Weekly Summary- 1/17

The first week of Digital Storytelling was a bit of a review for me. I had taken DGST 101 three semesters ago and hadn’t touched or used WordPress since. Getting back into it took a bit of remembering, however, I had fun being able to create a new site to use and make my first few posts of the semester. The relearning process drove me crazy for a short amount of time before I figured things out, but getting used to Squarespace and having made a website there then coming back proved to pose a bit of difficulty. Other than that, the first week went well and wasn’t too hard and I’m excited to keep learning and expanding my knowledge of digital media creation.

Weekly Summary

This week I first starter by reading over the course syllabus to fully understand what this class was going to be about, and what kind of work we are going to do. I wanted to get some sort of grasp on the class so I would be able to organize when assignments are due and when to do them.

The first week task was more of a educational guide on how to use everything. I did not have too much trouble setting everything up, more so worried if I set them up properly. Word press was very new to me so I watched a video to help me understand it more. We also had a meeting with the professor and another classmate to meet each other and talk about the class, I found this very helpful. I also rewatched Blade Runner for my film review and I was happy to do so because it was one of my favorite movies.

Goals

My goals in this class, is to get a better understanding of different types of technologies. This is my first time using wordpress and having a domain and I am exited to fully understand how to use them. I also want to have more of a digital presence with different kinds of media besides photos.

Movie Review

Blade Runner from 1982, directed by Ridley Scott, is a visually captivating and deeply meaningful film that continues to spark deep reflection even many years after its debut. The movie takes place in a deteriorating Los Angeles of 2019 filled with neon lights, capturing the journey of Rick Deckard who is an overworked ex-policeman assigned the duty to chase down renegade artificial humans known as replicants. These replicants show more life and susceptibility than those who made them. The aesthetic style termed “future noir”, mixes dark rain-laden streets with extensive urban ruin which appears both unfamiliar yet unsettlingly believable. The themes of this movie, looking at the moralities surrounding creation, what it means to be human and how delicate life is, have a deep impact. This is especially true when Roy Batty delivers his memorable “Tears in Rain” speech. Whether or not Deckard himself is human leads to unending discussions while the situation faced by replicants brings uncomfortable questions about exploitation and ethics in a world that puts technology above all else. The powerful acting of Hauer combined with Ford’s nuanced depiction of internal struggle gives Blade Runner an invitation for us to think about our humanity which makes it stay relevant as we continue advancing rapidly technologically today.

“Ever get the feeling you was being watched?”

The other day friend of ds106 Grant Potter noted that the tech noir adjacent theme of surveillance is a theme on the Criterion Channel this month. One of the films on their list is The Anderson Tapes, which conveniently happens to be available on tubitv. I was drawn to it because it’s directed by Sidney Lumet (whose book Making Movies is highly recommended to anyone interested in the topic), and finding out that it has Christopher Walken’s first steps sealed the deal.

scene of a government office with a picture of President Nixon on the wall

We noted that there’s a sort of retro-futurism to tech noir. This is definitely retro, dated by the photo of Nixon on the government office wall. Those weird computerish bleeps and bloops in the soundtrack and trailer are supposed give a pseudo sci fi feel, I suppose. It’s a conventional heist film, except that the viewer isn’t the only one watching. From the Wikipedia entry:

Unwittingly, Anderson is under pervasive surveillance almost the entire operation, from the earliest planning to the execution. This includes a private detective hired by Werner to eavesdrop on his mistress Ingrid; the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, checking on a released drug dealer; the FBI, investigating Black activists and the interstate smuggling of antiques; and the IRS, which is after the mob boss who is financing the operation. The various surveilling Federal, state, and municipal agencies all have different missions (and targets), so none is able to “connect the dots” and anticipate the robbery.

Throughout the story we see cameras, screens, wires and recorders. Everything is watched, everything is recorded. A big difference from today is that everything is siloed. I guess they hadn’t figured out the power of data fusion back then. In the end, everything gets erased because most of it wasn’t exactly legal. Oh to live in such innocent times.

One of the underappreciated highlights though has to be Martin Balsam’s toupee.

actor Martin Balsam in The Anderson Tapes, wearing a toupee

Noir Chopper

I am creating a course aggregation site for the current Tech Noir ds106 course, and it’s been a while. Thankfully Alan Levine and Tom Woodward have been kind enough to help me hack the old gold TwentyTwelve WordPress theme to get the mother blog to show excerpts (not native to the theme) and now maybe even include photos.

Chopper from Minority Report looks a lot like Slave-1

Turns out getting excerpts to work on the main blog page was pretty easy thanks to Alan, who figured out you just need to change the line in content.php of the TwentyTwelve theme from

<?php if ( is_search() ) :

to

<?php if ( is_search() or is_home() ) :

That worked brilliantly. Now in terms of getting the feed aggregator FeedWordPress to pull images, Tom created the plugin Noir Chopper that not only creates excerpted posts but also pull in image if there is one…so this post is a test.

Update:  Tom’s plugin worked a treat! In order to get posts on the homepage to include the first image (category pages had them out-of-the-box) I had to include a clean version of content.php for that theme.

Goals for this Class

While it was the eighth task on the to-do list, I opted to consider what I wanted to get out of this class before reading/watching this week’s assignments. I work in theatre, primarily in lighting design, which provides an interesting method for storytelling. While lighting isn’t something that most audiences conciously notice, it is something that carries a huge amount of the narrative and helps to create the wold on stage. As such, I’m always working to try and find new ways to tell stories and interact with the world around me, especially in ways that may be unexpectected or unnoticed by most. I’m excited to learn more about different ways to tell stories, but also to engage with the “tech noir” theme and consider how technology has helped or hindered the development of complex narratives.

Weekly Summary 1/16/2025

My first week of ds106 was productive! This is my first DI course, so it was a lot of information to take in, for me! On the second day of class I went to the DKC because I overwhelmed myself with information by going down a syllabus-domain-mastodon-discord-cyberpunk-tech noir – RABBIT HOLE, and I freaked myself out. Luckily for me, Feli from the DKC was fantastic and helped relieve me of any worries that I had. Feli gave me a pretty in-depth explanation of how this class works and showed me around on word press, how to create subdomains, and showed me a few different tools that could be helpful to me in the future.

Overall, I would say the first week was a complete success! I carefully followed the syllabus, went to the DKC, and completed my first 2 blog post.

Week 2, here I come!!!

Mae B

What would I like to accomplish in DS106?

Three goals I want to achieve:

  • Effectively tell a story through my work.
  • Use new techniques that will make my content engaging.
  • I want to learn more about my creative side. Most courses that I’ve been taking are business related. Some possible skills I’d like to work on: Selecting imagery and music, feeling more comfortable with recording myself, and familiarizing myself with these new online publishing formats.