HT to Mirdos Leon, source:uknown

Vito Campanelli, Web Aesthetics: How Digital Media Affect Culture and Society, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam and the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2010. ISBN 978-90-5662-770-6.

On Friday, March 11th at 17:00 during Video Vortex #6,  the INC is pleased to present Web Aesthetics: How Digital Media Affect Culture and Society by author Vito Campanelli.

During the launch Vito Campanelli will introduce the public to Web Aesthetics.

As the most recent publication in the INC’s Studies in Network Cultures Series, Web Aesthetics explores how online video, Web interfaces, file sharing, mailing lists and social networks are transforming our experience of the world. While the social dimension of these Web-related forms dominates public discourse, their aesthetic impact is largely ignored. In response, Web Aesthetics intervenes in the field of new media studies and art theory, proposing an organic theory of digital media aesthetics.

Check out this great review found in the most recent issue of Neural magazine (online and in print):

Re-posted from Neural magazine online:

“The aesthetics of networks and the web, approached from the most acknowledged definition of aesthetics, is an underdeveloped field despite more than a decade of web design and hundreds of web-based artworks. What can be called “Web Aesthetics” is the main research focus of Vito Campanelli (media theorist and Neural contributor), who analyzed the web and its role since the beginning. The pervasiveness of what he calls “web-related forms” is taken as the main territory from which to start and to come back to after every digression based on social, political, historical, and aesthetic speculations. Campanelli argues that the net art movement has introduced new and confrontational aesthetic canons, but he valuably connects a variety of different concepts like (just to name a few) the importance of dialogue with memes, the optical and haptic experience of the web (explained through web-based art), the Aby Warburg’s “engram” and the “remix”. These fluid connections are sometimes intertwined with fascinating parallels, like the one between the space of contemporary frequent flying and moving in airports and the kind of “travel” we do in peer-to-peer networks. Campanelli winds his theoretical path through plenty of philosophical ideas, finally building something that is properly aesthetic. And his commitment to analyze digital media with a philosophy of aesthetic language is impressive, as is the amount of research involved – very visible through the abundance of quotes – that makes this text a pivotal one.”

On the 25th of July thousands of people from all over the world uploaded movies about their lives to YouTube. They all collaborate on the movie ‘Life in a Day’, a historical experiment to create a movie about one single day on earth. Out of more then 80.000 sent in videos, with more than 4,500 hours of film, director Kevin Macdonald made a 90 minute long documentary. The film had been premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in the United States. Five of the contestants are Dutch: Meijke Van Herwijnen, Esther Happy, Frank de Vries, Jaap Dijkstra and Jan van Etten.

See here the trailer of ‘Life in a day‘.

Call for entries text from Tuesday, July 6, 2010 for ‘Life in a Day’.

Every day, 6.7 billion people view the world through their own unique lens. Imagine if there was a way to collect all of these perspectives, to aggregate and mold them into the cohesive story of a single day on earth.

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of “Life in a Day,” a historic cinematic experiment that will attempt to do just that: document one day, as seen through the eyes of people around the world. On July 24, you have 24 hours to capture a snapshot of your life on camera. You can film the ordinary — a sunrise, the commute to work, a neighborhood soccer match, or the extraordinary — a baby’s first steps, your reaction to the passing of a loved one, or even a marriage.

Kevin Macdonald, the Oscar-winning director of films such as The Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void and One Day in September, will then edit the most compelling footage into a feature documentary film, to be executive produced by Ridley Scott, the director behind films like Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, Thelma & Louise, Blade Runner and Robin Hood. LG Electronics is supporting “Life in a Day” as a key part of its long-standing Life’s Good campaign and to support the creation of quality online content that can be shared and enjoyed by all.

The film will premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and if your footage makes it into the final cut, you’ll be credited as a co-director and may be one of 20 contributors selected to attend the premiere.

At the upcoming Video Vortex #6 conference, video artist and media theorist Joanne Richardson will be presenting a talk titled Making Video Politically in the session Online Video as a Political Tool
To see her video work (and blog): http://subsol.c3.hu/joanne/videos.html

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The following is her text “At the Crossroads of Art and Activism” that her talk at VV#6 will reflect on:

At the Crossroads of Art and Activism by Joanne Richardson

During the past decade art institutions have developed an interest in works engaging with local struggles or the alter-globalization movement more generally, especially works on the borders of documentary video. This tendency is sometimes referred to as engaged art or activist art, though there’s been little theoretical reflection about what defines it beyond its choice of content. Disciplines such as philosophy and anthropology have produced interesting concepts, like those of the organic intellectual or the action researcher, which invoke a different mode of knowledge that doesn’t attempt to extract information from an object of study, but tries to create a common know-how that can alter people’s local environment. It’s only in the last 5 years that art historians and theorists have started to reflect more seriously about the forms of knowledge produced by art – although their analysis tends to get stuck within the currently trendy label of “artistic research.”

In its broadest sense, research suggests a detailed study for the purpose of reaching a new understanding. It comes from the French “recherche,” which means to search closely – or literally, to search again. But research is usually understood more narrowly as a scientific investigation or scholarly inquiry that follows systematic protocols and aims to find an answer to a specific question. Since it’s obvious that this is not what art does, most reflections on artistic research have sought to define what differentiates it from scientific research – namely, its non-discursive or somatic character, its admission of subjectivity rather than objective neutrality, and its emphasis on the process of searching rather than finding a definitive answer.

However provocative these definitions might be, I’ve found them unsatisfactory for thinking about my own work. First, they’re about art in general rather than artistic practices that try to intervene in reality instead of representing it. And secondly, as a philosopher who chose to leave academia and become an artist, something disturbs me about the characterization of art as research. Perhaps it’s similar to what disturbs me about so many activist and artist friends who are now doing PhDs. This is not a personal irritation, but a pessimistic assessment of the expansion of the knowledge economy and its ability to internalize its own dissent. Or at least its margins. As Simon Sheikh has noted, the legitimation of art as research and its standardization into prescribed formats of academic learning reflects the dominant interests of an information-driven capitalism. And it constitutes an attempt to sweep away what has been most sovereign about art: its indiscipline and its potential to escape from the commodity-form.

What I’ve found more inspiring is an old, dusty statement made by Godard in 1970 that called for making films politically rather than making political films. His distinction shifts the emphasis from the content of a work to its mode of production and reception. Although this statement comes from the period when Godard worked with the Dziga Vertov group, which he later criticized for having produced “Marxist-Leninist garbage” films, the best examples of making film politically are his later collaborations with Anne-Marie Mieville. In 1970, Godard wrote that to make film politically was to be militant. What’s striking about his later films with Mieville is their distance from militant filmmaking as well as from the newly emerging video activism. Here & Elsewhere is especially interesting because it deconstructs one of his earlier Dziga Vertov films. We went to Palestine a few years ago, Godard says. To make a film about the coming revolution. But who is this we, here? Why did we go there, elsewhere? The voiceover confesses, “back in France you don’t know what to make of the film … the contradictions explode, including you.” Here and Elsewhere is a critique of how militancy is staged as a political theater, from its propagandistic gestures to its covering up of disjunctions in order to present a false image of the people united in struggle. The film also interrogates the complicity of activist filmmakers who organize sound and images in a particular way to present a “correct” political message and inhibit critical thinking.

To grasp the suggestiveness of “making film politically” it’s necessary to subtract the word “film” (and see it more broadly in terms of cultural production), and also to subtract the common meaning of the “political” as affairs of government or modes of organization. Godard’s use of the political as an adverb mirrored a new paradigm that emerged among the French left in the 1960s, which viewed the political as a rupture with established politics and an attempt to institute new forms of production and, implicitly, new social relations. Viewed in this expanded context, the slogan of “making films politically” has provoked me to rethink the relation between art and activism in a more complex way than placing the means of production in the hands of the people. Bringing the technologies to the people has been one of the hallmarks of media activism from the 1960s to the 1990s, which presupposed that enabling everyone to communicate freely would bring about a revolution from below. After 2000, I started feeling a growing unease with the assumptions of the media activist networks I was involved with. Their call for open participation and for the transformation of passive consumers into producers struck me as a perfect liberal democratic utopia. This is why it was so easily appropriated by capitalism. All the hype surrounding Web 2.0 was based exactly on a celebration of open participation. The massive factory of YouTube users who worked for free and directly contributed to its value didn’t get any share of that value when Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. Such a distorted actualization of the promise of media activism made it obvious that it wasn’t enough to just “do it yourself.” Simply putting the means of production in the hands of the people would not automatically shatter oppressive relations of power. There were still other questions to be asked.

It was in attempt to ask these other questions that I turned to the tradition of leftist experimental film of the 1960s and 70s. I felt particularly inspired by Godard and Mieville, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki and Peter Watkins, who all began from the activist premise that what must be changed is not merely the content of the work but its mode of production – but understood this transformation in a more complex way than democratizing technology. I’ve attempted to elaborate this complexity along 5 trajectories that highlight the relations between the image and its referent, between different subjects, between form and content, between the work and its audience, and between production and distribution.

1. Mimesis: As an extension of photography, the documentary has traditionally been understood as mimesis achieved, as a presentation of “the object itself” (Bazin) that is “indifferent to all intermediaries” (Barthes). It was during the 1960s that documentary film became self-reflexive, questioning its mediating gaze in its attempt to capture reality. American direct cinema sought to achieve a truer representation, a kind of pure transparency, by subtracting the subjectivity of the filmmaker as much as possible. By contrast, French cinema verite inserted the camera and the filmmaker directly into the screen, affirming the inevitability of mediation and the constructed nature of all representation. In this context, making films politically can be understood as using the conventions of the documentary-form in order to subvert them from the inside. Questioning the reality effects of mediated representations doesn’t mean denouncing all images as inherently corrupt – on the contrary, the problem is a certain way of producing images that naturalizes them by hiding their construction or barrages us with such emotional force that it diminishes our capacity to reflect. A critique of mediation means admitting the subjectivity of perspective and asking how our own ideologies and inherited prejudices can influence the general frame that creates meaning.

Still from "In Transit" - Joanne Richardson, 2008

I began experimenting with the documentary-form with In Transit (2008), a diary of a journey in Romania that reflects on post-communism, and how it functions through a series of erasures: of history, of identities and of thought itself. But while the narrative criticizes these erasures, it is not from the purity of an outside. Several citations invoke the private archive films of Peter Forgacs, which criticize official history in order to oppose it with authentic private histories. In Transit shows how private histories are themselves impure because memory functions like a dream-work that erases connections and creates new associations. The video makes use of childhood stories, family photographs and poetic texts, all of which have the possibility to provoke strong emotional responses. But it frustrates the possibility of a sentimental identification through estrangement devices that call attention to their construction. A sense of distance is created through sound-image discontinuities and the narrator’s admission of the uncertain origins of authentic documents. By simultaneously creating and breaking the desire for identification, In Transit asks the audience to step back and reflect on their own relation to the images they’ve just seen. It is only from a critical distance that it becomes possible to dig through the pile of ruins that are left by the erasures of the past and to uncover the traces of things that have been lost. Without this distance, private memoirs can easily become as ideological and manipulative as official history.

2. Intersubjectivity: In the most literal sense, making film politically means interrogating its entire mode of organization – its hierarchies of knowledge, its divisions of labor, the relation between the artist and those who are represented, the relation between the one who “directs” and those who perform what is usually seen as the less important work. Transforming these hierarchies would entail making the process of production genuinely collaborative by involving other subjects in a dialogue rather than speaking for them or instrumentalizing them as a means to communicate a preconceived message.

Still from "Pain Romanian" - Joanne Richardson, 2004

In 2004, I made 2 videos about nationalism with teenagers as part of Real Fictions, a video activist project that sought to transform apathetic spectators into noisy producers. In retrospect, it seemed that by focusing predominantly on involving non-experts in the process of production other important elements were neglected. Formally the videos were typical documentaries, and although they were collaboratively produced, there was a clear boundary between those who made the works and others who were represented in them. This boundary was deliberately subverted in Reconstruction, a work about the repression of the anti-NATO events in Bucharest in 2008. The video was a collaboration with anti-NATO activists and the artist group h.arta. In contrast to the earlier project, the subjects who were represented were also the ones who made the work. Reconstruction was filmed over a four-day workshop, during which 10 protagonists were simultaneously actors, audience and directors. They took turns speaking before the camera, giving each other instructions and commenting on their performance. They discussed their memories in a group and wrote the script together. In one memorable discussion, several people admitted that what happened wasn’t just the fault of the Romanian authorities and began to analyze their own organizational mistakes. The video functioned like a Brechtian learning play, in which the actors were transformed through the process of collaboration and gained new insights about themselves.

3. Form: The specific arrangement of images and sounds in a film can create a feeling of immersion and identification or disrupt it. A montage of association adds concordant images and voices to create a homogenous totality. If the form is disjunctive, made up of elements that don’t seem to fit, the message becomes ambiguous or even contradictory, requiring the audience to take an active part in constructing its meaning.

Still from "2 or 3 Things about Activism" - Joanne Richardson, 2008

My first use of disjunctive montage was in Made in Italy (2006), a work about the delocalization of capital and the migration of labour made in collaboration with the Italian video collective Candida TV. We wanted to avoid making an activist video that would portray the struggle of the working class in a unified voice. Made in Italy presents a clash of different perspectives – owners of Italian companies in Romania, trade union leaders, workers and migrants – it’s up to the audience to navigate through the contradictory messages and draw their own conclusions. Two or Three Things about Activism (2008) went a step further – it was not only composed of disjunctive voices but had visible breaks in its structure and deconstructed its own motivations. The video begins with a richness of sound and images, immersing the audience in the stories of Romanian activists. After 20 minutes, the picture starts to break down – all background images are eliminated and the cuts between the words of the protagonists become visible. “I wanted to show the actions behind the words, you wanted a bare archive of reflections, with no images masking the words. You said an excess of images leads to a poverty of thought. And so we must learn to hear again.” The form contributes to the overall goal: by showing the unphotogenic aspects of Romanian activism, the video seeks to become a tool for discussion and self-reflection. It doesn’t try to represent its subject, but to intervene in it from the inside.

4. Reception: In a sense, the relations between the image and its referent, between subjects, and between form and content also create a specific type of relationship to an audience. Questioning the reality effects of images, or using an open form and various estrangement devices – like sound-image discontinuity, interruption of natural time sequences or direct address – tend to break the feeling of identification and provoke the audience to have doubts and questions.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now remembered as one of the key protagonists of May ’68, once suggested making a detourned leftist western. Godard replied that if the western preserved a traditional Hollywood form and created a typical relationship of passive spectatorship, it wouldn’t matter whether the content was leftist or not. If the audience was just sitting back and absorbing a fairy tale, even one with a leftist message, they would learn nothing about their specific situation. Yet it seems that many militant films and activist videos today still look like fairy tales with a leftist message. And in this sense, rather than creating the possibility for critical thought, they inhibit it. A work of art that makes the audience uncomfortable and demands that they step back and reflect (or even criticize or disagree) is more genuinely activist than a work of agit-prop that plays on the emotions of the audience and provokes it to act in accordance with its message.

5. Ownership: Many artists whose work may be engaged or activist in the above sense have still not posed the question of the ownership and distribution of their work, or how certain institutions can alienate these relations by placing them outside their control. Today there’s a widespread consensus that copyright has been perverted to benefit corporations rather than the artists for whom it was originally intended. But no such golden age of copyright ever existed. Ever since its inception during the period of Romanticism, the system of copyright has been a legal tool to transform art works into commodities and turn a profit for the owners of capital. And yet artists continue to be flattered by their association with the myth of the creative genius, turning a blind eye to how it is used to justify their exploitation. Copyright pits artists against each other in a war of competition for originality – its effects are not only economic, it also naturalizes a certain process of knowledge production, delegitimates the idea of a common culture, and cripples social relations. Artists are not encouraged to share their thoughts and expressions or to contribute to a common pool of creativity. Instead, they jealously guard their “property” from others, who they view as potential spies and thieves lying in wait to snatch and defile their original ideas. This is a vision of the art world created in capitalism’s own image. As long as a work of art is copyrighted and can’t be disseminated or used freely, as long as it circulates primarily through dominant cultural institutions and is accessible only to an elite type of audience, it is doomed to remain trapped in a system that constrains its power and renders its critique ineffective.

The call for “making film politically” is a suggestive signpost for the need to move beyond the content of political engagement and consider how modes of production, forms of organization, methods of articulating meaning and the ownership of culture all form part of an interconnected whole that must be interrogated in its entirety. This process of questioning brings to mind the humble origins of the word “research.” It is literally a second search. Once the first search produces a certain type of knowledge, the second asks how that knowledge was produced, what its conditions of possibility have been. And what those conditions leave out. This second search is not something that is specific to art – it is an indiscipline that resides at the core of every discipline, an immanent critique that seeks to expose and transcend its own limits.

Berlin, 2010. Written for IDEA: Arts + Society, nr. 35 (Cluj: Romania).

Here is the flyer of the Video Vortex #6 event, made by Team Thursday, Loes van Esch and Simone Trum, a Rotterdam based graphic design studio.

by Carlos García Moreno-Torres

2010 has finished, and yes, this is a big deal for Online Video; for such a young thing, every turn in the calendar is, and this is a big turn in the calendar. Not only a year, but a whole decade comes to an end, and looking back we can see that each year offered milestones for video on the web: 2000 to 2005 was the prehistory of online video with some small sites mostly offering video downloads that one played locally. In 2005 Skype introduced videocalls and not yet knowing its monumental consequence, YouTube was born. In 2006 YouTube was bought by Google and by 2007 it consumed as much bandwidth as all of the Internet did in 2000. Video had already changed the whole deal of the Internet.

In 2009 the iPhone joined the party and became a major player in online video with the release of the iPhone 3GS, the first model to include a video camera, multiplying uploads to Youtube by 4 in the first week. Now, about 35 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube – in other words, there are almost 6 new years of video available only on YouTube.

But there’s online video beyond Youtube. A good example is Vimeo, a site that was actually born one year before Google’s video giant. With a different purpose, focusing on user created content, it has grown to become one of the biggest video sites, and the standard online video web platform for audiovisual creators, with a large artist user-base.

Three big online broadcasting companies (Justin.TV, UStream and LiveStream) were founded in 2007, and have continued to grow, making internet broadcasting accessible to anyone and more and more common. Websites focused on entertaining clips like Metacafe or Dailymotion have expanded non- stop following YouTube’s footsteps, and Facebook having integrated video sharing feels like centuries ago. Videochat expanded from Skype to all other major IM services (MSN Messenger, Yahoo, Gmail…), and even more traditional media companies like newspapers include videos in their online editions now, with some social-video news on their way to becoming mainstream (like the dutch zie.nl).

If we look to a different screen, the one found within our living rooms, we can see how PlayStation3, Xbox360, Netflix, Hulu, Boxee, Apple TV and, more recently, GoogleTV have been progressively half taking-over, half partnering with the traditional audiovisual industry networks to bring online video to our televisions.
But it’s not all about the platforms. Online video is maturing as fast as the technology that supports it makes possible. We’ve seen the constant increase in the resolution of video, 3D online video is a reality (as we wrote a few weeks ago), and HTML5 and the new possibilities it will bring are around the corner. With a need to rule and organize on the go, the basis for open video online (referring, by open, to both content and techology) are also in constant evolution: WebM, Wikimedia, open video databases such as the Open Images project (facilitated by the Netherlands-based Institute for Sound and Vision)…we can be sure that the next generation of online video is coming, and it will be here sooner than later.

Nevertheless, and in spite of the great growth that online video has had (and is expected to keep having), not all the stories are about success. 2010 was also the year of Chatroulette, a Russian company that allows users to randomly video-chat with other users and jump to a new random connection at any time in the exchange. It achieved great popularity, created some Internet celebrities and had some real celebrities talking about it and taking part…and after being one of the year’s big hypes…it just vanished. Today you can still visit Chatroulette, but the number of users has dropped drastically, and it’s now an internet old glory, just like Altavista or Lycos.

When looking for something more tangible than all of these proliferating platforms and formats, we find the people behind the videos, with the greatest example being the important role online video played in Obama’s presidential run in 2008 showing, for the first time, the potential and power of this media.

But what will we see in this new decade? Will online video evolve into open video practices? Will it get shaped into a new industry controlled product delivering professional content to our homes and devices? Will people still watch “Charlie bit my finger” in 2020? Or going a little further: will people still gather around a screen after a dinner to watch the latest YouTube hit?

Well, it’s impossible to tell right now, and if good news is we’ll certainly have the answer in only ten years, excellent news is that the process and the daily discovery will be amazing and exciting.
Welcome into a new era.

As most of you know the INC is in the process of producing the second Video Vortex Reader

We are pleased to announce that the Reader is well into the copy-editing phase of production.

The Reader will be launched March 2011 at the upcoming Video Vortex 6 event in Amsterdam. We hope you can join us.

As with the first VV Reader, the second will be available in printed book form, as well as a free pdf download from our Reader page.

While the first Video Vortex reader is out of print, the full PDF is still available so check it out if you haven’t already.

We’ll be posting the Table of Contents for the upcoming reader in the next couple weeks, so come check it out.

by Carlos García Moreno-Torres

Ever since Avatar came out 3D seems to be the magical word that makes any movie a blockbuster. All of a sudden, the audiovisual entertainment industry (films, TV and videogames) has been trying to convince us that a 2D world doesn’t make sense anymore, releasing all kind of 3D products, from movies to Television sets & TV channels, videogames, cameras and photography books.

Steve Jobs recently said that users don’t want to see amateur clips, that they “want Hollywood movies and TV shows (…) they want professional content and everything in HD”. Of course this is not necessarily true (although some of his thousands of fans might take his word as gospel), but the truth is that big feature films are now easily reachable online (HULU, Netflix, Apple TV…) and the times of terrible quality pirate videos seems to be on its way out. So, no matter if the competition is Youtube or professional content, the truth now is that you can have good movies in HD and even decent popcorn at home.

In this era of the movie theater at home, the film industry needed something to get people back to the cinema, to enhance the experience and add something you can’t have from the comfort of your living room (besides avoiding the costs, the queues, the car ride, the parking…), and they decided it would be 3D.

After a year where the motto seemed to be you just need to make it 3D to make it a success, it looks like theaters won’t be able to hold the exclusive on 3D for as long as they would like. 3DTVs and cameras keep coming onto the market, PS3 and XBOX360 support 3D, and the Nintendo 3DS is coming out soon, with a 3D screen that doesn’t need glasses. Nevertheless, the evolution seems a little slower for the screens we spend more time on, that are our main window to the online world: phones and computers.
But, is it just a matter of time until we replace all screens for glasses-less 3D screens? Will we experience real 3D interfaces and websites anytime soon? In my opinion this doesn’t seem likely. As for online video, things are different.

Over a year ago YouTube quietly added 3D support. No big Apple-style announcement, just a new feature developed out of the endlessly productive 20% time free that all google engineers have to work on the projects that they’re passionate about (same 20% that gave birth to Gmail and Orkut). The solution, simple and elegant, has been evolving all these months, and allows you to select the 3D technology you’re using (different kinds of glasses, 3DTV or none at all to see both 2D views next to each other). Some of the other biggest online video sites like Vimeo also supports 3D.

This just shows how online video doesn’t necessarily stay in the “amateur hours” of Youtube and the artsy clips of Vimeo, but keeps and eye on the industry, not forgetting about 3D and the growing community of 3D creators that work and share their expertise online.

Interestingly, in a time when 3D is the big hype, it has been growing quietly in the guts of online video, and although most users don’t seem to notice it now (only about 5000 3D videos on Youtube!), the structure is being built so it will be ready and available when 3D screens invade the computer market.

If that finally happens (and according to the current industry tendency, it seems inevitable), Hollywood will have to find a new way to get people to theaters. Maybe they should try making good movies, that always worked.

Pre-Conference Seminar: Open Video Conference Europe
Mediacentrum, Sumatralaan 45 (Media Park), Hilversum

On November 11, 2010 The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and Knowledgeland host a one-day pre-conference seminar on open video in relation to public broadcasting, co-organised with the Open Video Alliance.

The Open Video Alliance is a coalition of organisations and individuals committed to the idea that the power of moving image should belong to everyone. Heading towards this goal, tools for creating, manipulating, and sharing video must be available to everyone. Moreover, open video requires that legal and business structures support the ability of huge numbers of individuals to use video in ways that go beyond just watching.

Public broadcasters aim to inform, inspire and entertain citizens. Because public broadcasting is funded directly by taxpayers, it is often argued that it should accommodate the current needs of society and culture. Its productions are an important part of our collective memory and can also be considered as belonging to the commons; resources that are collectively owned. Embracing open video will enable public broadcasters to optimise their accessibility and form a participatory culture around their productions. However, public broadcasters currently face serious legal and technological challenges and may also have to overcome some fears, uncertainty and doubt.

This pre-conference gathers representatives from public broadcasting, the creative industries, civil rights organisations, cultural heritage organisations and government to discuss the future of public broadcasting in relation to open video.

Attendance to the seminar is free, but reservation is required due to limited seating. Please reserve via e-mail:  ian.van.riel@balie.nl

Program
Plenary keynotes (10:00-11:00)
Ben Moskowitz (Open Video Alliance)
Peter B. Kaufman (Intelligent Television)

Coffee (11:00-11:15)

Plenary Presentations of Relevant Projects (11:15-13:00)
Michael Dale (Wikimedia Foundation) – Video on Wikipedia
Jamie King (VODO) – Promoting and Distributing Creative Works Using P2P
Dolf Veenvliet (Blender Foundation) – Open Movie Projects and Software
Frans Ward (Surfnet) – Open Video in Education
Bram Tullemans (NPO) – Online Video for Dutch Public Broadcasting

Lunch (13:00-14:00)

Three Parallel Working Groups (14:00-16:00)
1. Video on Wikipedia (step-by-step instructions on adding video content to Wikipedia, focus is both on the decision making process and the actual upload procedure)
Moderators: Ben Moskowitz & Michael Dale

2. Open Distribution Models for Broadcasting (working out possible models that broadcasters can pursue to open up their content)
Moderator: Peter B. Kaufman & Paul Keller

3. HTML5 Video 101 (exploring the possibilities of the HTML5 video element)
Moderator: Hay Kranen

Coffee (16:00-16:15)

Closing Discussion and Closing Remarks (16:15-17:00)

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For full Economies of the Commons 2 information: http://www.ecommons.eu/

The giant online video initiative “Youtube Play” is getting great attention, making it into news headlines, cultural magazines, and all over the blogosphere, including this very blog. With such a high-profile project, it’s not surprising to find a wide range of responses, some applauding Guggenheim and Youtube, while others turning a more detailed and critical eye to the specifics of the actual project.

SanctionedArray is one such project.

Put on by the collective Specify Others, SanctionedArray is a curated collection of video art placed online, with guidelines that explicitly open up the restrictions enforced during the “Youtube Play” project that excluded submissions from citizens or residents of countries sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in the United States, which include Belarus, Cote d’Ivoire, Congo, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Myanmar/Burma and Zimbabwe.

While curating, or the selection of art works within a juried competition, is already understood and generally accepted as a practice of excluding some artworks in favour of others, the initial exclusionary eligibility criteria in the Youtube-Guggenheim “Youtube Play” collaboration raises a number of important questions: in particular, why shouldn’t artists from sanctioned countries be allowed to take part in an initiative that has been overtly expressed as a global project, particularly when Andy Berndt (Vice President, Creative Lab of Google and Youtube) expresses in a promotional video that “Any video creator, all around the world, anywhere, can nominate their work”? what does this exclusion say about not only the merit of artists who are residents or citizens of these countries, but also, who constitutes “the world”?; is the ultimate goal of this restriction to block the possibilities of circulating ideas that stem from within perceived “problematic governments”, and if so, is it not only the voices of these “problematic governments” blocked, but also the voices of people within these countries, further limiting their global presence.

Whatever the responses to these questions and others might be, one truth stands, and that is that both the amount of submissions to SanctionedArray (700) which were open to residents and citizens of all countries (OFAC sanctioned or otherwise), and the number of videos selected (100), show there is a definite creative voice to be heard from those countries. The numbers become even more significant when we take a further look at the list of countries, with places like North Korea, Myanmar or Zimbabwe, where connecting to the internet is far from trivial. At the same time, it shows the solidarity of creators from non-sanctioned countries that choose to submit their works as a way to support this initiative, and therefore give it greater importance, offering participants from sanctioned countries a deserved space to share their creations, voices, expressions and ideas.

The SanctionedArray project continues with its latest phase, CuratorsArray, which encourages invited curators to select videos through using, and expanding, the SanctionedArray database.

After all, and in spite of the restriction, perhaps a positive outcome for a number of video creators from sanctioned countries was that thanks to SanctionedArray, not only their works have a space, but attention has been drawn towards the difficulties and limitations they often experience in sharing and promoting their work through digital lines, enforced both from within their countries, and from outside in the allegedly free world.

For more information take a look at the SanctionedArray website.

Or Check the terms and conditions of Youtube Play.