March 29, 2003
Videoblog Myths
drew davidson sent me an email today alerting me of a slashdot story on videoblogs. a lot of comments. many of the 'blogs are dumb' or 'vanity video' variety, but for such a geared up digital community they're surprisingly low bro when it comes to knowing the first thing about video. like the post that says you need a qtss server (or similar). nope, http is just fine for video blogging.anyway, apart from feeling smug since my video blog is over two years old i remain dumbfounded that the only model people seem to be able to think of for video blogging is middle brow distributed talking heads. aka tv journalism meets reality tv stirred for the web. well, yes, this will work, and is viable, now. but isn't it little more than vanity video wannabes?
then i'm reading scott's blog today and he's discussing noah's talk down his end of the world oh my goodness he too makes the same mistake (and he should know better) in an aside about hypermedia and ted nelson:
Noah also cleared up some confusion I had about the term "hypermedia" -- in Nelson's terminology, hypermedia is not just multimedia, but multimedia the user can manipulate interactively (my paraphrase). So an online dissection kit is hypermedia, a Quicktime video is not.
all my vogs are quicktime video. quicktime video is pretty much the only environment that lets you script interactive video. well, there's DVD of course which is mpeg2, but really. quicktime is a file architecture that supports different file formats (over 100 graphics formats, i don't remember how many video formats) and it has a sophisticated whatver you call it in programming speak, where you can script extraordinary things. (write a movie that responds to xml, user events, other movies, any input you can script (mouse, keyboard, microphone, external files), and so on.
it isn't that myjop is to save quicktime from the flash kiss of death. it is to get people to understand that if you want to work simply with interactive video on your desktop, then quicktime is the environment. everything else still thinks it is television. i've an essay about this out later this year, in the meantime check out part one of a tutorial (also being published shortly):
desktop vogging.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)
March 26, 2003
DRH 2003
This year's Digital Resources in the Humanities gig is at the University of Gloucestershire. This is an annual British conference that is similar to the ACH conference series, though DRH tends to have more media rich works. It's a useful event that is a beginning in the effort to bring together the predominately archival and literary computing crowd with those crossing more fully into new media, education, and similar.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)
April Melbourne Weather
Today I remembered why I wanted MelbourneDAC to be held in April, preferably over Easter. All week the weather's been (will be) cool mornings, blue skied mid 20s afternoons. Never mind. But it is weather that encourages conversation.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:15 AM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2003
Rosella Take Two
Well, I returned to the Rosella vog self portrait that I finished last week, since I've been unsatisfied with it. Looking back at some earlier work I realised how much I like the work that has the multiple video panes, and so I'm returning to that for a while. I really have not explored enough of the possibilities that this offers.
(Last week I gave a lecture to a group of students about working creatively and productively in networked media - what I always characterise as affirming the constraints of networked media, and I realised afterwards that all my recent work has not been using the video panes, it prompted me to return for a while.)
This version of "rosellasorselfportrait2-hand" is exactly the same as the previous except I've upped the data rate slightly (a whopping 1Kb per pane, each pane of the main video is compressed to 12 fps, 3kbs with a peak of 6kbs using the Sorenson 3 professional codec with 2 pass Variable Bit Rate turned on and with natural aka automatic key frames enabled), and have tiled the video into 9 panes.
This returns me to the montage with collage material that I'm particularly interested in exploring.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)
March 22, 2003
Lo-Fi
My interactive video aka video blog project has been included in the most recent low-fi net art projects online show. This is sort of rather pleasing (as invitations to present your work always are) since I don't think I actually applied so they have seen my work and included it amongst others.
Next week I'll go back and spend some time looking at the other projects, but for now, I just really like the homepage. Call me slow but it actually took me days to realise that the spinning cursor was the hotspot - I'd just figured that there was some weird Safari and Flash problem I'd never encountered before. Then I realised that cursor was always in the same place, and so I moused over and yep, that's the spot.
Increasingly I'm learning and realising that I like interfaces and work that don't just make me 'work' (in the way that earlier hypertext theory talked about the new role of the hypertext reader) but which shift control away from me as user to a stronger dialogue with the work.
This is sort of the standard claim of interactive media, but most works just don't do this, they're images that are rollovers or are not much more than menus-as-pictures with the same level of action or interaction as a text list in html, just prettier. But here something as simple as a cursor spinning - what I normally see for instance Safari has frozen on a page, teases me with its irony, discreteness, and hidden invitation. I like that. Control should be distributed, and then, if we're lucky, it might not be control anymore.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)
March 19, 2003
New Media Reader
Nick and Noah's anthology, "The New Media Reader" has just arrived on my desk. Took ages, an evaluation copy sent surface mail by MIT Press tends to take a while to arrive in Australia. Immediate impressions. It's big. It's thorough. It is catholic. I'd probably use it as a excellent source text for a review subject.
I actually would like to read it cover to cover, since there's a lot of material in there that I know about but haven't actually read (as a contemporary academic, who has time to read cover to cover?) and now these nice people have put it all together for me. It is a survey, but even includes a brief section from Deleuze and Guattari's opening chapter of "A Thousand Plateaus", so I'm impressed.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:32 AM | Comments (0)
March 17, 2003
Self Assessment
The self assessment that students are doing in hypertext theory and practice is, well, an interesting experience to date. Several students still struggle with what it is they are assessing, and want me to either authorise their assessment by agreeing with their marks or their claims, or simply retreat to a very content focussed model to judge what they've done and learnt.
This means that a student might have learnt a lot about using the computer and blogging (what I characterise as collateral learning) but they haven't learnt theory X, and don't know or recognise that they have actually learnt something, and that something is of value.
From my own point of view it is interesting that every week in our labs it is only at the end that we do the self assessments, which inevitably means we run out of time. This is because I too am content focussed and so try to get to an 'end' in the lab and then we can do the self assessments. This is counterproductive, and today I realised the very simple and retrospectively obvious solution. We will do the self assessments at the begi
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)
Rosella Vog
I've just finished another vog, this one is the second of a proposed trilogy of self portraits and is me feeding some crimson rosellas at Christmas time.
Technically this is a simple vog, one video track, three animation sprites and a child movie track that loads one of three audio tracks on mouse enter events. The animation sprites are made up of four still images from the video that are run through using the idle event time of each sprite. Each of these sprites also has a mouse enter action which changes the idle event time for the sprite (so the animation speed varies) and it also loads a child movie audio track. These child movie tracks (child movies are movie assets - stills, audio, video or whatever, that are stored externally to the parent movie and only downloaded if the client/user requests them) vary in size from 60 to 180 kb and so there will be some lag as enough downloads via http for the track to begin playing.
The video track just plays, all the user action happens down below in the animation tracks.
Aesthetically the work is thin. The visual layout with the three panes being wider than the video pane was a continuation of the recent work where the kinesthetic areas of a vog move away from simple or singular video panes, but it is too concrete and present. I think it might work better if some of the panes varied (faded in and out for instance) over time, or on the basis of user actions.
The audio tracks are also, um, not quite there. Commentary from me which was originally made as text on screen as in the walking vog, but I just wanted a more audiovisual experience happening so decided to shift it to soundtracks (which actually makes it much faster and easier to make). But the commentary don't give the texture to the images that is required, it just stays too flat. This is not an artefact of the format - television ads can tell compelling stories in 30 seconds - but is largely a product of what I'm slowly recognising as my high formalism. Probably why I see myself as an academic and not an artist (artists I suspect see my work as too academic, academics of course only see art).
However, I like the visual texture that is starting to happen, though I want it to be more variable, so next time I will think about having the mouse events happen in the video pane, and these control the animation sprites, so that some fluidity enters the interaction. I'm not a big one on mousing into sprite A controls sprite A.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)
No Words
::fibreculture:: A lesson from history
is a post to an Australian email list by Craig Bellamy who has lifted a story by a South African historian via an English newspaper.
I haven't written anything about Australia's shameful behaviour in relation to boat people, refugees, or our government's sycophantic desire to please George Bush. Because I never have the words to deal with abject stupidity. This journalistic piece deserves to be read.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:33 AM | Comments (0)
Desktop Vogging Tutorial
The current issue of the Fine Art Forum Ezine is out. Has part one of a tutorial I'm writing on desktop vogging. In the first part I show how to make a collaged/montaged movie using QuickTime Player and in the introduction I mention some of the qualities that need to be affirmed to work successfully in internet video. In the tute itself I also point out how doing this in QuickTime Player produces a completely different outcome to working in a nonlinear editing package. All the media files needed for the tutorial are included. YMMV.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:15 AM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2003
Kevin
My kids and I have a pet yabby (Cherax destructor). His name (well I haven't confirmed gender actually) is Kevin because he is such an avid and serious gardener (if you grew up in Victoria then the name ought to make immediate obvious sense).
And I've become a bit of a fan of Kevin as a pet. Yabbies tolerate extreme water conditions, can go without food for three months, and are rather active beasties. Though it turns out that they are very territorial, so our two yabbies in one tank are now one . . .Yesterday Kevin moulted. The third time since Christmas. First time I've seen it happen though. As the new exoskeleton matures he pumps water out of his body to shrink, his old exoskeleton splits and he emerges out of it. He then pumps water back into his body to fill the new exoskeleton, and keeps rather quiet for a day or so at is hardens. So yesterday when he was lying on his back keeping rather still I decided he was moulting rather than dying, and sure enough his shell split along the length of his underside and he somehow wiggled and squeezed his way out of it. Normally he'd eat the old exoskeleton, largely for the calcium, but Sophie's taken it to school for show and tell. It really is quite remarkable.Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:29 AM | Comments (0)
Google Literacy
In a lecture the other day someone asked "What is the difference between a blog and a web page?" An excellent and obvious question at the beginning of a course on hypertext where blogging forms 25% of the assessment. Rather than answer the question (I am trying to stop being a teacher who has answers, and to teach students that the way to learn is not to treat their teacher as the knowledge source that fill's their empty minds) I suggested we try to find an answer in our first lab. This was largely to start one of our first major learning tasks for the semester - being able to do online research, and so first of all was where to search. Everyone knew that Google was the best option, though not a single student had any idea why Google was such a successful search engine, most assumed it was size of their database or speed of the page. The next problem was what to search for. One student came up with a search phrase that were OK ("what is a blog?"), no one thought to simply type in "what is the difference between a blog and a webpage?" and most tried terms like "blog", "blog webpage" and so on. Searching for "what is a blog?" or "what is the difference between a blog and a webpage?" bring up Rebecca Bloods essay on the history of blogging with a Google rank of one. Following the link to Rebecca's page you can pretty much get an answer to your question. Except several students then wanted to know how would you know that the page was accurate or authoritative. Now I guess I already knew who Rebecca Blood was, but even so, I was very surprised that no one seemed to have any strategies to judge the validity of the content. These students wouldn't have a problem assessing a pamphlet they were given in the street, but didn't have any protocols for Web based content. So, we went through a list of things you might do, a lot of which do require some network literacy about things like domain names, web servers, and even directory hierarchies, things I put under the heading of network common sense, there were other things that fall completely under obvious plain sense, yet even these students (who out of their secondary education are in the top 5% in the entire state) did not have the ability to do the obvious - I suspect because throughout their educational career they've always been given authoritative sources (why learn how to do this when if it is in a book in the university library then it must be right?). No one bothered to read the page (after all, the teacher's there), yet right at the top right of screen there is a full citation to Blood's book on weblogging, with ISBN and all. The page was in the directory /essays/ and so I suggested going up the hierarchy to view the /essays directory to see what was in there - and of course there was plenty of content, and finally I suggested going to the root level of the site to see what that told us. We also discussed the domain (an eponymous .net) and what that might indicate, the design and writing values of the content, the extent of content available, and how none of these alone might mean much but when judged in relation to each other can tell you quite a lot. Finally, I pointed out that the site had a Google rank of 1 and that because of how Google determines page rank this is an index of authoritative rank, and possibly more authoritative than any of the other indicators. This is the page that the web community, and more specifically the blog community, has linked to most regularly to provide a definition of blogs, and when the hypertextual link economy of the Web is combined with its reflexive nature (most of the best theoretical work on blogs and hypertext is online) then it shouldn't be surprising that most of the best content is found in this way.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)
Class Exercise: Online Literacy
Most academics that I know tend to have several false assumptions about their students, but these assumptions underwrite all their teaching practice. In thinking about this, and how to teach students these skills instead of assume their existence, I am trying to work out some simple tasks that will let students learn how to, in this case, judge the validity of online content.
The first assumption academics make is that students learn and think (by think I don't mean opinions, I mean approach problems, theory and so on) much like themselves. This gets expressed in our insistence on using assessment tasks and methodologies that owe everything to academic practice, but virtually nothing to professional practice outside of the university. So students present tute papers (because of course they all have to be able to present at conferences), write essays (since the humanities essay is of course the major form that graduates use to write professionally), and sit exams.
The second major assumption is that students understand theory theoretically. That like us academics they have the high level abstraction and contextual skills to see theory as a schemata and so can see how it hooks into other theories, other contexts, and of course this means that academics are able to take a concept from discipline A (let's say de Certeau's notion of the strategic and the tactical) and apply it to discipline B (academic writing and blogs where blogs are tactical in regard to the essay's strategic). Never mind that this is actually where, ideally, the student should be at the end of their tertiary education, or that for many students this is just not a learning out come that is viable or relevant for them cognitively, professionally, or personally.
What this actually means is that those students who best match ourselves (for instance already have these skills) will perform brilliantly and, tautologically, become our personal exemplars of how good we are at teaching. But we haven't taught them anything, these students can already do it, they get it (and will probably go on to postgraduate study), we just provide some specific content in a specific disciplinary field. Those students who don't have these skills, well, they'll get through, and will learn some content, but not what goes on behind that content.
This was very apparent to me in the Google exercise that we did in class the other day. No one has ever had to teach me how to evaluate online resources, and that is not because I've been using the Web since the beginning - I have the skills that let me abstract these things successfully, which is probably why I enjoy being an academic. Yet virtually every student (well, I only had 8 in the class) did not know how to evaluate the results of a Google search, and most had no idea how to use Google properly in the first place! This is not, yet, the Internet generation, though most would have had net access throughout their secondary schooling.
So the task is to teach this. This week everyone had to find something online that was about how to write good hypertext (whatever that might be), and they needed to blog and discuss what they found. Though thinking about it now I've once again put the cart before the horse, since most of them aren't information literate enough to trust their judgment about what they find in the first case, but this ability is presupposed by the task I've set. Hence I need to step back a bit, so in next week's lab I'll get everyone to discuss what sorts of qualities or properties they used to judge how authoritative the content they found might be. I can see I'll probably have to place that front and centre for quite a few weeks, so that those students who aren't like me can build their very specific checklist and literally tick things off as they view online content. We will get there, and I do regard this as a major learning outcome for these students, for once they are competent about this a lot of content questions and problems look after themselves.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:15 AM | Comments (0)
March 12, 2003
Moaning
Lisbeth has introduced me to a fantastic word, "brokkehoved", or in English, "a talking moaning head". I'm not sure if this is Lisbeth's English but I love the idea of a moaning head, not body, just the head. (You can take the language out of the vikings, but you can't take the viking out of the language? - I'm having visions of a head on a pole, noisy of course.)
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:31 AM | Comments (0)
Interactive Cinema Resources
Milgram Reenactment has a page with a good list of video and new media resources.If you scroll down to week 14 there are some links to work in low fi cinema and the like. But in other weeks there are things on blogging, surveillance, and so on.The site seems to be documenting a fascinating performance piece where Stanley Milgram's experiments were recreated (reperformed?) in Glasgow. I've no idea what the link page above is doing here, since that has teaching written all over it!
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)
Yep
I've moved my blog engine to Movable Type. Jill and I were talking about networked literacy while we wrote an abstract together and this environment makes a lot of things possible.
Then I found Kung-Log and tried it out on the teaching blog I'm running with my students, and I'm sold.
The design will change, but not today. The old site is left untouched, so the URL's aren't broken, and the old design is archived, but it will be a slow migration and I expect I won't get the design settled down here for a while yet.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)
March 03, 2003
Wind and Dust
Today in Melbourne has been extraordinary weather. Through the night I was woken by the humidity, heat, and wind. A blustering squalled northerly (which in Melbourne means a hot wind). As I worked from home this morning I watched my windows shiver and bow with the wind, and rang for a glazier for my upstairs neighbours when their window was blown out. After work, still the wind, and now dust. The sky and entire city is cloaked in an orange shroud that a month ago was smoke and today is dust. We are in the midst of a major drought and this dust probably comes from New South Wales and has been blown hundreds of kilometres. It is gritty and eerie since because we are not a desert city. To the east there is 400 kilometres of green, to the north probably 160 kilometres, and to the west 300 kilometres.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:06 PM | Comments (0)