What scholars of manuals have to say

As we finalise an article about the manual for Horror Film 1 and the potential to use DNA as a storage medium for the manual versions and additional components, we have gone looking for literature about manuals.

I (Louise) have learnt that making procedures is called ‘procedural discourse’. David Farkas writes about this back in 1999. It is about ‘written and spoken discourse that guides people in performing a task-in other words, it is “how to” communication.’ His article aims to set out what makes a procedure a procedure, he sets out the relationships, and persistent logic in making procedures, as he describes it. Here’s a short summary – we’re in the territory of purposeful human behaviour – people wanting to get stuff done, usually around a quite clearly defined goal. He defines getting stuff done more eloquently – he calls it accomplishing tasks and he clarifies that actually means changing things.
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Let’s talk about expanded cinema – Poster session SEAPAVAA 2023

Dr Louise Curham from Curtin University’s iSchool starts a dialogue with audiovisual archivists of South East Asia about expanded cinema.

Here’s the recording of this talk:

 

And here’s what I say (not quite identical but pretty close)

SEAPAVAA talk 2023 Bangkok slide 1

Hi everyone. Thanks very much for inviting me to be part of SEAPAVAA 2023. I want to begin by acknowledging I’m joining you from the lands of the Ngunawal people, the Aboriginal traditional owners of this land I’m on in Canberra.

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Artists Film Workshop comes to Canberra’s Antics Hair Microcinema Friday 17 Feb 730pm

Join us for an evening of recent and brand new work by the Artists Film Workshop, all on 16mm.
Lab members Sebastian Vaccaris and Paddy Hay have programmed a stellar line-up, it’s a first for Canberra to see works from  AFW, Australia’s most prolific contemporary artist-run film lab.
The line-up includes Anybody Coming to Dinner byAudrey Lam (2022) and Fade by Callum Ross-Thomson (2017).

Antics Hair Microcinema

The old Antics Hair Salon in Canberra will come to life again in January and February 2023 as Canberra’s newest microcinema.

What: film screening/film performance event
Where: 8 Petrie Plaza, Civic, Canberra
When: 8-930pm Sat 14 Jan
Tickets: $10 donation

Over the past couple of years a group of Canberra artists interested in projection, reflection and moving image have gathered on and off and worked together in different constellations. Join us for screenings at 10 Petrie Plaza (opposite Ted’s Photographics) in Civic in the shop front that was Antics Hair’s final location.

On Sat 14 Jan, join Rowena Crowe from Wollongong, current lead of Sydney’s artists film lab, Workshop for Potential Cinema and local artists Caroline Huf and Louise Curham. We will screen new works originated in 16mm and super 8, some shown on these gauges, some digital.
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Louise Curham on Otherfilm Festivals 2006-8

Reposting here an article featuring TLC’s Louise Curham speaking about her memories of the Otherfilm festivals in Brisbane, from the REMIX website.

OtherFilm are a collective dedicated to experimental, avant-garde and expanded forms of art.

Recollecting OtherFilm in Brisbane. The first event I went to was at Queensland College of the Arts in one of the gallery spaces on the river side of the road there, the Southbank campus, I was invited by OtherFilm which was Sally Golding, Danni Zuvela and Joel Stern to come up and make some performances.

Danni had been tracking the work that I had been doing with the Sydney Moving Image Coalition (SMIC), some of it myself and quite a lot of it with Lucas, Lucas Ihlein. Lucas and I still collaborate together as Teaching and Learning Cinema. Danni had got wind of our research on Australian expanded cinema, which we had both become really independently become interested in expanded cinema. And we had an idea to try to drum up interest, I guess in an exhibition of some of this work to show some international work. Lucas really loved the work of the London Film Makers Co-op. He been over to London and met various people like Guy Sherwin and Malcolm Le Grice. He was interested in works like Malcolm’s Horror Film and I had found Corpocinema, the Jeffrey Shaw work and that was an important one in connection to a piece of art I was making at the time for my MFA. So we sort of in different ways, had gotten really interested in expanded cinema, this work that explored the performance of cinema really, and was also had a score-based element to it or at least our experience of it.

Here’s the link to the full article.

Audiovisual Archiving – radio discussion

Thursday 27 October 2022 is UNESCO’s World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, a celebration and reminder of the importance of archiving and preserving our audiovisual heritage. To mark this event we’ve brought together a panel of experts to tell us about the exciting, creative and challenging field of AV archiving– Louise Curham, (Lecturer and researcher at the School of Information and Communication Studies at Charles Sturt University), Lucas Ihlein (artist, and researcher and teacher for the University of Wollongong), Asti Sherring (Manager of Changeable Collections at the National Museum of Australia and a researcher with the University of Canberra), and Melanie Swalwell (Professor of Digital Media Heritage at Swinburne University of Technology).

Here’s the discussion:
https://2mce.org/podcast/sics-radio-celebrating-world-day-for-audiovisual-heritage/

Three conjectural models for records people from ‘Tending the archive’

Three conjectural models for archives

There are three key ideas in my (Louise Curham’s) PhD thesis Tending the Archive that are relevant for the recordkeeping community. That community is broadly conceived as everyone interested in facts and how they get produced.

Conjectural model 1 – authenticity

There are three parts to my conjecture about authenticity.

1) Authenticity extends to the quality of the action that gets documented in the record. A good record of a duplicitous action is not going to support the record user.

2) Authenticity calls for a double-visioned experience. An encounter with a record needs to take into account both the event that the user seeks to reach through to, and the record that enables it. The authorship of that record will shape that access. Emphasising authorship of the record plays a role in authenticity.

3) Authenticity also calls for ethical use of the record that emphasises what remains true to the record and what varies from it in its new circulation.
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Trying out the (Wo)Man With Mirror user’s manual with Laura Hindmarsh in March & April 2016

In the last post, I explained how the time delay of almost 12 months has bought some useful thinking time. Here’s a short narrative of what we did with Laura over the weekends of 19-20 March and 6-7 April, 2016:

In suburban Canberra, Lucas and Louise are working with young artist Laura Hindmarsh who is here to try out using the user’s manual produced in 2009 for the Teaching and Learning Cinema re-enactment (Wo)Man With Mirror. The work takes place in three stages.

The first stage is to amass the resources needed for Laura to make the work which involves buying and painting a mirror, buying film stock, organising Pete Humble, our cinematographer friend to assist with filming Laura’s (Wo)Man With Mirror. There is an earlier blog post about the first meeting with Laura and measuring her up for her mirror.
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Work starts on ‘using’ the (Wo)Man With Mirror user’s manual

Subtitle: Louise’s PhD uses (Wo)Man With Mirror as a case study for performance-dependent heritage and things that need passing on from person-to-person; why we involved an anthropologist; why this blog post is/is not a record.

At the Urambi Village Community Centre, Saturday 19 March 2016. Left to right: Louise Curham (Teaching and Learning Cinema), Laura Hindmarsh (artist), Peter Humble (cinematographer), Diana Glazebrook (foreground, anthropologist), Lucas Ihlein (Teaching and Learning Cinema).

Louise’s PhD uses (Wo)Man With Mirror as a case study for performance-dependent heritage and things that need passing on from person-to-person

In this picture, Teaching and Learning Cinema and colleagues are gathered in Canberra to work with visiting artist Laura Hindmarsh to ‘use’ Teaching and Learning Cinema’s (Wo)Man With Mirror user’s manual. We will spend the next two days getting to the point where we’ve shot Laura’s film.  A few weekends later, we’ll work with Laura as she puts together a performance using the film.
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