compression

Original Publication:

December 12, 2000

Publication Data

Brings together URLs and date of publication.

Original URL of Publication:

http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/12.2000/12.12.00.html

File Size:

348KB

Original Dimensions:

194 x 144 Pixels

Duration:

0' 47"

Original Blog Post:

I've been here for 6 weeks and the temperature has, but for one day, been unwaveringly steady between 6 and 10 degrees. Every day. Every night. . .

video on a web page is making a face with a screen in a page in a screen. This faceness, what Deleuze (and Guattari) have called faciality, is often not liked by people because they can't see the face well enough. artefacts, bandwidth limitations, crappy compressing - whatever, masks the face where no mask ought to be. people don't like it when they can't see a face that ought to be visible like a face.

then. when they can see the face. they often decide it isn't fast enough.
but faces don't need to be fast.

this applies to all our moving images on web pages. not just pictures of faces.

Description of Vog:

This is probably the first vog where I really tried to do something with compression. The video is deliberately compressed very heavily (which was very hard to do since it is a talking head and it needs a very low data rate, I actually had to double the frame rate to get an acceptable level of artefacts in the compression), because I wanted to foreground the role of compression and noise in video online. That it is a positive, a productive constraint. To be embraced. (In 2000 not many thought video online was viable, and most of the talk was about the big glossy future when we'd have enormous and instant bandwidth, I thought - and still do - that this is just )

There are no text tracks, links or anything else in this vog, it is just about compression - sometimes the lack of links or other things can be as meaningful as their presence - but only in an environment where this is the norm. It is as significant to not link from your blog post to another as it is to link.