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.

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:

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

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

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

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

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

Evan Roth - Graffiti Analysis

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

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

Grafitti Research Lab - Laser Tag

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Carlos García Moreno-Torres

Since its birth in the early 20th century, cinema has probably caused a more visibly active reaction from audiences than any other form of art (fan conventions, discussions, reviews, seminars, remakes, parodies…). This bounty of responses is most likely due to cinema’s proximity to popular culture (its far-reaching stretch across a vast and diverse public), and its socializing character. Like many other media, participation in the creation, or more accurately re-creation, of content has increased drastically in the last few years; growth doubtlessly due to the omnipresent Web 2.0, cloud culture, internet society, or any other aspect of the phenomenon infiltrating the developed world today with smartphones, laptops, tablets and millions of users attached to them 24/7 creating and uploading content, often in collaborative or crowd-sourced ways.

If we look at fan films, a practice consisting of shooting your own version of a movie, TV show, or book etc., (with different productions having varying grades of fidelity in comparison to the original), we realize that they have in fact existed for many years. The first fan film, according to Wikipedia, dates back to 1926, even when recording technologies were far from accessible to the public at large. That being said, it seems natural that in this current moment, when internet trends continuously tell us that we’re somehow back in the era of craftsmanship, when everybody can be a photographer, a writer or a cinematographer, we are taking this trend seriously, and remaking and versioning the most significant pieces of modern culture in very personal ways.

Fan film initiatives illustrate the creative power of the millions of users connected to the internet every minute of every day, with the good news being that crowd-sourcing initiatives are growing up, maturing, and getting ready to leave the nest of the minority of intensive users to reach a larger public. There are more and more examples that prove that collaborative practices are not just an idea born as a logical consequence of this technological and cultural momentum, but a reality that is already making an impact in popular culture.

It’s significant that two really closed environments like TV and the Hollywood industries are now recognizing the value and interest of these initiatives. By the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarding a crowd-sourced and code-directed Star Wars fan film mash up project with an Emmy, and LucasArts (the copyright holders to Star Wars) supportively getting in contact with the “Star Wars Uncut” initiators, shows that these kinds of practices are here to stay. Interestingly, similar to cinema, there are both different genres, styles and breeds of crowd-sourced fan film video projects, as we find projects like the mentioned award winning “Star Wars Uncut” which draws from popular culture, but also others related to a more classical cinema sphere, like Perry Bard’s “Man with a Movie Camera”, a global remake of Vertov’s 1929 film.

Read the original article from the New York Times about the Emmy winning project to learn more about this Star Wars based project that opened industry doors to this new collaborative practices: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/28/arts/television/28uncut.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=an%20emmy%20for%20rebuilding%20a%20galaxy&st=cse