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 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.

By Nicola Bozzi

Andrew Clay - 'The YouTube Rich List: A List of Riches?'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

A media theorist and lecturer at Leicester’s De Montfort University, Andrew Clay has been investigating online video for some time. As an opener of the sixth edition of Video Vortex, his intervention explored YouTube and effectively went a bit beyond, as the Reader tagline suggests. The British theorist raised several compelling questions about the popular video sharing platform, inspiring the audience to ask quite a few questions at the end. In particular, his analysis of the top YouTubers – the ones who got rich by putting serial sketches online and engaging the community – took stock of the YouTube experience so far, focusing on the blurrier and blurrier distinction between amateurs and professionals.

Criticizing taste-based evaluations of content such as Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur, Clay took notice of the most successful video genres – that is, comedy and entertainment-enhanced news. What seems to be the most interesting aspect of the phenomenon to the British professor, though, is the community and the networking possibilities that it enables. Top YouTubers not only partake in the same superstardom, amplified by increasing collaborations with each other, but also have the capacity to engage the audience in a participatory media space, as well as casual crowds.

Apart from the YouTube-specific discourse, Clay put the platform in relation to other preexisting media – like Mtv, once the mainstream source for edgy content – and pondered on future developments. For example, it is clear that the website wants to get more and more involved with television, while maintaining and extending its online supremacy even by schooling and workshops in less media-savvy countries – a bit like Current TV did in its early days.

If YouTube’s merit has been that of bringing niche into the mainstream – narrowing the technical gap between professionals and amateurs – according to Clay there is a deeper, hidden purpose that drives people to struggle in order to establish their niche presence on the internet giant’s surface. Quoting German philosopher Martin Heidegger, he argues such focus on inauthentic lives is a human attenpt to scare death away. We don’t know if the Annoying Orange will be forever remembered, but it might definitely survive its author.

Andrew Clay at Video Vortex. Photo by Anne Helmond

For Andrew Clay’s presentation see, here