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.
Andreas Treske, Organizer of Video Vortex 3
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.
Aras Özgün
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