Three goals I want to achieve:
I started the week for this course by reading over the syllabus carefully, as well as scrolling through the course website just to start acclimating myself to what is expected of me. I then started the weekly tasks for the first week, and planning out when I would do what. I also thought about what I wanted to accomplish with this course. I went more in depth about my goals in my post My Goals for this Course.
I found the first week tasks to be easy, as I simply created the accounts I needed. Also, I already have created a domain and various subdomains in past digital classes, so creating a new subdomain, as well as installing WordPress with it was a piece of cake. I also had the group meeting, which was very helpful in terms of answering questions and getting to know the professor as well as some fellow classmates. It was also interesting to dive into the background and meaning of Tech Noir, as well as some films and tv shows that fall under that genre. I watched an episode of Black Mirror, which I went into more detail in my post Film Review: Black Mirror.
I watched an episode of Black Mirror called “White Bear”. I have watched a couple of episodes of Black Mirror before, so I knew the baseline plot of most of the episodes were trippy, futuristic, had some major plot twist, as well as some message about society. This episode had my jaw dropped as I did not expect the plot twist ending. To explain it without spoilers it really had me questioning my morals, and thinking about what we have come to as a society today with easy access to technology and how you are always being watched with what technology we have today.
The main thing I’m really looking forward to in this class is expanding on my knowledge of digital media and my skillset in creating different types. I’ve become increasingly interested in using digital media and producing different works, mainly towards my overarching goal of using it to improve the business I own and work towards scaling. My goals are to use the creative freedom in the class to focus on certain skillsets or forms of media that can contribute to my goals outside of the classroom!
This class has always piqued my interest, so when I got the opportunity to take it this semester, I was very excited. The most important thing I learned from this week was to not let the volume of tasks intimidate me. At the beginning of the week, the assigned amount caught me off guard, and I was anxious about how to succeed in this class. One by one, I eventually started to cross them off. Some parts took longer than others, but for the most part, they were very easy to complete. The hardest part, and the thing that drove me crazy, was setting up Discord because of technical difficulties. I already had a Discord account for another class I was taking, but when I clicked on the invitation link, it wanted me to set up a new one. Then I forgot which email I was using for my Discord, and it was a longer process than it needed to be. The easiest part was getting to watch an episode of Black Mirror. I had a lot of fun doing that because I’ve been meaning to check out the show and the episode I watched; I really liked it, which was a pleasant surprise. I’m pleased with how the first week went and am happy I didn’t fall too far behind on the assigned tasks.
Tech Noir and Cyber Punk intrigued me because I had never heard of those genres. I’ve heard of some content that falls into those genres but haven’t heard those terms before. On top of being unfamiliar with the names of the genre, I have seen very, very few Tech Noir/Cyber Punk shows, movies, video games, etc. That being said, from what I read, the content sounds interesting, and after watching an episode of Black Mirror, I am definitely open to learning more. I liked reading the Wikipedia article on Cyber Punk, which explained the mood and the setting of Cyber Punk. The way they talked about their location and wanting to emulate “Hong Kong on a bad day” was a great way to describe the setting and gave me a good visualization. Learning about how the term Cyber Punk was coined was also interesting. The name perfectly fits the vibe of the genre. After the readings, I chose to watch Black Mirror from the list of TechNoir/Cyberpunk Media. I’ve always wanted to check it out, and I chose the episode “Joan is Awful” because one of my favorite actresses, Annie Murphy, played the protagonist. I was immediately hooked. I found the episode’s concept so interesting, and how it played out was captivating! When I finished the episode, I immediately recommended it to my friends. Now, I am immensely interested in the genre, and I plan on watching more content in the category!
I tried to make a ds106 comeback last year with the AI 106 course, but it turns out I wasn’t even up to getting off the couch. It was a long winter, and quite a few of my responsibilities were put on pause while I worked on my mental health. There are those moments we all face, and last Spring was one of them for me. I’m just fortunate I have such amazing folks around me online and off.
Film Noir and the dark technology of armored cars with shot from the film Criss Cross.
But this semester is a new day and the bava is back in the ds106 driver seat alongside Paul Bond. Paul gave me a free pass last spring with AI 106 and for that I’m forever grateful. The bummer was I really did want to jump back into the fray, and watching AI106 from the sidelines highlighted how much fun I was missing out on. The mock AI company Aggressive Technologies born from that course experience was absolutely brilliant, and to see that group dig into the ds106 ethos of joy was, well ….a joy.
Tech Noir bar from The Terminator
This week begins yet another chapter of ds106, this time focused on a topic that I have been thinking about doing for at least ten years: Tech Noir. My mind immediately goes to movies from the 40+ years ago like Alien, Blade Runner, Empire Strikes Back, and Terminator, but that’s just my opinion, man. As part of week 1’s intro, Paul and I discussed the broader noir theme in terms of 1940s Hollywood to help frame the qualified tech-focused nature of this genre that emerged in the late 70s and early 80s. In fact, since its inception the themes defining noir quickly transcended film to include literature, design, video games, and much more.
Also, let’s not forget that back in the Spring of 2015 Paul, Martha Burtis, and I taught noir106 during my last full semester at UMW. So exactly ten years later we’re back to noir, but this time with a qualifier most relevant to our moment: technology. Paul did a nice job of locating Tech Noir in terms of the cyberpunk 80s in his “Tech Noir ds106” post::
Tech Noir was a thing of the 80s. The preceding decades had seen the horrors of the Vietnam War, the corruption of Watergate, years of inflation followed by a deep recession, with ah ever-present awareness that WWIII could be right around the corner. On top of that, computers were migrating from the realm of science fiction into people’s everyday lives and homes. So that bleakness returned, in considering where we might be going as a society.
An interesting thing about Tech Noir and cyberpunk is that they tend to look at a near future, a future that may now be in the past, like 1984. One could argue the extent to which they were right or wrong in their visions, but I think the point of sci fi is not to be prophetic but to examine the current moment through an imagined setting.
Damn Paul’s good! He’s also very mindful that focusing too much on our interests defeats the purpose of ds106. We want to try and develop a theme and then have the class run with it in directions that interest them. As a result they should be more compelled to write, design, mash-up, and playact a world of media that buoy their creativity—thankfully noir is broad enough to contain multitudes.
A GIF from Richard Siodomak’s The Killers
The other thing I like about ds106 is it always inspires me to blog and comment, which are two of the things I resolved to do more of this year. ds106 is kinda like a gym for bloggers.
Finally, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that Mastodon has been feeling pretty fun these days. I know it has its limits, but I ‘ve been getting help with designing the the new old course site (thank you, Alan and Tom!), the daily creates are still on fire, we’re already streaming ds06radio there. Who knows, the social.ds106.us server could be a way of interfacing the students with the network like we could with Twitter. Hope springs eternal in the ds106 breast.
You know it’s good when you have Grant Potter dropping knowledge about Criterion’s current Surveillance Cinema series or the video game series Watchdogs or even that crazy Japanese contribution to Tech Noir: Tetsuo: the Iron Man. That’s just the kind of in-passing comraderie that made ds106 so amazing back in 2011 and allowed the class to move beyond the limits of our imagination. There’s something about having a loose, open space for sharing that makes the endeavor exciting. What’s more, given we control our own Mastodon server we can control the adverse effects given we control the vertical and the horizontal. I mean wasn’t that what this was all about?
Blah blah blah, it’s all fine and good to blog blog blog but ds106 is about making some art, dammit. All this analyzing is paralyzing, it’s time to play this dang thing….#4life!
As I wrap up my ds106 assignments for this week I feel accomplished. When I first got the canvas page and went to the courses main page on ds106.ai I was very overwhelmed and lost. I no idea how to navigate the website and I didnt know what I was getting myself into.
Once the website was updated with this weeks assignment and I had the time to sit down and actually read what needed to be done I still felt overwhelmed but understood what I needed to do and I was able to set aside time in the week to get them done.
I split my work into two days. The first day was just to set up the accounts I needed to and get familiar with them. I stopped on step 7 of the assignment so that I could get all the deliverables out in one sitting. Im not sure how that flow would work going forward, since this was the first week and there is just a lot of set up but I will continue to take things one step at a time to avoid feeling overwhelmed.
I enjoyed the assignments of this week and I really liked how they are sort of personalized. there are requirements but you can chose how you meet those requirements and I appreciate that. The assignments completed this week were the Film Review and the ds106 goals. I feel good about how these assignments went and it makes me excited for the assignments that are to come.
My goals for this class is to learn more about digital media and learn how to be more proficient with technology. For example, Im still learning how to use WordPress and this blog post is still taking me a while to set up because I have no idea how to use this program, but I’m learning! My goal is also to stay on top of the weekly assignments and to not fall behind.
I chose to watch Black Mirror on Netflix. I chose this because I had already watched a couple episodes but haven’t watched them in a year so i felt it was a good time and excuse to get back into it.
My thoughts and reactions to watching Episode 4 Season 3 “San Junipero” were more emotionally charged than I thought they would be. I think that Black Mirror does a great job in letting the viewer care for the characters in the episode and learn from their mistakes and doings while also being subjected to the horror aspect of the show. I felt that even thought our society now does not have the technology to really make a world that is digital and you are able to make a life outside of the life you live, the concept is easy for the audience to grasp and be immersed in that world. Therefore all of the classic horror tropes are more phycological which I feel gets us to care even more than usual. Overall, I really liked this episode and plan on continue watching.