Seth Keen

Interactive documentary event, i-Docs 2012, Digital Cultures Research Centre (http://dcrc.org.uk) Looks at tagging, locative and HTML5 video. Names to add to my word cloud ‘web-docs, cross-media docs, cross-platform docs, locative docs, docu-games, installations, digital performative docs…’.From the about on the website:

This is a space for people that want to know more about interactive documentaries (that we have called “i-docs”). You will find academic and blog references (link to resources), an archive of existing i-docs (link to archive) and a forum open to discussions about all the possible forms of i-docs you can think of (link to discussions). A team of experts (link to team) have decided to join forces to open the discussion on what is interesting and/or new in this emergent field, and on the ethical, aesthetic, political and financial consequences of the i-doc genre. We welcome your participation! Feel free to mail your papers and ideas to the co-editors of our discussion section (link), or simply comment on their posts.

From the emailed callout:

This year’s symposium will be organized around four topical questions that emerged from i-Docs 2011.

1. User participation in i-docs: how can the act of participating change the meaning of an i-doc?

• Where is the participation happening: within the i-doc or around it?
• When and why do people want to participate? Is participation an inherently good thing?
• What are the ethics of participation: where to stop and where to push?
• How do strategies of participation affect the creation of meaning within an i-doc?

2. Layered experience, augmented reality games and pervasive media: are locative i-docs changing our notion of physical experience and space?

• Is pervasive technology an effective way to layer the experience of reality?
• How does our perception of space change in locative and augmented reality i-docs?
• What are the consequences and ethics of tagging content to a place?
• How do user experience and design issues effect the planning of a “real world” experience?

3. Activism and ethics: how can i-docs be used to develop new strategies for activism?

• Is combining information with role-play opening activism to a younger audience?
• Is implicating the user in moral dilemmas an ethical /effective strategy?
• Where does an i-doc end and social media activism begin?
• How does activism fit with emerging business models for i-docs?

4. Open source and the semantic web: how are tagging video, HTML5 and the semantic web opening up new routes for i-docs?

• What new relationships are being created between documentary recordings and live data feeds?
• Where does the role of the author lie in an open source i-doc? Are producers becoming curators?
• What is the production cycle of an open source i-doc? Is it a finite or continuously evolving entity?
• Are users browsers or co-creators of meaning? How can deep engagement be encouraged?

emphermal media - Internet Attractions: online video and user-generated ephemera

Conference and call for papers:

The first workshop in the series focuses on user-generated ephemera, in particular the proliferation of online video. The emerging digital
media environment has created new opportunities for user-generated content to achieve broad distribution and so create a public of users.
This has been typified, and enabled, by recent phenomena such as YouTube. The fleeting and competing nature of user-generated content
has placed particular emphasis on the role of media performance – what can be understood broadly as a display of communicative competence for assessment by an audience. The workshop will examine the status and significance of user-generated ephemera (in particular online video)
and the kinds of performance inscribed herein.

http://www.beyondtext.ac.uk/

The Beyond Text strategic programme…identified visual communication, sensory perception, orality and material culture as key concerns for 21st century scholarship and the wider community.

Nate just sent me Lev’s latest book Software Takes Command which you can downoad as pdf or doc. It is licensed under CC and the book takes on some of the characteristics of software (from the opening page):

One of the advantages of online distribution which I can control is that I don’t have to permanently fix the book’s contents. Like contemporary software and web services, the book can change as often as I like, with new “features” and “big fixes” added periodically. I plan to take advantage of these possibilities. From time to time, I will be adding new material and making changes and corrections to the text.

So, like an rss feed I will need to go back for updates.

A conference that explores the intersection between design and cinema:

…while interrogating the place of design disciplines within cinema. The attention drawn by this conference showed the necessity of evaluating the knowledge that existed in the intersection of these two disciplines.

The theme for the 2008 conference:

Theoretical studies have become more and more interested in our experiences in those designed environments, both real and fantasized, as distinctions between them became blurred. We have chosen the real, the hyper-real and the virtual, as our topics via which a number of issues are expected to unfold. These issues could be defined both as personal experiences and as social practices. When stated in terms of the experiences of the individual, philosophically and psychologically based studies will unavoidably be on the scene. When taken in terms of our social existence in a post-modern world, our experience of the uncanny, of alienation, and genuineness, in short, our mixed feelings about what is real would likely emerge as issues to be discussed.

Real

Designing of objects and environments

Experience of designed objects and environments

Hyper-real

Manipulation of the real

Blurring of the real

Virtual

Creation of a parallel universe Implementation Hybrid existences

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.

The book Media Work by Mark Deuze has surfaced again. I got the reference initially back in January in Amsterdam from Geert and yes it is in the RMIT Library. Review ‘Mark Deuze on Media Work’, by Michael Stevenson on the Masters of Media blog that covered Video Vortex outcomes. A blog post ‘Building New Media Organisations’, by Axel Bruns on Deuze’s presentation at the CCI Conference. Mark Deuze interviewed on ABC Radio National this morning as a podcast.

Form the book summary:

The media are home to an eclectic bunch of people. This book is about who they are, what they do, and what their work means to them. Based on interviews with media professionals in the United States, New Zealand, South Africa, and The Netherlands, and drawing from both scholarly and professional literatures in a wide variety of disciplines, it offers an account of what it is like to work in the media today.

Media professionals face tough choices. Boundaries are drawn and erased: between commerce and creativity, between individualism and teamwork, between security and independence. Digital media supercharge these dilemmas, as industries merge and media converge, as audiences become co-creators of content online.

The media industries are the pioneers of the digital age. This book is a critical primer on how media workers manage to survive, and is essential reading for anyone considering a career in the media, or who wishes to understand how the media are made.

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

A recent book reference from the videovortex list:

NARRATIVITY: HOW VISUAL ARTS, CINEMA AND LITERATURE ARE TELLING THE WORLD TODAY , Ed by: DIS VOIR René Audet, Claude Romano, Laurence Dreyfus, Carl Therrien, Hugues Marchal translated by Paul Buck & Catherine Petit

To tackle the question of narration in its ruptures and mutations in an age of media culture and influences of videogames – where the ludic
and interactive principle is an important element – is a way to draw up an inventory of the Nineties, a time when art starts to function like some kind of editing table on which the artists can recreate daily reality. Through that reflection on time, the question is to show how its new languages and new ways of writing are representative of the contemporary imaginary expressed in it and to reaffirm that the work of art is an “event” before being a monument or a mere testimony, an event which constitutes an experience drawing in the spectator.