Author Archive for seth.keen

Video Vortex Reader (published)

Published
by
seth.keen
on October 12, 2008
in video vortex
. 0 Comments

vv reader

The Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube was released last week as a follow up to the Video Vortex forums, conferences and exhibitions staged from the end of 2007 into 2008.

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about the book: The Video Vortex Reader is the first collection of critical texts to deal with the rapidly emerging world of online video – from its explosive rise in 2005 with YouTube, to its future as a significant form of personal media.

After years of talk about digital convergence and crossmedia platforms we now witness the merger of the Internet and television at a pace no-one predicted. These contributions from scholars, artists and curators evolved from the first two Video Vortex conferences in Brussels and Amsterdam in 2007 which focused on responses to YouTube, and address key issues around independent production and distribution of online video content. What does this new distribution platform mean for artists and activists? What are the alternatives?

Contributors: Tilman Baumgärtel, Jean Burgess, Dominick Chen, Sarah Cook, Sean Cubitt, Stefaan Decostere, Thomas Elsaesser, David Garcia, Alexandra Juhasz, Nelli Kambouri and Pavlos Hatzopoulos, Minke Kampman, Seth Keen, Sarah Késenne, Marsha Kinder, Patricia Lange, Elizabeth Losh, Geert Lovink, Andrew Lowenthal, Lev Manovich, Adrian Miles, Matthew Mitchem, Sabine Niederer, Ana Peraica, Birgit Richard, Keith Sanborn, Florian Schneider, Tom Sherman, Jan Simons, Thomas Thiel, Vera Tollmann, Andreas Treske, Peter Westenberg.

open spectrum

Published
by
seth.keen
on October 3, 2008
in Media
. 0 Comments

quality control poster

Started thinking about a one-minute presentation for the Open Spectrum symposium coming up at next week. Ellie Rennie is one of the key people behind the event and has written this supporting argument ‘Quality control: a new system for ethical media’. This article by Tim Berners_Lee Warning sounded on web’s future was circulated as coming from similar directions.

blankets

Published
by
seth.keen
on October 3, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

blankets_web.jpg

This was one of my favourite photos from my trip to the Sydney Biennale out in the front of AGNSW. I was just finishing a whirlwind day through as much of the Biennale as possible and was crossing to an old stamping ground (The Cross, Darlinghurst) to catch up with Julian Hooper who was over from Aotearoa for his exhibition Elokelo at Gallery 9.

theweathergroup_U

Published
by
seth.keen
on October 3, 2008
in Art
. 0 Comments

tents

I was intrigued by theweathergroup_U initiative at the Sydney Bienale. KD said to check them out for potential VD colloboration. I have had contact with David in the group previously through an experimental video screening of ‘The Hazzards’ at UNSW. Part of the summary of what they are about as a collective:

theweathergroup_U is a collective interested in pursuing experimental methods of audio-visual media production, environmental mapping and monitoring technologies, and processes of community-based interaction and knowledge exchange. As artists and media workers, they are primarily concerned with cross-cultural digital storytelling methods. Using the interlocking themes of weather, ecology, climate, geography, communications and collaboration, they seek to explore different ways of seeing, listening and documenting the interactions with natural systems that punctuate our daily existence.

open p2p design

Published
by
seth.keen
on October 3, 2008
in design
. 1 Comment

Received a link to this online design thesis openp2pdesign.org_1.1. I like the way this thesis has been re-designed for online distribution and translated from Italian into Spanish and English to increase the spread.

openp2pdesign.o rg was born in order to publish, disseminate and develop further my thesis, and to stimulate on it a collective discussion. The intention is to render the ideas behind the thesis not as property of a single person, but to share them collectively within a community. The thesis as the first source code on which to develop a community: this is why it has been translated to English and Spanish too.

There is some material in here on Free Software in relation to design, along with some nice design ideas like the way links are represented around the body text.

Towards Open and Dynamic Archives

Published
by
seth.keen
on October 3, 2008
in Taxonomy
. 0 Comments

The ‘Towards Open and Dynamic Archives‘ is project that Stoffel Debuysere.

The traditional functioning of audiovisual archives is being completely reshaped by today’s technological advancements. The expansion of fast broadband networks and the availability of software, hardware and recording equipment have broken down the barriers to the production and distribution of audiovisual content. Large quantities of multimedia materials are flowing on the Internet and into the archives every day, and all over the world ambitious projects are set up to digitalise heritage collections. Moreover, media start to look more collective and inclusive: the ubiquitous “Web 2.0″ discourse promises new levels of participatory culture in which all users are producers, sharing, appropriating and remixing content, overcoming the old regime of top-down broadcast media. Blogs, wikis, social networks and “user-generated-content” tools are presented as the new wave of voluntary alliances that users seek online. Even the traditional media are swept away into the hype: the BBC designated 2005 as the “Year of the Digital Citizen”, in 2006 Time magazine chose “You” as the as its esteemed Person of the Year.

RDF

Published
by
seth.keen
on October 3, 2008
in Tools
. 0 Comments

Meet with JJ the other day and he spoke about RDF being the next thing to watch on the web. From W3C:

Today’s web is built predominantly for human consumption. Even as machine-readable data begins to appear on the web, it is typically distributed in a separate file, with a separate format, and no correspondence between the human and machine versions. As a result, web browsers can provide only minimal assistance to humans in parsing and processing web data: browsers only see presentation information. We introduce RDFa, which provides a set of HTML attributes to augment visual data with machine-readable hints. We show how to express simple and more complex datasets using RDFa, and in particular how to turn the existing human-visible text and links into machine-readable data without repeating content.

links for 2008-09-22

Published
by
seth.keen
on September 22, 2008
in Tools
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hotel

Published
by
seth.keen
on September 18, 2008
in Art
. 1 Comment

hotel
hotel

links for 2008-09-14

Published
by
seth.keen
on September 14, 2008
in Social Media
. 0 Comments

I got this link from Geert’s critique of this video, ‘Michael Wesch Takes On YouTube’ on the video vortex list and in that critique he mentioned the book reference: James Elkens, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction.