The videodefunct project has been selected into NewMediaFest 2007. The list of selected works are available to view on the Java Museum site. Details of a+b=ba?. The proposed question:
whether blogs and/or blogging can be tools for creating a new type of net based art.
I attended the Scott McQuire presentation recently tilted ‘MOBILITY, COSMOPOLITANISM AND PUBLIC SPACE IN THE MEDIA CITY’. Which was part of the RMIT ARCHITECTURE + PHILOSOPHY PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES. Part of his summary:
What happens when the TV screen leaves home and moves out into the street? Public space in the 21st century is increasingly shaped by interactions between media platforms and architectural structures. The result is the formation of media-architecture complexes which are fast coalescing into ‘media cities’.
It was a comprehensive presentation on this subject matter and it provided me with a strong reminder of using historical context to set up an argument or even as a thorough way to present your research. The talk had particular relevance to my own research as there was direct connections with video and screens, which meant I could refer to the presentation as a model for talking about online video. Scott showed historically the development of large public screens in a simple clear way, which provided the perspective he needed to discuss his particular research interests on these types of screens in a more contemporary context. His project ARC funded also demonstrated the background and clarity that is needed to explain that type of research publically. Practice references that interested me was the artistRafael Lozano-Hemmer work alzado vectorial; Repositioning Fear; underscan.
During the talk I was attracted to the terminology and phrases used to describe what is happening in this area. I jotted down ones of interest, almost from a semi-poetic perspective. Some of these quotes are Scott’s and they are mixed in with other theorists that he quoted in the presentation (they are in order from start to end):
adept dwellings
mobile and variable
computer city
mass customisation
user-directed feedback
brainscape
control space
traceable record
electronic footprint
surveillance society
spatial mobility
consumption profiles
digital networking
interconnected systems
data circulation
crowd circulation
commodity display
experimental interfaces
personal participation
collective engagement
collective choreography
encounters with strangers
visual voice
shared experience
media dense spaces
What type of associations does my research have with the principles of ‘community media’?
With my project, which examines in a broad context online video practice, I did not intend to make a direct link with the notion of community media. Unlike, Leo and Bruce I do not make a reference to ‘community media’ in my research summary or proposal.
In hindsight, this is because I come from a background of broadcast media experience in which I often looked for alternatives within that platform. For example, I gravitated to producing content for SBS Television because they offered the room to experiment with both content and form. So, my research interest initially was motivated by the potential to discover and test alternative approaches to the way video is produced and distributed online.
But, another influence that possibly connects me to the notion of ‘community media’ is a focus on an independent documentary practice that examined social and political issues. Within this practice, I was always on the lookout for stories that the mainstream media would not touch. I think that this in combination with exposure to academia and media as a field of study has led to being influenced by the age-old approach to examine the “ideological frameworks” that control media. Which all adds up to making connections with the principles behind community media; alternative media; grassroots media; independent media; citizen media; radical media, hacktivism and activism. In a quick glance across current definitions of these varying areas of media there is distinct similarities and differences. What they all have in common is the motivation to provide a perspective that is different from mainstream media. These “avant-garde or counteractive media” practices offer me the potential to explore and discover new approaches towards the production and dissemination of video on the Internet.
Intuitively, I like the idea of not situating myself within any of these groups. The closest I come to making a commitment is using the word ‘alternative’ and ‘independent media’ in my research summary. Why am I not committing more? Well firstly and I admit it I need to understand more context and history around these media approaches which is part of being here today. But, more importantly through research that focuses on the web, I am becoming more and more aware of a phenomenal shift in the way media is being produced and consumed. New problems and benefits are emerging as part of the potential for individuals with access to computers and the Internet having the potential to produce and distribute media content. For example the question has been raised as to whether many bloggers are merely regurgitating mass media through another platform rather than utilising the potential to provide a diverse and independent perspective. Other questions are being asked about the type of labour that user-generated content is producing around websites like YouTube, when so few enjoy the significant spoils of the sell-off to larger conglomerates.
Always interested in the ‘other’, and prepared to put ideas out that need more research and substantiation - I would like to propose that ‘community media’ now and in the future will draw from movements like open source and more recently from analysis being conducted into peer-to-peer theory. This is the type of community media that I would like to tease out in my research. But, what will not change is as Alessandro Ludovico (the editor of the independent online/offline publication Neural) stated in a recent open source workshop – is that a key element of non-mainstream media is networking and making connections with people who are interested in providing a diversity of perspectives. I was inspired by the way that he has extended this idea into getting like groups together (like in his case independent new media publishers) to discuss and share ideas, issues, and ways to survive. Collaborating in this way and being on the edge of collapse produces interesting responses to traditional approaches. Mute one of these independent publishers to stay afloat came up with a print-on-demand (POD) approach to publishing where one copy rather than the obligatory financed 500 copies can be produced on demand. Also, the consumer can remix articles and self-publish from serial publications into a magazine of their choice and have that printed. All this content is licensed ‘copyleft’ meaning it can be remixed and used for commercial purposes. Radical approaches like this are prime examples of thinking and working differently as part of maintaining independent forms of media and could be called a type of open publishing.
Working from this networking and networked perspective, I see some form of online documentary that somehow provides more of a conversational approach to the way media is produced. Adapted social software is used to create a production where the producer, the people involved in the story and other interested contributors can all participate in an open process. Situated in a location that has developing country issues.
For example, on the weekend in discussion with a colleague from ANU, I was intrigued by his story of a very large group of illiterate workers ‘The Bombay Dabbawalas’, who are coordinated in Mumbai, India on a daily basis to deliver lunches from each of the workers’ partners homes to their offices. Millions of colour-coded containers for each level of the office buildings are collected and delivered daily with a very small percentage of error in the deliveries. This is a fascinating example of ingenuity, communication and a type of networked system that forms part of the fabric of that community. Somehow, I would like to see through the use of online video technologies a similar example of media that operates at this community level. This is not YouTube, it is a type of video sharing that really utilises the potential to provide a valuable and autonomous point-of-view.
Coming back to making connections between my research and the principles behind community media, a connection that I would make is with open source culture. Recently I have been drawn into the debates and inquiries occurring around copyright on the Internet. The theorist Lawrence Lessig provides some interesting insights into the notion of promoting a read-write culture rather than a read-only culture on the Internet. He divides the Internet into four distinct areas Content, Applications, Logical (as in the protocols) and Physical (as in the telecommunication infrastructures). He uses the example of the development of open source applications as a benchmark for opening up these other three areas. Like for example, content being controlled through copyright law by large organisations like Sony, Disney, Viacom and Warner Brothers. Another example, is the issues around the implementation of broadband in Australia as part of controlling the physical developments of the Internet.
His argument is how the same innovative approaches that have made open source platforms like Linux a key part of the Internet fabric could be applied to these other areas. He advocates ‘private’ approaches to make this happen, as governments are not in tune with what is required. Creative Commons is part of accommodating both the read-only and read-write needs of the content area. All of this is about keeping the avenues open for people to not only access content but also produce and distribute content. In a broader sense I think ‘community media’ can be seen as being both local and global, where key issues around accessibility will affect media on all levels.
References:
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The nature and future of creativity, Penguin: New York, 2004.
Jay David Bolter, ‘Theory and Practice in New Media Studies’, Digital Media Revisted, Eds. Guannar Liestol, Andrew Morrison, Terje Rasmussen, MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass., 2004.
Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, Routledge: NewYork, 2007.
Trebor Scholz - What the MySpace generation should know about working for free, re-public: re.imaginging democracy, 16th April 2007,
http://www.re-public.gr/en/wp-print.php?p=138 (accessed August 5, 2007)
Lawrence Lessig, ‘Free Culture: What we need from you’, LinuxWorld.com, online video presentation, http://www.linuxworld.com/events/keynotes/lwsf06-lessig.html (accessed August 5, 2007)
Anna also put me onto film forge a drupal supported system.
FilmForge is a version of the content management system Drupal, tailored to the needs of videomaking communities. FilmForge makes it simple to install and run your own video sharing site.
Anna from engage media who was helping andy out at the still/open workshop put me onto show-in-the-box.
WordPress is a fantastic blogging tool and we’ve been using it to run videoblogs for a few years now. Over time we’ve begun to develop and use some tools that make WordPress better suited for video. Show In A Box was created to bring these all together and create the ultimate videoblogging platform.
I meet Elliot the Australia creative commons project office at still/open and he put me onto some new features for applying CC licenses. He advised that it is a good idea as an Australian resident to utilise the Australian licences. These licenses have been adapted to suit people living here and provide more support legally. The country of origin can be chosen as the license is selected and this is added the machine code. The other addition is the ability for the author to add their personal details and how the license is attributed including the source file of the content. This extra information makes it easier to reference content used and provides the user a better idea of how the author wants to be attributed. One of my examples. Also, he creative commmons search facility that has been set up with varying companies.
Mark (his blog) is into google apps including google reader an online rss client, along with google mash up editor.
In the still/open workshop Mark Whiting introduced us to the mapping tool compendium which we he used to map the discussion in the first workshop project. The mind map is viewable on the post ‘Source of Openness, an Image of the Face to Global’.
In the AIR project coordinated by Beatriz, I identified a number of what could possibly called open source correlations which are written here as free flow thoughts. Firstly, the documentation is very detailed and informative with links to secondary sources and background processes. This seems to flow across many of Beatriz’s projects. For example a website was prepared in advance for this workshop with categories created for documenting the workshops at each location. I was really interested from a practice perspective on the types of documentation used to record projects like AIR or pigeonblog in detail. An example of how the processes are as important as the outcome, and are key components of the outcome. From an open source perspective documentation is a pivotal aspect of sharing knowledge or in this case providing the directions needed to create open hardware/software tools for collecting scientific data. (As I write Beatriz is recording photographic images of our group crowded around an electronic ‘breadboard’ connecting and disconnecting wires, in what I would call a miniature landscape.) AIR as a project is part of moving a data collection process out from the scientific enclaves into the hands of the broader community as Beatriz states in the summary of the air project:
AIR is a public, social experiment in which people are invited to use Preemptive Media’s portable air monitoring devices to explore their neighborhoods and urban environments for pollution and fossil fuel burning hotspots.
A process that is for example, emblematic of the shift of media production out of the high-end production studio into the hands of the public, who have access to a desktop computer and the Internet. Often we are fed statistics and have no idea of how these figures where collated. Having the opportunity to collect scientific data, like having the potential to produce media content is an empowering way to understand these processes on another level. The access in regards to building the hardware to collect data moves beyond the current social media model of all the work being done for the user. This is where increasingly all that has to be done is to add content to an infrastructure that has been developed. In the air workshop we follow specific stages, experiencing the development of the hardware needed to collect data from a bottom-up approach. Imagine in my own teaching getting students to assemble a weblog content management system, I wonder how that would effect their understanding of blogging. I did have one student who took a blog apart and stuck it back together by playing around with the PHP code, but that is pretty rare. Beatriz spoke of moving the contact with projects like ‘air’ beyond artists out into the community. In pigeonblog I was intrigued by the interest pigeon fanciers showed in becoming involved in the data collection process. These are art projects that engage with the general public in some form or another where people make contributions, and become involved.
Notes from the still/open workshop I am attending.
These are the notes I took down from my perspective as we presented our group work in the Alessandro Ludovico workshop. Our group handled the content aspect of hypothetical open source publication. We discussed the group making comments on these notes as there was plenty more discussed in the session that my be quite different form what I write here:
What it is about? Face to global is the title of the publication. The sub-heading for the publication “Source to Openness”. The concept for the idea comes from previous publication examples ‘Factsheet’ and ‘Whole Earth’ that Alessandro mentioned in his presentation. The publication is a directory for all things ‘open source‘ starting at the local level. This is what is happening in your neighbourhood from free wireless, free software development through to community based activities like ‘mothers groups’ who act as type of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. These groups as an example are voluntary brought together to network, socialise and share knowledge about raising a child. This is specialist knowledge that cuts through all the plethora of books and literature on the subject. The conversations in these groups are about editing this knowledge through hands on experience. ‘Face to global’ provides an index and reviews all these activities occurring locally. Activities are mapped and can be viewed electronically via social software. A theoretical influence “Think Global and Act Local”. The publication in hardcopy format or as a softcopy pdf, from front to back, starts local and progresses to global. Working with the ‘mute’ idea of being able to re-edit your own publication from existing content each location has the potential to assemble a publication that starts local and moves to specific global interests. With the editorial there would be differing forms of editorial overview applied to the varying types of publication that emerge from the content. An aspect of this approach would be to facilitate specialist publications like from the mothers group for example. Other publications could be edited from user-generated content that is collected through some type of social software. Each distributed in varying ways using for example print-on-demand for hardcopy output where the idea is to distribute tangible real paper publications back into the community. Like Brewster Kahle with his Internet Bookmobile these could be printed on street corners on demand.