Last Friday Led It Up attended the Video Vortex #6 conference @ Trouw. The entire day was about different elements of the online video ‘vortex’ we live in these days. Various speakers showed examples of projects they were involved in and we learned a bit more about online video art, open source, platforms and aesthetics.
Havana, magazine fom the HvA, made a clip of the day. Led It Up moviestars Jorian and Daan can be seen in it. Check it out here, and click more for the rest of this post.
Maarten Brinkerink, from the Institute of Sound and Vision, was the moderator of the session that was of most interest to our project. There were a lot of speakers so we’ll focus on our favourites. First up: Ben Moskowitz from Mozilla. He really got us jumping in our seats. He spoke about the difference between online video and web video and convinced us that these are not 2 different words for the same thing. What we have now is web video, video as we know it and simply embedded on the webpage. Moskowitz argued that the potential for online video is much bigger than this. With the use of HTML5 posibilities are extreme. Check out an example here. Another interesting project he showed us was Mozilla’s popcorn. Here’s an explanation in their own words:
Video on the web has always been a bit disappointing. After all, it’s pretty much just like television, only smaller. And unlike the rest of the web, video is just as much a passive experience in your browser as it is anywhere else. Mozilla would like to change that. Developers at the browser maker’s Drumbeat project — an initiative that advocates new open web technologies — have created Popcorn, a tool intended to make web video every bit as interactive as the rest of the web. Popcorn is a very new effort and still a bit rough around the edges, but results are already impressive. Popcorn adds metadata to HTML5 native web video, annotating videos with information like location, details about the people and topics in the video, subtitles, and licensing details. The metadata can be used in real time to add to the experience. Source: Mozilla
Basically HTML5 will release online video from its adopted ‘old media’ constraints, arcording to Ben Moskowitz. Click here for a Popcorn demo. For us this presentation was mostly interesting because we might use HTML5 for our LED screen. It gave some interesting insights and broadened our knowledge of the possibilities.
Ben Moskowitz
Another cool project is Web X-ray Goggles, allowing everyone to instantly check out and change/remix the code and layout of their webbrowser. Very interesting for us to see this kind of remixing by the public.
Evan Roth served us some cool art projects in The ‘online video art’ session, following Ben Moskowitz. Roth had given the animated GIF mash up workshop the day before, attended by our very own Level Up. Among their work we saw some awesome projects done by Roth and F.A.T. Lab (Free Art and Technology).
Evan Roth
Click here to view the embedded video.
L.A.S.E.R. tag: an open source tool for writing graffiti on buildings with lasers.
Another nice project was shown by Dagan Cohen, alled “Upload Cinema”. In short, he shows us that the web is changing film. Thanks to “Upload Cinema”, Dagan gives an opportunity to present the best of the web in movie theatres. The audience submits videos and the best ones will be selected to be shown. Another interesting way of remixing content.. In sum; very inspiring day.
Dagan Cohen
Click here to view the embedded video.
Upload Cinema
Photos by Anne Helmond and Networkcultures