Vlog 2.1: December 2003 Archives

« November 2003 | Main | January 2004 »

December 29, 2003

Dear Blog

Well, I'm not sure if I need a new category or not, but I'm sitting at Tullamarine Airport waiting to board my flight. Transit in Singapore, and then Paris for a 5.30am morning. 32� outside here, last time I checked around 4� there. My Dutch Australian taxi driver (who was in the merchant navy and jumped ship on his third visit to Melbourne in 1960) assured me of how much I would like Paris, except for the Parisians (the same advice that my Greek Australian barber gave me this morning), and of where I should go to find cheap accommodation in Amsterdam. This part of the terminal is elevated on stilts and you can feel the floor shudder every now and then. I don't know if it is from some unseen jet nearby, trucks transporting underneath, or just people. The anteroom to adventure? Perhaps once, before jumbo jets, now it is only a prelude to twenty two and a half hours of confinement, poor food, and the whims of they who sit next, in front, and behind of you.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 09:09 PM | Comments (0)

December 23, 2003

Holidays are a Callin'

There will be very little happening here for the next month or so. On December 29 I leave for Paris, then Toulouse, Brussels, Copenhagen and Amsterdam. I'm giving some talks in Belgium to sing for my supper, but have kept my head down and out of everywhere else. [insert grin] I'm on holidays. I need one, I want one, and I'm having one. [ / insert grin]

Posted by Adrian Miles at 07:06 PM | Comments (1)

Tinderbox 2.1

The latest release of Tinderbox is out. I originally used Tinderbox for maintaining one of my first blogs, before migrating to Movable Type. I've just paid my USD70 for another year of upgrades from Eastgate, since I want to return to Tinderbox for some writing, thinking, and playing. It's seriously excellent software.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 07:03 PM | Comments (0)

Damned Useful

Document here bought to you by Apple. Basically it's about how to write a webpage properly, the sort of thing I'd make compulsory reading for my web writing students after they've got some code literacy. I'll just store it away here for later.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 06:58 PM | Comments (0)

December 22, 2003

Port Fairy Water 2-3

As the screen shot shows, this vog has the six sound tracks layered into this movie. Unlike the first two iterations, where the soundtracks are loaded as child movies, here they are all copresent in the movie. The differences?

Well, filesize for starters. Port Fairy 2-1 and 2-2 are only 2.6MB in size (they have been lightly compressed so that image quality is high), but now the file is 3.5MB. This is because in Port Fairy 2-1 and 2-2 the soundtracks are external to the movie that is being played, and only loaded dynamically if and when a mouse event calls them. Now, with the soundtracks embedded into the one QuickTime file, they of course require space.

However, only one soundtrack runs for the same duration as the video track, so what this means is that depending on when the user mouses into the movie there may, or may not, be a soundtrack to hear. That is quite literal. It isn't that the soundtrack has been scripted to a volume of 0, but that at that point in the timeline there is no corresponding soundtrack (as the screen shot indicates). Therefore a disadvantage of authoring like this is that your soundtrack durations must match the video duration if you wish for there to be continuous sound. This also illustrates why using childmovies can be a good idea. Not only does it mean you can write a leaner QuickTime front end to your content, but it also means that your soundtracks can be made to loop and so are available (audible) at any point in the timeline in the video track - their duration and location is completely independent of the parent QuickTime movie. An advantage of integrating all the soundtracks is that there is no lag as you move from one soundtrack to the other, instant on and off.

The point of this particular movie? Simply to move the soundtracks from being child movies to being an integral part of the architecture of the final movie and to literally demonstrate the implications or consequences of this. Unless the silence does a John Cage like thing for you, childmove soundtracks would seem to be a more intelligent model for sound in interactive QuickTime work where you want, for example, multiple commentaries, music, effect, or sound tracks. Oh, and in case this is being misunderstood, in interactive QuickTime vogging the soundtrack changes immediately for whatever scripted structures have been provided for. It is not a DVD model where you view the clip once with soundtrack A, then view the clip again with soundtrack B. This is a different and more sophisticated narratological or videological (what I call elsewhere softvideo and softvideography) model than what is ordinarily used in environments like DVD.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:00 PM | Comments (0)

Port Fairy 2-2

This vog is identical to Port Fairy 2.1 except the video is now horizontal rather than vertical. The sprite works the same way, same audio tracks, same order. Same idea, different perspective.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:57 AM | Comments (0)

Port Fairy Water 2-1

This small work has cropped two videos, layered them horizontally to produce a single video track (straightforward sort of thing you would do in any nonlinear editing system). They are compressed at reasonably high quality. There is a child movie track, which has six sound tracks - one atmos track and five commentaries. Mousing into the movie is counted, and controls which of the soundtracks plays. Everything loops.

Once upon a time I'd do this by using two different video tracks and treating them as individual tracks within QuickTime, however I've decided that this series will emphasise architectural and scriptural elegance, so in this example it was more effective to lay these two tracks in an editing program and then exporting it as a QuickTime file. This means the file consists of a single video track, the other method, authoring directly in QuickTime, means that QuickTime has to play two video files. There's not much gained in this movie by doing that since I don't want or need to do anything to the video windows as separate entities. If I wanted to script the movie so that the video on the left behaved or appeared in any way different to the video on the right then keeping them as separate video tracks (objects) within the QuickTime architecture would provide with the appropriate affordances and granularity.

Key points:

User activity is defined by mouse entry, not mouse click. A caress or touch rather than ringing the bell. This means simply moving over the work affects the work and so it is hard for any user not to produce a minor change in the work. (Changes should always be minor. Small scale interactive works are that, and shouldn't confuse large outcomes with grandness of vision.)
The time of the work is indeterminate. The video track runs for 1'26", and that is fixed, since the soundtracks are child tracks they have been built to run independently of the playstate of the video track. This means, in the simplest model, the duration of the entire work is the total duration of the child soundtracks. This totals around 4'30". Hence this 1'26" of video 'contains' 4'30" of content.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:53 AM | Comments (0)

December 19, 2003

bandwits

Tim over at vogner land has an impressive turn of phrase. "Bandwits" for those who think they're making vogs but pay no regard to bandwidth. I'm with Tim on this, for several reasons:

bandwidth costs and whether its the viewer/reader or the person running the server, someone is paying for it
low bit rate video (Tim's lo-vi, lov it) is an aesthetic property of voggging
as an aesthetic property it is one of the formal constraints
as a formal constraint it contributes to the art of vogging (in the same manner in which you might say there is an art of blogging)
vogging is not wannbecinema by another means (just like blogging is not wannabefiction or wannabepublished by another means)
showcasing your filmmaking abilities online is not vogging, it is defacto broadcast media
it does not have to be about making art
it does have to be about creating a vog vernacular which is not video, cinema, tv or blogging
the definition at vidblogs is a good start
just as we write with words, vogs mean we write with video
writing in video, which is not to be confused with video impressionism

Posted by Adrian Miles at 08:03 PM | Comments (2)

Port Fairy Water, Series 2 (aka when is an interactive movie an interactive movie?)

After finishing the first Port Fairy Water vogI decided that I've strayed a bit too far from the vog manifesto. It isn't quite as religious or eschatological as that probably sounds. Just a realisation that with all the sprite activity, child movie tracks and so on the work was getting unnecessarily complex for what I'm wanting to achieve or demonstrate. That the movie dimensions were probably getting too big, and that it was all pyrotechnics rather than content. Or, to put it the other way about, the pyrotechnics was the content.

While a sort of modernist zeal to explore the formal implications and possibilities of low bit rate interactive video is ok for a while, things were losing direction. The seductions of scale are pernicious :-). Larger images, more bandwidth, more of the screen. Not against any of that per se, but I think for a video blogging project it is sliding into something else.

So I'm going to make a brief thoroughly modernist series, Port Fairy Water, Series 2 (aka when is an interactive movie an interactive movie?). It is only going to use the content that I've generated for the Port Fairy Water vogs, though I'm constraining all content to be 208 x 117 pixels. It will all play within the browser space and I'm hoping to iterate a series of simple possibilities around mouse events, video, and six sound tracks.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 07:13 PM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2003

Peer to Peer

I note that the Canadian government is instituting a levy on things like iPods and that the money collected will be distributed to artists, presumably because it is assumed with tracks being ripped sales are being compromised. Thank goodness for the Canadians. In Australia there has been a surcharge on blank audio cassettes for years. The surcharge is collected and distributed via the Australian Performing Rights Assocation (and the PPCA) to artists, on the understanding that the major use of blank audio cassettes was to duplicate albums. Now, given all the nail gnashing about MP3, AAC, and so on, why can't a similar surcharge be placed on blank CDR's, and on things like MP3 players? As they do in Canada? We already have devices to collect copyright payments for the photocopying of articles and book chapters (audited and administered by the Copyright Collection Agency), or to require businesses to purchase a licence if they wish to play radio publically in their shops. Why is the move to a similar and existing system for CDR and MP3 (and DV tape and MiniDisk, etc) something that isn't regarded as a solution?

I can imagine one rationale is that I can rip a CD on my PowerBook, and distribute it without ever having to buy a CD to burn it onto, and I could play it off my PowerBook for free via something like iTunes. I could also transfer it to others via email, ftp, etc. That's true. But I still buy quite a few blank CDRs, even if I don't burn audio CDs on them, most of them are for moving data around or providing things to students, and so what you lose on the CD I may or may not rip you would certainly make back in the spindles of 50 blank CDRs I very regularly purchase.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 07:06 PM | Comments (2)

Language Technology Reserch.

The Language Technology Research Group at Melbourne University (about 700 metres up the road from my office) is an interesting collection of projects and research. A lot of computational linguistics and the like, from what I can see, though the list of Baden Hughes' possible research projects for graduate students makes interesting reading. Seems some of this material would be very much in ACH type territory. (I think, he mumbles...)

Posted by Adrian Miles at 07:00 PM | Comments (0)

December 13, 2003

Gravity

This is a minor online art work that is impressive. Simple, slight lateral use of frames, a humour that has the implication of making visible the basic conditions of a HTML based art work. A work that looks back towards the origins of net.art (I don't have the details of the piece so for all I know at the moment in might have been written in the golden age of net.art). It's minor nature should not be underestimated. I'm a great believer in the ability of some works of art doing what Deleuze describes as stuttering. They make language or a form stutter. They are 'minor' or marginal works in terms of a dominant code, language or vector of power. Deleuze's examples are Kafka, or even Godard (who can literally and figuratively make film 'stutter'). Here it is a minor work, apparently an aside, not monumental in scale or grand in ambition. But it works, it has humour and even perhaps the smallness of its aim is why it complements html so well, its stuttering is that it takes HTML and demonstrates that with a paucity of code and an explicit requirement for the user to do something the work works. The call to action is significant, without scrolling you can't and don't 'get it'. It is only about getting it. That's it.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 06:53 PM | Comments (0)

Gratulere

Anders has passed his defence and is now Dr Fagerjord. If you can read some of his work, exceptional combination of media studies in the context of information architectures.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2003

Human Character Interaction.

Playful interfaces. Crumpler is an Australian company that makes awesome bags. Their corporate aesthetic is very nicely represented here. Sometimes I'm struck by how much better this stuff can be than many art pieces. It takes the piss because it can and because it really is about money.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 05:28 PM | Comments (2)

Matt and Clarity

I see that a while back Matt doesn't think that Donald R's complex clauses are that bad. While I agree with Matt that they make sense, in the context in which they were uttered they're absurd. I can imagine they are a response to a question about Iraq, and by the time the reporting crowd had actually processed this the time to query would have been gone. It is rhetorical stonewalling. This is particularly the case with journalists because, unfortunately, your merit as a reporter in these contexts, from the point of view of your boss and your peers, is whether you get to ask a question. The premium is on asking, asking another, a later perhaps reflecting while writing your copy. In such circumstances to answer like this is to befuddle because no one could have had the time to devise a follow up question.

What is sort of, ironic? sad? silly? is that it could have been straight from Yes Minister, a BBC comedy where the senior bureaucrats master this sort of language to ensure that the ministers (and prime minister) don't know what is going on. I quote the following from the BBC web site, perhaps the show's writers have moved to Washington?

Private Secretary Bernard Woolley (Derek Fowlds), provided a useful foil for one of Sir Humphrey's show-stopping expositions:

"The fact that the Prime Minister needed to know was not known at the time that the now known need to know was known, and therefore those of us who needed to advise and inform felt that the information that we needed as to whether or not to inform the highest authority of the known information was not yet known, and therefore there was no authority for the authority to be informed because the need to know was not yet known, or needed."

Compared with Rumsfeld's:

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 04:53 PM | Comments (2)

RSS, the Arts and Standards

During the Eyebeam Forum on distributed creativity liza sabater made a wonderful post about RSS, a metastructure of the web, and creative practice. What I particularly like about it is her observation that this work requires standards, and if you don't, won't, can't use the standards then you won't be on the bus. Hell, you're not even going to be on the footpath :-)

Posted by Adrian Miles at 02:05 PM | Comments (0)

December 11, 2003

Missing Essay

Noah just let me know that the link to the pdf of my softvideography essay was dead. Now fixed:

http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/essays/softvideography.pdf

Posted by Adrian Miles at 09:48 AM | Comments (0)

Social Software and Serendipity

The world contracted. Chuck finds Byron via the post I made yesterday. Don't know what that means, since it would of course have been trivial for one to have Googled the other, so it is more the serendipity of how this domain works that I think is key.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 09:33 AM | Comments (0)

Rhizomatic Identities

I've run an announcement list for, I think, nearly three years. The list came out the collapse of another list, and was in response to what seemed to be a need to have a moderated distribution list for call for works, papers, exhibitions and so on. Recently the fibreculture announce list has developed some decent activity, and so it seemed to make sense to simply post the things I've been distributing to fibreculture announce. Bigger distribution, and it is about working the network, not duplicating because it's my list. Several people, though, have wondered why I would do this, because the list has been effective, useful, and has an identity. I find this odd. In the same way that I find email lists and their 'owner's' anxieties about the decline of lists odd. These are usually the same people who can happily stand up and pronounce (in books, email, conferences, grant applications, art works, you know what I mean) that the network is any or all of rhizomatic, nomadic, distributed, vectorial, acentred, again, you know what I mean.

If we're serious about the network as nomadic and rhizomatic of course lists will die. Of course new ones will form, mutate, and so on. Rather than invest so much in worrying about a list not 'working' (what does 'work' mean for something that is nomadic and rhizomatic?) move on. In my case, it would take 4 minutes to set up a new list, 20 minutes to send emails to several other lists inviting subscription. That's what it means to be nomadic. Nomadism does not only apply to how many lists or web pages or other sedimentations I might fly between, it refers to the sedimentations themselves.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 09:14 AM | Comments (1)

December 10, 2003

Useful

Via the chaotic etc, a description of what Panther's (OS X 10.3) text services are. This is the text handling stuff that is built in. Trés kewl.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 08:15 PM | Comments (0)

My Blogosphere Grows

With a welcome to Byron Hawk to the blogdom. I've only met Byron once, at the Fort Worth Computers and Writing Conference, in 2000 I think, but he's certifiably a fellow traveller. . .

Posted by Adrian Miles at 08:10 PM | Comments (1)

How Long?

Before our conservative - locking - up - asylum seekers - (including children) - removing - most - of - our - islands - from - our - 'immigration - zone' - xenophobic - 1950s - inspired - federal - government passes legislation to make this illegal, it is with I guess some pride I note that there is still, somewhere here, some notion of social equity and justice happening.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:33 PM | Comments (0)

December 09, 2003

Softvideography Essay

An essay of mine, "Softvideography", has just appeared in the latest Cybertext Yearbook. Here's a teaser:

If you like, these digital tools are primarily orientated towards publication (or transmission) and this form of publication requires a linear time based substrate, the privileged model of which is of course film and its avatar the video cassette — video hard copy. Now, obviously I am suggesting that this is not so very different from using your computer to get words out onto paper, and it isn’t. But of course it also suggests an alternative conception where we can use our computers to work with time based media where the delivery environment is not subject to the temporal temperance of cinema and video. This does not simply mean that we can now make works that are multilinear, which seems to have been the popular understanding (and practice) of much networked interactive media. As we’ve seen, softcopy in relation to writing includes much more than multilinearity, and while all the formal qualities of softcopy may be formed in relation to their interrogation of the stability of the page, they have also provided a poetics of screen based textual production and reception that productively looks outside of the page or the book. This suggests that we ought to be able to articulate a new poetics for desktop video — where historically digitisation in regard to video has been understood to be little more than a combination of a moving image plus sound track that can be played ‘randomly’ — that is neither specifically cinematic, videographic, or generically multimediated, a poetics that looks towards the formal possibilities afforded by digital, networked, screen based video. This poetics requires the video equivalent of softcopy, or as I prefer, softvideo.

The full citation is:
Miles, Adrian. "Softvideography." Cybertext Yearbook 2002-2003. Eds. Markku Eskelinen and Raine Koskimaa. Vol. 77. Jyväskylän: Research Center for Contemporary Culture, 2003. 218-36.

You can get a pdf of the essay.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

Port Fairy Water - 3

I can be obstinate. Have just completed the third iteration of the Port Fairy Water project. This time the six video tracks (three of the river, three of the pier) are all built as individual video tracks in the one movie file. Four of them are on layers behind the background, so they're not visible (but they're all playing) and clicking on any of the visible video panes simply swaps layers around. This gets around the network lag that happened with the child movie structure that the first of these experienced. The other side is that the file is now 7.4MB! This is what comes of having what is, in effect, six videos in one.

The five sound tracks still exist as external child movies, each loaded by mousing into either of the video panes, but these are all files between 48 and 152Kb in size so should load and play pretty well in most contexts. The rest of the work is as the earlier iteration. Because it is a 550 x 550 pixel vog I've decided to only play it via QuickTime player. Embedding video of that size on a web page only really works when I don't have a pile of generic blog stuff going on around it. I guess I should just rework the archive pages.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 10:19 AM | Comments (1)

December 08, 2003

Prime Time

The google bomb that links miserable failure to Mr Shrubs biography has made todays major state newspaper of record, The Age. The article is pretty straightforward, though not particularly au fait with the topic. I can imagine the panic now about subjective indexing...

Posted by Adrian Miles at 04:38 PM | Comments (0)

December 04, 2003

Bad Vog Corrected

The Port Fairy Water vog that I made a couple of days ago that didn't work properly online (though Will Luers has it working...). Well the download I made, which should work fine off the local drive, there was an error so the audio didn't work.

Now, finally, hopefully fixed. So visit the second Port Fairy vog, click the movie, and it will download a 7.4MB tar archive. Play it from your hard drive, and enjoy.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:27 PM | Comments (0)

December 03, 2003

Bad Vog

Yesterday I published a vog that I finally finished. Disaster. It is just too complex a structure to work on the network. The architecture requires the parent movie (basically the large 500 x 500 black movie you look at) to load three child movie tracks simultaneously. And play them. This is quite different to having a movie with one video track that has two different images playing (like you'd make in an editing environment). It is asking the QuickTime player to:

manage the download of three files external to itself
determine when it can start playing each of these files (simultaneously)
redner these files to the viewer
keep an eye on the the sprite tracks which overlay the entire active video panes (which are at the same time child movies)

It can do this locally off a hard drive, but not on the network. The lag is too much, so while the mouse hangs around over a sprite (because you're waiting and wondering what should happen) it counts various nonexistent mouse entries. I've left it online, as an example of what not to do. And I've made a new version of the poster movie that when you click on it will now download a 7MB+ archive of all the files. It should play locally off a hard drive just fine, just leave the files where you find them in the directory. (See screenshot.)

Posted by Adrian Miles at 07:46 PM | Comments (2)

Distributed Creativity

This week I'm invited to be one of the leaders at the 6th annual Eyebeam online forum on distributed creativity. The actual forum is at a long url, and the specific theme is "Whose version? Innovation in Authorship." (I'd actually forgotten that whose was whose and not who's so that doesn't auger well does it?). Hasn't started up yet, I'm assuming because it is running on US time.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 07:19 PM | Comments (0)

Contemporary Words

Doing a Google search for an essay by Jessica Helfand I noticed these sponsored links in Google! What I'm really impressed by is not the blatant cheating that this facilitates (I think there are numerous quite straightforward strategies for dealing with the quality of learning outcomes), but that when I went to CheatHouse.com (gee, they're coy aren't they?) they have a sort of peer network happening.

You can buy essays, or you can submit an essay and after approval you then are allowed access to downloading essays. This is an excellent idea, and more or less one part of what I described a while ago for a legitimate academic exercise!

I got sucked in too, I clicked the search field at the top of the CheatHouse page to search for an essay to find it's an ad and I was taken to a search page at Nocheaters.com. Here if I couldn't find what I wanted they'd write it for me at USD29.95 a page. What I'm concerned about is their claim that:

NoCheaters.Com does enough volume to afford our student customer base a low $29.95 per page rate! In other words, even 10 pages worth of scholarly research, number crunching, and data analysis, comes to less than $200!

I might be in the humanities but I'm pretty confident 10 x $29.95 is closer to $300 than $200, so given how shonky their maths is, what's it suggest about their writing?

The federal government really has missed its opportunity here. Assuming people pay this much, this suggests that an Australian student values an essay at around $420 Australian dollars. If we require two essays per subject, and four subjects is a full time semester, then that's $3360 that the open market values passing your course at.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 06:42 PM | Comments (0)

December 02, 2003

Port Fairy Water

What I wrote six weeks ago:

Well, haven't made any vogs for a long time, partly because it's the end of semester, have been writing a funding application, and I'm trying to teach myself Final Cut Express (when I learnt video editing it was pre-digital, so though I've been making interactive video works for nearly three years that's been using no more than iMovie). So, this weekend I put in a concerted effort while the kids were at a birthday party to finish something I've been working on for a while, Port Fairy Water.

So, now I've set aside time from more important tasks to actually get a vog out there. Frustrated the hell out of me that I just haven't set aside or had the time to do anything for so long.

The work is made up of a parent movie with three child movie tracks. Each of these child movie tracks contain, in turn, multiple movies.

One of the child movie tracks contains five soundtracks, which are loaded on demand. This is determined by counting mouse entries into either of the video panes. Each of the video panes is also a child movie. The one of the left is a view of the Moyne River in Port Fairy, hand held from a small picnic ground. The pane on the right is a view from the ocean wall at the mouth of the river, looking straight down a pier pylon to the sea and kelp below. Each of these video child movies contains three movies, each of identical content, just progressively higher quality. They default to the most heavily compressed versions of each clip when the movie begins.

Mousing into either of the video panes is counted, and determines which of the five soundtracks is played. For each soundtrack there is an accompanying graphic which appears, containing the text of the voiceover soundtrack. Clicking on the video causes another child movie track to be loaded. With the sound and video tracks each cycles through their series continuously, so that once you've viewed each of the video tracks the fourth click will load the first, most highly compressed, copy of the clip. Likewise with the soundtrack.

I added three download progress bars, one for each of the childmovies (the two videos and the soundtrack movies). I haven't used these before as a general rule, thinking that the lag that's involved with childmovies, which is a qualitatively different lag to just downloading a clip, is a condition of the network. But it is clear that users just don't get what it means to use childmovies, that the content resides elsewhere on the network and is not loaded at the same time as the parent movie (the movie that you first 'play'), and so if you click on the video, the movie you are 'watching' requests another movie from a server, and this other movie cannot start playing until it has downloaded. So I've added progress bars so that there is an indication that something is happening. Which is a pretty basic HCI point isn't it?

The progress bars aren't that clear. The blue line indicates where in the current movie (remember it refers to the child movies) you are up to. There is a light grey background to the bar which indicates download progress. A child movie will not start playing unless enough of it has been downloaded for QuickTime to reckon it is can play without having to pause for more data.

I added the text with the soundtrack in response to an observation of Anders'. While what he pointed out about the soundtrack is correct, these works are quite actively not about usability, and explore redundancy, repetition, and noise. So while the use of the soundtrack in the example he mentions doesn't 'add' to the usability of the project, it does require the user to do something, in much the same way that not disclosing all information or narrative at once, and requiring some act for further disclosure, is a reasonable action to have to perform. So, here I've taken it further, by introducing some redundancy and further repetition by narrating and stating the narration as visible text within the movie. What does it achieve? I don't know. Nothing specific, but it overlays a sort of density to the words as spoken and read which is not so much about redundancy (on the way to vacuity or ennui) but rather to foreground the distance, gap and material differences between spoken and written text. It is not an act of erasure, to speak is obviously not the same as to present written text, and by placing both in such proximity is to explore this difference, and to foreground it.

The work is very much about water, a sort of crude Renoirism (Jean, not his dad). The heavily compressed videos, which load first because they'll download much faster than the higher quality videos, have a degree of pixellation that deliberately produces the artefact equivalent of digital impressionism. This is done without filters, just compress it down very hard and let the codecs start to work their magic, largely by working on 16 x 16 blocks of pixels (in the case of Sorenson Pro) which become very visible when the codec has to make do because you've set a data rate too low.

So, the blurring and noise this introduces, particularly when you film things like clouds and water (abstract elements), gives an elegance and beauty to the content that is serendipitous in its relevance. The water has a mutability and play of surface that of course provides quite the reflexive mirror for work exploring digital compression. Light reflections, surface, depth, pattern that is abstract and observed. This is not much different to early narrative cinema, where many films found themselves gazing at light on water or light on clouds, there is a narcassism to this looking which is perhaps less the misread gaze than the machine seeking the mirror to glimpse its face. So, while about water and location, I think this work is much more about video, more so than most of the other works where I have been much more consciously reflexive.

I wonder if this is then a more mature work? Nah. Bugger that.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)

Child Movies, an Explanation

QuickTime supports ‘parent movies’ and ‘child movies’. A parent movie is a container movie that may, like any other QuickTime movie, consist of numerous tracks, but it will also include one or more movie tracks. A movie track, which should not be confused with a video track, is a QuickTime track that allows you to load external QuickTime content, in effect other QuickTime movies, into another movie.

The movie that contains the movie track is known as the parent movie, and the content that is loaded within the parent movie is known as a child movie.

Child movie content can be any data type that QuickTime can read, and it can reside anywhere that the parent movie can access it, so if the parent movie is designed to be delivered via the network, then the child movie content can, literally, reside anywhere else on the network. A parent movie can contain multiple child movie tracks. More impressively an individual child movie track in a parent movie operates as a list so that it may contain numerous individual external files. For example, you can make a QuickTime parent movie that contains a child track, and that individual child track consists of, lets say, a list of nine sound tracks. The parent movie can be scripted so that one of the nine child movies is loaded subject to whatever conditions or actions are scripted for, and this can be altered dynamically during the playing of the parent movie.

Child movies are able to exist in complex relations to parent movies, as it is possible to tie a child movie’s duration and playback to its parent, or for the child to be independent of the parent. Where a child movie is slaved to the parent movie it may only play when the parent movie is playing, and it will stop playing when the parent movie ends. Where a child movie track is not slaved, then it can play independently of the parent movie’s duration, and even separately from the parent movie’s play state, so that even where a parent movie may be paused, the child movie can continue to play.

This sets up very interesting problems for what constitutes the playing time of a movie, and also allows QuickTime to become a 'front end' for considerable other content that is only loaded subject to variables - user activity, date, time, movie state, external data, internal data, and so on. Much like a browser is simply a front end onto other content, QuickTime (like Flash, for example Sounds Like Techno which uses XML into Flash) can also be regarded as a browser space to interactive time based content. Where it departs from Flash though is that video and audio are native inhabitants.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 04:01 PM | Comments (0)

Clarity of Intention

Donald Rumsfeld has won this years Gobbledegook award for the following:

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know."

Inspires confidence for foreign policy, defence, and diplomacy, doesn't it? (Courtesty of The Age.)

Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)

Clara Mancini

I first met Clara at the 2000 Hypertext conference in San Antonio. She works in Britain, and the Open University and comes from an Italian semiotic film theory background (well, in terms of her theory, in terms of what other background's she may have I don't know!). She has just passed her PhD, supervised by Simon Buckingham Shum, and her thesis explores and proposes novel ways of using some film semiotics in hypertext rhetoric to visually aid or make sensible argumentative structures.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 09:13 AM | Comments (2)