VideoVortex #3 Ankara home | bios | program | documentation | exhibition | credits
Thursday October 9
10.00 – 12.00 Workshop: Open Collaborative Mapping/OLPC Project (Markus Schaal)
14.00 – 16.00 Video Art Screenings
Friday October 10
9.30 – 12.00 Workshop: Video Blogging by Michael Verdi
13.30 Doors open, coffee and tea
14.00 Welcome by Andreas Treske, Head of Department of Communication and Design
14.15 – 16.30 Opening Session: Political Economy
Moderator: Sabine Niederer
Aras Özgün
Dominic Pettman
Kylie Jarret
16.30 Coffee, tea
16.45 Video Vortex Reader Launch by Sabine Niederer
17.00 Video Screening by Vera Tollmann, ‘Always on your minds’
18.30 Exhibition and Reception
21.00 COMD 10th Anniversary Party
Saturday October 11
10.00 – 12.00 Participatory Culture
Michael Liegl
Martin Koplin
Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen
12.00 – 13.00 Lunch
13.00 – 15.00 Online-Video and Blogging
Michael Verdi
Sarah Késenne
Başak Şenova
15.00 – 15.15 Coffee, tea
15.15 – 17.15 Art Online
Moderator: Mehmet Şıray
Brittany Shoot
Gülsen Bal
Dan Oki
17.15 – 17.30 Coffee, tea
17.30 – 18.15 YouTube and Censorship: Turkish Case
Mehmet Ali Köksal
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Friday October 10
14.15 – 16.30 Opening Session: Political Economy
Aras Özgün
On The Politics of a New Economy
“User generated content” has been a buzzword that defines certain technological developments gathered under the label “Web 2.0,” as well as a key element of the discourses built around this misleading label. The term itself carries ideological connotations and refers to certain notions which have been essential to the online communications from the very beginning; dynamic participation, interactivity, decentralization, non-hierarchical organization, autonomy, self-expression, freedom of expression etc.
We feel very much compelled to question the political effects of this model by critically evaluating the economic aspects of it. But this is not an easy task, since the traditional concepts and formulas of critical political-economy falls very short of approaching the constitutive dynamics of this new production mode, yet alone being explanatory. Neither the “value” created in this model is tangible as in the industrial production mode that the classical theories of political-economy were designed for, nor the “labor” processes that create it has anything in common with the “waged labor.”
Therefore, while we have to critically evaluate the political effects of such new mode of immaterial production, we also have to compose new theoretical tools and approaches. One obvious characteristic of this new production model is that, it operates by organizing the existing social relations under its own logic, by making the basic social relations “productive” (in a commercial sense) and creating “value” out of “play” rather than “work.” Then, it seems appropriate to discuss the political effects of such new form of economic production by utilizing the theoretical tools we find effective for understanding the political structuring of the “social” in a broader sense –such as “bio-politics,” “governmentality,” “economy of desire” etc., which will be the task of my presentation.
Dominic Pettman
Love Me, Love My Avatar: The Libidinal Economy of Virtual Intimacy
There is a popular conception amongst many Zeitgeist watchers, especially in places like the US, Western Europe and Australia, of the urbanized East as existing somehow further into the future. As William Gibson once stated: “The future is here; it just isn’t equally distributed yet.” This kind of cultural fetishism extends to not only technolust, but the practices that new gadgets and electronics encourage. The phenomenon I’d like to focus on in this paper is that of virtual girlfriends and boyfriends: whether in the form of digital avatars, automated text messages, or episodic confessionals on YouTube. Such hyper-mediated encounters – which emerged from Japan, but are spreading unevenly over the globe – fascinate and appall those who still hold P2P romance IRL in high-esteem. A romantic relationship between a flesh-and-blood person and a computerized image seems like an insult to the intrinsically human and humanist discourse of courtship; and indeed it is.
How does this perspective change, however, if we consider “love” as a technology? That is, as both a code with its own algorithmic parameters, and a discourse which challenges the hyper-rational assumptions of the “merely machinic.” Extending arguments articulated in my most recent book, Love and Other Technologies, this paper asks how the emergence of virtual dating, and other cybernetically-inflected treatments of romance, are working to undo our jealously-held notions of intimacy and identity. In doing so, this presentation seeks to explore the specific libidinal economy of user-generated online hubs, in order to suggest that we are witnessing the early coalescence of a new inclusive mode of community.
Saturday October 11
10.00 – 12.00 Participatory Culture
Michael Liegl
What Is Going on Here? Navigating Multi-modal Acoustic Spaces
Most research on interaction features discourse, in one way or another (interviews, conversation, talk in interaction). Furthermore, it often focuses on settings, where instrumental, strategic or teleological action occurs, for instance “operating together” (Mondada, 2001) or “telling a joke” (Sacks & Jefferson, 1995).
Language and the rationality of teleological action, it seems, are steering mechanisms needed to transform a mere gathering of people and things into orderly situations that can be socially accounted for. The setting I would like to talk about seems to lack those two fundamental features. In my paper, I look at video footage from an extended ethnographic study of a New York based Media Collective and their weekly “Multi-Media-Open-Jam-Session”. Here, friends and strangers gather every Sunday night in an 8 hrs session, producing non-structured audio and video together. In this setting there are up to 16 participants, playing simultaneously digital, analogue and acoustic instruments. Sometimes sounds and images are produced in a computer mediated collective environment (several networked laptops), sometimes there is even streams coming in, or remote collaborations taking place simultaneously with the local jam.
Since the setting provides non-idiomatic improvisation, it could be argued that it is lacking fundamental accountability (Garfinkel, 1967), making it a difficult border-line case of the social, the comprehensible and one might argue, the sane. An approach to this setting might be attempted in following Goffman’s (1981; 1986) deconstruction of the assumptions of orderliness and accountability in utterances in conversation, and his argument for focusing (similar to Schütz, 1951) on more atmospherical notions like “being together” in a shared space as a kind of primordial layer of the social. The notion of “being together acoustically” is the center of my study on acoustic occurrences in this setting of interaction without discourse. What I am after are phenomena like: “Giving up control and agency”, “Letting go”, “Waiting for an event to happen in a non-structured space”, “letting order occur and disappear”.
Martin Koplin
Participative and Interactive: Mobile Media as E-Culture
Mobile media are a part of today’s eCulture: they are potentially interactive and can support to create citizens’ participation in themes and questions of our time. Used in the context of culture, it concerns an initiative, with which the formation of social, intercultural and cultural competence and identity meets new “cultural techniques” that more and more came from the media-use of children and young people: mobile and online, creatively, participative and playfully. It can originate a cultural dialogue between different groups. Collaborative created media, which can be commented, evaluated and rated by their users, support the development of an enhanced participation in cultural knowledge processes, live-long-learning environments, and art production.
The generation of different ITC-based participation methods at the places of local history and art exhibition, means exchange of experts, medialization of museums and exchange of the museums with citizens as well as the communication between different parts of the population. Visitor participation is based on the experience, that people today enjoy more to take active part in the information processes that surround them, then to consume only passively. The information transfer can get more into a common activity between providers and users in active communities. The active communities generate information together, improve, supplement and correct them. Culture consumers become designers and will better understand and identify themselves with the idea behind it, which is a core goal cultural work.
Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen
A Case for Distributed Video Comments
Video sharing sites, most notably YouTube, offer video commenting features, but these features break with fundamental traditions of the web. They rely on a centralized structure where the producer is forced to host video with a specific provider if he or she wants to participate in video-based conversations. This stands in staunch opposition to the ways in which comments on blogs function. There, anyone can participate on equal footing by publishing commentary on their own blogs and then use conversation trackers such as Technorati or technologies such as TrackBacks to assemble a distributed conversation across all blogs, not just those powered by a specific provider.
A working distributed video commenting system based on open standards and open-source technologies will be demonstrated, and we will explore the underlying design of the system to determine how it differs from centralized video commenting services. The system will also be used as a case study for a broader discussion of how to track visual conversations online: What kind of assumptions are present in distributed database models, and do these assumptions foster a certain type of conversation? How do we create interaction design to navigate these visual conversations? Is there even a space for equal access video conversations across domains, or has YouTube taken over to a degree where other ways to handle conversations are doomed to fail?
13.00 – 15.00 Online-Video and Blogging
Michael Verdi
Videoblogging: Networked Relationships
Video and sound offer such a rich experience that even small, compressed, web-cam clips provide an extraordinary level of intimacy. When you combine this with a network of over a billion people, the nature of self-awareness, relationships, community and our families begin to alter. This presentation will take a look at some of the consequences — both intended and unintended — of videoblogging and the unconstrained personal connection it offers.
Sarah Késenne
On Gig Flix
What a thrill to see the videos Latin-American U2 fans uploaded on the web. They show the same Vertigo tour shows of the concert film ‘U23D’ I saw the evening before in Brussels’ IMAX film venue. It is said to be the first 3-D multi-camera recording of a live event ever. All the muscles of this 85 minute immersive experience of tangible high definition, spectacular spidercam shots and graphic overlays contrast highly with the ephemeral qualities of these short, handheld ‘cellflix’ of Argentinian and Mexican teenagers. But they are both signs of our times.
In one of these amateur videos we find our 15 years old cameraman laughing at the lens in extreme close-up, meanwhile joking to his friends. They’re all waiting for the kick-off of the long expected U2 concert of the Vertigo tour. Night has fallen, and he sweeps his phone 360 grades around: a generic camera movement to express exposition. We get vaguely an idea of the enormous mass of people gathered in the football stadium, an average of 100 000 people according to the website of ‘U23D’. We seem miles away from the stage. Now the blaring lights of this sports arena go out, and for a long time the quicktime player shows nothing but a black screen, if not for the glowing mobile screens, like dirty pixels. The start of the concert is pure ecstasy, and abstract: a distant light explosion and videowalls popping up in the dark. The phone returns to his pocket, while much closer to the action the ‘U23D’ crew gets its multi-camera set rolling. To achieve the 3-D stereoscopical effect, the concert is filmed simultaneously by a double camera apparatus: a grateful metaphor for the multiple video practices I want to discuss here.
Başak Şenova
Navigating in Digital Territories
The presentation evolves around the notion of “space” along with the perpetual and spatial considerations in the context of digital art. In this respect, by taking the perpetual components of space as its point of departure, my curatorial practice and field of research investigate and utilize the construction and the operation logics of the urban based realities and associated cross-territorial practices and networks. This presentation is an attempt to explain this methodology by navigating through some case studies, with a specific emphasis to “Unrecorded” Exhibition (Istanbul, 2008).
15.15 – 17.15 Art Online
Moderator: Mehmet Şıray
Brittany Shoot
The Role of the Curator in Online Video Art
As video online has exploded, visual and video art have moved in parallel and incongruent ways. Online art-specific collectives like Rhizome have formed as receptacles and meeting spaces for artists, but are they relevant or even necessary? What do art databases like the Perpetual Art Machine mean for how we understand, consume, locate video art? Are these sites curated spaces by simply existing? And, if so, how do human curators navigate and cull from these spaces?
We will explore the definitions and potential discomforts of online curating, as well as what should define online video curating and what makes a person an “expert” in a digital age. The web enables everyone to become an art curator, but we must look at the differences between curating and merely grasping at memes, attempting to discover or produce the next major movement. Specifically following in the theoretical traditions of McLuhan and Postman, video online must be approached with the same skepticism and care we have used to evaluate new media over the past forty years. Understanding it within its own distinct online framework, art is an essential, potentially less explosive place to begin discussions about curating, ownership, and the basics of web video.
Gülsen Bal
No Holds Barred
The starting point of this presentation resides in analyzing differential structures in its multiplicity through focusing on the new aesthetic constitution of culturally specific conditions within shifting modalities of far broader issues to emerge since 9/11 within different planes in today’s contemporary art practice.
The direction of this argument consequently leads towards a profound concern about the fragile and ambivalent position in exploring what happens when creative practice transcends its own context with the politics of production in the scope of the divergent lines of encounters in the “production of subject” and usurping the very subject-position beyond the verb “to be.” The question that remains and the one worth asking: what happens here within the creative practice? At critical moments such as this, where is its hit heard?
In this domain the question concerns a practical approach to creativity which reflects the problem that presupposes encountering different aspects of the conceptual forcing construct from the possibilities and limitations, confrontation and plurality which are capable of transcending their own context captured at “where do I stand” beyond to be hold barred.