vog (a BETA videoblog)

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.

A follow up to the Bergen Clouds vog. This is another skinned movie where the QuickTime file has a skin track placed over it which is what allows for the transparencies. This was another effort at playing with low resolution footage as well as including a gallery of the everyday photos I had been taking. The work is from when I was working half time for the University of Bergen and is one of the few vogs I've made where there is direct address to the camera. This became very popular with the rise of video blogging, and is the dominant mode for the diary form that video blogging developed, but one that I've never been much of an exponent of (or usually very impressed by). But to give this work credit where it's due, I was playing with it as an idea here (a good two to three years before video blogging actually came to be). Mouse into video pane to change the photos, it has four sprites one to change each of the individual photo panes.

From the original entry:

a second project following on from the bergen clouds film that plays around with the idea of a film that doesn't look, sound or feel like a film. so it is another skinned movie.

this one alst has 4 child tracks that only load still images, depending on where and how often you mouse into the video panel. there are 70 images in all, each child pane uses the same 70, they are just a collage from visits to norway and things that i associate with my time here. well, some of the things that i associate with my time here.

one of the things i was interested in was just what happens in terms of possible combinations from something as simple as this. i think instead of repeating the same 4 sets of images the next one will mix them up more. i could do that here by making the child movie lists that each uses not the same as each other. but i think it is of much more value to make this and see what doesn't work in it, than to feign that such things don't actually happen.

they're sketches towards a poetics. after all.

this one is also a return towards the basic ideas of the vog: video blogs. so it is a recorded blog like conversation to camera.

and then in the sister blog that I had going back then (funnily enough being written and published out of a much earlier version of Tinderbox, just like this one, I wrote on October 13 2002 :

voxvog is a new vog that continues the recent interest in vogs without borders (the earlier one is bergen clouds). i wanted a vog that returned to some of the original theme of developing the vogs - video blogs, so it is a conversation to camera fromme about my week, what i've been up to, and just a simple sort of commentary. it isn't meant to be fiction, nor sophisticated, it is meant to be more like a video message you might leave or send friends to let you know what you've been up to. of course by itself that isn't a vog, so i've added four sprites in the video which control each of the top panels which load still images as child movies.

three major things being explored here.

one is the pixellation of the image which is a result of very heavy compression. of course this means it actually gets delivered and plays pretty damn happily across domestic (first world) bandwidth. it is also a continuation of my earlier interests in tiling the video, but now rather than slicing it up i get a similar though different effect through the video artefacts that are now visible as the 16 pixel blocks. this is part of my general applied research into the relation of montage and collage in digital video, in particular as an immanent desktop aesthetic (what i think lev manovich mistakenly describes as spatial montage) and as a continuation of deleuze's theorisation of montage and the frame as qualitative sets. this is also expressed by the 4 child movies with the still images that load based on user activity.

the second is the an experiment in complexity. the 4 child movies all load from the same collection of stills, and pretty much load them in the same order. there are 70 stills in all. the sprites simply count how often the mouse enters each sprite track and uses that to load a specific still image. now i could have scripted this so that the child movies were randomised, or some script that performs calculations using variables of some sort, but this seemed to me to introduce unnecessary complexity. already in this example we have a continuous video with 4 child tracks which load 1 of 70 possible images. each child track loads 1 of 70 possible images, which i thin k means there are 70 x 70 x 70 x70 possible combinations of images. that's more than enough complexity and pattern making, scripting complexity in this case removes readerly intervention (since it becomes too hard to discern any pattern), and just becomes arbitrary. though if i do something like this again i might use the same list of images for each child movie track but in different orders, this is too regular for me.

the third is a continuation of movies that aren't really movies, though they rely on video and quicktime. this obviously has video but the use of the stills and the lack of a 'frame' seems an intriguing question to ask, even if it goes nowhere. this is a film who's frame is the computer desktop, not the black not edge of the cinema nor the veneered plastic of the television. but the frame here is not the edge of the computer screen, the video is a bit more embedded in the screen than that, more a part of the ecology of the screen. would be even better if i could show it without the application menu showing, though this effect is easily achieved in this (and bergen clouds) by playing the movie then clicking outside the movie in the finder. not sure if this is possible on windows (probably not).

i need to think about this more, but it is in some respects an unframed movie and a movie that 'naturally' inhabits the desktop (i mean it just couldn't inhabit tv or a cinema screen, the logic precludes this). this has some significant possibilities theoretically, particularly in relation to the contextually necessary nature of enframing in picture making (just think of derrida's work on the frame here, not to mention deleuze's writing on the frame and the shot in cinema one).