vog (a BETA videoblog)

From the original blog post:

A work that mousing into the left video panes increases the text font size, mousing into the middle video panes stops the movie, and mousing into the right video panes decreases the font size of the text track.

This is a repetition of the previous movie but without the images being sliced and diced. This is because most of the photo's were taken by Anna and she doesn't like how the tiling pays no specific attention to the visual content or design of the video. Deliberate on my behalf, as the visual content and design of the still images is deliberate on hers.

This no longer works. The text track appears, very small (which it always did), but now when you mouse into the video it simply disappears, rather than changing scale. This is the result of changes that Apple made in QuickTime (where in my experience some of these effects you could apply to text tracks got broken quite regularly). The text commentary was long, and here it is (I just extracted the text track from the movie, then exported that as a text file, all within QuickTime):

Port Fairy is a small coastal community in western Victoria. It is on the Moyne River and is one of the oldest settlements in the state. That doesn't mean a lot, since it means the oldest buildings might be from 1850 or so. Portland is nearby and that is I think where the first settlement in Victoria happened, thought it wasn't Victoria back then.

It used to be just a fishing village, but twenty or thirty years ago they started an annual folk festival on a long weekend in summer. Now the tickets sell out within a week of release and I don't know how many people go but all accommodation and camping for everywhere around is booked solid.

Anna and I spent a night there on the way to Glenelg in a sort of cabin that isn't but is a sort of semi portable house type thing. In town there were still the pubs but also some renvoated so that at one pub you could get a room for over two hundred dollars a night. There were a couple of cafes that could have been in any fashionable strip in the inner city, and enough well groomed folk older than me driving European cars to let you know that it has become quite the place. Bed and breakfasts, guesthouses along the river.

The Moyne River is small but down there it is wide enough for fishing boats to enter and moor at the jetties alongside the river. Same place where the European car guest houses are. You can't get far up the river, there is a low bridge over it, and downstream it just flows out through a wide seawalled channel out into Bass Strait or maybe even the Southern Ocean. Some wild seas out there sometimes (the swell comes up from nowhere - head south a few miles and turn west and there's nothing but ocean until Africa and between the Australian mainland and Tasmania is Bass Strait, it is shallower and so these big stormed oceans roll in from the Antartic and get channelled into the shallower Bass Strait and the waves turn brutal, out the other end of Bass Strait that current then meets a different current coming down the east coast of Australia, and there the seas can be tortured and tortuous), for us though it was calm soft skies with little wind.

We had breakfast in a small park by the river sitting at the picnic tables. Didn't have enough cutlery so I drove back into town, found a hardware store and bought a knife and teaspoon. Muesli, yoghurt, fresh baked things from the bakery, coffee and tea. A teenage boy was dropped off by his mum with a fishing rod and bucket and disappeared down the path, through the tea tree, to fish in the river. I imagine bream is the fish of choice. Some magpies came to watch our food, and I sat down by the river shooting some video of the boats, people walking along the river, and workers building a new jetty. Two blokes and a son pulled up and started preparing the electric barbeque, I guess everyone else was coming a bit later. A family occupied another table.

Anna read the paper, sitting in the sun, I quietly watched and filmed her.

That afternoon we drove to Nelson, what I suppose you would describe as a hamlet on the Victoria - South Australia border. Well, not quite, it's about 4 kilomteres up the road, but it is on the Glenelg River. General Store, pub, boat hire, petrol station, some Bed and Breakfast places, couple of caravan parks and the rest holiday houses, handful of locals, and places to stay.

Ours was Causaurina Cabins, more of those sort of slightly more robust and immovable than caravans but made by caravan company sort of cabins. Small bedroom, couple of bunks, kitchen come lounge. Signs insisting that fish be cleaned at the boat ramps and not in the cabin.

South the river runs into Discovery Bay. Anna and I had several walks along here, windy and crisp. Shells, kelp, cuttlefish, plastic bobbins from the fishing boats. In the estaurary pelicans sit, confusing regal indifference with indolence. The pied oyster catchers with their silly red legs creak as they scurry across the sand, refusing to flight until some signal known only to them indicates otherwise. And amongst them in their tininess are the dottrels, the quail of the coast, racing breakneck ridiculously leaving not a trace at the waters edge.

The coast seems to run forever but it never does though the appearance counts for a lot. Reverie of the beach walker, prodding at the great wadded kelp corpses, gathering the odd feather, shells, Anna stopping to photograph what she finds. I like to scan the horizon, wondering if a whale will spout, or perhaps a seal or pod of dolphins. Even an albatross.

The Glenelg River begins somewhere in the western district of Victoria, not a particularly long river. But its last eighty kilometres or so it becomes meandering slow and flaccid through a corridor of national park. This has complex eucalyptus forest (complex to me because around Melbourne a lot of the bush is often dominated by a single major species) with mixed species, all through limestone. The Glenelg Gorge is where the river has carved its way down through the limestone, which I guess why it is such a leisurely river as it's carved its way down so far it doesn't fall that far over the eighty kilometres. We walked along the gorge, through the bush, surprising a kangaroo caught between the path we were on, the cliff, and its dinner. It decided dinner was better than suicide, and after eyeing us from a couple of metres nonchantly returned to its foliage feed.

There is a bushwalk along the top of the gorge. Well, actually there's the Great South West Walk, which does some bloody enormous two hundred and fifty kilometre loop, and we did a ten kilometre loop of that along the top of the gorge. Red soil, white cliffs, grass trees, grevilleas and gums. Some signs, a fence to prevent the accidental and a large bright yellow leech on the path waiting for some mammalian meal to attach itself to.

All along the river are numerous camping grounds, some places from which to launch boats and canoes, and jettys. One afternoon driving through the national park we made lunch at one of the jetty's. Anna lit a fire in the barbeque and we gathered some timber, then had a fry up on the hotplate. Brunch sort of lunch. Fried eggs, tomato, bacon. With that smokey burn that campfires contribute with your clothes eventually well smoked with a smell that I suspect is distinctly Australian from the eucalypt timber, but I don't know. A motor boat was at the jetty and a young family shared the site with us. They had a holiday house at Port Macdonnell, in South Australia, and trailered their boat to the Glenelg for some fishing on the river. A quick lunch for them with a four year old boy and his little sister. Chatty too. Driving out some emu's raced across the road and into the bush.

In Nelson, above the highway bridge, we found boathouses nestled into the river bank. I've never seen anything like this much in Victoria. They're very pretty, looking like environmental architecture with their colours and patina of moss, rust, sea gulls and fish scales. Some of them have small cabins on top with a deck, I could imagine sitting up there of a summer's evening, citronella burning, perhaps a line in the river, radio on the cricket but quietly, and even perhaps a cold beer. Or just the kids jumping off the small jetty, playing in the water. Outside the general store there was a large flock of galahs, scouring through the grass seeds and obviously something special there. Not raucous, just conversational grey and pink with an eye to the road. In the general store postcards, fishing tackle, maps, brochures, notice board, food basics, post office and the man who knew everyone. The tennis courts (every Australian town has tennis courts) have a shed with a mural painted on them of some ladies playing. Brute naif rural.

We both photograph what we see and find. I shoot some video. I use these photos in this work exploring stillness into movement. Almost as found image objects. I have added some film noise to them, just masking their stillness (but of course some of them still have the date stamped on them, or have a figure who obviously doesn't move) with noise. I crop and tile the images (much to Anna's chagrin and discomfort) with the tiling indifferent to what is in the image, and the flow of playback is surrendered to the vagaries of the network, other computers, and the user. Where is cinematic movement? Found footage, found images, everyday snaps, free software, vogs-as-readymades.

On the beach Anna does cartwheels. At one of the campsites she teaches me how to find patterns as she photographs round things that she discovers.