vogmae interactive networked video practice

This essay uses the material thought advocated by Paul Carter to argue for the materiality of writing. It does this by examining hypertext as an academic material writing practice, using ideas from design and hypertext theory. It specifically argues for a crystalline structure in hypertext as the actualisation of virtual possibilities via links and how this is different and novel in relation to existing academic writing.

This is a work that awkwardly begins to actualise a cinematic hypertextual academic documentary form. I think of it as a preliminary sketch towards a yet to be. It is also an analysis of the relation of videoblogging to television via Deleuze's concept of the 'any-instant-whatever' and the pose.

This is a special issue of the Fibreculture Journal that I edited (with necessary prodding from Andrew Murphie and markup from Lisa Gye). This themed edition is entitled "New Media, Networks and New Pedagogies" and there is an introductory essay by me and then work by a variety of people. (It's a good collection.)

Softvideo is a term applied by the author to video works which treat the computer as the means of production, distribution and consumption of video works. In these contexts video develops novel affordances or possibilities that problematize traditional uses and understandings of video as time based media. In this essay, which consists of a printed essay and an accompanying interactive academic QuickTime project, a critical and reflective analysis of a series of softvideo templates - the "rhizome templates" - is undertaken. These templates are publicly available and allow video bloggers and others to experiment with softvideo forms. The essay documents the use of the templates and situates them within a critical view of traditional video practice from the point of view of softvideo and video editing as a rhizomatic practice.

A hypertext essay that argues and explores the relations between hypertext and cinema. Primarily this is via the isomorphic relation between hypertext links and cinematic edits.

Multimedia is a term and a product which appears to have managed to monopolise the public, corporate, institutional, and political high ground in the debate about new media. Variously characterised as a synergy between existing media, a combination of text and visual data into a revolutionary recombination, or as an interactive and emancipatory text, multimedia has been promoted in terms that bring it dangerously close to an object that has more to do with Utopian projections about the next millennium than with what any of its fundamental claims might entail.

A self published report on the implementation of hypertext in a media studies program in 1995.

Oh, the essay uses George Bataille's theory of the general and restricted economy as the basis of a critique of some instrumental approaches to linking in hypertext. I also point out that the idea that the link is neutral and only ever instrumental also has affinities with realist literature.

In hypertext criticism when students don't 'get' a hypertext they 'bite the breast' claiming the irrelevance of hypertext rather than questioning the adequacy of their own reading schemas. This brief work uses object relations psychology and its description of our relationship to art, and idea of the breast as a ‘transitional object’ for the child as a model for describing such criticism. The transitional object is that thing that the child uses to mediate its first experiences of itself as an entity separate in the world.

In this brief essay I argue for the materiality of hypertext as a necessary part of interpretation while arguing that the intent of the work is the work for itself, not to be confused with the intent of the author, reader, narrator or whatever.