The second day of the Video Vortex Ankara conference opened with a panel on Participatory Culture, which started with a presentation by Michael Liegl about Share. Share is a series of jam sessions in NYC (and other cities) that Liegl characterized as multi-modal space, and perceived as a sociological object of study. (http://share.dj/share/). Liegl’s documentary of Share Montreal is available on the Share website.
Martin Koplin presented an interactive storytelling project funded by the EU, called Mobile 2 Culture (M2C): Mobile Media as E-Culture. Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen gave a very interesting talk in which he proposed a distributed video-sharing platform, in which everybody hosts their own video content. As the project is still under development, keep an eye on his blog www.solitude.dk.
Dan Oki and I used the break to discuss the program and preparations for the next Video Vortex event in Split! When we got back into the conference, it was unfortunately quite near the end of Başak Şenova’s talk, which was titled “Navigating in Digital Territories.” The presentation was by videoblogger Michael Verdi, about the topic of Videoblogging as Networked Relationships. In 2004, Verdi’s daughter Dylan was on ABC news, as she was elected as one of the People of the year. The reason? She was the world’s youngest videoblogger. Verdi gave beautiful examples of the powerful medium of online video, and the of the enstrangement it can cause (when recording you don’t know who your audience is, so there’s no specific context other than your own). He also told the story of a couple that got together online, and really got to know eachother through starting a private videoblog where they posted video messages to eachother (-and yes, they are a couple now).
Sarah Késenne presented her research on ‘gig flix’, and compared the multicamera set-up of professionally produced concert registrations (in which the fans are extras, and the footage is often simultaneously recorded and edited), to the amateur footage (often made with mobile phones) available on online video platforms such as YouTube. Her research has been published in the Video Vortex reader, which is available here.
During the Q&A, Dominic Pettman asked Michael Verdi if after the mirror stage, there might be something as a webcam stage? The answer was simple and beautiful: We are outsourcing our memory to a network.
The last panel was about Art Online. The first speaker was Brittany Shoot, a self-proclaimed ‘recovering academic.’ With the strong belief that “sharing is caring”, Shoot has started dvblog.org, an “online resource for art & entertainment movies in QuickTime format”. I can highly recommend it, for it is a non-commercial and highly valuable database of shorts.
Artist and academic Gülsen Bal (http://www.art-axis.org/) talked about her project Folded In, which shows representations of borders in the social networks of Web 2.0. From her website: FOLDED-IN, an online multi-user platform that combines videogame basic elements with the possibility of a constant data flow, addresses the creation of an online community that will not only be part of the game but will create the networking that conveys the world in our absence in its multiplicity.
Dan Oki told a history of new media work, starting with a web project in 2002, in which scenes would be put online, and visitors of the website could start editing. But editing didn’t seem to be enough, they acted as the director too:. People would write to the actors, giving them suggestions, and adding narration. This gave Oki the idea of re-editing the film every time it was shown in a cinema, thus showing the database. Dan Oki ended his talk with his latest project, in which he is tagging his super 8 films. The project is called ‘My last super 8 film.’ A work by Dan Oki was shown in the Video Vortex Ankara exhibition.
Pictures of the event are collected in the Video Vortex Flickr Pool.