Seth Keen

The ‘Full video report of Video Vortex V’ on the Climatics Platform/Brussels
Video Vortex V was held at the Atomium in Brussels

Video Vortex V is conference no five in this ongoing satellite series being hosted by Cimatics festival, KASK and CLEA. The event will be held in the radical 50s expo building Atomium, in Brussels. The program (download pdf) description has been revised:

The past two years, the conference series – which focuses on the status and potential of the moving image on the Internet – has visited Amsterdam, Ankara and Split, growing out into an organised network of organisations and individuals. Time for an interim report, perhaps. We asked some participants of the first Video Vortex editions and publication, as well as new ones, to reflect on recent developments in online video culture.

Over the past years the place of the moving image on the Internet has become increasingly prominent. With a wide range of technologies and web applications within anyone’s reach, the potential of video as a personal means of expression has reached a totally new dimension. How is this potential being used? How do artists and other political and social actors react to the popularity of YouTube and other ‘user-generated-content’ websites? What does YouTube tell us about the state of contemporary visual culture? And how can 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?

Some of you heard it already in Split: the 5th edition of the Video Vortex conference series will be held in Brussels. Video Vortex V is announced for November 20-21 2009, and will be hosted by the Cimatics festival… With this second Brussels meeting the goal is also to set up Video Vortex as an organised network, making it more sustainable.

submissions – http://cimatics.com/entries/

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.

Download the pdf
More publication information

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.

The Video Vortex video documentation is now online. Ogg Theora files are also available for download.

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…

GL writes a brief summarising report on his blog about the Video Vortex conference held in Amsterdam (2008).

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

Malka’s video vortex reports on moving web.

Video Vortex – conference report day 1
Video Vortex – conference report day 2.