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Weeks later, reading about cyborgs and posthumans, I was reminded of Dziga Vertov, an innovative Russian cinematographer who already in the 20’s pronounced himself ‘a mechanical eye, a machine’, who ‘freed from the boundaries of time and space, coordinate[s] any and all points of the universe, wherever [he] want[s] them to be. [His] way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus [he] explain[s] in a new way the world unknown to you’.

His Man with a Movie Camera, which shows a day in the life, is innovative for various reasons one of them being the idea of a film within the film; the film itself becomes the subject (the relevant sequences showing Vertov in most impossible positions from the point of view of human anatomy and physical accessibility!).

Reading around Vertov, I found two contemporary projects echoing his ideas:

Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake – one of the most creative uses of the Internet according to Google. Users contribute their own interpretations of Vertov’s sequences which are then streamed alongside, thus adding a twist to the original version. A day of encountering significant objects back in the 20 together with their equivalents in the contemporary times, filtered and processed by the contributor’s and final viewer’s imaginations. A dialogue reaching beyond temporal and spatial boundaries. Could that be another example of posthuman pedagogy?

dearphotograph.com, explored in detail by Ian Bogost, allows us to see what a photograph looks like in a photograph. It’s not only about sentimentalised human experiences but the object itself as the photograph becomes a salient entity encountered by the viewer. Bogost refers to it as object-oriented ontology which basically asks us to see the world of things as things in a world, rather than our world, with things in it. Another boundary blurred, another domination democraticised. Through visual turn …

The good news is that the majority of my feeds are working well.  One that has worked from the very beginning is my Female Science Professor RSS feed. I see that the articles I posted in Reddit are showing up in my Lifestream, so pleased about that.  My information gathering on humans/posthumans took me back to the film festival and I added another couple of YouTube videos to my favourites.  However, it looks like I may have messed up on one bookmarking attempt with Delicious.  I’m a little hesitant to remove it in case I end up deleting all my entries, especially as I’ll be submitting my Lifestream soon.

I attempted to save a video to Vimeo but don’t think it has worked.  It can take several hours for it to show through on my feed.  I would assume that all feeds should be necessary and workable.  If Vimeo doesn’t work at my next attempt I shall have to delete it from my feeds.

I am still unable to get the full benefit of Twitter.  I have been able to tweet but I’m rarely able to open the links my colleagues tweet as my Internet connection is so slow.From the standard of blogs and comments made by my colleagues I know that these links will be very interesting. It’s so frustrating not being able to follow through and I get heartily sick of seeing these signs.

I have spent some time thinking about my assignment and how I should present it.  With this in mind I had a look at Weebly.  Jeremy emailed the link to the assignments of last year’s cohorts and I see one of them used it.  I need to play around with it before making my decision.

I’ve had a look around this site but cannot see any sign of comments I’ve made on my colleagues’ sites. Hoping that it is something that can be easily resolved.