Saturday afternoon, March 2, 2013

Check out the lovely projects which were discussed!

Cornelia Sollfrank, Giving What You Don’t Have:

Giving What You Don’t Have – Trailer from coco castro on Vimeo.

Survival Kits, an artistic project by Deborah Ligorio

Andrew Clay: Insert Yourself Here: A Social Presentation About Social Film
Tweets about “#iyhvv9″

Saturday, March 2, 2013

In his Breaking the Frame talk, Vito Campanelli takes Vilém Flusser’s philosophy of photography as a starting point for thinking about a theory of online video. Flusser described how photography or imagery was contained by categories covering the culture like a net, where we only see what comes through the meshes. The artist or photographer tests the categories and his apparatus: Flusser talks of a ‘programmed freedom’.

Campanelli raises the question of perspective, like we heard before in the panel about First Person Shooters. Now, in digital times, many points of view are possible, and we don’t necessarily choose the best one. There is an imperative to realize as many points of view as possible, using different devices. The user no longer has a fear of the apparatus, but just uses and enjoys it. There is no critical level, no choices to be made anymore in what is shot with the camera. This means that the issue of reduction in experimentation comes up again (this also rings with the talks yesterday). Still, we need to see video as a product never finished, not frozen in one definite option, instead existing as an infinite, modifiable possibility, an infinite editability.

Campanelli also asserts that space as a category gains importance, which is a recurring theme at this Video Vortex conference. Before, with film cameras, the filming itself didn’t bring about a significant movement. Now, with modern cameras incorporated in gadgets to be carried a everywhere, there is a freedom of movements. Just think about the great difference between looking through a viewfinder with one eye closed, as in old photo cameras, and the way we film with a digital device, holding it from our body towards the object, looking at the screen together. We move beyond the obstacles which were there before and this leads to the aesthetization of the framing act. Moreover, says Campanelli, aesthetization will be the one thing left, working for the pleasure of the filmer and viewer, who nevertheless is still in constant search of information. It is one way of interacting with the data overload which characterizes our digital times. Does this mean that information overload leads to an aesthetic way of viewing and capturing the world? Is the pleasure of framing all that remains?

Robert M Ochshorn uses mathematical filtering in order to reframe the world, really ‘breaking the frames’ so the structure and time lapse of the video is foregrounded. The core of his research lies in the idea of compression, raising many questions about what information is, what is important, what editing means in this process. Or, to draw the line with other talks and themes: reduction and manipulation of material, very much in a repetitive, computational kind of way, concerned with indexing and archiving. Ochshorns work seems more concerned with temporality than spatiality. Shown on the big screen of the conference hall it really hits the spot, and makes me very curious to learn more about his projects.

Friday afternoon, March 1, 2013

Joshua Neves opens the Friday afternoon dedicated to Video Theory. Does video really resist theory, like is said so often? Multiplicity, assembly, vortex as models for video indeed resist the specificity and singularity mostly associated with theoretical models. Lets look at some possible ‘videographies’, for example ‘video itineraries’: video as being everywhere and everyday on the routes in our lives, fitting in there seamlessly. Another is the ‘documentary impulse’, related more to the content of the video; just think about the 17000 islands project presented earlier. Video as a form of spatial practice thus has different forms. Moreover, it’s not only spatial, but also having a bodily intimacy: there is an intimate relationship with the Internet (not someone on the Internet, but treating the Internet as being someone you can talk to, interact with). For this reason it must also be important to study the infrastructure of online video, with Neves proposing we see this as a ‘media archipelagos’. Such a theoretical model fits the multiplicity, assemblages mentioned before.

What kind of ‘data’ is the basic material for this assemblage of video? Boaz Levin discusses different ways of working with data, from the 60s up to the times we live in now, the times of data visualization. Raw data is being used as material, but then, where is the story, the line or trend to follow? The fabrication of story, identity, and community through mediation can be analyzed in their immediate forms, as the reduction of immediate data. This reduction to for example graphics is a manner of presenting it to the viewer.

Perspective becomes a key point of analysis. More specifically: the first person perspective. In cinema this point of view is almost prohibited, while in online video it is used all the time. As in the (real) First Person Shooter video that is hardly indistinguishable from a video game. What does that mean? And how can we apply this to such ‘objective’ reductions as we see in data visualizations? Peter Snowdon researches perspective as well. Video becomes ‘radically subjective and radically non-dramatic’. However, we must not forget that the real in itself (like raw material and data) is nothing, maybe not even real. It has to be manipulated into a story in order to get a (real) meaning.

Friday, March 1, 2013

Web video has lost its innocence and incorporates notions of subversions and empowerment, says Sascha Simons. Web videos function as a medium of testimony, of the witness. A witnessing that needs to be repeated and confirmed again and again. The video as a testimonial medium of course raises the question of authenticity. We need to research an aesthetic of authenticity, of empowerment and of innovation. Video is in this way standing in a tradition, but also breaking with these traditions.

Video plays a huge role in modern day protests, like the Indignados and the occupations of squares around the world which can be found all over YouTube. Coverage of the protest would be impossible without the footage of the people being there and filming what they see with their phones and flip cameras. Like Margarita Tsomou showed in her talk about the Syntagma square occupation in Athens. It was prohibited for journalists to film on the square, so there were only images from above, filmed from the luxurious hotels. Journalists were talking more about the conditions of filming than the actions themselves. They were not wanted there by the protesters, who bullied them away with lasers. For this reason the only pictures from within were captured using mobile phones. Most pictures are of the fights when the square was cleared and for privacy reasons the footage is still limited, as is the case with material from the square before the police came.

Tsoumos shows how she put all the videos next to each other to get a multiple point of view: ‘Simultaneous multimontage’. This differs notably from a montage put together to form a narrative. It is personalized instead of objective or representational. Befitting the slogan ‘Everyone speaks for himself’ and the ideal of direct democracy. Moreover, the film is not edited, which leads to another concept of time in the video. Perhaps, she says, even comparable to time on the square? The boredom there is a counterpoint to our short attention spans which should lead the videomakers in their decisions. Tsoumos also asks the question of the database and indexing and archiving. Can YouTube do the job for such protesting testimonies?

Protesting may be huge in the video sphere, but the biggest video platforms consist mostly of comedy – including the humorous genre that is broad, multifaced but in the end, male. Also the most popular video makers are funny men, so to speak. In China, like we saw in the great talk by Nan Haifen, just as well as in Germany, as Boris Traue demonstrated.

When you’re funny, you just turn on your webcam and start your career, right? Not completely so. There is a clear trend leading away from ‘the rise of amateur’ to the demand of professionalism. At least that is what Jo Cognito, video blogger avant la lettre from 1995 on, says. In 1995 you could sit at your computer, and start producing and no one could tell you what to do. Now all the time you need more of everything, more technique, more light, more gadgets, more filters, plus more television to be visible. YouTube made available studios for users to film their own videos in television quality. Or is it the other way around? YouTube is way bigger than television. As a video blogger you need to keep track of television, but also television can’t ignore YouTube anymore. Television is on YouTube, and YouTube increasingly invades television programs.

Thinking back to the talks yesterday, it leaves me wondering where the future will lead. Will it be a windy road, switching from the animated gif to semiprofessional YouTube-shows, from humorist male antiheroes to peace and aggression on squares and streets? Is there also a middle way – where did the ‘middle of the road’ go?

Pavlos Hatzopoulos and Nelli Kambouri talked about the Greek neofascist party Golden Dawn and their use of YouTube to bring forth their cause, showing horrifying videos of violence against migrants and disruption in the parliament: truly the dark side of social media. Here explicit ‘amateurism’ is used as an aesthetic, the medium of the witness put to use in a completely different and conscious way. Opposed to the ‘accidental’ testimonies of the protesters, and opposed to the professionalism of the YouTube-studio described yesterday. Please also see Pavlos’ and Nelli’s thrilling essay about social media on Syntagma Square in the Unlike Us Reader.

Thursday, February 28, 2013

The future is back: new visions for film on the web – under this title the panel presents the art and practice of film makers in this era of online video. What are the film makers doing and how do they realize the possibilities in their work?

Seth Keen joins via Skype and speaks about his practical research circling around ‘poetic taxonomies and spatial fluctuations’. He shows how he develops a new way of editing film, leading to multilinear online documentaries. The starting point is the question on how to use the networked relations of the web in making documentaries. These relations are put there both by the makers and the audience.Through new, online editing and compositing software it is possible to assemble these new style videos.

To get there, the assemblage parts have to be suited in the first place. For example, Keen uses only single shots himself. This also relates to another important characteristic: all separate parts must be readable, indexable, categorized in some way. What consequences does this have for non-narrative, poetic forms? How can you design a system that recognizes those parts? And how to guide the user who’ll make the assemblage through that? Multilinear documentaries seem heavily related to exactly the poetic and non-narrative. How to bring such online poetic documentaries a step closer?

Edwin & Thomas Østbye initiated the project 17000islandsinteractive.com where again parts of a film can be used by the public to make a new, personal video. The audience then takes control. Moreover, by using the original film, it is destroyed. That means a kind of sacrificeon the side of the film maker, as Edwin points out, which isn’t easy of course. But the project shows the big opportunities for new ways of filmmaking, online and with a crowd of millions of people together, theoretically.

This new way of video editing can also be used in portraying the major protests of our time, like Margarita Tsomou has done. Check the the Friday morning blog post for more on that.

In the evening a great presentation Gabriel S. Moses urges us to start questioning the definition of video altogether. He analyzes the meme of The Ring, which revolves around a (deadly) video. If video slowly starts do disintegrate somehow into non-narrative, repeated images, not necessearly rising above the meme, as can be most explicitly seen in GIFs, then we need a new term altogether, to clearly make the distinction with the old-school video tapes stacked on a shelf and now probably moved into the basement or attic.

This definition-challenging and somewhat frightful (meant in a positive horror way of course) talk is followed by the presentation of the Network Notebook The Inner Life of Video Spheres by Andreas Treske, where he lays the groundwork for a theory of online video, bringing together many of the themes discussed before. Check out Andreas’ video on Vimeo, or is it a video at all?

Thursday, February 28, 2013

The opening keynote is by Beth Coleman from MIT. In ‘Tweeting the revolution’ she talks about the rhetoric of activism, how collective histories of collective action take shape in the networked media. How do the public and the civic, but also the poetic, constitute themselves on these media like Twitter and Facebook and would it be possible to develop some kind of ethical framework for that?

By now we are all aware that the Egyptian revolution wasn’t perhaps all in all a Facebook revolution. The social networking site was important for logistical reasons, but doesn’t tell the whole story. Coleman recalls the argument of Malcolm Gladwell against ‘clicktivism’: just liking a Facebook page can’t be enough to truly engage, there needs to be a bodily presence, you have to have ‘skin in the game’. Coleman seems to agree on that, but wants to add that the distinction between real life and something like cyberspace seems totally outdated. We need to think about the tweeted revolution with the intertwining of cyberspace and real space as the basis. The Arab Spring truly was the biggest uprising since 1968, says Coleman, but the differences are as big as the similarity in impact is.

Who didn’t see ‘the MOST AMAZING video on the Internet‘ (and that’s quite a statement, right?), a compilation of scenes from Egypt around #Jan25? A student from Georgia put it together, sitting behind his desk in his dorm room, wanting to help, take part, engage. He must have devoted hours to the video, and the result is engaging indeed, sending shivers down your spine. Amazing to me is the music score mostly, a full on American tearjerker rock song (not my favorite genre). The end shows a quote by JFK. So at the same time as being very touching and effective, it gives you a feeling of propaganda of the American kind. Whether you like that or not, it’s a long way removed from objective journalism.

This leads to the ethical point Coleman is making. She doesn’t judge the student making this video in his spare time, his engagement should be applauded in the least. What the video shows is the need for a responsibility on the side of the viewer. ‘Where do the images come from,’ she should ask herself, ‘are they correct’? It is also necessary to read the language of the video, the rhetoric if for example the revolution. (This reminds me of the use of the iconic picture of the French Revolution, which was copied in the iconic picture of the American victory in WWII – and in many more places.)

The rhetoric of these videos do not only deal with facts, concludes Coleman, but also with social relations surrounding the video like in Iran. Through video is it possible to engage socially, even while not being there in the square, in the flesh. Another example, from the US, is a video in which young gang-style guys reclaim a murder scene with a taping of (again) amazing dance moves. Turf Feinz RIP Oscar Grant video: This is comparable or at least somehow related to occupying a square, says Coleman, because both are ethical engagements. It’s about being with someone via mediation, not despite mediation. The question of being there in the skin is simply a bit old fashioned. You can be there and engage without physical presence, through the enveloping sphere of video.

If you’re interested in this topic, be sure to check out the Facebook Riot panel at Unlike Us #3, and the new Network Notebook by Andreas Treske, The Inner Life of Video Spheres: Theory for the YouTube Generation.

Video Vortex #9
Re:assemblies of Video
28 Feb. – 2 March 2013
Lüneburg, Germany
Centre for Digital Cultures
Leuphana University

The conference asks how can we analyze and compare assemblages of online video? 
Besides speakers, performances and workshops we already announced - among them Beth
Coleman and Nishant Shah - we would like to introduce to you a further set of
speakers and topics: 

Joshua Neves, Gabriel Menotti and Filippo Spreafico find different ways to organize
filters and frameworks for glimpses of online video. Neves pleads for adopting new
thinking for each video assembly, a multiplicity of video theories. The method of
Menotti to access the videosphere is through curation. Even more hands-on is
Spreafico’s video montage, which simultaneously shows his „local“ and „personal“
view on information.

Along the activism-journalism-civic media axis, Sascha Simons scrutinizes the
phenomenon of amateur video witnesses along lines of  circulation, credibility, and
mobilization. Margarita Tsomou takes the protests on Syntagma Square in Athens in
2011 as her familiar example to explore the visual affectivity of bodies and social
spaces in a performance lecture.
Besides covering movements of majorities inserting itself in existing social
structures, video can be seen as a literal social beast reflecting the dark side of
amateur video production. Nelli Kambouri and Pavlos Hatzopoulos look at the
blistering video propaganda of the Greek fascist party Golden Dawn.

At this critical stage, contested video networks have to deal with attempts to
subsume cultural production and consumption under brand and corporate authorities.
Coders and developers of VLC, FFmpeg, Pan.do.ra and P2P Next gather at Video Vortex
to exchange concepts and strategies to keep video formats, codecs and archives
available to the commons.

Video as part of the learning sphere is likewise contested: MOOC(s) are rising as a
new promise for democratizing education or just as effective market reach. Hybrid
Publishing Lab and guests from Coventry University will discuss critically how
videos get re-embedded and re-annotated in teaching platforms.

Financing of film, television and video projects reflects the logics of the new
assemblages. Media industry and users alike are expecting multiplatform-ready
narrative forms. Three case studies of the Moving Image Lab mirror these challenges
and will be discussed alongside Dystopia, an interactive web film, to reflect what
new terrains and demands are showing up in media production.

Andrew Clay translates the challenge of social media right within a format of
academic presentation. Surrounded by three video projectors and using the
interaction of participants, he will immerse a talk on social film into the format
social film. The social force of copresence and sharing in a state of crisis is what
interests Deborah Ligorio in her art project Survival Kits.

Certainly social video is about the mirroring of social visions. This February in
Cairo, the artists Kaya Behkalam and Azin Feizabadi together with curator Jens
Maier-Rothe conceived a performative lecture on the very notion of »projection«.
Jasmina Metwaly from Mosireen Collective – who organized Tahir Cinema, open air
projections of mobile video during the egyptian revolution –, will respond with her
insights and experiences in facilitating and screening political video.

How much citizen reporters rely on personal engagement, skills and persistence, is
shown by the film High Tech Low Life by Steve Maing, a cinematic portait of two
Chinese video bloggers.

Video Vortex #9 in general traces new digital video culture, its users, spectators
and producers by looking at criss-cross effects between neighboring domains, tracks
and turfs of video. The way users made digital culture a part of their real life is
illustrated in the ‚video meme’ "Digital Natives" by artist Renée Ridgway.

Participants: Beth Coleman, Seth Keen,  Edwin, Thomas Østbye, Andreas Treske,
Stephanie Hough, Martin Katić, Theresa Steffens, Arndt Potdevin, Robert M. Ochshorn,
Nan Haifen, Viola Sarnelli, Boris Traue, Achim Kredelbach , Dalida María Benfield,
Renée Ridgway, Gabriel S Moses, Nishant Shah, Margarita Tsomou, Sascha Simons, Nelli
Kambouri, Pavlos Hatzopoulos, Joshua Neves, Gabriel Menotti, Filippo Spreafico,
Caroline Heron, Jonathan Shaw, Jan Gerber, Sebastian Luetgert, Johan Pouwelse,
Sebastian Luetgert, Sascha Kluger, Jamie King,  Stefano Sabatini, Peter Snowdon ,
Miya Yoshida, Boaz Levin, Azin Feizabadi, Kaya Behkalam, Jens Maier-Rothe, Jasmina
Metwaly, Left Vision, Katja Grundmann, Graswurzel.tv , Björn Ahrend, Timo
Großpietsch, Vito Campanelli , Robert M. Ochshorn, Alejo Duque, Lucía Egaña Rojas,
Andrew Clay, Stefan Heidenreich, Deborah Ligorio,  Cornelia Sollfrank, among others

The full program can be found here on videovortex9.net

VV9 is organized by Leuphana University’s Moving Image Lab and Post-Media Lab. A
portion of VV9 also constitutes the first part of the ANALOG event series, sponsored
by the university’s Centre for Digital Cultures.

VV9 is funded through Innovation Incubator, a major EU project financed by the
European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the federal state of Lower Saxony.

The flyer of the 9th edition of Video Vortex is out now. Re:assemblies of Video will be held between the 28th of February and the 2nd of March 2013 in Lüneburg, Germany