Seth Keen

These are my quick notes from Adrian Miles’ recent lecture for the course Intergrated Media One in the Media department at RMITR University. I have attempted to quote what was said vrebatim and paraphrase other points from my own perspective.

The three references being referred to below:

Lumiere Manifesto
Softvideo
Vernacular Video

Lumiere Manifesto

“What would it be to think about the Internet as a studio?”

This reading in context is related specifically to video blogging practice rather than online video more broadly. There is an understanding that video blogging is seen as a type of documentary practice. Miles has written about this previously and identifies blogging as a documentary practice in that essay.

Miles, Adrian. “Blogging and Documentary.” OzDox. Sydney, November 9th, 2006.

The Lumiere Manifesto, Miles suggests focuses on the camera as a recording device where the camera records what is in front of it. But, they are not stating that this is treated as being a direct recording of reality, instead it is about looking at what is around you and capturing moments that have significance for you personally.

“Simply stop and look around at the world…”

What they promote as a manifesto is easily carried out due to accessibility to hardware and software but also because the treatment of the content is simple and does not require complicated scripting, expensive hardware/software and post-production.

In this manifesto what these writers and makers advocate has a very different approach to video –sharing websites like YouTube, which is dependent on the constant addition of content. In comparison the are wanting content producers within the specific constraints outlined to make short duration videos that have a certain beauty, resonance, poetics amongst the plethora of video content online.

The emphasis is not about narrative in this manifesto, with the focus more on the “subjective and objective” with a connection to the personal.

Softvideo

In this overview of Miles’ own essay he opened with the comment that video should be seen as having the same qualities as a blog. Key characteristics here is granularity, time and links.

Granularity in nutshell, is about video being more porous, like the way you can have access to copy and paste parts (quoting) with text. In the end this is about systems that allow video to be more granular.

Miles writes more about this idea of granularity in a section in a book chapter titled ‘Programmatic Statements for a Facetted Videography’ available in the Video Vortex reader pdf download.

Miles argues that softvideo in a simplified analysis is about video content being highly granular, made up of small bits that remain self-contained, enabling the ability to arrange them into a multitude of configurations. Miles, using the example of a linear edited sequence being made of a number of shots on the timeline, argues that a potential softvideo quality is lost, when all these individual shots are merged together when the final edit is exported into one video file.

The underlying motivation for the softvideo essay is that online video broadly should not just be seen as a delivery platform for old genres where the Internet is merely a distribution environment.

Podcasting was used as an example of this popular type of approach towards online video where nothing is changed in the content in terms of it being re-purposed for the Internet, as a different platform. wih different characteristics. A comment Miles used in a previous lecture “The ipod is treating your content like a book.” Turning this around – what is there beyond the podcasting approach?

“If we take the networks as the starting point for making – what will these objects look like?”

Time as a concept within these broadcast models radio, TV, cinema is transferred directly to the Internet and seen as being fixed and “industrial”. Within a networked environment like a computer and the Internet time does not need to be fixed in this way.

As an example of this argument, Miles has demonstrated the way QuickTime as a multimedia software, that includes video does not rely on the cinema editing software model of frames per second to playback a duration of time. QuickTime can hold a frame and play that frame for whatever set duration is created. This is an approach that responds to how time can be manipulated in a digital environment compared to transferring the film frames constraint in the analogue medium of film into non-linear software like iMovie and Final Cut Pro. This software approach towards video editing ties in with the similar approach taken towards the Internet being used as a distribution platform for TV and radio content.

Links are also an affordance, that need to be utilised in networked video. Granularity is a result of the ability to create multiple links between bits. Remembering as discussed above that film editing is fixed but also made up of whole lot of parts as shots that are edited together. In other words granularity has always been evident even in film editing but never been utilised as the focus remains on the end result, the large singular artefact rather than the parts that make up the edited film.

But, it seems to be an ongoing struggle to get online video to be seen as being anything else but a narrative that emulates previous media like cinema and televison. Software that has invigorated the potential to explore the softvideo affordances like granularity; time and links has come and gone. Ezedia the software we are currently using in this course stopped being updated a few weeks ago. Live Stage Pro has had a similar fate. What do we work in now (Keynote the Mac version of Powerpoint)? Perhaps there are some answers in the shift to open video being explored by Mozilla within the firefox browser? Making video a first class citizen of the Web

Softvideo as a concept in the end as Miles pointed out invigorates an inquiry to look at alternatives outside the status quo with the objective to find out why this may be important.

“What would you make, and why is it worth doing?”

strong>Vernacular Video

With this essay it pays to remember that it comes from the context of video art. Video art is what is being challenged here.

The accessibility of hardware and software has changed. In the past equipment was expensive and only accessed through arts funding. With this in place how does video art make itself special? – Could it be by making itself even more elitist as a “high art practice”? The response is not to continue the high-art elitist approach, which sees video art as being only made available in the white cube.

The difference being argued for is about aesthetics (to use Sherman’s word “elegance”), being used to differentiate the artist from the populist mass online video practice, taking place. Video Art takes itself into the ‘vernacular’ domain, with the challenge being to work out what type of approach makes aesthetics “relevant”.

Perhaps one approach could be focusing on form. The same formalist approaches that made video art distinct as arts practice in the gallery, could be applied within the environments where video is more broadly being articulated and distributed. Formalism in art responds to medium as a way of discerning an arts practice. For example in painting Pollock draws attention to paint as a viscous material. Painting as a practice moves to being more “self-reflexive” with the focus on form rather than content. The focus is on the medium itself as way of separating itself out from other arts practice like sculpture, for example.

What could eventuate if that formalist approach was taken in these new environments?