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This Way of Life

I recently joined NZ On Screen as Project Director. I’ve long admired NZ On Screen for it’s spirit and beauty so it’s a huge privilege.

NZ On Screen is the online showcase of New Zealand television, film and music video. It’s fully funded by NZ On Air. There are over 1700 titles on the site, including iconic TV episodes, classic music videos, and landmark documentaries. All titles are free to watch.

I believe that when you place cultural artefacts online, you help democraticse access to it. You highlight heritage, encourage identity-making and engender creativity. Today’s most viewed title, This Way of Life, epitomises my view.

Filmed over four years, This Way of Life documents the story of Hawkes Bay hunter and horse wrangler Peter Ottley-Karena, wife Colleen (Ngāti Maniapoto), and their six children. Intercut with Peter’s articulate bush philosophy, it captures the family’s romantic, dignified relationship to each other and to the natural world. Ever-present amongst the challenges their commitment to a ‘simple life’ faces is Peter’s broken relationship with his step-father. Life received a special mention at the Berlin Film Festival; Variety called it “resonant and stunningly shot”.

Check it out if you have time. It’s a wildly romantic provocation and altogether a good way to start the year.

This Way of Life

January 3, 2012 1 Comment Short URL considered

Field notes: Scallops and users

I’ve been pondering Michel Callon’s (1986) brilliant paper, “Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay”, on translation. Translation is central to Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Actors have diverse interests. The creation of a network rests on the ability to appropriate other’s interests to one’s own. Callon [...]

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November 10, 2011 0 Comments Short URL considered

Field notes: Design and Actor-Network Theory

I’m starting to get superstitious about serendipity. As a designer-of-things-slash-sociologist-of-design, I’ve spent a large chunk of this year thinking about my design practice and how Actor-Network Theory might improve it. Quite by chance, I stumbled on Bruno Latour’s lecture A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter [...]

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August 5, 2011 0 Comments Short URL , considered

So where were we?

Inspired by Dan Hill’s 2008 blog post, The street as platform, Matt Jone’s 2009 Webstock talk, The Demon-Haunted World, and Anne Galloway’s 2004 paper, Intimations of everyday life: Ubiquitous computing and the city, I decided I wanted to know more about ubiquitous computing. I come from a social science and web design background so I [...]

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June 25, 2011 0 Comments Short URL considered

Review: A week at the airport

I read “A week at the airport” on a comfortable black couch at Queenstown airport. It was 8am in the morning and the sleepy little airport was just waking up. I had two hours to kill before boarding a plane and it seemed very apt to be thinking about airports when I was inside one. [...]

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April 27, 2011 1 Comment Short URL considered

Review: Urban computing and its discontents

Published in 2007 Urban Computing and Its Discontents still has beautiful, relevant moments. You feel as if you are eavesdropping on an brilliant conversation. The conversation, between Mark Shepard and Adam Greenfield, is loosely framed around the questions – What do architects need to know about urban computing? What do technologists need to know about [...]

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January 7, 2011 0 Comments Short URL considered

Field notes: “Web’s blood flow”

Over the last month I have been studying Bruno Latour’s (1999) chapter “Science’s Blood Flow” in Pandora’s Hope. (This is *the* reading I have been raving about to unfortunate souls I have cornered.) “Science’s Blood Flow” is a chapter about reconnecting science with society by, in Latour’s words, “following the ways in which facts circulate” (1999, [...]

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December 7, 2010 1 Comment Short URL , considered

Sharing research

In qualitative research there is a tradition of giving back to research participants. My research participants and I are part of the Wellington web design and development community and I am deeply interested in sharing my research findings with them and our community. Two things have crossed my path recently on the subject of sharing [...]

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November 16, 2010 0 Comments Short URL , considered

More cities and cyborgs

At the same time I was writing field notes on cities and cyborgs, Dan Hill presented at the NDF 2010 conference. I was super gutted to have missed it and super pleased it was recorded. I was especially delighted by Hill’s description of his work with the State Library of Queensland –  a wonderful case study [...]

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November 12, 2010 0 Comments Short URL considered

Field notes: “Cities and cyborgs”

When asked by my supervisors to reflect on how space is changed with ubiquitous computing, I immediately quoted “People are walking architecture” (an Archigram concept cited by Matt Jones (2009)) and “The cyborg self has emerged into the city, clutching an iPhone” (Matsuda, 2010, p. 2). I want to stitch these quotes together and play [...]

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October 23, 2010 2 Comments Short URL , considered

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