「Positions through Iterating」week 2

Earlier last week, I reflected on my previous work – editing together a hundred different angles of a solar eclipse using a multi-take cut technique to compose a complete eclipse process. but fail to clearly convey to the audience what I intended to express through this publication. The main reason for this problem was also because during that iteration process, I only had a vague thought in mind – that I wanted to convey the observation and understanding of the same event from different perspectives – So this week, I aimed to make this vague idea explicit and allow my audience to feel it through my publication.

The following content outlines how I arrived at this answer.

First, I reconsidered my goal and methods for creating the publication: goal – to transform objective events into subjective observations, namely turning the process of a solar eclipse into videos recorded by different people (from TikTok). Methods – using multi-take cut, highlighting the differences between different perspectives to reflect the variations in individual understandings.

Upon reflection, I realized that my unconscious choice of TikTok as the source footage for the multi-take cut was because our way of obtaining information in mass media is similar to the combination of multi-take cuts and cross-cuts in cinematic language. The endless stream of information in mass media and our limited time and attention results in information producers extracting the key highlights from events and using sensational headlines to capture this limited attention. Different information producers extract different highlights, and we stitch these together through “multi-take cuts” to form our own understanding of events.

In the case of this eclipse process, after flipping through this book, we didn’t see or know the eclipse itself. Instead, we saw a patched together eclipse tale with others’ perspectives through the lens and screens. This is a kind of subjectivity with ‘fragmented output,’ ‘patchwork input,’ and ‘misunderstood understanding.’ These three terms summarize the characteristics of the process which we receive information through mass media.

Next, I came across an article about perspective, with one example stating that some workers in South Africa, without the concept of perspective, couldn’t discern the distance of objects based on their size in images, thus unable to read images with depth. This made me think about the influence of diagrams on our understanding of things.