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 Serena Westra

Ben Moskowitz - 'Video of the Open Web, Not Just on the Open Web'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

The second speaker of the Platforms, Standards & the Trouble with Translation Civil Rights session is Ben Moskowitz. For the second time in a year, the first time was in November for the Ecommons conference, he came all the way from the USA to join us. Moskowitz works for the Mozilla Foundation and is an adjunct professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. He served as the director of the Open Video Conference and led the 2009-2010 iCommons video policy project.

He fills the room with enthusiasm as he starts speaking: ‘Hi, how are you all doing?’ He begins his presentation with a shocking statement for a conference about YouTube: ‘Web video isn’t real web video.’ But before the other speakers and the audience can start a protest, he starts explaining: it is not real web video because it is online video. There is a difference between both, in the sense that most web video on the Internet is ‘just TV pasted into a web page’. This might as well be a black box, according to Moskowitz, and is quite of the opposite of open source. The problem with this form of presenting web video, like YouTube and Vimeo, is that it is too static. You cannot even link to a video: you can only link to a page.

Moskowitz solution to this problem is HTML 5 video. With HTML 5 you can embed videos: ‘They become a part of the fabric of the web.’ You can create sematic connections and all kind of things you can’t simply do with flash. It will revolutionize storytelling in a way that is non-linear and points directly to other information, links, sources, maps, and so on.

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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.