Joanne Richardson - 'Making Video Politically'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Video artist Joanne Richardson (GER) was invited to give a presentation in the session called “Online Video as a Political Tool”, beginning her talk with a critical look at the terms ‘online’, ‘political’ and ‘tool’. As Marx had wrote in the Economic Transcript, a social revolution will “not get to the next stage” when the state is used as means to overthrow the state. Here’s the opposition between Heideger (using the available tools) and Nietzsche (somehow doing something completely different) becomes relevant in considering the subjectivity of activism and the traps of deconstruction, a few of the central topics in Richardson’s work.

As Richardson was a participant in the Romanian ‘indie media’, the question of “what is it that makes our media other than other media?” started bothering her. Even more, the online tools that had been made available had proven to be largely a celebration of openness and accessibility itself. Making video users into producers would clearly not have brought new models of producing, “what makes video activism different other than putting it into the hands of the users?” To come back to Marx’ point: don’t these approaches by the masses still follow the same ways of production as with ‘other propaganda’?

After stumbling upon a film of Jean-Luc Godard that displayed a political struggle, for Richardson this was the shift from “[political] content to the mode of production.” Following from this shift of production were different strategies to depict political agendas. The first one, that of image reference, is about the relationship that truth claims. By questioning the image and the reference political film-making would act as a ‘counter-documentary’.

Another aspect, that of form and content occurs when “the form is made of elements that don’t fit, [consequently] it asks the audience to take its part and create meaning.” Richardson here mentions the a montage method in which footage from different political events are mixed together and suggest a collective social struggle while in fact the ideological contexts were hardly comparable.

In “2 or 3 Things About Activism“, Richardson deconstructs the effects of montage. In the former work, she uses different kinds of fragments which gradually fall apart and thus create a distance between the viewer and the objectivity of the image. Overall, Richardson stresses the importance of this ‘critical distance’, as the viewers “should not create identification but [...] make them think for themselves and reconsider the relation to the image.”

Ferdiansyah Thajib - 'A Chronicle of Video Activism and Online Distribution in Post-New Order Indonesia'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

On the second day of Video Vortex at the Trouw in Amsterstam, Nuraini Juliastuti and Ferdiansyah Thajib explored how video activist in Indonesia, appropriate a variety of distribution strategies. They began with a brief historical overview giving brief a historical overview of video activism in Indonesia. They continued with a mapping of video activism, the prospects and barriers and a brief exploration beyond activism.

At the early stage between 1970 and 1990s it began with an entrance through videocassettes. As explained in Juliastuti and Thajibmain’s book Video Chronic, the New Order saw the potential dangers of the cassettes and took measures to contain and control video practices. Nevertheless, film in Indonesia experienced several boosts, in the late 1980s the production and consumption was increased by the advent of private television stations, between 1991 and 1994 video production rose with fifty percent and in 1995 there was a rise in video piracy which extended the consumption beyond the economic class. This historical overview that they presented and is further explored in the book ‘Video chronic: video activism and video distribution in Indonesia’ shows that video practices in Indonesia are an interplay between production, distribution and consumption. They went on to show that at the end of Suharto’s New Order in 1998 a burgeoning of alternative media such as zines, mailing list and discussion platforms can be seen. These can be seen as alternative media outlets that form channels for discussion that could circumvent repression. According to Juliastuti and Thajib  two main ways of media participation can be observed in Indonesia. First there is the empowerment of marginalized communities. Secondly, media participation can be seen as a reaction to the more general exclusions created by capitalist media.

Nuraini Juliastuti - 'A Chronicle of Video Activism and Online Distribution in Post-New Order Indonesia'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Thajib and Juliastuti went on to explore the intersecting trajectories of video activist, consisting of grassroots-, tactical- and experimental video activism. Grassroots video activist work with specific communities. Online they highlight the ceremonial aspect of being together, they also need video to connect with other events that are going on nationally and globally. Tactical video activist are those who are flexible in the methods of distribution. They use online distribution actively and feel that the mainstream media are not the appropriate channel or means to attain their goals. Tactical activists also use specific sites for their videos, for instance Indymedia. Experimental video activist explore the potentials of video and do more than expire change and intervene. They see online and offline as another way to experiment, connect and as a means of developing themselves.

Despite the rise of the video activism there are still technical barriers to be overcome. The limited bandwidth, particularly outside urban centers, the high-cost of getting access to the Internet and the increasing size of video files are difficulties to be overcome. Not only are there technical barriers but also the public perception is a barrier as well. The moral panic among the aggressor community; fears of being exposed to pornographic materials are mentioned as reason for not installing internet facilities in villages. There is also a digital divide which is not so much about getting access to the tools but is more about how can the tools be used. Media literacy is more an issue than who has access to the Internet, which became evident during the panel discussion after the presentation. Furthermore, the video producers are also concerned with how the material is going to be used and don’t really see the use for putting it online. Most of the producers care more about watching and making the video’s in conjunction with the community and they are not sure how it is going to be perceived and watched online.

The last part of the presentation went beyond video activism. The ubiquity of mainstream video-sharing services opens an area where the non-activist video can be pushed to the public and old media are using more amateur content. Additionally, the police are increasingly using the video’s as evidence, for instance a video of violence on Java, and to identify the actors involved in the events. The question then remains what the activist can do with the videos. Ferdiansyah Thajib concludes the presentation by stating the audience must do more than just view and take action, and that the video’s must emphasize the social change content that already exists offline, this to ensure that the audience is more receptive to these video’s.

The research into video activism in Indonesia has been published as a book (pdf), which can be found on the following website.
http://engagemedia.org/videochronic-english

About the author: Ryanne Turenhout is a master student of New Media and Digital Culture at Utrecht University.

By Ourania (Rania) Dalalaki

Florian Cramer - 'bokeh porn poetics: On the Internet Film Genre of DSLR Video Camera Tests'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Florian Cramer (media theorist, director of the Piet Zwart Institute) participated in the first day of Video Vortex to provide the audience with an insightful overview of the  Bokeh Porn concept. In his presentation he introduced us to Bokeh Porn as a subculture within online video aesthetics and the associations that connect it to Vimeo aesthetics.

This subculture of Bokeh Porn  has to do with past movements of amateur film making, computer operating systems and, last but not least, the DSLR video revolution. A revolution that enabled the proud owners of the commercial technology of DSLR cameras to participate in the production of more cinematic videos and has chosen Vimeo as the medium that better presents its final projects. The community that has adopted this aesthetical approach is not a pure amateur community but also a filmmaking one; its presence is not only found online (although the online community is enormous and apparent in fora and websites such as dvxuser,slashCAM, eoshd) but also offline, with the recent example of the International Amsterdam DSLR meetup.

Florian Cramer presented the origins of Bokeh: in photography, the Japanese term Bokeh represents the aesthetic quality of the blur or, simply put, the blurry and out-of-focus background of the image; an effect that used to be captured in filmmaking only through professional cameras, as it has certain particular technical requirements (large film size, wide lense etc). This filmmaking aesthetics genre was originally introduced to broader audiences in post-1960 Hollywood film production with the movie “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”; Bokeh is part of the mainstream visual language ever since.

The proliferation of such technology, that spreaded via DSLR video cameras, made it possible for the average amateur consumer to successfully achieve the Bokeh effect and integrate it in filmmaking /video production. A good, “typical” in the words of Cramer, example of an amateur video implementing this cinematographic technique, pushing the “blur” effect to the point of making Bokeh the central aspect of the whole film, is the online video “Light Benders” by Ben Carino, available on Vimeo. A second example can be also found online: “The Bathroom“ (created by user pilpop) clearly illustrates the formula for Bokeh Porn which can be summarized as such: experimental productions applying Bokeh, introducing frames with soft colors, smooth shots and a piece of instrumental music to accompany the creation. Furthermore, in his presentation, Florian Cramer stressed the major role that the camera plays in such productions to the point of becoming the main actor in the film, the pure materialized version of McLuhan’s dictum “the medium is the message”, the Narcissus that is reflected in more contemporary ponds for the sake of the directors’  gratification.

As Cramer informed his audience, the term Bokeh Porn was theorized by Simon Wyndham in his web log, in an attempt to depict the core of the culture that developed around Bokeh. More explicitly, according to Cramer the baseline of Bokeh Porn aesthetics is concluded in the production of short “test” demo films, where narratives are generally absent. This absence is not meant in order to serve modernist purposes but to fulfill the creators’ desires to film mainstream videos, in a non experimental implementation of an originally experimental technique. Bokeh Porn directors are not entirely amateurs yet they are individuals who, coming from amateur culture, wish to produce works that look and feel like professional ones. To achieve that, they have become vital parts of this subculture characterized by the obsession, fetishization of technical equipement, driven by the notion that the filming procedure is more important than the film itself, underlined by the presence of only one narrative that describes the Bokeh filmmaking process. Bokeh Porn stands for pure continuity, for “fluidum” instead of Barthes’ “punctum”, for the wish to expose the dream factor of the film -the camera itself.  Bokeh, in the words of Florian Cramer “is a form of visual fetishism, is not avant-garde but porn” (quote captured by Anne Helmond).

This short presentation on Bokeh Porn aesthetics concluded with inquiries that investigated the associations between Bokeh and reactions towards the flat digital image and the connection between this genre and the revival of analog aesthetics (seen through innovations such as the Hipstamatic application for iPhone devices). More specifically, the speaker argued for the haptic, tactile quality that we used to know as a cinematic quality. He also underlined the fact that with Bokeh Porn aesthetics this touchable, tactile quality is materialized through the camera as a production tool. All in all, for Florian Cramer, users implementing Bokeh Porn aesthetics in amateur, demo, filmmaking production stand as other Alices in Wonderland, holding their cameras – the dreamworld of cinema- in their hands.

By Ourania (Rania) Dalalaki

Holmes Wilson - 'Universal Subtitles - Collaborative, Volunteer Subtitling for any Video on the Web Using Free Software'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

The importance of subtitles is an undeniable fact for Holmes Wilson, co-founder of the Participatory Culture Foundation. Through the foundation’s  latest open source, software-based project Universal Subtitles, the creative staff of the foundation argues that subtitles urgently need to support the vast universe of online videos.

What is Universal Subtitles? Universal Subtitles is a software platform that allows people to collaborate and create captions for online videos.

Why subtitles are important? Subtitles are essentially the bridge that can assist online videos move freely across language barriers while the use of captions can make them “searchable” for web search engines. In addition, the feature of subtitles can make an online video accessible to deaf and hard of hearing viewers as well as cover the needs of those who just need these annotations to focus on their screens. In his presentation at Video Vortex #6 Holmes Wilson stated that subtitles can extend the political impact of a video as well as enable and empower the interactive viewer-video exchange.

Why subtitles are hard to do? Creating subtitles to annotate online videos can be a tricky procedure for a number of reasons according to Wilson. Machine transcription and translation provide low quality results still; the whole procedure is time-consuming and requires participants with language skills in order to be completed. Also, as we are dealing with online videos, the potential captions’ creator must take into account that videos move across websites/platforms while there is no ready-to-use standard application for web video subtitles. In other words, even if one makes the subtitles, there is no provided way to apply them directly on the video. It was mainly the desire to solve these problems that led to the development of the Universal subtitles project.

Why Universal Subtitles? Universal Subtitles manages to satisfy the needs of the public: it is a free, accessible, open source software (which means that the code behind it is provided online for those interested), it can be used on any site or platform (beyond YouTube!) as it works across multiple instances of a video. Universal Subtitles inspires its users to work on a participatory, collaborative (in Holmes Wilson’s words: Wikipedia like) model. One of the most important features of the software is the fact that it allows the video to spread across different platforms while the subtitles retain their piercing effect, as they will persist and also improve through the online community that supports the project.

Universal Subtitles has already won some hearts in the online world as many organizations are already using the software (such as: Mozilla, Wikipedia.org, The New York Times, the music band OK Go etc).

How does Universal Subtitles work? You can check that for yourself through their demo or watch this video from the Video Vortex #6 presentation proving that creating subtitles is easy and fun to do!

Holmes Wilson’s presentation on Universal Subtitles is available online,  here.

Teague Schneiter - 'Improving Access and Facilitating Use of Indigenous Content with Isuma's Hi-Speed MediaPlayers'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

In Friday’s first session called “It’s Not a Dead Collection, it’s a Dynamic Database”, media archivist and researcher Teague Schneiter (US/CA) took off with an elaboration about the ‘IsumaTV‘ project she’s currently working on. The people behind this initiative aim to set up an accessible infrastructure for streaming and uploading video content in indigenous subcultures. This is not only a technological challenge, but also requires a lot of media literacy within these communities. Other than with traditional heritages, it doesn’t focus on the long-term storage but instead prioritizes the accessibility of the users.
When it comes to the technological part of accessibility, the project would require a solid approach to work for the across different communities. Since the Inuit areas are largely isolated from ‘regular’ broadband services (the costs / bandwidth speed ratio is one of the aspects that widens the ‘digital divide’), the organisation introduced special media boxes into these indigenous communities. Through this local server network, the IsumaTV network performs much better than mainstream platforms like YouTube or Facebook would have. Moreover, having a stand-alone video platform overall increases the feeling of (reclaiming) ownership, “it helps with having a good relationship with the users.” Even though the technological trade-off is that the network updates with a delay of about a week, this is still acceptable for a project with a goal to preserve cultural heritage.

In the end, the project seems very worthwhile. Especially in the “era of of rapid change, [in which] indigenous groups seek to preserve their subculture”. Since the project started in 2008, over 2000 videos in more than 41 languages have been uploaded as well as pictures and text. Content-wise, it proves to be valuable to have the locals themselves act as curators, instead of having slightly related ‘outsiders’ maintain the archives. The fact that the communities rely mainly on verbal communications is another point that video creates a lot more insight into the different cultures.

Future plans with this initiative are to attract more sponsors like repositories, institutes, museums and participatory media (especially now the Canadian government has cut the budget), as well as to add crowd-source (subtitling or voice-over) features as well as further improving the network its accessibility.

By Diana Soto de Jesús

Ebru Baranseli - 'Internet Censorship in Turkey and Online Video'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

As if the Internet Gods had planned it all along, Ebru Baranseli gave a report on the current situation of Internet censorship in Turkey right on the World Day Against Cyber Censorship.

According to Baranseli, a professor of graphic design at Anadolu University, until 2001 Turkey’s government had a “hands off” approach to Internet regulation: “It was thought that the general legal system regulating speech related crimes was adequate.” But that line of thinking wouldn’t last long. From 2001 onwards the government started to intervene.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Last Thursday (10-03) I attended a workshop about animated gif mashups led by the artist Evan Roth. Twenty minutes before the start of the workshop the room was already filled with enthusiastic students, no doubt because of Evan’s well-documented reputation when it comes to lively workshops. The audience included a variety of New Media-, Interactive Media-, Audiovisual Media-, Media & Information- and Media Design students, some from the Netherlands, but also a few exchange students from Austria, Curacao and Argentina. All the participants were asked to bring their computers for the workshop. Evan Roth immediately gave his session an informal tone, by kicking off with: “I’ve never done this workshop before, I just want to have fun and make some video mashups with you guys”.

He quickly introduced us to his earlier projects for the Graffiti Research Lab and the Free Art & Technology lab. As an artist, Evan is outspoken about open source and free culture. This is exactly what the F.A.T. Lab is about: an organization dedicated to enriching the public domain, by keeping all the content in the public domain. Its disclaimer states: ‘you may enjoy, use, modify, snipe about and republish all F.A.T. media and technologies as you see fit.’ However, the workshop during the Video Vortex wasn’t about activist issues or promoting free culture, but about making gifs.

We all know gifs, or graphic interchange formats, probably as those geeky granular images of dancing people or singing cats. Their old school image is why Evan things they’re cool. But I was still wondering why Evan decided to let us work with gifs. I had in mind that his answer would have something to with open source and free culture, since everyone is free to collect and spread gifs and use them for other purposes. But he surprised me by saying that his main point for that day was just having fun. “There should be more room for fun in art”. He told me how his other lectures and workshops were more directly linked with politics, but that he felt like really doing something else this day. He wanted us to just play with gifs, get our hands dirty. He did add that he clearly sees how gifs are important in an ideological sense, since they create some sort of overall image of the internet right now, they’re all small time capsules. So from a historical point of view it is important to curate them somewhere where they can’t get lost.

The future of the ubiquitous gifs? Hard to say, according to Evan. He feels they had their peak in 2010, when ‘We Make Money Not Art’ started growing bigger and bigger. At the beginning of the internet era gif and jpeg were the standard form, but slowly they were overtaken by png and flash (for movies). This is why Evan isn’t sure how gif will develop in the upcoming years, so most important is to make sure that all previous gifs are saved in a good database.

Since there weren’t any students in the room who already had any experience with making mash ups, Evan gave a quick demonstration and showed us some of his work. After making sure everyone was connected to the internet, he showed us Private Pad, the ‘public chatroom’, we’d be using for sharing links and FileZillah where we could put the gifs we’ve found on the internet. Using gifmashup.evan-roth.com (an open source animated gif mash-up software built by Evan), we could add a couple of gifs together to make a mashup. He gave us a few links to GIF collections, like Dump, Heathersanimations, Gifsoup and Tumblr. The rest of the workshop there was filled with the buzz of a great atmosphere. Everyone was actively searching and sharing gifs and Evan filled the room with songs varying from Biggie to the Beatles, looking for a suitable song to accompany our collective mash up. When the server started crashing since the input was so great (we filled three folders with gifs), Evan decided to let us vote for a song and started to create the mash up. Sadly we were running out of time, so we only got a sneak peek of our work, but it already looked great.

Evan’s mission was definitely accomplished, his workshop surely was a lot of fun.

The results of the workshop:

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:

Patrícia Dias da Silva - 'Joining the Online Video Conversation? The Presence of Institutional Actors on YouTube'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

The second day of the Video Vortex conference at Trouw in Amsterdam. In the seventh session Patrícia Dias da Silva, a PhD Fellow in Social Sciences at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, talks about how YouTube has been embraced by European institutional actors, and how YouTube is reaching out to traditional actors and media, instead of maintaining an ‘alternative’ posture which nowadays is more connected to the Vimeo platform.

YouTube allows political institutions to reach out to their audiences in a visual and interactive way by creating online video channels, posting videos, and using the social tools around the video. CitizenTube was initiated by YouTube as a political VLog in 2008 and initially had strong focus on the US elections but expanded and grew toward a platform for citizen journalism around the world. It showed a first step towards the use of online video for a political and journalistic purpose and to engage an audience to respond, comment, and interact with the videos that are posted and perspectives that are shared.

The use and appliance of new media technologies and platforms by the European Commission was first described in the eEurope initiative from 1999. There was a strong believe the internet would revive the economy and provide new economic and political changes for Europe. A first attempt to use the YouTube platform to reach out and interact with ‘European citizens’ was the Questions for Europe channel in collaboration with EuroNews. It allowed people to ask questions by posting videos which would be answered by members of the European Commission.

In 2007 EUTube was launched after the failed introduction of the European constitution to engage with citizens and to create a community of voices. It was a first step from the European Parliament to engage and connect with European citizens by using online video and the reach of the YouTube platform. With the tagline ‘sharing the sights and sounds of Europe’ it was a noble attempt to gather the different perspectives around Europe and create a dialogue about the road that Europe should be heading. The channel launched in four different languages of which English was the most popular. The channel showed reports about the EU, people in the field working for Europe, and institutional videos to promote projects and departments.

After showing some examples of the institutional use of the YouTube platform, Patrícia Dias da Silva brings up several discussion points about the use and success of these initiatives. First, the European politicians saw and used YouTube as a static archive, as a collection of videos all stored on one online channel, instead of being a dynamic archive. It was used as an aggregation of the appearance of public figures and politicians in other news media, speeches, and personal items. For example, the channel of the Berlusconi government is mainly showing videos from his own news networks.

As a second point of discussion da Silva shows how institutional videos often disable the ability to comment on videos and start discussions with other users. So on the one hand YouTube is used to reach out and allow interaction between Institutions and ‘the people’, but the functionalities provided by YouTube are disabled. The British Prime Minister David Cameron disabled comments on his videos but allowed interaction on his personal website. A third point of discussion is the low participation on YouTube channels with political ambitions. The Norwegian Prime Minister requested video questions on his YouTube channels resulting in only 5 responses. The same was the result from a similar initiative by the European Commission and EuroNews with the Questions for Europe channel. Most videos were uploaded by EuroNews and hardly any question were uploaded by participants themselves. Fourthly, a problem faced by many channels was the flaming and trolling in the comments of the uploaded videos, an important reason to disable the comment functionality. As Margot Wallstrom, former European Commissioner for Institutional Relations and Communication, described ‘The level of intelligence is low, and closing the board would improve the décor of EUTube’.

A fifth point of discussion questioned if the channels were used for increased participation, or as propaganda channels for European perspectives and regulations. People do not believe the motives of participation but see it as government funded propaganda. The sixth, and last point noted by da Silva is the frivolous nature of some videos posted by politicians and institutions to attract more viewers and comments. As an example she refers to Spanish video ‘Votar és un plaer’ (Voting is enjoyment) video place by the Joventut Socialista de Catalunya in which a woman is having an orgasm while voting. This practice results in flagged videos (18+) and comments and discussion on the use of video by political institutions.

We can conclude that governments and political institutions are struggling with how to use online video platforms to reach out and connect with the people. As noted by da Silva, they often see YouTube channels as repositories for videos; as dead databases. They miss the dynamics and interactivity these tools provide in creating a narrative for an online audience. By engaging the public with, for example, social media tools, you can get them involved. However, people tend to see social media initiatives by politicians as manipulation or propaganda tools without a real interest in the interactive participatory side of the story. Flaming and trolling in comments, a low engagement, and the lack of interactivity, often results in declining attention from both the public and the initiators after which participation dies out. As long as institutions do not see and use the added value of online video platforms, these initiatives will fail. It would be a good strategy to look at the activist use of online video, for example in the middle east, and how public engagement results in active participation and valuable discussions.

About the author: Geert Faber graduated with a Master of Science degree in Business Administration from the Free University in Amsterdam and is currently graduating as a Bachelor of Arts in Media & Culture specializing in New Media and Television studies.

On Twitter: @GeertFaber

Bloggers and Audience at Video Vortex #6. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Evan Roth presenting at Video Vortex #6. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Registration Desk at Video Vortex #6. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Ben Moskowitz presenting at Video Vortex #6. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Bloggers and Audience at Video Vortex #6. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Video Vortex. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Michael Strangelove presenting at Video Vortex #6. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Geert Lovink speaking at Video Vortex #6. Photo by Anne Helmond

Book Launch Video Vortex Reader II. Photo by Anne Helmond

VeniVidiVortex: Closing Party. Photo by Anne Helmond

The whole Video Vortex 6 photoset can be found on Flickr. Please join us by tagging your Video Vortex photos with vv6 and adding them to the Video Vortex Photo Pool.