Teague Schneiter - 'Improving Access and Facilitating Use of Indigenous Content with Isuma's Hi-Speed MediaPlayers'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

In Friday’s first session called “It’s Not a Dead Collection, it’s a Dynamic Database”, media archivist and researcher Teague Schneiter (US/CA) took off with an elaboration about the ‘IsumaTV‘ project she’s currently working on. The people behind this initiative aim to set up an accessible infrastructure for streaming and uploading video content in indigenous subcultures. This is not only a technological challenge, but also requires a lot of media literacy within these communities. Other than with traditional heritages, it doesn’t focus on the long-term storage but instead prioritizes the accessibility of the users.
When it comes to the technological part of accessibility, the project would require a solid approach to work for the across different communities. Since the Inuit areas are largely isolated from ‘regular’ broadband services (the costs / bandwidth speed ratio is one of the aspects that widens the ‘digital divide’), the organisation introduced special media boxes into these indigenous communities. Through this local server network, the IsumaTV network performs much better than mainstream platforms like YouTube or Facebook would have. Moreover, having a stand-alone video platform overall increases the feeling of (reclaiming) ownership, “it helps with having a good relationship with the users.” Even though the technological trade-off is that the network updates with a delay of about a week, this is still acceptable for a project with a goal to preserve cultural heritage.

In the end, the project seems very worthwhile. Especially in the “era of of rapid change, [in which] indigenous groups seek to preserve their subculture”. Since the project started in 2008, over 2000 videos in more than 41 languages have been uploaded as well as pictures and text. Content-wise, it proves to be valuable to have the locals themselves act as curators, instead of having slightly related ‘outsiders’ maintain the archives. The fact that the communities rely mainly on verbal communications is another point that video creates a lot more insight into the different cultures.

Future plans with this initiative are to attract more sponsors like repositories, institutes, museums and participatory media (especially now the Canadian government has cut the budget), as well as to add crowd-source (subtitling or voice-over) features as well as further improving the network its accessibility.

By Diana Soto de Jesús

Ebru Baranseli - 'Internet Censorship in Turkey and Online Video'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

As if the Internet Gods had planned it all along, Ebru Baranseli gave a report on the current situation of Internet censorship in Turkey right on the World Day Against Cyber Censorship.

According to Baranseli, a professor of graphic design at Anadolu University, until 2001 Turkey’s government had a “hands off” approach to Internet regulation: “It was thought that the general legal system regulating speech related crimes was adequate.” But that line of thinking wouldn’t last long. From 2001 onwards the government started to intervene.

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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:

Ashiq Khondker - 'The Diegetic Desktop'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Ashiq Khondker and Eugene Kotlyarenko’s presentation was the most entertaining and confusing of the first day of Video Vortex #6. To begin with, their collaboration took place exclusively on the internet, after Ashiq contacted the artist to interview him about a series of videos he shot entirely with screen capture software and published online as a sort of mini-series entitled ‘Instructional Video #4: Preparation for Mission‘. To match the spirit of Kotlyarenko’s pieces, the interview – or the attempts to get it done – were recorded with the aforementioned software and edited into a narrated, self-presented documentary. That is to say, there was no usual speaker-behind-a-laptop combination, but a fullscreen projection of the clip.

Called The Diegetic Desktop, this video showed Ashiq trying to interview an arrogant and downright obnoxious Kotlyarenko via iChat and Skype, while switching between notes and Web browser windows or sharing his screen with the American artist. As the video progressed, it seemed there was no way to deal with Eugene, annoying and uncooperative, lazily slouched on his sofa with a giant bottle of water and a couple of mysterious green pills that obviously didn’t cure his delusions of grandeur.

The apparently failed interview had a big impact on the audience, who became very engaged, asking questions or even calling Kotlyarenko an ‘a**hole’. But then a surprising revelation was made: the whole video was set up. When Sabine Niederer, managing director of the Institute of Network Cultures, complimented Ashiq on his patience in interviewing such a difficult character, he confessed that both he and Eugene had been faking it all along. Ashiq said that playing the goofy guy came naturally to him, while Eugene took on the role of the arrogant artist.

It was not just an entertaining presentation, but an actual piece of video art that, rather than making sweeping statements about the future of online video, showed how diegetic desktop works play with software and our minds.

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:

Patrícia Dias da Silva - 'Joining the Online Video Conversation? The Presence of Institutional Actors on YouTube'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

The second day of the Video Vortex conference at Trouw in Amsterdam. In the seventh session Patrícia Dias da Silva, a PhD Fellow in Social Sciences at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, talks about how YouTube has been embraced by European institutional actors, and how YouTube is reaching out to traditional actors and media, instead of maintaining an ‘alternative’ posture which nowadays is more connected to the Vimeo platform.

YouTube allows political institutions to reach out to their audiences in a visual and interactive way by creating online video channels, posting videos, and using the social tools around the video. CitizenTube was initiated by YouTube as a political VLog in 2008 and initially had strong focus on the US elections but expanded and grew toward a platform for citizen journalism around the world. It showed a first step towards the use of online video for a political and journalistic purpose and to engage an audience to respond, comment, and interact with the videos that are posted and perspectives that are shared.

The use and appliance of new media technologies and platforms by the European Commission was first described in the eEurope initiative from 1999. There was a strong believe the internet would revive the economy and provide new economic and political changes for Europe. A first attempt to use the YouTube platform to reach out and interact with ‘European citizens’ was the Questions for Europe channel in collaboration with EuroNews. It allowed people to ask questions by posting videos which would be answered by members of the European Commission.

In 2007 EUTube was launched after the failed introduction of the European constitution to engage with citizens and to create a community of voices. It was a first step from the European Parliament to engage and connect with European citizens by using online video and the reach of the YouTube platform. With the tagline ‘sharing the sights and sounds of Europe’ it was a noble attempt to gather the different perspectives around Europe and create a dialogue about the road that Europe should be heading. The channel launched in four different languages of which English was the most popular. The channel showed reports about the EU, people in the field working for Europe, and institutional videos to promote projects and departments.

After showing some examples of the institutional use of the YouTube platform, Patrícia Dias da Silva brings up several discussion points about the use and success of these initiatives. First, the European politicians saw and used YouTube as a static archive, as a collection of videos all stored on one online channel, instead of being a dynamic archive. It was used as an aggregation of the appearance of public figures and politicians in other news media, speeches, and personal items. For example, the channel of the Berlusconi government is mainly showing videos from his own news networks.

As a second point of discussion da Silva shows how institutional videos often disable the ability to comment on videos and start discussions with other users. So on the one hand YouTube is used to reach out and allow interaction between Institutions and ‘the people’, but the functionalities provided by YouTube are disabled. The British Prime Minister David Cameron disabled comments on his videos but allowed interaction on his personal website. A third point of discussion is the low participation on YouTube channels with political ambitions. The Norwegian Prime Minister requested video questions on his YouTube channels resulting in only 5 responses. The same was the result from a similar initiative by the European Commission and EuroNews with the Questions for Europe channel. Most videos were uploaded by EuroNews and hardly any question were uploaded by participants themselves. Fourthly, a problem faced by many channels was the flaming and trolling in the comments of the uploaded videos, an important reason to disable the comment functionality. As Margot Wallstrom, former European Commissioner for Institutional Relations and Communication, described ‘The level of intelligence is low, and closing the board would improve the décor of EUTube’.

A fifth point of discussion questioned if the channels were used for increased participation, or as propaganda channels for European perspectives and regulations. People do not believe the motives of participation but see it as government funded propaganda. The sixth, and last point noted by da Silva is the frivolous nature of some videos posted by politicians and institutions to attract more viewers and comments. As an example she refers to Spanish video ‘Votar és un plaer’ (Voting is enjoyment) video place by the Joventut Socialista de Catalunya in which a woman is having an orgasm while voting. This practice results in flagged videos (18+) and comments and discussion on the use of video by political institutions.

We can conclude that governments and political institutions are struggling with how to use online video platforms to reach out and connect with the people. As noted by da Silva, they often see YouTube channels as repositories for videos; as dead databases. They miss the dynamics and interactivity these tools provide in creating a narrative for an online audience. By engaging the public with, for example, social media tools, you can get them involved. However, people tend to see social media initiatives by politicians as manipulation or propaganda tools without a real interest in the interactive participatory side of the story. Flaming and trolling in comments, a low engagement, and the lack of interactivity, often results in declining attention from both the public and the initiators after which participation dies out. As long as institutions do not see and use the added value of online video platforms, these initiatives will fail. It would be a good strategy to look at the activist use of online video, for example in the middle east, and how public engagement results in active participation and valuable discussions.

About the author: Geert Faber graduated with a Master of Science degree in Business Administration from the Free University in Amsterdam and is currently graduating as a Bachelor of Arts in Media & Culture specializing in New Media and Television studies.

On Twitter: @GeertFaber

Bloggers and Audience at Video Vortex #6. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Evan Roth presenting at Video Vortex #6. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Registration Desk at Video Vortex #6. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Ben Moskowitz presenting at Video Vortex #6. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Bloggers and Audience at Video Vortex #6. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Video Vortex. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Michael Strangelove presenting at Video Vortex #6. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Geert Lovink speaking at Video Vortex #6. Photo by Anne Helmond

Book Launch Video Vortex Reader II. Photo by Anne Helmond

VeniVidiVortex: Closing Party. Photo by Anne Helmond

The whole Video Vortex 6 photoset can be found on Flickr. Please join us by tagging your Video Vortex photos with vv6 and adding them to the Video Vortex Photo Pool.

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 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 Geert Faber

Mél Hogan - 'It's not a Dynamic Database...It's a Dead Collection?. Photo by Anne Helmond.

The second day of the Video Vortex conference started with the session ‘It’s not a dead collection, it’s a dynamic database’ covering a next phase of digitalizing and distributing video archives. The first presentation of the day is from Mél Hogan who talks about the rise and fall of three large online video art repositories in Canada and the setbacks they encountered. Mél Hogan is currently completing her research creation doctorate in Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. Her research documents defunct, stalled, and crashed online video art repositories within a Canadian cultural context.

The title of her presentations (and of this blog) provokes the title of the session and questions whether the web provides a dynamic databases or dead collections. The growth of YouTube and its popularity has set new standards for online video databases, archives, and interfaces. More often online projects become entities on themselves instead of just bringing an offline collection online.

To showcase the difficulties of bringing video art repositories online, Mél discusses three cases from Canada and the setbacks they encountered. These cases were created by interviewing the people, partners, and organizations involved, by reviewing ground reports, and tracking the visual history of these collections and website by using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. A general notion among these online projects is the implied value of the content the archives contain and the focus on the broader context. All the project envisioned an archive of videos and described a context in which those videos should be placed, however, the cases show that this context is often harder to develop and control, and affects the popularity and success of the online archives.

The first case describes the start of Vidéographe by viThèque which started in 2010 and is still online. The project encountered several setbacks in the development of the channel because of the involvement of several different partners and getting copyrights for the content. After years of development the project is now taken into the courtroom to settle arguments between different ex-partners, resulting in a widespread of competitive online channels presenting the video material of Vidéographe. A showcase how context is hard to manage and control on the web, and how the offline organization of projects can influence this.

The second case discusses the Vtape project which started in 2006 and ended in 2008 being a part of the virtual museum of Canada (Musée virtuel du Canada). The website has an active link to the archive but has been offline, or ‘temporarily unavailable’, for many years now, questioning the access of websites beyond the technical framework.

The last case discussed the Médiathèque project initiated by SAW video’s which started in 2003 and ended in 2009. The website provided artists a payment of 200 dollar per year for every submitted video. The website turned out to be an online repository of online video which focused more on availability instead of context, a faith, as Mél notes, for all digital media. A severe server crash in 2009 suddenly ended the availability of the website and it has been offline ever since. Although back-ups are available the website is still offline as a result of lack of dedication from SAW video’s, and new initiatives being developed. Mél Hogan has written a more detailed overview of the rise and fall of Médiathèque and the traces left on the web in a paper for FlowTV.org.

Collaborations with different partners and receiving long-term funding are common difficulties for online art video repositories. It is still unclear who controls and owns the content in the databases and how copyright material should be distributed from these archives. The cases discussed shows how videos were dispersed over different video portals including popular video websites such as YouTube and Vimeo. Another setback many online repositories faced was the adoption by both the audience and the artists, over time hits declined and channels were never adopted by the video art community. A challenge new channels trying to tackle by including social media tools for reaching their audience. Having the technology in place is not enough, context, partners, relationships with artists, and funding has an important influence on the success of the channel. This can be achieve, for example, by developing a  good connection between the artist and the platform and by giving the artist some control over the platform to involve them in the process to keep the platform online. However, as Mél notes, crashes and broken links have shown the paradoxical nature of online archives; failures are part of the narrative.

On Twitter: @Mél Hogan

About the author: Geert Faber graduated with a Master of Science degree in Business Administration from the Free University in Amsterdam and is currently graduating as a Bachelor of Arts in Media & Culture specializing in New Media and Television studies.

On Twitter: @GeertFaber