vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

La Descente

Robert Croma has a new video entry, La Descente. The project is not video blogging, they are more considered, formal, graceful and rare than that. Slow motion, a sea of people descending, I assume to the Metro (following earlier work from Paris), or the Tube (he is British), or perhaps we’re in New York. I can’t yet tell. It is the morning, well I imagine it is the morning simply because they look like they are on their way to work, not home (it is a descent, after all). Sort of Metropolis for 2010. Some notice the camera and watch as they walk, because of course you couldn’t pause here, not on the way to work and not within this slow sea of movement. It is perhaps, what, a quarter of the way through and my tension, pleasure, anxiety rises as I am waiting for something. Croma’s work regularly uses some postproduction digital effects to highlight, enframe and detail momentary and otherwise missed moments of quotidian elegance and grace. Is it that person, watching the camera and the video maker, is this the moment. No. It continues. I realise I have been wrong. That’s a student, this must be afternoon, no student leaves for university at the same time as the workers, and that tabloid so many have, I realise it’s the Evening Standard, so it is the afternoon, people heading home. So now I read their faces as tiredness, the fatigue not of what lies ahead, but of what has been. The day that was and the crush and rush of the ride home. And I notice the shopping bags, the small and large talismans bought back from the day in the city. Nothing happens, beyond the interminable crowds. Mums, dads, kids, people with phones, iPods, bags, prams, trolleys. It is poetic observation, sort of Renoir’s romantic realism with Vertov’s cyborg eye that lets us see what we can’t see (well, he didn’t call it that but that’s what he’d be up to today, wouldn’t he?).

Priviliged Accidents

The Looxcie camera is wearable and records continuously, dumping old stuff as you go. Hit a button and the last thirty seconds are captured as a clip which can be transferred to a device via bluetooth. While the camera stores four hours of low res video, the main idea seems to be the ability to grab these special 30 sec moments.

This allows the capture of accidental moments that have qualities in themselves (as security video sometimes does though usually not since they are looking in dull places to begin with). It is the difference between the ‘pose’, where things are deliberately composed and if you like performed, versus what have been described as ‘privileged instants’. When you can record every moment, every moment is now the same (unlike the ‘pose’ which is to try and capture an essence), but in amongst all that sameness, precisely because you get it all, will be remarkable moments (privileged instants). These can, potentially, be wonderful (remembering the ‘horses for courses’ or ‘one persons wheat is another’s chaff’ rules).

Hard Core

This is a project that is mix of investigative journalism, reportage and documentary. Socially disadvantaged region of western Sydney – Beating the Odds. Aside from its social commentary function it is an interesting and more mature development in the online news dash documentary conversation. Good to see we’ve moved past the ‘web documentary’ model of the late 90s early noughties into something that is secure enough about the medium that it can just get on with its job.

Open Video Conference 2010

This yeas Open Video Conference is calling for proposals. They have a scholarship like scheme in place to help with travel if required. Probably the premium open video event there is.

57 Fragments – Fade to Black

Fragments has been updated. More material, also built with the latest version of Korsakow. There is now a playhead under the video, and if you leave the mouse in the play space a ‘share’ button appears which provides shareable HTML code to the individual clip within the project. Early testing indicates that there may be some performance problems (thumbnail links that don’t appear, even possibly video clips that just won’t play), we’ll see. The earlier version is archived via vogmae.net.au/fragments02. The first version is at vogmae.net.au/fragments01.

I’ve been working on the Fragments project. One of the things I’ve been working with in this project is the use of video material that is just shot as is. Preferably just single shots, and as much as possible no edits, or if you prefer I’m editing in camera but also striving for single one shot takes. This is because I’m interested in quick, lightweight, simple and dirty modes of working. For developing a style of practice that sits easily with video as mobile, disposable, informal, tactical, minor, transitory. It is not about making films, in the same way that doodling and making notes, comments, observations and lists in my moleskin is not writing a novel. It is a thinking through doing, in the latter through words and in the former with video. This is of course now possible because video is as good as zero cost to shoot and edit, unlike how it was only a few short years ago. Why? Because I work and teach in a Media program and regularly attend, hear, read, material that still approaches video practice as about the ‘program’ or the ‘film’. It is like thinking that all writing is only about the novel, yet poetry (in all its extraordinary forms), song lyrics, let alone transitory writing (a diary, notebook, lists) is as significant to writing culture and practice as, of course, the novel.

So, as I’ve been sketching away there have been a couple of sequences that I’ve edited together, but the majority have been single clips. But there is something not quite working, and so I’ve added a fade out to the end of each clip. This is to indicate to the user that the clip is finished (after all it is all networked and so a clip may pause due to bandwidth constraints), but there is also something deliberately cinematic about the fade that I’m also liking. I’m quite intrigued by this, as there is a great deal in what I am doing that could be misconstrued as anti-cinematic (it is, in fact, the opposite) and so use of something like a fade to black – in such a conservative manner – might appear as almost a cinematic supplement (in Derrida’s sense). But no. The fade and the grab bag of cinematic visual effects is not some outside to the video practice happening within Fragments,for this work exists in a post digital economy of practice where as a fully digital process (from whoa to go) it just becomes absurd to think that effects constitute an outside. It is all and only malleable, but as I hope this project also indicates, we can still watch, see and record parts of the world. This connection matters to me, and is perhaps why I’ve always been experienced environments like Second Life as so, well, thin.

Korsakow Writeup

Brief promotional write up of Korsakow out of the Concordia Journal (the same Concordia that hosts and houses Korsakow at the moment).