vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Collaboration Exhibition

This is verbatim from Jason Daniels off the videoblogging email list:

The name of the project is the 100 Second Film Festival http://100second.ltc.org

Quite simply, it is an evolving collection of videos that are all one hundred seconds or less in duration. The collection is creatively commoned and projected at theaters, museums, bars, libraries, etc. Launched in 2005, the goal has been to use the web to share the videos giving people the power to build their own community based screenings. In 2007, that dream is being realized in new ways.

There are two primary ways to collaborate:

1) Submit a video to the festival. This video should be of fairly high quality (ie – close to full frame and not Flash). Email the permalink to 100seconds@gmail.com. Tag a video on Blip with ’100seconds’. There are no limits on theme or subject matter, anything that is one minute and forty seconds or less is acceptable. Oh yeah, the initial deadline for submissions is July 1st. More details here<http://100second.ltc.org/main.html#participate

2) Create your own screening. This is a more time intensive but more powerful collaboration. Around September 1st – we will be posting all the videos from 2005, 2006 and the new submissions from 2007 in a group on the collaborative software platform SpinXpress – http://www.spinxpress.com/jdaniels/100_Second_Film_Festival

As an example, I am involved with at least two separate screenings in Massachusetts which will be composed of lots of local videos that will be posted to the Spin group. For the balance of the screening (an 80 minute show) I will be pulling videos from the Spin group. Another screening is being planned in the UK and that screening will feature local works plus a different slice of videos from the Spin group. Those interested can join our group and use the software to sort of sculpt their own festival out of the videos available. As a community event, it is usually a pretty successful draw. If you still have public access TV in your area you can work with them, too.

Some of the best from 2005 – 2006 are complied into this video on the Internet Archive. http://www.archive.org/details/100_Second_FilmFestival_bestof20052006

If you would like any more information on the festival you can send an email to me at 100seconds@gmail.com

Strategies

Sarah, who is doing honours in labsome this year has gone through our new media undergraduate program. This means she’s very comfortable blogging and using RSS and various other basic bits and bobs of networked practice. In labsome we’ve been doing some work on reflective practice and introducing poetic and creative research methodologies into more traditional research practices. So she’s decided to write for 15 minutes each day, in her blog, on something related to her topic. I think that’s a great idea, and I also think that if you collected each of those across the course of the year then you would have a major (and intriguing) documentation of the academic and intellectual trajectory of your year. This would (and should) form a key part of her exegesis.

I guess I get slower as I age. Nah. I’ve always been attracted to methodologies that allow things to be made from smaller parts (that’s probably why I was drawn to cinema and then hypertext), and that doesn’t assume or presume that we must begin by imagining monuments. (Of course I’m lousy at finishing things, so my resistance to monuments is also my difficulty in framing any idea or project that requires some sort of closure before it can be begun.) I like ecologies.

Stuey

No, I don’t know him, never met him. But everyone seems to refer to him as Stuey – after all he is Australian. Stuey O’Grady won Paris – Roubaix on the weekend. This is known as the Queen of the North (also the Hell of the North – it got that name after WW1 when the ride went through landscapes brutalised by the trench warfare that happened throughout this region), and is probably the single biggest, most famous and prestigious one day race in the world. Yes, there’s the Olympic road race, but that’s only been open for a few times, and the world titles but again they only got status relatively recently. Paris Roubaix has run for 105 years. They go over sectors of Roman cobbles that just break bodies, bikes and spirit. It is regularly wet. It is only won, has only ever been won, by real road riders – you can’t hide or be protected in a bunch all day to feel wind in the last 50 metres as you dash to the line.

So, winning this is like winning the US Masters in golf, or Wimbledon in tennis. And he won it the way you would dream of winning it. Big break all day looking after the team leader’s chances (O’Grady was the B plan), puncture, pick up the chase group that has the creme de la creme of the race, ride away from them, catch the break again, then with 28K to go in a 260K race attacked and rode away from the lot of them. Awesome.

Beginnings Without An Ending in Sight

Yesterday as I was going over the splash screen idea come requirement Julian asked a particularly good question. It was in regards to designing/making the splash screen even though you might not yet know what happens next, or even what, specifically, you’re working on. The question was:

why?
why do this like this?

It is a good question. Unfortunately it was asked at 2.15 with 5 minutes left so I tried to answer it, when I would have preferred to just ask everyone else how they might answer it. This is my answer.

First off by doing the range of exercises we did in class it was hoped that various ideas and possibilities would form for you, these are all (each and every one of them) possible trajectories for your project. There is no reason why you cannot explore or use all of them. By starting like this you have started the project – rather than deciding (and spending 4 weeks doing just that) on what to do we have all made a start. The word you invented, and its definition, then works as a place from which to start, as well as an end to aim towards – it defines the style or something else that your project aspires to, so it provides direction as well as a place from which to begin.

The second thing is that in a lot of what we do, particularly around ’school’ ‘university’ work, that is knowledge work (creating knowledge through learning rather than repeating what you already know or have been told to know) we only begin, or plan it in such a way, that we will only begin when we know where we are going. This is, after all, the purpose of things like essay plans. (Plans are good, this is not anti-plan, it is an alternative practice, not a replacement!) However, if you already know where you are going then what are you going to discover (learn) as you go there? In other words this strategy can tend to encourage you to stay within what you know, what is known, and to ignore, disregard, leave out, anything that gets in the way (remember noise?) of where you are going.

This is like going for a walk down the street, and ignoring anything that happens on the way because you are going from A to B. Now sometimes that’s good, for example you might be on the way to uni and don’t want to be late. But on other occasions this is just silly, and not what a pleasant walk (a stroll) is, could be, or should be. Indeed, you might be on the way to uni and something happens that causes you to go elsewhere and you realise that whatever that other thing is is worth following. You didn’t know this was going to happen, it is unexpected, but worthwile. (You meet someone, you see something in a shop that you’ve been looking for for ages, you get a phone call about a really good job, etc.)

So here by designing the front we are developing a research strategy where instead of knowing where we are going next we are setting up a style, expectations, a mood, some ideas, and letting those suggest and help direct what should be next, and what needs to happen next. Instead of leaving this all on scraps of paper or in a plan, we are including it as a process within the work itself. But we are also letting our research be creative.

Creativity, by any definition, must include something about making something new. The new, by definition, hasn’t existed before (it’s new). This is what it means to be creative – when writing a song, painting a painting, choreographing a ballet, and so on you don’t plan it all out in advance, you work from an idea, or a mood, or a premise and see where that leads you. This is what we are doing.

Why? Because as knowledge workers who are going to be creative media professionals you need to experiment with and learn what it feels like to make and think things where you don’t know in advance where they are going. This is creativity. It involves risk, adventure, experimentation, error and invention. These are necessary, valuable and these days basic qualities to be a productive, active and happy contributor and participant in modern knowledge ecologies which are also modern information ecologies.

YouTube

Over at LongTail there’s a quote from the YouTube terms of reference where it is pointed out that it isn’t quite as bad as I thought:

However, by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successor’s) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels

Yes, if you remove your content from YouTube the rights are revoked. But read the above. You are giving permission for YouTube to use your material anywhere (in any market), in any media, they can cut it up, and in any other form. For free. As a future or current media professional why would you place this value on your own work?

Small Things That Cause Small Smiles

This one turned up in my inbox via email, and I also noticed it on Mark’s blog: No One Belongs Here More Than You. Quirky, cute, and also enjoyably ready to hand.

Leonardo Transactions

From the email announcement:

Transactions is a new section in the print journal Leonardo that publishes fully refereed papers in a fast track to disseminating key new results, ideas and developments in practice.

Papers are solicited under the stated aims and scope of Leonardo, but are restricted to two pages of published material. A fast referee process is employed in which the result is restricted to “accept” or “reject” a submission. If a submission is rejected, the submission of a revised version will be treated as a new paper.

This is an excellent idea and I suspect is evidence of Roger Malina’s influence with his hard sciences background as this sort of thing is very common in the sciences. Much of the humanities could benefit well from a good kick up the pants from quite a bit of the dissemination models offered by the sciences:

• studio practice (they call it a lab) is common
• joint authorship is common (regardless of its individual merits in an era of the RQF it is outrageously effective at producing a long list of publications to your name)
• a commitment to publicly accessible archives
• recognised (accidentally?) that books are very slow media (not many scientists write books, let alone treat books as their major source of knowledge production and dissemination)

AV06 Sound + Sound

This week the Monday lab had a discussion about a theme for the next task. Alas the conversation went round and round and I ended up more or less defining it anyway. (Was a lousy lab today, lost my way.) So, the task:

• one video track
• two sound tracks
• controllers for play/pause for each of the sound tracks

There is no theme, the constraint is entirely technical. The idea/problem is that the two soundtracks could be played simultaneously, so how do you design/make sound that allows this? And of course they could be played one at a time, or out of sync with each other. The video should just play….