Keith and I presented our ‘Who would have thought of that!, Collaborative Cross-disciplinary Research Grant’ videodefunct project this week as a work-in progress. Here is a version of the presentation with added links. The presentation also included Keith’s demonstration of the interfaces he has been developing in javascript.

Following the objective of this fund we recognised the opportunity to create a ‘mash-up’ project that brought together our research interests. This research includes Keith’s MA work in Design and my own PhD research in Media. We identified the opportunity to explore and experiment with the way video is archived and presented on the Internet. We where both interested in exploring a hybrid form. The approach towards exploring this objective was influenced by a number of key factors:

1. A new working relationship – one that involved not only collaboration but also the objective to integrate differing research interests
2. The timeframe, the project funding came through just before the last summer break.
3. A modest budget.

Taking these factors into consideration we decided to work quickly and intuitively. This meant that we set up a very open premise that was based around a simple objective. Simply - we where both interested in creating a hybrid form that was located somewhere between a videoblog and YouTube. A website that reflected our own interests in terms of how we wanted to begin engaging with video on the Internet. We wanted to find out what this hybrid would look like and through the process of making it what we might learn about videoblogs and YouTube.

In providing context for this project, we approach this research from the perspectives of a designer and media practitioner. Which means in this project our key interest is to focus on aesthetic control and use an engagement with practice to generate theory. The proposed theoretical outcomes mix together the design precedent of working towards improving practice, with both the formal and cultural critique of media analysis. Overall, a key objective was to follow the ‘design as research’ model as a means to open up new spaces for websites that are used for publishing video. New spaces that emphasise potentialities in terms of ‘poetics’ rather than the pragmatics of interaction design.

We knew due to the timeframe and budget that we would have to work with a framework that already existed. I had been looking at the way videobloggers where beginning to respond to the way video was presented in their blogs. I noted, how some of the more established videobloggers where beginning to work with varying ways to present video within the infrastructure of a weblog. They where designing categories and pages, which provided direct access to the video posts, amongst other types of posts like written text. These videobloggers seemed to want to give users a separate option to access video independently. There was also a mixture of approaches towards the way video was being posted. Some would post and include written text with the video clip, while others followed a more purist line maintaining a video clip and title as the key elements of their videoblog. Both Keith and I had no particular precedent - we were open to mixing mediums, along with exploring new ways to present video in terms of archiving and playback.

We noted that David Wolf was developing a more advanced approach towards presenting video on blogs with some work he was doing on TV production website called ‘The Guild’. David was working with the open source blog publishing system, WordPress. Following open source principles and practices he was sharing some of the background on these developments on the Internet, via his own blog. We approached David with the idea of setting up a version of this customised weblog as a starting point to develop a hybrid videoblog. David was working with the Wordpress feature Custom Fields, which basically allows the blogger to add customised features onto a write’ post. In this case the custom field provides a way to streamline the posting process, providing an embed tag for the video, along with some archiving features.

The system sets up recent posts of the video clips on the front page, creates a clips archive page of all the clips posted and also provides the opportunity to create clip categories. At this point with the prototype called ‘wildcat’ ready to go, we started exploring differing approaches towards the development of this system, with the idea of mashing these interests back together later on.

Keith focused on the design of interfaces that would play back video in varying configurations. In line with my own media research, I was interested in exploring an infrastructure for an online documentary. Therefore, I decided to focus on content and the notion of a collection of smaller parts being linked together to make a larger whole. I kept things very simple testing the existing customised blog with some video content that I had immediately available, some 8mm film archive that I had used extensively in some previous projects. I wanted to at this stage start experiencing the archiving process of naming (or tagging) the clips and giving them categories. I decided to leave the aesthetics of the interface until later on. The scenes captured over a twenty-year period by two artists, cover a number of topics, with particular themes emerging across the content. The weblog structure for the first time provided an easy way to offer access to this material through various categories. The selecting, organising and naming process provides an opportunity to create associations and connections across the material.

The first prototype provided the impetus to explore a form that I called a vlogumentary - a type of audiovisual blog that is motivated by a documentary approach towards a particular subject. I also wanted to move beyond linear video to explore interactive forms, with the key objective to create links across the separate video posts within the blog and with other material outside the blog. In my head I imagined, a blog type documentary that was posted to as the documentary progressed and also provided access to the people involved in the documentary to make comments. It was also fun to explore a documentary approach from a poetic perspective. Each clip a poetic response to a moment associated with train travel. This suited my limited time and made use of my daily commute to and from RMIT. Naming and categorising these clips in a poetic manner compared to the more pragmatic approach in the first prototype also began to demonstrate the variations of meaning that could be constructed in the archiving process. In retrospect, this experience opened up the possibility of exploring a documentary subject in more of a responsive, immediate way over a period of time.

In addition to the process of archiving (selecting and naming), I also wanted to start progressing towards providing the user with varying options to access and view the material. For example this could be viewing categories together as a cluster. In conversations with David, we discussed adapting the custom field further, to play back the categories as groups of clips. Different types of interfaces are created as a means to experience the archived data in varying ways. This exploration tied in with Keith’s work on interface design. As a group we recognised that Keith’s interface developments could be mashed together with an adapted WordPress custom field. What was needed was as Keith put the development of a ‘bridge’ to bring the two together. In addition, to this it was time to move away from the blog interface, to a design that suited the emerging hybrid.

Where to from here? We would like to finalise the ‘pedestrian’ prototype. The development of the next prototypes would be affected by the documentation of the process to date and the resulting theory that is produced - with the aim to return that theory back into the next lot of practice. The aim long-term would be to refine a model that we would be interested in using to develop a larger-scale project.

What will be the theoretical outcomes? In essence the key objectives of the project was to explore the ‘poetic’ and aesthetic’ possibilities around the publication of video online, along with using this experience to critique popular and established forms like YouTube and Videoblogs. A type of theory that explores as mentioned earlier, the integration of design and media research. The documentation of the design and cross-disciplinary collaboration processes - provides theory that aims to verify design and media practices, around the use of the Internet for the presentation and distribution of video content. Down the track, Keith and I discussed publishing the critique outcomes within the system we have constructed using a mix of mediums from video to written text.

I am underway with a prototype vlogumentary that begins to explore the first lot of criteria that emerged out of the first v-defunct prototype. The objective is to follow my nose a bit. The video clips are explorations of the theme ‘train travel’ and are influenced by a poetic approach.

The poetic angle provides plenty of room to explore a number of varying types of form that utilise spatial montage and interactivity. I am not sure where it is all going but overall the aim is to create a broader sense or experience of train travel through a series of small video responses.

Initially the links across these clip is mostly about making connections to other permalinks or posts.

In the wildcat vlog database experiment as a starting point the aim was simply to get some video into the customised structure. I chose to use some 8mm film footage from a previous project, mainly because I always saw this footage as being an early example of a film diary. Shot over a period of 30 years by two artists Charles and Sheena Hazzard - a weblog provides an excellent structure to collate and bring together short duration clips into varying categories. The objective of these notes is to look at working towards what I call a ‘vlogumentary’.

Categories: The database structure of the weblog provides for the first time a way to separate the varying types of events that the Hazzards recorded. The user/spectator can decide whether they are interested in viewing clips associated with the ’sugar festivals’ for example. The next step would be to provide a method of viewing these collections of clips as a sequence.

Post titles: The post tilting was stripped back to simple pragmatic names. In a planned work which has a more focused theme, the post title can provide a significant insight into the clip contents before it is viewed. Also, including written body comments on a post can add significant information prior to downloading and viewing. I note on the chasing windmills vlog that they have opted for no text letting the video speak for itself as a self-contained unit alongside what is a serial ongoing narrative. pouringdown does the same.

Chronological posting: Another influencing factor is the chronological diary format of a blog. In this example the date and time of entry are not a considered part of the narrative. In a future work this feature would provide for the user, insights into how a project and narrative is structured. I note, that generally in most vlogs and even blogs for that matter the idea generally is as a user and visitor to a blog or even through RSS feeds to keep an eye out for latest posts. But, also blogs do operate as an archive that can be searched in a number of ways. The trick is to possibly work with both of these features.

Other notes: On reflection, these clips are an excellent example of covering daily events. The process of recording on 8mm film forces the shooter to edit in the camera as part of trying to capture a scene as it happens. The on/off of the edits in the camera produces a particular type of aesthetic in terms of capturing a scene quickly and as it happens. They are also good examples of working towards shorter duration scenes that fit the Internet and vlog format. A digital stills camera demands a different approach where due to size it seems to be more about keeping the camera still and looking for a continuous short duration shot.

So, what does this blog set-up provide in terms of a type of video database? Simply, it provides a latest post feature via the thumbnail clusters at the top similar to a latest post list in a conventional blog in the sidebar. A default category called ‘clips’ (usually ‘uncategorised’ on a conventional blog) where all the clips uploaded to the blog are registered. The ‘clips’ category’ page follows a similar approach used by videobloggers to direct users to the videos that have been posted on their blog. For example the 2007 video archive page on Michael Verdi’s blog, which used a yearly archiving approach. The thumbnails clusters can also be pushed out into smaller groupings as sub-categories as discussed earlier. An issue with these thumbnails is that often due to their small miniature scale they image is lost and provides little insight for the user on what the clip might be about. I note on Verdi’s blog he has been careful to choose very graphic imagery for his thumbnails. I could be argued that they force this type of approach if they are to be useful navigation indicators.

In the last few weeks I have been planning out an approach towards the videodefunct video database project. Initally, I imagined developing one-off video objects that provided a critique of the video-sharing site YouTube. The idea was to explore in each of these objects, both a formal and cultural critique. This means the works would aim to experiment both with form and content as part of examining video as a form beyond single-channel closed objects, like the hardcopy output approach of television programs, or even a cinematic edit going to a locked-off film print. A video form that as dicussed in the post on ipod video, is more responsive to the properties of the Internet as a network. Then a light bulb went off in regards to a blog as a form of a video database. Instead of placing the emphasis on a single video object, what happens if each uploaded video is seen as being a part of a larger whole, the database? The focus shifts to taxomony and folksonomy. In the short term an initial experiment using the customised version of WordPress being developed in the videodefunct project may be about exploring each individual video as part of a larger collection.