vogwurk + werdwurk
glimpsed: [] melbourne time

this is just a sketch around work i've been doing for the last 9 months which is practical and theoretical. the vogs are video blogs and are based on low bit rate interactive online video.

like a blog they are personal, fragmentary, exploratory. more aphoristic than televisual or essayist. they are often explicitly juxtaposed to a textual commentary as one of the things i'm interested in is expanding the gap between video and text.

want a writing that is immanent to digital networked video, not imposed (espen).

i guess it could almost be called networked video (not networked tv!). on the practical side there is a manifesto, partly mock, partly serious, vogma.

some of the works are small sketches exploring the formal qualities of quicktime (for instance just text movies with href tracks), others get more complicated using multiple soundtracks and more complex visual structures (collins street, bergen beach).

the fracturing of the surface of the video, turning into parts, is something about endowing movement on the work by breaking into parts. it animates the thing. but it is also an increasing interest in the intersection of collage and montage that becomes very obvious problems when you start working with video as hypertext. (for it should be noted that all the issues that this video raises are just the same issues that hypertext once thought were raised for text;

i had been storing urls for notes, particularly in the link directories, within the url attribute that is already an attribute of all notes. however this also has some other features and so i've created a new attribute and i'm using that to store urls, so that way i can still use url for the clever things that it does - from mark bernstein:

If a note has a URL and the note's value of ViewInBrowser is true, then opening the note will also cause the URL to appear in your preferred Web browser.

the downloaded archive is now a bit out of date. (only took a day.) the latest ceres update seems to have fixed the date problem so the argument for the archive agents is now slightly different. this means that if you were on a non u.s. system the archive is probably empty (since it's a date that won't make sense to your system). also the template for the archive was formatted wrongly, just some html errors...

after a couple of people have asked how i build this vlog using ceres i've put together the ceres file, templates, and a readme in ceres about how it's build. you can download it from:

i'm sitting in heathrow waiting to board a flight to oslo (and thence to bergen). i'm coming up to 25 hours since my flight left melbourne and london's clear morning has now been swallowed by fog. much like how my head feels. :-) and now the flight is delayed an hour. technical fault. oh oh. this is not really the time you want to hear about technical fault's delaying the plane you're about to board, is it? this is when we all become stoic and rely on an absurd faith in the quotidian normalcy of sending pressurised tin cans at great velocity through the sky. and of bothering to note this in writing which becomes i guess the future imperfect act of faith, of itself.

while reading peter lunenfeld's "snap to grid" [Lunenfeld, Peter. Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures. Boston: MIT Press, 2000.] i was reminded of the forgotten first excitement of word processing. a little while ago i gave a couple of lectures to some students studying literacy, about electronic literacy and such stuff, and as an example of how ubiqutious screens are i mentioned the example of word processing, how most of our writing now is done on a screen. but what i'd forgotten about is also just how fluid text on the screen is as it is so utterly taken for granted. but i remember the excitement of using my first word processor (word 1.0 on dos 2 or 3 point-something) and having lines of type automatically wrap, and pages just flow, all by themselves, as you did that escape p soemthing-other to get the dot matrix stamping away. a miracle. for i was a student wanting to write good essays and had often manually typed an essay only to find that i'd managed to miss a sentence (always at the top of a page) which would require retyping the entire page again. so much time spent on the mechanics of getting it to the page and not on writing. i've no idea how you would even teach students the leap that text on a screen in a gui achieves. except maybe get them to write an essay on a typewriter :-)

while doing some more sophisticated building in ceres i realised i could use the URL attribute of each note to store a url. this means i can now write my link directory with a change in its html template so that there is a link clickable link - before now it was just a text string and i couldn't see a simple way to make it clickable. but wait, there's more!

(our operators await your call...)

this now meant that the url wasn't visible in the note (if i left it in there it would appear twice on the page which just looked, well, like a bug), so i edited the default value of KeyAttributes (under textformat) in the info window for a note and added url as one of the key attributes. presto, the url is now listed at the top of each note window when its open, so i can see it when i'm in ceres. but wait, there's more!

(go on, make our operators happy!)

in the note view i can double click any of the listed KeyAttributes to edit them. now i'm not sure what happens if i try and edit things like the date the note is published, but it means i can add or amend the url without needing to go via the info window. that's nice.

ATTENTION, ATTENTION, calling all two of you who have linked to this blog - any links to any archived pages made before today are now dead. gone. deceased. the content is still there, just got a new home. because

i've solved my archiv and permalinks problem. now this will only make sense to those who use ceres, which is a small beta testing community to start with, but one day... well, it might prove useful. certainly handy for me so that in two weeks when i can't make head or tail of what i've done at least i might be able to figure it out backwards. because

as i was saying there was this problem. i realised that stuff was twice as hard because i was building stuff from two container notes, that's how i was doing the two column vogwerk and werdwurk stuff. rather than ditch all that (cos i like it) i moved all the notes into a single container, and then used keywords to nominate whether a note was for the vog or the werd column. then two agents grab stuff for each column, written in the last 28 days. the index page now uses those.

another agent grabs anything inside the container that holds all the notes (don't care about the vog or werd columns there) for a given month, and i make a list of the titles and dates on a page, but (and this was where i was stuck for yonks till i looked at the blog template that the cere's crew have provided) i could see how to write publish the title of the child notes in the month archive and link to their title but link to where they're actually being published (just a simple a href="pathway/">big changes</a> does it). and hey, got the system happenin.

somewhere round here i've moved from cutting edge to bleeding edge :-)

oh, and i just make a prototype for the vog column, and one for the werd column, that makes the keyword entry automatic, and the colour coding i want too.

well, i think i've worked out a bit of an archive system in here now, without using agents. the problem with agents is i end up with urls that are novel - they're created anew when a new agent is formed, which means each new agent (archive duration) generates new urls so the permalinks would be semi-permalinks.

anyway, the outcome of this is that any links anyone has made into content here is now broken. well, to werdwurk and vogwurk. not to the link directory.

so, its now post-wtc. the world has changed? perhaps. certainly if you're from the united states of america.

what have we learnt?

i've recently realised that coffee is my index of cultural sophistication for a place. simple. so that when i was first in bergen, late '98, i think i found one place that actually made a latte that was, well, a latte. now i think there are 4 or 5. in a city of 250,000. now here in melbourne, a city that was once voted the worlds most liveable city (hey, it was an international vote and don't ask me how they decided it but i live here most of the time ok?), we have coffee. good coffee. we've had real coffee, from gaggia's, since 1956. now in the city of melbourne (what in america you'd call downtown) we have over 150 coffee shops, most of which make real coffee. in the inner city (nearby suburbs) we have a vibrant and famous cafe coffee culture, you simply don't survive here as a cafe if you don't or can't make a decent creme on your latte. and it must be good.

real coffee? i mean italian coffee. strong, dark, bitter, complex aromatics and dense on the palate. made under pressure and by people who know how to warm and not scald the milk.

and now there's a starbucks. (steve alessi, an italian american film academic from ucla, once told me how his wife came home and had decided it was time to go home (to italy) - the local starbucks had opened a drive through. i can see her point.) we have whole shopping strips that thrive on cafe's and coffee. crowded, noisy, colourful, good. you ask for a latte or a machiato and you know what you'll get. coffee is a culture, a practice, like wine, and a culture that doesn't understand this, well, you see why i use it as an index.

and so a starbucks. soft weak coffee in tutti frutti. it's right next to the nike lifestyle store. sometimes people confuse more with better.

have removed the agent that publishes links to the last couple of days added links. i ran into the usual problem in ceres, where if i publish the children of a note elsewhere then the children of that note cannot be exported indvidually as html files. thought childlinks would get round it but at the moment childlinks does not insert anything into my pages for me. this is the frustration of being a beta tester when you actually want to make finished stuff with the software :-)

have added a new agent to ceres so that new links added to my link directories in the last two days are gathered and linked to this index page. at the moment the links are to the content in the agent directory, which means that in 2 days they'll actually have disappeared - i need to work out how to write an automatic link to their permanent directory.