Tag Archive for ‘videodefunct’ at

Tag Archive for 'videodefunct'

mapping

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on November 23, 2008

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I caught up with BC recently in a follow up to his presentation as part of the affective atlas project here at RMIT. He introduced me to open street map

OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by people like you.

Along with some other resources including the Pan America Institute of Geography and History based in Mexico, all part of a discussion on the community providing their own information towards the mapping process. Domesday project is an example of both community and specialist documentation. From wikipedia:

It included a new ’survey’ of the United Kingdom, in which people, mostly school children, wrote about geography, history or social issues in their local area or just about their daily lives. This was linked with maps, and many colour photos, statistical data, video and ‘virtual walks’. Over 1 million people participated in the project. The project also incorporated professionally-prepared video footage, virtual reality tours of major landmarks and other prepared datasets such as the 1981 census.

Another reference Association of American Geographers and Chris Perkin’s research and Subversive Cartographies. The essay ‘Radical Cartography: Artists making activist maps‘ is a useful reference towards my current interest in this field. From the abstract:

Radical cartography is a practice that uses maps and mapping to promote social change, and is part of a cultural movement that cuts across boundaries of art, geography, and activism. This paper will present examples of cartographic work by artists, architects, and collectives who create maps to raise awareness of social justice issues. These maps are both artworks and part of a larger activist research and practice.

The other person who reappeared from the videoblog scene was Daniel Liss (pouring down) and his project Seven Maps

Other links:
Book Review - An Atlas of Radical Cartography
Making maps DIY cartography - subversive cartographies post
International Cartography Conference Chile - themes/submission

emotional cartographies - five examples
map my london

ArcInfo GIS software
jet studio GIS software

Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, Verso: London, 2007

NGO-VD prototype (notes 1#)

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seth.keen

on November 9, 2008

in Uncategorized and videodefunct

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Following are the varying themes and aspects of the NGO project:

Narrative
classification; taxonomy; folksonomy; ontologies; annotation
archives
granularity; fragmentation
multilinear; spatial montage

Temporality
singular shots - temporal montage; no edits adds to reality
multiple windows - spatial montage; repetition; multiple perspectives
short duration

Technologies
open source
licenses
Internet - semantic web?
online video - players; video scenes

Design
user experience
iteration
experience design
design notes - subtitles multi-language; loops; visited clips; random bundles; thumbnail annotation; audio indication;

Production Process
low cost; accessible; real-life documentation
observational
scripting - colloborative, consultative, non-linear; themes; questions FAQ;
AV editing becomes classification/folksonomy

Other
Mapping - Ground truthing (combining web 2.0 characterisitics with mapping technologies)
Adding context through other means in addition to interviews or instead of…could be maps, graphic information i.e. employment statistics; crime; water etc.
Environmental portraiture
Thick description

Analytical Methodology
art and technology
design for social use - Bauhaus

GRC November 2008

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seth.keen

on November 5, 2008

in PhD and videodefunct

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I have not written much about a project that myself and the VD collective have been working on for the last few months with an International NGO. Mainly because it involves the applied commercial development of the VD system. But with another School Graduate Research Conference (GRC) looming in a week, I think it is time to break the drought. Funnily enough, without reflection on my blog I have also been slipping behind in the documentation of this project.

Last semester my June, GRC panel provided the following feedback to consider for this GRC:

“…who is the audience of your research and what is the contribution you are making to them.”

“Your work touches on a lot of technology issues that are here or on the near horizon, yet this is only one aspect. You also engage with different forms of narrative construction, temporality and user experience as well. What is the priority and how will you work with all of these?”

These are key points that I am now considering amongst a busy time of marking and more project production within the next couple of weeks. This is a new project on top of the NGO gig. I have been reflecting on these pointers and recently revised the research summary as one step towards beginning the process of writing up this research towards submission. Taking into consideration the development of the projects, particulary VD the following evolved:

//non-video/new-video/net-video Online video is a growing phenomenon on the Internet that has predominately involved the distribution of televisual and cinematic content on this system. I would argue that this is an approach that fails to respond to the materialities of the Internet as a media form. A practice-led, poetic research model is used to determine how online video can be utilised to articulate and disseminate knowledge on the Internet. Design is used to invent online video systems that explore the affordances of the Internet and Social Media technologies. These systems are developed collaboratively through an iterative process of content production and evaluation. Situated within the field of Media, I examine both the formal and cultural issues that the Internet poses for independent online video practitioners.

I think this is moving in the right direction with another 1-2 steps to go to finalise this towards being an abstract for the exegesis. Supervision work with Labsome Honours students really helped me clarify more and more, the practice-led research process and introduced me to some of AM’s notes on poetic research. Nothing like thinking through a process when you are teaching it to others. The poetic research concept started for me with Terrance Rosenberg’s article. A concept I plan to tease out more in my exegesis for this research.

Another phase of re-writing this summary is also revising the research questions. It was interesting to work hard on the clarfication of some research questions with the Honours students this semester. In such a short timeframe this helped us both understand what was being undertaken, on the premise that they could be revised and tweaked towards the end of the research.

Picking up on the point of how I plan to work with all of the themes mentioned above I picked up on the need to locate a framework that brings all these themes together around one point of inquiry. Something I noted in an earlier post around an mcd presentation. It is not really an issues addressing all these themes as long as they are handled from one unifying perspective. I also picked up or reminded myself that the theory, this framework and the dominating themes being explored emerge from the practice. This is all about reflecting on projects which brings me back to the current NGO project. I have been thinking about what this project is bringing to the surface and what a number of blog posts would cover.

A quote form Rosneberg’s article on poetic research.

In the case of the “poetic” the focal territory is found through a process. It is iterative, working in the space between substantiation and deviation. Backgrounding and foregrounding happen in a dynamic process and this produces a research context. Poetic enquiry evolves its field of focus whereas conventional research sets in advance its focal channel. (See figures 3 and 4). The focal territory in poetic research is established in open water.

FAVSC and VD

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seth.keen

on October 15, 2008

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David Wolf and I presented Videodefunct at Footscray Audio Visual Social Club (FAVSC) on Tuesday night (part of the Footscray Community Arts Centre). I stepped in last minute for Keith who was down with a virus. The FAVSC blurb from their MySpace site:

FAV-SC is a regular meeting place for artists, noise makers, sound-designers, electronics boffins, installation artists, film freaks, VHS geeks, performers, programmers, DIYers, phonographers, photographers, holographers, circuit benders, laptop musicians, curators, producers and anyone with an interest in lo/hi-fi new/old-media art.

VD hack-it-up workshop

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seth.keen

on April 8, 2008

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The VD collective got together for a hack-it-up workshop over the weekend. The main focus in the end was tackling cross-browser functionality with a focus on IE which is a mission (so we will need a bit more time to crack it). We also revamped the VD website http://videodefunct.net/ by bringing all the data together. There are a number of pages which provide a lot more details on the project: about (which includes licensing notes on the application and content), bios, prototypes, background, exhibitions, support. I also wrote a post titled ‘VD in a nutshell’, which includes some notes for presenting VD hopefully in a language that is very accessible. In a review of want we think VD is about and where we are heading we decided that “Videodefunct is a multi-channel video environment.”

rhizome videodefunct comparsion

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seth.keen

on February 19, 2008

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I had these thoughts on some similarities between AM’s rhizomes and the v-defunct player, when I was replying to a videoblogging mail list post.

The project certainly has been influenced by Adrian’s work with vogs and his writing on softvideography and the VD collective are similarily interested in exploring video on the Internet beyond being single-channel and linear like a version of TV and cinema on the web.

VD simply breaks down what would normally be a larger linear video as you say into smaller granular clips, that are tagged and categorised on posting in the vlog/blog format. The user then uses this metadata to reassemble these clips in a player attached to the vlog as a page. The vlog as a larger thematic video work is made up of smaller clips.

In Adrian’s rhizomes that he is currently refining I think a similar type of interactivity and granularity occurs where Quicktime in this case is used as a container to bring in a number of varying content types in varying order. Rhizomes in way are configured in a variety of ways to display this content like the customized player page in VD. Both often explore video being displayed simultaneously in more than one frame. (multi-channel)

videodefunct notes

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seth.keen

on February 6, 2008

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In thinking about developing some content and a major project in the videodefunct CMS, I made the following notes. The planned idea is to produce a larger-scale documentary type work in the system.

I now see this as possibly being multi-layered with multiple perspectives from the self-reflexive through to user-generated AV content. The benefit of the system compared to a television/cinema documentary edit is that the material that is valuable but often discarded can be included, which follows along the line of the hypertext projects being developed in Networked Media. This means varying layers can be included like self-reflexive notes on the process and the subject for example. User-generated content could be another layer in addition to planned coverage.

In contrast to the television/cinema documentary-factual approach this online system is very flexible where it can be adapted to work with content in an unscripted, non-linear way. This means AV content can be recorded in the field with very little planning as the scripting so to speak is done afterwards in the process of classification. Also, existing archives have the potential to be translated into a type of online documentary-factual form that responds to that content specifically.

This notion of a classification process rather than a conventional edit is interesting where the preparation of each individual clip/shot in pedestrian for example is like the logging process in preparing for an edit. Each shot is trimmed with an in and out point named (given a title), put in a category and then tagged. In the logging of shots the editor or assistant works out a way to name the shots in relation to planned scenes; when the footage was recorded or other idiosyncratic classifying system than can be used to help the main edit. The conventional main edit in a way, happens in the actual videodefunct player where the metadata that is added to each shot, along with how the player is configured influences the way the shots are brought together by the user. Actually editing a sequence within a clip (like in The Drunken Truth) creates yet another obvious layer ripe for exploration.

In Banter I was influenced by the neato plug-in Tag Managing Thing. This plug-in is used to tidy up tags afterwards where for example a tag that only features once may be folded into a tag name that is represented a number of times on varying clips. In terms of respecting the way tagging works I am not fully convinced that is appropriate to re-work the tagging process afterwards. But, I did find it useful to look at the tags and categories in the player as away to see how the individual clips worked as a whole. I actually skipped the plug-in and ended up re-working the tags, categories and titles manually. This was because the actual content together presented ideas I had not seen in the posting - tagging process. These ideas I was interested in bringing out with an eye on more content being added into the discussion. In a way this process has connections with a conventional TV/cinema edit where focus on a particular subject is nurtured and developed. By rearranging the metadata which is how the video content is classified the work overall is taken in a particular direction for the viewer.

banter

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seth.keen

on January 24, 2008

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Banter http://www.videodefunct.net/banter/ The Banter prototype is an audiovisual report on the videodefunct project that provides a critique and background details on the system. Banter will evolve as AV material is collected and added.

bull market construction

Published

seth.keen

on January 24, 2008

in videodefunct

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As I arrived in Hong Kong on my way back home they had their biggest share loss in 6 years. It was a tightrope as ‘the fed’ dropped interest rates to keep things afloat globally. All a far cry from Amsterdam. I recorded some huge construction activity which I think (on transfer) will be good for a small experimental defunct prototype.