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 Caroline Goralczyk

Michael Strangelove - 'The Cultural Value of Amateur Video'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

In his talk on the cultural value of amateur video, the author of “Watching Youtube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People”, scholar and artist Michael Strangelove explained how amateur productions will gain greater value due to their potential of challenging the meaning of things, their subvertion of a capitalist mode of production and their use by individuals as tools for self-representation of the world. Why does ‘Laughing Baby’, ‘David coming back from the dentist’ or the ‘Star Wars Kid’ make a difference in our lives? And what is it that makes online video different from TV? Dr.Strangelove’s answer to this is straight to the point:  “It’s the amateur”.

When elaborating on how online video is entering into our culture as part of the material we use for creating our world, Michael Strangelove referred to Michel Foucault’s notion of compulsory visibility and how the new generation of digital natives is growing up with the thought of radical transparency in representing themselves. This drive to be visible and to reveal one’s private life is reflecting how online video matters in people showing bits of themselves, always having in mind that any moment of their life could be moment visible for others, a Youtube moment.

“What we see through online video is what is different and what is the same” states Strangelove, pointing to the value of amateur video for constructing reality and shaping feelings by challenging the tastes and styles that are commonly recognized by the general public. In this regard, online amateur productions particularly convert the capitalist mode of production away from a centralized power, from ‘the few to the many’, from ‘homogeneity to heterogeneity’. People will talk about their mundane lives, women will be de-marginalized and given a voice, which will overall result in the challenge of official versions of the worlds and in contesting the prevalent situation. Online video then serves as the source material used for expressing what attracts us, what repulses us and how we construct reality. This alternative mode of cultural production further enhances new forms of aesthetics as through online video we can see others and we can also react with intolerance.

Michael Strangelove - 'The Cultural Value of Amateur Video'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

When asked whether critical notions of ‘the amateur’ such as the one put forth by Andrew Keen are justified, Michael Strangelove answered ambiguously. He stated that there is a valid critique of the amateur’s production and notions of free labour of users are becoming more important in the face of using user-generated content for commercial gain. As for now, the work of the amateur is showing contradictory effects and pulling in two directions: it moves between an increase in expressive capabilities and the recapturing of these capabilities into the commercial market system. However, there is a clear map of forces at work and the substantial impact and value of amateur production does not primarily lie in the production, but in the contestation of meaning of things.

Dr.Strangelove in preparation for Video Vortex #6:

By Nicola Bozzi

Vito Campanelli- 'Book Launch: Web Aesthetics'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Vito Campanelli’s presentation of his own Web Aesthetics. How Digital Media
Affect Culture and Society (published by NAi) was one of the few theoretical ones in a very visual and demo-ridden Video Vortex edition.

In his work, the Italian scholar reduces important phenomena like social and peer-to-peer networks to their historical premises, laying the foundations for an organic aesthetic theory of digital media. His intervention outlined his conceptual framework, providing the common denominator to the examples analyzed in the book. Read the rest of this entry »

By Catalina Iorga

Florian Schneider - 'An Open Source Mode of the Documentary'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

German filmmaker, media artist and activist Florian Schneider ambitiously set out to present a mission statement for a novel type of documentary, the open source mode, and launched into a highly theoretical and somewhat cryptic talk that contained a few guidelines on how this transition can be made, but lacked any clear examples or results.

He started by explaining the moving images that ran in the background throughout his presentation, namely scenes from the first Dutch sound film and one of the first documentaries in film history, ‘Philips-Radio‘ (known in France as Symphonie Industrielle). Made in 1931 by Joris Ivens after a commission from Philips Eindhoven, the film shows the mass production of radio transistors at the corporation’s factories.

Schneider proceeded to question the possibility of a ‘Philips-Radio Revisited’, of making a documentary about a fragmented, discontinuous post-industrial space. Ivens found himself in the very midst of production, while nowadays it’s impossible to visually reconstruct the technical aspects and social division of production; this network cannot be traced.

The aesthetic potential of the contemporary network should become the main focus of documentary makers, as opposed to emphasising only the creation and distribution of content. Schneider believes that what is at stake is the production of a new vision, an optical experience. In other words, it’s not about ‘what to see’ but ‘how to see things’, meaning that a number of challenges must be considered: ethical, political and especially aesthetic ones. He is calling for a reinvention of the documentary under network conditions, keeping in mind that the network logs, captures, records and stores interactions between subject and object.

Schneider first elaborated on the status quo of the documentary. First, there has been an emancipation of this genre from its typical carrier media – film and photography – and an expansion into other fields, such as painting, theatre and other artistic forms. Another crucial development is digitisation, which has redefined editing; to edit can now mean to connect data streams instead of splicing 16 or 35mm film. The network has replaced or engulfed ‘the streets’ on which the filmmaker would wander in the quest to (re)appropriate a reality that exists independently from the hermetic space of the creator’s studio. In this quest, the documentary filmmaker waits something to happen, for the unexpected to occur; this notion of anticipation reverberates into the editing process as events are reconstructed with the same frame of mind.

Florian Schneider at Video Vortex. Photo by Anne Helmond.

He then expressed a series of concerns about how film is made in the networked environment. In this context, there is a tension between legible and illegible, with a strong tendency for making things readable and decipherable in order to be searched, found, categorised, indexed tagged and subjected to an algorithmic process. Schneider controversially claims that text-to-image hybrids (i.e. subtitles), which can be indexed, represent death to film since they make everything calculable. This anti-computationalist perspective continues with his recommendation of an algorithm that produces difference rather than sameness, multiplicity instead of identity, since online aesthetics are all about weaving items into a mesh of similarities instead of discontinuities.

Nevertheless, the network allows the filmmaker to explore an absolute out of field, to work with sources not originally captured in frames given that the content of the image always escapes proper framing. The essence of the network image, what makes it mobile is that there is no chance to readjust it.

Ending with an open question – ‘What is networked seeing?’, Schneider left the audience eager to find out exactly what an open source documentary would look like. Maybe that will be answered at next year’s Video Vortex.

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.