An overview of a presentation by Nora Barry at ‘Remixing reality with narrative media’ narrative media’
During the 60s and the 70s, an independent cinema community was established thanks to the existence of an extensive network of alternative film clubs with branches in various parts of the world. According to Nora Barry, if independent digital cinema wants to achieve a similar situation, it would be best for it to broadcast in various “physical” environments (festivals, organising public projections) that favour contact and the creation of a community, especially in areas and regions lacking in technological resources.
Film on the Internet By Donato Totaro
Offscreen, Volume 11, Issue 1 (January 31, 2007)
In either case, it is clear to me that internet cinema, barely eleven years old, has yet to find its own niche in terms of aesthetics, style, form, and purpose. Whether internet cinema evolves into something lasting, or a strong voice for alternative cinema, or even remains as a viable exhibition site for cinema, or whether it becomes just another one of the multitude of ‘screens’ that have risen since the beginning of cinema is largely connected to the broader question of interactivity: Do we really want interactivity in our narratives? Do we really want (or need) what Manovich calls ‘ambient narrative’?
As part of contextualising both the methodology of my research and the practice this quote by Peter Downton, is useful in terms of remembering the basics of what is expected of the practice. Also, the importance of reflecting on previous practice and “The identification of themes…”
Peter Downton, ‘Reflections on reflective practices’, Design Research, RMIT University Press, 2003. p.126-7.
These candidates are practitioners who have a substantial body of work and an established trajectory of practice…
These candidates are expected to engage in reflection on the assembled evidence of of their achievements to date…They are encouraged to search for themes that have informed their practice…The identification of themes that have evolved usually clarifies for them a number of issues about the nature of their design activity and the practice knowledge evident in it. They begin to tell new stories about their work, new stories elaborate new patterns of inquiry.
As well as making the nature of their work rather clearer as a result of curation and reflection, participants in this program are expected to produce new work through which they find a means to summarise their position at this point and which facilitates ways for them to move forward in their practice. They are encouraged to produce a work of focused speculative power that can contribute to the knowledge of the field.
Homecasting: the end of broadcasting? by JosÉ van Dijck
Established broadcast organizations are currently renegotiating their relationship with the new kids on the block: internet giant Google recently bought up YouTube for the hefty sum of 1.6 billion dollars after Murdoch Inc acquired MySpace about a year ago. Ever since the popularization of the internet in the mid-1990s, technology gurus have prophesied the decline and eventual demise of broadcasting. The trendy expression “postbroadcasting” has come to signify the idea that television, after its convergence with the internet and other digital technologies, will gradually disappear as a distinct institutional practice. Projections of a postbroadcasting age are generally warranted by a deterministic logic: they tend to reduce broadcasting to a technological system that is bound to affect social use. However, the internet never replaced television, and the distribution of user-generated content via sites such as YouTube and GoogleVideo, in my view, will not further expedite television’s obsolescence. On the contrary, they will introduce a new cultural practice that will both expand and alter our rapport with the medium of television - a practice I refer to as “homecasting”.
Book - Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, JosÉ van Dijck
http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?book_id=5623%205624%20
Henry Jenkins writes on his blog Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube
We had ten minutes to speak so I took this as a challenge and offered nine big ideas about the place of YouTube in contemporary culture.
This abstractorr clip posted on engagemedia was played recently at the rights online seminar run buy open channel. abstractor.tv
Abstractor is a simple device that instantly transforms any TV into a beautiful piece of art.
Anyone can easily create an Abstractor by attaching two black boards to any TV screen. These boards cover the screen entirely – except for a small horizontal gap between them – allowing a narrow beam of light to escape from the TV. All TV programs and commercials look beautiful through the Abstractor.
I noticed awhile back that Jean Burgess was doing some research on YouTube. A description from her blog research page:
I’m currently designing a major case study of YouTube as a complex system that sits within the history of the emergence, mass popularisation and marketisation of new media technologies and literacies (from the printing press to the Kodak camera and the domestication of personal computing).
In a recent post titled YouTube Research Gazette Jean brings together a great collection of YouTube research. First up, the Infoscape Research Lab who have on their site a section with the url name ‘videopolitics’. A description on the project titled ‘Code Politics: Party Leaders and Partisans on YouTube.’
Where do issues in virtual public spheres come from during an election? This research project aims to examine the movement of issues through media over time via coding, archival and analytical research into online media processes, understood as code politics. When and how do parties set the agenda, or do they? How does the blogosphere deploy new media formats such as embedded video or RSS, and how do aggregators (such as www.YouTube.com) that provide these formats influence agendas? What is the relationship between political parties, mainstream media, bloggers and the blogosphere?
There is other things to explore here but what caught my eye in the meantime was Chuck Tyron’s writing published on Flow TV. Chuck is profiled on his Chutry blog and he has an extensive delicious tag on YouTube. He is also participating on braintrustdv. About braintrustdv:
BRAINTRUSTdv is an ongoing attempt to understand electronic cinema on its own terms as well as through the prism of the twentieth-century art form from which it derives.
BRAINTRUSTdv is more concerned with the history of video technology than with the latest development; more concerned with aesthetic debates than with technical specifications; more concerned with articulate arguments than with terse weblog exchanges.
Back to Tryon’s writing on Flow TV which covers a number of socio-political perspectives.
The Stage 6 website are working with the DivX video codec. They propose an alternative.
It’s an experiment. Like all experiments, it exists to test assumptions and answer questions. In this case, those questions are about the future of media. How do new technologies and platforms re-shape the content experience? Instead of just making things different, can digital media actually make things better? Is it possible for a video site to offer more than dogs on skateboards?
