sethkeen.net/blog » Media

emphermal online video

seth.keen — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 08:37:24 +0000

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.

a soft book on software studies

seth.keen — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:18:23 +0000

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.

design and cinema crossover

seth.keen — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 02:35:20 +0000

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

open spectrum

seth.keen — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:01:14 +0000

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.

Media Work

seth.keen — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:10:33 +0000

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.

environmental portraiture – film/video

seth.keen — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 01:24:00 +0000

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

narrative as an “event”

seth.keen — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 15:46:29 +0000

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.