Vlog 2.1

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August 31, 2004

digital interactive video exploration and reflection

Diver is, as the title suggests, an unwiedly acronymn. Got this from the videoblogging list, is a very impressive piece of software that would be ideal for teaching cinema studies. Will send 'em an email tomorrow to find out more.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 06:20 PM | TrackBack

August 30, 2004

apple explanation of the Microsoft ActiveX component

This is straightforward. QuickTime should be enclosed by an object tag that has the classid for the QuickTime ActiveX component. It's a pain to do but necessary. The QTHTML tool writes this automatically by the way. This page documents this. The code looks something like:

<OBJECT CLASSID="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" WIDTH="160"HEIGHT="144" CODEBASE="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab">
<PARAM name="SRC" VALUE="sample.mov">
<PARAM name="AUTOPLAY" VALUE="true">
<PARAM name="CONTROLLER" VALUE="false">
<EMBED SRC="sample.mov" WIDTH="160" HEIGHT="144" AUTOPLAY="true" CONTROLLER="false" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">
</EMBED>
</OBJECT> The structure is simple. This is compulsory:

<OBJECT CLASSID="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" WIDTH="160"HEIGHT="144" CODEBASE="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab">

and then after that you write series of PARAM name="attribute" VALUE="value" pairs, always enclosed in their own tag. So for each value you add to the embed tag (controller, autostart, and so on) you must match it with a PARAM Value pair. The PARAM value is the embed tag attribute, for example "controller" and the value is the value given to that in the embed tag, for example "true".

Hence if I added loop="palindrome" in my embed tag I would need to write:
<PARAM name="loop" VALUE="palindrome">

Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:02 PM | TrackBack

qt file formats

For future reference, this is the page at Apple that lists all of the file formats that QuickTime supports. A misunderstood point about QuickTime, it is a media player, where media means media not medium.

Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:01 AM | TrackBack

teaching, the web, copyright

I'm teaching something that is going to be called Network Media (aka Networked Medias). It is a first year subject that every Media student has to do. Includes basic HTML, blogs, and shortly embedded time based media and DVD design. At the moment everyone is writing a series of web pages for assessment, and I'm being besieged by questions about what images found online can and can't be used in their work.

The short answer is that without explicit permission none. Which shocks everybody and turns into a litany of if everyone else does it why can't we. (Yes, I have said what my mother always said, "if they jumped in the lake would you jump in too?", and yes, it is as ineffectual now as it was then.)

Then I realised, after several days of patient explanation, that there was something very basic that I, and of course most of the students, had overlooked. All of semester one involved basic Photoshop, camera use, composition, and so on. So I sent the following to everybody. It now reads as unnecessarily harsh, though I have a lecture with them in 20 minutes so can deal with that then, but this is what I proposed:

Posted by Adrian Miles at 09:07 AM | TrackBack

August 27, 2004

tutorial on how to export from iMovie using 3ivx

Sean has made a QuickTime video tutorial on how to export from iMovie using the 3ivx codec. This exports compliant MPEG4 and is a better codec than Apple's. The video tutorial is online in Sean's video blog, you need QuickTime 6 or better to view it.

Correction sent from Sean:

I would like to point out one inaccuracy though. The tutorial can be viewed with QT, Real, or Windows Media, and should be viewable with QT 5 or later (although I haven't tested with QT 5 in a while.) [received August 27]

Posted by Adrian Miles at 05:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Media Studies blog project

This is the informal non pr announcement. We (that is, me) have just set up blogs for every first year Media Studies student. At the moment most of them are linked from the subject blog, and from a couple of weeks ago I thought this was an optimistic start. This is part of the general curriculum review that has been undertaken in Media Studies, and it was decided to provide a blog for every student because:

• students in an applied manner would develop fundamental network literacies
• students would have a writing space that was theirs throughout their undergraduate degree which could then be used as a reflective journal across all their disciplines
• graduates in media studies need to have networked identities
• graduates in media studies have to move beyond old media hierarchies
• writing is a communicative act
• in contemporary media ecologies the distance or distinction between 'design' and 'writing' no longer exists
• students are expected to become knowledge producers, not consumers

  We don't know if this will work, some students will love their blogs, others will despise them, most I expect to accommodate them and in turn be accommodated by their blogs. Does it matter that some won't 'get it'? Perhaps, but numerous students don't 'get' essay writing, or mathematics, or music. On the other hand by using this with essays and portfolio based assessment there are a range of learning styles and knowledge outcomes that I hope will begin to even out the hierarchies that traditional humanities based assessment has privileged.

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 05:40 PM | TrackBack

  August 26, 2004

  Remember

  That if you want to migrate a Movable Type installation from BerkeleyDB to mysql then in the mt.cfg file leave the local file path pointing to the DB installation as is. If you remove or change this before running mt-db2sql.cgi then you'll just get errors. Leave the configuration pointing to your old database, then run the cgi to move it into mysql.

  Why did I do this? Because I wanted to run mt-close.cgi to close old entries in the MelbourneDAC blog which was full of 1700 spam comments. Turns out you can't run mt-close.cgi (well I couldn't) until my blog was using mysql. It's been a slow day blog farmer kind of day.

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 05:07 PM | TrackBack

  videoblog pinging

  In blog land a ping is the signal that one blog sends to another blog, or to another server, to indicate that a post has been made. A blog may ping a central service to indicate that an update has been posted, or it may ping an individual blog to indicate that one blog post has made a comment about another blog post. So pings have proved extremely useful to help build connections between blogs. Well, Andreas Haugstrup and Jay Dedman via http://www.videoblogging.info, have established a site where you can ping when your videoblog is updated. When you post, ping:
  
  http://www.videoblogging.info/ping
  
  and your videoblog will be recognised within www.videoblogging.info

  If you need help working out how to ping from your blog, visit http://www.videoblogging.info for help.

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 04:35 PM | TrackBack

  digitally obsessed

  Digitally Obsessed is a web site that has a lot of QuickTime resources. If you go to their software page you'll find things like QuickTime Quick Batch that does batch conversions for you, and QT HTML which generates appropriate embed tags for QuickTime on html pages. This is useful because there are a lot of attributes available and you have to double up on them to accommodate Internet Explorer on PC because of the ActiveX crapola.

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 10:21 AM | TrackBack

  massive change

  Is a Bruce Mau project. Massive Change is about the relation of design to global change. Two things as I passed by today. Designers seem to have become major sort of, well not guru's but something like a guru. I'm also thinking of John Thackara and Doors of Perception. The second thing is how Massive Change uses a very simple blog template structure. A series of single points, presented as categories on the left. Each you visit in the manner of a manifesto and there are comments being collected for each point. So it is the manifesto turned into blog dot points so each manifesto item is its own page. Jeremy and I did the same thing for network literacies - design convergence or just bloody obvious?

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 10:05 AM | TrackBack

  and thanks

  To Dan Winckler (a video blogger of some repute). I don't think something I've made has ever been called "fucking cool" before.

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 08:11 AM | TrackBack

  syntheses

  Courtesy of Collin who had linked in to my earlier entry on using Mau to invent knowledge, I have found Rob Kendall's "Smoothcircuit". Only had one play of it, but this is very good work.

  And from the same place Collin introduces me to Jeff Rice's "Theories I believe In" which is a nice adjunct to the network literacy manifesto. Weave the webs. Build. HEY YOU!.

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 08:08 AM | TrackBack

  August 25, 2004

  dion's turning japanese

  My friend Dion is teaching English in Japan for the next long while. He's started a blog and I know Anna will squirm with envy at the dots (though one entry a blog does not make).

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:04 PM | TrackBack

  3ivx

  These settings are courtesy of Sean Gilligan (but this is what he's really up to) and apply to the 3ivx MPEG4 codec. I played around with this the other day and got it working fine in QuickTime on a machine without the codec installed. Made a movie with it but obviously changed the settings since it then broke without the codec installed. So, these are the settings to use for 2 Pass Encoding:

  1. First Pass: Don't output video
  2. Second Pass, Basic Options:
  3. Best Quality
  4. Suppress last 0 frames
  5. Second Pass, Advanced Options
  6. Force keyframe every 300 delta frames
  7. Half Pixel Motion: on
  8. Four Vector Motion: on
  9. Mpeg Quanitizer (ASP): off
  10. Adaptive Quantization: off
  11. Output Pure MP4 video: on
  12. Use VopN Coding: on

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 10:43 AM | TrackBack

  August 24, 2004

  embedding vog roll 2.0

  To embed vogroll 2.0 into your video blog:

  <OBJECT CLASSID="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" WIDTH="60" HEIGHT="405" CODEBASE="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab"> <PARAM name="SRC" VALUE="http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/vogroll/vogRoll2.mov"> <PARAM name="AUTOPLAY" VALUE="false"> <PARAM name="CONTROLLER" VALUE="false"><EMBED SRC="http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/vogroll/vogRoll2.mov" WIDTH="60" HEIGHT="405" AUTOPLAY="true" CONTROLLER="false" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/"></EMBED></OBJECT>

  Things to watch out for: the above has no line breaks and shouldn't. So if you copy and paste it via a text processor or similar, and oddness intervenes, just make sure you don't have stray line breaks appearing. You might not see them, but doesn't mean they're not there and certainly the server will send them!

  The object classid nonsense is for ActiveX in Internet Explorer, you can leave it all out if you prefer but you can run into problems on PCs.

  For an explanation of what this is about, there's the post I published a little while ago.

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 04:07 PM | TrackBack

  vogroll 2.0

  Last week I made vogroll version 1.0. A QuickTime based movie that is the video equivalent of a blogroll. This first version consisted only of still images with a simple mouse in event which rolled over the image. Clicking would take you to that individual's videoblog. Well, it didn't take long to realise that what I'd done could just as easily be done by a basic image map, so really not a lot had been achieved by doing it QuickTime.

  Which leads us to Vogroll 2.0. Why a whole iteration? Because this one is now video. This time mousing in to each person's image will cause a brief 3 second clip to play. Mousing out restores the image. This works for each person in the vogroll. This makes the vogroll much more, well, voglike.

  The video that I've used I've just lifted from each individual's videoblog. The one I did I did specifically for this project, so I'm inviting those who want to use it to shoot and make available a three second clip, which is what I'll include. The total file is currently 260Kb. I reckon I can shave a few Kb off that, but the problem with a vogroll like this is that as more are added to it, the file size rapidly only becomes viable for broadband.

  Which brings me to vogroll 3.0, which is my job for next weekend. In this one I'll experiment with using child movies for each of the tracks. The advantage of this is that the vogroll movie will be a fraction of its current size (it needs to be 260Kb because it currently contains the 3 second samples from each vogger). It also means that the video content that any user wants to display can be as long as they wish. As long as the bit rate is really low, so that it will more or less stream on demand, then if you want a 5 minute intro to who you are on your blog, off you go.

  Bit rate rather than total file size is important here because the parent movie (what will actually be the vogroll that you embed in your videoblog) will be, say, 30 or so Kb, but as you mouse into a person's image it will retrieve whatever it is they want to say or present. This will be video, presumably off their own website (though I can host it here), which will appear within the vogroll movie only when someone mouses into it. So a request is made to receive this video, and it plays within the vogroll movie. So as long as the bit rate is low (and it is fast start) then it will start playing almost immediately (I'd expect within 3 seconds). Off course three seconds is an eternity, but such lag and delay for me is a condition of the network.

  Oh, another benefit, by building it like this we should be able to play nearly any video format inside of QuickTime, including avi as long as it is compressed with a QuickTime legible codec.

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 03:53 PM | TrackBack

  August 23, 2004

  manifesto for change

  I'm currently teaching a subject that goes by the name of Advanced Seminar (these days its a final year communications research project course). In this subject I try to get students to think much more creatively and critically about their own practice. Last week I talked about how their undergraduate careers have taught them to consider the 'what is', but the industries they're going into require them to be able to think of the 'what ifs'. How they've all learnt how to read something and work out, possibly repeat (but of course not literally) what it says. How to do yet another analysis of a film, a book, an image, a sound. That these are foundational skills but they ought to be a foundation to then consider new possibilities and to invent new knowledges. Not add to the existing storehouse.

  This week I repeated the same theme, but this time through the simple distinction of having been acculturated to being knowledge consumers, but now they are to become knowledge producers. That being students they're given things to read, to consume, to interpret and to present in their essays proof that they've been able to read and interpret. It is a model of consumption. So what might it be to move to being knowledge producers? Was a difficult though useful discussion.

  To model this I handed out Bruce Mau's "An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth". Everyone spent a few minutes of class time to read it. There were a few questions which we discussed answers to. I then invited everyone to choose three of the items in the list that they thought were important to themselves and what they wanted to do. "What they wanted to do" was left open, it might refer to their project work this semester, or it could refer to their careers, next year, and so on. They had to write why these three things were important.

  We went round the room, everyone nominating their three and why they were important, including myself (process is more important than outcome, begin anywhere, and avoid fields and jump fences). I used my three to contextualise how this course actually runs, and why. Quite a few people had some common points so we discussed these and what they actually might mean, and since some students had made really good points in their discussion I returned to these to tease them out a bit more.

  Finally, I asked everyone to do number 28, make new words. They were to look at their three key items and develop a new word that would express this quality. Their final projects should, then, exhibit this quality. I also did this, and I explained my process so that the students had some sort of methodology. I listed a key word from each item, brainstormed from that word, and made a word that was a creative composite from these.

  From 'Cross fences and jump fields' "jump" was the most significant quality for me, this lead through leap, fall, skip, run, dance. for 'Process is more important than outcome' I listed event,river, flow. And for 'start anywhere' it was begin, birth, baby, child, star, origin, flow, music. From this I invented

  museflowance

  A term that suggests music but also muse, so a particular idea of invention and creativity. The sound of word (hopefully) suggests something about dance or music, it is a word that sings on your tongue, and also expresses the key qualities of flow, rhythm, invention, and creativity.

  Everyone announced their words, some combined languages, many were brilliant. The point? Invention, creativity, new knowledge. This word can now work as the exemplar by which they judge what their project is and becomes. It demonstrates what happens (and what it feels like) when you stop repeating knowledge and start anywhere on anything to invent outside of the known. For next week? We'll see, but first of all everyone was given the job of drawing what their word should look like, to present next week.

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 06:39 PM | TrackBack

  August 20, 2004

  embedding QuickTime

  Apple maintains an excellent series of pages detailing what the embed tag can do with QuickTime. Did you know you can string together up to 256 different QuickTime movies, getting one to play after the other, just using the embed tag? No, have a read, it's quite amazing what you can do with it.

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 05:36 PM | TrackBack

  blog engine upgrade

  Well, this blog will be messy for the next week or so. It's Friday afternoon and I've just upgraded to MT 3.x, so I will not be redesigning for a while. But I do want to upgrade and see what problems it might cause before I move a pile of other blogs on hypertext.rmit to MT 3. So, sorry for any interruption to normal broadcasting....

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 04:44 PM | TrackBack

  August 19, 2004

  but wait, there's more...

  From Chris Weagel on August 18 (sorry, no permalinks):

  If you are interested in joining the vidblog revolution, send me you name and address, and $4.99 (American) and I'll send you your Vidblog Manual, lifting belt, our complete seed catalog, and prize list, PLUS TWO FREE BONUS VIDBLOG ENTRY STAMPS (to get you started)

  FREE!

  FOR FREE!

  ...or you can just join the vidblog mailing list.

  rotfl.

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:33 PM | TrackBack

  August 17, 2004

  Freud-Lissitzkey Navigator

  This is the collaboration between Lev Manovich and Norman Klein from 1999. it uses web as a new media space to develop an interface come work that imagines what it might be to navigate, as a game, Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. SHIFT-CNTRL Gallery: Lev Manovich and Norman Klein
  

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:19 PM | TrackBack

  smultron

  This is an open source editor for OS X. It might work quite well in our labs as a general text and HTML editor. Smultron.

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:08 PM | TrackBack

  a vogroll 1.0

  I've just made vogroll 1.0. It is a simple QuickTime movie that is to work as a video blog roll. You mouse into each users image (at the moment most of them are screen shots of their websites), there's a simple rollover going on there, and click to load that person's video blog. I've done it to demonstrate an idea, and because no one was sending me their photos so I figured if I went ahead and made it then they'd get the idea.

  What I want to be able to do is to have the movie read an xml file and on that basis be able to know if a vog has been updated recently. This is very much at the extreme end of my ability, and I'll probably need to get help to do it. The idea is to have RSS or similar, this may or may not need to be then parsed into a different XML structure. The movie reads it, if certain values are found the sprite image for that blog is then changed, indicating an update. I'll probably set it to previous 24 hours. But you could include in the XML the ability for someone to insert their own duration as a variable.

  If you'd like to embed the vogroll 1.0 in your own page then here's the code:

  <OBJECT CLASSID="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" WIDTH="60" HEIGHT="450" CODEBASE="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab"> <PARAM name="SRC" VALUE="http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/vogroll/vogrollV.mov"> <PARAM name="AUTOPLAY" VALUE="false"> <PARAM name="CONTROLLER" VALUE="false"><EMBED SRC="http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/vogroll/vogrollV.mov" WIDTH="60" HEIGHT="450" AUTOPLAY="true" CONTROLLER="false" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/"></EMBED></OBJECT>

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:13 PM | TrackBack

  foucault site

  Found this nice site on Foucault, courtesy of Michel Foucault, info.. Somewhere to return to.
  

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 10:48 AM | TrackBack

  Brucker-Cohan's reports

  Turns out Jonah Brucker-Cohan has some reports available online. I met Jonah at the 2002 AoIR in Maastricht where he presented some of his work. Fantastic artist, I really appreciate the way he makes literal the idea of the interface.

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 08:56 AM | TrackBack

  August 16, 2004

  small comments make larger ripples

  Well, I put the cat among the pigeons the other day. My students are all learning how to write HTML, with quite a few of them having had some experience courtesy of Frontpage and its ilk. Anyway, I gave most of them a pretty hard time over the colours they were designing with, and suggested that if they weren't sure then copying the two key colours on some recent streetwear would generally work. I also did say that generally pastels are big at the moment in 'general' web design.

  Well, Charlie has taken a well aimed swipe or three, as has Georgette. This is good. Give them things to bite against and students do find their voices.

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:17 PM | TrackBack

  bell curves

  Walking in the mountains around Lugano with Sebastian we talked a lot about various things pedagogical and ecological. Since he's an educational psychologist by training I asked him about bell curves in assessment. I know that here when secondary students sit their final exams the results are 'standardised' which generates a bell curve. I have known the odd academic to explain to me that results for a course should also follow a bell curve. "Why?" I asked Sebastian. Ideology and nonsense was his refreshingly straightforward answer. Sebastian suggested that because distributions in natural environments followed bell curve distributions it made 'natural' sense that the same ought to apply in assessment. But there was no intrinsic nor pedagogical reason why they ought.

  I wanted to ask this because I had wondered about this recently, and couldn't understand that if I set very explicit assessment tasks with clear and public assessment matrices (a high distinction journal would exhibit these specific qualities, and so on), and if lots of students achieved this, then did this mean that I was marking too easily or that everyone had achieved the standard that was expected? And if this is the case why shouldn't they receive appropriate marks? This might seem trivial one way or the other, and if you're not an academic I can assure you it is, but for things like technical skills no one seems to think this way. When you go for your driver's licence there is no bell curve, you meet the standard you meet the standard, done. So I'd agree with Sebastian and think it is very much a case of ideology, an ideology that has its pedigree in print and the academy where excellence is confused with privilege.
  

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 10:32 AM | TrackBack

  August 12, 2004

  another elastic vog

  I've just quickly put together another vog, this one from footage I shot from my first floor street balcony in what I suppose was a suburb of Lugano. ElasticMovies Lugano Hotel View is the work. It has the same visual interaction as the previous elastic movie, mousing in causes the video to 'zoom' (on OS X it will zoom till you seem to get a 9 x 9 grid of pixels then it gives up and you just get white screen, of course I guess I might have just focussed on a white pixel). Mousing out causes the video to reset itself to its appropriate size. The footage is what I shot from the hotel. I've left the sync sound track on, which includes some very noisy street sound (cars going past). I've also recorded a voice over which is played as a child movie. This means the soundtrack is much longer than the video, and loads independently of the parent movie (the video) so you won't hear my commentary until this second track has downloaded. I could script when it ought to start playing but prefer to let network vagaries and stutters have their head in these matters. It needs QuickTime 6 since the video is MPEG4.

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 10:46 AM | TrackBack

  August 10, 2004

  video blogs, the update

  There has been a sea change in video blogging recently, largely driven by the apparently irrepressible Jay Dedman. This is a belated attempt by me to try to log all the recent video blogs that have turned up:

  • Chris Weagel
  • Steve Garfield
  • Rob Wilks
  • Peter Van Dijk
  • Jay Dedman
  • Mica Scalin
  • Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen
  • Charlene

  There are more out there, that's just the quick run through. All of these vary dramatically in terms of aim, outcomes and intentions. They range from Mr Garfield's video journalism which has significant quality and also is currently seeking and exploring 'traditional' journalistic realms (Democratic National Convention for example) but he's also advocating an alternative citizen journalism practice using video blogs. Others are shooting the quotidian everyday and posting that. Which is as a blogging derived practice ought to be.

  What's missing? Interactivity, interlinking, trackbacks, all those things that shifted blogging from being journaling into blogging. They're coming, and they're needed. What's more important right now though is to develop the vernacluar, what is linked video? Why would you do it. Watch this space.
  

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 03:24 PM | TrackBack

  elastic movies one

  Well, another vog, elastic movie one. I'm trying to get this material out more regularly now, and will probably do a minor series of these elastic zoom movies using material I shot while travelling. To play this film click to load it from the poster movie. Mousing in to the movie causes it to start zooming in on the video, mousing out restores original dimensions. You can click and drag the video to 'focus' where the zoom is going.

  The work continues my interest in video artefacts and noise, a sort of anti-cinema where networked interactive video needs to embrace not the lack of bandwidth but the pixel as primary element. It is a videographic pixellated practice, it is not chemical based so lets not hide from the materiality of this medium. The work reuses material that I used last week, though I think the next one will use new footage. I would be interested in doing the same thing for a triptych but I suspect the CPU demands are going to be too high.

  The zoom in this video is slow, it should zoom a bit closer at a rate of one unit per second (for those familiar with LiveStage Pro the idle rate is set to 60, which means 1 cycle per second). I did use a faster refresh rate which makes the zoom much smoother, but I'll leave that for another movie.

  I was interested in making a work that just moved closer and closer becoming increasingly abstract. The simple narrative soundtrack grounds it as a vog with a simple commentary, and the level of interaction is simple, abstract and not about narrative. More work seeking a poetics.

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:56 PM | TrackBack

  Movable Type 2.x stylesheets

  Movable Type seem to have hidden or removed the version two stylesheets. Luckily they're archived at:
  http://web.archive.org/web/20030628041228/http://movabletype.org/default_styles.shtml (courtesy of hummingcrow.)

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:07 AM | TrackBack

  August 07, 2004

  realism and a general economy of links

  An essay of mine from 2001.

  Miles, Adrian. "Realism and a General Economy of the Link." Currents in Electronic Literacy Fall.5 (2001).

  Available at:
  http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/currents/fall01/miles/index.html and mirrored locally at http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/essays/currents01/

  This continues the work I was doing around this time exploring link economies. The basic premise in this essay is that general theories of the link in hypertext (including usability theory) are analogous to theories of literary or textual realism. They ought to conceal the means of production and their policing is managed precisely because they express an excess that falls outside of restricted economies. This is one of my essays where I explore hypertextually these points to boot, with a Storyspace derived map of the essay available which shows link density. I always liked the opening sequence where I deliberately take the reader through a hypertext corridor (only one link per node) which appears as a loop except each minor iteration the link opportunity shifts.

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 04:15 PM | TrackBack

  flickering events

  Stephanie Strickland in First Person writes:

  Flickering or oscillating poems differ from pure sound and image work in the following respect: whereas sound layered on sound creates new sound, and image on image makes a new image, alphabetic text, superimposed on alphabetic text or on image, does not reliably yield legible text. In the poems that explore this truth, one flickers between seeing the viewable and reading the legible. [Strickland, Stephanie. "Moving through Me as I Move: A Paradigm for Interaction." First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. 183-91. p. 185]

  The last sentence I've quoted, how the object or thing flickers between the viewable and the legible. It is an elegantly posed problem. The flickering is important, though I think the wrong word since it, for me, too strongly implies two states that the movement falls or lies between, however between the viewable and the legible the flicker opens onto complex sets or flows or events of possibilities. For example this is the space that much religious representation explores, where the task is not to represent the sacred (which is deemed or defined as impossible) but to allude to it indirectly through making that which is not viewable (you can't see the sacred) legible. This is pretty much the entire oeuvre of Robert Bresson, for example. And the sentence is strong because it indicates the eventfulness of this work, that such work is about the movement between rather than either of these possible states. Our contemporary state is one of flux and flow, you cannot stand in the same river twice, you cannot write the same word twice, you cannot visit the same web page twice.

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 03:06 PM | TrackBack

  August 03, 2004

  The Rule of Thirds

  It has been way too long since a vog appeared on the main rationale for this blog, so last night I finally made sure I had the time to complete one. The rule of thirds. I shot it on a new iSight that I've got, specifically for trying to ramp up some informal vog material. Three dialogues to camera, sliced in Cleaner, compressed into MPEG4, and then very simple scripting in LiveStage Pro. The scripting is simply on a mouse enter event for each video pane, turn one sound track on, turn the other two off:

  TrackNamed("LeftSound").SetVolumeTo(0)
  TrackNamed("CentreSound").SetVolumeTo(0)
  TrackNamed("RightSound").SetVolumeTo(255)

  The work discusses the three things that went on recently (thrombosis, hard drive failure, sick children). Trouble usually travels in threes, and of course the rule of thirds is also a simple photographic come cinematographic rule of thumb (derived from the Golden Mean but that's questionable mathematics) about decent composition.

  The work is deliberately fragmentary. The video panes only run at 12fps as I was seeking a stuttering, collaged mismatch between voice and face. Stuttering as the condition of the network ("will it arrive? where does that link take me?"), progress bars parading as interaction to hide the fact of these stuttering fragments. This cinematic vog practice is not wannabecinema. It lives and stalls on the network. It consists of three videos with three sound tracks. Mousing into each video pane allows you to hear the commentary for that individual video pane. Very straightforward.

  This vog is simple in design and execution, didn't take very long to script (took me longer to get the iSight and QuickTime Broadcaster happy), and continues the vogs continued insistence on exploring vernacular interaction as a viable methodology for desktop video on the web. The question or problem it poses is suitably simple: if you had a video with three simultaneous soundtracks what would you narrate? How? Why? I think I'm thin on answers, but thick on problems.

  Now, I'd better start getting to work on the stuff I shot while getting to that conference...

  Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:48 AM | TrackBack