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

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 Nicola Bozzi

Dagan Cohen - 'Upload Cinema: Bringing Web Film to the Big Screen: from Nice to Mainstream'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Upload Cinema is a monthly video spree that quite literally takes the most valuable YouTube gems to the big screen. That is, the not-so-big one of the Uitkijk, the smallest and coziest movie theater in Amsterdam.

Dutch creative director Dagan Cohen and cinema programmer Barbara de Wijn started the initiative because they thought (the best) YouTube videos deserved a bigger screen. So, to make sure they selected only the most compelling, they made the format of their cinematic get-together strictly editorial and topical, with a monthly theme explored with the help of experts and, of course, crowd-sourced suggestions from the users of their website. 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.

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 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

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.

By: Diana Soto de Jesús

Almost 8 hours into the workshop we’ve just finished showing our work. Its an eclectic collection that goes from funny countdowns to sardonic observations on femininity, passing through Dutch villagers in traditional outfits dancing to techno. It was interesting that certain types of images such as groups of animals running wildly, orchestra directors and early 20th century dancing couples were featured in many of the videos even if these dealt with different topics, were made in different styles and (most of the time) using different footage. This highlights the creative potential of remixing where the sources may be similar or even the same in some cases, but the results are quite idiosyncratic and creative.

But what are the sources? Where can you get your free and perfectly legit audio and video material to use and share as you wish? Read the rest of this entry »

By: Diana Soto de Jesús

Maarten Brinkerink, organizer of the "Remixing and Re-Use of Open Video Collections" Workshop. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Just a day before the much awaited sixth edition of Video Vortex, students, media producers, video amateurs and overall new media enthusiasts are gathering in the Netherlands Media Art Institute to indulge their geeky tendencies in some open video remixing and experimenting.

In the context of the Open Images project, participants of this workshop will get creative with material from the Netherlands’ public broadcasting archive, to make their own short videos. We’ve now just started and this is the goal of the day: each and everyone of the participants needs to make a short (1 minute) movie by the end of the day.

But first things first. Who is responsible for all this?

The workshop is organized by Maarten Brinkerink project manager of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and it is lead by mixed media artists and Emile Zile and José Miguel Biscaya.

And so, amidst the tangle of ethernet cables providing the much needed internet connection, the workshop begins.

As we present each other it becomes clears that a lot of participants have some experience with video editing but no experience whatsoever with open source video. To which Emile clarifies that there’s quite a difference between video editing experience and experience working with samples and remixing.

José describes what we’ll do today as making a college, something that most likely everyone is familiar with even if only from his/her kindergarden days. He explains that sampling is  about taking something out of its context and doing something else with it, more than experience what you really need is intuition. So its not about building tight narratives but rather interesting mash-ups. Keeping this in mind Emil and José gave a series of tips that I summarize here.

1. Think about audio, it can really change the meaning and add a new layer to your remixed video – As an example Emile mentions the Gendered Advertiser Remixer a tool where one finds two columns, one with video material and one with audio material from commercial ads and can then combine then. Consequently, one comes up with very uncanny ads where Barbie is showing off her silky smooth blond locks to a narrator with a deep bass voice more apt for a G.I.Joe add. This kind of wacky gender bias experimentation works because the duration of both audio and video material is the same, both sample banks are 30 seconds long. Furthermore, they both have quick video editing and quick paced dialogue. So these unexpected collisions between different media end up producing a “third meaning.”
2. Get a broad range of samples to work with – that is, even if you have an idea in mind, say kittens for a new addition to the ever growing LOLcats collection, don’t stick to samples only from that area. When you are doing your search look for material in other topics like say, religion, you never know what you made find.
3. Chance is on your side – Think about chance collisions. This is one area where randomness can be a good thing.
4. Forget the Timeline – “Timelining” or making a structure doesn’t really work for this kind of endeavor. It is more about seeing what collisions and connections work.
5. Get rhythm – You don’t need to make a film that looks like a film with a beginning an end, you can go by rhythm. For example cut a series of left to right motions and mash them together.

I’ll be tuning in again later to let you know all about the specific sources to find material and resources to edit them in order to create your own video stories with found material, as promised by the Video Vortex organizers.

Program Out Now!

Download here the program for the VVV closing party.

Reflecting on our growing digital culture and its increasing audiovisual presence in our daily lives, artists CONSTANT DULLAART, ANJA MASLING, GIORGI TABATADZE, EMILE ZILE, and YELLOW GOOGLE HEAD AND MACACOSTAILEY and DJ 4LCH3MY (aka Katja Novitskova), reveal the possibilities and playfulness of online video to explore, appropriate, and create.Slamming, mixing, melding, mashing, stalling, freezing and buffering will ensue as artists drawing from moving images on the Web beckon you into the vortices of our online video world. From the live collision of video clips to the manipulation of the YouTube interface, the Institute of Network Cultures welcomes you to a closing night of visual sensory over-load through performances and projections.