documentating and discussing the problem making that is vogging with the tiresome quotidian of the desktop digital.
oh, i'm adrian miles, rmit melbourne and intermedia bergen.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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written and published in Tinderbox 1.2.3
12.2002
another vog just been done. this one was shot on my canon ixus still camera (it can grab 160 x 120 avi's) since that was all i had, and i like the idea of just being able to grab stuff on such a portable thing. (unfortunately this was the last time that particular camera worked and to repair it is over $500, that is going to have to wait quite a while.) this vog has three video panes, mousing into the top one toggles a text track in the movie which is just a text field to read - i haven't done any scripting to fix its appearance on windows so the well documented problem with different font sizes will appear. the second video pane toggles the volume of all three movies (so this is a vog with 3 video panes and 3 simultaneous soundtracks), while the third toggles 4 text tracks that are actually just a little kinetic homage. it is a brief and quick work, as much about readymade tools meeting readymade content as much as anything else. though the space of the video panes is also from will luer's work who does very interesting things in terms of the layout of his video spaces within the larger video window of his movies.
melbourne rain
::31 Dec 2002 12:12::
went to see the two towers yesterday. i never wrote about the first film so i'd better start there.
a film about new zealandness. a celebration of new zealandness. this is obvious through the film's reception in new zealand (it really does need to be appreciated that this is a country of 4 million people, where 24% of its citizens live elsewhere - mainly in australia which is the regional superpower, and that inspite of themselves new zealander's define themselves against australia whereas australia really doesn't care, much like australia's relation once to britain, and now the u.s.) and just, well, how there is like 2 degrees of separation in n.z. between people to know someone who worked in some capacity on the film.
so for a small nation to actually make such a major film, more or less to hollywood standards (with hollywood money) is a big thing. and so in the first film you just get all those aerial shots and panoramas, just as in australian cinema at one point you had to have infinite horizons, it had a series of iconic new zealand actors (those who have 'made it' internationally), and was as much about having gotten away with it (the deal, the film, and so on) as being a film of lord of the rings. so it was a celebration of new zealand landscape, culture, ability, and chutzpah.
the second film. i read the 3 volumes many many years ago, so can't talk about felicity and the like. though i did see it with a bevy of fans who all seemed happy. what i remember of the 3 volumes was a saga about honour and morality. this isn't in the film, the film is epic but as in the first film this epic quality (particularly from my australian point of view) is about scale and monumentality which is expressed via landscape (as celebration of new zealand), effects, visualisation, and scale (3 films, 3 hours, a national project).
the second film. it is symptomatic that gollum is the most complex character. the rest are drawn wholly from the novel and rely upon the novel for their depth, which pretty much means that in the film there isn't a whole lot. but gollum, he gets complex speeches, introspection, betrayal, corruption and hope. this is symptomatic on two counts. as part actor part animatronics (or is it just cgi? there is a major acting credit given) gollum becomes a major trope for the film in general in this combination of fx's and characterisation. it is also symptomatic given jackson's filmography, where such interstitial objects appear to be a recurring and inevitable feature (shlock horror, marginal disruptive genres). finally the character's complexity, while reflecting the corruption and fascination of the power of the ring, is also a figure of jackson and the film, for how else must it feel or be to do what he is doing than to be gollum? caught between stewardship of the project for an entire country (yes, it is that big a deal), his desire for the film, and what the project requires to be realised (work, vision, compromise). and of course stewardship of the project in regards to the novels, for it is clear that he has accepted or adopted that as his role.
so gollum, the heart of the film. the rest is smoke and mirrors.
lord of the rings
::27 Dec 2002 21:08::
i've just finished a new vog. it consists of a collage of 10 individual 1 minute views of different parts of my desk, more or less collaged so that they describe the shape of my desk (nearly but not quite). mousing into each of the 10 video panes loads a child movie commentary (1 of 10). it is hard to tell or notice but 5 of the commentaries only send sound out the left channel, and 5 only send sound out the right. the commentaries are about the work, observations and rather ill/un formed musings on movement and representation, and just the general vog stuff.
the work would be better, as i mention in 1 of the commentaries, if there was some evidence in there somewhere that there really is a minute occupied (or 10 x 1 minutes), but since nothing happens they may as well be photographs. that they aren't is important to what the work is about, but it doesn't quite get there.
another sketch on the way to something about duration, interaction, and simultaneity.
desktop doco
::27 Dec 2002 19:18::
interesting looking conference for 2003, from the email:
The primary goal of BlogTalk is to inventory the current and emerging uses of blogs. Active bloggers as well as people from all professional fields are invited to attend.
::20 Dec 2002 13:53::
uk site that has a half decent list of links but also a lot of very interesting creative work. to be returned to.
digital fiction
::17 Dec 2002 17:33::
the list of artists and works accepted for dac is now available. <http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/artists.html>
works
::17 Dec 2002 17:05::
two main things i'm trying to get on the road before christmas (3 actually but dac is sort of bubbling along ok). there's a blog research education project i'm a member of out of intermedia in bergen. we've established a moveable type based blog, and i'm busy trying to find time to write some stuff in that blog about the project, using blogs in teaching, etc. what i'm writing at the moment is as much for my project partners as for me, simply because i'm the only one who actually regularly blogs, and am definitely the onlyone who has actually used the blog in education.
the other thing is i'm starting a new research project, based on an annotated sort of reading around deleuze's two cinema books. this feels like an enormous project, something i've put off doing for over 2 years, but now i figure it's either put up or shut up. so i'm going to try to put up. it isn't quite ready yet, there's quite a bit of architecture going on that i need to get a bit more of a handle on. it will be an intermittment project, but i hope regular enough so that it actually helps me understood these books. or at least appropriate and misread them in useful ways.
busy writing
::17 Dec 2002 17:05::
a preliminary list of speakers and paper titles is now available for melbournedac 2003. there will be more names added to the list shortly, as acceptances come in, and of course some will no doubt disappear as people withdraw for their various reasons. it is an intriguing line up of speakers and topics. (though i have to think that otherwise my sleepless nights will start before christmas.)
preliminary list
::12 Dec 2002 17:32::
in my haste to include the link to liz's citing of some useful conference axioms i left out where liz got them from (as has been pointed out to me). aaron swartz wrote them, and you can find them at the above url.
update to dac mantra
::12 Dec 2002 12:19::
a very high profile melbourne businessman (owns mining companies more or less), joseph gutnick, has successfully won a case in australia's high court to sue an american internet publisher in victoria. the internet publisher is a major business news publisher, and had published something that gutnick believed to have libeled him. the article in question was on a subscription service, and was written and published in the united states (new york i think). this has caused a certain amount of panic, perhaps not unreasonably, as it means that if i wrote something about someone in singapore here in australia i could be sued in singapore, under singapore law, for this.
however, as most have pointed out, the decision in the high court here is very straightforward. the judges have applied the same standard to internet publishing as to print publishing, where distribution has been treated as publication and if i am libled in time magazine and it is distributed in australia then under local law i have always had the right to sue here.
it has caused a panic, but some key points need to be kept in mind. it probably does not mean that you will be sued in a court of convenience - it is unlikely that a north american would travel to australia to sue in australia about how they were libelled on an australian computer screen from a north american site simply because an australian court would treat it as trivial and malicious litigation. in the case above the person concerned is a public figure, is an australian citizen, the content was sold to subscribers in australia, and so the court has treated it as pretty much the same as a print publication.
high court brouhaha
::11 Dec 2002 8:57::
at intermedia at the uni. of bergen we have established, and been funded for, a prepilot (a preliminary proof of concept sort of thing) project around blogs and emergent knowledges. the original proposal is available at ftp://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/Users/amiles/Public/collogatories.pdf and is pretty much in english. i've realised that the sort of work i do in terms of research, technology, and teaching is what i'd quite happily call or describe as emergent pedagogies. new teaching, new media, new learning. it is not elearning.
new blog new project
::10 Dec 2002 18:06::
liz lawley has very conveniently assembled for me the rationale for how i want to do things at dac. this is very helpful, and rather convenient!
dac mantra
::10 Dec 2002 17:21::
sizzle is a bit of software written by henry mason that lets you author dvds. it is sort of almost command line and on the cheap, but if that's your interest (and can't afford other things) then it will apparently do the job for you. the online documentation is handy as it seems to offer a good dirty entrée to the world of dvd, something i know next to nothing about.
sizzle
::10 Dec 2002 16:41::
last night was the last scheduled class for the 'new media theory and practice' subject i've been teaching. it was a summer school intensive, more or less 2 evenings each week with 2 full saturdays for a total of 39 contact hours.
this sort of intensive teaching is hard for everyone, and i tried to approach the content of the subject in quite a different way to how i would teach a course that was distributed across a semester (13 weeks) where students do not have full time jobs, families, and the like.
so all the reading that students have undertaken has been self-directed, largely because a) i didn't want to set a reading list that would just end up being impossible to manage, b) they all have professional careers where they have to be able to find, judge, contextualise, and manage appropriate material, and c) with the time and pressure constraints students should be reading what they read around topic areas that they define.
from this point of the view the reading the students have undertaken has been quite successful. of course most are only really finding the key material at the end of the course, though they will continue to read it because they have short research projects to complete. more importantly most have re-learnt or repeated a simple research skill (they are studying a postgraduate qualification after all) which is to define a problem, find relevant resources, and then filter these. this might sound trivial but certainly in my experience of teaching at university the pragmatics of this is never taught - humanities academics tend to assume that students think and work like humanities academics and now how to find relevant resources (particularly non-obvious ones), and how to get from the statement of a problem, via research, thinking, and writing, to a thesis that actually engages with thought, writing, and the problem. most don't know how to do this and most aren't taught how to do this.
anyway, as several commented at the end of the course, they have a feeling of new questions and problems arising, rather than having questions answered, and this is actually where i try to get students. sort of sounds either idealist, or vague, or romantic, and certainly doesn't work for students who need categories and containers (still learning how to help and teach such students), but the ability to frame relevant problems, and then having the toolbox to know how to go about finding answers to these problems, is pretty much the major network literacy that we all need to have.
we also did a self assessment exercise about participation during the subject. during the last class everyone went through the participation 'diary' they had been keeping (which they filled in after each session) and on the basis of that assign themselves an overall grade (out of 10) for how they performed. several students did not want to assign themselves a result, and there i made the cardinal error of imposing the regime on them. what i should have done was spent time talking about why they might not like to do this, why others might like to do this, and then to see if there was a way of resolving these differences or even of just making visible what these differences were. that's the point of the process after all.
that this is the case is even more apparent when you stop to understand or consider what this sort of assessment is trying to assess and how it goes about doing this. most forms of assessment tend to concentrate on quantity: you write x number of pages or words, and within that you are examined or tested against a range of competencies or skills. for instance how well you've researched, argued, etc. the problem with this is that you are assessed either against your peers (this is better than that), when you never have access to your peers work (so the difference between a pass and a high distinction is actually invisible to you - imagine you only get high distinctions, you have no idea what a pass essay even looks like!), or against an imaginary standard (an idealised standard defined by the academic who inevitably uses themselves as the standard). the big issue in all of this is that such practice is rhetorically justified as measuring what you're learning, or even what you've learnt. except if no one tested/measured or evaluated for this at the start of the course how would such a methodology be able to identify how much has been learnt by the end? so good students go well, poor students go poorly, whereas is all students wrote an essay at the beginning, and then you assessed the qualitative change during the semester, different assessment outcomes result.
to get back to the self assessment exercise. what is actually being assessed in there is the qualitative change that has occurred for the student during the semester, not the quantitative change. it is not how much 'more' they now know about a specific topic, but how differently they think about and do something. this is why i think students ought to assess it, because i can't judge this, i can judge quantity pretty easily, and i can mark against my imaginary standard, but for me participating in a subject is about qualitative change for the learner, and to let students know that this is ok, and that it might even have happened (or is happening) means you have to have a mechanism to make it visible for them. this is one of the ways i do this.
teaching and learning
::10 Dec 2002 8:57::
will has made a new vog. winddog.
this work has emerged from what he's seen of udo atsuko's flash work but shifts it more towards the register of the vog. it uses the short staccato stuttering of atsuko's elegant found scapes but now adds a soundtrack (wind), to a series of vignettes (in that they're small looped stutterings, and small windows within a larger unspecified frame).
each video segment (and there are 5 visual tracks + the sound track) is short, loops, and seems to have also been cut down so that the frame (and data) rate is very low. this i think gives the video a certain poetry, which works well with the use actions required to make the vog work, and of course reiterates (reflects in a productive engagement) the conditions of the work in its preferred environment - the networked desktop. all i mean by this, but it is important (to vogging and to the development of an appropriate aesthetic) is that the stuttering is the same stuttering of the mouse click, the page load, the multiple content windows that clutter our screens.
with the black background to the movie, on a black page/screen, the different panels appear to describe more screen space than they actually do. as you mouse into each video pane it is replaced by another, somewhere else, but in fact the movie is only 320 x 240 and all of the panes except one simply describe the shape and scale of this larger space; one covers the upper third, another the lower third, another the left, another the right. but it is intriguing how taken as a whole the 5 tracks appear to describe much more space than a simple 320 x 240 rectangle.
technically i assume that this vog uses the soundtrack as a child movie, this is why it is able to play (and loop) continuously regardless of the status of the window panes. I suspect each of the video panes are all part of a single movie, and that the mouse actions simply shift layers of the video. you can achieve the same thing by enabling and disenabling tracks (which this might do), though i know from experience that doing this with text tracks really causes a performance hit, so i suspect here they are all enabled and it is just layer changes controlling the visibility.
like the vogs i make these also shy away from the click, always such a brutal thing, that click, when you can just mouse into, touch, ever so lightly, the video and it will respond. this reminds me of one the norwegian words for video and film which literally translates as 'living pictures', which for me is not a romantic claim but recognises the indexical quality of a film or video image (that needs an essay there, i don't think vogs work if the images aren't indexical) and so using the mouse to touch rather than hammer just, somewhere in the scheme of things, presents quite a different poetics to the screen and its surface. this is very much the case here, and in the small body of work that will has made, with images that concentrate strongly on the exquisiteness of the everyday - autumn foliage, blossoms - or perhaps it is the exoticness of the everyday (as his earlier "firstrice" makes clear), the touch rather than the hammer is definitely what is sought.
mise-en-scène becomes complicated too, because it is no longer defined or constrained as that which occurs or appears in the frame, but now would appear to need to think about what happens between the frames compositionally. this is what separates it from montage, which concerns itself with seriality only. this movie is 320 x 240, so where each video pane appears in the vog is a question or problem of mise-en-scène, just as what appears within each video pane is a problem of mise-en-scène. the order they may appear in, and the relations this produces are temporal relations, questions of seriality, and this is the domain of montage proper.
in relation to my own work what i enjoy about these is their patience and their quietness. instead of my noisy multiple simultaneous windows here invidual variable windows offer glimpses, and it is this glimpse of the 'what was' combined with their and our movement that suggests an interesting series of explorations.
windog
::6 Dec 2002 17:28::
mark has an interesting couple of ideas about links and tools. the left to right timeline is what i'd characterise as academic convergent evolution - it is similar (and different) to something i wrote about in the vog some time ago. to me this suggests that when you get your head into and towards the new then there are quite specific (strange attractors?) things (what i tend to think of as material practices) that draw you towards.
in the same way that his suggestion of combining tinderbox with an editing package is something i've wanted for ages, except i wanted storyspace and some editing tool. which brings me to the continuing importance of
Sawhney, Nitin "Nick", David Balcom, and Ian Smith. "Hypercafe: Narrative and Aesthetic Properties of Hypervideo." Proceedings of Hypertext '96. Washington: ACM, 1996. 1-10.
Tolva, John. "Medialoom: An Interactive Authoring Tool for Hypervideo." (1998) http://www.mindspring.com/~jntolva/medialoom/index.html Access: November 1, 1998
and
Sawhney, Nitin "Nick", David Balcom, and Ian Smith. "Hypercafe: Narrative and Aesthetic Properties of Hypervideo." (March 9, 1997) http://www.ic.gatech.edu/gallery/hypercafe/HT96_HTML/HyperCafe_HT96.html Access: May 25, 1998
what mark describes also reminds me of something i saw gunnar liestøl working on last year. he was using livestage pro and quicktime to show short clips, but within the clips were dynamic indicators that you could click on, and these then expanded below the main timeline, unfurling the movie as it were, giving you access to further information or story. what was very very nice (and elegant) about this was that the click didn't launch a new screen/movie but sort of emerged from the current movie so that it built a sort of tree diagram of the embedded movies. it was much more like using outline view in word. very nice and very suggestive.
i think mark should come to melbourne so we can play.
layers and tunnels
::6 Dec 2002 13:53::
in my ongoing saga to find an email client i might have found a compromise. powermail's latest release integrates with the os x address book - one of the things that made mail.app attractive. but it has much more powerful filtering. so i might give the demo a demo. the compromise here is data structure, i'm pretty sure powermail does the mail in a single database thingie. ugh.
powermail
::6 Dec 2002 12:35::
homesite of henning ziegler, this is the person i had a brief critical exchange (good natured i add) with a couple of months ago.
henning ziegler
::6 Dec 2002 8:52::
i've no idea if other national postal systems do this, but here in australia i you post a letter addressed to santa, north pole (or where ever else you think santa lives, or for that matter whatever common name you want to use for the particular figure concerned) then it is 'delivered'. a hand addressed letter arrives, and inside is a mass printed card from santa, thanking the child for their letter, letting them know that he'll do his best but not everyone can get what they ask for, and so on. my kids love it. hell, i love it. it is the sort of thing that if the national postal service (australia post) were privatised would probably be dropped as just a waste of money, but is that sort of gift economy event that has no return. that is its beauty and elegance.
(of course if telstra, the semi privatised national telco, did this - and why haven't they thought of this, oh, and if you see this telstra and do it, i here declare my public ownership of this business proposal as a project to be taken for incubation at www.iii.rmit.edu.au - it would be sms santa or faxback santa, but since they don't get it they charge you for both ends of the transaction.)
anyway i'm going to write a letter to aussie post saying thank you, with a prime minister who has just announced that he would authorise pre-emptive strikes at near neighbours if our security was threatened (indonesia is one hour away from northern australia, the world's largest muslim nation, i mean, gee, i'd love to be an australian in south east asia just now), it is important that somewhere something happens without interest.
santa
::4 Dec 2002 10:04::
mark got a new look to his blog, and now torill. must be something about northern winters. i must say, torill's is looking very spiffy :-)
torills new design
::3 Dec 2002 18:45::
busy afternoon trying to return to blogging about vogging.
will has an interesting post froma month ago on pov. while i would probably disagree with the suggestion that pov gets into the thoughts of characters via the soviets (surely that's much more griffith than eisenstein?) the question of what pov in interactive cinema might be is a very good one.
pov though very much relies on sequentiality at least at a binary shot level: we see character look, we see what they are looking at, or we see something, then we see that it is the pov of a character. this could be done with a continuous take, just by moving the camera, but i suspect that if you have an interactive cinema where shots become atoms that can be reassembled into novel sequences (which is in fact the condition that faces any film editor) then it is not so much that pov becomes something different in interactive video (though i might be misunderstanding will here) but it is only whatever a character looks at.
in other words character looks, next shot, we assume they are looking at this. of course they might not be (character in daylight inside, looks |cut| is nightime outside) but what i'm getting at is that a pov shot has nothing internal to itself that defines it as a pov, whether by scale, duration, content, etc. it is only ever a pov shot because of something outside of itself (it forms part of a series ) and so pov in interactive cinema will probably be exactly the same thing. (this is what deleuze describes in thousand plateaus as an incorporeal transformation.) its status as pov is determined by the series it is located within.
narrative pov, though, that's something else entirely.
return to vog
::3 Dec 2002 18:11::
luuk bouwman has set up tropisms which is a video blog developing hardware and software to allow
this is exciting, more commentary coming soon.
tropism
::3 Dec 2002 18:08::
well, video blogs are about to be the next big thing. trust me.
nah. don't trust me. a google search on video blog already uncovers a lot of recent work, while a similar search on vog turns up some game sites (online games, not sure what the v stands for), and vog blog pretty much turns up only links to me.
so, they're coming. but they're not. take macromedia's devcon 2002 video blog. (all of the video blogs are here.) they aren't really vogs, and they still aren't video blogs, and though jeremy allaire notes that their crudity is part of the blog aesthetic
this contains all the apple quicktime documentation. seriously gnarly.
new qt documentation
::3 Dec 2002 9:25::
MySQL on Mac OS X is fast, stable, and straightforward to learn. Not as complicated as some databases, it is nevertheless robust enough for the vast majority of web development applications -- which is probably why it has become one of the most widely used open source databases available. This article outlines the many benefits (and a few drawbacks) of MySQL, and most important, provides detailed instructions on how to securely install it on Max OS X.
handy since mysql is pretty much the default database system you'd use with things like php or perl for projects. including things like database driven video sites.
mysql on os x
::3 Dec 2002 8:28::
this is something that arrived via tidbits. simple (and if you know javascript obvious). if you add this bookmarklet:
::3 Dec 2002 8:16::
david silver is a young and very active researcher in cyberculture studies. maintains the resource centre for cyberculture study.
david silver
::3 Dec 2002 8:12::
well it sounds like something from a middle brow national geographic doco, and the design does little to disabuse you of the idea, but an eclectic collection. not certain of the province or the scholarship of what it contains, useful for pointers and directions, but i'd follow up on what you find.
the living internet
::2 Dec 2002 13:33::
from their own email:
welcome to the very heart of the netzwissenschaft project. Most research essays listed here are from 2003 down to 1999. It's a personal linklog of, in my view, persuasive contributions to the emerging field of Internet Studies and Network Research. Please find the latest entries on top. Updates at least once a week.
a place for interested browsing and serendipitous discovery.
netzwissenschaft
::1 Dec 2002 20:58::
meanwhile over at partially organized you'll find the daily movies, which seem to me to be closer to the mark. i mean how many bloggers spent time editing, rewriting, cutting, massaging content or just sort of get near enough good enough? that's the model for vogging. which reminds me, got some rain i shot as video on a canon ixus v2 that i want to add to the vog. tomorrow.
vogs are a comin
::3 Dec 2002 17:10::