Video Vortex #9 – Re:assemblies of Video
28.02. – 02.03.2013
Video Vortex 9
Lüneburg
4 reports of the event by Miriam Rasch: here, here, here and here.
Video Vortex #9, Re:assemblies of Video, is conceived and hosted by the Moving Image Lab and Post-Media Lab of the Innovation Incubator at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany.
Online video vortices such as Youtube, are assemblages of assemblages: its infrastructure and spheres of use and production again consist of assemblages. The video sphere today is a mesh of different types of elements; we have databases, screens, interfaces, protocols and server farms. Comments, tags, lists and channels, cameras, producers, frames, users and audiences. Last, but not least, money flows, broadcasters, advertisers, property rights, eyeballs and statistics, all add to, and operate in multiple assemblages.
Currently we see new configurations of components in video culture, interacting in new ways and with loose forms of influence. VideoVortex #9 proposes that now is a time to re-engage with a structural and contextual analysis of online video culture.
We encourage critics, theorists, artists, programmers and video makers to look at:
1.)… assemblages of different videos, graphics and texts, be it in material or with a view to new environments of authoring or curation. Such an approach re-poses the question of interactive multi- and hypermedia in the age of html-5, Popcorn, Apps and the likes.
2.)… assemblages of content, interfaces and infrastructures, as found in platforms, with their changing forms and logics of circulation, and to scrutinize media-‘flows’, ‘liveness’, ‘channels’, ‘archives’, ‘lists’, and producing ‘dissolving originals’ and new forms of mash-ups.
3.)… socio-cultural assemblages of producers, owners, curators and perceptive ‘audiences’. The conditions and social realities of video- and TV-production, issues of copyright and re-organization of ‘imaginary’ capital evoke questions as to what extent technology, standards and protocols – and their symbolisms – are taking over the role of what before has been ascribed to ‘culture’.
4.)… assemblages contributing to ruptures and revolts: Indeed „the whole world is watching“ different real or so-called ‘revolutions’: social upheavals are transmitted via video. What does it mean to be an ‘observer’ (individually, socially or scientifically), a ‘participant’ or a ‘witness’? Questions of relevance, media positioning and ‘real virtuality’ are are gaining new urgency.
We particularly welcome talks, presentations and workshops, which cross and combine the levels outlined above – as their separation is itself owed to a heuristic assemblage.
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All too often the (theoretical) discourse on moving images and online video is out of sync with the actual field of video culture and its most current phenomenologies and developments. Therefore we want to gather videos of all shades with the help of “navigators,” people we trust to point out and profile some of the groups or constellations of video that make up the wild and divergent currents of video culture.
While English remains the default language for international communication, we also look for video cultures inside Russia’s Runet, behind the Chinese firewall and in African countries’ active social (video) networks. How to search by yourself without speaking Mandarin or Russian? How to get outside your filter bubble? What else is there beyond viral video and amateur clips posted by the evening news? What do new forms of video look like? Is it still the so-called amateur behind the camera, or do we find new notions of professionalism? How do different cultural uses of online media become visible?
To expand Video Vortex beyond the conference, we will augment the conference experience with video-related input of all sorts. Everybody has had personal and often erratic glimpses via channels, subscriptions, circles of acquaintance, specialized blogs, mailing lists, etc. Rather than static archives of edited files we find fragments, links and lists, enigmatic in unknown contexts. Tools and methods are as diversified as the forms of video culture itself.
We invited correspondents in Tokyo, Athens, Moscow, Lagos, Beijing and other places to observe and select videos from their local spheres, and to comment on their specific grammar. We are interested in video clips such as glitches, mashups, activist recordings, tutorials, news clips and media criticism as a way of understanding local politics, technologies, visual culture – and languages.
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Networked video has entered a new phase and become part of major configurations. The days of pioneers and amateurs seem to be over, as do the old worlds of professional broadcasting networks: Digital technologies have professionalized production, and do-it-yourself skills have established new styles and formats. Tubes, channels and domains for mobile video are part of our everyday digital life. These tectonic shifts – from amateur and professional to an assemblage of media creators, from spectators to participants, and from a single viewpoint to parallax perspectives – have given rise to effects of a geographical and generational scope yet to be determined. The ninth edition of Video Vortex proposes that now is a time to re-engage with a structural and contextual analysis of online video culture.
Two keynotes will extend the discursive field of Video Vortex #9: Beth Coleman will re-engage local affairs with visions of networked activism, and Nishant Shah will unpack video at the digital turn as object, as process, and as a symptom of the transnational flow of ideology, ideas and infrastructure, especially in emerging information societies in the uneven landscape of globalization.
VV9 also features a number of performative lectures and thematic workshops dealing with video realities. We will follow up on the long tails of rebellion with Mosireen Collective in Cairo and Margarita Tsomou in Athens. Boris Traue and Achim Kredelbach, aka Jo Cognito, will discuss YouTube’s recent forays into televisual terrain and its delegation of organizing power to commercial “networks” and media agencies. Boaz Levin will look at the way media gravitates towards im-mediating events, and Miya Yoshida will critically question familiar terminologies from “amateur” and “user” to “prosumer” and “citizen reporter.”
In the run-up to the actual Video Vortex event, international video correspondents have been investigating phenomenologies of video online. After 10 joyful years of global ubiquity, the conference will also engage with reinventions of the local under conditions of digital culture. A collaboration with the local video activist collective Graswurzel.tv, whose activities are linked with antinuclear protests in Wendland (near Lüneburg), will explore mobile video in (alternative) news journalism. Artist Stephanie Hough will join with local participants to oppose tracking and other incursions into our screen lives by turning a public square into a stage for a mass lip-sync.
The future of film as it fuses with video in the digital realm, and the reconfiguration of its aesthetics, interfaces, production and distribution, will be discussed with Thomas Østbye and Edwin, the directors behind the participatory film project 17,000 Islands, and explored by Seth Keen in the domain of interactive documentary on the web. Alejo Duque and Robert Ochshorn will analyze the technological appearances and travesties of video, the soft power of codecs and compression in the information complex, and how to “interface.”
A liquid publication will go live as a sourcebook shortly before VV9 and continue to expand during collaborative editing sessions at the event in Lüneburg, ultimately living on as a multifaceted publication: http://www.rmozone.com/videovortex9/
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Thursday February 28th, 2013
Confirmed speakers: Beth Coleman, Seth Keen, Edwin, Thomas Østbye, Andreas Treske, Stephanie Hough, Martin Katić, Theresa Steffens, Arndt Potdevin, Robert M. Ochshorn, Nan Haifen, Viola Sarnelli, Boris Traue, Achim Kredelbach, Dalida María Benfield, Renée Ridgway, Gabriel S Moses, Nishant Shah.
Friday March 1st, 2013
Confirmed speakers: Margarita Tsomou, Sascha Simons, Nelli Kambouri, Pavlos Hatzopoulos, Joshua Neves, Gabriel Menotti, Filippo Spreafico, Caroline Heron, Jonathan Shaw, Jan Gerber, Sebastian Luetgert, Elric Milon, Sascha Kluger, Jamie King, Stefano Sabatini, Peter Snowdon, Miya Yoshida, Boaz Levin, Azin Feizabadi, Kaya Behkalam, Jens Maier-Rothe, Jasmina Metwaly, Graswurzel.tv, Björn Ahrend, Timo Großpietsch.
Saturday March 2nd / Samstag 02.03.2013 VIDEO VORTEX #9 Re:assemblies of Video
Confirmed speakers: Vito Campanelli , Robert M. Ochshorn, Alejo Duque, Lucía Egaña Rojas, Andrew Clay, Stefan Heidenreich & Deborah Ligorio, Cornelia Sollfrank.