vog (a BETA videoblog)

To use this let it play, and then mouse into the space where the text appears on the left of the video and oe of the three narrations will play. The narrations are the same as the text that scrolls. The text looks so rough because they are text tracks within the video, they are not rendered into the video like I would do in motion graphics. They're pretty much just ascii and exist in the QuickTime file as text. (This is why it looks different on a Mac or a PC.)

This work is part of an ongoing series of small scale interactive video works (video blog::vog). Each is marked by its:

• interactivity (interactive video ought to require nontrivial action within the video frame not 'click to view' aka 'browser=tv')
• appropriate duration - desktop networked activity (of any kind) is always someone else's desktop work ought to know that it is only one window amongst others and that time is just another form of low bandwidth (what can you day in 30 seconds?)
• reworking of our assumptions of video - if interactivity is now inside video (anything you can do in flash you can do in quicktime) what do we make with it? what can we make? what should we make? what does it want us to make?

The brief work presented here "stars and tears" uses still images photographed with a domestic digital still camera which then has some film noise applied, is sliced into fragments, and rebuilt. The slicing is a form of montage come collage (mollage?) which is the most appropriate compositional trope for desktop environments - layered windows in space (collage) that vary in time (montage).

There are four soundtracks attached to the movie. Each of these soundtracks is stored externally from the film, so that as you mouse over the text tracks a new soundtrack will be loaded. This is done to reduce the size of the 'interface' and it is also a sketch towards what a work that uses external soundtracks might sound and play like. The lag that you experience as one soundtrack is unloaded and another requested is then inevitable and is a part of the work. This is not aporia or lack but the positive and pregnant moment between asking for and receiving. The moment of or for the possible performance of the promise. (This is why in a vog you never click, it is never an order or a command, it is always invitation.)

(This was published in the online journal Poems That Go.)