Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle, the theoretical dissertation I completed for my BA (Hons), was a big deal.
It was a big deal for me personally because it was a breakthrough in terms of my skill as a researcher and writer.
But it was a big deal academically too because it was a 30,000 word thesis that received the highest mark of my graduating year and was also bestowed with a research excellence award.
I had put a lot of work into and had planned to achieve a solid first from it, but I had never envisioned attaining the result I ultimately did achieve with it.
The success I achieved with Ways of Being came as a huge surprise and it opened a lot of doors; particularly regarding the undertaking of a master’s degree, which was something I had not previously given serious thought towards.
Ways of Being was a consideration of the epistemological, ontological and metaphysical downfalls of film theory’s understandings of the spectator and the spectacle; with particular emphasis directed towards the neurobiological implications of the spectator’s body.
The research focus of Ways of Being was something that I was passionately interested in and which I had only scratched the surface of within the submitted thesis paper.
There were a great deal of loose ends, both in the main body of the work and also in the appendices, that I really wanted to continue further.
In particular, Appendices A, F and I (which had once been the basis of another chapter in the main body) were two of the key sources of continuation.
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| I couldn't squeeze Chapter 3 into the limited word count of the main body, so it ended up becoming Appendices F and I |
Ultimately, Ways of Being and its success ended up becoming the main driving for behind undertaking a master’s degree; with the potential of undertaking a PhD further down the line.
But deciding what master’s degree I wanted to pursue and how I was going to fund it took a very long time for me to figure out.
In the meantime, I decided to keep my research focus active and created the Ways 2 Interface blog where I could record my latest findings and theorizations.
As much as Ways 2 Interface was a continuation of my theoretical dissertation, it was also a continuation of my practical dissertation, EYES.
EYES was a web series concept proposal package that was a reflexive expression of contemporary networking attitudes and their implications on our ways of being.
The proposal package included a produced pilot episode, a series bible and a producer’s planning portfolio document.
The package also included a blog, EYES of a Storyteller, that I used to chronical the development of the project and Ways 2 Interface very continues in the same vein of its loose and transdisciplinary blogging style.
Ultimately, while I didn’t end up continuing my research in a traditional master’s degree, Ways 2 Interface did serve much the same bridging purpose between my BA (Hons) and the creation of my MTA Portfolio.
The curriculum of the traditional master’s degree I had planned on undertaking, Creative Technologies and Enterprise, but ultimately abandoned was also absorbed into the makeup of my MTA Portfolio.
Ways 2 Interface had a huge part to play in to create of my MTA concentration in Multimedia Studies and Creative Technologies and, for a time, very much serves as an adjunct blog to it.
