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My last video post of this year. A quickie loop.

Videobloggers were ambitious in 2007 and the results are mixed. For me, the highlight of online video was Navlopomo. As Aaron Valdez put it so clearly:

My own inkling, and what keeps me going in online video for the next year, is the sense that we are building real value around something immaterial and ephemeral. What is permanent in this overwhelming flood of video? To me it is the distinctive voice. The tactic. The insurgent attack on the everyday.

A culture is growing around the desire to look thru another's eyes. This might be the real dream of cinema and not the vaudeville entrepeneur's hope of making a buck. We all want to make a living at doing what we love, but this is just the beginning of a new kind of discourse and new space for cognitive exploration. The practice needs nurturing before the harvesting.

And so, following the advice of a favorite and recently revived vlogger, I am giving this video post of an animal pile to a "voodler." Sam Renseiw's spacetwo : patalab, for me, is a model of this new practice:
1. take small camera everywhere
2. move through space letting the body/camera record its traces
3. post-produce the pieces into psychogeographic maps
4. repeat

All the best in the New Year.

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Phantom Loop Study #6

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Phantom Loop Study #3:

Working a bit in the dark here. Trying to conjure phantoms thru looped textures of everyday life - color, sound, rhythm, scale. Not sure if this works. Maybe I'm looping too much? I think I need more dynamic narrative elements. But it doesn't matter much because it is NaVloPoMo.

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Phantom Study #2:

This week's loop project is the phantom narrative loop. What happens in a loop? Is it really the same each time around?

We are hard-wired to experience movie time as leading somewhere, to an end. Playing with dynamic relationships between shots in a looped sequence conjures phantoms - mental projections. That is the goal, anyway. Gertrude Stein's "a rose is a rose is a rose...".

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This week's project is the phantom narrative loop.
Phantom Study #1

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You're sleepy. You keep reading the same pages, loosing your place, slipping in and out of attention. You're looping...

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10 seconds and looped.
NaVloPoMo

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10 seconds and looped.
NaVloPoMo

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Marking time.

NaVloPoMo

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NaVloPoMo

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NaVloPoMo

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Rupert at twittervlog.tv
seems to have started an outrageous game.
This will get us digging in the archives for the inconsequential.

My own added rules: under 10 seconds and looped.

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The colors are breaking down.

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Derik A. Badman's great blog about comics, multipaneled storytelling and generative literaure...etc. He is here quoting Alison Bechdel on "incidental life."

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A recent podcast interview with Adrian, gets me thinking about what he calls "minor video" or "minor cinema." The value of the miniature in a networked world. The battle for attention, screen space, hits, ratings as modeled on youtube will, Adrian predicts, subside within six years. We are experiencing the growing pains of a new medium. The long tail hurts.

After the novelty of videoblogging, now what? What is networked video anyway? I had argued in the once active vlogtheory listserv that rss video was a good step in that it made watching, creating and conversing a somewhat unified process. But even the impressive Miro is still just a form of TV , because it separates the vlog text from the video and makes commenting on individual posts very difficult (especially when the video is served from a host like blip.tv). All we need is a permalink to the post on the creator's website. This is the whole point, isn't it?

I don't look to net video to be informed, to be entertained, or to pass time. I don't read blogs or books for entertainment either. Loaded in my rss reader are streams of thought-reports and thought-experiments that I find important to my daily life. The books stacked near my bed are half fiction, half non-fiction. I pick up what I need at the moment. What feeds my thoughts, what gets the blood flowing again. Movies (especiallly with my kids) still fall under entertainment. A kind of shutting down of thought. An immersion in cgi. But art films, like Lynch's Inland Empire are increasingly like books for me. I dip into them, daydream inside them. I think this is what a minor cinema or literature seeks to do - to lead you to a place you have never been before. A clearing. A place to breath a different kind of air.

Take Sam Renseiw's spacetwo : patalab. As video alone, there seems to be nothing special. But read what is attached to each post and look at the context of the project and you find a unique, electrifying "voice." And there are many such voices (look under "Watching" to the right).

What distinguishes video in the deluge of images, is the contextual voice. Yes, the writer's voice. Sometimes that voice can be brought into the video itself- I'm think of Liss's pouringdown - and Jay's Momentshowing where spoken or written text is a layer of the video post. I personally like to keep text and video separate but together: html and quicktime. Might the simplicity and elegance of dynamic html with linked video bring about a rebirth of hypertext fiction? A video blog that takes the writing as seriously as the video is well on the way.

Videoblogging is still show and tell, but it seems like the showing is increasingly being broken from its telling. The showing is what marks the individual moments of our own lives. But it is the telling that connects those moments to the larger ongoing Tale of us all. The Long Tale.

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Some thoughts from Ivan Pope's art blog: The 'Long Tail' of Contemporary Art

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Looking at contemporary online examples of haibun and haiga- forms that still inspire me as approaches to videoblogging and net cinema - I end up on this great exchange about our storytelling future:

The 21st-century novel. - By Walter Kirn and Gary Shteyngart - Slate Magazine

How to give shape and scale to our ephemeral adventures on and off the network?

Isn't there something just a little disingenuous about this latest multiplex spectacle. Isn't this more in the spirit of a digital Thoreau?

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A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination

by Angus Fletcher

I devoured this book. It resonated with thoughts of an emergent poetics of online cinema. Angus Flectcher argues that Amercian poetry, starting with Whitman, exploded the notion that poetry should gather images to form an expression of the poet's or reader's concern - an allegory of human import. This is a top-down procedure. How to use nature to express (illustrate) eternal truths, etc.

Whitman and John Ashbery are used as models for a new bottom-up approach to gathering images. A poem as an attempt to shape/probe the chaos of spatial experience - objects, associations, other media, landscape, weather, memories, queries, signs - all go into the semiotic mix.

Of course, poetry has a rich history of formal contraints (sestina, sonnet, haiku - many based on numbers) that give shape to the chaos. Online cinema needs these new constraints, but what is a vlog post other than an attempt to capture the semiotic flux of experince using sound, image, text, thought etc.

1. aggregation: gathering the materials, the images, sounds and texts. the subject.
2. tagging: signals an order of importance, for literature this is rhetorics. For video this is simply editing and mixing - camera angle, distance, scale, duration - as well as the rhetorics for text and spoken word.
3. nonlinearity: getting the parts to interact. internal references. how can the editing generate questions about what has come before and what will come next?
4. flow: the development of theme, plot. how time is handled. the experience of time. where are we going?
5. diversity: images that are, well, diverse. a vlog about a garden would include the fowers, but also the stray gum wrapper.
6. model or schema: pruning. shaping the piece. the intention can be hidden or quite simple and direct.
7. building blocks: for poetry this would be the words. reworking a line, trying to find the best word, etc. for video, spoken words or text are included in the visual and auditory building blocks of frames/shots/sounds/music.

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From cecil vortex: An Interview with Ze Frank

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Returning from a very long hiatus. I've been teaching, parenting and reassessing my work on this site. Also planning future projects. Posts will be more frequent, but meanwhile, please check out my essay for the current Post Identity, edited by Nick Rombes and featuring some familiar names in the videoblogging/online cinema world.

My essay is called Cinema Without Show Business: a Poetics of Vlogging and though it is already somewhat dated, I think it might interest those (like me) who are still scratching their heads with issues of how cinema belongs on the net.

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This news made my day.

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Before summer completely escapes, I want to get down some thoughts about Daniel Liss' Seven Maps. The week of August 6th-12th saw another project funded by the vlogging community via Have Money Will Vlog - itself an incredible project that has funded Chris Weagel's ongoing American King and more to come.

Liss' proposal for Seven Maps came as an invitaition for funders to contribute their own ideas, via a wiki, for seven distinct video posts. There was some excitement in the idea of sending Liss out with camera to various parts of the world, but Liss made it clear he wasn't looking for journalism assignments. He was looking for external restrictions that got him out of his "comfort zone." A group of "filters" extracted from the mix of ideas a plan and a set of rules for each day's post that was only made known to Liss and viewers 24 hours before.

Even with a dying camera, Liss was able to take on each set of rules with the usual finesse and ingenuity that subscribers to pouringdown.tv have come to expect. There were some real gems. The sixth map stands out for me because it points to an emerging form - the fictional vlogger. But, the project as a whole fell short of my own expectations. Why? Was it too easy for Liss? If vlogging is about framing the everyday, why would we expect the everyday be any different in Montreal? Is vlogging about the extraordinary or the banal? If it is about the banal, why should Liss or any vlogger leave his or her "comfort zone" in the first place? The zone that we know best is our own lives. For me, Liss' videos are exceptional because they apply great cinematic ideas to his own microcosm. His metaphors are not taken from the common stock, but are improvised out of the material of living. The "problem" I had with seven maps (a very interesting and instructive problem!) is that the rules for each post were too abstract - they didn't get Liss deeper into his own life, they took him out of it.

I would be interested in another round next summer. This time, instead of leaving home with a set of rules, Liss should be OUR high priest. A week of ritual observations that comingle multiple microcosms. Not sure even that would "work." But after all, these communally funded vlog projects are not about working or not working, entertaining or not entertaining. This is about ritual - the spectator, the creator and the object are one.

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Vloggers are not two inches high. They are real and come from all over. Had a great time talking to Juan Antonio and Cristina, Anne, Raymond, Erik, Adam, Chris, Andreas, Brett, Michael, Randy, Michael Schaap, Eli, Philip, Matt and Daniel.

Thanks Schlomo for hosting the vlogtheory breakfast.

Of course, I missed Charlene, Mica and Duncan.

"Smile" by ..:: ParticlePeople.com ::..

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Take Action: Sign the Petition -- Don't Let Congress Ruin the Internet

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In Adrian's recent post he writes, "RSS, video in a blog, at the moment is only a delivery mechanism, and I remain frustrated, bemused and surprised at how many people confuse that with a revolution in form, accessibility to media making, media or genre."

While RSS alone does not lead to bloggish/conversational modes, there are of course still the active uses of trackbacks, comments and links and especially a kind of visual conversation where vloggers respond in style or content through video posts. I would argue that this is creating new forms and genres - something that we would never see on TV or in a Movie theater. The central videoblog conversation is how and why we make our own daily experiences cinematic (or televisual). So while we do need the tools to give video more network value, lets not overlook what is new - an emergent cinema without show business. RSS is only one of many tools that make networked video easy and accessible. The glass is admitedly half-full, but it a delicious brew.

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Making big decisions.

Watching a lot of Bullemhead.

Playing with AT&T Labs Text-to-Speech.

Snow.

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This message is brought to you by The Pan.

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Juan is a Venezuelan videoblogger. I've been a subscriber to his En Video for about a month (he started his vlog in December 2005). His videos capture intimate, fragile moments that we can all relate to, but the minimalist approach doesn't hide the sense of turmoil just outside his door.

Juan was kind enough to answer a few questions.

1) Why did you start to video blog?

I kind of fell into it more than starting doing it. I started Blogging one year ago without knowing about the vlogging movement. One day I decided to make a short video that I could show on my blog in order to let it be seen. After that, I started looking for people that made what I had done and I discovered videoblogging.

2) How would you describe what you are doing? Are there other things you want to try in your videos?

What I do (or at least what I try to do) is to show short moments from my life in a particular way. I like to show more than the moment itself by going deeper into what I felt and the way I reacted. I will love to have the guts to film outdoors. I’m terribly shy when it comes to shooting in front of unknown people but I’m trying to get comfortable with it.

3) Where did you learn to make videos and put together a vlog?

I was introduced into the basics of video editing by an excellent Venezuelan filmmaker called Carlos Caridad (who also runs a blog about filmmaking called Blogacine [www.blogacine.com]). I attended to a class he gave at my university and there I learned a lot about the production of a video. I learned to vlog in an autodidactic way by getting on the web and reading about it.

4) How do you want your video blog to evolve?

I want to be able to make images talk by themselves instead of needing to be explained by any other medium. I also want to show the poetic and philosophical side I know video has and maybe get some people interested in it.

5) Are there other vloggers in Venezuela that you can point us to?

There is a Venezuelan vlog dedicated to interviewing people from the film industry (I don’t know the guy who runs it), it is called Maraca vlog (http://www.maraca.info/blog/).

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