Thursday, February 28, 2013
The future is back: new visions for film on the web – under this title the panel presents the art and practice of film makers in this era of online video. What are the film makers doing and how do they realize the possibilities in their work?
Seth Keen joins via Skype and speaks about his practical research circling around ‘poetic taxonomies and spatial fluctuations’. He shows how he develops a new way of editing film, leading to multilinear online documentaries. The starting point is the question on how to use the networked relations of the web in making documentaries. These relations are put there both by the makers and the audience.Through new, online editing and compositing software it is possible to assemble these new style videos.
To get there, the assemblage parts have to be suited in the first place. For example, Keen uses only single shots himself. This also relates to another important characteristic: all separate parts must be readable, indexable, categorized in some way. What consequences does this have for non-narrative, poetic forms? How can you design a system that recognizes those parts? And how to guide the user who’ll make the assemblage through that? Multilinear documentaries seem heavily related to exactly the poetic and non-narrative. How to bring such online poetic documentaries a step closer?
Edwin & Thomas Østbye initiated the project 17000islandsinteractive.com where again parts of a film can be used by the public to make a new, personal video. The audience then takes control. Moreover, by using the original film, it is destroyed. That means a kind of sacrificeon the side of the film maker, as Edwin points out, which isn’t easy of course. But the project shows the big opportunities for new ways of filmmaking, online and with a crowd of millions of people together, theoretically.
This new way of video editing can also be used in portraying the major protests of our time, like Margarita Tsomou has done. Check the the Friday morning blog post for more on that.
In the evening a great presentation Gabriel S. Moses urges us to start questioning the definition of video altogether. He analyzes the meme of The Ring, which revolves around a (deadly) video. If video slowly starts do disintegrate somehow into non-narrative, repeated images, not necessearly rising above the meme, as can be most explicitly seen in GIFs, then we need a new term altogether, to clearly make the distinction with the old-school video tapes stacked on a shelf and now probably moved into the basement or attic.
This definition-challenging and somewhat frightful (meant in a positive horror way of course) talk is followed by the presentation of the Network Notebook The Inner Life of Video Spheres by Andreas Treske, where he lays the groundwork for a theory of online video, bringing together many of the themes discussed before. Check out Andreas’ video on Vimeo, or is it a video at all?