Seth Keen

A pdf callout for Video Vortex 8 including the planned themes.The announcing summary:

We are pleased to announce that the 8th edition of Video Vortex will take place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Croatia, between the 17th and the 19th of May, 2012. So far Video Vortex has taken place twice in Brussels and Amsterdam and once in Ankara, Split and Yogyakarta. The Video Vortex network was founded in in 2007 and deals with the cultural, political and artistics aspects of online video. Video Vortex 8 is organized by the Kazimir Association in Split and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb in collaboration with the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam.

The documentation for the Video Vortex 7 event in Yogyakarta, Indonesia has just been made available on the VV website.

Video Vortex planned in Zagreb, Croatia, between 17th and 19th of May 2012 at the Museum of Contemporary Art. More information to come…

I have been searching around looking more broadly at the notion of online video aesthetics for the prod studio I teach in 2nd semester. Video Vortex 6 had a panel which focused on aesthetics. I found Florian Schneider’s talk on Open Source Documentary useful. His comment about how annotation sounds a death knell for documentary is a useful against argument for the types of works that I have been making. From a review of the presentation by Catalina Iorga.

He then expressed a series of concerns about how film is made in the networked environment. In this context, there is a tension between legible and illegible, with a strong tendency for making things readable and decipherable in order to be searched, found, categorised, indexed tagged and subjected to an algorithmic process. Schneider controversially claims that text-to-image hybrids (i.e. subtitles), which can be indexed, represent death to film since they make everything calculable. This anti-computationalist perspective continues with his recommendation of an algorithm that produces difference rather than sameness, multiplicity instead of identity, since online aesthetics are all about weaving items into a mesh of similarities instead of discontinuities.

Video Vortex 7 Yogyakarta From the Video Vortex website:

Indonesia has seen an explosion of video practices and organizations since the arrival of affordable platforms for production and distribution. To date, much vital work has been done – in ground-up networks devoted to art and digital culture, social activism and participatory media – to survey this diverse activity, its growing purchase on the public sphere, and the challenges faced. But as DV is absorbed into the mainstream media-scape, what are the crucial technical, social and aesthetic strategies for a politics of video going forward? Which are the exemplary videos, video-makers, and organizations, and why? And what histories have shaped the medium, that have yet to be written into the discussion? This event gathers key thinkers from video’s diverse constituencies in Indonesia, and innovative practitioners from abroad, for exchange and focused discussion that will take the discourse on video in Indonesia beyond overviews.

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: Video Vortex Reader II

Following the success of the first Video Vortex reader (published late 2008, second edition, 4000 copies in total), recent Video Vortex conferences in Ankara (Oct. 2008), Split (May 2009) and Brussels (Nov. 2009) have sparked a number of new insights, debates and conversations regarding the politics, aesthetics, and artistic possibilities of online video. Since these issues develop with the rapidly changing landscape of online video and its use, we want to open up a space once again for interested people to contribute to this critical conversation in a second issue of the Video Vortex reader.

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/

24/7 DIY video summit has finally posted the curated selections and presentations that went with them, from the summit in early 2008. The videoblogging selection which can be viewed in one long hit on YouTube or as singular clips down the bottom of the page.

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

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.