Mode-bending Linking
In response to Eduardo’s detailed and thoughtful insights on the Manual Script assignment I commented on her post as follows:
Hi Eduardo,
I really enjoyed the creativity you brought to this task and it was a fun interpretation to turn it into a game. Your observation on cultural bias in terms of representation and interpretation is also insightful as the use of gestures could mean something quite different from one culture to another and alter the intended communication. I also wondered if the emotions that you were portraying could be a form of bias in the sense that they are framing how the audience knows you feel about the objects.
With gestures, there is the purposeful exaggeration of movement to draw attention to the object being referenced. In this way, it feels less natural than viewing a true interaction with the subject and object. In the absence of the object, the viewer’s eyes are more aware of the gestures that may be less important in an authentic interaction.
The addition of sound certainly aided in recognizing some of the objects but I would argue not all. One observation I made was how the sounds become amplified in this context and are far more noticeable than in an authentic situation. As an example, the chewing sounds become dominant in the banana eating scenario to the point of distraction but I wonder if this is an individual response or one shared by many? I could certainly understand the object in question was a banana through gestures, but I would not have been able to draw this conclusion with sound alone.
Thank you,
Chris
Reason for linking: I liked that Eduardo engaged with gestures in his task as it was something that I did not do in mine. I did wonder how that would have looked with my objects and bag. One of my original ideas was to create a video where the camera phone would represent the DSLR camera within my bag and through gestures would be removed and used. It would interact with the other objects but in doing so become the dominant object within the bag. Sounds would also be recorded so that you could hear the velcro of the bag as it opens and I thought about including ambient Balinese music for context (but this would have been inauthentic). The difference in this scenario is that the gestures would have been authentic rather than exaggerated in absence of the referenced object.
In the end, I decided to orally tell the stories connected to the objects as I felt it better fit the assignment of how these objects are connected to me and my identity. Audio, therefore, became imperative for my task in a way that the object’s function sounds would not have.