In a recent vog, the last of the Canberra commentaries, I finished with some musings about how music is perhaps the major poetic trope for vogs (I included an extract from the commentary here). I’m not sure how important ‘pop music’ is as a specific term, or just ‘music’, but I do think that if people approached vogs as musical then things would make more sense. We could then easily recognise the legitimacy of a range of production values, styles, and methods. Aesthetically it might let people relax more about the ‘content’ question and instead of getting lots of too long linear simple commentaries people could think productively about (and with) repetition, rhythm, poetry and the minor.
For example, I’m sitting here listening to Lambchop’s 2 CD album which I think is called Aw Cmon and No You Cmon, and I notice each CD starts with a variation around similar musical themes. One is called Sunrise, the other Being Tyler. I don’t know what they mean, but I recognise the repetition and the pattern and so I know one speaks to or from the other. This gives it depth, beauty, and history. I also see that one track is called ‘Four Pounds in Two Days‘ another is ‘Steve McQueen‘ and yet another ‘I Hate Candy‘ (ith the lines “And I hate candy/But I like rain/And I like substance/To tickle my brain”). My point is not about the merit or otherwise of the titles or the music, but the ease music has with writing music and lyrics about anything. The obligation is to being musical and lyrical. Being interesting comes from this.
So last week in response to a tongue in cheek conversation on the videoblogging list I made an hour long video that is 1MB. I’ve written about doing this before, and it is the same principle that I used for the piece I made for the International Day of Time Dependent Art. To make it I filmed the content, compressed it, and then using QuickTime Pro stretched its duration to an hour. Since QuickTime assumes that the computer and the computer screen are the medium of publication (unlike video editing systems – frames per second are an aretfact of linear media), it simply holds each frame for as long as is needed so that it now runs for an hour. In other words it adds no additional frames, and the file size remains as it was, regardless of the duration of the work.
The work I made, which is at http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/1.2005/1hour.mov, was just me jumping around in front of my iSight for probably a minute. So it is very (very) slow motion. I then recorded a brief commentary which is loaded into the movie as a child movie track, so that it is not affected by the slowness of the one hour video. Now this is a work of no content in the usual sense. It isn’t about my day, or whatever else you might make a vog about, if you watch it in real time it is a very long hour indeed. So how would I characterise this work in relation to music? Well, it is the vog equivalent of something like the work of Cage. All I mean is that it interrogates the idea of the vog, and it does this by concentrating on some of the formal properties or elements of the vog. So rather than concentrate on content, it asks something prior to content. A way to frame this would be to ask what would you do with an hour and 1Mb? What could you do? Why? Imagine a dissolve that lasted this long…
Tags:
hypertext,
Vogging
