This the current blurb I'm using when I try to get the vogs into an exhibition. YMMV:
During the MelbourneDAC performance night last week Roger Dean did an amazing gig. Hazel Smith, one of the collaborators on the piece, has written a description of the work on empyre. When you're unfamiliar with a particular field, in this case improvisatory performance, descriptions like this are essential to be able to contextualise the work.
Warm sun crisp morning. Afternoon cafe latte nursed with green green grass, fading elms, cry and call of children mixed with squeak and screech of playground. A couple appear with a soccer ball passing it between themselves, playing, practising and tackling. Shortly afterwards another couple, this time with a football and the ritual of kick to kick. I am touched by the unusual ordinariness of the scene, girls with boys in the park, playing as partners the games that in my childhood could only be gendered. Sunlighted autumn a weather out of joint and a city's mood responding with intimate public interludes.
Post Conference Depression. Didn't know it existed, but it does. Been flat all week after the energy, excitement and effort of MelbourneDAC. Didn't help that I didn't really take the opportunity to say goodbye to people properly, nor that during the week I never slowed down enough to talk properly with anyone. Too busy keeping the flow flowing, or somesuch nonsense. Anyway, the weather holds, the drought worsens, my mood darkens, and all the papers for MelbourneDAC are now available to the scholarly community, the abstracts page in the papers directory provides a link to everything.
Sheesh, my list of things I'd do differently has caused a minor flurry in some academic blog circles. The major and most interesting commentary seems to be from Liz's original comments. Sometimes I think the ivory tower thing gets a bit much. Each semester I read a pile of student essays, and grade them. I write comments on them. Most of my peers do this. The student gets (usually) no opportunity for redress or feedback back to me, and in most cases my judgement is treated as final, and of course happens after the work is done (well after feedback would have been useful). I more or less just did the same thing with professional academics. Except redress is possible, and since no one is reading their papers at the conference it might also help people think how to present the work that they are passionate and care about as something that they are passionate and care about. Most of us do this to most of our students most of the time. The point is not the criticism but to encourage people to find their writing voice. Yes, a stick should not be used to do that. Granted. But really, things are getting precious and the ivory tower is looking just a bit too closed?
Will be incommunicado here for the next two weeks. Countdown to MelbourneDAC, then from Monday it will be MelbourneDAC, and things are, frankly, flat chat. (Is that an Australianism?) So sorry for the lack of replies to emails and so on, dear Writer, and the lack of updates here, dear Reader (yes, there is one of you). Stay tuned, as they say. But realistically, two weeks I'll be semi-articulate again.
Not even sure if that's a real word. Well, it is since I wrote it and it is clearly a word. Maybe it is just a guttural 'testy'. Anyway, feelin' tetchy so things might get more dogmatic round here, or not. What hypertext teaches us about interactive video. Well, of course I mean real hypertext, that means writing hypertext in a hypertextual environment and so writing hypertext hypertextually. It's pretty simple really, in a real hypertext environment we learn that nodes (aka screens aka lexias and so on) are semi autonomous in that they must be able to be recombined in novel combinations. We have endless hairsplitting debates about where the combinatatory engine ought or could be - scripting, reader history, performative links, external variables, narrative outcomes, reader choice, and so on. But we generally recognise that these textual (visual/acoustic) units have to be made in a way that lets them have multiple and simultaneous facets towards their other textual units. To not do this constains their ability to be joined to other bits.
Which is to say that each becomes, in some manner, sort of independent (axiomatically more independence equals greater potential multiple combinatinatory possibilities). When writing in an environment like this you quickly learn that each of the nodes is a semi-autonomous object, and that the links you write and build with become the rather flexible glue that gives the work its texture. Which does actually bring me to interactive video. In an architecture like QuickTime each track is a similar sort of object. For example you can have 12 video tracks in the one QuickTime movie, and 3 sound tracks. Now you can make a QuickTime clip that then plays all these at the same time, fine, but that's sort of old media, or as I've been describing it lately, hardvideo. Get your head into the lesson of hypertext and you understand that each track is an object that is semi-autonomous, and that means you can treat each object within the single 'film' (though it is no longer a film, is it?) as being much like a node in a Storyspace hypertext. It may be used (visited), it might not. More importantly, each can be independently controlled in relation to each other or anything else.
Once upon a time a film consisted of a sound and an image track, and this was a sort of ur-film which was fixed in duration, order, and so forth. So the work you did in combination was always against the ground of this ur-film. But a hypertextuated (always wanted to invent a sentence where I could write that) cinema means the ur-film is the possible work that could be realised within the one film object (which is made of its multiple track objects). Just as the ur-hypertext of any particular work is the never realised ghost of the hypertext that is written, and read. It really is a very different conception of what the 'work' is, and of what it means to work on a work.
All promise and possibility, or to be sexier, singularity and event.
I take back what I said about the eZediaQTI demo. Limited to saving work with 5 'objects' across 5 frames. I"ll have to read the manual to see what it can do instead.
eZediaQTI - Cross-Platform Interactive QuickTime Authoring Software is the official title. New quicktime authoring environment that has a decent demo available. We're buying some copies for our Media Studies program, with a view to installing it across all our Macintosh labs so that we can introduce interactive audiovisual authoring in a basically nontechnical way. I've just downloaded the demo, and hopefully will get to play with it shortly. If it works as the editorials describe then it will do what we need in my new interactive video subject well. I'm also installing some copies of LiveStage Pro, for those students who really want to cut their teeth on this stuff, but for everyone else, this should do just fine.
BTW, what is it about Canada? LiveStage and eZediaQTI are both from Canadian firms, must be something in the tap water that they have developers that 'get' QuickTime and desktop media futures.
ChapmanLogic.com is a wonderful blog I've just found. In the blogroll is a link to my video blog (vog), under "Links to the Avant Garde". Wow. Never thought I'd get that title, chuffed, blushed and shushed.
Anyway, it is the home of Eli Chapman, I think, and they are exploring video blogging tools. Let the revolution begin. Oh, and my wish list:
I can provide 60 students as beta testers, and have server space for anyone wanting to experiment with vogs and needing to place some quicktime somewhere with reasonable bandwidth.
Telegraph | News | Lights! Camera! Retake! is a British story about the Honda ad that Brandon discussed and I picked up the other day. Describes the work that went into making it. As I'm fond of pointing out, great ads approach great art.
Beth Mazur at IDblog has made a passing reference tovogging. I can see I have to write the second part of my vogging tutorial quicksmart, since it is being misread as how to put video onto a blog. It isn't. It is how to make collaged and montaged video inside a $30 piece of software in, about, 3 minutes (with practice, 50 minutes if you follow the tute). As Mr Manovich (and Mr Landow), the 'native' aesthetic of the contemporary gui is overlapping windows (collage) that change in time (montage). So I reckon video on the web will probably be similar (and it ain't no different to any contemporary sports broadcast). The tutorial is about how to do that, and why doing that in QuickTime Pro is completely different to doing that in iMovie, Final Cut Pro, and so on, it's a softcopy desktop video thing. On the other hand, they are labour intensive (though that's largely me), but again as I pointed out some time ago, look at what Movable Type does automatically, and imagine a tool that does that with video blogging. The tools will arrive, I want to make sure we know what to do with them.
Jenny Weight, aka geniwate, has started a blog - I must be lonely. Jenny is an exceptional (local) hypertext writer, though I'm not sure how she would describe her practice these days.
Things been slow around here, MelbourneDAC is the reason. Slowly melting into a puddle of something not very pretty. Been trying to blog quite a bit of info about the conference, have just converted every paper to pdf and made available to speakers, put the list of things to do seems to be getting longer, not shorter. Anyway, abstracts and schedule now all online in html, some minor corrections coming in a couple of days.
Jill has made one of those simple observations that contains a significant insight. Particularly for someone like me with my penchant for the differences between time and space. Yes, blogs form contingent and emergent discourse communities, email lists presume this.
My contribution to simple observations is the one that occurred to me when I was writing out my notes for the lecture I gave at Swinburne this week. You write in your blog, and that this is one of the reasons why blogging is a new literacy.
To illustrate this I used the example of Word and essay writing. When you write an essay you write 'in' the essay. You don't write somewhere else and then under the file menu choose Save as Essay... There is an assumption (ideological and so naturalised as invisible) that to be a good academic essayist you pretty much need to write an essay as an essay. It is hard to find a student who doesn't realise this. Yet how many students (and others for that matter, and they should know better) think that writing in Word, and then going Save as HTML, is writing hypertext? Well, perhaps not many, but it would be clear that this is not hypertext writing, that to write hypertext you need to write hypertextually in a hypertext environment.
Which returns us to blogging. You don't blog in, say, Word, and then choose Save as Blog... from the File menu. You write in your blog, or in an environment that is close enough to your blog to be bloggish. To blog you blog, you don't write somewhere else for something else and save as. It seems to me that all the basic networked multiliteracies have this in common. You write in the medium - email, SMS, HTML, Storyspace, blogging, and so on. And this is one of the ways blogs are useful, productive, and a genre (and why there can be discussion about authenticity).