These are nearly-not-quite transcripts of the commentaries I have made in the BlogTalk DownUnder quote prototype.
What is missing? Urls, date and time of entry, comments, a heading, trackback, access to the original post. This prototype isn’t posed as an answer but another question along the way.
Technorati Tags: vlogTheory
I’ve been making interactive sketches in interactive QuickTime for nearly 5 years. Irregular, but each one is conceived of as, more or less, a proposition about a different sort of video practice. A video practice that is appropriate for, and expands upon, what a networked, interactive video practice might (or should) be.
There are numerous problems with this work, not the least of which is that it is easy to confuse these sketches as something other than sketches. I think each of them proposes serious, intriguing, and rich possibilities for fiction and non fiction narrative. However, each of them is formalist, because they have been conceived of as needing to foreground their own formal properties and processes to make these properties visible, but each then gets mistaken as only being about reflexive and formalist possibilities. In other words narrative is secondary so that narrative doesn’t confuse what these works do. (Flash has the same problem, except there it is being seduced by frictionless interface that seduces everyone, content disappears into slicked up frictionless vectors of response.)
I am not a designer. I am not a narrative film maker.
I am a proposer and builder of propositions and problems.
Here is the first rhizome movie. To participate you need to download it. Build some parts of it yourself, and then publish it via your own video blog. Please email me (adrian.miles@rmit.edu.au) if you do this. I am making available a very simple prototype (engine) for others to use. More will follow.
What is it? What does it do?
Download the archive file available at the end of this post. When opened you’ll see that it consists of three things. A QuickTime movie, a folder, and a readme file. The readme file more or less contains the same information presented here. The QuickTime movie (rhizomeOne.mov) is an interactive movie. It is very simple in how it works. When played it will load two videos into itself, and it will play these two along side each other, so that you will see one movie which is made of two video panes next to each other. It will play these continuously, and they will loop. Moving your mouse into one of these will turn on the soundtrack of that particular movie, mousing into the other will turn on the soundtrack of that one.
For this to work you must place the two videos you want played into the folder that is in the same directory as RhizomeOne.mov. This folder is called media. One of the videos must be called videoOne.mov and the other must be called videoTwo.mov. (If you don’t name them this then rhizomeOne.mov will not work, it is scripted to find movies called videoOne.mov and videoTwo.mov inside the folder called media.) These videos should be 160 x 120 pixels in dimension. (Yes, you could make them bigger than this but this is how big they will be displayed in this movie, and making them bigger just wastes everyone’s time and bandwidth.)
These videos can be compressed any way you wish, can be of any duration, but they must be named as described. (You can compress them as mpeg4 and then turn them into .mov’s, email me if you don’t know how.) Once you’ve assembled it, publish it in your blog in the usual way. All the files and folders must be uploaded to your server account, not just rhizomeOne.mov.
What do I do with it?
I am posing the problem. You can ignore it. Or you can play with it. The movie simply plays two tracks at the same time independently of each other. One might be shot while you’re driving somewhere, the other might be the destination. One might be you talking about your girlfriend, the other your girlfriend talking about you. One might be a politician, the other a contrary view. They might both be songs. Or poems. Cinepoems.
So what’s the big deal?
These two movies are played in another independently of each other. They can have different durations. In all cinema, and nearly every video vlog, duration is fixed, your two minute vlog is a two minute vlog. If you now have two playing alongside each other, looping, with different durations, how long is your video now? If the story changes because your viewer mouses out and in, who is editing? What is an edit? This terrifies most film makers only because they assume and grant themselves the privilege of control. (With that attitude blogs could never have happened.) Give it up, be the maker of possibilities, not finalities.
rhizome one .sit archive (for os x)
rhizome one .zip archive (windows and os x)
Email lists are odd locations. Some lists that I have experienced are well mannered and extremely productive places. They encourage community and generally exhibit what I guess I’d call the same sorts of courtesies you’d expect if you were in the same room. Most lists that I have experienced are volatile, they arise in a spirit of cooperation, engagement and expectation, yet within 12 months have either died a quiet death from disinterest, or are a frenzy of repetition, short tempered opinion and irrelevant babble. The videoblogging list seems to be becoming the latter.
In some ways this is a consequence of its own success. New members join, and ask the same questions that have been asked a dozen times before. New members join, and reignite discussions and debates (what is a videoblog is always a hot potato) that have been raked over, and raked over. For those who have been on the list for the longest, and who might also have been vocal on some matters, it can become exhausting or more simply frustrating to see the same naivety come around a second, third, and fourth time, with the same consequences each time. As ‘academics’ point out why new member 842′s definition of videoblogging doesn’t actually work as a definition (usually because it would cover everything from static html with video through to ebay) new member 842 and all others of a similar ilk decide the academics are just, well, eggheads really, and its art and if I say its art then it must be art. Or a videoblog is whatever I want it to be.
(These are people who don’t seem to realise that we actually have things like genres, for instance, that proscribe certain patterns that we are subject to.) Then they’ll be the asinine complaining about what someone else said, or 150 messages basically about US foreign policy, or this week a round of name calling and spite that if your kids spoke like that you’d be ashamed.
A good list takes a lot of work. It needs clear rules, it might even need moderation at times. All of these things have to be transparent and explicit, from the beginning. Then lists survive. That some lists prosper and some die is a condition of the network, but there is a difference between surviving for the ‘good’ and simply being noisy (lists die all the time, the network is an ecology so death is internal, not external, to the system).
Not a lot of action been happening here recently. Commentaries have been appearing, but they were all lined up to progressively appear over a few weeks, so I haven’t actually written anything for a bit. This week has been intensive oral assessment of first year students. Which just means they come and present their final video projects (combining video, still image and two sound tracks) to their tutors and then have a conversation about what they were trying to do, how, why, what worked, what didn’t, and so on. It is very high quality assessment, largely derived from a studio arts crit. practice which is unusual in those disciplines that have historically devolved from more traditional humanities practice. (Where assessment is intensely print based, seems to be fascinated with summative outcomes and is canonically didactic – the student writes, teacher corrects and the student notes corrections.) There is dialogue in these oral assessments, a to and fro that is usually very productive and is able to move the conversation from assessment into learning. It takes time, though at half an hour a student the time isn’t that much more than other forms of assessment, but the outcomes are much more substantive.
These are nearly-not-quite transcripts of the commentaries I have made in the BlogTalk DownUnder quote prototype.
Play with the medium. of course. To play most videoblogs, I click one button. Then consume. This is old media masquerading and mistaking it as something new, is certainly not proposing an aesthetics and practice of play. In my imaginary world you have to “play” a blog to make it work, it isn’t just consumption, and you should have to “play” blogged video to make them work. Play is more than that button next to the timeline.
To blog is to play in networks. To read a blog is to play amongst these networks. This play is active, ongoing, and creative. It is not sit down, shut up, and watch.
Technorati Tags: vlogTheory
These are nearly-not-quite transcripts of the commentaries I have made in the BlogTalk DownUnder quote prototype.
I have quoted selectively from Michael’s video. This is what happens in quotation. It becomes selective, dangerously so. I don’t manipulate it by recutting, I just sample and respond. Except isn’t sampling just another form of editing? I’m editing Michael by using his video, straight off his web site, loading it into my movie. Just like I can selectively quote text, or write a blog post that recontextualises what someone else has done.
Of course I could also have used Michael’s video as the interface, but it’s too long. That’s 19MB for 4 minutes 49 seconds of commentary, 3.88MB a minute. I guess low bit rate is now longer on the table. My criticisms of this, not the content, the form.
1. Why is it 320 x 240? If you just want to show a face, why not keep it smaller. That would reduce file size by a minimum 50%.
2. Why does this matter? Because you, and me, and everyone else has to pay for our bandwidth. For what I have to pay, in Australia, for broadband at home, your 19MB costs me just under 90 Australian cents, each time I view it. Sound cheap? 10 a week at that size and I’m at 9 dollars, I get 1Gig a month, so at this bandwidth I could watch around 50, that’s let’s say 13 a week. At this size and compression that is approximately 64 minutes a week. That’s using all my bandwidth, and its costing me a damn sight more than television. Bandwidth, and compression, matter.
3. The network stutters. This is a condition of computing and the network. They crash, we make errors in our code, urls, posts, typos. There are 404s all over the place. There will never be enough bandwidth. Stuttering, dropped frames, lost attention, these are the positive and constructive constraints that we have to work with. These are not ‘outsides’ that we should imagine will one day to be solved, they are outsides to be embraced. Just like early cinema was black and white, silent, and had variable frame rates. Rather than imagine the network doesn’t stutter, let’s make work that embraces the stutter. There will never be enough bandwidth. There will never be a screen large enough. There is no art without constraint.
4. My commentary consists of multiple individual movies. They are loaded dynamically – if and when you ask for one. If you just listened to two or three of mine, then you’d only be downloading enough for that, and not the entire work. This means my work is granular, and so others can address it in its fragments and parts. It is also a simple way of being network aware – if you just want to hear, again, part 4, you shouldn’t have to download parts 1 to 3. That’d be like not being able to read an individual blog post without reading, or at least downloading, the entire blog.
5. When our work becomes as fractured as the web, as fractured as any good blog, then we can easily quote, refer to, sample, and watch, what we have to say.
Technorati Tags: vlogTheory
These are nearly-not-quite transcripts of the commentaries I have made in the BlogTalk DownUnder quote prototype.
“Access to the media”.
Well, no. Most people in the world haven’t even used a phone. So let’s just acknowledge that we’re talking about a privileged media here. Yes, for a certain group with the education and resources who live in the first world, this is a change, not a revolution. It isn’t the best thing since sliced bread. It isn’t going to change world. What we can change is what these media objects are. There’s enought TV and radio out there, we need to work out a new way of expressiong audio visual content, then we can invent something new. Imagine if we could invent a way that made it easy for people in the third world to sample and remix and make media. New sorts of media. Because the literacies for audio visual media are so different to the literacies of print. But right now what we do is privileged. Instead lets invent something worth doing. Why would you take this to Africa if all you’re going to do is to get people to make more television?
Technorati Tags: vlogTheory
Email blues would be problems with email. Spam, too much of it, whatever. But this week I got a wonderful email from Dr. Jay Gordon who has been enjoying reading some of my published work. So I guess that’d be email yellows. Or reds? I’ve asked Jay for a copy of a paper or talk he’s presenting at Stanford, and note that he’s got a Tucumán Amazon parrot. We don’t have them here, as pets or otherwise (well, someone might but they’d be extremely rare in this country’s aviculture). I used to have cockatiels, pale headed rosellas, galahs, as well as lots of other sorts of birds, so anyone who shares their shower with a parrot is alright by me.
This is the blog of Matthew Clayfield. An Australian interested in videoblogs, who generally has useful things to say on the videoblogging list (which is following the arc of many a list before it – ever growing irrelevant threads and internecine dullness) and more interesting things in his blog. It’s a production blog, a nice genre if ever there was. (And a note to everyone: it really should be easy to find out who you are, where you are, what you are, from your blog.)
These are nearly-not-quite transcripts of the commentaries I have made in the BlogTalk DownUnder quote prototype.
“Let’s stop typing or talking about what a video blog is”. Why? That’s to turn one thing into what it isn’t. How will google find your sentences, in your video? Anything of what you say? Some things are best said in text, some in photos, some in music, some in video. Sometimes a combination of several. But let’s face it, all you do in this post is talk, so why couldn’t that have been just written? Let’s face it, it could just as easily have been a podcast, you can listen to this with no image track visible, and nothing, I mean nothing, is lost (or gained). So if we shouldn’t write about vogs, we should video about this, then shouldn’t the video track, not just the sound track, be doing something? And if you think no, just commentary is fine, then I think you’ve misunderstood your own argument. If we should videoblog this then the video has to add something, if it works just as well with just audio, then why aren’t you a podcaster with pictures? I don’t care either way, because to think the only way communication works is via video is to not understand much about media, or communication.
Technorati Tags: vlogTheory
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