Conference program
Friday January 18, PostCS11
09.30 Doors open, coffee and tea
10.00 Welcome
10.15 – 12.30 Opening Session
Moderator: Geert Lovink
Tom Sherman
Rosemary Comella
Florian Schneider
12.30 – 13.30 Lunch
13.30 – 15.30 Online Video Aesthetics
Moderator: Patricia Pisters
Andreas Treske
Tal Sterngast
Stefaan Decostere
Helen Kambouri
15.30 – 15.45 Coffee, tea
15.45 – 17.45 Alternative Platforms and Software
Moderator: Seth Keen
Matthew Mitchem
Valentin Spirik
Philine von Guretzky
Jay Dedman
Tatiana de la O
Saturday January 19, PostCS11
10.00 – 12.00 Cinema and Narrativity
Moderator: Sonja de Leeuw
Thomas Elsaesser
Dan Oki
Jan Simons
12.00 – 13.00 Lunch
13.00 – 15.00 Curating Online Video
Moderator: Vera Tollmann
Thomas Thiel
Sarah Cook
Patrick Lichty
Emma Quinn
15.00 – 15.15 Coffee, tea
15.15 – 17.15 Participatory Culture
Moderator: Monique van Dusseldorp
Tilman Baumgärtel
Ana Peraica
Dominick Chen
20.00-00.00 Evening program: Video Slamming
YouTube made 2006 the year of Internet video. The video content is produced bottom-up, with an emphasis on participation, sharing and community networking. But inevitably, like Flickr being consumed by Yahoo, Google purchased YouTube. What is the future for the production and distribution of independent online video content? How can a participatory culture achieve a certain degree of autonomy and diversity outside mass media? What is the artistic potential of video databases and online filmmaking?
Looking at the videos on YouTube, what aesthetics do we find? Is there a homogeneous style that mainly builds on eyewitness tv, candid camera formats and webcam diaries? And now that music videos and commercials increasingly resemble video art, can we define how artistic practices influence the look of online footage? Is YouTube a medium and platform in itself for art works, or is it merely used as a promotional device?
Alternative Platforms and Software
This session will investigate developments in the field of open source software in creating alternatives to proprietary software like Windows Media Player. Through investigating Peer2Peer alternatives and open licenses, both users and programmers aim to create a truly distributed network, in which content can freely float around without having to use centralized servers and sign strings of user agreements.
Do fragmented video databases lead to new narratives and genres? Does a database like YouTube evoke new media skills or rather contemporary conditions such as ADD? Against the latter, scholars have put the ability of users to reassemble short stories into larger new narratives. The bricolage is assembled by the end-user, not the producer. Does this add up to a new cinematic experience?
From 16mm film and video to the Internet and back, artists have always used the moving image to produce critical and innovative work. This session will explore early examples of Internet video and investigate how artists and curators have responded to the YouTube challenge. Online video databases seemingly are the ideal artist portfolio online, with unlimited uploads and a massive audience. MySpace is inhabited by bands and musicians, but why don’t video artists and filmmakers occupy YouTube? On the other hand, where would this leave the curator?
Web 2.0 promises new levels of participatory culture in which all users are producers, sharing their homemade content with their networks of friends. In this utopian approach, the user has the potential to overcome centralized top-down media and create dialogue. To which extent can this be considered citizen journalism? Is the increased user participation a sign of a new socio-political culture or is it a mere special effect of technological change?
Evening programme: Video Slamming
Much like poetry slamming the use of short video fragments has become a dominant mode in visual culture. Where are the video files found and how are they used and played with? Is ‘video slamming’ the new way of watching audiovisual files? This evening session is all about the new ways of watching, using, and playing with moving images, such as scratching, sampling, mixing, (meta)tagging and recommending.