In 2010 Integrated Media One, for the first time, used the Korsakow software for making and exploring multilinear online video.
There are:
course, workshop and reading notes (written in Tinderbox and published serially)
a teaching blog where commentary on student work was made
an archive of the 2010 final k-film projects made
Integrated Media in 2011 returned to being based around the Korsakow software to explore how to make multilinear online video. There are:
rough course notes (lectures, workshop outlines, readings) written in Tinderbox and published serially to the web
an integrated media blog where I write occasional commentary on student work, provide some resources and the like
an archive of the final interactive Korsakow films created by the 2001 cohort
I write course notes using Tinderbox for lectures and lab/workshops and they are published serially to a rather messy and haphazard site. They are added to, amended, edited, each year. The 2011 course notes are located at vogmae.net.au/intmedia/2011/
a vog respects bandwidth
a vog is not streaming video (this is not the reinvention of television)
a vog uses performative video and/or audio
a vog is personal
a vog uses available technology
a vog experiments with writerly video and audio
a vog lies between writing and the televisual
a vog explores the proximate distance of words and moving media
a vog is dziga vertov with a mac and a modem
(added on February 2, 2002)
a vog is a video blog where video in a blog must be more than video in a blog
Original Citation:
Miles, Adrian. “Blogs: Distributed Documentaries of the Everyday.” Metro.143 (2005): 66-70.
Blogs: Distributed Documentaries of the Everyday
What the average citizen needs is not a steady stream of facts, passed on by organizations fearful of going out on a limb, but interpretation, which might in other arguments be called editorialising, persuasion, orientation, ideology, propaganda, or, as here, representation.
What is a blog?
A blog is an Internet based, personal publishing system. It is different to writing traditional homepages, or managing personal web sites because these activities generally require pages to be written individually using specific software, the individual management of links, individual design across all pages, and the development of relatively sophisticated understandings of information architecture, style sheets (and style sheets have only become a recent option), and so on. However, even with these simple procedures, site maintenance of home pages and personal web sites was time consuming and ‘good’ sites required a lot of technical knowledge. Then blogs came along.
Blogs use what is called a Content Management Systems (CMS) to author, build and maintain content. A CMS is not used to produce single web pages, but as its name implies, allows the management of content across an entire site. Blogs generally store content within a database, which exits separately from its Web pages and republishes the entire site into new Web pages each time a change is made. This makes it simple to redesign your entire site, because everything is now template driven: change your templates, republish, and every single page in your site now expresses your new design and includes new content. No more changing by hand ten, 100, or even a 1000 pages.
Furthermore, blog systems have automated most of the simple ‘information architecture’, access, and design problems that we face when wanting to maintain content online. This has been achieved through the development of various conventions within blogs, and any standard blog engine will adopt these features. For example, blogs recognize that online content is generically volatile and dynamic. The front page of a blog is therefore expected to routinely change as new posts are made. However, blog architecture also understands that all material needs to be permanently available so that it can be linked to and found in the future. This ‘linking to’ is after all what binds the Web together (it isn’t called the Web for nothing). Blogs have developed the convention of a permalink, which is attached to each post on the front page, and indicates the permanent URL for each entry. This permalink is automatically generated for each blog post, and allows others to locate the permanent address of individual entries, facilitating future reading.
In addition blogs, much like the diary that is one of its antecedents, automatically archives each entry according to date and time of publication. It may also include individual posts within themed archives as well. Blogs usually have an option allowing public comments on individual posts, provide a search engine to find specific content, and let you modify and customize each of these features. Finally, most modern blogs support a function called ‘trackback’. Trackback ensures that if someone else writes a blog post specifically mentioning your blog post, then your blog will know about it. Trackback is achieved by all sorts of ‘invisible’ communications going on behind the scenes between various blogs. This ‘back end’ communication is one of the key aspects that have allowed blogs to grow as a genre, as it helps provide the glue that binds all these pieces into loose affiliations. Unlike a diary, a blog is not thought of as an individual site, but as a discursive event that participates in a collection of relations to other sites, and other people. It is a writing that binds parts into wholes as blogs are not only a collection of fragments within one site but also participate in network ecologies. The relations established between blogs (as evidenced in individual blogrolls) and between posts (evidenced via commentary across blogs), is fundamental to the genre. It is a distributed, networked writing and reading practice.
This adds up to a lot of sophisticated technology, something that most of us simply wouldn’t have the skills, time or resources to make. Blogs are not in themselves particularly complicated, but rather, a very good implementation of a very good idea. As a result, blogs have blossomed into a significant genre. They have recognized that content online should consist of small idea based chunks. This content can be written in a variety of styles and voices, should be readily accessible using existing technology, and is about weaving connections, pathways, and commentary between distributed parts.
While the technical infrastructure of blogging is crucial to the genre, and has materially informed and defined many of the key aspects of blogging praxis, the blogs’ over riding governing discursive quality is the manner in which it is embodied within the life world of its author. This is what brings blogs into the orbit of documentary, a connection which to date has probably been most strongly expressed in the recognized affinity between blogs and journalism. However, while quite a few journalists maintain blogs, and there have been several prominent news ‘effects’ attributed to blogs, this relationship is determined more particularly by the manner in which blogs utilize indexical markers and verisimilitude to participate in the economics of representation that is common to documentary.
Blogs As Documentary
Published in 1991, Bill Nichols’ Representing Reality remains a canonical work in relation to documentary. It provides a strong definition of documentary practice that pays particular attention to the implications of structuralist and poststructuralist theory. Nichols’ argues that documentary utilizes an indexical medium to make claims about the world that are subject to verisimilitude, and that the form exhibits a groundedness in ‘the’ world that is subject to numerous discursive contexts that are not only an attribute of film’s indexicality. These relations of context, indexicality, and verisimilitude will also be made for the documentary economy of blogs.
My interest in exploring the relation of documentary to blogs is twofold. On the one hand, literary and cultural theory, while sophisticated, does not provide a very good heuristic for considering non-fiction work. In fact, the contrary is probably generally the case, since much of this theoretical work has tended to concentrate on demonstrating the fictional tropes present in non-fiction, and therefore the illegitimacy of general claims for ‘truth’ or ‘objectivity’ in traditional non-fiction forms. In cinema studies, documentary theory provides ways through such theoretical impasses, and it is hoped that similar methodologies will be useful to engage with blogs as non–fiction practice.
On the other hand, it is clear that as blogs become increasingly media rich they will offer new forms of web based documentary practice. Having a theoretical methodology that recognizes the affinities between what has been generally understand as a literary genre, and an existing audiovisual documentary practice, may assist in the critical and creative development of these emerging genres.
Modes of Documentary
It would be relatively easy to demonstrate an affinity between documentary and blogs via the modes of documentary that Nichols defines. For example, the four dominant representational modes of documentary: expository, observational, interactive and reflexive, and the characteristics of each, are clearly attributable to blogs in general. However, blogs depart from this typology in typically combining all of these modes within a single ‘text’. While some blogs could be seen to tend towards a specific mode (for example political opinion blogs are probably more expository than reflexive), as a hypertextual and networked genre, a blog will routinely entertain all four modes. This is not a zero sum game of theory where blogs become a catch-all theoretical category, but is rather the expression of the polyvocality that network cultures and literacies afford discursive praxis.
Blogs emphasize this plurality and it forms a basic condition of the genre. This is as much a product of the formal material qualities of blogging — a ‘document’ made up of irregular fragments — as of its historical location at the end of the ‘late age of print’. Modes, in Nichols’ definition, are no longer that which separates works, but are now accommodated within genres that anticipate, recognize, and authorize the continual mixing and recombination of these modes. Not only does this describe blogs, but it would also be a reasonable description of contemporary post–whatever documentary practice.
Index, quotidian, verisimilitude
Documentary arose with the advent of appropriate technologies of record. Today, we are considerably more sophisticated in our understanding of the relations between images (analog or digital), what they purport to represent, and what they may mean. However, what appears untroubled by this discursive complexity is the continuing desire to engage with the world in meaningful and significant ways through the agency of non-fiction. The world is increasingly recorded and replayed, in numerous and volatile contexts. While the ‘objectivity’ of this indexical record is no longer assured, or even particularly relevant, the ability and desire to engage with the world and to then author identity experientially in such contexts, appears as the benchmark for ‘prosumer’ technologies. It is also their potential.
The distinction between consumption and production in this context traces a line between each of these points. At one end is the consuming individual, satisfied with the minor spectacle of their own media production. At the other end is the authoring individual, allowing these tools to be interrogated by, and to interrogate these technologies, via the shift from analog consumption to the pluralities of digital authoring and reproduction. Blogs are located in the threshold between these two points. It is the difference between situating the self as participant in and of the simulacra, versus the possibility of experiential and individuated modes of engagement. It is a writing in, versus a written by.
What is apparent in these new constellations of recording–as–writing, or recording–as–rewriting, is that a groundedness in the world remains. For example, in their everyday use, outside of the realm of the professional media industries, these technologies are used primarily as apparatuses of the everyday. They are used to document the quotidian of the consumer, but in this digital moment, also become amenable to appropriation for uses along or outside of existing media institutions. In other words, these reproductive technologies support the rise of alternative media practices and genres, where their common feature is a change from reproduction to configuration; that is a writing with.
These practices are qualitatively different to pre–digital media use, where authoring was largely constrained to methods of record (photographing being the major form), and the writing of more complex media forms was the preserve of media industries. Blogs are clearly a participant within this change, where the most popular of media, that is writing, has mutated into a discursive practice that exists in an indifferent relation to existing media forms. Hence blogs, like contemporary digital technologies in general, herald and facilitate a return to broader technologies of writing. Such practices, while amenable to fictional genres, also orientate themselves towards the world in a desire to make claims of, or to document this world. An indexical intent is expressed within these new technologies of writing.
This is a key intersection between documentary and blogs. Documentary appropriates the agency granted by the indexical to facilitate the claims it desires to make. Likewise, blogs have embedded within their generic methodology, networked specific indexical ‘markers’. Blogs emphasize an indexical relation between author and world, between what is written and the world. This is not to ignore or discount the regular appearance of subjective writing within blogs. Rather, it is a recognition that blogs ordinarily regard such subjective writing as a consequence of their groundedness in the world of the individual author, which is what separates such entries and the larger genre in general from fiction.
Just as there are subjective and essayist documentaries, which in no way lessens their status as documentaries, blogs not only accommodate but privilege the subjective engagement of individuals with or in the world. Indexicality in this context appears not as a literal condition of a recording medium but via the elements that surround and are included in blogs. Blogs generically include a viable email address, a descriptive paragraph (or link to a biographical homepage), links to other blogs that constitute a discursive community, and the use of textual markers such as proper names, geographical locations, and date and time stamps. As with the supplement of the signature, these ‘collateral’ indexical markers operate as a naïve authenticity, but they also provide that verisimilitude which is an engagement with the world.
This ‘everydayness’ of blogging grounds practice in the lifeworld of the writer, and tends to assist in legitimating the blog in terms of its purchase upon the world. The claim that blogs are documentary-like because they express authentic voices could be viewed as idealistic, but that would be to misread the argument. More simply, blogs routinely contain linguistic, extra–diegetic markers which have the effect of locating the blog, and blogs in general, in the world. The notion of authenticity here is related to the indexical markers described, so that these textual markers operate much like the analog indexical relations evident in film. This is not to overstate the point, but is to insist that when a blogger mentions a place, time, or person, such places, events and people do exist. What is of interest here is not the possibility or impossibility of textual markers grounding such authenticity, but the desire within this environment for such rhetorical and material practices to develop.
Again, this brings blogs close to documentary in their mutual desire to demonstrate connectedness to the world. This is not the same as saying they are objective statements about the world, nor that they are true in the factual sense. But they are making truth claims, and like documentary, blogs have developed an argot that assists in grounding and legitimating these claims. The point is not how secure such actions may be, but simply that both expend considerable semiotic or discursive energy in the obligation to do this.
These textual markers are a form of verisimilitude. This is the economy of documentary argument where, as Nichols’ demonstrates, the documentary ‘effect’ is less a product of the indexicality of the image than a series of contexts that are employed, and read, granting purchase within the world. This purchase is not factual in the quaint sense of being objective, but is understood to be a view about the world that is evidentiary, representational and argumentative. They are claims made about the world and as such are subject to contestation, but they do nevertheless remain claims about the known, or a knowable world.
It would appear then that documentary and blogs share similar representational economies in their engagement with the world. While blogs appear to be more personal than documentary, this does not discount the connection between them. However, the affinity is perhaps more significant not merely because we can demonstrate that both make arguments about the world (all non- fiction does this after all), but that the manner in which this is conducted bears specific and shared formal qualities. In other words, it is productive to consider blogs not so much as a form of non-fiction writing but as a networked documentary practice. What documentary and blogs have in common is the development of specific rhetorical and representational strategies to legitimate themselves as non-fiction. These strategies involve more than the propositional phrases common to non-fiction writing, and extend into specific ways of indicating and grounding themselves within the world. In documentary film, this might be as simple as relying upon the indexicality that is the excess of analog recording media. In blogs, these strategies include proper names and network specific markers (such as email addresses) that attempt to secure the blog in its verisimilitude.
This is why blogs have so rapidly adopted, or been co–opted by, existing recording media, including photos (photoblogs), audio (audioblogs), and video (videoblogs). The accelerating movement of blogs into mixed media is not because blogs facilitate the distribution of these expressive forms, but because they are an immanent medium of record, argument, and representation.
Documentary blogs
Blogs propose a non-fiction, media rich practice that provides a viable model for network specific documentary practice. In this model it is apparent that existing work flows of preproduction, production, exhibition and distribution are irrelevant. In networked writing and production, the distance between creating or doing the work and its dissemination is radically diminished. Additionally, the problem of distribution and exhibition shifts from one of where to exhibit, to ensuring sufficient bandwidth to support possible audiences. The idea of audience now changes. These documentary blogs would now be constituted by small parts that can be interconnected, generally by other practitioners.
The documentary ‘work’ now emerges from the relations established internally and externally by this broader documentary community. Similarly, the use of syndication, now a significant feature of blogs, might allow individual documentary authors to produce subscription ‘feeds’ about specific content. This can be done across a range of different documentary blogs, and individual feeds are then aggregated in a single web page. In other words, there could be multiple documentaries, made up of multiple parts, with multiple author–producers, each syndicated and then collected within a different networked location. These feeds can contain text, image, sound and video. Imagine a documentary that consisted of such video fragments, with descriptive metadata that could be reconnected in multiple contexts.
An example is provided by podcasting, a blog technology that has developed recently. Podcasting is where audio content (for example interviews) is self-produced and published via a blog. Where it departs from being the usual audioblog is that a specific RSS feed is generated from the blog that includes pointers to the audio entries. Client software, similar to an email client, is used to subscribe to these syndicated feeds. Relevant audio files are automatically downloaded to your computer, and in some cases synchronized to your iPod for listening on demand. In the case of podcasting, a grass roots audio documentary and music practice is developing that allows work to be easily distributed and consumed using existing portable audio devices. This is already suggesting interesting possibilities for alternative radiographic and audio–documentaries, particularly in terms of production and distribution. Similar systems are currently under development for video distribution and aggregation.
Another example is offered by the recent development of flickr.com , a networked photo sharing and cataloguing CMS. In this system, each subscriber is able to post photographs, include metadata, and it produces individual RSS feeds. This allows you to place your photo album within an existing blog, to search for photos according to tags and to aggregate content. Using flickr and RSS, it is possible to view on a daily basis, all new photos for any given tag. At the time of writing, a search for ‘Melbourne’ indicates that there are 434 photos. I can view this online as a slide show or subscribe to this via RSS. By subscribing, I could then embed this visual content into other web pages, or simply view the material via a RSS client.
The work in each of these examples is produced by individuals and distributed globally. The content is unedited, in all senses of the term, and it should be apparent how communities of interest and new connectivities may emerge from these processes. These developments pose exciting futures for documentary practice because the same activities can be accomplished using video content. Imagine shooting brief video sequences, editing and publishing them electronically, and then distributing and aggregating this content. What kinds of documentary could be made if content is separated by place, produced by individuals distributed in time, and able to be aggregated according to specific themes in varying combination? Is it still documentary? Of course. Does it have a director? Not really.
This imagined, micro documentary practice, where the medium of production, distribution and publication allows these micro documentaries to be collected and presented more or less ‘together’, would express significant differences in tone, content, style, manner and engagement within the individual works. Such a project would be blog-like, and would be a combination of individual works that may be primarily expository, observational, interactive or reflexive (to borrow Nichols’ terms). But the experience of the work, as the collection of these separate parts, would clearly be of a plural, mixed mode genre and discourse.
At such a moment, documentary has shifted from being mediacentric (video or film for example) and fixed (in length, format, location and so on), towards being networked, open, pluralist, polyvalent and dialogic. This is the threshold we face today. While existing media forms will continue and even thrive, it should be obvious that these technologies afford new genres, styles, and methodologies. This future needs to be created. It offers an alternative documentary practice that is, to borrow some rather fashionable intellectual argot, nomadic, deterritorialised, and smooth. It awaits invention.
Adrian Miles teaches in Media at RMIT University and is involved in practice based video blog research.
References
‘Apple – ilife.’ Apple, 2004. http://www.apple.com/ilife/. Accessed October 17 2004.
Biemann, Ursula, ed. Stuff It: The Video Essay in the Digital Age, Edition Voldemeer, Zurich, 2003.
Geitgey, Adam, ‘The Kaycee Nicole (Swenson) Faq,’ Rootnode.org: Music Magazine and Community, http:// www.rootnode.org/article.php~sid=26, Accessed October 17
Hoem, Jon, ‘Videoblogs As Collective Documentary,’ Diablog, http://infodesign.no/diablog/index.php?p=190&more=1, Accessed October 21, 2004, Kinberg, Joshua, ‘Vipodder.Org’, http://www.vipodder.org, Accessed October 26, 2004
Landow, George, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1997
Miles, Adrian, ‘Podcasting and Vogcasting’ Vlog 2.1, http:// hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/vlog/vlog_archive/000488.html, Accessed October 21, 2004
Moulthrop, Stuart. ‘From Work to Play: Molecular Culture in the Time of Deadly Games.’ First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2004. pp. 56-69.
Nichols, Bill, Introduction to Documentary, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2001.
Nichols, Bill, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1991.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Ed. Terence Hawkes, Methuen, London, 1982.
Weinberger, David. Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. Perseus Books, New York, 2002.
Original Citation:
Miles, Adrian. “A Vision for Genuine Rich Media Blogging.” Uses of Blogs. Eds. Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs. New York: Peter Lang. 213-22.
A Vision for Genuine Rich Media Blogging
Blogs are a rich, diverse and quintessentially disparate medium expressing the internet as a network of noise, connection, communication and difference. Latterly these qualities have been evident with the appearance of traditional time based media, principally audio and video, in blogs and their more recent corollaries pod and video ‘casting’. The incorporation of audiovisual media within blogs has seen the development of substantial new blogging genres and also has the potential to generate new genres of audiovisual content and associated technologies. The key problem confronting the successful incorporation of audio and video into blogging practice revolves around how those qualities that make a blog a blog can become part of time based media, versus the appropriation of blogs as merely distribution or publishing ‘engines’ for audio and video files.
There are, as this anthology indicates, many ways in which blogs can be defined and theorised. The contribution I wish to make to this discussion is to identify blogs with those formal features of blog Content Management Systems (CMS) that can be seen as a material response to the ‘affordances’ of networked writing. Affordance is a term popularised by the industrial designer Donald Norman and refers to a user’s perception of what can be done with an object. In the case of blogs the generic (and hegemonic) form in which blog software has developed ‘affords’ such things as the writing of individual posts that have a heading, date and time stamp, the automatic attribution of authorship, optional provision of comments, category and date archiving, and the automatic provision of a permanent URL at the level of individual entries. As such blogs have also accepted much of the affordances of hypertext, evidenced in the manner in which their basic unit of construction is the post, which is essentially a small chunked hypertextual node. This node is able to be read and understood on its own — you generally do not to read an entire blog to understand a single entry — and by virtue of its permalink can be interwoven hypertextually with other nodes, whether in the same or other blogs hardly matters. Another series of affordances are realised as a consequence of the networked nature of blogging (though of course the hypertextual and networked nature of blogging means that these two key attributes are deeply intertwingled) and this is evident in how blogs generically contain blogrolls, trackback, RSS, permalinks, and also the increasingly common provision of links to third party blogosphere, folksonomy or social software sites such as technorati, blogstreet, flickr, del.icio.us and blogshares.
In general, these generic attributes can be understood as a consequence of blogs as a networked hypertextual writing activity, where such a practice has been instantiated in the material technological affordances of specific CMS’s. These tools make certain sorts of writing, particularly a writing that is beyond or outside of writing narrowly conceived as my words on my screen, possible and form the foundation of blogging as a medium. In addition blogging also expresses many of those qualities that were originally attributed to hypertext more generally. For example they are multivocal, multilinear and have moved past print to produce complex intertwingled docuverses of interconnecting fragments.
Many of these qualities are also utilised in audio and video blogging, however, it is also apparent that much of what can be characterised as the basic affordances of blogs are lost, or ignored, in audio and video blogging practice. To illustrate this we can perhaps use the recent and explosive development of audio blogging. The ability to embed audio in a web page (as opposed to making an audio file available for download and playing in a separate player) has been available since 1996 when Apple first released a browser plugin that supported QuickTime. However, it was the development of podcasting clients in 2004 that seeded the rapid and exponential rise of audio enabled blogs. These clients, in exactly the same way that RSS aggregators facilitated the rise of RSS as a major distribution form (in fact pod and video cast clients are essentially RSS aggregators that support media enclosures) enabled users to subscribe to RSS feeds that contained audio enclosures. These enclosures are pointers within a RSS feed that locate media objects, for example an audio file, and download this in the background. In the case of podcasting, as the eponymous title indicates, the best clients automatically synchronise these audio files into Apple’s iTunes library and automatically place them onto the users portable mp3 player to listen to at their leisure. With the rise of the video iPod, exactly the same can now be done for video files.
RSS feeds, which have driven the success of pod and videocasting, are generally automatically produced by blog CMS’s, and where they are not several third party services are available to produce appropriate RSS feeds. It is these feeds that users subscribe to, and in this manner audio and video files are distributed to clients. This aspect of pod and videocasting clearly takes advantages of blogs as distributed personal publication and distribution technologies, and has successfully appropriated a lightweight protocol (RSS) to provide the infrastructure to develop an alternative distribution regime. This is impressive, and has lead to a rise of ‘prosumer’ commentary, particularly in podcasting, where the best content is, as with blogging more generally, on a par with any commentary heard on public radio, with of course the corresponding observation that the worst content is, frankly, deplorable — this is after all the up and down side of any distributed and accessible networked technology that allows individuals to become media producers and distributors. This content, and here I include audio and video blogging, is as diverse in style, content, presentation and technical excellence as writing is in text based blogging. It includes pieces produced to professional or near broadcast standards, through to what can be generously described as naive media works. However, while this diversity of content and style is a feature that audio and video blogging shares with traditional blogging, this is by and large all that the majority of content being produced and distributed in this manner achieves. In other words most of the qualities that makes a blog a blog have been translated into content but the specific networked and hypertextual affordances of blogging, have been elided. This is, of course, why the suffix casting has been so successful and intuitive for those undertaking these activities as it is, by and large, a practice that looks more to old media models than the affordances and possibilities already realised and provided in what is now the canonical model of text blogging.
I would like to critique in more detail aspects of existing practice, before proceeding to a discussion of other possibilities and futures. As a video blogger I certainly don’t believe that the revolution has yet happened, in spite of the runaway success of podcasting and the rapidly pursuing videocasting. To date, the major achievements of both these media rich forms of blogging is best celebrated and understood in the light of existing media institutions and traditional mass media. As with traditional text based blogging, it was not that long ago that to have a publication with an international audience would require very substantial capital outlays. Even if self publishing the cost of printing, distribution, advertising, and of course any editorial and writing costs, are potentially enormous and so have always effectively been a barrier to entry. This is, of course, one of the reasons why in capitalist economies mass media developed — audience must be maximised to generate a return on this capital outlay. The Web has of course changed this dramatically, so that anyone could write and distribute their work for negligible costs internationally. Blogs have taken this a step further than the traditional (and former) web homepage by allowing any individual to become a site publisher, rather than merely the author of individual pages. Exactly the same constraints, though with even greater capital costs, confronted those wishing to broadcast video (television) and audio (radio). In virtually every country access to spectrum is state controlled and licences for access are extraordinarily expensive, and this is before you have paid for a studio, on–air talent, the necessary audiovisual equipment, and so on. Audio and video blogging are a minor revolution from this point of view as, just as with text blogging, the cost of entry is minimal, to the point of being trivial for those in first world nations with disposable income. This includes the technologies required, where the majority of these author–producer–directors use domestic audiovisual technologies and commonly free audio and video editing software that comes included with their PC operating systems.
It is this ease of access to publishing, combined with the ease of distribution via a blog CMS, particularly with the rise of enclosures in RSS, that offers the first major contribution of audio and video blogging to media culture. This has seen the rise of ‘citizen journalism’ and alternative media, for example. However, alternative in this context needs to be strongly recognised as alternative to mainstream mass media, and certainly does not extend to alternative or other conceptions of audio and televisual media per se — the material forms of audio and video distributed and published via blogs remains resolutely conservative in its conception of what audio and video actually is as a material practice and object. Furthermore, it is possible to critique much of the recent commentary around these alternative media practices (much of it appearing within blogs) in terms of a particular North American (more specifically United States) experience of mass media which is marked by its homogeneity and commercial imperatives — most of the rest of the world has the experience of state run media institutions which generally support significantly more cultural and aesthetic diversity than mainstream US media, and do not rely (and regularly don’t even include) any form of advertising. In addition, the long tail notwithstanding, most of the rhetoric about alternative media practices, remembering that alternative means alternative to mass media, participates in an economy of audience maximisation that is very similar to that which occupies mass media — after all, if you are attempting or claiming to offer other voices to that of the dominant media institutions the effectiveness of this alternative does appear to be premised on confusing influence with audience scale.
This does mean that audio and video blogging is a media practice that sits in an interesting and potentially productive tension with existing audiovisual media institutions. It currently favours individual production versus existing capital and time intensive industrial production models, supports a diversity of voices, and is comfortable with a range of genres and production standards. However, as those familiar with the histories of film, video, and sound will appreciate, such a list offers little, if anything, that distinguishes audio and video blogging from existing practice — there is a strong and established tradition in each of these media that recognises and supports an extremely diverse range of genres, production standards and the legitimacy of self defined creative constraints. What remains novel in the audio and video blogging model is only the range and ease of distribution.
This is not the case with text blogging, and this difference must be made clear to see how constrained existing audio and video blogging is as a blog based practice. Blogs do considerably more than provide ease of publication and distribution for a diversity of voices. For example, as indicated, they support and have lead to the development of emergent communities of practice through the provision of blogrolls, trackbacks and similar services. These products of good blogging should not be thought of as adjuncts or supplements to blogging, but are integral to blogging as a different writing practice, a writing that has recognised the network as an immanent site of intensive connections. Blogs are about these relations between parts, it is absurd to think of there being a single blog (whereas it is trivial to conceive of their being one book, in fact many religions are premised on such an assumption) precisely because a blog is determined by its relation to other blogs, whether individual posts or entire blogs. If you publish your blog in print, i.e. make it a book, then it is no longer a blog, its ‘blogness’ is broken. In the case of audio and video blogging it is the presence of audio and video files that defines it as an audio or video blog. However, it is possible to remove the audio and video from the context of the blog and to publish it in other media and for there to be no intrinsic change, or loss, to the material. Currently you can place the video content of your videoblog onto DVD and project it in a gallery or cinema, and it is for all intents and purposes the same content as appears in the videoblog. Exactly the same applies to audio content. This is why podcasting can be successful — there is nothing intrinsic in the media file that necessarily relates it to its ‘blogness’ and so it survives this translation with ease. In fact, it is conceivable and trivial to imagine a television show for broadcast along the lines of “Australia’s best videoblogs”, and similarly a radio show based on “Australia’s funniest podcasts”. It is possible to conceive of an alternative audio and video blogging practice in the same way that text blogging is an alternative media form to the book and print. This alternative steps past the reductive consideration of content as that which constitutes and defines audio and video blogging and recognises that it is the formal material properties and affordances of the network as distributed and interlinked that have been fundamental to the development and construction of blogging as a different writing practice. The problem for audio and video blogging then becomes one of how these media artefacts may weave amongst and interlink this network.
We have seen that pod and video blogging share some of the qualities of text blogging through its multiple genres, voices and, for want of a better term, production standards. The work ranges from the genuinely naïve, passing through wannabe broadcast quality through to a deliberately low bit networked aesthetic. However, lets consider some of the elements missing from audio and video blogging in relation to blogging more generally to see how it could be different — after all it is supposed to be audio and video blogging and not merely audio and video on demand or via syndication!
Currently audio and video content in blogs is unable to be used in the ways that we take for granted with text, and more specifically is unable to manage most of the now ordinary tasks of posts in a blog. For example, within any contemporary web browser or RSS reader I can click and drag over text in any blog entry, from any blog, and then copy this text using the software’s generic edit–copy command. This text can then be pasted elsewhere and so it is technically trivial for me to quote and so comment upon or otherwise engage with, someone else’s writing. If I listen to audio or view video in my browser or RSS client, there is no similarly trivial manner in which I can select some audio or video to then paste into my audio or video entry. If I open the audio or video file in a specific player application, for example QuickTime Player Pro, I can copy and paste someone else’s content into my own, as I have always been able to do with text, however to do this I need to know considerably more about HTML, the web, and file formats than is required for any other user simply wishing to copy and paste what they find in a text blog. Why is this the case? Why, for example, does the QuickTime plugin not allow the user to nominate a passage of audio or video and copy and paste it directly from the browser’s Edit menu — this is exactly what you can do using QuickTime Player Pro outside of the browser, and presumably would be trivial to implement.
In addition, the simple ability to edit and paste audio and video from within your browser or RSS client (after all this is where we do our blog reading) points out a further anomaly in relation to audio and video in blogs. If I do quote your text in my blog post, and follow the usual citational protocols of linking to the source of the quote in its individual entry, then your blog will know that I have written about that entry via the use of trackback. This is not the case with audio and video, so even if I were to open your audio file in QuickTime Player, make a selection, copy and paste this into my blog audio post and publish this there is no equivalent to trackback supported so your audio file will never know that it has been quoted. This is not merely a technical question, after all an architecture as sophisticated as QuickTime (which can read XML, supports the dynamic editing of text tracks and largely has all the functionality required to allow the types of intermovie communication to support some time based equivalent to trackback) can already do this, and so its lack is more appropriately a theoretical, critical or ideological question where the absence of these functions, indeed the largely complete disregard of these as possibilities within the audio and video blogging communities, demonstrates the extent to which audio and video blogging as a practice looks backwards to existing media for its methods rather than towards the possibilities of blogging.
This simple example of quoting is useful to foreground the manner in which the key aspects of audio and video blogging is only the presence of audio and video and these are in fact ignorant of the network and its affordances. This is evidenced not only in the simple problem of quotation, but is also evident in the rise of syndication as a major component of audio and video blogging so that the media files are routinely viewed or used with a dramatic loss of their networked and blogged contexts. In other words title of the entry, date of the entry, the presence of comments or trackbacks, descriptive or associated text in the blog entry that accompanies the audio or video, links within that text, and so on, are gone. The media file remains utterly mute in relation to the network, and so remains firmly embedded within the paradigms of audio and video traditionally conceived. It is possible using existing technologies to include links within audio and video where these links can be time based and so only present during relevant periods of the entry, and in the case of video, or audio with a simple image track (for example a still image) they can also be located on parts of the image just like a traditional imagemap. Once again the problem is not technical, QuickTime has these affordances, but the tools to easily link from and to parts of time based media in the manner established by text blogs falls outside of the paradigms by which time based media is understood. In this manner the existing uses of audio and video in blogs is much closer to print and the book than the hypertextual fluidity of text within any common garden variety blog. Once you have published your audio or video blog entry (regardless of the efforts to produce it) it becomes a closed and whole object that is deaf to the network that it ostensibly participates within.
What it might mean for audio and video media to be porous to the network? To allow quotation, interlinking and to develop a media which is as permeable and granular as networked text? These questions cannot be answered until we have tools that enable this to happen as easily as it can be for text. The narratives that could then be sung remain to be discovered. Blogs are the first online popular media to have recognised that relations between parts are an immanent quality to a properly networked practice, and while audio and video remains closed to the network audio and video blogging can be little more than audio and video in a blog, rather than audio and video blogging. Until this event occurs, the moment which in retrospect makes it obvious why audio and video ought to be plastic and permeable, the culture of the media star remains uncontested and central to audio and video blogging which accounts for why much of this content mimetically mirrors the direct address forms popularised by mass popular media. This paucity of invention mistakes style for new paradigms and with the rise of mobile non–networked devices there is every opportunity for TV and radio to kill the yet to be born video blogging star.
References
Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale (N.J.): Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991.
Landow, George P. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Miles, Adrian. “Media Rich Versus Rich Media (or Why Video in a Blog Is Not the Same as a Video Blog).” Blogtalk Downunder. http://incsub.org/blogtalk/?page_id=74 Sydney, 2005. Accessed November 4, 2005.
Miles, Adrian. “BlogTalk Prototype 1.” Vlog 3.0. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vlog/archives/2005/04/22/blogtalk-prototype-;1/ April 22, 2005. Accessed November 4, 2005.
Miles, Adrian. “BlogTalk Prototype 3 (Small).” Vlog 3.0. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vlog/archives/2005/05/04/blogtalk-prototype-3-small/ May 4, 2005. Accessed November 4, 2005.
Nelson, Theodor Holm. Literary Machines 91.1: The Report on, and of, Project Xanadu Concerning Word Processing, Electronic Publishing, Hypertext, Thinkertoys, Tomorrow’s Intellectual Revolution, and Certain Other Topics Including Knowledge, Education and Freedom. Sausalito: Mindful Press, 1992.
Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things. London: MIT Press, 1988.
Simmons, Jen. “Citizen Journalism.” Multimedia.05. http://teaching.jensimmons.com/multimedia/2005/10/citizen-journalism.htm October 14, 2005. Accessed November 4, 2005.
Zach on the dna symposium blog has some good points, wondering why so many wanted to call the works “films” and if this was a two cultures divide thing. I agree with the questions raised about the problematic terminology, and suspect some if it was less a two cultures thing than people wanting to self identify what there practice might be, and preserving this into this other stuff. I don’t think it translates that well, which is why the work and comments of someone like Kat Cizek are significant. She certainly has highly significant projects in this domain, but does not frame this as film making, academically it was classic action research, but she’s an artist. So it has mixes of lots of things, but as she said I think on the final morning, it is enabling, protecting, and collaborating. As was clear from the recent work, there is a direction, sentiments, a milieu, but it was the web developer who came back with the webGL. Kat’s art is the realisation of the overall, and the intelligence and ability to create and work with a team where participants know they can do this, and she can respond. It is a rare ability.
In relation to Zach’s points about terminological awkwardness, I personally think ‘databasie’ is a word that should not see the light of day, but aside from my personal view there, we need to recognise that we don’t “watch” a databasie, we need a specific term there too. But they’re not films, they’re not movies. Many are what we would have once been happy to call non fiction multimedia. Still not sure why they still aren’t non fiction multimedia. But hey, I don’t even think they’re much about databases either, so for my money perhaps non fiction multimedia and programmatic non fiction, computational non fiction?
Picking up where I left off thinking through #dnasymposium. I’m going to use Richard Lachman’s project Diamond Road Online as the basis of a thought experiment. Let me be really really clear, no, I mean CLEAR. I thought the project was fantastic, and I was very impressed by what he presented yesterday. So my thought experiment is not a critique of the project, but is to use that material to think with.
So, as he told us, the TV version was 3 hours but they recut it all into 90 second vignettes and ended up with 8 hours of material. I think that produces 320 vignettes (lexias, sequences, whatevers). Let’s take blogging as a model of serialised content that makes sense in a networked environment. I will publish 2 a week. That’s 160 weeks of content. Since Richard’s already built a logic engine for the story (the relation of the parts) then in, say, week 10 when I might find this for the first time there are links/thumbnails/contextual information showing me what of the previous weeks are directly relevant to this one. I can find the others anyway, in and of themselves.
Each 90 seconds is self sufficient. Makes sense in itself, by itself. I might subscribe via RSS so it comes to me, because I want it to. I might visit the actual site, I might reblog about it, even embedding one of the videos into my own blog, which trackbacks (links) back to the Diamond Road Online site. The story grows in time, in small parts. Yes, it is Dickens. But it has an arc, it has multiplicity, it has a timeline which is both in the real world and of its own making. However, it also lets the same ‘stuff’ be distributed, consumed, used, without me having to ‘digest’ for an hour. I might, I might not, but I can. Each piece is not a monument, the overall work and experience? Perhaps. But it has a small footprint in so many ways, and that matters.
Original Citation:
Miles, Adrian. “Media Rich versus Rich Media (Or Why Video in a Blog is not the same as a Video Blog). Proceedings of BlogTalk DownUnder. Sydney, May. http://incsub.org/blogtalk/?page_id=74
Blogs are now a media commonplace with regular mentions and appearances in mainstream media and an apparently exponential rise in use within education, knowledge management communities, and various forms of Web based self publishing. While definitions of what constitutes a blog are, in the manner of all such definitions, problematic, videoblogs pose this problem afresh with recent and rapid developments in this nascent field.
My own views on video blogs are well documented, and have been for some time (Miles 2000). There are specific qualities or properties that a blog has which makes it different to existing forms of electronic writing and demonstrate that blogs are a medium in their own right.
For video blogging to be video blogging (as opposed to video within a blog), similar qualities or attributes need to be available to those who wish to make and view (or use) blog based video. A specific aspect of this is the granularity of blogs and ways in which we may conceive of video as being similarly granular – that video needs to be as granular as text. This hypertext essay is a discussion that has developed from an iterative theoretical and design project where video prototypes have been developed to explore and make visible the possibilities for alternative forms of video blogging practice.
The first prototype provides links to specific web pages with a combination of thumbnails and time based links, the second prototype begins to pose questions around quoting video within a video, while the third provides detailed commentary upon an individual, external videoblog entry.
Dave Winer offers a technical definition of a blog, where “[a] weblog is a hierarchy of text, images, media objects and data, arranged chronologically, that can be viewed in an HTML browser” (Winer, 2003). This is a patently poor definition, at it successfully includes the home page of most major news organisations, and probably any auction in ebay! While Winer also recognises the importance of a personal voice in blogs, that is “writing about their own experience” (Winer 2003) – which goes some way to possibly removing ebay from potential best fits – I’d argue that any compelling definition of blogs requires a combination of technical characteristics, embeddedness in a life world, and emergence.
The technical elements are reasonably clear (though subject to change as our systems continue to evolve), and involve the use of a Content Management System (CMS) to manage the administration and automate several key aspects of a blog. This includes the management of a blogroll, permalinks, date and time stamps, archives and categories. It also recognises that a blog consists of multiple posts that are displayed in reverse chronological order (most recent at the top), and that these posts are the basic, or primary, structural unit of a blog.
Embeddedness refers to the manner in which a blog is situated within the life world of its author (or authors). This is a stronger statement than emphasising personal experience, only because it moves it away from the presumption that personal may equal the subjective and intimate. Embeddedness, on the other hand, recognises that a blog is about what its author finds relevant in the world, that such relevance may have a very fine focus, (for example documenting an experimental practice or exploring parenthood), and that such embeddedness has consequences for the sorts of truth claims and discursive engagement that is common to blogs (Miles, 2005).
Finally, emergence (which in the context of this essay will not receive the attention it deserves) describes the patterns of connection that are produced, in situ, through the activities of blogging. These are the relations formed by the interconnections of blogrolls and the lattice of links between individual blog posts (something that the development of trackbacks have responded to as they are a simple way to make visible these interconnections). These form patterns of relations that build and vary over time which are unfixed, fluid and reflect vectors of interest. They are, in a nutshell, how blogs are small world networks (Watts 2003) where such networks express discursive communities of interest.
As a consequence of these features blogs exhibit very high granularity, and while we could argue forever as to whether such fine granularity constructed the medium, or if the medium occasioned the development of tools to support this piecemeal structure, it is obvious that it is these structures that allows blogs to be a networked writing rather than writing on the network, a writing that is porous to the network.
There are numerous ways in which blogs may be defined (see also Walker, 2003, and Wilkie 2003a, 2003b). However while the intricacies of definitions are useful for some scholastic exercises, what is of more contemporary significance is the recognition that blogs are now not merely a noun and a verb (I blog, I have a blog), but a medium in their own right.
This might be controversial – I don’t really know – however it is clear that there are now numerous sorts of blogs (diet blogs, war blogs, political blogs, research blogs, group blogs, and so on) and that as a concept it makes little sense to consider them collectively as a genre. We have genres of blogs, just as we have genres of novels, television, painting and cinema. Each of the latter are media, not genres. Each of these media support and allows an extremely diverse range of practices and expressions.
Blogs are at this point, which is a useful moment if only because it helps force us to recognise that the Internet, or the Web, is not a medium in the common held (pragmatic) sense, unless we want to consider paper as media. (Which it is, but I assume my point is clear.)
It is reasonable to approach the definition of blogs from two different views. One is, perhaps, formalist in its concentration on the technical or technological aspects and qualities of blogging. The other is more literary or otherwise post-something theoretical in its orientation as it emphasises the textual or writerly nature of blogs.
In the first instance, blogs tend to be defined by such features as the use of a Content Management System (CMS), and the presence of the specific formal features that blogs have developed as a genre. For example to consist of multiple posts which have a heading and time and date stamp, the presence of permalinks, blogroll, and support for comments and trackback. Several of these terms are neologisms that have developed in response to the need to define a blog nomenclature, that is they’re quite specific to blogs, and each in quite specific ways have helped to determine what a blog actually is.
The second approach accepts the presence of these technical aspects of blogging, but generally treats these as secondary to the primary qualities of blogs. This is much like a discussion that may wish to conceive of defining the novel (for example) where the material or technical elements of the medium, for example that it traditionally consists of printed marks on serially bound and numbered paper that is collected between two covers, is regarded as of less significance than the fact that novels are fictional, authored, and have a specific narrative structure. Such an approach, for example, is what we would ordinarily understand literary theory to be, which has of course produced numerous sophisticated, and valuable approaches and methodologies.
In blog theory this approach tends to concentrate on blogging as primarily a textual problem. This may be extremely broad ranging, and participates in a long tradition of textual or theoretical scholarship that continues the Platonic reification of print where the materiality and technical apparatus of the medium is considered secondary to its behaviour as discourse. However, it is clear that blogging as a medium has, like other media, developed via a sophisticated series of exchanges between the constraints and affordances of enabling technologies and the intersections of individual and collective desire.
Granularity is a term common to the hypertext literature (as any casual search of the ACM hypertext proceedings will show) and refers to the scale of the units used within a larger system. For example, the Web can be considered highly granular (in general) because it is made up of many millions of individual parts, each of which appears well suited to being interconnected in quite unstructured (non hierarchical and multilinear) ways.
Books, on the other hand, are not as granular as the pages within the book are generally designed to be used in a fixed order, and as an object you tend to have to connect (to use hypertext terminology) to the entire book when wanting to insert it into other contexts. (This is the role of footnotes and bibliographies, for example).
This difference is simple, but illuminating. In a page based essay I need to refer to the entire containing object, lets say the book, and the reader, if they wished to view what I am referring to are obligated to get all of that object. Hence we think of it as being not particularly granular. On the other hand, in a web based essay I may provide a link to the specific page from which I’m citing (which may be one page amongst many in a larger work) but there is no need for myself or the reader to have to get the entire ‘object’ for this connection to take place. Hence we think of this has being highly granular.
Text, as text, and prior to considering it in terms of genres or discourses, is highly granular, as is video ordinarily understood as consisting of narratives composed sequences, in turn composes of shots.
In the context of hypertext and multilinear, interactive web based material, a premium is placed on formats, genres, or systems that support a high level of granularity because such systems offer multiple possibilities for (or of) connection and reconnection.
Text is, by and large, granular. Pragmatically its lowest level of granularity is the letter (we even have a specific word indicating this property), and then it scales to words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and from there into a very wide range of discursive objects.
This is recognised (and taken for granted) in all our digital tools that deal with text – for example in any contemporary operating system there will be a series of default behaviours that apply to words – in OS X I can double click a word in any application and the word will be automatically selected. In Microsoft Word it is a given that letters are a major minimal unit, and so I can add, delete and manipulate them at this relatively fine level of granularity. The same rules more or less scale elegantly to larger constellations, hence I can also work easily on words, sentences, paragraphs and sections in Word.
Exactly the same holds for digital video, where minimal units (called shots) are combined into larger sets (sequences) which in turn are assembled into more complex units. Similarly, within the tools available for digital video production there is an implicit recognition of this granularity so that editing software is able to easily identify, manipulate and operate upon these minimal units. In other words you can split complete shots into smaller shots, address footage to an extremely high degree of accuracy via timecode and there will be tools to manage these shots as they intrinsically recognise shots as a meaningful minimal unit.
The profound difference in our understanding of granularity in text and video lies, however, not in our tools of production, but in our technologies of reception.
Granularity is a common term in hypertext theory that is used to describe the level of detail that a particular object or element may have. Detail, in this instance, is if you like, a level of focus. When something is very granular it means it consists of small units (the literature refers to these units in various ways, including ‘chunks’, ‘lexias’, and ‘nodes’), and conversely something with little granularity tends to be a larger discursive object.
Hence, granularity does not refer simply to the size or scale of a unit but more significantly describes the minimal size or scale of a unit that retains discursive integrity. A clumsy term, but one that shows that the degree of granularity is not a measurement of quantity but of quality – a blog post retains this integrity, half a blog post doesn’t.
While it could be argued that our ability to reference individual pages in a book are also an instance of such granularity, this misses the specific nature of what is intended by the term. It is not that something may consist of smaller parts that can be identified, but that these smaller parts are suitably or wholly meaningful in themselves. In other words I may refer to a specific page in a book or essay, but there is a recognition that that reference is primarily to find the mentioned material, and to understand it appropriately its surrounding material (possibly the rest of the book) needs to be read. Certainly at least recognised as a more significant whole than the part which I have quoted or alluded to. This is not the case with blogs (and with web pages in general). The individual entry is written and designed to be a self sufficient utterance, by and large.
In relation to many other written forms, and here I have in mind particularly academic genres, blogs exhibit a very high degree of granularity. They are, to use the extremely apt and popular phrase of David Weinberger, ’small pieces loosely joined’ (Weinberger, 2003).
Blogs, as generally recognised, consist of short entries that are displayed in reverse chronological order. The blog is regarded as more or less the ongoing sum of these smaller parts. However, each of these parts is largely self contained, so that a reader can read any individual blog entry and in most circumstances understand what it is about.
This makes the blog highly granular because it is possible to link to individual entries within any particular blog. This is why permalinks as a convention developed – a permanent address was needed for an entry at the time of publication as the URL of the homepage of the blog is not the permanent URL of any individual post, yet it is posts, not blogs that need to be linked to.
It is this granularity that has been instrumental in defining blogs as a medium, and has enabled the development of technologies and practices specific to blogging. This includes the development of trackback, comment systems but also the rise of the convention of having named posts which are date and time stamped in some manner, as well as the application of categories to individual entries. Without such granularity, our blogs would merely be essays, diaries, or journals.
It is also this granularity that has allowed blogs to be woven by the network. A blog consists of multiple posts but also multiple links in and out. These links point to parts, not wholes (individual entries, not entire sites) and it is the presence and density of these links that are fundamental to blogs as emergent systems (Miles 2005b). The issue for a video blogging practice is to try to conceive of video as being similarly granular.
The first prototype developed for this paper consists of a simple QuickTime movie that contains three sprite tracks. Within this specific work the interaction is very simple, as the video plays (the content is me talking to camera about being able to quote networked artefacts in online video) time based links appear which, when clicked, pause the video and launch their relevant urls in new browser windows.
The thumbnails are derived from the web pages that are mentioned in the commentary, and have two ’states’. The first is when they first appear in the timeline, which coincides with their mention in my commentary. Prior to this point the user is not aware of their presence, and they don’t actually exist in the video – they are literally time based. (As a consequence this also means that the user does not know how many might appear.) During their first appearance, and while their context is relevant to what is being discussed in the video, clicking on the sprite will pause the commentary and load the target url in a new browser window.
The second state occurs after the link to the external site is no longer relevant to the commentary as something else is being discussed. Clicking the the thumbnail at this point returns the video playhead to the moment in the discussion where that particular external reference is first mentioned, giving the user the opportunity to retrieve the context of the quote in terms of the commentary. Again, clicking during this interval will pause the commentary and load the reference URL into a new browser window.
Clicking at this point could have simply paused the video, as in the first instance, and loaded the reference URL into a browser window, however a decision was made that the context in which the quote was made should take precedence over simply following the link. This is the case in print citation, from which this is more or less derived, since in print the source of a quotation (for example citation details in a footnote or bibliography) are always offered in the context of the original quotation – the quoted object is always intimately linked in its local context to its source. In print you cannot avoid the context in which the cited material exists, where context means the other material (let’s say text) that surrounds the quoted material. In effect the same principle is being applied here, so that the context of quotation is always recoverable.
This first prototype demonstrates that links within video can have such a level of granularity – the links can apply to discrete parts of the image, much like an imagemap, and they can be time based where their behaviour may vary over time. Such granularity within video is fundamental to any conception of video that is to be blog like, and assists us in beginning to conceive of possible models for how such a video practice may operate. For example, while this prototype provides a simple visual mechanism by which we can identify the presence of links, and make them available, it does not indicate the destination URL, and lacks many of the basic qualities utilised in a blog, for example a post title (whether of the videoblog prototype or of the linked URLs), URL, date or time information or even where in the video the links appear – the user must view the video, or use the scrub bar, to find the location of any links within the work. Finally, this prototype specifically cites networked objects realised as URLs within a video stream, whereas the second prototype begins to explore the idea of citing video within video.
The second prototype that was developed begins to utilise and explore more specific qualities and properties of a video blog practice where video from other videoblogs is included within an individual video piece a practice I have described elsewhere as softvideo (Miles 2003.)
In this work there is a commentary and video track of myself, discussing in broad terms the idea of being able to cite other video within a video work. Alongside this video pane there is a second video pane (or window) which will load the video blogs that are mentioned by me in my commentary. These will only be loaded if the user clicks while they are being mentioned, otherwise no other material is loaded and displayed in the second video pane.
Technically this prototype uses a feature of QuickTime known as child movies, a term that bears some affinities with hypertext theory’s use of similar terminology to describe hypertext structure (for example the use of sibling, parent, and child as common descriptors of hypertextual hierarchy). The prototype is the parent movie, so acts as a container for other content that resides outside of this individual movie. Such material may reside on a local drive, or in this case, elsewhere on the network. In this specific instance the only material being loaded from outside of the prototype are two other videos, one from the video blog of Eric Rice (2005), and the other from Jay Dedman’s video blog (Dedman 2005). These, as in prototype one, are only available when being specifically mentioned in the commentary, and require the user to click the quote mark icon that appears between the two video panes.
This user action will pause the commentary, and then load the mentioned video from its specific networked location, in this case from either of two other video blogs. What is important to note here is that this content is only downloaded by the client (user or reader) if they click on it, and that this content resides in a location which I have no control over. If the owner of that content removes it, or changes its location, then this work will be ‘broken’ in the same way that linking to an external page that is later removed (or moved) will generate a 404 ‘Page not Found’ error.
An advantage of only downloading this content when it is requested is to minimise the bandwidth demands of video quotation systems – if the user doesn’t want to view the mentioned material then it is not downloaded to their system. This saves bandwidth and time and minimises for the client, and the authors (the author of the parent video and the authors of the child content that is being quoted) the overheads that such a system may incur where child movies are not utilised. For example, if I had simply used QuickTime to copy and paste the other video into this movie, then the total file size would be dramatically increased, whether clients wanted to view the cited video or not. Alternatively if I had utilised some other strategy (for example preloading the quoted video in case it was to be requested) then the author of the quoted video, and the viewer of the parent video, would still be accruing unnecessary bandwidth charges.
If the user clicks on the quote icon when no specific video is being mentioned then a jpeg is loaded (again this is loaded from elsewhere on the network) indicating that nothing is being quoted at that particular moment. In addition a controller is provided for the second video pane so that the user has control over the playback of this second video.
There is quite a bit that this prototype fails to do, or does poorly. For example as with the first prototype it does not indicate the source URLs of the quoted video, or the blog pages where this video is located. Some access to the original material is important since in a blog it is an established practice to provide a link to another blog post when your entry refers to this content. In addition, the interface is not particularly clear, so it is not obvious to the user that they need to click the quotation icon between the video panes to load the external video. This is a legacy of my own specific creative aesthetic practice where I deliberately encourage users to explore a video to find what or how it may be interactive, an aesthetic that is not particularly amenable to a generic interface for video blogging.
However, the work does quote video within another video, it does provide commentary or comments that allude to this work in a manner that is sympathetic to blogging practice, and it does this in a manner that begins to indicate ways in which a blog based video practice weaves with video in ways analogous to how we weave with text. The third prototype begins from this point, and attempts to explore it more forcefully.
Prototype three extends the ideas sketched in the first prototype, and then developed further in the second. This work, the most complex of the three, involves the use of two child movie tracks and an interactive track that consists of fourteen buttons.
One of the child movie tracks loads a video blog entry by Michael Verdi, his “Vlog Anarchy” (Verdi 2005) . This is displayed in a video pane in the lower right of the prototype, and in the original prototype this comes directly from where Verdi has published this video. This video does not automatically play, which is the case with the second prototype, as in this example the video is quoted in parts, and not in its entirety. This is, in many ways, a stronger example of quotation than the second prototype, simply because in the second example the entire video work is played, or available for play, whereas the usual model for quotation is, of course, to only cite a part of the entire passage or work.
In this example quotation is performed by the user clicking on any of the fourteen available buttons. Each of these plays a specific section of Verdi’s video, and only that section, and once it has finished playing it then plays my commentary that responds to Verdi’s points or observations. These commentaries, which are only sound tracks (there is no video associated with my comments) are loaded as childmovie tracks, and so as in the second prototype are only loaded and heard if requested by the user.
The video windows that appear down the left side of the video are of me, and have no sound attached, they are multiple videos suggesting and proposing ways in which we can also recognise that video in these contexts is as much an act of assemblage (of montage and collage together, see Miles 2003) as it is of publishing a ’single’ window of audiovisual content.
This model is the most mature in terms of its consideration of video as granular. The parent movie, which orchestrates my commentary and the quotation of the specific passages from Verdi’s video, constrains which parts of the quoted material is available, so exhibits the idea of quotation as selection. In addition, my use of child movies to load the commentary means that the user, if they wish to view and hear section twelve, does not need to download and listen to commentaries one to eleven. Similarly a section can be easily reviewed and replayed by clicking again on the relevant button. Such random access, the ability to move from any part to another, is of fundamental importance to any system of quotation in time based media.
However, since Verdi’s video (which is nearly five minutes in duration and nineteen megabytes) is, in network and blogging terms, a large object, a major constraint in this prototype is that it cannot work successfully until all of this external video has been downloaded. This is for the simple reason that if the user selects a commentary button that refers to a sequence that occurs late in Verdi’s material this can only be played if it has been downloaded into the parent video – you cannot physically jump to a point in the data if this data has not arrived yet! As a consequence this work is scripted in such a manner that it cannot be played until all of this video has been downloaded and cached locally, which then allows the work to operate properly. A second version was also made, where I recompressed Verdi’s original 320 by 240 pixel video clip down to 160 by 120 pixels (which is the size of the video window I am displaying it within in the prototype). This has the benefit of reducing the file size to 5 megabytes, which means it loads and plays much faster, and also significantly reduces the processor demands of the prototype.
In other words, because Verdi’s work is, in many ways, ungranular (and to the extent it is conceived of as an entire or whole object it strongly mirrors most existing video blog practice) to quote it within another video requires the incorporation of all of this material within the prototype so that parts of it can then be viewed. This is a legacy of the technical infrastructure of the HTTP protocol, and of QuickTime, so that there is no easy system to deliver specified parts of a file rather than the file in its entirety (this is technically possible and available and is known as byte serving).
Text is granular. Blogs, as perhaps the first indigenous medium to have developed on the web, are granular. Video on the web generally is not.
This is an important, and possibly fundamental distinction, for as I have argued video is highly granular (certainly as granular as text) during the production process yet once published it becomes quite closed to all of those activities that granularity affords. These activities have two basic aspects, one is granularity in terms of the network, and the other is granularity in terms of users.
In current practice videobloggers compress and embed their content into their blogs and this content becomes a closed object. It is assumed and expected that users will watch or listen to this material in its entirety, and is presented and constructed around these assumptions. This is, for example, why it is common for videobloggers to have opening and closing credits to their work – they assume that anyone will view the entire piece, and hence credit sequences are a part of this work. However, if we could quote just parts of a videoblog, just as we do with text, then obviously credit sequences are redundant. Furthermore, once we quote parts, not wholes, the assumptions that credit sequences rely upon become visible, and we will need to develop alternative methods for nominating such information within video. Just as we have for text.
Furthermore, this time based media, once published, is generally published in a manner where it has little awareness of its networked contexts. Such video does not automatically contain or embed, for example, its URL, time or date of publication, and other basic metadata. Current video architectures, existing and proposed (for example Apple’s QuickTime, and potentially MPEG21), can contain this information. Alternatively it could be embedded textually in a post’s metadata allowing it to be collected by existing blog systems. That this is possible, but not being done, is perhaps symptomatic of the manner in which video and audio is still conceived of as a ‘closed’ system, of finished rather than partial or fragmentary works. (Similar issues also arise with the duration of much work presented in this manner, their length makes them the equivalent of blogs posts that run to several screens – in blogging this is probably the exception rather than the rule, in podcasting this is the rule, rather than the exception, currenty videoblogging shows all the signs of following podcasting.)
If we use blogging as our exemplar, and if it is videoblogging then presumably the intention is for blogging to be the exemplar, then video in videoblogs should be granular in relation to the network. Furthermore it is reasonable that videoblogs should also exhibit the general qualities of what makes a blog a blog. Hence, blog based video would be made up of small parts, reflecting or expressing the life world of its makers, and an individual video blog would (much like television) become a serial form where the continuities and discontinuities between parts become important.
More significantly, however, video itself and not just its finished artefacts would become granular. For example, in my web browser when I am reading your blog I can click and drag my cursor over your text and copy this text for insertion into my blog post. However, in my web browser when I view your video I cannot nominate a passage of video to copy for insertion into my video post. Why not? The technology certainly supports this.
Similarly, if we recognise that a blog post is not just the text of the post, but includes its title, date and time of publication, trackbacks and possibly even comments, then a blog post is constructed of many parts and blog CMS’s have tools that recognise and can extract these parts in meaningful ways. In video and more specifically in video blogs, these parts also exist and can (or could) be extracted. For example a QuickTime movie can read an XML file and include within itself all of the above information. Futhermore movies could read this information from or about each other, and so exhibit the sorts of network awareness that characterise blog posts.
In addition, just as text is granular after its point of publication in a blog, so too can video. This refers to how we might use other video within our video posts, which is what this essay has concentrated upon. However it can also describe a method of working in video where we no longer conceive of video as being the production of something with a single image and sound track. This process, which has been elsewhere described as softvideography (Miles, 2003) lets us author video in ways that make it more comparable to text. Video in this model is always, even after publication, something that is constituted from parts that may or may not appear or be realised in the final work. It is, if you prefer, thinking of the video object as more like a blog so that just as a reader may only view part of a blog (indeed only part of a blog post) so too they may only view or listen to parts of an individual video entry. This change is a paradigmatic shift in what we think we are doing when we make a video blog entry, and a similar shift in what we think the role of the viewer or user of the video will be. It is a move towards a more active user, though I’d argue certainly no more active than what we expect the average blog reader to be. It does bear repeating that the change is simple, but deep, and is no more complex than recognising that our video can now be made of variable parts, just as our blogs are.
It is possible, though currently nontrivial, to treat blog published video as granular. The prototypes that have been authored to accompany this paper (which have all been published in a video blog) are early demonstrations of such a process. The first prototype shows a video file which contains partial time based links so that we might be able to imagine a video blog practice that lets users link to other networked items, just as we do with text.
The second prototype is a (rather dull) commentary that mentions two other video blog entries. When clicked upon during their mention, the commentary pauses and the prototype retrieves the mentioned video blogs and plays them within this movie. Such a video blog entry shows that it is technically possible to include other networked videos inside a similarly networked video, and helps to illustrate the questions that this raises.
The third prototype takes this a step further so that parts of an individual video blog (published elsewhere by someone else) is selectively quoted within another videoblog. In this example there are multiple selective quotations so that here commentary is woven around the originating video blog entry.
What each of these prototypes does not achieve is as significant as what they demonstrate. However, what I wish to emphasise at this nascent point in videoblogging is not what generic conventions or even practices ought to be pursued, but to observe that applications could be developed that allow us to work within video so that it retains its granularity after publication. Just as blogs have with text. This would be a hypertextual video, and much like blogs and their emergence, we do not know what such a practice will become. A blog, if printed, is no longer a blog, it cannot be a blog without its permeation by and within the network. If video in a blog can be removed and played, and is qualitatively no different, then it is not yet blog video. That difference requires invention. The architectures and tools exist, the hindrance is simply our prejudice, that is our horizons of understanding and expectation. This essay is an invitation to reimagine that horizon.
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Original Citation:
Miles, Adrian. “That Moment Might Do: Videoblogs and the Any-Instant-Whatever.” Post Identity 5.1 (2007).
All following quotes from: Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema One: The Movement–Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
“Movement, conceived in this way, will thus be the regulated transition from one form to another, that is, an order of poses or privileged instants, as in a dance.” (p.4)
“The modern scientific revolution has consisted in relating movement not to privileged instants, but to any-instant-whatever. Although movement was still recomposed, it was no longer recomposed from formal transcendental elements (poses), but from immanent material elements (sections). Instead of producing an intelligible synthesis of movement, a sensible analysis was derived from it.” (p.4)
“[Everywhere the mechanical succession of instants replaced the dialectical order of poses: "Modern science must be defined pre-eminently by its aspiration to take time as an independent variable.' [Bergson, Creative Evolution, cited in Deleuze]” (p.4)]
“It is in this sense that the cinema is the system which reproduces movement as a function of any-instant-whatever that is, as a function of equidistant instants, selected so as to create an impression of continuity.” (p.5)
“If the equidistant points are chosen well, one inevitably comes across remarkable occasions; that is the moments when the horse has one hoof on the ground, then three, two, one. These may be called privileged instants, but not in the sense of the poses or generalised postures which marked the gallop in the old forms. … If these are privileged instants, it is as remarkable or singular points which belong to movement, and not as the moments of actualisation of a transcendent form.” (pp.5-6)
“conceived in this way”
Once upon a time it was thought that the world was a fallen place (indeed many still believe this) and that all of the earthly forms were only shadows of their possible true and ideal form. A circle, here in the world, could only ever be not quite perfect compared to the circle that I could imagine, describe mathematically, or expect to find in a promised land.
Now while in our vernacular existence such ideal forms may never be achieved (bracketing the problem of whether it is a legitimate problem), it has not meant that many art forms, for an awfully long time, aspired to the expression of such ideal forms. This is the art of the pose. Of the frozen gesture that is imagined to express the essence or quintessence of a moment, emotion, or event. Much Renaissance religious art springs to mind, as does courtly dance, and of course more recently the traditions of classical portraiture – which of course appear in some early photography.
In such a universe movement can only be understood as the interval (and a dangerous, potentially fallen interval at that) between one pose and the next. Or, as Deleuze suggests, one privileged instant and the next. In this conception movement is quantitative, as it is the distance between privileged instants (which in themselves would be qualitative moments, it is the difference between the Stations of the Cross and what falls between the stations) and as such is always secondary to that which they may progress between. Here movement is not a relation in itself, and is not even particularly that which relates one privileged instant to the next, all is invested into these instants–in–themselves so reifying an epistemic regime of essence, wholeness, and transcendental perfection.
Now, as Deleuze later notes, we still have the occurrence of privileged instants, the difference now, is that we no longer conceive of the world as being constituted by the attempt to unveil or achieve such moments, or that the everyday is the sum total of the distance between such inadequate moments and the poses available. In the secular world of narrative closure, for example, the denouement that facilitates the closing of all stories within popular media is the unveiling of just such a privileged instant. A moment that in the familiar formulaic of such storytelling is understood as having always been there, waiting.
(It is interesting to note, however, that in a modern literate and media dense world, it is possible to conceive of the privileged instant as that which cannot be seen, that refuses the pose. For example think of the sublime religious cinema of Robert Bresson where the conclusion of each film is an unveiling of the transcendent and sacred – which is why in fact it can never take the form of the pose – and so must happen off screen.)
Now, for video blogging I am going to take it as a given (you’re welcome to argue this with me) that it is currently defining itself against the mirror of contemporary popular television, and to a lesser extent various forms of independent film practice (documentary, essay films, travelogue, no budget cinema, home movies, and so on). Now, and I don’t know where this will lead (if anywhere), but it might be productive to recognise that we could characterise contemporary television (I have in mind in particular things like television news, current affairs and traditional television documentary) as a television of the pose, of a disciplined (in many senses) instant that always knows what is next (hence the popularity of the blooper) and always trys, and certainly accepts, the privilege of its instants. While much televisual news presentation may have moved from the gravitas of the 1960s, it retains its autonomy and authority as a series of known and repeatable poses (the desk, direct address to camera, the ‘call’ or segue to reporters on location, motion graphics, and their role as ‘anchor’) that, as poses, are transferable or exchangeable (between individuals, stations, even nations). In video blogging (remember, I suggested caution here, I really don’t know where this is going) the pose is evident in the rapid adoption of a novel form of direct address to camera where the speaker is the director/author of the blog post, but their direct address now aspires to the informality of the traditional blog. Hence it is usually hand held, improvised, and more often than not perambulatory. This a pose which has some of the qualities and all of the aspirations of the privileged instant, yet of course since it is a video blog (by definition the video of the very everyday) consists of any-instants-whatever.
Movement here is literally only internal, it is not between other video blog posts and other video blogs, even where they may be named, cited or called to.
“modern scientific”
Empirical procedure requires measurement to be indifferent to that which it measures. A metre is a metre, and each moment of time is evacuated of duration (of a lived or vital temporal change) so that it can become the measure of other activities. This is best rendered as the movement of objects in space, or the change in time of some thing. In other words movement is now made of up repeatable and measurable units and movement becomes equated to the reproduction of such movements, or simply the record of the passage between points (whether in space or time).
In this conception movement, that which relates the before and after, there to here, has the possibility of becoming or being indifferent to what lies between (it is after all sixty seconds, and sixty seconds is sixty seconds and will always be so). This separation of movement from the thing, and the separation of movement into a quantitative measure, is obviously essential for scientific procedure.
Imagine conceiving of the history of media (and here media refers to the use of substrates to narrate things that are not, in themselves, of that substrate) as the movement from the representation or production of privileged instants towards the dissemination and multiplication of any-instant-whatevers. Greek statuary, Renaissance tableaux, the rise of the novel (a literature of the common), industrialisation and modernism through to mass media and now blogging with its media rich avatars. This original pose was also a compressed form of information, where the pose, the privileged instant, contained within it megabytes of deep knowledge or at least its potential. With the move to the any-instant-whatever knowledge was divorced from the pose, which after all is what allowed Shannon’s breakthroughs in cybernetics.
Blogs as the media of the any instant whatevers. This is the basis of reactive criticism against them (are about anything, and so about nothing).
televisual flows?
“mechanical succession”
This mechanical succession was of course made literal with the rise of the movie camera. The same apparatus was transposed to the video camera, and even with the move to digital video the mechanical nature of recording is maintained through the succession of instants and their recording. Indeed, the sample rate has largely stayed constant, with cinema having standardised itself at a sample rate of 24 frames per second, PAL video at 25, and NTSC video at 30 frames per second.
In all of this the sample rate is independent, it bears absolutely no relationship to that which is being recorded, an obvious point, but aside from Bazin’s early insistence on the indifferent mechanical nature of the cinema one that we seem to have become acculturated to.
(By way of counter illustration, imagine strolling through a garden where the rate at which you could view each of the scenes that opened before you, from wide open vistas to the intense purple of an iris, was entirely arbitrary. Where to view was not determined by your interest, by the reverie of the stroll, but by frames per second or its equivalent.)
is this where we get televisual flow from. and then from here can i move from televisual flow to blog flow?
“equidistant instants”
The principle that informs the recording of time based media is very simple. Each instant sampled is, from the point of view of the recording machinery, equal. The first, the last, all that lies between, are the same. They are the same media, same amount of information, same size. Furthermore each sample point is equal in its relation to every other sample point. This is realised through the metronymic exactness of the recording apparatus where each sample point is equally distributed in time from the other.
As a consequence recording registers any-instant-whatevers. The recording apparatus is indifferent to what is being recorded, unlike the pre-scientific recording of the pose.
I have argued in other places about the relationship between cinema and hypertext (Miles, 1999). In many ways connections established via links are conterminous with film edits in that they are able to establish new relations between parts and that an edit, like a link, effects an incorporeal transformation of its parts, which is what enables individual parts to be ‘broken’ and distinct parts to be rejoined. As a consequence hypertextual writing systems, while clearly post literate, can also be considered as a post cinematic writing.
Now HyperText Transfer Protocol (the ubiquitous ‘http’ of the World Wide Web) is a stateless protocol, where stateless means that HTTP does not retain state information about the connections it services – at best it knows which page you may have just arrived from, but that is all, (which is why any part can be connected to any other part). As a consequence we can see that for blogging each post is equidistant from another from the point of view of linking. Indeed spatiality, such as it exists, is translated into time online as how long something may take is a much more significant question than where is it coming from, even though the two may be intimately related.
It is this equidistance between posts that has facilitated the development of the complex link ecologies that are the hallmark and innovation of blogging. Individual textual blog posts, while equidistant from each other, would not in themselves appear to be the product of equidistant instants, certainly not in the manner of contemporary mechanical recording. However, from the point of view of other media systems it is a small step to recognise that blogs are a movement (and I stress this as a general movement rather than the specific mechanical, scientific and equidistant sampling described by Deleuze) towards such equidistant instances. The difference however, is that the any-instant-whatever is realised not through a specific mechanical apparatus of recording but within the logic of blogging as a medium. Blog posts can be, and often are, the textual equivalent of an any-instant-whatever, whether this be via the dullest blog in the world (Walker, n.d), the various cheese-sandwich of the day efforts (Bernstein, 2006), or more commonly what an individual blogger chooses to write.
The distinction being drawn here is minor, but needs to be clear. From the prejudiced perspective of mass media (which has, in the Internet Age become more accurately “High Mass Media” as opposed to the net’s “Low Mass Media”) blogs are precisely about any-instant-whatevers. In this they are much like the personal diary, except now through the agency of the link forms of movement are created between parts that generate novel forms of continuity.
“singular points”
While the machinery for recording time based media is based on sampling equidistant and immanently equal moments, as a consequence privileged instants are revealed. These are those moments recorded, sometimes by accident other times by design, that would otherwise be unavailable. This could be because they happen too quickly and so reproduction allows temporal manipulation (think of the pattern of a drop of water in slow motion), or by happenstance. Such moments are remarkable not because they return us to the transcendental form of the pose, but because amongst the eventful change of the ordinary the exception is recorded.
Fundamental to this is that these moments, Deleuze’s ‘singular points’, are a product of movement, the consequence of movement, and are not derived from or the expression of the pose, of the idealised extraction of movement into a fixed form. Movement has priority, and as is clear throughout the first chapter of “The Movement Image” movement is not the quantitative travel of an object from one place to another, but is the qualitative change from one state to another through time:
“Thus in a sense movement has two aspects. On one hand, that which happens between objects or parts; on the other hand that which expresses the duration or the whole. . . We can therefore say that movement relates the objects of a closed system to open duration, and duration to the objects of the system which it forces to open up.” (p. 11.)
How can I have a blog post that stays, always, open to other relations (because it remains available to be linked in to)? Because the possible (in Deleuze’s terminology the virtual) sets that it has before it are part of a whole which is open, where the open is that which allows and is qualitative change, that is duration. If an individual blog post did form a set, that is a bounded group (whatever terms we may use for what constitutes membership of the set), including the set of possible future relations, what needs to be accounted for is, precisely, the post’s possible movements through these sets (as they will, of necessity, be plural). Now, as it finds itself, via links, amongst new sets of relations, it will find itself, in itself, altered. For example it is trivial to write something that criticises or recontextualises another blog post, and by linking to that post so changing that other post’s possible meanings. This is different, radically different, to simple hermeneutic claims about multiple interpretations – it is an act of incorporeal transformation where the object itself becomes something different to itself without transforming or changing the thing itself. (Exactly the same process happens in cinema as Kuleshov’s experiments showed.)
How can this be? And in spite of appearances that is not a naive question, rather it is one that we have forgotten how to ask precisely because we have become acculturated by such televisual economies (the instant connection that is the edit). Blogs slow this down, but it is the same activity, and it is enabled because these relations are about qualitative changes between parts, and such qualitative change is available because duration provides an always changing (and so open) whole upon which
This suggests that blogging, that is plain text blogging, is post televisual and that it is continuing a thinking of duration that the cinema inaugurated. It also suggests that video blogging is more conservative in relation to this post televisual economy to the extent that it remains entrhalled by the televisual as a reproduction of movement and not movement in itself (immobile section versus mobile duration).
Original Citation:
Miles, Adrian. “Softvideography.” Cybertext Yearbook 2002-2003. Eds. Markku Eskelinen and Raine Koskimaa. Vol. 77. Jyväskylän: Research Center for Contemporary Culture, 2003. 218-36.
Interactive video has much that it could learn from hypertext. Not the hypertext that is most of the web, nor the hypertext that is parodied in many of the essays in the recent interactive cinema anthology “New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative”(2002), but the hypertext theory and practice that has spent over 20 years actively making, theorising, reading, and researching multilinear narrative, multilinear structure, link typologies, narrative closure in interactive narrative, anti narrative, and so on and so forth. It would be academically trivial, and probably spiteful, to catalogue the way in which recent writing on interactive cinema literally reprises the anticipation, excitement and assumptions about interactivity and nascent futures that hypertext experienced, or to point out that in three or four years exactly the same retrospective criticisms will be made of interactive video as have been made of hypertext. Multilinear narrative, structure, and architecture are problems common to new narrative in general, so I’d like to extend this research more specifically with an investigation into ‘softvideo’ practice – critical ressentiment can take care of itself.
In 1988 Diane Balestri published a paper that by its regular appearance in introductory books on hypertext, for example Bolter (1991) and Snyder (1996), can be considered a canonical work. In this essay she discriminates between using the computer to author ‘hard copy’, that is work which requires a material substrate such as the page, and using the computer to author ‘softcopy’, work that is only intended to be presented via the immaterial substrate of the screen.
The implications of the distinction between hard and softcopy have been extensively explored in hypertext theory, and have been used to affirm numerous key qualities of hypertext as softcopy: screens are variable in their dimensions and may be multiple; work no longer need have a front, back, or middle; content can be changed at will; readers can manipulate the presentation of content through the alteration of font size and properties, window dimensions, text and window colour; content and structure can be variable during the reading or use of a work; a work may have multiple (and simultaneous) narrative architectures; and it may be unable to be represented or distributed in any adequate hard copy format.
However, much of the literature on softcopy appears to have concentrated on its implications for the presentation or reading of content or documents, whereas softcopy also has obvious and significant implications for how we consider the authoring of content, a point well made in a different context by Moulthrop and Kaplan (1991). All that is meant by this is that if we are working in a fully softcopy environment, that is working on a computer to present material that is only to be realised via the computer, then we can use new or different tools, and certainly different methodologies and practices, than those we might use for hard copy authoring and presentation. This should not be confused with the common Information Technology instrumentality that uses digital tools to do old jobs in new ways, softcopy is instead a paradigmatic shift in the sorts of objects that can now be authored which entails, like most paradigm shifts, new ideologies (or at least the revisiting of old ones) of not just reading but also authoring.
As an example of hard copy (print) ideology in softcopy environments, consider the role of alphabetisisation, which we ordinarily use to serially order things like academic bibliographies. Of course, they only need to have this order because they have traditionally appeared on paper, so that if you need to find a particular bibliographic entry you need to know where in the list it ought to appear. However, in a softcopy environment this is no longer necessary (and its persistence is largely due to the hegemonic hold of print literacy in academic culture) because a simple search function can easily retrieve and display any bibliographic entry, anywhere in the document or docuverse. This is not an argument against the alphabetical ordering of lists in bibliographies, it is only to point out that features like ‘sort’ in word processing programs are there to facilitate content into hard copy and maintain existing paradigms of content authoring and dissemination. Most hypertext tools, on the other hand, tend not to rely on things like alphabetisation to sort or categorise information, including lists.
To write in a softcopy environment is to begin to recognise some of the ideological assumptions drawn from the hard copy world that have naturalised (and socialised) our approach to the authoring, publishing, and reading of content in softcopy domains. These assumptions are derived from our intimate understanding and experience of the material resistance of hard copy environments (which for instance is why and how we have things like pagination), as it is a sophisticated material literacy that lets me make a list using a biro on paper rather than glass, and mistakes the decision to do this as my own. In print literacy this material resistance includes such things as the materiality of language (de Saussure’s signifier), our tools of inscription, and what it is we think we want to say with these. That each of these have been naturalised by the hardcopy paradigm of traditional print literacy is foregrounded by softcopy as a writing and reading practice.
softcopy towards digital video
Simply put, softcopy suggests that it is not only the presentation of objects that may change in digital environments but also the sorts of objects that can be created. However, we can only make these new objects when we are able, as most of us are with print literacy, to recognise and write in and with the qualitative material resistances and affordances of the softcopy world. This materiality is often thought to be superfluous in electronic environments, after all digitisation erases difference at the machine level, but of course as any new media practitioner knows there is resistance in code, the screen, bandwidth, users, and so on. There is a difference however between being able to affirm this resistance as that which constitutes work — work as an object and work as praxis — and regarding this resistance as noise that an imagined electronic future will dissolve.
When we move to video and digital technologies it is apparent that digitisation is firmly established in the production work flow of film making at almost all professional levels, with significant creative and industrial consequences, as Elsaesser and Hoffman’s (1998) anthology and McQuire’s (1997) report show. Certainly, from introductory film schools to high budget features have adopted digitisation in various guises, and with the introduction of iMovie on the Macintosh and Windows Movie Maker on Windows XP, digitised video is largely the only way domestic users have ever had to edit their work. While the aesthetic influence of the digital as a mode of narration on commercial and industrial production remains relatively minor, though landmark narrative fiction works are probably Tykwer’s Lola Rennt (1998), Figgis’ Timecode, (2000), Cochran and Surnow’s television series 24 (2001), and Nolan’s Memento (2000), see for instance Hales (2002) and Dovey (2002), it is also the case that most of the digital tools used in cinema production have been resolutely orientated towards hard copy outcomes, and in fact treat digital video largely as if it were only hard copy orientated. This hard copy view also extends to computer based video work that is not intended for traditional screen based (television and cinema) delivery, such as online, CD and DVD content.
desktop digital video into softvideo
Desktop based digital video is probably at a similar point to what desktop publishing was with the introduction of the first Macintosh in 1984. It is now possible to shoot, edit and print to tape broadcast quality video using a small digital video camera and a laptop computer (indeed Apple’s influence here is striking with Final Cut Pro largely revolutionising and redefining digital video production as it moves from the desktop to the laptop). Like desktop publishing before it – right down to the almost but not quite affordable tools — desktop digital video primarily decentralises the ability to do what previously could only be done with very expensive, essentially centralised, capital and skill intensive resources. And, just like desktop publishing, its major effect is not to see a revolution in genres or a revisited poetics of cinema, but simply facilitates access to production resources so that more people more or less can now do more of the same.
This, it must be stressed, is not a bad thing. However, as hypertext rather elegiacly showed us, it was not WYSIWYG design and printing that led to significant new digital genres (indeed the laser printer is irrelevant in this context), but work that was designed to take advantage of the environment that the computer in its entirety provided. In the case of digital video, the same applies. For example, iMovie and Final Cut Pro, Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Premiere, Avid Xpress DV, and Media 100 are all digital editing systems intended to facilitate content for presentation in existing televisual contexts. This means, much like the printer in desktop publishing, that they’re primarily used to print content back to tape, whether to the camera or a VCR hardly matters.
If you like, these digital tools are primarily orientated towards publication (or transmission) and this form of publication requires a linear time based substrate, the privileged model of which is of course film and its avatar the video cassette — video hard copy. Now, obviously I am suggesting that this is not so very different from using your computer to get words out onto paper, and it isn’t. But of course it also suggests an alternative conception where we can use our computers to work with time based media where the delivery environment is not subject to the temporal temperance of cinema and video. This does not simply mean that we can now make works that are multilinear, which seems to have been the popular understanding (and practice) of much networked interactive media. As we’ve seen, softcopy in relation to writing includes much more than multilinearity, and while all the formal qualities of softcopy may be formed in relation to their interrogation of the stability of the page, they have also provided a poetics of screen based textual production and reception that productively looks outside of the page or the book. This suggests that we ought to be able to articulate a new poetics for desktop video — where historically digitisation in regard to video has been understood to be little more than a combination of a moving image plus sound track that can be played ‘randomly’ — that is neither specifically cinematic, videographic, or generically multimediated, a poetics that looks towards the formal possibilities afforded by digital, networked, screen based video. This poetics requires the video equivalent of softcopy, or as I prefer, softvideo.
applied softvideo
A softvideo poetics requires an immanent form of working with digital video that is perhaps modelled as much on writing as it is on film making practice. This is not an argument for the necessity or inevitability of code but only the simple observation that we have a sophistication in the way we use a biro and a piece of paper that is an exemplar of an informed literate poetics. We doodle, take notes, write in the margins, sideways, on recto and verso, apply different pressures for variable densities of ink, and so on. Contrast this to interactive digital video, as a specific, immanent, and emergent digital computer process, and what largely happens is that traditional praxis remains untouched. We shoot, we cut, we compress, we put the moving image plus sound track online or into our interactive work.
What is the difference between hard and softvideo? Largely that in hard video the digitised video remains a singular or if you like sufficient media object in or for itself. I mean this not only in terms of perhaps what the video segment, fragment or sequence might mean, but more specifically as an object in itself where the integrity of the object is and remains singular. It is a moving picture track with a sound track with a fixed duration. This is digital video as a delivery envelope, and even where such content might be inserted and made a part of multilinear interactive works, whether fiction, nonfiction, experimental, online, CDROM or DVD it is not interactive for the video remains mute in regards to interaction which generally happens outside of itself. In other words, it is not that much different from television, click, it plays, click, it stops, click, it gets louder, or perhaps quieter.
However, if we approach video as softcopy, that is as softvideo, then we can think about digital video in dramatically different ways. This thinking, of course, can only be preliminary as I think it is clear that the genuinely novel forms or genres that will emerge from a properly digital video practice are yet to be recognised, or even found. (In much the same way that I would argue that blogs are one of the first major immanent genres for networked Web based writing, and they took a good five years to appear, and probably another two years to become obviously visible and intelligible as a genre.) But such a thinking does and will ground itself within the materiality of digital video as a practice that hears and responds towards that which is immanent to, and enabled by, these technologies, a looking forwards toward the new rather than our current looking backwards to define the forms and uses for digital video.
A first step towards softvideo is to no longer regard digital video as just a publication or delivery format, which is the current digital video as desktop video paradigm (which is of course the same as the desktop publishing model) but to treat it as an authoring and publication environment. This suggests that a major theme for a softvideo poetics to explore is the description or development of a videographic writing practice within video itself, that is to use digital video as a medium in which we write. To return to my hypertext analogy, it is the difference between writing in a native hypertext architecture (say for instance Eastgate’s Storyspace, Apple’s Hypercard, or even simply HTML) and writing in Microsoft Word and choosing to save your document as a web page. The former is writing hypertext while the latter confuses publishing in a medium with writing in the medium. To write in or with digital video should allow us to articulate a vocabulary of the elements that may constitute the formal contexts of softvideo, so that softvideo can become an engaged rather than imaginary practice.
Currently, as far as I can determine, QuickTime is the only readily accessible digital architecture that supports the qualities of softvideo, and what follows is an explanation and exploration of some of the implications of this as I have developed them in my own applied research practice.
As a simple example of what I mean by the materiality of softvideo is the difference in the way that a softvideo architecture conceives of frames and frame rates. If, or instance, I wish to show a still image with a continuous soundtrack, then in most video editing programs I simply import or capture (or draw) the requisite image, then stretch its duration to the soundtrack. When I save and export this work it will then draw this still image for the required number of frames at the specified frame rate. This is digital video as hard copy, for if my delivery environment is the computer screen then there is no need whatsoever to draw the single image at any frame rate, because there is not in fact a need for a frame rate in this sense — frames per second itself being very much a hard copy or hard video concept.
However, if I author my content in something as simple as QuickTime Player and do the same thing, then the final digital movie that is produced operates in a softcopy manner, QuickTime simply displays one image (one frame if you like) and holds it on screen for the specified duration while the soundtrack plays. In real terms this means that to add (keeping our example rather simple) an image to a soundtrack and then saving this as a completed digital video only adds the size of the still image to the final digital file. This is the case whether the movie runs for one, three, or twenty minutes. This is a softcopy conception of digital video.
A project that illustrates this well is “International Day of Time Dependent Art” (Miles, 2002) where approximately two minutes of digitised video, or if you prefer 2MB, has been stretched to run for twenty minutes twenty seconds. Of course the effect of this is to make the indexical video content (what the video footage is of) appear in extreme slow motion, but the point is that this is a digital movie that now runs for over twenty minutes, yet is only 2MB in size. Stretching its duration to forty minutes, if I am authoring in QuickTime for softvideo, makes no difference to the file size — it would still be 2MB in size.
This is, of course, just a beginning, but it does suggest some of the ways in which cinematic duration becomes problematised in softvideo (a point I shall return to). More significantly for a softvideo practice is the understanding that an architecture such as QuickTime is a multitrack and multiobject architecture. What this means is that a QuickTime (and in the near future MPEG 4) file does not need to consist of one video track and one sound track, indeed the “Day” work mentioned above consists of nine video tracks, one text and one sprite track, but can more or less include any number of video, audio, text, picture, and indeed several other sorts of tracks. Now, this immediately makes possible various forms of videographic collage and montage within a single work, what Manovich (2001) describes as spatial montage. For instance, by combining one picture track with, say, nine video tracks, a movie like “canberra rain”(Miles, 2002) is possible, with the divided video panes in themselves providing a form of montage, a literal cutting, internally within the movie, while also being simultaneously a form of video collage. In addition, nine text tracks are available within “canberra rain” which adds another layer or level of collage within the movie as they toggle between visibility and invisibility in response to user activity, and of course as each text pane partially obscures the video panes it also becomes an additional level of montage, though a montage performed via collage.
When child movies (see for example “Child movies”, Miles, 2002) are introduced, that is tracks where the content is independent of the parent movie, then further formal problems become evident. For example in “Exquisite Corpse” (Miles and Stewart, 2002) three child movies are arranged within a wide screen parent movie. As the three videos and their accompanying sound tracks are child movies each can be played independently of the parent movie, and independently of each other. This also means that each child movie may also be of variable duration. In the case of “Exquisite Corpse” the user mouses into the upper or lower bar over each video window, which simply runs its associated video pane at normal speed, with full volume. At the same time the next video pane in the series plays at half normal speed, and then the next track at quarter normal speed. Mousing into another video track simply repeats the process in series.
A simpler outcome is effected in “voxvog” (Miles 2002) where the central video window is divided into four transparent sprites that count and store the number of mouse entries (that is the action of the user moving the mouse into the sprite space is counted) and this is used as a variable to control which of 70 individual images to load in each of the four smaller video panes. These four panes are childmovie tracks and so what gets loaded in this particular work is conditional on when and where the user mouses within the video space. Of course these could also have been loaded on the basis of time, a combination of time and user activity, or indeed just randomised.
one softvideo poetics
It is important to recognise within these works, and in softvideo practice in general, that each of the tracks that constitute a QuickTime work are independent objects able to be scripted by the softvideo writer (softvideographer?). That is, each track can be conceived of as analogous to individual nodes in a hypertext work. Furthermore, each of these tracks (as objects) have a range of properties that can be controlled or negotiated via a softvideo writing practice, which in this case is literally scripting, so that their speed, visibility, volume, size, colour, transparency, direction of play, mobility, and even their presence, can be engaged with. While a softvideo movie may contain nine video and nine text tracks each can easily be made to move, play, overlap, disappear, reappear, and so on on the basis of readerly actions.
As a point from which to begin, certainly in the contexts of my own applied research practice, these formal elements constitute the domain of one particular softvideo practice (for softvideo is a methodology rather than a genre, style or formula) involving the use of softvideo for networked interactive desktop video. These works, known as vogs (video blogs) appropriate the generic form of the personal blog as one appropriate model for articulating a softvideo argot. This means the vogs are works that consider themselves to be sketches rather than monuments, after all, in an age of desktop consumer digital video it is probably time that video became as disposable (or cheap) as the word. As the vog manifesto (Miles, 2000) states, networked interactive desktop video are an applied softvideo practice that recognises a set of key terms as enabling and productive constraints. These terms include their production and delivery via a network, on desktops, they require and assume interactivity, and they treat digital video as an authorial plastic architecture rather than a delivery format.
Vogs are networked in that they are distributed via existing, viable network infrastructures, often including low band. In addition, a vog may utilise the network as an integral part of its softvideo practice, for instance in appropriating objects outside of itself that reside on the network (for instance “Bergen Appropriation” Miles, 2001), providing links to objects that are available on the network, or in a more sophisticated model utilise things like QuickTime’s child movie abilities to load external content when requested. However, vogs are also networked in a less technical sense through the softvideo writing model they offer. They are small works that, like blogs, tend towards a public intimacy and offer a model for what I’d characterise as a distributed softvideo writing practice, in the same manner as blogs (Mortensen and Walker, 2002). In other words, they are less about consumption (watching others content) than exploring models for authorship and production, for as blogs and most other successful and viable networked communication technologies indicate, it is the ability to participate as communicative peers that is much more significant and viable for distributed networks than our reconstruction into new consumers.
A vog is interactive in that the user has to do something, and this something affects in a literal way the work itself. This is more or less Aarseth’s (1997) ‘ergodics’ where the reader or user needs to perform non–trivial actions to read the text, and these actions are non–trivial because they have consequences for the text. Hence, clicking a play, pause, or stop button is not ergodic, nor is it what I would characterise as interactive — unless we want to call our everyday use of television interactive — as they are essentially trivial actions (much like turning the pages of a book) and do not qualitatively affect the text in itself. Of course, this also presents the possibility that while an individual vog ought to be ergodic, it would be perfectly reasonable when considered as a genre or a collected body of work to have a vog or vogs that in fact are not ergodic. This would be analogous to those hypermedia works that might utilise passages where there is little user choice, for instance parts of “Grammatron” (Amerika, n.d.) or “Hegirascope” (Moulthrop, 1997), and recognises that when interactivity is taken as a given then the lack of such interactivity becomes significant and meaningful. A Web example of this would be the “last page on the internet” screens where the playful irony of the work can only operate because of our now taken for granted assumption that all web pages are in fact linked in and out.
Finally, as an applied videographic networked practice vogs recognise that the visible context of publication or distribution is the personal computer screen. This does mean that the context of viewing is individual, personal, and probably domestic. It also means that users in such environments are generally time, bandwidth, and screen poor. Simply put, most people, most of the time, may not have two hours to interact with your content each week, and so much like blogs, vogs tend to be brief and either self contained or episodic. Even where users have significant bandwidth, for example first world universities, this still poses considerable restraints on the screen dimensions and resolution of softvideo works. In addition, users not only generally have smaller screens than those who work professionally in new media, but of course as a personal and domestic space user computer screens are also being used for other things at the same time, so a vog does not usually attempt to own all of a users screen space. This reflects the way that people actually do use their computers, ordinarily having several windows, programs and activities underway at once. An appropriate use of softvideo for such contexts then ought to recognise this and insert itself within or around what is the desktop computer equivalent of Raymond William’s (1990) televisual flow.
conclusions (consequences)
The implications of a work as simple in structure as “Exquisite Corpse” (Miles and Stewart, 2002) are quite dramatic. As each of the child tracks has been scripted to loop “Exquisite Corpse” is a film with no duration, that is it has no end. This is a much more radical implication than simple video looping suggests, where such looping has tended to be singular and stable and so no fixed end simply means iterative repetition, for here there are three loops, with completely independent and variable durations, where the speed of play is partially controlled and negotiated by the user. Hence, to play this work, and here play becomes a very literal and active verb, the user via their action and the scripting is controlling the playing rate of each of the three tracks, and as they move from one to the next the duration of each is constantly changing, effectively always changing the duration of the whole.
Furthermore, the relations or combinations established between each of the three video panels is and remains an open set, for mousing through the movie in the manner required to play it produces forms of collage (images on a common plane in simultaneous vision) and montage (when and where you mouse effects visual changes in the relations between consecutive parts) meaning there is no fixed work, canonical order, sequence, or teleological point that the relations among each of the three works aims towards. Hence, not only is the work of no fixed duration due to the combination of three variable loops, but also each time it is played performs a new and singular iteration of the work.
The recognition that each track within the work is in fact capable of being an independent entity is a major paradigmatic shift in terms of traditional cinematic practice. It does begin to suggest the ways in which softvideography is a qualitative shift from the more usual methods of digital video production and it also helps to illustrate the way in which softvideo is analogous to hypermedia writing rather than traditional visual and audio editing practices where mise-en–scene considers the parts within the scene as ‘objects’ to be ‘written’ with, and montage as a second level principle of organisation and decision. In the final work these choices appear as fixed and from an authorial and directorial point of view decisions are singular, as one shot is selected in lieu of another and then inserted into a fixed sequence. In softvideo each track, which of course can be of variable duration, location, size, content, and type, becomes an object to be written with, where this writing with is constituted by or in the event of authoring the work. Each track within a softvideo work is nbow considered as an object so the activity of making or writing softvideo is constituted by not only the decision about which objects to include and when, but also which of the variable properties for each of these objects ought to be scripted, and what that scripting might affect. These objects could be video sequences, soundtracks, still images, text, or even entire other QuickTime movies. Softvideo becomes more or less a form of ongoing and always variable, and so open, mise–en–scène. Once we recognise that tracks in a QuickTime softvideo work are discrete objects writing with these, providing an interface that controls them in some variable manner, and then actually playing these works (where it is clear that to play means much more than stop, pause, start), suggests that softvideo always requires and participates in an engaged and individuated process. It’s model is always a contextualised singularity.
All that I wish to mean by this, and I do want to insist on the change it represents, is that rather than compose the work visually and acoustically (before the camera and then in postproduction), then ‘flattening’ this work into hard copy, there is an ever present malleability to the material that now extends from the moment of content production, past that moment of traditional authorial closure, into its future. This malleability is not the question or problem of the ways in which the work will always be interpreted differently, but affects the very nature of the object that is to be interpreted, as such a work, at least in some respects, will always be a qualitatively different object in each presentation. It is not that the object produces varying interpretations but that users in the act of reading the work will inevitably produce varying works.
That the practice of softvideo raises significant and productive questions for traditional cinematic practice and theory ought to be obvious. One major question revolves around the way in which softvideo problematises montage as a fundamental mode of time based discourse, for each of the works discussed shifts the location, role and function of montage away from the preselection and serial ordering of an eventually fixed sequence towards other possibilities. Montage as a principal of selection and organisation can now reside somewhere between the shooting or gathering of material, a dynamic combinatory system of construction (more or less automated), and a user who (more or less) knowingly controls and determines the particular montage event and sequence.
The use of multiple windows further complicates this as the relation of window to window offers a complex collage practice, whether this be via a multiwindowed work or, in the case of the vogs, that the works appear in an always and already multiwindowed environment (the PC screen) so that a simultaneous visual relationship to other windows is always present. When time is added to this, so we recognise that the collage that is the computer screen also varies in time (this window now opens over that window) then we have a combination of collage and montage that does appear to be one of the major formal properties of such digital environments (Landow 1999, Manovich 2001).
While cinema has always had a sophisticated relationship to temporality it has also had a certain belligerence — ninety minutes of film or video has always and will always occupy ninety minutes. Not in softvideo. Like cinema and hypertext, it is the manner in which the parts reflect a qualitative change in the whole that is the principle of meaning and construction in softvideo (Deleuze 1986, Miles 1999). This suggests that not only is spatiality largely not of great significance for such screen based works, but that the cinema’s indexical relation to time may no longer be the bedrock for a screen based interactive softvideo practice. However, as Deleuze more than adequately demonstrates (and for that matter Chris Marker’s La Jetée), cinematic duration is not the same as the record or representation of time (time as quantity) but rather the expression of a qualitative change in an always open set. This suggests, to me at least, that Deleuze will offer softvideo an applied argot that will assist in our theoretical consideration and development of a new desktop cinema practice, a theoretical endeavour that I hope will complement a possible future softvideo practice, a videographic écriture.
References
Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Amerika, Mark. Grammatron. http://www.grammatron.com/ n.d. Accessed October 7, 2002.
Balestri, Diane Pelkus. “Softcopy and Hard: Wordprocessing and the Writing Process”.” Academic Computing 2.5 14 – 17.Feb (1988): 41 – 45.
Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale (N.J.): Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema One: The Movement–Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Dovey, Jon. “Notes Towards a Hypertextual Theory of Narrative.” New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative. Eds. Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp. London: British Film Institute, 2002. 135 – 45.
Druckrey, Timothy. “Preface.” New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative. Eds. Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp. London: British Film Institute, 2002. xxi-xxiv.
Elsaesser, Thomas, and Kay Hoffmann, eds. Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998.
Hales, Chris. “New Paradigms <> New Movies: Interactive Film and New Narrative Interfaces.” New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative. Eds. Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp. London: British Film Institute, 2002. 105 – 19.
Landow, George P. “Hypertext as Collage-Writing.” The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. Ed. Peter Lunenfeld. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 150-70.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, 2001.
McQuire, Scott. Crossing the Digital Threshold. Brisbane: Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy, 1997.
Miles, Adrian and Clare Stewart. “Exquisite Corpse”. Video blog: vog. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/9.2002/corpse.html September 28, 2002. Accessed October 1, 2002.
Miles, Adrian. “Childmovies”. Video blog: vog. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/vlog/archive/2002/102002.html#3923. (Web Log) October 7, 2002. Accessed: October 7, 2002.
Miles, Adrian. “Cinematic Paradigms for Hypertext.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 13.2 July (1999): 217-26.
Miles, Adrian. “Bergen Appropriation.” Video blog: vog. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/1.2001/bergencams.html. January 27, 2001. Accessed October 7, 2002.
Miles, Adrian. “canberra rain”. Video blog: vog. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/8.2002/canberra.html August 8, 2002. Accessed September 19, 2002.
Miles, Adrian. “International Day of Time Dependent Art.” Video blog: vog. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/2.2002/index.html February 20, 2002. Accessed September 19, 2002.
Miles, Adrian. “melbourne remembering Bergen (3)”. Video blog: vog. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/5.2002/nordicsky.html May 18, 2002. Accessed September 19. 2002.
Miles, Adrian. “patience”. Video blog: vog. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/1.2001/bergencams.html January 27, 2001. Accessed September 19, 2002.
Miles, Adrian. “Vogma: A Manifesto.” Video blog: vog. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/manifesto/index.html. December 12, 2000. Accessed October 7, 2002.
Miles, Adrian. “Voxvog.” Video blog: vog.. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/9.2002/voxvog.html September 24, 2002. Accessed October 7. 2002.
Mortensen, Torill, and Jill Walker. “Blogging Thoughts: Personal Publication as an Online Research Tool.” Researching ICT’s in Context. Ed. Andrew Morrison. Oslo: University of Oslo, 2002. 249-79.
Moulthrop, Stuart, and Nancy Kaplan. “Something to Imagine: Literature, Composition, and Interactive Fiction.” Computers and Composition 9.1 (1991): 7-23.
Moulthrop, Stuart. “Hegirascope”. http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/moulthrop/hypertexts/hgs/hegirascope.html. October 1997. Accessed: July 18 2000.
Snyder, Ilana. Hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth. Interpretations. Ed. Ken Ruthven. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996.
Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1990.
Filmography
Figgis, Mike. Timecode. 2000.
Marker, Chris. La Jetée. 1962.
Nolan, Christopher. Memento. 2000.
Tykwer, Tom. Lola Rennt. 1998.
Various. 24. 2002.
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