vog (a BETA videoblog)

Just something that might help with this one: This uses a visual skin to hide all the usual software application things you'd associate with a QuickTime movie. So once you load it is a good idea to hide the browser and return to the video, so you sort of see how it plays over the top of whatever is open on your screen.

This remains one of my favourite works. It is a skinned QuickTime movie with two buttons for interaction. One accelerates the video's play speed, while the other loads the same video, though more heavily compressed. What I like about it is that the work is just so thoroughly only for the computer. It isn't rectangular (well it is but most of it is transparent) and it really only works as something that you'd launch and play with on screen, it just wouldn't make sense being projected. So it is a vog that is very much about being intended to be used and viewed on individual computers. In addition I like the abstraction. It is sky and a flag at dusk, nothing happens except the breeze and the light. As you load more progressively compressed versions the pixellation increases till you end up with something that could be a Turner up close. It is all colour, pattern, light and shade with movement. Formalist fascination with the materialism of interactive online video - compression, user action, movement as qualitative change.

From the original entry:

Twilight lingers in Bergen.

Mousing in to the + speeds it up while mousing into - loads degraded, more heavily compressed versions of the video.

This is a project that wanted to begin an investigation into the aesthetics and possibilities of skinned movies. But skinned movies that didn't replace the standard QT interface with something groovy but removed it all together. It comes out of the Canberra trilogy series where i started to think about the frame of the video not just as a container for video but as itself an authored space.

Movies that are more like parts of the desktop, that could just sort of float around (clouds, get it) on the desktop.

With no drag area available they are also sort of intractable, a digital movie object on your screen that sort of is in the way, since you can't move it, but sort of not since they're just clouds. It is part of the desktop, a part of the collage and montage that the contemporary gui always and already is.

Also the lowest bandwidth clouds, the ones you get after patiently clicking the '-' 4 times, is the most pixellated (since most heavily compressed) but in many ways the most interesting. The pixellation that is going on here is a reiteration of the slicing that I did in my earlier vogs. It is partly the addition of noise that conceals the artefacts of the low data rates (the artefacts being low frame rate and compression noise), but it is also the combination of montage and collage (mollage) that i have addressed in several papers which looks as much to Deleuze as it does to the principals of desktop networked interactive cinema.