vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Research, Reflection, Essays (note to some students)

This semester in Integrated Media we have got down and dirty with some simple QuickTime authoring. Using pdf to make movie books, then collages in QuickTime player, and finally simple interactive works using Ezedia QTi. However, the guts of the course has been:

• learning to work to a time or a deadline where quality versus completion is to be negotiated
• thinking about, using and making ‘malleable media’ where audiences now always remix everything (when was the last time you watched an entire tv program without channel surfing, an album in its entirety, all of a text book, and so on – we fast forward through videos, time shift content, pause, repeat DVDs, and so on), this malleability is how we need to think about the media we make. Blogs are malleable, how do we think about time based media as malleable?
• making work that is not about being ‘finished’ but about parts that are always in the process of making new wholes – when is a blog ‘finished’? it is a silly question, the same issues apply to how we have been thinking about audio and video this semester
• applying this to a research task as a methodology, a way of doing

This has confused everyone, or nearly everyone. Now, why are we also doing research in the same way? After all, most of my students’ senior educational lives has been about being acculturated to a culture of only submitting ‘whole’ ‘finished’ things. This ideology trains you well in concealing the not known, the things you’re unsure about, or even how you got to the structure, content, argument that you go to. It is something that generally happens at the end as an end. Your get a question, do some research, make a plan, follow the plan.

In the real world not much works like this. You go to a location, and the camera can’t go where you thought. You start a project and something doesn’t happen. Your budget is halved, the deadline is real, and so on. Even outside of thinking about this in terms of professional work practices (exactly the same issues arise for a practising academic) this old methodology means how you do what you do remains a black box, a mystery. If you can do it, you’ll get good marks. If you can’t do it, it just stays in the black box, a mystery.

This methodology then lets you add parts, scraps, into your research. They are formed by this parts. This is research, as opposed to the monument that you make at the end. This task requires you to document, explore, make all that goes into the activity of doing research and of then making that the work. Think of it as one of those films that are the ‘making of’. This is what you’re doing. You have identified a problem, and now as you explore (remember you might not answer it) this you are going to collate, join, include, build with, all the bits and pieces you find along the way. Ideas, references, quotes, asides. Your essay is this. This isn’t what you do then you write your essay. Think of it as a mixed media research journal.

Why? Lots of disciplines already work like this (it is common in design disciplines) for the very good reason that this sort of reflective practice makes visible the process of how you get to the end. By making this visible we can see what you are doing, others can see what you are doing, and it can be constructively critiqued. Which means we can see where your research isn’t robust enough, or where you are getting stuck or stopped. This is not that different from making a documentary. You do some research and then you go and collect a pile of stuff, and then you make things from it. You often aren’t sure what you’re going to find in that pile, and you’re often not sure what you’re going to get. The skill is in finding good stuff (asking the right questions) and then in assembling something from these parts. Now, these parts could make lots of different documentaries – they could be used to make different arguments, and each of us would build it differently (there are better and worse versions, but are there right and wrong ones?).

Don’t shy away from what you find, the scraps you collect and include. You are research flaneurs using mixed, interactive, time based media.

Some References and Examples

• Chris Jenks on flaneur
• the flanifesto
• Manchester Sociology web site with stuff on the Flâneur
• A first year essay from Network Media (Emily Smith)
• David Kolb’s “Sprawling Places”
• A discussion about needing a new grammar
• Subversive Hypertext (David Kolb) – but don’t begin at the beginning, and see the gesture towards gesture
• And more David Kolb, on cut up narratives (here he is discussing what he thought about while writing “Sprawling Places”)

Now This is Something I Could Do

From Matthew over at esoteric rabbit I find that Nicholas Rombes is doing a frame by frame analysis of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. This is a brilliant idea, perfectly possible by virtue of something as simple as a blog (though I imagine as the project progresses other topologies will appeal or suggest themselves). These are the sorts of initiatives that matter. Yes, there are excellent DVD or CD interactives on specific directors, titles, or whatever, but they’re all top down. Big projects, timelines, etc. This is quotidian, a bit at a time, it doesn’t have to be finished for it to work, to be available, and to contribute. This is what these technologies of writing are actually about. It is not an essay, a book, a conference paper, but it is legitimate academic work that utilises the affordances of these other media to produce what I call (after Entwistle and Marton) knowledge objects.

It is inspiring. Now to combine this with some videoblog/interactive video tools…

A Riff on A Natural Disaster that Became a Social and Political Disaster

This video will only work with QuickTime 7. (Why is explained here.) Clicking the poster movie will launch the video in QuickTime player.

This is a brief collage work. I’ve taken some video from CNN, which turned up on the net last week in several locations, dropped it into a background with a bit of text on top. Click the video will open another movie (part of the same movie file) which places the video on top of the text.

This was made in Ezedia QTi, which I’ve just introduced students to. To make it took about 10 minutes, from getting the original video, recompressing to H.264 at 160 x 120, choosing the background, adding the text and the buttons. (I’ll write more about Ezedia shortly.)

Yes, the work is antagonistic. I get irascible about assumptions about freedom and equality. As a good North American friend said to me after Bush won the fraudulent first election, “democracy in this country only means the opportunity to vote, it does not mean equity between votes”.

This Is Why

I added a teaching portfolio category. Because promotion documentation requires all of this sort of stuff in detail. So, I note that a ‘digital composing‘ course at the University of Vermont has provided a link to me, amongst an interesting list of others. Thanks for the links, and I like the thinking in the Narrative Webs assignment.

Honours in 2006

Well, I’ve been given a. A what? Promotion? Well, certainly more responsibility. I’m now “Acting Honours Coordinator” (I guess they’ve figured out it’s always been done with smoke and mirrors which is why the titular ‘acting’) and have more or less been given the job of making Honours viable. Which as anyone in the higher ed sector in this country knows translates largely into the gloriously simple metric of ‘bums on seats’.

So I’m off building a new web site (old page here), making changes to some of the curriculum, though the wholesale changes won’t be happening until 2007, and what I imagine could be called revisioning the program. Expect a stronger awareness of project and practice based research, collaboration, studio or lab based research, and since it is a School of Applied Communication, an expectation that everyone in Honours will ‘get’ something sensible about contemporary media ecologies (aka network literacies).

I’ve got a studio/workshop space for us, and it is going to be something between a traditional humanities research practice (think silence of the library with tomes of text) and a games development lab (think zolt cola machine, too much music, and someone’s clothes crumpled on the couch).

<turn on triumphant fanfare>It will not be to everyone’s liking, but it doesn’t have to be. This city is well served for traditional research centres, it is well served for design research labs, but there are very few places in between. This is RMIT’s strength, and it is time to make it the School’s.</turn on triumphant fanfare>

From the Baltic

The Baltic Sojourn Blog is new to me. And let’s face it, probably not really my content (after all “notes from an American preacher in Lithuania” does not have a lot in common with my universe), but they are experimenting with QuickTime, videoblogging, and so worth keeping an eye on as they learn the ropes. Welcome, and good luck with your contributions to not only yoru existing audience, but to what videoblogging might become.

Fading Worlds

Found ‘the rest of the world‘ via Annariitta (btw, I think people will still visit Helsinki, you don’t choose to go to Finland for the summer weather after all…). Anyway, the project is actually Vanishing Point out of low-fi.org (which featured my vogs a few years ago – small world). This is just very cool, and depressing. There are whole parts of the world becoming invisible (which of course we always knew, we just didn’t make the invisibility visible). For obvious reasons it mirrors geopolitical and economic power. I wonder what colors it would be if it measured non institutional sources?

Kevin Died

Our pet yabbie, Kevin, is dead. They are supposed to live up to three years so by my reckoning Kev had a good innings. Great pets, low maintenance and their moulting is quite amazing. After each moult he got a better and better blue (he was wrestled out of a very muddy swamp so was deep brown as a, oh, 3 cm nipper), so after his last moult, only a couple of months ago, he was approaching a very beautiful, electric blue. RIP, Kevin 2002 – 2005.

QuickTime 7 and H.264

This week I did some tests using H.264 and it rocks. No questions. Much better quality at low bit rates. Ideal for videoblogging. So, since I make experimental interactive stuff that generally breaks in a lot of computers I’ve decided to, once again, jump right in and just embrace the bleeding edge. So, it is H.264 from now on. This means that you’ll need QuickTime 7 (or some nifty other video players) to be able to view what I’m making here.

Why? Because without seeding innovation everyone will settle for second best. If you don’t want to come along, that’s fine, but I’ve only ever made stuff for an interested minority, mass or at least large audiences are for others. I don’t have anything to say here outside of what videoblogging could, should, ought to be, whereas I think unsurprisingly most videobloggers are more interested in thinking about what stories about their worlds they can tell, and how. So, believe me, H.264 is a stunning codec and MPEG4 is the best architecture for this sort of time based media.

It’s no different in blogs. Most bloggers are more interested in writing about their worlds, the blogs about blogs are an (influential) minority.

In this area I’m an early adopter, test it, break it, adopt it. If you haven’t updated to QuickTime 7 yet, then we are just at different parts of the same curve. You will need to view H.264 soon, and you will be viewing it in the future whether you realise it or not (for example in next generation DVD), so come on back in a few months :-)

Amendment to the Manifesto

I originally wrote vogma (a manifesto for vogs) on December 6, 2000. I amended it on February 2, 2002. Some time this year (so the date of this entry can be the ate of amendment) I amended it again.

(After all, what’s the point of a 21stC manifesto if it can’t actually mutate?)

The Manifesto, currently, reads:

1. a vog respects bandwidth
2. a vog is not streaming video (this is not the reinvention of television)
3. a vog uses performative video and/or audio
4. a vog is personal
5. a vog uses available technology
6. a vog experiments with writerly video and audio
7. a vog lies between writing and the televisual
8. a vog explores the proximate distance of words and moving media
9. a vog is dziga vertov with a mac and a modem
10. a vog is Jean Luc-Godard with a mac and a modem
11. a vog is a video blog where video in a blog must be more than video in a blog

I have this naive ‘osmosis’ theory where I think that if I write something like this, it will just make sense and the job is done. This is why my research output is so thin, particularly around vogs, I think the above says an awful lot and turning each point into an essay (which would be easy) is just some sort of academic sleight of hand. On the other hand it is probably what I should be doing – because I’d be pissed if someone else did, I know a lot about this stuff, I care deeply about it, and <feigns deep indignation and misunderstanding>I should realise most people, most of the time, don’t get what I’m on about.</feigns deep indignation and misunderstanding>