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May 27, 2004

Ben Waggoner

Waggoner, Ben. Compression for Great Digital Video: Power Tips, Techniques, and Common Sense. DV Expert Series. San Francisco: CMP Books, 2002.

This list of titles is turning into a hall of fame really. Like Matthew Peterson and QuickTime, it isn't that what Ben Waggoner doesn't know about compression isn't worth knowing, it simply doesn't exist. If you really do want to understand what's involved in more detail than you'll ever want (unless you're an engineer) about compression this is where you go. It is the sort of standard text that everyone who works in video and audio online should read simply to develop the literacy in what compression is. Why? I guess in the same way that if you drive racing cars you aren't the mechanic, but to get the best out of your car you have to be able to talk mechanically to your mechanics. Same deal here. Understanding something about what happens in them there codecs helps you appreciate what you can and can't do, why, and simply how to compress more successfully.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 08:59 AM | Comments (0)

May 26, 2004

Interactive Quicktime

Peterson, Matthew. Interactive Quicktime: Authoring Wired Media. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman Publishing, 2004.

What Matthew Peterson doesn't know about scripting QuickTime isn't worth knowing. Not only this but this is one of the best written 'technical' books I've ever had the pleasure of using. The CD contains all of the examples described through the book, and includes demo versions of the necessary software to make everything that is included. What is particularly impressive are the questions that end each chapter. These aren't to test what's been read but raise new questions and problems in an engaging, engaged and informing way. This is part of Apple's QuickTime Developer Series, and with their QuickTime for the Web title these form the two fundamental books for those wanting to work interactive QuickTime.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 08:54 AM | Comments (0)

May 25, 2004

QuickTime for the Web

n.a. Quicktime for the Web: For Windows and Macintosh. Third Edition ed. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2004.

This is the bible for QuickTime, a part of the Apple QuickTime Developer Series and pretty much lays out all that QuickTime does. This is the book that, if you're serious in wanting to work with QuickTime, you'd read cover to cover.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 05:15 PM | Comments (0)

this is not vogging

I've commented on these discussions before, but this is one I'd missed (it is from 2002), Tom Tomorrow (gottaluvit) notes that the last thing we need are more talking heads aka video blogging. Yep. Videoblogging should be and will be about blogging with video. Blogs are not talking heads. They're people writing rich, informed and engaged things. There are thousands of blogs that don't do this, which is hardly a criticism of the genre (read a bad book lately, lousy news article, how much TV do you really enjoy?) but is an observation about what happens when communication is distributed. That's fine too.

But videoblogging will be about the things that blogs are about, so the vogs will be rich, informed, engaged, intelligent, have something to say or do, and will push and redefine what video is. In the same way that blogs make visible what lots of us hypertext people have been advocating and saying all along. The network makes a difference. Authorship and readership approach towards a zero degree.

And yes, it is harder to do in video than in trad. blogging, but the technology is already there we just don't yet have the tools to let us do it because no one can think of a reason to do it. That's just lack of vision and sloth.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 03:34 PM | Comments (2)

blog events

While trying to tidy out my old email (those things I promised to reply to but didn't) I came across this gem from Jane Love, from June 2002:

but blogs strike me as a particularly rich instance of the generative potential of a technology running up against an instrumentalist vision of it: that's what this whole "blog debate" is about, i think. the people who think that blogs are "no big deal," who view them in terms of their immediate, noncontextual operability, can't understand those who allow blogs to recondition their sense of what's possible in online writing practices. for these people, blogging isn't simply a technology, it's an *event.* maybe that's what i'm trying to get at in my argument: a sense of the eventfulness of any given technological instance. alain badiou would call this the ethical imperative in the technological situtation, i think (i've just started reading badiou), and i think it's the most difficult and demanding aspect of realizing the role of technology in education. and elsewhere.

The Event is the blog. Its vectors flows and passages. Or just read Michael Joyce's essay in Ilana Snyder's recent anthology :-)

Posted by Adrian Miles at 09:29 AM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2004

when is a vog a vog?

Ah, this is rapidly becoming a bit of a chestnut isn't it? Having a relook at www.vidblogs.com today things are moving apace. What with moblogging courtesy of G3 spectrum, and the example of blogging, more and more people are moving towards video blogs. This is, of course, hardly surprising, but like many of the blogs out there they don't amount to a lot. Harsh, yeah, I know. I'm all for empowering people, but plonking video onto a blog front end is not yet the revolution. It is plonking video on a webpage. Why?

Vogging is the same. A vog ought to be:

places like vidblog.com confuses publication with making. Any good blogger knows that words don't come cheap. Neither should video.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:43 PM | Comments (3)

Social Software

Stumbleupon is a site that David told me about. It seems to be a URL bookmark aggregator and repository, you use it to 'vote' for pages you want to keep a record of (aka bookmark) and it then uses this information to not only maintain your bookmark list but also it uses this to find other users' recommendations. In this way it farms the collective wisdom of its users so that if you like site X, Y, and Z then it can recommend other sites based on the collected recommendations of other users. Much like amazon.com's recommendation service.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:38 PM | Comments (0)

May 17, 2004

Internet Art

Thames and Hudson have published a small book on internet art, this page is the list of all the artworks in the book. A useful resource.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 06:24 PM | Comments (2)

krappy.com

A friend of mine has just launched his ecommerce site, krappy.com. Bad taste knows no bounds.

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

May 14, 2004

Farming

Bad day down on the farm. Beautiful sunny crisp day, time to read, write, prepare for next week. But, um, my installation of mysql (which of course is crucial to everyone's blogs) is appearing grumpy. It is still running, and apparently doing what it ought to do, but the root account in mysql seems to be, well deaf. I've eventually found how to reset the root password for mysql (here and here are the best two explanations) which I've done, but I simply cannot log in to mysql using phpMyAdmin even though the config file ought to let me. Spent 4 hours today on this. One of those moments when I realise I'm an academic, not a sys admin.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

May 13, 2004

Creative Computing adopted

The program I teach within here at RMIT has just formally adopted the manifesto for creative computing as a pedagogical document that defines our approach to the teaching and learning of Information Technologies. This is a good thing. Because

Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)

May 12, 2004

Snow From the Train

Another vog, another one of the European holiday series (and yes, I am trying to get them out a week at a time and yes, I do want to finish them!). This is called Danish Snow and is material I shot out of the train window as Anna and I travelled from Copenhagen to Amsterdam. In the south of Denmark we travelled through a wonderful snow storm, all the fields carpeted, rabbits hopping away from the train across the snow, trees with their white umbrellas. I love the snow, I think it is mysteriously magical the way a landscape is transfigured, silenced, and relit by snow. The novelty and beauty is something I never tire of (though I live in a country where snow is a long drive away so I guess if I lived somewhere where snow was a regular event my views may be different).

This vog is like the previous Brussels Park vog (explanation here) where I have two child movies loading next to each other and mousing into one controls the playback speed of the other. As in the previous vog the effect is to speed up playback. Clicking in one videopane restores the original speed of the other, and also lets you toggle through a series of textual annotations. One of the things I'm interested in with the textual annotations is perhaps using this to provide a specific date stamp for the work. There is still the usual date and time stamp within the blog post itself, but another timestamp that appears within the work. I did toy with making this a text track and clickable so it operated as a permalink, but wasn't happy with the outcome, though this is something I expect I'll be returning to shortly.

Increasingly I'm realising that my work is very much about time, duration, the quotidian and the effect come affect of duration in indexical media. The specific indexicality that I'm interested in is time based, so it is important in vogging, at least in my vogging, that work records worlds that are verisimilitudionous (is that a word or have I just spelt it wrong), a condition that I think is actually key to blogging (he adds). So my vogs seem to be less concerned with complex interactivity, or even that mutlimedia broadband media rich experience, than time poems.

Hence this work is about movement, place, memory, the exotic, and embedded variable durations.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)

May 11, 2004

Hypertext.RMIT adds another research blogger...

Melissa Gregg from the University of Queensland has just taken residence in a blog that is being hosted by hypertext.rmit. We now have over 20 academics and postgraduate researchers using blogs that we make available here, largely because they can't find supportive or flexible enough policies or people internally to allow such activities. A revolution of small moments.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)

May 10, 2004

Announcing KnetLit ...

Jeremy Yuille and I have moved the manifesto for creative computing to a new blog come website. The object of this is to extend our ideas and thinking about what we mean by each of the terms, and to, let's be frank, set an agenda. It is open for comments, but please keep in mind that it is very early days yet - we're writing, adding, and designing. This will also form the basis of a research paper we are writing about creative computing, and an action research project we intend to undertake in the second half of this year. The site is located at http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~knetlit and comments, additions, revisions, criticisms, are welcome.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 07:24 PM | Comments (0)

Nearly End of Semester

Well, only three weeks to go to the end of semester one. I've been teaching a new first year subject, Editing Media Texts, which forms part of the new curriculum we've developed for the Media degree. Several years ago we initiated a review of all that we did in Media, including curriculum, industry relevance, administrative structure, and so on. This gave us the opportunity to pretty much completely redress and redesign everything that forms the curriculum, and start from scratch, emphasising process based teaching, collaborative practices, and media relevant literacies.

Historically our first year required students to stream into either TV or radio production, to undertake a humanities major, and to do some compulsory communication subjects. The new structure in first year has removed TV and radio as options, and its object is that by the end of first semester every first year will be able to:

and be able to reflect on these activities critically. By the end of first year all students will also be able to:

Academically theory in first year is something you read about, so it is all secondary and descriptive sources. More, "what is ideology" rather than reading say Comolli and cinema and apparatus (Comolli would be second year). So, I've been responsible for Editing Media Texts, where, you guessed it, we've introduced editing. I've used the subject to also introduce a series of basic computer literacies, such as using the student server, using OS X, backing up work, and so forth. I've also been able to use the subject to begin to teach students computer literacy, where they are learning how to read an interface and so figure out by themselves what to do in any given program (I'll write more about this shortly). Within EMT the emphasis has been on process based teaching, with a lot of reflective practice, and a lot of peer and staff feedback for each of the editing exercises they've had to do. While they haven't submitted final work yet, things on the whole have been excellent. Students 'get it', and so while we may be using iMovie to edit, they are spending four or five hours editing a one minute sequence where all the time is spent thinking about editing, and not learning how to negotiate a complex program.

This is, very specifically, one of the major objects of this course, students are to be spending their time editing and thinking about editing, and not doing party tricks in Final Cut Pro or Avid (and there are party tricks enough in iMovie) or Photoshop. There has been some excellent work, some mediocre work, and some poor work, attendances have been maintained throughout the semester, and while my reading list is abysmal (I think all my time and energy went into developing the process based methodology, now that I've got most of that working next year the reading can be more appropriate) all of the students are now, in a basic way, media capable in terms of getting content into the computer, cutting it, and saving it. Next semester we concentrate on ways of getting back out again.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 03:24 PM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2004

Too Kewl for School

During some discussion at the presentation at SIAL a student showed me this URL, which has the very wonderful TouchGraph Google Browser. Type in your URL and you get an interactive graph of the link architecture. Move nodes around, retrieve them, get information on them. I like this and I think it might even be useful in relation to teaching with blogs to draw emergent blog architectures.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)

Places to Visit

Places to visit as part of the talk on networks that I'm giving to students at RMIT's Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory this morning:

Key Points.

Networks are ecologies. They are constituted by communication flows. These flows are symmetric and asymmetric. They exhibit emergent properties (including strange attractors and phase transitions). They are distributed. They are acentric and polymorphous. They are participate in and constitute a sociality.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 09:50 AM | Comments (0)

May 05, 2004

Revisting an Old Question

If I make a vog that allows ergodic realtime interaction with its users, where is the work? For example, imagine a vog that is networked, so let's say 100 users are 'viewing' it simultaneously. Let's imagine that this vog is scripted with various bits of narrative content delivered off a server via child movies. This means that the work each user 'views' could be qualitatively distinct.

In this context, what, or where, is the critical object that we ordinarily describe as the work?

This is a problem that has been well described by people like Thomas Pavel (see Pavel, Thomas. Fictional Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) who problematise where a text resides (if we burn all copies of Hamlet, have we destroyed Hamlet?) but here it would appear to develop an added layer of complexity or confusion (noise) simply because there is no substantive substrate to what constitutes the text. At least in the Hamlet example there is an artefact that we can, to a significant degree, recognise and accept as Hamlet.

While the ontology of this gets interesting, it is also indicative of the manner in which contemporary textuality (for want of a better term) is increasingly determined or defined by its experientiality. This is the same thing that John Thackara describes as the province of design. For example, let's say for the sake of demonstration that there are 10,000 news orientated Web sites online. Each of these sites relies on three or four major sources for all of their news, and then some local reporters for local content. Because all news services rely largely on the same sources (and even where they don't, still largely follow the same newsworthiness criteria) the only thing that can separate each of these sites from the other is the experience of the site that they provide. This is an act of design, and this design experience extends from visual presentation to writing style to what information is provided and its architecture. The point is that what discriminates or separates one from the other is primarily experiential. This is why the 'creative class', to use Richard Florida's terminology, is so significant for this is the economy we now find ourselves participating within (blogs being of course a prime example of this, blogs are design experiences not textual artefacts if by artefacts we mean discourses that a community of readers can read and agree on what the textual object is). This economy is not only economic (sorry) but more significantly semiotic and it affects the ontological semiology of the objects or artefacts we now write, make, publish, and participate in.

Returning to my vog example, the textual object here is less important as an object of study in itself than the sets of experiences that it produces. That is the effect and substrate of the work, and is where the work is to be found. This might suggest that these works are closer to sport (and games of course) than the sorts of artefacts humanities scholars ordinarily think they're studying. It has become a participation sport, with blogging simply being the textual networked equivalent of extreme sports.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 09:02 AM | Comments (0)

May 04, 2004

Network Speed

This is from John Hopkins via a current discussion on empyre:

I framed that problem thus: "By nature, networks are human-scaled and exist in human-scaled time. They develop at the speed of life."

Posted by Adrian Miles at 09:11 AM | Comments (0)

May 03, 2004

Have eBay, can Fantasise

I got this via an email so if he's made the office email rounds then no doubt he's got a lot of traffic and popped up all over the place, still, you've got to admire the self confidence. (What's it about? Jay Maynard's TRON costume.)

Posted by Adrian Miles at 06:17 PM | Comments (1)

Manifesting the Manifesto

I note that Geoffrey Rockwell has picked up the manifesto and added some ideas. First off I'm rather chuffed since Geoffrey is someone I think I've only met once, at the ACH 1999 conference at Charlottesville, where we commonwealth colonials shared some fine over-the-border scotch one evening. He's a computing humanities scholar of the first order, who was instrumental in setting up the McMaster Multimedia Studies stream. Anyway, flattered to be read by such company, and that aside he wishes to add:

Creative computing extends curiosity about what could be
Interrupting, repurposing and transcoding are fundamental practices in digital literacy
Responsible computing is open

The first is good, and while I would probably leave out 'curiosity' (we culled a lot of text out of the early versions) and leave it as suggesting the possible, the intent is certainly in accord with where things ought to head. I'd probably argue about the second one, I'm not sure to what extent it is different to the manifesto's point about breaking, gleaning and assembling, though it might be useful to add Geoffrey's terms to the same point as another way of restating what these verbs intend. Finally, I'm not frankly not sure about the last one. My working method is that 'open' is being used in some Ecoian (Ecoean??) sense but then I get stuck as to what is being suggested, what does that actually mean in relation to 'responsibility'?

Marginal note: Jeremy and I are moving the manifesto to its own site and working up more content around it, we're also hoping to use it as the basis for an action research project for a subject we're hoping to co-teach next semester. More news soon...

Posted by Adrian Miles at 05:32 PM | Comments (0)

Brussels in the Park

After quite a lull (teaching tends to do that) I've just finished another small vog, part of the holiday series I've been working on. This vog, Brussels in the Park, was shot while overseas in January but I've only just got around to capturing and scripting the work. I shot it on my Canon Ixus so it is all very lo-fi, and I then stretched its duration in QuickTime Pro to make it run about 8 or 10 times longer. The effect of course is very slow motion, but how this plays in QuickTime is as a series of discontinuous stutters, more like one frame then slowly move to next frame, pause, and so on.

Technically what I've built though is a bit more tricky. There are two videos, each loaded as child movies in individual video panes. Each video pane also has a sprite attached, which has been scripted so that mousing in to one video varies the playback speed of the other video, and vice versa. The script is very simple, it just doubles the playback speed of the clip. This won't work well until all of each clip (remember they're child movies) has been loaded, since it can't very well play back faster if it doesn't yet have the data to play! Clicking the video pane has the effect of restoring its partnered clip to normal playback speed and of displaying 1 of 3 text graphics (successive mouse clicks rotates you through each of the minor texts). I can vary the playback rate of these embedded videos because I've loaded them as child movies, and it sets up a nice series of juxtapositions between each of the video panes in terms of play back speed and the visual content. These were shot after Anna and I had visited René Magritte's apartment (scroll a long way down the page) and this is a park nearby and so I filmed the trees and the sky since they do look like the trees and sky in his work.

One function of these texts is to date stamp the vog, within the vog, much like the way individual blog posts provide a timestamp with individual posts, and of course it also continues my interest of exploring or using the relation of text and moving image within individual works where reverberations or resonances are established between each - one is not equivalent to the other, they have different economies to perform and participate in. The stolen soundtrack, a sample from Neil Young's "One of These Days" is related to a new vog series I'd like to do which is, well, a series of letters to friends of mine. Though I guess using this grab from the song might get me a cease and desist letter. The variable playback also continues what I'm increasingly realising is my specific interest in interactive digital video, which are new problems of or for film temporalities, hardly surprising given my interest and respect for Deleuze's cinema books (for a first failed attempt to document this). This work also continues a series of statements or explorations of interaction, so most of the activity responds to the mouse entering the play space of the video, with clicking also now producing other effects on the nature of the work. I don't like interactivity to be defined or determined by 'clicking on' it is just too Pavlovian an idea, I'm much more inclined to think about the or a play of surfaces, interactivity for me ought to be closer to an idea of touch, rather than jab.

The entire project, including the video and the LiveStage files, are available 3.9MB total.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:11 PM | Comments (0)