vogwurk + werdwurk
glimpsed: [] melbourne time

::tekka::

a new subscription only journal sponsored by eastgate, edited by anja rau. i took out a charter subscription, so i imagine my name will one day be immortalised in pixels on an archive screen somewhere. if it lives up to its brief it will be good, but being subscription based is brave. will be an interesting test of a business model.

tekka
::19 Jan 2003 17:55::

::walking vlog::

have completed my first vog for 2003. this ought to be one in a sequence of three which are sort of self portraits. this vog, walkingakafragementsoffriendship is mainly of my feet, walking on mt. sugarloaf in the cathedral ranges, here in victoria. it has three text based pseudo narratives that are enabled simply by repeated mousing into the video pane of the movie.

as i was authoring this several structural possibilities presented themselves and as i resolved these to their simplest form a couple of things became clear.

how to explain this? when authoring in quicktime i can make any part of the movie, at any point in time, respond to events. these events might be user actions (which is an anthropomorphic way of saying the mouse enters, leaves, clicks on, clicks up some nominated part of the movie), movie events (for instance the appearance of a particular frame, or similar information from another movie), or external data (xml for instance). now in most of my vogs i use only one of these possibilities, which is the mouse entering some part of the video. sometimes this entry toggles a particular action, sometimes it loads something, something it makes something visible or not. regularly i count these mouse entries so that the number of times the mouse has entered determines which image, childmovie, or text string will be loaded or toggled. however, i rarerly, if ever, constrain these to particular times within any work. this seems to be for two reasons.

the first is simply that the works are too short to require such actions to be significantly constrained temporally. the majority of works are around 2 minutes duration and are of a single event or scene (rather than longer works or multi-scene works) and so the interactive structure of the works can accommodate a stable and more or less singular form of interactivity.

(as a by product this is why the vogs do not need to have buttons or labels telling you what the navigation is or does. first of all because it isn't navigation, the interactivity is to 'play' the work, and i do think there is a significant difference, secondly because they are only of a single scene the works do not need to invent an architecture that can accommodate multiple themes and so can invite the reader to experiment. here size is of major benefit, they are all minor works in minor keys and experimentation costs very little in time, effort, or in understanding the schema. after all we have to label buttons in more complex works because the interaction is the narrative architecture which we use to produce our narrative schemas to understand the work, and if we can't identify the architecture we will not have a hope to develop a schema. the easiest (and dullest) way to do this is to label the activities.)

the second is that if the actions available to the movie or the user vary over time then it becomes extremely difficult to understand what is going on in the work on the basis of the work alone. for example if mousing into a video pane (or part of a pane) varies the volume, but then doing the same action 30 seconds later varies the playrate of the movie (something that is trivial to script) you're pretty much asking your user to do an awful lot of work to understand what is going on, and it will be the exceptional reader who is able to discern pattern. furthermore if you randomised this (imagine having a video pane that might vary volume, playback speed, transparency and soundtrack) so that each mouse entry became one of four random possibilites for each entry, then you could trumpet your complex interactivity in your artist's statement, or curatorial essay, but you would have a work that was largely unreadable without the statement or essay. so by keeping the activity singular across the duration of the work (mousing into a particular area will generally always have the same general outcome) the architectonic nature of the work is more readily available, without necessarily compromising the ergodic qualities of the work.

outside or alongside these rationalisations though is an attitude towards the work where it ought to be or remain an open set of possibilities. what i mean by this is evident in the current vog. here there are 3 small narratives available that are text based and delivered a sentence at a time as you repeatedly mouse into the video pane. the vog counts these mouse entries and uses this to determine which sentences to be available on screen. as i was authoring the work a concern was whether or not these should be constrained temporally, so that mousing in and out of the video at particular time points of the work would constrain what text was available - for instance i could have divided the timeline into thirds so that mousing in and out in the first third would only show the first narrative, in the second third the second narrative, and so on - but apart from the difficulty this presents to the user (as described above) i just much prefer the idea that the users actions in relation to the work presents itself as an continuous set.

this means that in this vog you can mouse in and out and run through the three narratives several times over during the 2 minutes 30 seconds of the work. this is not coding laziness but an integral part of my aesthetic (and my theoretical approach to linking and interactivity). the set of possibilties that the work presents (the set of possible futures that a link may express) should be an always open and available possibility throughout the work. action is then always subject to the rhizomatic formula of n-1 and never the lacanian formula of n+1, writing and authoring is the same.

walking vlog
::19 Jan 2003 13:01::

::vog and bragging rights::

i named my video blog vog since it seems an apposite sort of neologism for what a video blog should be called (though vlog or videoblog seems to have become popular recently - given we have klogs i would've thought videoblog displayed a distinct lack of élan). but drew davidson and mark amerika have both emailed me that vog is what they call volcanic smog in the hawaiian islands! so technically vog isn't a neologism at all. (and i know clog couldn't be, has too wooden a sound to it.)

vog and bragging rights
::12 Jan 2003 20:21::