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

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

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

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.

Ashiq Khondker - 'The Diegetic Desktop'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Ashiq Khondker and Eugene Kotlyarenko’s presentation was the most entertaining and confusing of the first day of Video Vortex #6. To begin with, their collaboration took place exclusively on the internet, after Ashiq contacted the artist to interview him about a series of videos he shot entirely with screen capture software and published online as a sort of mini-series entitled ‘Instructional Video #4: Preparation for Mission‘. To match the spirit of Kotlyarenko’s pieces, the interview – or the attempts to get it done – were recorded with the aforementioned software and edited into a narrated, self-presented documentary. That is to say, there was no usual speaker-behind-a-laptop combination, but a fullscreen projection of the clip.

Called The Diegetic Desktop, this video showed Ashiq trying to interview an arrogant and downright obnoxious Kotlyarenko via iChat and Skype, while switching between notes and Web browser windows or sharing his screen with the American artist. As the video progressed, it seemed there was no way to deal with Eugene, annoying and uncooperative, lazily slouched on his sofa with a giant bottle of water and a couple of mysterious green pills that obviously didn’t cure his delusions of grandeur.

The apparently failed interview had a big impact on the audience, who became very engaged, asking questions or even calling Kotlyarenko an ‘a**hole’. But then a surprising revelation was made: the whole video was set up. When Sabine Niederer, managing director of the Institute of Network Cultures, complimented Ashiq on his patience in interviewing such a difficult character, he confessed that both he and Eugene had been faking it all along. Ashiq said that playing the goofy guy came naturally to him, while Eugene took on the role of the arrogant artist.

It was not just an entertaining presentation, but an actual piece of video art that, rather than making sweeping statements about the future of online video, showed how diegetic desktop works play with software and our minds.

By Caroline Goralczyk

Roel Wouters - 'Directing the Audience: What Happens When Media Producers and Consumers Merge?' Photo by Anne Helmond.

In his presentation on online video art and the design of fluid digital environments, graphic designer and project director Roel Wouters introduced the audience to interactive projects which include dynamic media such as web video and animation to install crowdsourced performances. With his collegues Luna Maurer, Jonathan Puckey and Edo Paulus he has published the Conditional Design Manifesto, which is based on the work of his collective called Conditional Design and emphasizes the idea of following processes in the digital realm rather than its products.

In their work, Wouters and his fellow group of designers focus on the increasing blur between consumers and producers which comes about as a result of web technology enabling user participation in the creation of online video art. Roel Wouters presented two projects that are based on users taking part in the installation of a video, one based on people taking pictures of themselves with a webcam, prior given the instruction to resemble a particular frame and one based on creating a video, resembling a particular scene or act.  As if to say “If I would be the director, you would be my actors”, these projects are based on collaborative story-telling in creating online video art which participants can share with their friends online.

“It is surprising how these projects result in really beautiful photography. People are not self-conscious when resembling the frame which they are given and that is why they appear very natural” stated Wouters when presenting the two projects “One frame of fame” and “Now Take a Bow” to the audience. His collective Conditional Design was recently involved in the 5days off festival in Amsterdam with a project based on an iPhone application which Routers calls a ‘social photo toy’, resembling ‘the ultimate amateur photo’, which is people taking pictures of themselves in front of a mirror using flash.

Here is an illustration of the ‘One frame of fame’ project:

Evan Roth 'Animated Gif Mashup Studio Workshop'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Artist Evan Roth received a degree in architecture from University of Maryland and a MFA from the Communication, Design and Technology school at Parsons The New School for Design. His work focuses on tools of empowerment, open source and popular culture.

Roth describes his own work as a middle zone between open source and pop culture. His work should appeal to people in museums and people in cubicles, wasting company time, at the same time. Unsurprisingly, he considers meme culture to be an art form as well.

Roth has a special interest in graffiti, and is one of the co-founders of the Graffiti Research Lab. A few of his interesting graffiti projects include:

Graffiti Analysis: A software tool that creates visualisations of the unseen gestures involved in the creation of a tag.

Evan Roth - Graffiti Analysis

Led Throwies: LED lights, attached to a magnet, that can be thrown onto a metal surface.

Laser Tag: Putting huge tags on buildings, using laser and projection technology.

Grafitti Research Lab - Laser Tag

Roth is also part of the Free Art & Technology Lab, an organization dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media. A few of the projects he discussed included:

The China Channel: A Firefox plugin that filters your browsing in such a way that it replicates the experience a Chinese person would have surfing the Web.

Duplicating the Google Streetview car: Instructions on building your own Google Streetview car. A Google de-marketing campaign:

F.A.T Lab - How to build a fake Google Street View car

EyeWriter: Hardware and software developed to enable famed graffiti artist TEMPT1, who suffers from ALS, to write graffiti again.

Aside from graffiti, Roth has a significant soft spot for animated Gifs. At Video Vortex, Roth  lead a workshop of 20 people in creating an archive of animated Gifs from the Web, than mashing those up with music to create in-browser music video’s. The result was comparable to this earlier video by Roth:

When asked if he sees a connection between graffiti and gif animations he had to admit he hadn’t really thought about it. An important resemblance between the two, he noted, is that both spring from amateur grassroot cultures.

Maybe there should be more animated Gifs out in the streets.

Matthew Williamson - 'Degeneracy in Online Video Platforms'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

A graduate of the Ontario College of Art & Design, and nowadays an artist working in a broad range of media, from print to web. Matthew Williamson examines the relations between man and machine, and was at Video Vortex to discuss the condition of online video today.

Kicking off with a quote from Michael Snow, who allegedly responded to the fact that his film Wavelength had been watched over 50.000 times on YouTube with:

“The people who watch the video online have not watched the film, but have actually seen a ghost.”

Indeed, the Web is full of these ghosts: Wavelength appears on a lot of online video platforms today. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that there’s a redundant amount of video platform on the Web these days, without much diversification between these platforms: Just take Double Rainbow for example.

This degeneracy is self-generated out of competition and reward. On Youtube, this reward is socializing. On sites such as Megavideo however, this rewarding is more banal, in the form of actual reward points per view. This can only lead to a flood of lowest common denominator content, with the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few.

So what will the future of online video look like? The answer to this question, according to Williamson, is that the majority of the internet content is moving towards video, so the amount of degenerate content will only increase.

On the upside, if enjoy anime music video’s, you’re all set.

By Cecilia Guida

Constant Dullaart (the Netherlands, 1979) is a visual artist who ironically explores new modes of imagining and using the internet as a medium. His research is focused on the contemporary language of images and re-contextualizing material found on the Web. For him, the Web is a space, a landscape, a world to investigate in all its various parts, from the ‘default’ style of the platform, to its contents, and its popularity and widespread use. His works are widely discussed online and have been shown internationally. Having participated in 2009 at Video Vortex #5 in Brussels where he presented on his artistic practice that uses online video, this interview connects the ideas presented there through focusing particularly on his series ‘YouTube as a Subject’. Taking his work on the image of the YouTube play button as a point of departure, the conversation reflects on the social theories of Marshall McLuhan, perceptions of artwork on the YouTube platform, questions regarding the position of the artist, the relationship between online and physical spaces, and the interaction of the audience in the era of the ‘participatory culture’ of the Net.

The website of Constant Dullaart: http://www.constantdullaart.com/

****

Cecilia Guida: In your series of short videos titled ‘YouTube as a Subject’ (2008) no people are visible in the work. On a black background the familiar image of the YouTube play button falls off the screen, bounces as a ball, grows out of focus or changes colour by the sound of techno music. The button is at the same time the starting point and subject of the work. Through a simple and smart gesture you reflect upon the digitalization of our contemporary visual culture, and call the spectators’ attention to meditate upon the relationship between the user interface and the moving image in logical and semiotic terms. For you, where did the idea for ‘YouTube as a Subject’ emerge?

Constant Dullaart: First of all I have to say that I disliked the YouTube design and video quality in 2005 when it started to come out—the chaotic site structure, the badly designed layout, and the obnoxious play button. After a few years it was clear that YouTube had won the battle of online video hosting companies, and it started to function as an archive (practical contemporary rights issues that avoid it from functioning in this way, and the 10 minute time limit aside), not only as a medium that was breaking with the authority of the expensive craft of the moving image professional. This caused me to wonder why the obnoxious play button had not been used as a subject since it was the first image people would see before watching all these important reference videos, art, wedding, news, etc. The play button is the starting point regardless of whether it’s a meme video, a Joseph Beuys performance, a Warhol screen test, or an instructional video. Every single one starts with the same image.

CG: In the Sixties early video art united negative and positive criticism about the technology, and offered alternatives for a traditional approach to the medium. Fluxus artists were pioneers in these investigations. Among them, Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik used techniques such as détournement, manipulation, repetition, slowing down and speeding up images, etc. in order to explore the technical limits and possibilities of the medium. In particular, Paik incorporated the ideas of Marshall McLuhan in his work, specifically exploring video as a form of social experiment to bring people closer together and a suitable medium for audience participation. Do you relate to these strategies of technical investigation, and to video as a form of social practice, in your work?

CD: Comparisons between media are often made around a whole range of issues, from the anxieties and fears during their establishment in society (such as the predominantly negative influence on children of video games, television, graphic novels or even books),  to the celebration of a medium’s influence on a better future, to the announcements of their so called deaths or exits from daily use in society.

To apply this comparison to an artist’s research of a medium is a simple step.

For this artist’s research, first, the technical possibilities of the medium are often explored, and art is made to exhibit these capabilities. These works tend to catch the attention of the general public more often in the beginning establishment of a medium. Why this works in this way exactly I have never understood. It seems like the medium is still suffering from a lack of original medium specific content, and needs to attract attention by showcasing its capabilities. These conclusions are difficult to draw between the internet as a medium and older media such as painting. But the comparisons can be made between the birth of the film camera, the influence of photography on contemporary western image language, and very recently,
video art. But then the internet contains several developing social media, like mail and text driven media, so it is hard to compare it to a single older medium, especially since it is so dynamic.

The second step would be to find the boundaries of the technical capabilities, whether it’s human / user related or medium related.

The third step of this medium research would be to view the young medium on a metaphysical level: not only what is the use of the medium, but also how is it being used, and what is the meaning of this usage? After this, the medium’s content could escape the process as described above and it should be able to be used with more authentic or medium specific content. An example to understand it would be the filmmaker Andrej Tarkowski. As the formal and technical possibilities of the cinema movie had been researched in the 20’s, he found an ‘adult’ medium to work with knowing a lot of the medium implications and playing with it in more detail. He used the medium specific qualities to enhance the content and tell an authentic story disconnected from the medium itself. Let’s say that for now in relation to internet: the medium is more interesting than most of its content.

My ‘YouTube as a Subject’ work can be seen as a reference to Marshall McLuhan’s ‘the Medium is the message’, although I thought of the work more as purely formal in the sense that the form was the content. You could say that if the form is the medium, then form became the message. But, I think this series of my work was not about the implications of the social web or of mass social online video hosting, it was not dealing with the hotness or the coldness of the medium as McLuhan would describe it. It was more about the specificity of one corporation existing within the medium. YouTube itself is not a medium. To have the work exist outside of YouTube was important to me. To collect my videos and contextualize them outside of YouTube (on an html page with embedded videos) meant it was about the player, and not so much about the social part of the website, to separate it more from ‘the Medium is the Message’ idea.

*** Interview to be continued in the second Video Vortex Reader, currently in production at the INC***