vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

VlogEurope 08

Vlog Europe has been announced and is slated for Budapest in mid October. See the vlog Europe blog for details.

Artefact, Ambience, Abstraction

This is another rhizome movie that is partly to illustrate the use of the templates, but also to just play a bit with some material. This is the same footage as the other recent rhizome movies have used, but I have compressed the crap out of it. Took the original, exported it to half its resolution and double its frame rate and a fraction of its data rate. Set forced keyframes to some really big number (so that there won’t be any). This is just impossible for the codec to do, so it will actually use more data than I requested since it more or less assumes I’m a dill for trying to do all that. But it helps really dirty up the video. Why? Because as the video becomes more compressed, as more artefacts appear, it shifts away from being indexical, representational video (video thought of as showing the world) towards pattern, pixels, movement, and colour. Ambient video. Ambient video is important. It is what video and the moving image becomes when it is ubiquitous, on screens, in the home, our phones. Walk past an ATM and watch the screen move, scrolling ads in bus and tram stops, pixellated signage, the list is enormous. In this world moving images move increasingly away from being of something else and become something for themselves. This is why we have VJing, for instance. So in a world where video online (just think YouTube as the banally obvious exemplar) is the norm, video can begin to free itself from being the hand maid to just mirroring (and all those efforts at narrative that seem to fall in lock step behind) and do other things. Be abstract. Make patterns. Other fragments that will only ever aspire to be fragments. Of the world. Of shape. Fragments of fragments.

Ambient Artefacts

Two Trains Travelling To and Fro

This is another lumiere rhizome. One was shot while travelling from Paris to Brussels on the TGV while the other is the return journey a few days later. I really like travelling on trains. Much more room than on planes (well, I guess I might not think that if I travelled first class, but like that’s ever going to happen), and you get to see sky and land and sometimes places too.

Two Trains

Semanal

This is a project that seems to contain (yet again) the inestimable Jay Dedman. Semanal is an aggregate video project where users aggregate their own content. No, that’s wrong. OK, the idea is that you are to make one video a week for 52 weeks. Your 52 weeks can begin at any time, but once started you’re doing one a week. You publish them where ever you normally publish your videos, and then you add the URL of the video and the blog post as a comment to the appropriate week in Semanal. They are using some nice WP plugins which lets the video URLs appear in vPIP popups, so you can easily see the videos for each week. Hopefully some thumbnail stuff will appear in the future so there can be a thumbnail for each weeks contribution – it makes sense to navigate video visually rather than textually.

lumiere at the beach

On the weekend there was a trip to Phillip Island and on Saturday evening we headed to the beach at Cowes. Beautiful weather, the bay was calm (this is the north of the island which faces a large bay) and I sat on the sand watching.

This uses the first rhizome template, with a text track stuck on top. It is silent. Each clip is more or less a minute long and is part of Andreas and Brittany’s lumiere project.

Play Quicktime version

Shadows and Trains

A second rhizome movie, using a second template. This uses the same footage from the recent Trains and Shadows vog just reversed. This template provides a controller for each video window, mainly because people get frustrated when they can’t stop and pause video. The template is available if you’d like to use it.

Shadows and movement. Home and abroad. Almost grey and the colour of Belgium in October. Patterns and views.

Play Quicktime version

Trains and Shadows

I am rebuilding all of the rhizome movie templates. Cleaner code, larger video windows and a bit more elegant over all. This is a small sketch vog that is using the first rhizome. I’ll be making them available in the next week or so from the main vogmae site.

The shadows were filmed on the wall at home, they’re just shadows (though I’m reminded of some aspects of impressionist cinema here) while the footage from the train is from my trip to Brussels for Video Vortex in October.

Play Quicktime version

Videoécriture: interactive video vernaculars

These are the slides I used for this conference presentation at AoIR in 2002 in Maastricht. Looking over it again after 6 years it seems to sum things up well and is probably where I am still fossicking intellectually at the moment. It also has the benefit of reminding me of several things I should have written but have not.

A resolution. To write and get these ideas out there and to stop bellyaching about getting it perfect and so on. I have a lot of ideas and do not have the patience or the temperament to fill in all the gaps with quotes from all of the sources. Just broad pointers and the ideas. Time to get on with it I reckon.