VV summer school is organized by Dan Oki and Dalibor Martinis.

Split, 07.07.2011

We would like to invite you and your students to participate in the Video Vortex summer school Vis, 2011. This is the first year that school is being organized as part of the international Video Vortex network. The aim of the project is to establish a European summer school and future joint study programs in the fields of film, media arts, performance and cultural theory.

As a bit of background, the island of Vis and the town of Komiza have a very particular location within both the Croatian geographical and historical context and within the wider Mediterranean cultural-historical environment. Vis and Komiza have witnessed prehistoric times, the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, the 19th century struggles of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy and England for the domination of the Adriatic, the wave of emigration from the island to America at the beginning of the 20th century, a free territory with Tito’s cave of 1944, and they have become an internationally renowned contemporary tourist destination. All the while, Vis and Komiza have been both the periphery and the center of Mediterranean and Croatian culture. Despite having a small number of inhabitants, a small surface area and being geographically isolated, Komiza is an urbanized place featuring a pronounced linguistic, cultural, economic and social identity. Based on these traits of Komiza and Vis, it is possible to develop a new symbolic value. The constant simultaneity of local and global can be found in new media practices as they establish new simultaneities (inside/outside, aesthetic/ethic, body/virtual…), and a paradigm of the net-work and/or the archipelago annuls the dichotomy between center and periphery. Summer school will rely on the already articulated inter-island cultural practices which have been, in this part of the Adriatic, developed by local cultural activists under the name of Moj otoče (My Island). The marine area surrounding Vis is many times greater than the area of the island and thus the sea (as a space which both isolates and at the same time connects, as a mythical place, as an economic resource and as a point of disappearing on one side and a life-sustaining medium on the other) can be seen as a parallel space of media research.

We will have the following teachers from six respected universities at this first Video Vortex summer school which will happen on the island of Vis in the town of Komiza between the 22nd and the 31st of August, 2011.

Sarah Kesenne – Sint Lucas Art Academy of Gent, Belgium

Kobe Vermeere – Sint Lucas Art Academy of Gent, Belgium

Merry Krell – Sussex University of Brighton, School of Media, Film and Music, UK

Adrian Goycoolea – Sussex University of Brighton, School of Media, Film and Music, UK

Peter Purg – University of Nova Gorica, School of Arts, Slovenia

Davor Svaic – University of Zagreb, Academy of Dramatic Arts, Croatia

Dalibor Martinis – University of Rijeka, Academy of Aplied Arts, Croatia

Sandra Sterle – University of Split, Academy of Arts, Croatia

Dan Oki – University of Split, Academy of Arts,  Croatia

Dinko Bozanic – University of Split, Academy of Arts, Croatia

Brian Willems – University of Split, Faculty of Philosophy, Croatia

Besides university teachers we will have also two other teaching participants:

Srećko Horvat – theoretician

Vjeran Šalamon – music composer and sound designer

We expect to have 2-4 students from each university. All together, around 20 students and 10 teachers are expected. The invited teachers should select some of their students to participate in the workshop. Structure of the workshop is that students work in couple of groups. For example, one group will be working in the field as a mobile film-media crew and another group will be assembling and editing materials and/or putting it online. Other groups or individuals can develop their own work methods or they can work exclusively with online moving image. There will also be a small film set and the production of a couple of scenes for a feature film will be taking place. We will have underwater cameras and motion capture control, lighting and sound equipment. For students who want to work on themes related to the island of Vis, here are a couple of possible themes:

- The Island of Vis and its Marine Area – Tradition

- My Island

- Global/Local – History

- Tito’s Cave – Vis 1944

Each day there will be a conceptual round table centered on planning the next day of production. Each evening we will also have one presentation or lecture by one of the teachers.

At the end of the workshop we will have presentations in the local cinema and on about 10 plasma televisions placed around the town of Komiza.

We will cover accommodation, breakfast and dinner for you as a teacher. The accommodation is in a two-star hotel, but on such a remote island it counts for four stars in the summer. The name of the hotel is called Bisevo, in the town of Komiza, the island of Vis. Please check it out on the web.

For students we have discount rates at the hotel. They have to pay 200 kunas per day, which includes accommodation, breakfast and dinner. It is, with taxes, around 30 Euros per day. The idea is to have workshops for 10 days and 9 nights. So for each student it comes to around 270 Euros, or 2,800.00 kunas.

In order to have a balance between students and teachers, the teachers do not get a teaching fee but have their accommodation and food covered, while the students do not pay a workshop fee but they have to pay for a discounted accommodation. Both students and teachers have to ask their respected Universities to pay for their travel expenses.

Besides the actual workshop, we will discuss plans for future joint study programs on the European level. Next year we expect more institutions to join us: the Academy of Fine Arts Budapest – Hungary, the Institute of Network Cultures from Amsterdam – the Netherlands and the Academy of Fine Arts from Bruinschweig – Germany, and other interested parties. A new edition of the Video Vortex conference will take place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb in may 2012. It will be a next meeting point for further development of the projects.

Sincerely yours,

Professors Dan Oki and Dalibor Martinis

Still from Mass Ornament (2009)

As the final event of  the sixth Video Vortex, YouTube lovers, video artists, and enthusiasts of all types were invited to enjoy an evening screening and discussion with media artist Natalie Bookchin. The screening was held in SMART Project Space Amsterdam, hard to find but a great location.

On Tuesday March 15th, the program started at 19:30 with Bart Rutten (Stedelijk Museum) introducing artist Natalie Bookchin. While Bookchin was  one of the speakers of the Video Vortex conference,  this evening was set up to give her the opportunity to discuss  and show the audience more of her work, and  engage in an intimate and lively discussion with Rutten and the audience. Bookchin showed us three of her works: Trip (2008), Mass Ornament (2009), and the pieces of her Testament series (2009), with great audience response. She even showed one of her newest work-in-progress chapter of  the  Testament series, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, asking us the audience for feedback, and their response to her work.

Want to know what the response was?

All  discussion, questions, answers and comments have been noted in a detailed report. It’s a great read that covers in detail the conversation that took place between Natalie, Bart and the audience that evening. The full report will be posted to the blog in a few days! Check back soon!

Natalie Bookchin in conversation with Geert Lovink. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Artist Natalie Bookchin took time to talk to Geert Lovink about online video and her artistic practice at yesterday’s Video Vortex #6 in Amsterdam.

To open the conversation, Natalie screened Laid Off, a part of her series Testament, which offered a 4-minute impression of her work, capturing the current global financial situation and mass unemployment in the US.

Laid Off

Click here to view the embedded video.

Below is part 1 of the conversation we got to hear between Geert Lovink and Natalie Bookchin, and adapted to include further information.

G: You’re teaching at CalArts, you worked in the 90’s with the internet, developed games, and now suddenly you’re working with online video. How did you stumble into this?

N: I had also been very involved in thinking about online space as a site not only to make work but to distribute and exhibit it.

In the 90s I had been working, distributing, and exhibiting my work online. In  2005, I began to find the Internet too noisy and too crowded, and wanted to return to offline space in my work. I began to collect images from private security webcams that I found through a glitch in Google’s search engine technology which picked up thousands of webcams regardless of whether or not they are intended to be public. The cameras offered an unusual view of the contemporary global landscape mediated through surveillance technology. I became interested in depicting the world as it was described by the technology, and so rather than looking at the recording devices in the landscape, I looked through the cameras, drawing attention to the formal elements of this perspective, its odd and awkward angles of view and composition, its often fixed perspective, the limited tonal range, the dirty lens, and the distance from and limited contact or lack of relationship between the camera — which has no operator present — and its subject. From this material I developed, Network Movies, a series of videos and video installations that I made between 2005 and 2007, where I sampled data flows of images from webcams from around the world to create portraits of global landscapes. Limited bandwidth and cheap cameras produced jumpy, mechanical motion and grainy, low-resolution images that revealed their technological conditions and were reminiscent of early cinema.  I began to make installations and videos offline, in order to provide a more embodied experience, absent in the distracted online space –with its small screen and potential for multitasking.

G: Your video work that uses online footage started with one installation didn’t it? When was the first one?

N: The first piece I made with YouTube footage was trip – a 63-minute single-channel video I completed in 2008, in which I documented a trip around the world using clips I culled from YouTube.  From these clips, I pieced together a trip around the world from the point of view of tourists, human rights workers, locals, soldiers, and many others.  The first point perspective put viewers in the position of a continually changing figure of the traveler, driving from tourist destination, across borders, and through war zones.

G: It’s a gallery installation piece with the look and feel of a collaborative global road movie. There you have your first experiences of making databases, how you select the videos and put them together. Let’s talk more about your approach. Now that we’ve seen Laid Off, it appears that it really must have been an enormous amount of work. It looks very complex. Technically, how did you do this? The syncing?

N: There is no database, nothing is automated – I simply searched, watched and collected the videos. For me, YouTube is in many ways a big heap of trash, out of which, with a lot of digging, treasures can be found. It’s not a platform so much as a site that hosts (and buries) videos. I don’t think it’s a community- so calling it social media is a misnomer. I don’t think there is conversation to be had on it through boxes for comments, or likes or dislikes. So I search.

I search for videos with an idea of what I hope to find, but I am often taken in unexpected directions. For example, with my current work-in-progress Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, I began with the idea that I was going do a piece about the reenactment and retelling of the recent Tiger Woods scandal. As I watched videos, I saw vloggers suddenly slip from discussing Woods, to Obama, or O.J. Simpson or Michael Jackson, or other African American public figures who had also been involved in media-driven scandals. As I watched and edited the videos and realized that the slips were key to the piece, it no longer became a piece about Tiger Woods, but instead about blackness as scandal. This was something I hadn’t known when I started the piece. The way I find and work with material is not and can’t be automated because it is through the process of searching and watching that I discover what it is I am making.

G: Ok, but let’s go back to your method, maybe you know the book by Richard Senatt, The Craftsman. When I think of you painfully putting this together, it’s like a digital craft, not using sophisticated software. But you use sophisticated ways to search for terms, in different languages.

N: Yes, for Trip I did search in different languages. In general, I use many combinations of keywords as I search, and I revise my search terms often as I develop each work. You’ve discussed in previous Video Vortex conferences the subjectivity of tags, which in some ways is very useful for me as I search, but it can also make it very difficult to find videos. I have many problems with the way YouTube structures its search engine – I’m not looking for the most popular videos, I’m looking for the most varied.

G: A lot of the videos you use are very personal. Are the people in these clips talking to family or friends?

N: Sometimes the vloggers make reference to other vloggers or to their subscribers, but mostly they don’t. They have all chosen to make their videos public – to make a public speech. Because of the layers of mediation, and because they are mostly at home in private spaces, their speech often becomes intimate, which creates a tension between the sometimes excruciating privateness of their speech and location, and the very publicness of the screening venue.

My Meds

Click here to view the embedded video.

N: In this one it’s not so much about the individuals, it’s much more about the choral group speaking together, in some way, in the other one there is a sense of individual personality that comes through at certain moments and then fades back into a collective voice.

G: Your work really reflects on theories of online subjectivity, new liberal labour and living conditions. It’s amazing to see this visualised. You can read a lot of books about the individual lives that people have, which you bring together in your work. Did this grow out of theoretical notions like the multitude, in which people retain their individual voices but are nonetheless part of something bigger?

N: In Mass Ornament I thought a lot about the relation of the individual to the collective, and the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism. Although I force a collective out of many separate individuals and spaces, the rectangular format of each video reminds viewers that ultimately each speaker, or dancer, is isolated. In this way my depiction of a collective remains partial, and produces a visual tension between the imagined collective and the isolated individual.

G: And that comes out best in Mass Ornament. It has that sentiment of them aspiring to dance together, even though they’re not aware of that when they’re filming themselves.

N: Yes, although many are in fact responding to other videos. In this way, they are dancing with an imagined community in mind.

–

End of Part 1.

(Part 2 of 2 – In conversation with Natalie Bookchin)

Mass Ornament

Click here to view the embedded video.

G: How did you come to use this idea of a ‘mass ornament’?

N: I began with the desire to do a piece that investigated the changing online status of video. Here, the emphasis is no longer on a single isolated video but on multiple chains of related videos, chains of responses, re-enactments, and remixes, and these responses are both to previous videos in the chain or to mass culture imagery.

G: In Mass Ornament you pay special attention to the audio track, it leads you through the work. This changes in Testament, where the image itself is not carrying the sequence and the sound becomes very very important.

N: Yes that is absolutely true. Sound, or rather speech, is the determinant factor in Testament. I primarily edit for sound rather than image. At first I thought, “how in the world am I going to make it a visually compelling piece?” but it turns out that image is critical – the image of the faces of the speakers give the fragmentary speech more weight, and grounds it from descending into a series of anonymous rants.  The scale of the image in the installation and the direct gaze of the speaker to the viewer create a sense of empathy between the two. Unlike Mass Ornament, I haven’t added sound, I’ve just cleaned it up and edited it, paying attention to rhythm and musicality and of course to what is being said. In Mass Ornament, I got rid of the original music tracks from most of the clips; besides adding my own musical tracks, in some sequences I’ve added ambient sounds of the rooms and of the bodies in the rooms. I did this to individuate separate spaces and dancers, creating a presence of the room and the individuals, so that even with a unifying musical track, we would be reminded of the individual in their particular space. I did not want to depict the individual reduced to an abstraction, to a “mass ornament”.

G: To come back to this motive: a heterogeneous, participatory culture that we know, the YouTube genealogy, and turning that into a collective statement made by you as an individual artist, people nonetheless see something happening here. A transformation is taking place, going beyond what people experience and express themselves. Have you had any responses from people who simply promote participatory culture?

N: No I haven’t! Although some people do tend to be relieved that I put my videos online. There are different ways to think about participation: does participation mean allowing others to add comments or to “like” or “dislike” a video? In my projects, I am searching for more substantive participatory impulses, whether that means identifying with a social body larger than the individual, or articulating shared political subjectivities.

G: Some would be relieved that finally there’s an artist synthesizing all this noise; people are complaining about information overload, but now there is Natalie Bookchin…

N: In some way I’m just paying attention, digging for, and compiling some of the stories we are currently telling to ourselves and others online.

G: Your works are all designed to be experienced in a gallery setup, and not on a computer. Is that a step forward or step back? And are you going to keep producing only for the museum?

N: I show the work in museums, but it is also available online. Each space reaches a different audience, and provides a different experience. The work is not online art (or net.art!) although it speaks to both online and offline space. It seems appropriate to me that the viewing experience also speaks to, and is available in, both locations.

For a chance to meet Natalie Bookchin in person and have a more in depth look at her work:

Tuesday 15 March 2011
SMART Project Space
Arie Biemondstraat 101-111 (Auditorium), Amsterdam
Time: doors 19.00 / starts 19:30-21:30
Tickets: 4 euros at the door

Natalie Bookchin in conversation with Geert Lovink. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Sam Gregory – 'Remix Video, Aggregated Video and Human Rights Activism'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Sam Gregory, program director at WITNESS presented his thoughts on using online video as a political tool at Video Vortex #6 in Amsterdam yesterday.

Gregory began with presenting an image – a frame grab from the footage shot almost exactly 20 years ago, of the Rodney King beating by the Los Angeles Police Department. This footage, not only generated massive media attention and debate in the USA, but was the seed for WITNESS – to support the use of video in Human Rights advocacy to change policies, behaviours, laws and practices.

Video activism and video advocacy was the main focus of Gregory’s presentation.

“With the ever-increasing availability of tools to create, share everyday video; witnessing and documentation of Human Rights violation is becoming increasingly commonplace, across amateurs to professionals”.

There were two points he raised regarding uploading to YouTube. First, the ubiquity of video is not evenly distributed. Secondly, the notion of access: should it be online and will it be effective online? How will these videos reach areas where there is no Internet access or mobile access to be engaged in it?

Gregory then presented a series of videos to depict what the Ecosystem of Human Rights video looks like, made up of commercial and non-commercial platforms.

“It is as much as the individual speaking out as well as the graphic imagery” he says.

“It’s not just about the graphic violations of Human Rights such as torture, suppression of street protests; much of it is documenting economic social cultural rights: rights to housing…”.

Many videos uploaded recently have been demonstrative of the current circumstances in Egypt, Tunisia & Libya. For example the video blog of Asmaa Mahfouz, created 2 days after January 25 includes a number of moments that are already iconic even a month later in terms of incidents that happened in Egypt.

And this: The most AMAZING video on the internet #egypt #jan25

Click here to view the embedded video.

Through the recent events in the last few months, he highlights two points:

1. HOW DO WE DEAL WITH THIS MASS OF INFORMATION?
Gregory quotes Jane Gaines, who wrote in the context of the Iraq war about the prejudice of our culture being “bombarded with images”, and we never talk about being “bombarded with words”. He believes moving beyond this is critical if we want to engage meaningfully in this field of ubiquitous video.

In the past two months have witnessed the flourishing of more institutional tool-based ways to think about aggregation and curation. Tools such as Ushahidi that allow crowdmapping of photos, videos, text, Crowdvoice.org created in the Middle East, Storify, aggregates social media including facebook and twitter, and CitizenTube.

Challenges: this type of curation is good for realtime protest-based situations, but less good for collective voices, and he references the Q&A session with artist Natalie Bookchin – how an individual story/event can be captured in a larger context.

2. OUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH THESE COMMERCIAL SPACES
Gregory questions of the role of commercial video sharing and the reliance of these platforms. They are not public spaces but a private space and use of it is governed by an agreement.

“Hosting a political video on YouTube is like holding a rally in a shopping mall. It looks like a public space, but it’s not.”

He concludes with his picture of the changing landscape:

“As we think about online video, it has these modalities of accessibility, credibility, malleability, fluidity and they allow this incredible sense of transparency, participation and action, but they also raise a lot of concerns about authenticity, about point of view, about control and how those images transform into action.”

Read more:

http://blog.witness.org/2011/01/cameraseverywhere

Sam Gregory, ‘Cameras Everywhere: Ubiquitous Video Documentation of Human Rights, New Forms of Video Advocacy, and Considerations of Safety, Security, Dignity and Consent’, page 268. Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube.