vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Bloody Hell

I’ve been trying to use the Embed QuickTime WordPress plugin that Andreas has written with little success. It is very cool as it has full support for all of the attributes of Apple’s QuickTime embed tag, which means it should be able to do an awful lot. I sent Andreas an email, he said it should work, didn’t so he had a look. Turns out that the plugin folder needs to be renamed from ‘embed-quicktime’ to ‘embed_quicktime’, and that WordPress every now and then does this sort of thing through its upgrades. Bloody hell, how is your average WordPress hacker to trouble shoot that?

Curation as Art and Intervention

This is a project where a variety of artists have curated individual collections of YouTube material. The act of selection, the constraint which determines membership, and the obvious fact of selection that this has produced, lets an art work develop out of the range of material available on YouTube. Writing this it occurs to me how close this is to a sort of scientific practice. All I mean by that is that if I was doing some empirical research into YouTube then one way of conducting that would be to set a content definition (videos that are about x, or are reworkings/homages/fan works of y) and then collect them, and start counting. Here a similar principle is applied, with the difference being that works are excluded (it is a curated collection) and that not much counting is going on. But it is the act of inclusion, and by implication exclusion, that seems to make all the difference. (Duoh, I know, but hey it is Friday arvo.)

Train x 4

This is just trying out a few things, timers in eZedia, the video that comes off my Nokia N95 (it’s a 30fps which is way too high, I think a better option could be to shoot higher res and then compress down) and embedding using the video embed button in TinyMCE in WordPress. The work is shot on a local train platform while waiting for a (late) train. Each is a seperate movie and they all loop. It plays in QuickTime Player because of its size, total data size is around 7MB. I’ve used a Livestage authored poster movie since the QuickTime embed tag and attributes don’t really work with poster images (well they do but it is foolishly complicated as they can’t be jpg or gifs) so just plain vanilla embedding a video that, when clicked, launches the target video in QT Player is the way to go.

Videoblogging Week 09

The sixth version of videoblogging week is happening April five to eleven. The object is to make a post a video every day for the week, and to tag it with “videobloggingweek2009″ so they can be aggregated. Mass, distributed participation. See the eponymous http://videobloggingweek2009.blogspot.com/ for more.

PhD Scholarship

We have a scholarship going:

PhD Scholarship, full time (approx. AUD22k per annum tax free).

RMIT University, School of Applied Communication (Melbourne) are seeking a communication/interaction designer who is familiar with social networks and networked media environments to work on an ARC Linkage project with Parks Victoria. The successful candidate will be expected to contribute to the project’s objectives and to collaborate with a PhD candidate in the field of geospatial information interventions for geoplaced knowledge management. The successful candidate will work in collaboration with the School of Mathematics and Geospatial Science at RMIT.

This research is aligned with the RMIT Design Research Insitute’s Geoplaced Knowledge Program. Applications are sought for either Masters or PhD investigations.

The associated researchers include Adrian Miles, Jeremy Yuille, Dr Brian Morris, Assoc. Professor Laurene Vaughan, Assoc. Professor Colin Arrowsmith and Professor Bill Cartwright.

If interested please send an outline of your interest/experience and a brief CV to:

laurene dot vaughan at rmit dot edu dot au and cc it to adrian dot miles at rmit dot edu dot au

Motion Graphics Advertising Art

Umberto Eco famously said (well, wrote) something along the lines of how gothic cathedrals were the comic book of their times. Graphic narratives telling moral tales that all could read, even the illiterate. I’ve often bastardised that in classes to talk about how advertising are the cathedrals of our time, and while we might not want to believe, some achieve beauty, even grace. This one is a wonderful performance work combining dance, motion graphics and some awesome light trickery, sort of thing I’d expect from Chunky Move. Check it out. No idea what the Puma shoes do, who cares? This is some gorgeous commercial eye candy motion graphics performance bling.

Projects

Fraser has an interesting project being cooked up for honours. I think there are two middle ways between the exponential branching tree model and generative systems. Both are particularly intriguing from the point of view of narrative. One is how things like Online Caroline work and is mainly through its mode of address which generates the illusion of narrative complexity, or at least recognition, in a highly constrained system. The second is from hypertext literature where you produce nodes that are able to be located in numerous possible points in the story line (a principle present in cinema too). I still think both of these have not received the attention they deserve or warrant academically.

Blue Bath

This is filmed on a low rez domestic camera, I like its compressed abstraction.

Blue Bath

HTML 5

Jay sent me an email pointing out the video element in the new HTML 5 spec. Been a long, long, time since I kept up with W3C and specs. Will be tons easier to embed video, as it will have its own tag, with support for poster frames and some basic properties that we now might use in an embed tag (eg autoplay, loop, controls visible). This puts video on a par with what we’ve been able to do with images in HTML which was first proposed by Marc Andreessen (the same that created Mosaic) in February 1993. As someone who has been using video online since Real allowed pseudo streaming (late 90s) and QuickTime supported embedding (when was that? the wikipedia page on QuickTime details a lot of its history but appears not to consider this that important) I remain bemused that it has taken so long for video embedding to become standardised like this.

A Railway Crossing

This is the rail crossing I regularly walk across with the kids. Trains remain an elemental attractor in cinema. Mechanised, regular, industrial. Flash and movement.

A Railway Crossing