vogmae interactive networked video practice

Traditional approaches which retain assumptions of media as narratively informed run the risk of misreading or ‘missing’ what is peculiar to the possibilities of these digital systems where there are an enormous number of discursive forms available which probably fall outside of what we would ordinarily identify as the subject of the literary or narratological.(Eskelinen 2001; Eskelinen 2004) Many of these forms, while clearly story like (for example blogs) also move away from the regimes of representational narratives, whether fiction or non fiction, and produce work that could be characterised as ambient. For example, a video sharing site such as YouTube, while consisting of millions of micro narratives in the form of televisual fragments, only has the possibility of coherence in any formal narratological sense through theoretical sleight of hand, however is much more amenable to theorisation when considered as an ambient form. When considered in this light it is clear that much contemporary online systems are in fact systems for the production of ambient narrative, and as a consequence are moving away from representative narrative (stories about things) towards affective assemblages — systems for the production, distribution and participation of affects.

To examine this I intend to apply Deleuze’s use of affect in relation to Bergson’s sensory motor schema and the cinematic interval (via Deleuze’s cinema books (Deleuze 1986; Deleuze 1988; Deleuze 1989; Bergson 1991) via an applied analysis of the online experimental video blog “Video Defunct” (Keen, Deverell et al. 2007). This project poses questions involving the specificities of blogging as a local and eventful practice in combination with a possible poetics for emerging networked video practice. By its use of video fragments the fragmentary nature of televisual content online is acknowledged, yet rather than using this to produce stories or narratives it uses a combination of basic web technologies (a blog, tags, categories and online production, distribution and consumption) to produce poetic and metaphoric works. These combinatory systems are ambient and affective and it is as affective systems that they can be theorised as discursive entitites.

Such systems can be described as affect engines, and the emerging online systems that constitute much internet development (what is loosely labelled as Web 2.0) seem to be primarily affect assemblages. Such assemblages enable the production of affect via complex forms of media practice suggesting that narrative will not be a dominant form as these systems continue to develop. These systems rely upon new relationships between local practice and content within global systems and distribute affect through this malleability.

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