From class today, about working inside multilinear authoring media:
The less a fragment narrates, the more possibilities of connection it has (think of Lego bricks). This is the general model of the blog. We are applying the same logic to film by making in a Korsakow film.
The network. The term has become so diluted because it has moved from the imaginary of early hypertext (Nelson, Bolter, Joyce, even of course Gibson), to its current condition. However, the term itself is haunted by earlier histories of industrial media, as in ‘network’ television and radio, and so retains connotations of the much less transgressive broadcast source and transmission model. In this older, but still extant context, the network are the formal affiliations between partners to achieve national systems of ‘badged’ content distribution, a branding and economic exercise in concert with the economies of scale that such agreements allow. This is not the new network, the network now.
The network is, and while the phrase has all the hallmarks of cliche it remains the best and simplest explanatory schema, rhizomatic in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense. Acentric, structurally asymmetrical in relation to traditional networks in terms of information and power flows, it is made up of a diversity of parts that can be placed into ever changing relations and it lacks the authority of the centre. It is fragmentary, partial, transitory, ephemeral. A shape shifter. Technically, what has mattered has been processing power – what your terminal can do, and bandwidth – how much data can be delivered how quickly. In the beginning text ruled because it was computationally easy to deal with, and required little in the way of bandwidth. Even into the early years of this century these two conditions were the major constraint on online video, constraints which have now, certainly in urban centres in the first world for the everyday user, been resolved.
In softvideo these constraints were recognised less as the limits preventing the possibility for online video than as enabling conditions that had to be recognised, appropriated and utilised within softvideo. Indeed, it was common at the turn of the century for video practitioners of all persuasions to be wary of working online because of concerns about the ‘compromises’ their work would suffer due to the small screen size video required and the compression artefacts that may appear due to the demands of getting a file with a small enough data rate to be delivered online.
Softvideo begins from a different set of propositions. Rather than looking at existing video practice, whether narrative, experimental or art based, and thinking how that could be translated online, softvideo took the qualities of the network as its material given and then tried to think ‘videographically’ from within the context and constraints of the network. In practice this means that the screen size of the video is small in contrast to the more usual assumption in video practice where whatever screen I have (television, cinema, gallery wall) is all mine. This also means the data rate is often deliberately, joyfully, low so that the material arrives immediately over existing network connections (which in 2000 still meant 56Kb dialup modems), which in turn allows for the sorts of things that are givens in traditional video become material to work with in softvideo. For example, the resolution of the image (its visual quality), and the frame rate of the finished work, are all manipulated in softvideo to produce an aesthetic of what has been characterised as lo bit rate, lo fi, lo–res media. Pixellation and video artefacts can be deliberately sought, shifting softvideo from being merely a recording medium bedded and wedded to verisimilitude and indexicality towards a painterly, digital, reflexive materiality where its pixels, the necessity and facticity of compression, become the material subject of the work. Softvideo has some semblance of relation to the world as it is observational, stilled, showing not telling mode of engaging with the world, and is situated within the spheres of nonfiction and documentary rather than fiction and drama. This world becomes available to aesthetisation via digital glitch and grunge as others might use chiascurio, lighting, mise-en-scene, and in the case of video, the signal.
This accounts for my use of ready to hand technologies in software, networks and cameras. The network has always accommodated remix, what we once called bricolage. It is intended to survive and even play with interruption and the small scale. Each work is a gesture that lies between using a camera that is small enough to carry, what I happen upon, and composition, compression, seriality. Not as specialised equipment but camera as a ready to hand part of everyday stuff. A video snapshot. Closer to the note book and pen. These are not intended to be large, a grand gesture, but when realised as a practice in its own right — rather than steps towards something other, grander, larger (more ‘significant’) have a quality that lies in their polite smallness.
In these ways softvideo, when observed from the perspective of the outside of traditional video, has embraced the network as the site of small works, minor practices, a dirty aesthetic of bits and pixels, an enabling making do (de Certeau). Compression and its artefacts as stochastic image making. Troublesome.
[Deleuze on the minor, de certeau for making do?]
From my PhD draft:
Softvideo needed to allow for the same principles and affordances of the network and personal computer so that it could have the opportunity to be not only a ‘high’ form (of art, video, or online media) and to become part of the habitus that constitutes the everyday experience of online culture. Conceptually in softvideo there is nothing distinct about the video that softvideo uses — it is made, captured, and edited in more or less the same way as you would for any other video project. Softvideo has no particular claims regarding the technical quality of the equipment used to record, or of the final output, and does not recognise attributes such as “broadcast quality”. Indeed, in many respects softvideo explicitly celebrates a lo fi model of making and consumption. The works are, unlike heritage media, intended to be small scale. This includes their duration, where videos are usually only a couple of minutes in length, if not shorter, and also their screen resolution (size) and the amount of computer processing power required to view them is explicitly small scale.
Softvideo then contrasted itself deliberately to a variety of alternative approaches to online video and the digital. These other approaches routinely adopted some combination of a high art or high technology model. In the former video assumes and grants for itself the right to ‘own’ the users’ desktop by relying upon presentation environments that default to full screen resolution, with the collateral assumption that the work also requires the monopolisation of attention and time. Such work would often be large scale, so relatively long and, in some cases, complex in its interactivity and narrative complexity. Work which relied on high technology approaches almost certainly defaulted to the monopolisation of the presentation environment and rely on specialised hardware and software at some or all points of production, distribution and presentation. These works are not able to be part of the ‘everyday’ experience of networked practice and often required either very specialised hardware for viewing, or in some cases the visiting of specific installations and events to access them at all. Softvideo politically and aesthetically, deliberately place itself in opposition to these modes as softvideo advocates a lightweight, agile, informal, sketch like practice that extends from how works are made through to the the opportunities to experience the work. Softvideo implicitly recognises that the network is distributed, granular, and fragmentary, and that the site of consumption or experience of the works is someone’s computer screen, that this screen is theirs and that these users ordinarily are doing several things at once. In addition the capacity and ability to make similar works should be near to hand for anyone — the significance of softvideo is not so much what I use it to express but is in the conceptual change it proposes for thinking through and about what a networked video practice and object can become.
Softvideo eschews the culture of ‘monumental making’ that is the historical legacy of film and video as a scarce, expensive, technically complex practice, and leans towards the ephemeral and the transitory. This does not mean that monuments, large scale complex works, cannot be made, but that softvideo, in conjunction with videoblogging, relies upon seriality and repetition, the sorts of aggregations that accrue in small and minor moments through time. In this way there can be parts that break, fail, as well as moments that stand out, because there is never enough invested in a single thing to compromise the project as a whole. This form of serialised making and consumption also allows for similarities and differences between individual works to be identified and to form in their own way particular constellations of meaning and affect. One video of a subject is simply that, but when placed in a series a semiotic economy of difference is now established.
In my own softvideo practice there is an emphasis on observation, showing rather than telling, description rather than narrative. I use ready to hand tools (my phone, small highly portable video cameras, digital still cameras with a video capability) to record my everyday life world. Aesthetically the project is not for me to impose a ‘deep’ significance upon this world but to build systems that allow relations to be established between these recorded parts so that what it might be, which is always open, variable and certainly not limited or teleologically locked to ‘me’, can be made and remade.
This is the abstract I, um, abstracted, for consideration at the Visible Evidence conference in Canberra this coming December. It is in response to Craig Hight’s “Emerging documentary practices: the implications of hardware and software tools” panel call out:
The availability of ready to hand video technologies for recording, editing, and publishing ‘everyday ephemera’ has seen an explosion of content online, from the low brow populism of YouTube through to the sophisticated observational post produced work of Robert Croma. These technologies of recording, editing, and distribution provide documentary practice with an everyday, quotidian apparatus for the creation of informal, reflective, observational and autoethnographic work. This paper will examine the use of ready to hand video technologies in concert with the use of the Korsakow interactive video authoring software, to create small scale, ‘ready to hand’ or ‘dirty media’ documentaries. This provides a model to investigate and develop alternative modes of making nonfiction video online material that falls outside of the economy of spectacle that dominates YouTube or the ‘personal broadcasting channels’ of Vimeo . The problem investigated is how to contextualise and author in these systems so that work created is outside of the unstructured banality of aggregative platforms and the serialised limitations of the blog. Emerging software models such as Korsakow require a creative practice of making that involves the critical curation of video ephemera into complex, emerging and multilinear constellations and clouds of associated material that let these works lie between the personal documentary, essay film, home movies and broader poetic traditions. More significantly the use of systems such as Korsakow allows for an autoethnographic methodology of personal, informal and everyday observation to produce a ‘soup’ of material that is then structured through the elucidation of emerging or unveiled patterns of relation amongst shots and sequences. These patterns create affective and poetic “lines of flight” for both maker and user and their value lies in the possibility of poesis amongst otherwise unremarkable moments.
From the hypertextual book chapter I’m writing. The nodes do not have a canonical order. Here’s another:
In Cinema One Deleuze defines and describes a natural history of the cinema. This is not so much a theory of the cinema – in the manner that we ordinarily think of cinema theory as an intellectual suite of tools by which we want to explain or account for the cinema – as an effort to first recognise cinema as a system of thought in itself, and then to try to identify (philosophically and cladestically) its terms. This is a radical enterprise. Not perhaps for what it then claims, but because in this first moment it begins from the premise that the cinema is a particular mode of thought in and for itself that is outside of us.
I like to think of this ecologically. Not because Deleuze offers it as an ecology, but in the way that we once may have thought the world was for us and that our species was privileged in relation to this world, but, now we realise that speciation and ecological systems are deeply interconnected, complex, and emergent and our species is deeply implicated within these networks and flows, where we are not privileged. The world does not exist for us, and is not really about us, though we find ourselves living here too. This, as a beginning, is how I conceive of Deleuze’s approach to cinema.
This is the abstract I proposed (and which was accepted) for an anthology around database narrative, cinema and aesthetics.
In trying to engage audiences with database narratives there seem to be two dominant modes at play. The first is what I would characterise as the “Encarta” model which is where large scale productions are undertaken that have, at the end of the day, all the hallmarks of studio production. Such works generally lack what could be characterised as ‘voice’ and in lieu of this emphasise comprehensive detail, a high level of technological spectacle, and high cultural capital. The second mode is more personal, the works are of a smaller scale and rely less on spectacle and more on the emerging of a narratorial voice within the work. They are intimate, crafted, and in many ways minor pieces. If the first mode emphasises information, the second is about experience. Such works are ambient, associative and affective. In this series of observations and reflections I intend to use Deleuze’s model of affect in relation to Bergson’s sensory motor schema and the cinematic interval to explore a poetics for cinematographic database narratives. In this way database models can be understood as combinatory systems that produce poetic and metaphoric works, where the rules of participation and engagement need to be reconsidered in relation to traditional linear models. A consequence of thinking of such works as affective is that the role of teleological narrative is lessened and this helps provide alternative ways to think about making such works, and what the relation between work, author, and audience might become.
And a later note to myself: Such assemblages enable the production of affect via complex forms of media practice suggesting that narrative will not be a dominant form as these systems continue to develop.
During the course of the writing I’ve departed some way from this. I am still deciding whether the editing is to try to return to this, or to let it follow the course it has.
Shaun Wilson has created a slow cinema slow media Vimeo group. This is part of the work towards a Slow Cinema symposium being held at RMIT in the middle of 2012.
I already had downloaded Condition One but it took an email from Jay to the Artists in the Cloud list to get me to spend a bit of time with it. It is an app that works as both a front end/shop front to journalistic video but also provides some viewer options that take advantage of some of the affordances of the iPad. The Guardian has played with it, with a series of short videos about Tokyo.
The stories are chunked up, so I can either get the entire Tokyo series (which includes bonus extras) or get four short episodes (between 1 and 3 minutes in length). They’re not small, the one I’m waiting to view is 1:39 in length and 250MB, that’s a shitload of video for less than two minutes of viewing, even at full screen on my iPad, and this Sunday evening things might be slow out there somewhere, but it is going to take quite a while to arrive. Not hours like in the old days (when you would start a download and come back the next morning…) but it’s looking like a good 10 minutes or so, which at the moment I’d have to say is getting in the way of the experience – though I don’t yet know what that experience will actually be.
While I’m waiting for that to happen what gets my goat up just a bit is the spruiking around “immersive” experiences. This is, of course, the pitch point, the point of difference, that which will make it not just different but great. Now, it might be, but immersive, as the work on flow has well and truly shown us, is not about technological ersatz similitude. Shit, novels have already taught us that. I read a novel, even on crappy paper with lousy typesetting, but if it is a good novel, it works. I might cry laugh, weep. I am immersed in my reading. Not because of the quality of the delivery technology. So this risks a techno determinism that thinks if we get it really really shiny (I’m still waiting for my 250MB and 1:39 of video to arrive) then it will be immersive, never mind I’ve twiddled my thumbs for over ten mintues already just waiting to be really really immersed. Immersion is a consequence of things like possible worlds, narrative voice, and how they intersect with my intention. If they intersect, it works, even at low rez. This is the same snake oil that virtual worlds people use to sell us their visions of the future. It is immersive because you get to move in it, as if this is a sufficient condition for what ‘immersive experience’ is actually trying to claim – verisimilitude and an experience that is, at least in some respects and aspects, somehow phenomenologically equivalent to how immersed I am right now sitting at a desk. But simply having to move something (my mouse, my avatar, my iPad) does not make something immersive in this sense, unless we really do just want ‘immersion’ to be more like, well I was going to say sitting in the bath, but that is much more immersive than what is on offer here. I can’t sit in it like I can in my bath, where I am literally immersed and water flows around and over me. In Second Life my avatar might sit, even swim, but I don’t, and in Condition One I’ve got a traditional cinematic perspective which I either swipe around, or move my iPad up down, left right. (I can’t see all the way round, it is more that I’ve shot wide and the default view in the app is narrower, hence I can move around it a bit.) it is sort of nice, and sets up big questions cinematically (how do I know I have not missed something important that happened not off off screen, but off screen, as it were?), with an off screen that is actually available I can now compose and narrate not only in depth (Bazin via Renoir here) but also by implicating and alluding to what is just out of frame, but can be in frame if the viewer moves the frame. But immersive? No. Immersion is a consequence of other modes of engagement, at the moment this is technologically cool, but that of itself is no guarantee of a good view.
Rupert Howe let us all know about wevideo.com over at the artists-in-the-cloud list. So, what is it?
Seems to be another go at video + editing + the cloud, though this one has subscription right from the start. I guess I am not the market for something like this, but even so I struggle a little bit with the vision. I pay (what to me is quite a bit of money for what I get) and for that I can edit video, publish it out to existing hosts, and also co-edit with others out there. There’s a legal music library it looks like I get access to.
Seems its only the collaborative editing that is significant. After all my mac comes with a video editor, I can buy one for my phone for a couple of dollars, and both will auto publish to YouTube. If I want something more sophisticated (which I do) then I also probably need a lot more than what a service like this can do, or would wonder why I’d pay for it when I already have an editor, pay for my own hosting, and so on.
Collaboration? Yeah, ok, but it won’t cope at the pro end so…?
just my thoughts. But I’ve been wrong too often on these things. Though I guess if I was in this space commercially my business plan would be to get some traction and be bought by Google so that it can be rolled into YouTube, which will make me plenty of money but it’s a crappy way to rethink video. Collaboration. Or the cloud.
Stumbled across the Lytro camera yesterday via TidBits. Game changer in its own way this one. It is a digital camera but it captures the ‘light field’ which means all the information in the shot – including information about the light waves. This means you don’t focus. You capture. Then when you view the image (electronically, for anyone) you can then manipulate the image, forever. For instance you can always change, vary, play with the depth of field. Want it all sharp? Change it. Want foreground and background soft? Change it. This, in my theoretical argot, is what I would call ‘softphotography’ where the photographic artefact, as a condition of itself, remains always malleable and open even in its ‘final’ form. They call it a ‘living photo’.
Why is this so interesting? Well, depth of field and focus are very basic formal qualities of photography. This removes these from the photographer to the viewer and the technical system. Imagine a large image that has things ‘embedded’ in it so it starts soft and as you progressively shift the focal plane other things are revealed. A sort of spatial narrative. This is pretty much the same as how serial order to a narrative is removed from only being the author’s prerogative in hypertext. (Yes, yes, I know, there is still an order, I know that. This is not a riposte to hypertext and its progeny. It is a casual truism that when I narrate or read that there will be a single order that happens. The issue is that now there is not one order available, but several, and it is that that makes the difference – a difference that matters.)
Then imagine if this happened in a video. Whoa. Focus pulls now happen for the user, not the Director of Photography or Camera Operator. We can change focus at any point, any moment. Imagine a Renoir with technology like this so that narrating in depth becomes a playful unveiling of what might be there, if you do something to look (or conceal?)
So this is exciting as it is one of the first times that a genuine change in the ontology of the thing has happened in this context. Flickr are still photos as traditionally conceived. YouTube, inspite of some developments around ‘deep linking’ still treats video as a particular sort of artefact – there is nothing changed in how I, YouTube, or you, need to conceive of video in itself when I go or publish to YouTube. But a Lytro image, that is a different thing altogether.
This means, I supposed, that I’m a deeply old fashioned formalist as it is the ways in which the digital and networked shifts the ontological basis of media forms that really excites me. That is my passion, my longing. And it is why I’m still waiting for it to happen with video.
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