vog (a BETA videoblog)

The original post:

This is another rhizome movie that is partly to illustrate the use of the templates, but also to just play a bit with some material. This is the same footage as the other recent rhizome movies have used, but I have compressed the crap out of it. Took the original, exported it to half its resolution and double its frame rate and a fraction of its data rate. Set forced keyframes to some really big number (so that there won't be any). This is just impossible for the codec to do, so it will actually use more data than I requested since it more or less assumes I'm a dill for trying to do all that. But it helps really dirty up the video. Why? Because as the video becomes more compressed, as more artefacts appear, it shifts away from being indexical, representational video (video thought of as showing the world) towards pattern, pixels, movement, and colour. Ambient video. Ambient video is important. It is what video and the moving image becomes when it is ubiquitous, on screens, in the home, our phones. Walk past an ATM and watch the screen move, scrolling ads in bus and tram stops, pixellated signage, the list is enormous. In this world moving images move increasingly away from being of something else and become something for themselves. This is why we have VJing, for instance. So in a world where video online (just think YouTube as the banally obvious exemplar) is the norm, video can begin to free itself from being the hand maid to just mirroring (and all those efforts at narrative that seem to fall in lock step behind) and do other things. Be abstract. Make patterns. Other fragments that will only ever aspire to be fragments. Of the world. Of shape. Fragments of fragments.