vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

My Little Toe

Is broken. Stubbed it on some furniture while walking by. Nearly four weeks ago. It is not really better. It hasn’t really changed. If I get a standard plaster cast I can’t walk, but on crutches I can’t look after C, (16 months). Or drive. No plaster then it appears unlikely to actually heal. At the moment I seem to be between a rock and a hard place.

Recommend a Look: Prelminary Notes on Web-Hosted Cinema

“Prelminary Notes on Web-Hosted Cinema” is Alejandro Adam’s very long self published essay that alternately drives me a bit crazy and which I also enjoy. I think some of the claims are strident, I also think it is overly romantic in some of its approaches to film and practice, and perhaps off key at times on possible aesthetics of a web based video practice. However, it is written in a spirit of belief, bordering on a manifesto, and with that it carries the day, and provides lots of places to not just nod but to shake and from there to make your own path, problem, and trajectory.

Like 4 version 2

There have been some viewers who have not had any success in viewing the like series of works. No idea what the problem is, as it works ok on a range of Macs that I’ve tried and on one friend’s PC. I’ve remade them, getting rid of an idle script that was supposed to control loading and playback, and replacing them with simple buttons that load the video (L), play the video (P) and stop the video (S).

The work uses child movie tracks within a QuickTime movie so it loads the parent movie, and each video or image you see is a one second QT movie that works as a placeholder. Clicking the L loads the actual video, which has been shot on a SonyEricsson K750i (so is a heavily compressed MPEG4), which runs for as long as the interview/statement lasts. By using child movies I can keep the entire movie footprint small in terms of file size and bandwidth, as the parent movie is small, and instead of the user having to download all the clips that make up each of the interview/statements they only download those that they explicitly ask for (by clicking the L). Of course this could be all of them, but if you’ve been watching them progress in time you may only want to see the most recent one, in which case the savings in bandwidth are substantial (for me and the user). It also means that each interview/statement can be whatever length it is, and that each can run independently of the other.

In vogs such as these duration as ordinarily conceived, that is the run time of the movie, is a notion that is shot to pieces. What is the duration of this individual work (which isn’t individual anyway since it is made up of one parent movie, four place holder videos, and then the four interview/statement movies)? Is it the total running time of each of the four interview/statements? But if I can pause one, start another, pause that, and resume the first, then this suggests that the run time of the video is not just running each one end to end (which is a very old fashioned, old media, industrial notion of the video object) but is whatever sequences and relations via spatial montage that the user forms by doing this. In which case there is no sensible or meaningful answer to the question of how long does this video run for (oh, each one loops too by the way). Such works make little sense on television, projected, or otherwise shown as video (or TV) and also pose some pretty intriguing questions for film and video. After all, the timeline appears gone, so where now the traditional narrative arc? There are lots more questions this raises, but hey, I’ve been asking these since 2000 so I figure you’ve got some of your own.

Click To Play

Interruptions

My hosting service, DreamHost, seems to have been having quite a few problems the last week or so. So this site has been unavailable for hours at a time. It is frustrating, but really, it is a small blog and an associated website that has some essays. It is hardly mission critical. Dreamhost is cheap, they’re green, and they provide free hosting to not for profits. So good on ‘em and inspite of various raves on the blog where they let you know when things are broken (that they even allow comments here is a positive sign) it’ll take more than some recent bumps to persuade me to move. Having said all that, sorry if you’ve tried to find content anywhere round here and the site was unavailable.

Lumiere Peter Horvath

Peter Horvath presenting at VideoVortex, Brussels, October 2007. Shot on SonyEricsson k750i.

Technorati Tags: lumierevideo

Finally

For probably the last two years in classes and at any and every opportunity in conference presentations, lectures and the like I have been pointing out that that video on YouTube was just television. One of the ways you could see that it was television was that it was easy to imagine a TV show based on YouTube content, and that if by taking video off YouTube and broadcasting it (or screening it in a gallery or cinema) nothing fundamentally changed then it wasn’t videoblog video but just video This argument is based on the premise that if you publish a blog as a book it is no longer a blog, some of the key qualities that make a blog a blog (comments, links in, and so on) by definition must be removed for print publication and in doing this the act of translation moves the blog from being a blog to being something else.

My second point is related to professional practice and TV, and was simply that if you worked in TV and you were not currently developing a show based on YouTube then you were a dill. Dirt cheap to produce, enough content for I don’t know how many shows (funniest, rudest, dumbest, at the moment we are in the midst of a federal election and there is enough content for at least one TV hour just on parody and satire videos related to the election). Well, it finally happened. Last Friday night on one of the free to air networks we had “Friday Night Download”. And it makes no difference to the videos.

Increasingly the only value TV has will be in liveness (Murdoch understood this years ago hence his purchase for the complete cable rights to the British Premier League at a then astronomical figure) so music, sport, disasters. You will increasingly watch drama as pay per view, on demand, etc – how it is delivered to you is secondary to being able to watch it when you want to watch it, commercial free – but TV as we know it will shift. This means that there is the potential for more drama and doco production, since the single biggest scarcity in TV is broadcast time, but in a networked or other delivered model broadcast time is no longer a scarcity. Once we move to this new economy I do think there will be more production, hopefully with a broader range of budgets – after all if you can produce a TV drama that requires 20,000 subscribers to be viable then you are making low budget TV but you certainly don’t need as much capital and risk up front (or a network agreement) to get it out there.

Another Interview

My neighbour, Lisa Gye (that’s neighbour in my real world street, not the office next door or somethin’), sometimes sets some of her students onto me for interviews and what nots. So a small posse (Tony, Jane and Meg) came by a few weeks ago and interviewed me about video, citizen journalism, participatory media and the like. The interview has been added into their convergent journalism mix and is now available.

like 04

Click To Play

Affective Atlas Symposium

Today I’m a participant in a one day symposium entitled ‘Affective Atlas 01″. It is a research project I’m involved in where we want to make affective atlas’s. I’m giving two presentations, one on why “affective atlas” and the other a report on a field trip undertaken with honours students to The Grampians National Park to make a prototype affective atlas using just a GoogleMap. There are two international guests today. Brian Greenspan from Carleton Uni in Canada, who does some really interesting work involving adaptive hypertext systems in relation to urban post something geography come cultural studies, and Bill Fox who has done some pretty cool stuff on placemaking.

I’ve put up pdf’s of the two presentations. The first is affect + atlas, the second Halls Gap.

Study on Students and ICT

A mention of a British longitudinal study on students and their use of ICT. This appears to be similar to a survey that was run as part of the mashedlc project that I’m a small participant in.