This is a writing project by Adrian Miles. Yes, I have a blog, an online video blog project, and another site where I collate my research, so why this one? Well, I've had a blog since 2000 and frankly there's a lot of really good stuff in there. Somewhere. The problem with the blog is that it is ideal for ongoing, serialised, documentation and reflection, and even nice to crawl through every now and then - like leafing through an old diary or notepad. But it sucks at being a good way to pull together and link to a body of stuff. It's too atomistic and frankly I'm a holistic sort of thinker.
So I want something that is easier to find connections within, to make links to or from things that are written at different times, at different speeds, and as this site is written in Tinderbox this is really easy to do. I also want somewhere to develop more sustained commentary, or failing that just to make it easier to find some of the better thoughts. I've no idea where they are in the blog, whereas here I can not only easily link but also curate things. So I'll probably republish some blog posts in here, just so I can find the things, and in turn perhaps others can use them if they like instead of trying to find stuff in nearly a decade of blogging.
My research? This is about vogs. This is the term I use to describe videoblogging, even though no one else does, but it's the term I coined in 2000 and I'm still persisting with it. It will list references and resources that I think are relevant, and commentary come thinking out loud things about online interactive video. My premise is simple. Video online should be as multilinear (or whatever term you can live with) as text in a blog, or a hypertext. The technology already exists to do this, but our practices and understanding of what video can do remain firmly within the orbit of very traditional forms. The ludic video writing project is one of my contributions to trying to prod this paradigm shift along. This is reflected in the original vogmae manifesto that I wrote in 2000.
Finally, yes, some of the material is incomplete. Some will also change as it is edited, amended, annotated and extended. If you're after academic stability stop trying to find it online. Or get over it. Those times have changed.
later...
After rereading the above several months later, and resuming this after leaving it fallow for a while I would also encourage you to think about what is here as sketches. A semi-formal writing that is reasonably developed, but is also the site of a variety of experimental practices. What is it to write as to sketch? To write iteratively in a way which is reasonably open and I suppose public and to not only present and publish polished, finished pieces? To look inside, somehow, the black box of academic writing and thinking, the actual practice of being a humanities trained and based scholar working across hypertext, new media and online video? There are affiniites here to the recent projects of someone like McKenzie Wark, and also to the broadly experimental approach outlined by Greg Ulmer. It is also, perhaps, a step sideways from the publishing economy of the academy and its increasingly problematic politicisation of 'knowledge' through what is largely a system of sedentary auditing of 'value' within a hierarchy of journals and bibliometrics. So this lies within a desire for a quick, lightweight and mobile writing thinking making model that eschews some of these demands but retains enough centripetal focus to be more closed and unified than a blog, but more porous to the network, and its own outsides, than a book.
About the title, I have written a template and expression in Tinderbox that counts the number of published nodes which is inserted into the title. Hence it is "n notes for a ludic video" where n equals the number of published nodes. Obviously then the title of the work will keep changing.
and later still...
The material here is all in draft mode. A thinking out loud. So there are typos, sometimes it doesn't make as good sense as it ought. This is not the place where a lot of polishing happens, this is my workbench, lab, studio. It is messy.