vog (a BETA videoblog)

One of those works I made when I was playing with text tracks in QuickTime where I look at them years later and I've got no idea how to actually run them or what they were trying to do. In this particular one it seems there are a pile of child movie videos, and mousing into them (it doesn't look it matters which) will toggle you through the text that appears. Mouse in and out quickly and they change quick.

Ah, tried it out and not quite right there. There are five text movies, not just bits of text. So when you get a new text movie you leave it to run, regardless of what the video is doing, and it plays. Then you can do the same with the next text movie. Sheesh, complicated really. Not a good way to tell about something, but it is an interesting experiment to think about text, multiple text, and video.

The footage, and commentary, comes from a holiday to Western Victoria.

From the original blog post:

I used the template from the Glenelg Observations blog to do a bit more experimenting. In this work there are no child movie video tracks (which is why it weighs in at 1MB), but there are 5 child movie video tracks. To play the vog (it will autostart) mouse into the video panes, this loads and plays the text movies, so mousing in each time will load a new text movie and play it (a total of 5 available, all brief).

Technically I just wanted to see if I could get better playback by not using child movies for video, but it hasn't made that much difference as far as I can see. What I should do is make them play in the QuickTime Player (the blue with the grey at that size is disgusting) and also full screen. Completely contrary to vogging but would work well for these works. (We'll see.) I was also interested in having a series of text works related to the video content appear, so that the video is now singular (in that it is a discrete linear sequence) but the text narratives that accompany it become plural. Now since they're text tracks they are very small files, but the text is keyed over the video which does require some CPU horsepower (ah, when the world runs on G5's, then desktop cinema will appear obvious and trivial), but I could run them backwards. But they're text, and each is written as a sequence so that wouldn't make much sense.

Instead, we have 5 text movies of 5 lines each and these are loaded by the user mousing into the active video panes. This sets up really interesting moments and stories since which text movie is being viewed is extremely variable (and can be easily replaced by another courtest of a mouse entry before it is completed) and of course different textual fragments appear juxtaposed with each of the five images used in the video.

This produces a simple combinatory engine that has, well, no fixed number of outcomes and the work, if the work is thought of as the relation of the video to the text, is only ever realised in each reading. I like that. Got a thing about process (as my beleaguered students can testify). Another thing I might do is up the data rate and make it seriously broadband, see if that makes these works flow in the way that they need.