Revolution of Everyday Life – Interesting used of tumblr and blog.

From a review:

Cinema is no longer monumental. Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, making a film no longer demands millions of dollars, booms, grips, lights, and cameras. We don’t need theaters. We don’t need studios. All we need is a mobile phone. Cinema has become everyday.

Marc Lafia has taken to making films that embrace the everyday cinema machine. He has an idea; puts together a cast (he has started working with the same actors); and films on the streets of New York with digital cameras. In his latest, ‘Revolution of Everyday Life’, he gives HD Flip video cameras to the cast and has them film themselves alone.

Came across this recent article The Mosaic-Screen: Exploration and Definition by Sergio Dias Branco , 27 Dec, 2008 on the refractory blog on the concept of the mosaic screen, which provides another way to define the use of spatial montage in the creation of moving-image narratives, in addition to the term split-screen. From the article:

This essay arises from these introductory ideas and aims to explore and define a new term that can be contrasted with split-screen: that is, mosaic-screen. In this stylistic device, used in regular moments of the television series 24 (Fox Network, 2001-), images that commonly vary in characteristics are arranged on screen.

This article is one of a number of artilces in the ‘Double Trouble – Special Issue on Split and Double Screens’

other links:
24 wikipedia
fox 24 website

Call for papers for Video Vortex 4 in Split, Croatia – 22-23 May, 2009.

Please send in a 500-word abstract and a short bio to Dan Oki (danoki [at] xs4all.nl) before February 5, 2009.

New themes are:
Telepresence and Web Aesthetics
Social Cinema
Architecture and Moving Image
Video Sharing
Technology and politics of the moving image
Literature and video online narrative

I had chat with AD about environmental portraiture as a concept of practice within cinema theory. He put me onto some great references:

John Smith (Regeneration?)
Article – On the Street where You Live: The Films of John Smith by Adrian Danks
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/29/john_smith.htm

Film/Video
John Smith, Lost Sound
Stan Brakhage, The Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea,
Ross McElwee, Sherman’s March
Ross McElwee, Bright Leaves (family background in Tobacco)
Ross McElwee, Time and Definate (extends Sherman’s March)
Andrew Kötting, Gallivant (observational essay)
Nick Broomfield

Melbourne Cinematheque, Experimental Landscapes 2008
Peter Forgacs, The Land of Nothing
James Benning, Landscape Suicide

Book
Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine (review on Screening the Past)
Cantrills Filmnotes nos 63,64
Arthur and Corrinne Cantrill

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

Steve Erickson is releasing a new book Zeroville.Steven Shaviro wrote a blog entry about the book .

I also had a close look at the opening 24/7 a DIY Video Summit, video clip (that ironically has no poster/thumbnail/preview image as it downloads when the web page is opened). The clip a vox-pox of grabs from speakers and artists attending the event provides an insight into what to expect. Following is links to some of the organisations and people featured in the opening clip. Interesting that remixing as an approach features in many of the videos selected. In the publicity information provided in an interview with the summit co-chair Mimo Ito there is a focus on remixing:

One of the most interesting aspects of online video sharing is the fact that videos are created in an almost conversational mode, where one video is a commentary on or a response to another video, and so on. We see this kind of video and response sequence with popular remix source footage…

As part of selecting these works, curating as a practice is a feature at the summit. Links provided in the introduction video:

Anne Bray (Executive Director) – freewaves.org an alternative exhibition platform

sacha costanza chock who is involved with http://video.indymedia.org/

The Goal and Idea of the Video Network is the distribution of High Quality Videos (vhs/dvd quality) over the Internet. It is based on the Open Publishing principle of Indymedia and will allow the Publishing of Copyright Free Videos under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

eric saks who runs an “alternative cinema” site called flicker He says his aim with his work is to subvert “pop culture”, mainstream approaches towards audiovisual media.

Jonathan McIntosh media artist, activist who is building a website called rebellious pixels. These could be described as activist orientated re-mixes of adverts and news.

tim park doki doki productionshttp://www.doki.ca/ Anime remixes that use text to subvert the message.

laura shapiro whose thing is vidding. From wikipedia:

Vidding is the practice of creating fan-made music videos (sometimes called songvids or fanvids) that edit clips from favorite TV shows, anime series, movies, or even official music videos, to another song. It is a cross between narrative story-telling and visual poetry and their content can range from a simple tribute to a favorite character or delve into shipping/slash.

Paul Marino Thinking Machinima blog

0xdb About

The 0xdb is a rather unique kind of movie database. It uses a variety of publicly accessible resources, like search engines and file-sharing networks, to automatically collect information about, and actual images and sounds from, a rapidly growing number of movies. What the 0xdb provides is, essentially, full text search within movies, and instant previews of search results.

The core idea behind the 0xdb is that file-sharing networks can not only be used to download digital works, but also to just retrieve information about them. Even though most movies in the 0xdb are copyrighted, and many of them are practically inaccessible for legal reasons, the monitoring of peer-to-peer traffic allows the 0xdb to identify and index these materials.

articles: 0xdb Movie Database Goes Live; 0xdb: The ultimate P2P-powered film database; Site Review 0xdb

I enjoyed Tom Sherman’s (Spring 2005) articles on video in the Canadian Art Magazine. His frustration with the video being called film brought a smile. In the article ‘Video No Film’, he states:

Fuck film. The dead ideas of film are being heaped onto video, Cinematic history is like a ball and chain. Video, as an inclusive soluble medium, is having difficulty defending itself from the weight of this affliction. It has become fashionable to declare, I “filmed this or that with my digital camcorder.” In this ahistorical time, it has become common to use the nomenclature of film, the predominant medium of the 20th century, to declare one’s existence in the 21st. Everyone is going retro. p. 5 of 6

His outspoken views prompted more discussion on the list nettime, by Alan Sondheim. And more here by Sherman, Is the new video ‘film,’ video or film? More on Tom’s video work here.

An overview of a presentation by Nora Barry at ‘Remixing reality with narrative media’ narrative media’

During the 60s and the 70s, an independent cinema community was established thanks to the existence of an extensive network of alternative film clubs with branches in various parts of the world. According to Nora Barry, if independent digital cinema wants to achieve a similar situation, it would be best for it to broadcast in various “physical” environments (festivals, organising public projections) that favour contact and the creation of a community, especially in areas and regions lacking in technological resources.