with digital culture stuff). That said, the current debates over who did what to start podcasting, when they did it, and what the Wikipedia says, are extremely relevant in seeing how well the Wikipedia can cope as a communally authored social lexicon.

Meanwhile, the Pod/Cast/War rundown ...
Adam Curry's been outed editing the Wikipedia, but anonymously, removing key aspects of podcasting's history which lessen his role.

Meanwhile, Dave Winer and Adam Curry are once again at each other's blogging throats. Adam seems to have tried to brush it off, but that's not something Dave usually lets happen!

To kick things up a notch, the mainstream news is taking an interest and Adam Curry is looking a little less saintly. Meanwhile, Dave notes that there has been a serious attempt to lock down who did what when in the origins of podcasting:

Adam Green did a podcast of the story of podcasting by splicing together podcasts from Adam Curry, Dave Slusher and myself. Very interesting way to tell a story. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

I think listening to that might clarify things a little ... I'm off to download it in a minute.

In the Gadget sphere, Richard Giles is less than impressed by Curry's antics ...

In a more recent blog post, Adam had this to say, ?I apologize to Kevin Marks for my history of removing this fact on WikiPedia. I really believed this was untrue?.

In August, before I submitted my chapter, I had Adam Curry proof read for accuracy (Dave Winer ignored any requests for his input). Adam replied ?Looks great, reads well, is accurate.? So why does he claim that he thought the above statement was incorrect. This seems to suggest that he either ignored what I?d written, didn?t read it properly, or did know about Kevin because I bloody well wrote about it in the chapter he proofread.

I'd say something trite like, 'history will decide', but the whole point is, it won't. The Wikipedia is the closest thing we have to a living historical entity and all these pod wars highlight is how integral debate is in trying to keep it healthy.

Update: The NY Times is also talking about "rewriting history" in the Wikipedia in "Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar".

Update 2: Rex Hammock has more in a post whose title says it all: "Use Wikipedia as a gateway to facts, not a source of them".

[Tags: adamcurry | davewiner | podcasting | podosphere | history | wikipedia | politics | socialknowledge | lexicon | ethics | podwar]

I'm in the midst of finalising the last chapter of my docotoral thesis, so while I was extremely heartened to hear my abstract for the upcoming academic collection on Battlestar Galactica has been accepted, I'll have to make sure I put the time aside before April to give it some proper attention. For those interested, here's what I've promised to write ...

Battlestar Galactica & 'Humanity's Children': Constructing and Confronting the Cylons

Abstract by Tama Leaver

In Mind Children, the director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, Hans Moravec, foreshadowed an inevitable 'postbiological' future where the machines, computers and artificial intelligences of today will culminate to form new life for which humanity en masse is the proud parent. When our 'artificial progeny' arrive, Moravec sees little place for their stumbling inefficient fleshy ancestors. In the mini-series which re-introduced Battlestar Galactica to a twenty-first century audience, the Cylon temptress, commonly know as Number Six, warns her human lover Dr Baltar that after the Cylons had been driven away from the human colonies decades earlier, "Humanity's children are returning home … today." In this key shift from the original 1970s series, the Cylon enemies of the Galactica's crew are no longer the product of aliens, but rather humanity's own technological creation which have become self-aware and self-directing. As with Moravec's prediction, the Cylons beg the question as to humanity's ultimate response and responsibility to the Cylons they created. For the military crew of the last remaining Battlestar, the enemy is the enemy, with no room for ambiguity. However, from the outset of the new series, the humanity and subjectivity of the Cylons has been a key theme, from Number Six's neurotic need for Dr Baltar's love, to two incarnations of the Sharon Cylon, one knowingly a Cylon, one a sleeper agent, both developing intimate relationships with the Galactica's crew. Moreover, the 2005 mid-season cliffhanger 'Pegasus' dramatically and provocatively confronted audiences with the possible consequences of de-humanising your enemy (which has both narrative resonance within the show's diegesis, and as a metaphor for the current 'War on Terror'). This paper seeks to address the concerns raised in the conflict between the Galactica's crew and the Cylons, exploring the ethical relationship with and subjectivity of humanity's Cylon descendants, arguing that humanity and our artificial progeny are far more symbiotically linked than either group would prefer to admit (and there are, of course, theoretical and ethical ramifications to these connections, which will also be addressed).

Should be fun. :) It's December now, so make sure you don't get too Cylonic this silly season!

Update (26 Jan 2007): As a number of people have emailed me asking to read this article, I should point out that it didn't end up getting finished in 2006. Instead, I've changed the concept slightly and re-submited the abstract to a new collection and if it's accepted then I'll finish the article off before June 2007.

[Tags: battlestargalactica | hansmorvec | humanityschildren | cylons | others | academiccollection | 2006]

Labels: battlestargalactica