Envisioning the Future of DIY – part 1, Ulrike Reinhard, who is blog (video records of the panel)
DIY 24/7 video summit plenary panel titled ‘Envisioning the Future of DIY Video’. From the lrike Reinhard’s blog:
Then they started out by giving their best visions of what Rheingold called the activist question: what to do to influence the way the institutions of democratic governance, of cultural production, of knowledge gathering will shape the outcome of DIY media!
Dialogue from a online video recoding by the first speaker Henry Jenkins:
My vision of the future would be one where everyone had the power to participate, and where diversity was valued as central to the enterprise so it is not that we build and they will come, it is not that we construct YouTube and we are automatically at democracy, there is still a struggle to be fought around democracy, it is a struggle in terms of education in terms of teaching media literacies skills to kids, struggle in terms of law, in terms of changing the notion of fair use so we have strong protection on our ability to respond to the stories that are absolutely central to our culture, it involves changing politics, how we mobilise people who are feeling empowered by making videos and turn them loose in the streets to transform society…
From YouTube to WeTube… , Henry Jenkins blog post, February 14, 2008
One of the things that has excited me about YouTube is the ways that it represents a shared portal where all of these different groups circulate their videos, thus opening up possibilities for cross-polination. Yet, as many at the conference suggests, the mechanisms of YouTube as a platform work to discourage the real exchange of work. YouTube is a participatory channel but it lacks mechanisms which might encourage real diversity or the exchange of ideas. The Forums on YouTube are superficial at best and filled with hate speech at worst, meaning that anyone who tries to do work beyond the mainstream (however narrowly this is defined) is apt to face ridicule and harrasment. The user-moderation system on YouTube, designed to insure the best content rises to the top, follow majoritarian assumptions which can often hide minority works from view. Perhaps the biggest problem has to do with the way YouTube strips individual works from their larger contexts…
I had these thoughts on some similarities between AM’s rhizomes and the v-defunct player, when I was replying to a videoblogging mail list post.
The project certainly has been influenced by Adrian’s work with vogs and his writing on softvideography and the VD collective are similarily interested in exploring video on the Internet beyond being single-channel and linear like a version of TV and cinema on the web.
VD simply breaks down what would normally be a larger linear video as you say into smaller granular clips, that are tagged and categorised on posting in the vlog/blog format. The user then uses this metadata to reassemble these clips in a player attached to the vlog as a page. The vlog as a larger thematic video work is made up of smaller clips.
In Adrian’s rhizomes that he is currently refining I think a similar type of interactivity and granularity occurs where Quicktime in this case is used as a container to bring in a number of varying content types in varying order. Rhizomes in way are configured in a variety of ways to display this content like the customized player page in VD. Both often explore video being displayed simultaneously in more than one frame. (multi-channel)
Alejandro Adams, Preliminary Notes on Web-hosted Cinema, http://www.braintrustdv.com/essays/web-hosted.html
There is nothing unique about returning to early film theory in an attempt to delimit the creative uses of digital video technology. Comparing the infancy of the first manifestation of cinema with the infancy of its successor is as natural as it is profitable. Invoking, as I will, the elaborate investigations of early theorists such as Béla Balázs and Rudolf Arnheim is a way to clarify my own observations concerning digital cinema in general and Web-hosted cinema in particular.
I got his reference from AM’s blog who posted a few notes on the article.
I picked up this 2008 published book Video: The Reflexive Medium by Yvonne Spielmann in Amsterdam at the beautiful Athenaeum Boekhandel.
From book description:
Video is an electronic medium, dependent on the transfer of electronic signals. Video signals are in constant movement, circulating between camera and monitor. This process of simultaneous production and reproduction makes video the most reflexive of media, distinct from both photography and film (in which the image or a sequence of images is central). Because it is processual and not bound to recording and the appearance of a “frame,” video shares properties with the computer. In this book, Yvonne Spielmann argues that video is not merely an intermediate stage between analog and digital but a medium in its own right. Video has metamorphosed from technology to medium, with a set of aesthetic languages that are specific to it, and current critical debates on new media still need to recognize this.
Full reference: Yvonne Spielmann, Video, The Reflexive Medium, MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, (2008) First published in German (2005)
The H.264 Announcement in Black and White by Ryan Stewart
Does the addition of H.264 mean Flash Player will support HD? Yes, Flash Player supports 480p, 720p and 1080p content encoded with either On2 or H.264. Performance will vary depending on the capabilities and configuration of your machine. In general a 2.0 GHz Mac or a 3GHz PC, with one or more processors, will deliver an optimum experience.
Will Flash Player 9 Update 3 support non-FLV files? Yes, with this update, Flash Player will also support MPEG-4 standard container files that contain video and audio data encoded using H.264/HE-AAC, including MP4, M4V, M4A, MOV, Mp4v, 3gp, 3g2. So basically you can play full, hardware accelerated 1080p Quicktime videos inside of the updated Flash Player. Welcome to the next generation of web video.
More detail: What just happened to video on the web?
GL writes a brief summarising report on his blog about the Video Vortex conference held in Amsterdam (2008).
In thinking about developing some content and a major project in the videodefunct CMS, I made the following notes. The planned idea is to produce a larger-scale documentary type work in the system.
I now see this as possibly being multi-layered with multiple perspectives from the self-reflexive through to user-generated AV content. The benefit of the system compared to a television/cinema documentary edit is that the material that is valuable but often discarded can be included, which follows along the line of the hypertext projects being developed in Networked Media. This means varying layers can be included like self-reflexive notes on the process and the subject for example. User-generated content could be another layer in addition to planned coverage.
In contrast to the television/cinema documentary-factual approach this online system is very flexible where it can be adapted to work with content in an unscripted, non-linear way. This means AV content can be recorded in the field with very little planning as the scripting so to speak is done afterwards in the process of classification. Also, existing archives have the potential to be translated into a type of online documentary-factual form that responds to that content specifically.
This notion of a classification process rather than a conventional edit is interesting where the preparation of each individual clip/shot in pedestrian for example is like the logging process in preparing for an edit. Each shot is trimmed with an in and out point named (given a title), put in a category and then tagged. In the logging of shots the editor or assistant works out a way to name the shots in relation to planned scenes; when the footage was recorded or other idiosyncratic classifying system than can be used to help the main edit. The conventional main edit in a way, happens in the actual videodefunct player where the metadata that is added to each shot, along with how the player is configured influences the way the shots are brought together by the user. Actually editing a sequence within a clip (like in The Drunken Truth) creates yet another obvious layer ripe for exploration.
In Banter I was influenced by the neato plug-in Tag Managing Thing. This plug-in is used to tidy up tags afterwards where for example a tag that only features once may be folded into a tag name that is represented a number of times on varying clips. In terms of respecting the way tagging works I am not fully convinced that is appropriate to re-work the tagging process afterwards. But, I did find it useful to look at the tags and categories in the player as away to see how the individual clips worked as a whole. I actually skipped the plug-in and ended up re-working the tags, categories and titles manually. This was because the actual content together presented ideas I had not seen in the posting – tagging process. These ideas I was interested in bringing out with an eye on more content being added into the discussion. In a way this process has connections with a conventional TV/cinema edit where focus on a particular subject is nurtured and developed. By rearranging the metadata which is how the video content is classified the work overall is taken in a particular direction for the viewer.
Dominick Chen‘s presentation at video vortex was impressive in terms of his projects and the connection he made with theory. There was also an informative use of terms as way to describe varying activities occurring on the Internet. (more later once I review the video record)
Other links: A slide version of his presentation on slideshare. The Masters of Media blog post, Participatory Culture on his presentation. Dominick’s bio on the video vortex website. A summary of his presentation. His blog derive.
This facebook article from the Guardian Unlimited was brought to my attention on a few lists, With friends like these… written by Tom Hodgkinson. (The Idler magazine) This article does an in-depth analysis on the people behind facebook and their philosophical-economic motivations. It made me realise that joining social media platforms like facebook is like signing up to a company or corporation that you detest. Something you would never do if you understood in advance what they where about, which is where in following what I would call a “social media fashion”, i.e. blindly follow your neighbour, some very bizarre companies are making huge economic gains. These developments also have quite a significant affect on the development of the Internet. For example, connections could be made with MySpace and YouTube.
Some quotes from the article:
Thiel’s philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University, proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic desire. Girard reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another without much reflection. The theory would also seem to be proved correct in the case of Thiel’s virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook.
Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving money around the world with no restriction.
Jean Burgess Why I am deleting my facebook account
