vog (a BETA videoblog)

This one is an enigma to me. I have found it sitting in an online directory with a collection of other vogs, but I cannot find any page or entry where this was published. No idea what is going on there. The work has three text tracks and three sprite tracks. The sprite tracks are aligned vertically over each of the three image panes, and they toggle the visibility of two of the text tracks. The video is made up of photos which have then been sliced. In practice this meant adding each photo manually to a new movie using QuickTime Pro, and then slicing them up when they were compressed for export, which is also when film noise was added. For here I have scaled the movie up to twice its original size, simply by doubling its width and height in the embed tag. These days QuickTime does a very nice job of gracefully scaling up, much better than it used to, and it really makes a huge difference to the experience of the work.

The slicing up is common to my work around this time, and reflects the interest in thinking about video as a) one window amongst many others on a computer screen (and so making this literal in the field of the video too), and b) beginning to rethink the role of editing and sequence and taking that out of only a sequential timeline (this shot then this shot then this shot) to something that also supports a notion of an edit (a break and a reconnection) within the simultaneous time and space of the video frame or image. More or less what Manovich describes as spatial montage.

The text are text tracks in QuickTime, which means they are literally ascii and not rendered into the video in any way. Their size changes on Mac and PC (due to different screen resolutions and so the text is rendered differently) and this is also why they can be scripted to appear and disappear depending on a user generated mouse event. The text is poetic, associative and bounces between the excitement and experience and living somewhere where snow is normal, and some of my thinking about vogging. Is this a video? Why? Why not? Questions about where does movement happen? Is movement a necessary part of the indexicality of this sort of practice? And of course the idea of snow on the screen as noise with noise added to photos to make them appear 'filmic' and the riffs you can do around that, particularly in light of my particular interests in the everyday use and production of noise in the image as a deliberate aesthetic trope and quality of digitised video.

The material was shot in November 2001 on one of my then working visits to the University of Bergen (I was employed part time by the Intermedia lab) where the weather turned particularly cold for Bergen and there was a decent snow fall that stayed around for, I think, about a week - long enough to convince me to buy nordic skies and get out after work on the trails up on Fløyen.