vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Epistolary Cinema

Over at Taylor Street Will (who is producing some wonderful work) has a post about personal narrative and intimate everyday stories. The key to the reintroduction of the epistolary form is that it is ideally suited to blogging since it is serialised, episodic, and easily embedded in the everyday. I’m sure someone must have written a paper by now on epistolary narrative and blogging (and if not, someone should, I would have thought the connections are a lay down misere), and the next step to video blogging is straight forward. Unlike much of what has been dominant to date following this idea moves us away from televisual clones (Rocketboom as a small scale web version of Saturday Night Live, or any of the various successful comedy efforts as being not much more than sketch comedy routines) into other fields. I’ve been leafing through “The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon” recently and it offers an ideal model for a personal, not quite epistolary narrative form that is a powerful template for video blogging.

Documentary Practice Critique

Welcome to “Documentary Critique“, a new group blog about documentary practice. By some of the names and links in the blog roll I think I know who they are, but remember, it is usually good to have your name and some way of contact available! Have subscribed to see what comes of this new beginning.

Knots

I’m still writing my paper for the Video Vortex symposium in Brussels this coming week. (Another trip where I will spending as much time in aeroplanes and airports as I will actually in Brussels.) I’m writing it as a hypertext in Tinderbox, and intend to publish one version of this as a hypertext (another will be as an interactive vog essay, and another will probably be as a flat paper). Still tossing up whether to present it in Tinderbox or Keynote – I’ll probably use Keynote since I can outline the argument and ideas much more clearly for presentation there. Anyway, I’ve written about 5000 words and I’ve got 18 nodes, 55 links, and so the structure is emerging as I write. But I’m now at the pointy end. It’s time to really start to nut out what I mean by crystalline structures and faceted video. I have it sort of sketched in my head, but right now it looms before me as a whole other essay on top off, or along side, of the current 5000 words. Which is why I’m writing about this particular knot here, rather than there.

These are good knots. This is where my writing moves from reporting or just joining the dots of my thinking out loud to be a thinking in the writing. A writing as a thinking as a making. We often forget, in those disciplines where writing is the medium, that writing is as much a doing as designing is a doing in design disciplines. You learn by doing it. You do it by doing it. Words are not instrumental or transparent things only or always just representational but are they very medium of our activity. Our marble, clay, notes. Time to not so much unravel the knot but to see where it can show me.

Growing

Andreas and Brittany have worked hard on their lumiere project and it has lead to some beautiful work. Will, with his very well developed aesthetic of finding delight in the minor moments of the everyday has a particularly beautiful work. Too many people come to film and video thinking that it is only about representation. Film my face, or that face. Narrate that story and make my pictures follow the story (why does a visual medium always end up subservient to narrative?). But what does it mean to think what the image is first of all, before we then choose to make it narrate or only be recognised as that face and not as light, shade, pattern, flicker.

[this entry was edited on September 30th, added Brittany and fixed up the spelling of Andreas' name!]

On Writing

I am sitting in a cafe, coffee (very good coffee) to hand. Some food coming and I’m writing rather productively. I can’t write at home as the baby is a walking grunting grabbing gleeful ‘bot. I can’t write at work since there are conversations, administrative demands and other distractions that force themselves into the time of writing and make it something else. I’ve written in cafe’s before. I’ve also noticed how well I can read on planes. I find this oddly surprising. There is a lot of chatter, some music, background noise. I feel quite self conscious sitting here with laptop open as couples share breakfast. But I get a lot done. It is a bit like the sound becomes noise which becomes white and because of that (not inspite) I can get a bubble of concentration going. I guess this means I should do this more often.

I was going to take a photo of here, particularly since there is a wonderful vase full of waratahs on my table, but then I remembered I didn’t have my phone with me. That sentence, just then. When I was a child that would be 100% science fiction. Sometimes you need to recognise the wonderment.

And as I write that I wish there was a really easy way to just collect all the other posts about writing. There is a category writing, but it should be much easier to just make some links. This is the strength and elegance of Anders’ blog, and it is easy to do in Tinderbox. I note that WordPress 2.3 now has tagging. This is a very good thing, and I might even give up on categories altogether and just use tags.

1000 Stories

Florian has got some greenbacks to make a video doco about Americans. If you’re American and want to offer your talent check out www.1000stories.com. I don’t know if it is going to a vlog as described or end up in Florian’s Korsakow system.