¡Rayos! by Brujo+, on FlickrI’ve been brainstorming some broad categories of things that might be worth discussing as part of ds106. This is mainly a re-categorization of stuff I’ve written about before but I wanted to try to think about how some of this might fit together down the road and make sure I had examples in a one spot1.
Now that I look at it, I should have put this in a spreadsheet and run it into exhibit. I didn’t think there’d be quite this much for only one category. I’m also seeing how examples will often fit into multiple categories. I should know better than to make lists in blog posts. It never does the data justice.
Anyway, here’s draft #1 dealing with examples of restrictors.
Restrictors
These are stories/projects that become more interesting because of the restrictions involved in creating them.
Text
Images/Presentations
- 4 slide sales pitch
- Pecha Kucha
- Restrict your images to any odd category. I used 98% medieval bestiary images once to talk about blogs. I plan to do an upcoming presentation using nothing but tattoo photos.
- Battledecks
- Battledecks – alternate rules
Genre/Form Restrictions
- Survival Manual
- Wolverine Poetry
- Zombie vocabulary
- Passive Aggressive Notes
- GI Joe Filecards
- Lord of the Rings – Web 2.0 style
- Pulp Fiction in Shakespearian prose
- Bad PowerPoints
Tool Restrictions/Generators
“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.”
– Igor Stravinsky
That is a much easier way to say all that garbage I linked in above.
Yes, strangely restrictions seem to make people more creative. Maybe it’s the need for some friction in the process. When filmmakers couldn’t show sex they were very inventive as to how to imply or symbolise it – once that restriction was removed we lost a lot of that creativity and imagery.
I like the suggestions above, particularly the restricting presentations using a category of photos (not as impressive as medieval bestiary images but I recently did a presentation using only my own photos – remarkable how apt they turned out to be).
Martin – I like that idea. I think there’s a lot of power in using your own work to make other pieces. I did something similar at UMW’s faculty academy last year in that I did my presentation on day 2 and used only photos I took from day 1 of the conference to do it. It made for a chunk of work that night but it was fun. Not necessarily great, but fun.
Lord of the rings web 2.0 doesn’t work…
Nevertheless, this “web 2.0″ story is much better I’d bet…” :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vZrf0PbAGSk
That is an interesting one – as I recall the LOTR one from 2008 was of a very different style. I can’t seem to find it anywhere any more.
I’d like to make a story like the one you linked to. In a lot of ways, it’s like the Google Lit Trips stuff but with some additional flexibility. I’ll have to think about that some more.