vog (a BETA videoblog)

WARNING: This loads 12 video tracks as child movies, each is set to autoplay and loop. YMMV but it crashes my browser every single time. Shouldn't, but it does.

Shot on my mobile phone, while having a look at some work in the 2010 Sydney Biennale. This is all from within one of the large old warehouses on the wharves where the light coming in from the windows produced enough contrast to trouble the camera - my Xacti could handle this much better and you just didn't get this sort of visual effect with that better camera.

The work is about light, repetition, pattern and rhythm. It is abstract, but also intimate. It is not descriptive, nor narrative. It is not showing you what was in the space, nor telling you what we saw. It just uses the windows and their light as simple raw, abstract material to make with, videographically. The scale is large for me. I toyed with JavaScript to open a window, various video lightbox solutions too, but reverted to just targeting QuickTime Player. It is not ideal, but falls within the ambitions of this sort of project which is web, rather than video art, specific.

The work is made up of five individual video files, all of which are loaded more than once. It relies on a child movie structure to load these videos, so that a) each of the five have their own durations, and b) they can all loop and play independently of each other. This is the sort of work that simply was not possible only five years ago, as the bandwidth requirements, and CPU power, just would have choked it in most contexts. The bandwidth aspect of this is interesting - while there was certainly enough bandwidth to download this sort of thing five years ago, there would have been delays and stuttering as they loaded, and I would have also written scripts to prevent each of the twelve child movies from playing until a minimum amount of media had downloaded. In 2010 I don't really have to worry about this. If it stutters, it stutters, but in general the media will load and play over what is now largely the default home standard for bandwidth (ie some form of broadband).

The ambient soundtrack has had its level dropped, this has been done programmatically within the parent video where I have scripted the volume for the child tracks, and this in turn has let me play a child movie commentary under the videos, which, as a child movie, has an independent play state to the videos.

This iteration offers no interactivity for the user. Just watch, which I guess is why I would be interested in presenting it more in a full screen mode, which is easily achievable with a brief line of code in QuickTime...