vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Blogs and Verisimilitude

Kaye Trammell raised some objections with a student blog project that I’m involved with (though I quite like being described as a communication professor, one day North American’s will realise that it’s only in North America that an academic is, by default, a professor). Her points are well made and legitimate, and have been very useful for the students involved as I had been suggesting there were ethical issues involved in the project and Kaye’s comments grounded this for them very well.

In response they determined to establish a credits page, as well as an “About Hannah’s House” category where the metafictional nature of the project can be indicated.

However, I’m not sure how something like “Hannah’s House” muddies the waters of what “blogging really is.” Partly because the poststructuralist in me always prickles when an ideological claim appears as an ontological claim. Secondly, because all non fiction genres have a long and rich tradition of works that problematise the borders of what might constitute the genre. In cinema we have works like “This is Spinal Tap” which is a mockumentary, but at no point does the work actually declare that it is fiction. More problematically there is the example of Peter Watkins’ 1965 “The War Game” which treated a fictional nuclear disaster as straight doucmentary reportage to chilling effect. And of course contemporary television has made an art form of the parody show of a show, for example The Garry Shandling Show, where only a sophisticated televisual reader would realise that it is in fact fictional and not reality tv. For my money an excellent example would be Chris Marker (of course) for his documentary style is very strongly inflected by the personal and the idiosyncratic, so much so that his 1958 “Letter from Siberia” documentary work was lambasted by critics for its punning, mix of animation and live action and subjectivity.

I should also point out that blogging offered what appears to be a wonderful vehicle for these students. They want to right to and from their daily experience in a manner that lets them build a resource for their peers, but they don’t and didn’t want it to be individual, nor did they want specific authorship so if they wanted to say something negative about the university they had some (minor) anonymity. At the end of the day I think the versimilitude of blogs is more important than their facticity, and I think this is an important distinction.

Edinburgh from the Bus

Click the image to load the vog.

A new vog, “edinburgh from the airport bus” using the same structure as the previous few works, which I’d like to explore a bit more. This work has three simultaneous video tracks, though each is compressed differently so that the first track is only 300Kb in size with a data rate of 2.9 kbytes a second. The next is at 7.6 Kbytes a second for a total size of 760 Kb while the final one is 29 K bytes for a file size of 2.8MB. There are sprites over each of the video tracks which either pause the movie, or vary the font size of the text track up and down.

I was interested in tiling a complete video pane, rather than the slicing I have generally been doing, but to then vary the visual integrity or ‘cleanness’ of these videos by having them be compressed variably. This hasn’t been that effective, largely because the difference in quality between the most heavily compressed and the highest quality isn’t discernible enough. There is still a lot of noise and artefacts in the highest quality one and so the graduation or variation between them is less visible. (I think I’ll return to this very shortly with footage that I think might be more suitable for this sort of experiment.) This work continues the aesthetic exploration of multiple video panes, networked practice, and the relation of text to image. What this series has begun to suggest for me is also a way of using a simple template like this to write a cinema studies piece, largely because here the moving image seems to drive the text. A major issue for me in my exploration of this work, particularly in relation to possible new forms for academic practice, is to move away from the humanities relegation of the image, particularly the moving image, to illustration for the text. This particularly happens in cinema studies where no matter what the work thinks it does the images are always reduced to secondary in relation to the written word. In a vog like “edinburgh bus” the text only plays because the video plays, it pauses when the video pauses, and the rhythm of the text seems to be driven by the moving image and so the relation of text to moving image is reversed. This poses what remains for me the crux of the matter; what would it mean to write so video was prior to or in front of the text, that the text responded to the video and bears witness to the image. This is a big step. At least for a text based humanities practice.

Having the three video panes show the same content, at different frame and data rates (4, 6 and 12 fps) seems to develop interesting rhythms internally. Each shows the same, slightly differently, and something about the difference between is what constitutes the effect of the work.

The textual commentary is just that, a commentary on my brief visit to Edinburgh, much like a blog entry, sans links (I can embed links into the text track but having browser windows popping up over the video just gets difficult to manage). This is, perhaps, getting close to a possible general template for an everyday kind of vogging, particularly since now that I have a template it is very quick to do.

Anja’s Mode of Green

Anja notes that I’ve been redesigning, and approves of the green but is concerned that we don’t end up with the same green as each other. :-) I’m not sure if she means the greens already on her page or what might be becoming, but I agree with Mark Bernstein (sorry, can’t find the entry) that Anja’s new architecture is extremely interesting.

Talk on Vogs and Softvideo

Clicking the thumbnail to the right will load a 11.3MB QuickTime movie (published out of Keynote) outlining the presentation I’m giving next week at Interact 2003. Once it loads (be patient, it is 11MB) simply use your cursor keys to click through it a slide at a time, a la power point.

We had a tech walkthrough yesterday down at ACMI and I’ve decided after writing the presentation that I’m not going to use it, instead I’m going to show some vogs, talk about what makes them interesting, then quickly use the desktopvogging tutorial to show how to make your own. Otherwise all I’ll do is run through a slide show and no one will be the wiser as to what the project is all about.

Gardening and Housekeeping

With thanks to Kurt aka hmmn for showing me how to get the photoblog working. I also sat down and did some serious reworking of the CSS (though I’ve retained the general architecture of the ‘stormy’ template from movable type). Anytime, that’s most of today done and it’s time to get home to the kids.