Location: Atomium, Brussels
20-21 November 2009

Video Vortex V is organized by Cimatics festival 2009 in cooperation with the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam and supported by KASK (Faculty of Fine Arts, University College Ghent) and the Center Leo Apostel (CLEA).

On November 20-21 2009, Cimatics festival is hosting the 5th Video Vortex conference. Two years after its first edition, Video Vortex returns to Brussels, this time hosted in one of the great icons of mid 20th century modern architecture: the Atomium.

The past two years, the conference series – which focuses on the status and potential of the moving image on the Internet – has visited Amsterdam, Ankara and Split, growing out into an organised network of organisations and individuals. Time for an interim report, perhaps. We asked some participants of the first Video Vortex editions and publication, as well as new ones, to reflect on recent developments in online video culture.

Over the past years the place of the moving image on the Internet has become increasingly prominent. With a wide range of technologies and web applications within anyone’s reach, the potential of video as a personal means of expression has reached a totally new dimension. How is this potential being used? How do artists and other political and social actors react to the popularity of YouTube and other ‘user-generated-content’ websites? What does YouTube tell us about the state of contemporary visual culture? And how can the participation culture of video-sharing and vlogging reach some degree of autonomy and diversity, escaping the laws of the mass media and the strong grip of media conglomerates?

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

Video Vortex V: DAY I

13h30 Introduction
by Geert Lovink

14h00 System flaws and tactics
Video channels, platforms and formats impose strict structures on how you can interact with it. This session is inspired by the inherent errors, disabilities and restrictions, often conducting our behaviour but in this case inspiring and exposing new insights.

Liesbeth Huybrechts/Rudi Knoops (BE)
‘Play that video , All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’
Both Huybrechts and Knoops teach at the Media & Design Academy in Genk.

Brian Willems (CR)
‘Blindness: the inability of YouTube to read itself’
Brian Willems teaches literature and media culture at the University of Split.

Rosa Menkman (NL)
‘Glitch: From Artifacts to filter. The Tipping point of failure’
Menkman is an artist and currently doing a PhD at the KHM on the subject of Artifacts.

Johan Grimonprez (BE)
‘It’s a poor story if it only works backward’
Grimonprez is an internationally renowned artist best known for his seminal DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y.

moderator: Andreas Treske

17h30 Q&A

20h30 Video Vortex evening programme at Les Brigittines
Film screenings, artist presentations and an audiovisual performance by Kurt D’haeseleer.
Venue info: http://www.brigittines.be/

Video Vortex V: DAY II

10h00 Online cinema
Similar to his essay ‘BMW Films and the Star Wars Kid: ‘Early Web Cinema’ and Technology’ in the recently published ‘Cinema and Technology’, Andrew Clay provides an in-depth approach of online cinema.

Andrew Clay (GB) – ‘Web cinema’
Andrew Clay is lecturing in Critical Technical Practices at De Montfort University, Leicester and programme leader of BSc (Hons) Media Technology in the Faculty of Computing Sciences and Engineering.

moderator: Andreas Treske

10h45 Categories of enactment / Strategies of resistance
Both lecturers have been contributing to the previous Video Vortex Reader. They are both artists and theoreticians and share a common attitude of resistance. In this session they will update and further expand their previous contributions to Video Vortex.

Keith Sanborn (US) – ‘beyond YouTube.world’
Sanborn is media artist and theoretician focusing on the investigation of public images and private perceptions with great attention to user generated content and web footage in general.

Stefaan Decostere (BE) – ‘Impact, complicity, fascination’
Decostere is a Belgian artist, has been producing documentaries for tv since 1979. In ‘99 he founded CARGO, a foundation for creation and development with media.

12h00 LUNCH BREAK

13h30 Artist practices: (sub)versioning
(Sub)versioning – the contraction of the Situationist ’subversion’ and the common IT practice of ‘versioning’ might best describe the practice of the artists in this session. They approach online video as a means for a subtle restructuring of existing popular media and a basis for investigating new modes of constructing and relating meaning brought about by the Internet

Oliver Laric (TR) & Aleksandra Domanovic (RS)
Berlin based artists Laric and Domanovic two of the co-founders of the platform VVORK. Their work has been the subject of numerous presentations at previous Video Vortex conferences.

Constant Dullaart (NL)
Dullaart is an artist and teaches at the Gerrit Rietveld academy, and curates several events in Amsterdam such as the Lost and Found evenings.

moderator: Vera Tollmann

15h00 Politics of online video
In a dispersed society, with a seemingly vanishing of mass culture, online video is challenging traditional channels of public communication, oppositional media. A session providing us with some remarkable case-studies and research-projects about participatory communication, the White House and citizen journalism.

Simon Yuill (GB) – ‘Citizen Journalism vs Oppositional Media’
Simon Yuill is an artist based in Glasgow, was involved in hacklabs and Free Media Labs and has written on aspects of Free Software and cultural praxis.

Elizabeth Losh (US) – ‘The White House’s use of YouTube and the reactions of privacy advocates’
Losh is Writing Director of the Humanities Core Course at the University of California and recently published ‘Virtualpolitik’.

Stephen Crocker (CA) – ‘Filmmaking and the politics of remoteness’
Crocker is an associate professor of sociology and assistent director of the Humanities Program at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He writes about media, social theory, philosophy and the sociology of the image.

moderator: Sabine Niederer

17h00 Closing Q&A

Extra: You’re invited at the opening night of Cimatics festival 2009 at Beursschouwburg with audiovisual concerts by AGF (DE) and TVestroy (CA).

PRACTICAL INFO

Where:
- Atomium (Ilya Prigogine sphere), Brussels
http://www.atomium.be

Time:
Friday Nov 20 13h30-18h00
Saturday Nov 21 10h00-18h00

Entrance Fee:
normal: 15 €
students: 10 €
(prices for 2 days, food and drinks included)
(registration beforehand is required)
day I: 7,50 € (evening programme included, registration required)
day II: 7,50 €

Tickets:
Tickets will be sold at the entrance only, but registration is required.
Register by sending an email to videovortex@cimatics.com with your Full Name and the days you will be attending (Friday 20 / Saturday 21) + Reserve your seat for the evening programme on Friday 20.

How to get there:
Direct: Metro 6 to Heysel/Heizel.
BY BUS: Take the bus 84 or 88 and stop to Heysel/Heizel
BY METRO: Take the metro 6 and stop at Heysel/Heizel
BY TRAM: Take the tram 23 or 51 and stop Heysel/Heizel
BY TRAIN: Stop to Gare du Midi/Zuidstation, then take the metro 6 direction Roi Baudoin/Koning Boudewijn and stop at Heysel/Heizel

About Video Vortex:
Video Vortex is an interdisciplinary platform dealing with the moving image on the Web. It brings together a range of perspectives, such as arts, aesthetics, research, practice, reflection, exploration, collecting, experimenting, etc.

About Cimatics:
This 7th edition of the Cimatics festival again goes at full throttle with todays image culture. As an audiovisual festival it puts the focus both on art, media, design and music in a mix of concerts, film-screenings, exhibitions, workshops, conferences, public interventions and parties.

Cimatics is spread out all over the city of Brussels. For 10 days and nights it will be hosted by numerous venues, both underground and above. It intends to be a citywide international festival for advanced creativity, a node where grass-roots, underground and pop or art become mixed in an exciting cultural mash-up.

Partners:
http://www.cimatics.com
http://www.kask.be
http://www.vub.be/clea
http://www.networkcultures.org

On 22-23 May, 2009 the fourth edition of Video Vortex will take place in Split, Croatia. The Department of Film and Video at the Academy of Arts University of Split and Platforma 9.81 will organize the event, in collaboration with the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam. After previous events on online video and responses to YouTube in Brussels, Amsterdam and Ankara, this event will focus on the moving image on the Web.

We invite contributions for the following themes:

Telepresence and Web Aesthetics
Video meets Web aesthetics: how is the phenomenon of ‘telepresence’ incorporated in various art forms, such as music, theater, visual arts, literature and cinema? What are underlying aesthetics and what are the specific interface contexts?

Social Cinema
Has cinema found its way onto the Web? Did it change the essential features of cinema? What are the new possibilities of collaborative production? Does the future of film museums and cinematheques lie in online cinematic databases?

Architecture and Moving Image
Online video offers an immense database of moving images, which could be displayed in urban public space. What are the existing cinematographic visions of the future of the moving image in public space? (In films such as Blade Runner, Minority Report, Children of Men, etc.) Which visions can be directly implemented, and which will remain film scenography?

Video Sharing
What are the standards and alternatives for sharing, licensing and hosting moving images on the Web? This theme explores issues around the distribution, licensing, collaborative production, and video hosting.

Technology and politics of the moving image
What is the future of visual browsers? How does moving image production relate to cultural, technological and political dominance? Open standards and codex politics. Surveillance issues.

Literature and video online narrative
Narrative strategies on the Web. From screenplay writing with hypertext, the broadcasted self and narrative avatars to collective narrative processes leading to Web literature, tag based video narrativity, public journalism and performative real-time literature.

Please send in a 500-word abstract and a short bio to Dan Oki (danoki [at] xs4all.nl) before February 5, 2009.

During the Video Vortex in Split we will present five cinema events:
1) upload cinema 2) mobile phone cinema 3) social cinema 4) cinematic data base 5) performative cinema

///
Please check out the Video Vortex reader: Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds.), Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures,
2008. ISBN: 978-90-78146-05-6.
Available as a pdf here.

On October 10-11 2008, the third Video Vortex event will take place in Ankara, Turkey, organised by Bilkent University (Department of Communication and Design), in cooperation with the Institute of Network Cultures. The event will feature a two-day international conference, evening program, live performances and new media art exhibition. As a follow-up to the Amsterdam conference, held in January 2008, and the Brussels conference, held in October 2007, Video Vortex Ankara aims to continue and deepen the debates, while bringing together a wide range of scholars, artists and curators as well as lawyers, producers and engineers.

The deadline for submissions is June 15 2008, please find the call for participation here.

Today, the Video Vortex conference started at PostCS11. We’ve closed registration, tickets are available at the venue.
Hope to see you there!

The conference is blogged by the Masters of Media at http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl. Conference photography by Anne Helmond: http://www.flickr.com/photos/video_vortex/. Video documentation of the conference will soon be available at http://www.networkcultures.org/archive/.

Registration for Video Vortex in PostCS11 in Amsterdam on 18 and 19 January 2008 has started. Day tickets can be obtained for € 25,- (students € 20,-) and passepartouts are available for € 50,- (students € 40,-). Please take a look at the registration page for more information. The content of the conference program can be found here.