vog (a BETA videoblog)

First comment on softvideographic movement.

Mouse into the text on the right to play the commentary. Click on the same commentary to pause it. Mouse in to the region to continue the commentary (02:17).

What is academic video in a context such as this? This is an academic video. It is making propositions about video as an architecture, form, and system. It is offering a critique of existing modes and approaches to what video online is, could be, might be. It does this via the traditional form of a rhetorical narrative, and through video itself.

A street in Montréal, May 2011.

A first proposition about online video. Nine different video files, each made and kept large enough (they total 18.5MB for this noisy 28 seconds) so that the network can cause lag, interruptions, stutter. Some will load, some not quite, some will play while others might still be loading. This is not one video with a faux fancy After Effects moment but a video file that loads into itself 9 others. First proposition? Video online, what we can conceive of as softvideo, is discontinuous, fragmentary, looping, partial. Wholes are provisional. It is only about relations between parts.

The first proposition? That video online is not a video but videos. (It is always about the sets of possible relations.) It is not so much about movement within but between. Here movement shifts from being a moment of indexical recording of something that moves - after all very few actually film things that don’t move - towards an awareness of the simultaneous movement between the parts. It is not just Manovich’s ‘spatial montage’ which remains haunted by an assumption of narrative, as if our minimal units were still discrete whole shots, nor indeed even by the possibilities of having several such shots together, alongside each other, chattering away. Video online, as a first proposition, is a deterritorialised image which allows for a video that need no longer define itself as only at the service of recorded movement out there, nor as a thing which requires the scaffolding of narrative to be.