By Elena Tiis
October 21, 2009 Felix Meritis, Amsterdam
In the crowded top floor room of the Felix Meritis, the moderator asks what the composition of the crowd is. Raise your hands. They go up at music labels representatives, managers, producers, artists, IT people, some students of this or that. Possibly the single most unifying aspect of this melange is the frequent ownership of an iPhone… Music & Bits was a pre-emptive kick-off to the Amsterdam Dance Event unfolding from the 22nd to 25th of October 2009. It consisted of a Hack Track in the morning for the technically inclined, and of a conference in the afternoon. In the following, I will loosely sketch out the course of the conference.

The talks begin by an exchange between the Berlin-based SoundCloud’s Eric Wahlforss and the DJ Speedy J. They strike quite a relaxed pose; no powerpoints and no notes, just an exchange to which the audience was invited to participate quite heavily. First, Wahlforss is describing how he’s been involved with music and “web stuff” for 15 years to date. But these have largely been parallel tracks for him. Frustrated with the limiting landscape of Yousendit and MySpace on the web for the purposes of sending and being exposed to new music, and the rote of sending/downloading/emailing in order to participate in it, his musicianship was beginning to move into the direction collaborative software creation. Music had become links that you pass around on the web since 2005, and SoundCloud began two years later. Wahlforss notes that there’s a big value for instant exchange and the new opportunities that technology provides. At this point, a manager of some kind from the audience prompts him about the legality of the matter – “how is this allowed?” In response, Wahlforss acknowledges that there is a grey area of content on the web, and there are certainly mashups of pieces that haven’t been cleared legally, but these form only a fraction of what SoundCloud contains.

Speedy J notes that it’s rather surprising that the first audience question should gauge the legality of grey use only. Importantly, a lot of the musician’s craft is in abusing technologies, and pushing these to uses not set up for them. Stretching these to their limits does the difference, it makes music interesting. At the beginning of his career, about 10 to 15 years ago, he had to often wrap his head around non-musician systems which meant often trying to enter the head of the instrument producer in order to create music. To this respect, SoundCloud is distinguishable by its musician-friendliness: it’s exploiting its possibilities to the fullest.

As concerns the audience question about the limited publicising capacity of SoundCloud, Wahlforss notes that the platform is not really oriented towards it: for the moment it mostly caters for people who already have a network. “We are before viral spreading yet, there is no “viral button” you can push.” Its use is as a tool with which to solve specific problems. SoundCloud’s business model is rather like that of Flickr – one can buy a pro-account in various forms, from single use to labels for their back catalogues but what mostly constitutes it is free use. A live application might be coming out soon, but at the moment it is not too mobile, computer-based, perhaps soon one can use the iPhone as a field mike…

Muxtape’s Justin Ouellette is next with a history of his application. He traces the beginnings of Muxtape in about 2003 when he hosted a college radio and wanted to have log of the tracks he played online for other people. Further, even before that the concept of sharing and mixtapes was inspired by the late 90s culture of turntablism, DJs and remix culture. Muxtape launched in early 2008 as a site hosting mixes of other people’s music but was shut down in late 2008 by the RIAA. In 2009 it resurfaced again as a platform for bands. Ouellette expands upon this aspect. As well as, importantly, on his preoccupation on keeping it stylistically simple.

Five things about design that dealing with Muxtape has taught him:
1. Focused design is all around.
It is centered around experience and engages the everyday. To this purpose, he devotes some time to what seems like an ode to the Galanz microwave in his NY apartment. It fits the space and the controls are simple and present a good user interface. This fascination with simplicity translates into Muxtape’s outlook.
2. Clean does not equal simple.
3. Event or the context are important for the experience.
For instance, in most car stereos there are too many buttons. Using it to listen to music therefore becomes a kind of exercise in frustration; and when an application frustrates you already before you start listening, there’s something off with the design.
4. Don’t throw away old models.
Muxtape itself is modelled after the analogue cassette tape. There is charm to old forms.
5. Limitations can be deceiving.
Mixtapes are 90 minutes long, which makes it easy to understand its limits. One packs concentrated effort into creating a mix in stead of trying out a few off the cuff like with a digital playlist now. The maximisation of choice, like in huge supermarket, is not necessarily the best; the charm of mixtapes was always about how people collaborate to delimit choice.

In response to audience question of whether Muxtape was singled out as a poster boy for the copyrights crowd, Oubliette notes that there might be something in that because Muxtape always was so self-evidently about music and did not couple it with blogging or other types of uses which would have meshed with easy categories. For the moment, he is concentrating on developing the second generation Muxtape as a promotion site for bands. The first generation Muxtape cannot come back because it seems that the industry is not yet ready for it!

Next, Brian Whitman of the Echo Nest gives “a short personal history of computers listening to music, 1999-2009”. He begins with tracing out his own beginnings as a producer of IDM in the New York scene, and his eventual dissatisfaction with the dynamic of “guys sitting in front of laptops looking so serious”. Software making is something that has made him a better musician. He took a PhD at MIT in information retrieval, in an environment which was looking at music as a file and at audio like a text. Algorithms do not understand music, however, to which respect he is very much concerned about figuring out how to get music into music analysis. To illustrate, or rather to soundbite some of these concerns, he played some automatically generated holiday music based on a statistical reproduction of 1,000 Christmas songs. It’s a strange disjunction; I for one can’t hear the holidayness in the machine’s rendering of the 1,000 such songs. He argues that it is necessary to understand language and audio at the same time.

As for Echo Nest itself, it grew out of the understanding that the best music experience is still manual. Data is actually hard: collaborative filtering (recommends other things that people have clicked on) is a bad recommendation system – it “destroys music”. If only collaborative filtering is the only system of online recommendation, the popular acts will eat the minor ones. Music forums like “I Love Music” capture some of the excitement of people about music, and it forms a much better palette of recommendations.

What the EchoNest does is trying to know everything about music and its listeners by processing data, which they sell to social networks, labels, video games etc. It has produced a range of products such as Fanalytics (a toolset for artists), and maintains an open source remixing community and code base which has produced, among other things, Morecowbell.dj for adding cowbells to songs… In the end, Echo Nest aspires to be something like a Google Earth of music.

Andie Nordgren and Martin Roth of RjDj present the concept of reactive music, and the possibility of having a sound studio in one’s pocket. Music not necessarily linear, they claim: encoding music can be done so that it is different every time. They begin with something of a timeline: in 1998 the sound studio becomes software, in 2008 the sound studio is found in the personal music player. This changes the consumption, distribution and production of music.

To make this audible, they showcase recent project: Kids on DSP’s reactive minimal techno. While demoing it live, Nordgren is talking/blowing/clicking fingers into the iPhone microphone which feeds it back into the music in distorted form. Someone with an iPhone tweets their fascination about this to their Twitter account right in front of me.

The RjDj ecosystem is composed of the reactive music player, music scenes which can be uploaded to the iPhone and composer tools. There is an online recording and scene community where recordings can be uploaded and which contains a search catalog. RjDj is not composition software of itself, neither is it attempting to build this up. It is rather about tapping into a “sweet spot” for a listener, to modifying sound in reaction to the environment that a person is moving in. … explains that they were taking technological concepts from, for instance, sound installations for the creation of a mobile experience. RjDj needs artists construing a base scene that the iPhone user can download to be reactively played. So it is a way of making interesting the value of someone else’s recordings. In audience prompt about the nature of their web presence, Nordgren notes that the site does not contain networking aspects yet but it might be on the roadmap. It is an API for musicians, not developers and the app is just a transport medium.

Next Last.fm’s Matthew Ogle climbs up to talk about the online music ecosystem. He stresses that he does not want to give a historical presentation about what has been happening with the application during the 7 years since it was first inaugurated. Human years are like dog years in the Internet world, so Last.fm – as a big dog – is over 50 about now.

In 2002 what would become the Last.fm of today started as two projects: a personal online radio which learns over time and an audioscrobbler which is a desktop media player plugin that tracks what you listen to. In combining the two, the developers got a feedback loop for crowdsourced music recommendation. 2009 was tough in the ad-supported music space because Last.fm’s music licensing and revenue model was constrained to the US, UK and Germany at the same time as the radio service was truly world wide. Making radio listening by subscription only in non-ad supported countries, caused some controversy and a fair degree of hate mail but the application has been weathering this quite well subsequently.

Music is not a product and not a service, but it exists within a “shifting ecosystem of discovery and use”. Last.fm in this sense is guided music delivery, the “connective tissue for your online musical life”. Ogle notes that it is true that Last.fm must be self-critical at certain points: they must acknowledge their own ecosystem – community of users and influence – and communicate better with it. This last point was engaged better in the case of the inactivity bear sign – a bear pops out when the user has been listening for a long time without doing anything. This actually managed to engage a lot of playful response in the form of people submitting various different versions of the inactivity bear. Currently the team is working on combo radios, multiscrobbles and party radio intersections (although everyone’s average music is not necessarily the best of the people involved) as a way of making the online radio listening a more fluid concept. There is also a project for Xbox with Microsoft.

Hypem or The Hypemachine (Anthony Volodkin and Last.fm’s artistic director Hannah Donovan) talk of the inevitable effects of style on music websites. Hypem aggregates what music people talk, or blog, about. In their talk about style, they start with noting that visual designers often last looked at when it comes to developing new applications. Good art doesn’t match your sofa and there are certain principles than need courting in the creation of a good website: user experience design (user needs), limitations, interaction design (user feel), content and visual design (looks). All of these have to be considered together, they cannot be separately developed and fused together later and their grouping like this should not necessarily reflect the order of importance although they are executed like that quite often.

When it comes to a evaluating a site, start with the “ooh” metric. However, it is hard to impress with style alone when this is not paralleled by content. The applications that take or track your data must create an “atmosphere of trust” with people. To this extent, Volodkin and Donovan flick through examples of sites that overstyle and detract from the point of a music site – that is, the music – to sites that are afraid of styling at all. Also, certain examples tap into a very restricted audience - there is an indie feel to the redness of Last.fm to which extent they’ve added the option of “paint it black”. Donovan argues that MySpace can actually manage to be communicative, connecting the public of a band with the music with the help of customisable aesthetics, for instance the page of the band Beirut. One can style without stylizing, which the route that Last.fm has taken.

The look of a social networking site has to contain visual shorthand for: “this site has social stuff on it”. Design culture can grow pocket-like, geographically specifically on the web, for instance Muxtape and tumblr tap into a certain New York geek look to Japanese sites disliking white space, to the extent that they are striving for being as crowded as possible. In short, sites do not exist in a vacuum, and music is messy so there is no reason why it can’t be presented in messy ways online too. Also, a site has to be conscious of what it wants to be when it grows up: does it want a mainstream audience or is it merely wanting to capture a certain audience. All in all, style does not necessarily mean stylisation.

As a last minute surprise revelation, Henrik Berggren from Citysounds.fm offers the audience the invitation to test the iPhone application to be launched next day. Citysounds.fm adds cities and location – pictures from Flickr – to music – from SoundCloud – so that cities have musical landscapes. The popularity ratings come from Twitter.

By Elena Tiis

Sitting in the plush, red chairs at Filmtheater ‘t Hoogt in Utrecht on the 15th of October, I listened in to the lectures of the “Accelerated Living” conference dealing with the ecologies of time & speed, and media technologies’ capacity to impact contemporary time experience.

The kick off was with John Tomlinson’s (UK; Professor of Cultural Sociology and Director of the Institute for Cultural Analysis, Nottingham) lecture on the culture of speed. Taking a broadly historical approach to what speed is, Tomlinson describes it as a condition of immediacy, a most spectacular transaction between time and space, that Marx describes as the “annihilation of space with time” (Grundrisse). Speed in general is under-researched; it fades from view in considerations of modernity, except for Virilio to an extent. Marinetti in “The Futurist Manifesto” talks about omnipresent speed, about capturing in art countercultural appropriations of speed. Interestingly, Tomlinson characterises Le Corbusier as a mainstream version of speed appropriation because the Swiss talked how a “city made for speed is a city made for success”, imagining how the speedways of the Voisin plan would serve businessnessmen as they swished to and from work. This type of speed was the mechanical, physical speed that could putatively transform the whole world.
Contemporary “fast capitalism” is facilitated by ICTs. The integration of media is a key dynamic for understanding of how this type of fast speed works, how it leads to the general increase of intensity and mobility. High speed speculative activity has the capacity to induce crisis.

To characterise this condition of fast capitalism, Thomlinson introduces the concept of “immediacy”, which is instant/has no lapse and proximate/close. It is a quality of cultural experience, containing a new sense of compulsion in life – that of communicational imperative or demand. To this effect, he treats a Blackberry ad as Derrida’s pharmacon – both a poison and a cure – because it is useful for both work and leisure. It also signals the bleeding of work-related emails outside of work hours, in a Marxist sense this is exploitative because these emails come to constitute unpaid labour, but on the other hand it has the advantage of being flexible. Consumers often start facing the burden of service, for instance they are required to buy their own plain tickets, to check in, to selecting seats etc. all of which demands their time.

The second major concept that Tomlinson introduces is “legerdemain” or lightness of hand. In the first sense, it is the body-work of touchpads and keyboards that seems effortless, something like gesturing as opposed to real work. This lightness has the capacity of bringing with it associations of immediate accessibility. In the second sense, it is a world of illusion and delusion, like a type of magic that conceals and deceives; the interface is hiding the complexity of the whole.

The baseline promise of immediacy is that “stuff arrives”, and in the manner of a cargo cult consumer use attains a casualness and even thoughtlessness. Finally, there are political and environmental costs to all of this because these media do not penetrate everywhere and are not accessible by anyone. There is also a sense that there is no broader narrative for current features of speed, unlike during the machine age when a strong narrative of speed operated on the assumption that there are disjunctions between home/abroad, now/later and desire/fulfilment. Now there is no gap to close so there is narrative of closure. To conclude, Tomlinson argues for the importance of ensuring that distinctions do not collapse and that one must keep in view the sight that there are broad, cultural-political reasons for us doing what we do.

Mike Crang’s (UK; Lecturer in Cultural Geography at Durham University) more geographically inflected take on spatial and temporal reach examines how to combine the fragmentary pattern of speeds and scales on different places. One must not forget extension, or the spatial distanciation of multiple temporalities. New technical possibilities shape world spaces where “bits [are] over borders”, where patterns of flows are connecting across physical boundaries. Crang showcases various examples of mapping these new realms, e.g. NYTE who map global conversation space from the perspective of New York. (http://senseable.mit.edu/nyte/)

He also emphasises the usefulness of drawing out Virilio’s dromo-chrono-politics, which is a way of collapsing distinctions that puts forward the question: what type of governance for ICTs?
GAWC’s world city index maps the propinquity of cities based on the shape of their communications and flight connections, showing that even these new forms build on old connectivities, especially those of colonial origins. One can also talk of the production of centrality, for instance when hub airports become gateways like in the case of the Helsinki – of itself it is not a big airport, but by virtue of its good Far East connectivity it can characterise itself as a major gate. Sekula also notes that we must not forget the sea as transport space: most global steamer routes haven’t changed much in fact, and these are mostly how as Tomlinson would put it “stuff arrives” as if by magic.
Crang devotes some time to the space of chronopolitics. This is to mean the way in which cities “shut down” at different times; time, in fact, is populated by different chronopolitical topographies. Crang proposes a typology of spatial and temporal fixings, which also involve social coercion. Flexible space involves trading on the real spaces of poor countries, for instance when New York time is transposed to Hyderabad where employees must use various locational masking techniques –
as well as working at inconvenient times of day – in order to service their employer.

Next, Carmen Leccardi (IT; Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Milan-Bicocca) takes a broadly philosophical approach to the restructuring of time. Her key terms are detemporalisation and acceleration society, which she compliments by a consideration of the ways in which “young people” bring into being new notions of time by engaging in anti-globalisation movements and new ways of constructing biographies. Taking her cue from Rosa, Leccardi defines acceleration society according to its three motors – economic (profit driven, neoliberal), cultural (need for experiences) and structural (rhythms of social change). Aside from this, it encompasses three levels: technological, political meaning and the role of social change, what she conceives of as the different meanings of institutions (which could constitute a point of contention because one might want to keep an analytical distance from the meaning of social change and institutional realities). Rosa’s “acceleration society” traces how technological acceleration means that time is growing in scarcity which manifests as a contradiction shaping our lives. Thus, how can we build civic space?

Leccardi spends time on the reconsideration of the idea of the future. Lübbe’s monster term of “Gegenwartsschrumpfung” – the contraction of the present – means that the present is not available for use and one must rely on the future for conceptual package. The building of identities in this interface is challenging, as it is the situation in question and not the over-all life-plan that matters in the end. Again, there might be some rigidity in Leccardi’s notion of these two; she seems to think of them in terms of their reflection in institutions and as their own separate spheres which tend not to interact.

Her guiding term “detemporalisation” means that time loses the character of being a dimension of experience, that the sense of duration is reshaped and operates in relation to the future. The unpredictability of the future is making life-plans irrelevant, therefore the “young people” of today are rather learning to act flexibly and contingently. She enlists two examples of this. First, antiglobalisation movements are resisting the violence of time/space commodification, think in terms of values and re-establish the connection between cause and effect in what is happening. The second feature are biographical constructions, which are concerned with mediating unpredictability and developing responses that neutralise fears of the future. I think that there might be more flexible ways of considering how notions of time are changing than simply from institutionalised to a non-life-plan. Be that as it may, Leccardi rounds up the first session of general introductions to the notions of speed from the perspectives of different academic disciplines.

After lunch, there is a change of moderation as well as an inexplicable change in the order of the talks. Stamatia Portanova speaks before Steve Goodman, who, due to the moderator’s confusion about the timeframes had his lecture cut tantalisingly short. This session begins to showcase talks of more specific inflection – as concerns choreography, music and visual perception.

Stamatia Portanova’s (IT; PhD in Digital Cultures at East London University) talk proposes a redefinition of the digital age as a neo-Baroque age. Her dense, dextrous presentation dealt with Bifo’s manifesto for a postfuturist age (http://eipcp.net/n/1234779255?lid=1234779848). Using futurist notions of time and movement as points of departure, she investigates more corporate conceptions of rhythm and topography. Movement is a sensation not a perception. Sensation is a vibratory wave crossing through bodies. As the body becomes a framer of spatial information in media interface, the liberation of the body is a biophilosophy that turns towards the affect, or embodied aesthetics. Intensity is understood as Deleuzian desire; an energy that is in itself and not for something. Aesthetic style with its technological present is controlling the body possible and creating a different ontology: Deleuzian desire and ICTs interfacing in the creation of energy as information. The digital is an idea, a concept before becoming reality. In this it is attuned to the Baroque in its striving for dissection, for a microscopic notion particles and the technological idea of the cut. Portanova’s contention is that we can find an openness in technology that is not only dependent on the imitation of life. Chronological and metric notions of time can allow us to imagine an infinite succession of time that is alive.

Steve Goodman’s (UK; teaches Sonic Cultures at East London University) talk was badly interrupted, so the promised exposition of the concept of speed tribes and the development of music cultures did not manifest. Even so, his brief talk was beautifully evocative of the forthcoming book “Sonic Warfare” (2009). Like Portanova, he begins by departing from Bifo’s provocation; how is it possible that futurism could become passé? He proposes a consideration sonic ecology, the competing corporate and grassroots initiatives in contemporary sonic culture. By contrasting futurism with afrofuturism, he is tracing the things that could be retained of futurism. Afrofuturism presents more complex ideas of speed than futurism’s god of speed. The sonic warfare concept is evoking the art of war in the art of noise. Afrofuturism is a colonised culture’s way of striking back through sound. As expounded by Kodwo Eshun in his “More Brilliant Than The Sun” (1997), it is a nexus of black musical expression, the city and the cybernetic in electronic music. Eshun’s concept of the future rhythm machine evokes the sensual mathematics of music as non-conscious counting. Afrofuturism is rewiring alienated experience through urban machine musics, presenting a landscape that extends into possibility space. Simon Reynolds’ description of the dystopic metropolis of warrior clans and robber corporations creating a city as a warzone and ecologies of dread in the 90s wanted to examine the intersection of underdevelopment, technology and race in the city, thus attains a different type of futurity. In contrast to Marinetti’s and Russolo’s unilinear notion of history with its white metallicist Übermensch, Eshun’s afrofuturism is polyrhythmnic, bred from cyclical discontinuity, aligning the future paradoxically. In the intersection of roots and futurism, memories are those of the future – the future scifi alien abduction actually happened in the past when black people were subjected to slavery! According to this, the sonic avant-garde of high modernism were actually afraid of rhythm. At this point, Goodman is forces to “skip about 20 pages” and concludes that in view of corporate co-option of musics, afrofuturism is not necessarily scifi but has proliferated as something that – aside from selling record – has the capability of affectively mobilise people.

Dirk de Bruyn’s (NL/AU; Senior Lecturer in Animation and Digital Culture at Deakin University, Melbourne) lecture dealt with the “after-image as a traumatic event” by using Prensky’s distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants as a way of tracing out inherencies in the way that people tend to interact with the medium and Brewin’s notions of VAM (verbally accessible memory) which deals with the context and SAM (situationally accessible memory) which deals with perception. These always intermix; the categories are not useful so rigidly. Flusser’s notion that “we all are immigrants now” repositions the migrant experience as that of globalisation itself. This has impact on our relation to technical literacy: we remain illiterate if not engaging in criticism of technical images. The issue is about how to critique technologically mediated images on their own terms, by the realignment of senses as in the case of the perceptual apparatus adjusting and sometimes fooling the viewer.

The final session could be said to attain to a type of microspecificity, first in relation to maps in video games such as Civilisation and Charlie Gere’s talk which managed not to consider nothing related to digital media, or the 21st century for that matter. This was followed by a presentation of two artworks by two British artists operating in the ambiguous interface between visual art and online media.

Sybille Lammes (NL; Assistant Professor of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University) spoke of gameplay and digital ludic cartographies. In particular, she explored the changeable status of minimaps in gameplay with recourse to De Certeau’s and Latour’s concepts. Is there something at stake in what games do to analogue maps? De Certeau’s notion of spatial stories – of touring – contrasts with the rigidity of mapping especially after the Renaissance period. In the middle age, the two senses were fuse: a map would show a place as well as an “experience” or a perception of it. Such touring traces are performative iterations. In games, minimaps are looked at and altered by the player as a way of exploring vast spaces. Further, Latour’s “immutable mobiles” concept provides a way of describing the image as technology: it can be moved around but still depends on inscription. The player is a mediator, mutating the map by tactically interacting with space but also constantly erasing earlier versions, or inscriptions.

Charlier Gere (UK; teaches New Media Research at the Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University), for the whole of his lecture on ecology and messianic time, did not address much of anything to do with new media. In stead, his concern was to trace out Ruskin’s complex relationship with environmental issues to the point of the latter’s positive theophany of nature. In his soi-disant “vicar mode”, Gere was continuously on the verge of getting utterly distracted by long quotes from Ruskin peppered by autobiographical jabs at the author’s many odditities and failings. This domain-bridging presentation dealt with an eschatological mode of experiencing nature, through Ruskin’s description of the “messianic/apocalyptic” storm cloud of the 19th century. Via references to Derrida’s spectrality, or the reproducible virtuality of technology, to Agamben’s political ecology of messianic time in reference to Pauline notions of it, he ends up with images of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima (the flash of the bomb took “photos”) to Tsernobyl’s radioactive fallout, arguing that invisible radiation is the storm cloud of the 20th century; its messianic narrative. At the end of this complex, flighty and quoty exposition I was left wondering where it is that we are then at the beginning of the 21st century – there are still about 90 years to think up/bring about the apocalyptic storm cloud of digital media and environmental depletion.

To conclude the day, artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead (UK) showcased two pieces of their work which deal with data by attempting to represent its two facets: the procuring information and the contrast between live and dead data. The exploration of the materiality of their material is at the crux of their endeavours.

* Beacon takes a live stream from search engines, functioning as a “useless clock”, portrait and a landscape whilst also managing to reveal a particular type of intimacy in people dealing with a search engine.

* A Short Film About War (part of Desktop Documentaries) is a collation of Flickr images and log texts accompanied by blog pieces spoken out loud. The film scrutinises the browsing experience and mediatic war through the net (web 2.0), especially by the use of Collective Commons images. The act of editorial becomes a sort of surrogate browsing experience for this collation of multiple strands of images and stories of war.

Open Video Conference – June 19 & 20 2009 NYC

A conference report by Teague Schneiter

On June 19th and 20th 2009 the newly formed Open Video Alliance held their inaugural gathering, the Open Video Conference at NYU Law School in New York City. The OVA, a collective venture between an ad-hoc group of organizations dedicated to fostering the growth of open video, including the Yale Information Society Project at Yale Law School, Kaltura (the developers of the world’s first full open source online video platform), the Participatory Culture Foundation (creators of the open source Miro internet video player), and iCommons, managed to pull off an impressively well-organized first event. The conference was organized at a pivotal moment for open video, a moment when the tools for creating and disseminating video online are now prolific, a moment where 60% of the world’s population now possesses a mobile phone, where sites that YouTube have created an entire movement of user-generated content, and where remix culture is becoming a new major mode of cultural expression. With the concept of open video comes the need for beginning to find answers to the can of worms of questions that emerge with these fundamental changes in media consumption.

As one of the first real attempts at beginning the dialogue between those concerned with open video—technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, artists, filmmakers, video creators, remixers, activists, archivists, as well as online video audiences—the organizers most certainly achieved their goal in bringing “energy, excitement, and enthusiasm to this important conversation.” Most impressive to see was that the framing of this conversation far surpassed a techy idea swap about open source and open codecs, and ventured into virgin territory that sought to investigate the possibilities for open video to a wide variety of groups, all working towards the goals of increasing transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization. Due to its wide emphasis on open video’s implications on software, politics, journalism, art, education, industry, business, technology, culture, communication, freedom, and democracy, it attracted interested and concerned people from every field, showing the almost infinite ways that people are pushing the boundaries of online video technology. The schedule was jam-packed full of interesting talks, each day with an auditorium and two seminar rooms with simultaneous lectures and panels. The over 800 participants illustrate that open video has a growing and now undeniable importance in today’s networked media environment.

Elizabeth Stark of Yale ISP/iCommons gave the welcome in which she discussed open video’s potential for free expression, participation on the internet, and the overall power of video to increase democracy and free speech. She used the example of how video is being used by citizens in Iran to exposes injustices surrounding the elections, to point to open video’s participatory and decentralized qualities. According to Stark, these qualities allow it to become one of the most effective tools of communication. Shay David of Kaltura gave a few opening remarks as well, mentioning how the concept of open video is quite complex, as it is made up of technology, licensing and content, as well as the combination of all three.

Next up was Yochai Benkler who’s Keynote was about the power of openness in a networked society to increase innovation and democracy. According to Benkler, openness began within software design and is now moving into rich and immersive space of video. He spoke about the implications of open video being radically decentralized, the change in open video offering free speech, justice, democracy, and overall movement from bottom up. He noted that the critical point is not necessarily market or non-market, illegal or legal, mainstream or fringe, but really the possibility of anyone to be affected, be creative, intervene and innovate. This is because human capabilities are widely distributed in the population, and the possibilities of free sharing and the information economy enable us to learn more and innovate faster, creating a more participatory culture, and a democratic public sphere. He discussed the concept of ‘distributed innovation’; the idea that the smartest and most creative people are never concentrated in the same institutions, but instead are dispersed throughout society. His last and most interesting thought was how we can build a platform to connect these distributed individuals to make best use out of their potential collaboration, and he noted that so far the Commons was the closest we have come.

The next speaker I caught was Head of School of Media Arts of the University of New South Wales Ross Harley. His talk, entitled ‘From Open Circuits to Open Video’, tried to illustrate how the current moves toward participatory culture are echoed in the history of video art in the 1960s and 1970s, noting that video art has always been concerned with establishing alternative networks of communication based on ‘open circuits’ and ‘participation TV’. He called distribution the Achilles heel of video art works, because an artwork the biggest question that arises is: “How do we get it out there?” Hartley encouraged the creation of a distributed network archive of video art that would make use of the potential of web-based networks for sharing, participation and openness. He based his idea on the concept of open archives and open source codecs. He discussed the FLOSS (which stands for ‘free/libre/open source software’) ethos, as an example of a project, which gives more freedom in allowing users to aggregate, browse and distribute video. Harley envisioned the development of a global user generated video network which would allow for the preservation, distribution and contextualization of video art in a recombinatory fashion, and thus the creation of multiple instead of monolithic histories and as well as new works of art.

The next event I attended was a Metadata roundtable called ‘Time-based Metadata’ which was a discussion of various implementations of time-based metadata by current practioners. Session leader Devon Copley, a Fellow at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University, introduced the presenters. One of the highlights was the interesting project of Yovisto, an open source video search engine specializing on academic content such as lecture and conference recordings, presented by Joerg Waitelonis. Yovisto seeks to the problems of accessibility and usability of long talking-head videos with lots f academic content that is difficult to navigate because of their lack of metadata. Though they are valuable academic resources, these types of recordings do not have tables of contents or keywords to allow researchers or students to find the information they require. Yovisto uses automatic (speech recognition, object detection, i.e. face, as well as intelligent character recognition, which recognizes a change in layout) and manual analysis of their materials to identify important text onscreen, as well as scene breaks, etc. Another highlight was Abram Stern of the University of California Santa Cruz’s Metavid project, a community driven archive of legislative video from both houses of the U.S. Congress that has been built from day one as a free open source framework. Taking video that was previously ‘unwatchable’ (due to its length and lack of metadata), they have created an archive that gathers its metadata from outside sources and user contributions to make the videos searchable by speaker name, spoken text, date, etc.

After lunch was the Working Group “Independent Video Platforms in ‘09’ where representatives from a variety of independent video organizations that engage with human rights, environmental concerns, social justice, were invited to assess the effectiveness of their niche roles to use open video to affect change in a YouTube saturated media environment. Discussion leader And Lowenthal from Engage Media, a Australian online video sharing site focused on social justice and environmental issues in the Asia-Pacific, opened the floor giving a quick run down of his organization, bringing up the difficulty in building indie media platforms that will effectively influence the mainstream in a media environment where the majority of activists are now using YouTube for dissemination of their content. Sameer Padania, Manager of The Hub, a online video interface for the human rights archive WITNESS, spoke about some of their biggest challenges: constantly adjusting to the online landscape which has shifted (and will continue to shift) dramatically, and changes such as the influx of mobile technologies/video. He prioritized the need to develop an independent power base online that makes use of interactive power in a different way than what has come before, and also trying to influence the majors (such as companies like YouTube) to be more human rights sensitive.

The next session I attended was moderated by Sameer Padania and was called ‘Human Rights and Indigenous Media: Dilemmas, Challenges and Opportunities.’ Padania gave an introduction about where open video meets ethical concerns that are involved with human rights more broadly, and Indigenous rights specifically. He brought up the question of whether a culture of openness can be supported when it comes to concerns of consent, dignity, representation, and security for Indigenous communities. Human rights lawyer Leah Shaver, affiliated with the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, spoke about video is a powerful tool, and open video as an even more powerful tool, for promoting human rights. She used a powerful example of a dissatisfied public in Iran demanding justice. As ordinary citizens make powerful and affected videos of human rights violations, the ability to add subtitles to videos would have been a major stumbling block in the past. Recently, however the Huffington Post was able to pass on the subtitling request to their readers and 100,000 people received subtitling request instantly. This kind of networking is a powerful tool for advocacy. She closed with statements about how open video enables broader participation and inclusion, and creates a culture that everyone can access.

Next, Program Director for WITNESS Sam Gregory gave a talk that was synched with a WITNESS compilation of videos and stills. He started by asking, how does open video culture relate to human rights? How can we share with open video community and broader community the ethical frameworks that are involved in bringing this kind of material into the realm of participation? The last speaker was NYU’s own Faye Ginsburg, who spoke about the movement of media technologies into indigenous communities, and the effectiveness of video for visibility; even the use of camera by Indigenous groups as protection. However, she also acknowledged the danger of open video when it comes to cultural protocols that vary per Indigenous community, i.e. when certain information that should not be shared freely with other non-initiated members of the community, or with outsiders. She gave an anecdote about how for Indigenous communities representation can have a very different and extremely serious meaning: last year, Second Life in collaboration with Telstra (the major telephone company in Australia) created a virtual Uluru (called ‘Ayer’s Rock’ in the west) complete with advertising billboards erected in front of this sacred place, parts of it unable to be seen by non-initiated members of the Indigenous community. She closed with the idea that human rights discourse breaks down at a point when dealing with ethical considerations such as these, and noted that the first way to deal with these concerns is to begin engaging in conversations with people about what is ethically acceptable and what is not.

The last event of the first day was a discussion by David Evan Harris about the Global Lives Project, a participatory video library of human life experience, which began as ten video pieces, each 24-hrs long filming the lives of ten people from ten countries. However, since the beginning of the project, it has expanded to include free and open to contributions from the public. Inspired by Harris’ feeling that Americans did not know enough about international peoples, Global Lives affords viewers the chance to be situated in other people’s realities. That evening was the effervescent After Party down the street at (Le) Poisson Rouge with a stellar live video remix by Eclectic Method and Red Foxx and Bloodsugar, and lots of dancing!

Saturday morning kicked off with a lively and extremely sharp Keynote by Jonathan Zittrain, Professor at Harvard Law and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society (who replaced Clay Shirky which for reasons unannounced could not attend), based on his book The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. Starting off with an introduction about the power of crowds, specifically the ability for a community to decide what is right without outside supervision, exemplified by the Wikipedia trend, Zittrain went on to discuss the potentially negative side of for-profit enterprise making use of user participation on the web. As an example of this, he discussed the trend of internet companies getting humans to do small amounts of labor for a nominal fee, what he calls ‘captcha sweat shops’, such as LiveOps and Mechanicalturk.

Directly after Zittrain in the auditorium, was a talk entitled ‘Industry Perspectives’, in which Zittrain moderated a group of industry experts on the future of online video, the balancing act between open and proprietary technologies, and importance of creating innovative infrastructures to support open video. Managers and CEOs from YouTube, blip.tv, Boxee, and Flash joined to discuss their experiences and frustrations with the need for to build the infrastructure to support open video from the ground up, since it just simply does not exist yet.

After this short session was Keynote by Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing TV, and daily internet video program that was launched in 2007, just after the economic downturn began, showcasing “weird, eclectic material”. Jardin made the interesting point that media companies playing to the center are not surviving, for example Stage9 Digital, Disney’s new production company closed its doors in March 2009. How and why then are independent web video startups like Boing Boing surviving? She says the answer lies in their use of Creative Commons content, and their encouragement of remixing and reusing.

One of the day’s highlights was the ‘Audiovisual Archives Birds of a Feather’ talk, which was lead by Amsterdam’s own Johan Oomen and Maarten Brinkerink, of the RD department of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. This session focused on what audiovisual archives are doing to offer parts of their collections online in order to encourage creative use of their content. Oomen gave the introduction, where he situated the discussion in terms of audiovisual archives being currently engaged in large-scale digitization due to the deterioration of the physical state of analogue carriers. He noted that a key mission for memory institutions is to make the material available online to large audience. In an environment where video viewing has shifted to the internet, libraries, archives and museums are changing their architectures to have more material freely available online. He asked a few key questions to the presenters, how successful will the ‘network archive’ be? Considering the moral obligation of memory institutions to provide open access, will Creative Commons prove to be a suitable model for heritage content? What are incentives for archives to adopt these models? How can business models coincide with more open models?

Though the presenters did not directly answer all the questions at hand, Moeed Ahmad of Al Jeezera spoke about their Creative Commons Repository that has been in the works since 2005. As a traditional broadcaster, Al Jezeera is beginning to embrace Creative Commons by releasing ten hours of broadcast quality footage under CC license. He noted that so far the perks or doing this have been in improving reputation, distribution, financial gain, community empowerment, respect for their audience, and the chances that their competitors will do the same. Maarten Brinkerink discussed the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision’s OpenImages project, which is an open media platform for online access to audiovisual archive material available for creative reuse. The platform is based on open source and CC license and holds some 3,000 items from their own collection (for which they hold the copyright) in ‘browse quality.’ Another interesting panelist was, Sara Chapman, executive director of Media Burn, who spoke about the impossibility for her small archive to keep up with the cutting edge in online video, because of funding restraints. She also pointed out that not many archives have yet actually put a large percentage of their material online. To work within the budgetary constraints, Chapman provides access to her content via other platforms that people are already familiar with such as YouTube, archive.org, Miro, etc. She made the point that if it weren’t for existing and widely used platforms such as YouTube, less people would have access to their archival material.

Another interesting talk was between Lauren Cornell, Executive Director of Rhizome, and Artist and Professor at Brown University Mark Tribe on ‘Emerging Video Art’. Cornell began with a discussion of openness, use and reuse of media as essential to history of film, new media and electronic art. She discussed the way artists such as Pixel Bleed, Paul Slocum, and Oliver Laric are creating new models of collaboration; where it becomes difficult to distinguish where the artwork itself begins and ends. She continued with a discussion of how Web 2.0 connects directly to the history of media art. In fact, she sees YouTube as the realization of the aspirations of early media artists such as Nam June Paik, who privileged open video and access. Tribe followed up with a discussion of his own work, and also a project called ‘One for the Commons’ that makes artists’ work available on Wikipedia. He noted that “artists need to set good precedence in regards to fair use by not backing down.”

Due to some slight changes in the conference schedule, OVA announced a surprise guest as a close the conference. The guest was introduced by Alan Toner (director of Steal this Film) who began with telling the story of how Pirate Bay took Sweden by political storm. In 2006 the organization’s headquarters was raided, and mass demonstrations ensued, which ended up in the formation of The Pirate Party, now with over 50,000 members and having just won 75% of the vote. Toner introduced one of Pirate Bay’s founders Peter Sunder – live from Marbo Sweden via Skype. An inspiring interview with Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin ensued, where Sunder showed his staunch beliefs that file sharing is a human right. He held that the laws should allow Pirate Bay because it violates so many other laws not to, such as: freedom of speech, privacy, and the free and open exchanging cultural ideas. Sunde made the prediction that the entertainment industry will have to compromise in a few years, as the environment media consumption is changing so rapidly, they will soon have no choice.

The conference was formally wrapped-up by a member of the Mozilla Foundation who noted the ‘electricity created’ when people begin discussing an issue as interesting as open video. It is growing fast and far. The online environment that we are trying to come to grips with now will be totally different world in five to ten years. He mentioned three areas in which we should push ourselves to create a better open video environment: 1) to make the right technology (choices), (2) to get open video to the mainstream, and (2) to “make great stuff that shows what open video can do”! In the spirit of opening up the conversation, Conference Producer Dean Jansen then announced a video-making contest (done in collaboration with Mozilla) to produce videos about the future of online video. The organizers also announced an informal ‘Hack Day’ for the following day where coders, software designers, technologists, video makers, policy makers, and the general public could come to collaborate and “cross-pollinate.”

The concepts of openness, sharing and collaboration were deeply woven not only into the theme, but the feeling of this unforgettable event.

Proudly we present the Winter Camp report; From Weak Ties to Organized Networks - Ideas, reports and Critiques.

about the publication: In March 2009 the Institute of Network Cultures brought 12 networks to Amsterdam for a week of getting things done. Aim of Winter Camp was to connect the virtual with the real in order to find out how distributed social networks can collaborate more effectively. The more people start working together online, the more urgent it becomes to develop sustainable network models. Do we just go online to gather ‘friends’ or do we get organized and utilize these tools to provoke real change in how we work together? How do networks deal with difference, decision making and economic issues? Together with 28 online interviews, this report provides a comprehensive overview of the general issues that the participating networks dealt with during Winter Camp.

colophon: Editor: Geert Lovink. Editorial Assistance: Margreet Riphagen. Copy editing: Marije van Eck. Design: Michael Schekyr www.schenkyr.com. Printing: Raamwerken Printing & Design B.V. Illustrations: Het Harde Potlood. Photos: Anne Helmond and others. Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam. ISBN: 978-90-78146-08-7.

Order a free copy by filling out this form.

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The whole project is now documented together with the videos and the photostream. Download here the pdf.

Report by Shirley Niemans

On February 18th, I attended the workshop ‘Abstract Images in Art and Science’ at Utrecht University, organized by dr. Ann-Sophie Lehmann, prof. dr. Paul Ziche, and Pim Verlaek as a cooperation between the Descartes Centre and the Visualisations Group of the Centre for Humanities. The Visualisations Group explores interdisciplinary approaches to the study of images and visual culture, and aims to connect researchers whose work is related to visual culture and the intersections between art and science.

The main goal of the workshop was to create dialogue between different scientific cultures that deal with the issue of abstraction. To this end the scientific background of the contributors ranged widely, from art history to the history of science, from computer science to logics, and from philosophy to media studies. Throughout the workshop, it would become clear that each scientific field not only came with a specific take on abstraction, but with a specific approach to bringing the point across. Dialogue in this sense was certainly facilitated; translation of concepts was often needed and added to a more concrete outcome for an interdisciplinary audience of students and professors.

The main problems that are encountered when studying the history of scientific images were addressed in the first lecture by prof. dr. Christoph Lüthy (dept. of philosophy, Radboud University Nijmegen). In the presentation “Words, Lines, Diagrams, Images: Towards a History of Scientific Imagery” he states that today’s science is very pictorial, judging by the new kinds of imagery found in contemporary science glossies. But what is the status of these images? Read the rest of this entry »

Report by Marije van Eck

The Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) in Rotterdam teamed up with International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) and Mediafonds to host the lecture ‘The Big Picture’,  on January 29^th 2009 at NAi. Three speakers focused on the interaction between architecture and film or video technologies in three presentations. The link between architecture and film might seem farfetched, but during the introduction by NAi director Ole Bouman and IFFR curator Edwin Carels, it became clear that they have become more closely linked in postmodernistic architecture, because architecture is currently more about storytelling than about just designing a building to live or work in. An architectural design now focuses on the full visitor’s experience of working and living. Bouman mentioned also, however, that architectural narrative isn’t new, because there is even animation to be seen in light shining through stained glass cathedral windows: architectural cinematography from the Middle Ages.

Shivers down your spine

It were these medieval cathedrals that formed the starting point for Alison Griffith’s lecture on the immersive view. Griffith is professor at Baruch College at the City University of New York and author of the book ‘Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View’. Her lecture focused on the history of the immersive experience.  From the upward gaze in a medieval cathedral to the omnipresent visual experience of the 19^th century panoramas (such as the Panorama Mesdag in the Hague) to the powerful IMAX movie, Griffith draws parallels between architecture and the experiences of awe, the ‘wow’ factor, and the hovering between reality and fiction that these buildings or installations induce in their visitors.

While cathedrals were built in a way that center the viewer firmly onto the ground, panoramas and IMAX movies put the viewer right in the middle of the visual scene. And although cathedral paintings and ornaments and panorama paintings are still images, as apposed to IMAX which makes use of impressive, gigantic moving image technologies, the response in the viewer is the same: the shivers down the spine. Griffiths mentions that there are instances recorded of panorama visitors fainting or falling ill with motion sickness because they were so overwhelmed by the images around them. It is the size and design of the building hosting the visual images that create the immersive experience. From the cathedral to high tech movie installations, they give us the opportunity to be elsewhere, without going anywhere.

Chasing the audience

While these visual experiences still demand the spectator to travel to them, William Boddy, also professor at Baruch College at the City University of New York, focused in his lecture more on the video technologies that are brought to the viewer.  With the rise of mobile video, and people getting used to watching films on a 2-inch screen, people are less prone to visit the traditional movie theatre, and therefore traditional businesses in the film theatre industry have started seeking income elsewhere. 

Boddy gave examples of various applications of mobile video technologies, usually combined with advertizing. He mentioned CBS Outernet, a company that hosts specialized television channels throughout the United States, such as Autonet, a channel that is broadcast at five thousand locations and reaches 2.5 million viewers.  More products have been introduced over the past years, such as shopping trolley touch screens with personalized shopping lists and response to voice input queries, and the Adwalker, a fully interactive digital bodypack, with games and advertisements, worn by females, because women are less threatening when approaching potential customers. Whether these applications could be the success their manufacturers anticipate remains to be seen. A most impressive application of bringing the commercial visual experience to the customer, is the holosonic billboard. It is a giant advertisement that can speak to people using an isolated sound beam targeting a specific area near the billboard. All these applications of mobile media redesign urban space, and make us wonder whether the abundance of media exposure will still allow for the existence of traditional media and film theatres in the future.

A new perspective

Michael Naimark, research associate professor at the University of Southern California, has focused in various research projects on how our image of the world is represented through photo and video technologies.  If we all took a photo of the scene at the same time, our interpretations of the photographs would be more or less the same. Yet there are very many angles, view points and external factors which make each photograph unique. 

Representation of the world exists through different media. Maps and models, photos and geotags (as used in Flickr), and panoramas and movie maps are just a few. Applications like Google Earth try to create an objective image of the world. Using people’s input in generating street views and 3D models -  but banning any artifacts that leave historical or personal traces - the images in Google Earth seem strangely desolated. Cars can be seen, the people inside are invisible. Several projects Naimark and his colleagues have collaborated in try to reverse this development, by leaving footprints behind in Google Earth, or by fitting dozens of (amateur) photographs taken from different angles, at different times, into a 3D panoramic picture of a certain landmark. This makes it a most subjective but at the same time generic image of the landmark in question.  By leaving ourselves out of the pictures and videos, we try to preserve an objective representation of the world, but at the same time we are distorting reality. Examples of Naimark’s work can be found at www.naimark.net.

From three different perspectives, the lectures focused on the architecture of the world through sound and vision. Numerous factors play a role in how we perceive the world around us, and what we do to escape from it. ‘The Big Picture’ was an enlightening view into these processes. 

part 1

Session 2: Search Engines and Power

Theo Röhle – Dissecting the Gatekeepers

Theo Röhle is a PhD candidate in media culture at Hamburg University. His dissertation seeks to establish Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and Foucauldian concepts of power within search engine research.

Where does the power of search engines exist? One position of power is established in everyday discourse through images of anxiety and fear. Giving power a face however, tends to obscure the complex relations underlying it. As ANT suggests, there is no fixed source of power, just a temporary stabilization of a network.

Defining the actors in the power network, Röhle locates the search engine as intermediary between user and transparency, and between webmaster and attention. As Google enters the picture, it diverts all actions through its own network. From an ANT perspective, this makes it the obligatory passage point for both user and webmaster.

Read the rest of this entry »

This Saturday, November 8, I had the pleasure of attending the well organized World-Information Institute conference Deep Search: The Digital Future of Finding Out in Vienna, Austria. With Deep Search, conference editors Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder set out to address the social and cultural dimension as well as the information politics and societal implications of search. An impressive line-up of eight speakers, divided over the sessions ‘Search Engines and Civil Liberties’, ‘Search Engines and Power’ and ‘Making Things Visible’, promised to make it an information-dense and interesting day.

As this will be a rather full report, I will post it in two parts. Be sure to keep an eye on the conference website, as the organizers promise to make a full video archive of the conference speeches available soon.

Keynotes

Paul Duguid - The World According to Grep: Both Sides of the Search Revolution

After a timely start and a word of welcome, Konrad Becker introduced the first speaker of the event: Paul Duguid, former consultant at Xerox PARC (1989-2001) and author of The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press, 2000). Currently, Duguid teaches History of Information and Quality of Information at the University of California in Berkeley.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Sabine Niederer

I just got back from a visit to Ankara, Turkey, where I participated in Video Vortex 3, a follow-up on the first two Video Vortex events, which took place in Brussels and Amsterdam. This event was organized by the Bilkent University in Ankara, Department of Communication and Design. Soon, the recordings of the presentations will be made available as video and audio files. My colleague Shirley visited the University last April, to meet up with the conference organizers to discuss the preparations for this event and see the venue. Her impressions can be read here.
It was a fruitful and well-organized event, and apart from my report, which I will post on this blog in several parts, you can find pictures of the Ankara conference and side events in the Video Vortex Flickr group. If you want to order a free copy of the Video Vortex reader, please visit the reader page.

///Thursday, October 9
Thursday there had been a workshop by Markus Schaal on Open Collaborative Mapping, in relation to the One Laptop per Child project and hardware. After that, organizer Andreas Treske and artist Aras Özgün presented screenings. I arrived at an empty Ankara airport on Thursday evening, and a student of Bilkent University was so kind to pick me up and take me to the restaurant where the organizers and speakers had gathered to enjoy lovely food and live music. The students had advised me to spend the Friday morning on a field trip to the Atatürk Museum and Mausoleum, and I decided to go there the next morning.

The Atatürk museum and mausoleum

///Friday, October 10
On Friday Morning, video blogger Michael Verdi gave the students a video blogging boot camp, teaching them all the skills and ways to set up a blog, shoot videos, editing and compressing the video to put it on the Web.

Vera Tollmann, Dan Oki and I spent our morning at the Atatürk museum and mausoleum, before we headed off to the University building. Packed with bags full of Video Vortex readers and Network Notebooks of course, to distribute at the venue.

After a warm word of welcome by Andreas Treske, we started the first session, which I moderated. The topic of this opening session was Political Economy. It started with the pointing out of the political economies that were discussed on the previous Video Vortex events, such as the political economy of YouTube, of distributing video online, of participatory culture, etc. Then we shifted to this session, in which the political economies to be discussed were that of cultural production (by Aras Özgün), that of love and other technologies (by Dominic Pettman), and the political economy of the broadcasted neoliberal self (Kylie Jarrett).

The first speaker was Kylie Jarrett, who works as a lecturer in Multimedia at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, and who very recently started researching audio-only content on the web (podcasting, pro-am). I’d like to recommend her article titled 'Interactivity is Evil! A Critical Investigation of Web 2.0,' which was published in First Monday in March 2008. In this article, she refutes the opposition between interactivity and discipline, but considers interactivity as a disciplining technology within the neoliberal political economy.

Her talk explored the implications of Web 2.0 around the agency and power of the user. She mentioned the double promise of YouTube, encapsulated in their slogan „Broadcast Yourself“, meaning the demand to broadcast your Self, and at the same time calling for DIY broadcast (it) yourself. (She ignored the trademark symbol for this talk). Jarrett urged the researchers in the audience to interrogate the state of agency of the user related to digital media, as an important focus for thinking about new technologies.
Jarett argued that identity plays a prominent role on YouTube, for not only do people
Broadcast themselves in performative or intimate ways, they also identify with the videos they embed on their MySpace page or blogs. You are what you embed.

Video Conference with Kylie Jarrett.

Furthermore, she elaborated on audio only files and how they could be used to go beyond the idea of popular (human interest) talk shows (like Oprah and Dr Phil), where the guest tells a private and personal story, and the talk show host translates this into a generalized point. On the Web, where the user can tell private stories without that reformulation or generalization, this agency shifts to the user itself, and the legitimization would happen through listeners, maybe. Or experts. I wonder if this would also be applicable to an image-only platform like Flickr. Does this also come with more agency, for you can compile the albums yourself and choose what’s on your page, instead of it being mixed up with all the other images made by others within the interface (when not searching)? And isn’t pirate radio a good precedent for what Jarrett describes when she talks about podcasting as a medium without the constraints of a set or centralized organizing principle?

Aras Özgün is a media artist from Ankara who is currently teaching at the New School in New York. He is currently working on his PhD dissertation on the political economy of contemporary cultural production, and has published widely on media, arts, culture and politics. He started his talk with an anecdote of him finding his own video work on YouTube. Not amused, he contacted the user who has uploaded the work to confront him with the copyright infringement and asked him to remove the video from YouTube. The person replied that of course he did not have the copyrights and thus the right to publish it, but that he had put it online because he liked it so much, and wanted to share it. He also thought that the compression of the work was not a bad thing at all, and the quality of a video on YouTube was actually quite good.

Özgün pointed out that he discourse around Web 2.0 has so far been dominated by language from management and economics. And YouTube is of course first and foremost a private channel, not a social platform but a company that (successfully) aims to make profit. Özgün regards the Internet as Haussmannized, referring to the famous Architect Haussmann, who transformed Paris by building Avenues cutting through the entire city. The Internet has YouTube as one of its major avenues.
So where Kylie Jarrett noted that on YouTube people share to show who they are, Aras Özgün argued that with YouTube people share to make things public, but that by sharing it actually becomes privatized.

The final speaker of this first panel was Dominic Pettmann, an Australian theorist based in New York, who has published three books in which he theorizes the libidinal economy of media, building on philosophy and media theory. His most recent book publication came out two years ago and is titled 'Love and Other Technologies: Refitting Eros for the Information Age.' Pettmann showed a fascinating world of virtual lovers, that are texted by their adult subscribers, like Tamagotchis are fed by children to keep them alive. The Asian industry around these dating sims is thriving, and causes a divide between the ones playing with or sustaining relationships with these virtual non-human lovers, and the ones not playing, who often find this behavior quite pathetic.

Dominic Pettmann and an example of a strikingly realistic sim girl

Of course there are plenty of worries about this new generation of what Pettmann referred to as „phone fiddling“ youngsters, texting their inanimate loved-ones. But he pointed out that love, even between two people in the same room is so often surrounded by technology, and that the line can thus not be drawn that easily between the natural or biological and the technological. The main problem of human interaction through technology, however, is that the most basic feature of eye-to-eye communication is still impossible. Even with video chat, it is not possible to look each other in the eyes, because of the separate camera that is based on top of your screen. And with virtual affairs being an often-heard motivation for divorce in China, we can look forward to more research into this field where love meets, or even becomes, technology.

After the first session, I launched the Video Vortex reader, and people were happy to see the book and immediately suggested producing a Volume 2, after the next couple of conferences take place, which of course would be great. I also announced that the next Video Vortex event will take place in Split in May 2009, and will be organized by Dan Oki.

After the book launch, Vera Tollmann, the researcher for the Amsterdam edition of Video Vortex, showed an impressive selection of video works, in a program titled 'Always on your minds.' With works by: Stéphane Querrec (who is currently a researcher at Jan van Eijck Acadeny in Maastricht, NL), Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Martijn Hendriks, Bernd Krauss, Oliver Laric, and Karolin Meunier.

After that, the conference exhibition was opened, which was curated by Andreas Treske. The first conference day ended with a party to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the Department of Communication and Design. This was celebrated at the university with a party with homemade food, drinks, and a performance by VJs and a DJ (I think even Andreas Treske himself did a small performance!).

Video Vortex exhibition

Report of “Hello Creative World”, 24 April 2008. By Marije van Eck

The website for “Hello Creative World”, a conference in entrepreneurship in arts and creative education, informed me this event would “show a diversity of interactive tours, challenging climbs, relax cabins, physical training, exciting landscapes, and plenty of opportunities to share your knowledge and experience with a wide variety of Art Schools in Europe”. So, all prepared for an expedition, I arrived at the Dutch Design Center in Utrecht, a former furniture factory. Red and yellow ribbon led me to the Zagerij, where I was invited by the crew into a conference setting, beautifully decorated by artwork hanging from the ceiling. My visitor’s badge, very appropriate, was a Swiss army knife. I was very curious what this day had in store, because my background is not in arts. My drawing has never exceeded that of a ten year-old, and I would not consider myself very creative. I do have an interest in arts and education, and looked forward to hearing different voices and learning new things.

“Hello Creative World” was the result of the project ECCE (Economic Clusters of Cultural Enterprise), which aims to encourage the development of creative SMEs in various regions in Europe. The program started with a screening of the animation “A Fantastic Piano Lesson” by Ton van Rijswijk, which is - fortunately I might say - available on YouTube. A welcome speech by followed, in which the importance and exceptionality of the Faculty of Arts and Economics was explained by Derk Blijleven, dean of this faculty. Peter de Haan of Vrede van Utrecht, which provided funding for the event, explained that arts and culture have always been very important for the city, and they aspire to make Utrecht Cultural Capital of Europe, in 2018.

Keynote Speeches
First of two Keynote speakers, was Anamaria Willis, CEO of CIDA (Creative Industries Development Agency) in the UK. Her speech was perfectly suitable for this event, because her theatrical appearance and enthusiasm were very infectious. A woman with a background in theatre, Willis was all about “making things happen, profitably”. Through anecdotes of her personal success, she emphasized that the key to success and profit in the creative industries is belief. Belief in oneself, and in what one is doing. Teachers at art schools should give their students confidence, courage, to go out into the world and start a gainful business.

Some students will think making money out of arts is wrong, or not important, but Anamaria Willis said that money is needed in order to be able to keep doing what you want to do. There will be many people telling art students they do not know anything about business, but students should be proud of their improvisation skills when it comes to business skills. Because creative people create markets, whereas other entrepreneurs will be successful if they leap into it quickly enough. Willis ended her speech listing quite a few attributes creative entrepreneurs (should) have, among which: integrity, conceptual thinking, networking (local and global), commercial aptitude, and optimism. Confidence, belief, faith in making the impossible possible, and knowing what they are talking about, can make art students successful business(wo)men.

The second keynote speech was provided by Jeroen van Mastrigt, from the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) Faculty of Arts, Media and Technology. His presentation was about the game industry. This is more my field of knowledge. Not a game designer, but having studied games, many examples from his speech were familiar to me, where they puzzled quite some people in the audience. Van Mastright has a history in new media, and is the initiator of the game design program at the HKU. He said there are many things wrong with the game industry, because a lot of companies do not innovate. Also, even though a lot of bigger companies have entered the game industry, they follow a blockbuster logic and focus on making games as realistic as possible. The game designers on the other hand, are young, energetic and innovative, but instead they create what the publisher wants them to create.

Jeroen van Mastrigt emphasized the role education can have in innovating the game industry. Students work, with large companies such as Philips, on innovative games, they create pervasive games and through creating these products they learn many (entrepreneur) skills. Education and research are very valuable to students, and some games created at art school are even so successful, that the students graduate already being entrepreneurs. “Giving kids the opportunity to create games is like not only teaching them how to read, but also how to write”, is how Van Mastright’s described the importance of the game design program.

The Climbs: Two Workshops
After the keynote speeches, the visitors were all invited to choose a workshop to attend. Options for the ‘first climb’ were: “Reflection - Developing Curricula”, “T-Shirts and Suits: Creativity and Business”, “Alumni Development” and “Talent Development: The role of governmental bodies in talent development”. Since everything was new to me, I chose the workshop that appealed to me most and in another part of the Dutch Design Center, I attended the workshop “T-shirts and Suits”. This workshop was moderated by Hans van Dulken of the HKU, and featured a panel of three speakers: David Parrish, an advisor and trainer for creative businesses, and author of the book T-Shirts and Suits: A Guide to the Business of Creativity, also freely available as a pdf; Aileen Gilhooly, opera singer and consultant, and Pierre Gueydier, of the faculty of the arts, languages and history at Université Catholique de l’Ouest in West France, responsible for students’ career development.

The workshop focused largely on the gap between creative people and business people. Making money is something that a lot of artists will consider ‘impure’. David Parrish tries to bridge this gap through his trainings and his book, which aims to make business theory accessible to many people. Learning about business will give creative enterprises more strength. Concern that arose, creative people will be forced into business molds, was done away with, because it became clear that the advisors, who have a background in the creative industry, always ask the creative people what is important to them, so it is not always about making as much money as possible. Pierre Gueydier spoke about a program at his university where product design students are facilitated in finding a steady job, because often creative designers are only hired on a temporary or freelance basis. The added value of a designer for a company was discussed, and a workshop participant mentioned that these people can help the company not only create beautiful products, but often also care for the environment and can help create sustainable products.

After lunch, I attended a second workshop. Available were: “Business Start-Ups at University”, “Work-Based Learning”, “Entrepreneurship: Art or Experience?”, “Research in Education” and “Internationalization of Art schools”. Because of my university background, in which I rarely create, but always research, I chose the ‘retreat in a mountain cabin’. A small group of people attended this workshop on education, hosted by Giep Hagoort, Professor of Art and Economics at HKU. He is the author of the book Art Management: Entrepreneural Style and chairman of the research group Art and Economics, currently engaging in research of cultural SMEs in Utrecht.

Giep Hagoort mentioned that research is not a hot topic at the HKU. I can understand that, because the HKU is not a research school. A workshop participant of the Willem de Kooning art academy in Rotterdam faced the same problem. Students are starting up their own creative businesses as part of the educational program, but no one is doing any research on how these businesses are developing, so she was interested in starting up a research group. Lack of research, by students and teachers, on the one hand, is a problem. The kind of research that needs to be done, is also an issue. Organizations that provide funding want to see numbers, while research in arts will not often provide statistical data. Funding in itself is a big issue as well. What kind of research can you do, who can you do it with, will funding be provided if the research is interdisciplinary? These issues I believe are very serious, but also very common in all fields of research, and it will take a lot more for them to be solved.

During lunch, I spoke briefly with Derk Blijleven, who spoke during the introduction of the event. After telling him about my interest in new media, and my research in online video, we spoke about YouTube, and he asked me if in my opinion a graduating art student could say that they did not want to associate with YouTube and therefore not publish their work on the platform. I was attempted to leave that decision to the student, but what Blijleven told me next was this conference in a nutshell: No, a student cannot ignore a platform like YouTube, because of its massive size and influence, because an art student is a marketer, and needs to be noticed, and needs to be aware of what people, the potential consumers of their art are doing. “A Fantastic Piano Lesson” was viewed 44,366 times on YouTube. Hopefully that will give the art student the courage to make their art work profitable.