This is, more or less, the commentary attached to today’s vog. The footage is from October when I was in Canberra, but the commentary relates to recent interests. The vog is from the mall.
I was going to make the entire movie clickable for the links, but that was going to involve finessing with transparent images compressed only with the animation codec in LiveStage Pro so that they could be ‘transparent’ sprites (so mouse events could go through to the sprites below). But that’s a bugger and not very intuitive so I just added dumb text that asks “link?” when a link is available. You have to click the link text to follow the link. Which isn’t quite the intent but it leaves room for another experiment.
The commentary:
Like the Contemporary Art Centre vog, aka flickering light, this one is also two child movies in a simple parent movie. Oh, that was a link by the way, you know, when I said “Like the Contemporary Art Centre vog” you could have clicked and it would have loaded that page for you. Go on, you can still do it, I’ll tell you when you can’t, and its probably useful to realise that I could have loaded the other video into exactly the same space as this, into this very page, or take you to its webpage. Which is kinda cool, but well, weird since why should a vog with a different title, date, content, time of publication and all the rest of it appear on this page?
And this one has a soundtrack. A normal soundtrack that is a part of the movie. Not a child movie. But watch what happens. You mouse into either of the video panes and it slows down. The sound track doesn’t. This is because the video movies are being loaded from outside this movie and are playing independently of this movie. Pause this movie, this soundtrack stops. But the videopanes keep going.
Think about that for a moment. A movie with movies with independent durations. This rewrites all that we think cinema is in relation to duration, temporality, and representation.
Ok, too late, the link ain’t here anymore.
Canberra is the national capital. Well, my nation’s capital. It is probalby a lot like United States state capitals, a city that was purpose built to be the capital – though only because Melbourne and Sydney couldn’t agree on who should be the capital so they split the difference and invented a city.
It is small, wide streets, no traffic. On weekends closer to a country town than a cosmopolitan centre. And everything is prefixed with ‘National’. The national museum, national gallery, national observatory, national botanic gardens, national bicycle museum (really). You start to see that they have a chip on their shoulder.
This was shot on my 2 megapixel still camera. Anna was lying down enjoying the warmth under a large elm, after we’d been mall rats for too long. The sandwich board about god was out in the street. I couldn’t resist, particularly the ‘debaptise yourself now’. Very odd to see something like this in Australia, a resolutely pragmatic horde of mostly atheists.
By the way, if you’d have clicked during all that you would have opened a new browser window with stuff about Canberra in it.
I like this vog. I don’t know about anyone else. Which is the whole thing about vogs as blogs isn’t it? It reminds me of a trip to Canberra, what I enjoyed about my time there. It suggests minor moments in the trip that are, of course, the most important. It is personal. It is small in scale (this isn’t cinema). It is brief (this is the Web). It makes more sense not as a single work (the cinema model) but as part of a series. Just like blogs.
Vogs are serial. Personal, and should aspire to the minor. If that doesn’t make sense, um, its like how Gilles Deleuze (a dead french philosopher) discusses Kafka as a minor writer, which is sort of counter intuitive. By minor he meant that within a major genre (the novel) and a major language (German) he wrote outside of both (novels that don’t end and an unofficial dialectic) and so made the major stutter. Vogs make television and cinema stutter. (Incidentally Deleuze said the same of Godard in relation to cinema.)
And yes, that was another link.
Tags:
deleuze,
hypertext,
Vogging
