The selected works for the JavaMuseum art + blog curated series are online. The launch of these blogs is officially tomorrow on the 1st November. Videodefucnt - Pedestrian is almost completed as a version, with a few minor tweaks to go.
Archive for October, 2007
Off the back of Scott’s lecture I have been revisiting the historical development of video. The ‘Video History Project’ turned up as part of that research. Form the about:
The Experimental Television Center’s Video History Project is an on-going research initiative which documents video art and community television, as it evolved in rural and urban New York State, and across the US. Begun in 1994, the Project has several initiatives including research, conferences and the website. Project Goals
* to provide a dynamic vehicle for the creation and dissemination of an inclusive media history, encouraging participation by a wide range of people including early practitioners as well as those presently shaping this history
* to identify, locate, and make accessible media history resources - tapes, artists’ instruments, writings and ephemera.
* to underscore the importance of intellectual access to information and to position independent media arts activities within a broader cultural context by cultivating research and public programming of these materials by those in the arts, humanities and sciences
* to increase public awareness of and appreciation for media and to create new audiences for the work by suggesting contexts in which the work can be appreciated.
* to encourage alliances among collecting institutions and those with educational and curatorial programs to assist the preservation of the works
The project goals provide a valuable perspective for working out the objectives of a research project both in terms of clarity for the researchers as well as users.
GT sent this URL for the website soundtransit that shares audio. He talked about the wonder of sharing sounds with people on the other side of the globe. Waking up in the morning and being able to listen to a neighbourhood in another country, or as the site says plan a “sonic journey”. From the site:
SoundTransit is a collaborative, online community dedicated to field recording and phonography.
1000 stories is a project by Florian Thalhofer and Mark Simon.
These are vignettes of people in a type of environmental portraiture style. Florian in a vlog structure publishes candid interviews where he lets the people talk openly, along with short clips that he narrates their personal stories over the top of with subtitles in English and other written stories with supporting images. These posts viewed as a group begin to demonstrate his simple intention to provide his viewpoint on another country through a process of interaction with people with a video camera. The varying approaches used to capture these stories also begin to utilise the multi-format nature of a blog where there is a potential to document a subject in a number of ways using mixed-media.
Starting in New York on October 1, Florian Thalhofer, a new-media artist and documentary filmmaker from Berlin, will travel all over the United States by motorcycle (generously provided by BMW), while U.S. filmmaker Mark Simon will travel throughout Germany by car. During their month-long journeys, each filmmaker will write about his experiences, collect stories, and conduct interviews, all of which will be posted daily at www1000stories.com – their video log.
Their route will be determined by interested folks in the U.S. and in Germany who reply to their “Americans wanted”/ “Germans wanted” ad on the web. Readers are invited to get in touch via www1000stories.com to suggest itineraries and potential interview candidates and to comment on the project.
Montevideo are well underway with an exhibition program for the exhibition side of video vortex.
20 October 2007 - 3 February 2008: Video Vortex Exhibition
Location: Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam http://www.montevideo.nl
Curated by: Annet Dekker
Artists: Beatrice Valentine Amrhein, Giselle Beiguelman, Susan Collins, Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar, Graham Harwood, MW2MW, Sonic()ject, and more.
Workshops by: Bricolabs, Furtherfield, Mediashed, and more.
Opening: 19 October 2007, 17:00 FLOSS Party!
The final overview of the first Video Vortex: Responses to YouTube Conference being held in Brussels this week.
Over the past years the moving image has claimed an increasingly prominent place on the internet. Thanks to a wide range of technologies and web applications it has become possible, not only to record and distribute video, but to edit and remix it on-line as well. With this world of possibilities within reach of a multitude of social actors, the potential of video as a personal means of expression has arrived at a totally new dimension. How is this potential being used? How do artists and activists react to the popularity of YouTube and other ‘user-generated-content’ websites? What is the impact of the availability of massive on-line images and sound databases on aesthetics and narrativity? How is Cinema, as an art form and experience, influenced by the development of widely spreading internet practices? What does YouTube tell us about the state of art in visual culture? And how does the participation culture of video-sharing and vlogging reach some degree of autonomy and diversity, escaping the laws of the mass media and the strong grip of media conglomerates?
This Video Vortex conference is the first in a series of international events, aimed at critical research and reflection surrounding the production and distribution of on-line video content, at the instigation of the Institute of Network Cultures (INC).
JOHAN GRIMONPREZ, PETER HORVATH, LEV MANOVICH, ANA KRONSCHNABL & TOMAS RAWLINGS, ADRIAN MILES, SIMON RUSCHMEYER, KEITH SANBORN, PETER WESTENBERG.
Jean writes here about dabble and here focus on video metadata.
This record, called “metadata”, makes it easy to search and find video. The community of Dabble members adds details and notes, correcting mistakes, and sharing what is valuable to them about the media, enhancing the metadata in a massive team effort that goes far beyond what any one site can do alone.
Also, there is a reference to Gotiut and a review on TechCrunch, that discusses a tagging feature that will allow the viewer to locate sections of a video file. A concept that makes a lot of sense.
Fourth, they are adding deep tagging features that will allow users to jump right to specific parts of videos - an important feature when reviewing sports footage, for example…
Notes from the article, ‘The man who put teenagers lives online’, by Owen Gibson, Technology News, Guardian Weekly.
Firstly, for my own research specifically the move to video and the number of uploads per day is phenomenal. Quote:
MySpace can have a similar democratising effect in the world of short film with amateur film-makers building up a MySpace fanbase before being snapped up by a big studio or broadcaster - 50,000 to 60,000 new videos are already being uploaded per day.
Reading through this article on MySpace, I was intrigued by the way the original creators looked around at what they describe as “the best social features” of other social networking entities. It would be interesting to define these features in terms of a research inquiry. The sites Craigslist, Evite and MP3.com where key references for the creators. The community site craiglist is intersting from a community media perspective, about:
Local community classifieds and forums - a place to find jobs, housing, goods & services, social activities, a girlfriend or boyfriend, advice, community information, and just about anything else — all for free, and in a relatively non-commercial environment.
The design of the site states Chris DeWolfe was not driven by a technical imperative i.e. lots of bells and whistles. The objective instead simplicity, with a focus on activities that young people engage in everyday, like for example locating tracks on an mp3 player.
Other associated links intermix media; friendster; geocities; tripod; Then there are copies facebook; bebo.
Some comprehensive notes on the engagemedia web site on distributing video on the web. Covers Player Software; Compression; Codecs; Container Formats; Standards; Mobile Devices; online distribution; broadband distribution strategy; Screening quality video; Video for viewing on computer or within the browser; Peer-to-Peer file sharing; Vodcasting; DVD and VCD distribution; Steps involved in authoring a DVD; Steps involved in making a VCD.
Also on the NGO-in-the-box web site there is an audiovisual section. Description from the web site:
The Audio and Video edition of NGO-in-a-Box is a toolkit that lowers the entry level for NGOs, non-profits and media activists wanting to use audio and video for social change. It is a collection of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) tools, documentation and tutorials that introduce you to the world of FOSS and the low-cost technology that is transforming the balance of forces in the realm of media production.
Defining what a ‘videoblog’ is comes close to defining what constitutes ‘new media’. Both mean different things to different people within varying contexts. In this instance, the definition of video meets the definition of blog. But, there does not seem to be the same confusion around the definition of blogging. Video in this equation after all has many contexts and uses from formats to practices. For example, Tom Sherman discusses in ‘Video 2005: Three texts on video’ the continuing misconception of video and film practices. I also wonder if the compulsion to clarify videoblogging is about the form being in the process of maturity and in many ways subservient to blogging. Meanwhile, the videobloggers continue the debate around the definition of videoblogs within the videoblogging community. Richard BF in ‘The definition of videoblogging as a genre’ with a follow up by Michael Verdi ‘What is a videoblog?’. Along with another recent perspective from Adrian Miles, ‘Being on the Television’.