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.
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.
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.
This was shot on my Sony Ericsson k750i, whilst sitting on the TGV inside of an early Sunday morning. I’ve placed them in a triptych using just QuickTime Pro to lay them next to each other, stretching each to match the duration of the longest one. I’ll probably make a second, sister work, in Livestage that uses the same video as child movies so that I can make them play back at different rates based on mouse events (or some other parameters?) just to help explore the differences between hard and softvideo.
An essay I wrote nearly two years ago is nearly ready to see the light of day. It is terribly florid, so I think the preprint copy I have will be rewritten at some point to clean this up. I’ve put the entire text of the pre print copy online, however this was always secondary to the interactive QuickTime version which I intended to be the primary work (which is also available on vogmae). Of course since it was for a journal this doesn’t actually work, so the print version is in the published journal but they have linked the QuickTime version off the online edition as a multimedia attachment. A good first step. The essay and interactive vog are in Artifact.
The abstract:
Softvideo is a term applied by the author to video works which treat the computer as the means of production, distribution and consumption of video works. In these contexts video develops novel affordances or possibilities that problematize traditional uses and understandings of video as time based media. In this essay, which consists of a printed essay and an accompanying interactive academic QuickTime project, a critical and reflective analysis of a series of softvideo templates – the “rhizome templates” – is undertaken. These templates are publicly available and allow video bloggers and others to experiment with softvideo forms. The essay documents the use of the templates and situates them within a critical view of traditional video practice from the point of view of softvideo and video editing as a rhizomatic practice.
L = load, P = play and S = stop. Since this is the fifth one in the series I guess I should explain what they’re talking about. The brief is simple, describe something that you like, without naming it. All video is shot on my mobile phone (SonyEricsson K750i) and transferred to my PowerBook via BlueTooth. Saved as QT (just to get the .mov extension to avoid any problems with the .3gp extension) and then authored using my soon to be doomed copy of LiveStage Pro.
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.
You need to click on the poster video, which then loads a qt movie which says “click to open in QT player”, clicking that launches QT player, then clicking the white square loads the video (the video isn’t loaded on QT player open). The black square pauses the video. Clicking the white will restart the video from the beginning – I have not been able to get my scripting sorted out so that it will pause the child movie rather than reload it.
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Two Trains
