vogmae interactive networked video practice

This is the second iteration of the rhizome templates, so if you found this location via my essay on softvideo in Artifact then the rhizome templates available here differ from those described there.

The rhizome templates are lightweight, QuickTime and XML based experimental movies that anyone can download and use for their own creative purposes. Their object is to make available some simple ways for others to experiment with network suitable forms of interactive video. This means they are:

• simple to implement
• able to be modified
• not just a single video source with a single video window
• non narrative

Each has a quite specific function, always highly constrained. These constraints are deliberate - rather than try to provide something replete with bells and whistles my approach is more to use a highly limited palette so that the 'interactive' bits (or whatever you want to call them) don't get in the way of making, distributing and thinking through the implications of the works. Each of them problematises traditional understandings of video in significant ways (if you can play two different video tracks next to each other simultaneously, and each is, for all intents and purposes independent of the other, the screen is no longer the province of a single time line slaved to an image track), and lets you begin to play with the possibilities of a video vernacular that is suited to networked practice but also looks beyond the web as just a 'little' cinema or tv.

Each of the templates works in the same way. There is a QuickTime movie (which is just a container) and an associated XML text file. You hand edit the XML to point to the video (and/or audio) that you want to use and when the QuickTime movie is launched it reads the XML file and loads whatever is listed in there. Each of the templates listed has more detailed descriptions of just what they do, while the rhizome faq tries to deal with most of the basic questions and problems in using them.

If you'd like a bit more theoretical background to these then there's a rather woolly essay I have a preprint version available (Soft Rhizomes 2) and the same essay realised as an interactive video, Soft Rhizomes 2: A Softvideography Vog Essay which is a 13.5MB download.