In our meeting on 26/7/07 we decided to complete the bridge being built between Keith’s interfaces and wordpress. We all saw the pedestrian prototype as having a customised blog like front page that provides a place to post and tag videos. From this front page the user can chose to engage with specific pages that allow for differing ways to view the content (these are Keith’s interface playback designs: diagrams). We also revised the project summary:

Videodefunct is an experimental work that focuses on producing a hybrid form of video blog. Currently as a work-in-progress, a number of prototypes are being developed in the open source blog publishing system WordPress. A key objective of the project is to explore the way video is presented within the structure of a blog from a ‘poetic’ perspective.

The practitioners involved (including David Wolf as programmer) are all interested in locating a hybrid form that reflects our own interests in terms of how we want to begin engaging with a blog that is used primarily as a platform for publishing video content. The videodefunct blog as an artistic form aims to explore new spaces that emphasise potentialities in terms of ‘poetics’ rather than the pragmatics of interaction design. Which means in this project our key interest is to focus on aesthetic control.

The prototype Pedestrian is currently in development, merging the database back end and user interface of WordPress with customised presentation methods utilising Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX). The aim is to provide the user with a number of alternatives in terms of the playback of the video clips. These video clips will include single-channel linear clips as well as interactive clips. They may be viewed in clusters in a random fashion as well as in more structured ways that are influenced by the choices the user makes. Pedestrian follows the theme of day-to-day travel, emulating the diary like nature of blogging as a collection of fragmentary short experiences.