[1]
http://wiki2.issuecrawler.net/twiki/bin/view/Dmi/DiagnosingTheConditionOfIraq:TheWebView

[2]
Stead, Naomi. The Ruins of History: allegories of destruction in DanielLibeskind’ Jewish Museum. Open Journal Volume 2: Unsavoury histories, August 2000. p.1.

[3]
Huyssen, Andreas. ‘Monument and Memory in a Postmodern Age’, in: Young, James E. ed., Holocaust Memorials. The Art of Memory in History. Munich – New York: Prestel, 1994. p. 15.

[4]
Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Paris: Seuil, 1970. p. 5-6.

[5]
Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Paris: Seuil, 1970. p. 5-6.

[6]
Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Paris: Seuil, 1970. p. 5-6.

New Media M.A. Director: Prof. dr. Richard Rogers
New Media M.A. Thesis Coordinator: Dr. Carolin Gerlitz

Staff Specializations

Richard Rogers
Prof. dr. Richard Rogers is University Professor and Chair in New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam. He is a Web epistemologist, an area of study where the main claim is that the Web is a knowledge culture distinct from other media. Rogers concentrates on the research opportunities that would have been improbable or impossible without the Internet. His research involves studying and building info-tools. He studies, critiques and builds on top of adjudicative devices online, such as search engines. He is founder of Govcom.org, the group responsible for the Issue Crawler and other Web research instruments, and also founder of the Digital Methods Initiative, Amsterdam, reworking method for Internet-related research. Rogers is author of Technological Landscapes (London: Royal College of Art, 1999), editor of Preferred Placement: Knowledge Politics on the Web (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck, 2000), and author of Information Politics on the Web (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), awarded the 2005 Best Information Science Book of the Year Award presented by the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST). He recently published The End of the Virtual (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009). His latest book, Digital Methods, is forthcoming at MIT Press.

See also:

Rogers homepage: http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/r.a.rogers/
Digital Methods Initiative (DMI): http://digitalmethods.net
Govcom.org Foundation: http://www.govcom.org

Jan Simons
Dr. Jan Simons is Associate Professor in New Media at the University of Amsterdam. He has published on cinema, photography, new media theory, and game theory. His research focuses on the processes of convergence and divergence brought about by new media. His latest book is Playing the Waves: Lars von Trier’s game cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007.

See also:

Simon’s homepage: http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/j.a.a.simons/

Yuri Engelhardt
Dr. Yuri Engelhardt is Assistant Professor in New Media at the University of Amsterdam. He holds an M.A. in medicine and a PhD in computer science. Engelhardt’s research interests focus on pictorial languages. His PhD has been published in book form, The Language of Graphics (Amsterdam, 2002).

See also:

Engelhardt’s homepage: http://www.yuriweb.com

Thomas Poell
Dr. Thomas Poell (1973) is assistant professor of New Media. Previously, he has published on the historical struggles over the democratization and centralization of the Dutch state. Currently, his research focuses on the role of specific new media, such as blogs, Internet forums, and social network sites, in contemporary political conflicts.

See also: http://nl.linkedin.com/in/thomaspoell

Bernhard Rieder
Dr. Bernhard Rieder is Associate Professor of New Media at the University of Amsterdam and a collaborator with the Digital Methods Initiative. His research focuses on the analysis, development, and application of digital research methods, as well as on the history, theory, and politics of software and in particular on the role algorithms play in social processes and in the production of knowledge and culture. He currently participates in the EMAPS project, an EU-funded study of the applications of electronic mapping, led by Prof. Bruno Latour. He also works on a long-term investigation into the historical and conceptual foundations of information processing techniques that process, sort, filter, and connect information on the web.

See also: http://thepoliticsofsystems.net

Carolin Gerlitz
Carolin Gerlitz, MA (UdK Berlin) MA (Goldsmiths) is Assistant Professor of New Media at the University of Amsterdam and is member of the Digital Methods Initiative. Her research explores the various intersections between new media and economic sociology. Currently, her interests focus on digital sociology, web economies, issue mapping, digital research methods, social media, brands, evaluation, topology and futures. She also works as post-doctoral researcher at the Issue Mapping project and as visiting lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London.

See also:
http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/c.gerlitz
http://www.gold.ac.uk/csisp/members/goldsmithsmembers/gerlitzcarolin/
http://digitalmethods.net

Sebastian Scholz
Sebastian Scholz, MA (1977) is a lecturer in New Media and Television at the University of Amsterdam. His current research interests focus on relations of visibility, knowledge and media, the ‘newness’ of new media and the history and theory of (popular) television programmes. He is finishing his PhD on scientific productions of visibility by use of ‘epistemic images’, titled „Topologies of the Visible“. Scholz got his MA in Media Studies from the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany with a thesis on transforming visual cultures of surveillance and control. He recently co-edited a book on the German crime series “Tatort” and published on (micro)photography, film, scientific visualization and pornography.

See also: http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/s.scholz/

Erik Borra
Erik Borra, M.Sc. (1981) is PhD candidate and docent Digital Methods for Internet Research at the University of Amsterdam, as well as Digital Methods Initiative’s lead developer. He holds an M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence. His research focuses on rethinking the Web as a source of data for social and cultural science.

See also:
https://home.medewerker.uva.nl/e.k.borra/
digitalmethods.net

InfoVis and Cognition
presentation on 21 February by Chaim + Felicia + Carolien

InfoVis and Data Art
InfoVis and DataArt – ppt pres
presentation on 21 February by Paulien + Minke + Erik

InfoVis starts with Data
infovis_presentatie.ppt
presentation on 21 February by Laura + George + Tjerk

Visual Structures
presentation on 6 March by Piet + Rikus + Raoul

Views and Interactions
presentation on 6 March by Maarten + Daphne + Lies

Maps
presentation on 6 March by Bas + Bob + Fleur

The drone. An unmanned aircraft, flying over enemy territory by itself. Secretly photographing enemy targets. Session moderator Mike Harding vividly explains to the audience at De Balie, during Sonic Acts XII, the properties of the drone, which is, in the first place, this information based weapon system. The drone now has numerous references in modern culture, of which drone music is one.

Harding pours out a hard to find drone of the midshipman fish, courtesy of BBC, which finds its source in the animal kingdom. It is what Harding calls a ‘true drone from the animal kingdom’. It is a continuous sound that doesn’t change much, but Harding is ‘not content with that definition. A sound can change radically but still retain drone qualities. There are no temporal limits on a drone, how short can a drone be? A starting point for a drone could perhaps be, that it is longer than your natural breath.’But drones are not just that. The role of the drone can also be to ‘underpin, or underscore, a composition an an essential part of the orchestra’. A drone can also be a part of a musical instrument in itself, as is evident in Leif Elggren’s Royal Organ.

Von Hausswolff
Definitions of drone music are still fluid, a member of the audience for example pointed that throat singers can not be forgotten in the discourse. But what is drone music according to its musicians? Carl Michael von Hausswolff says: ‘It is silent and beautiful, it can make you stop skiing in the middle of a forest and in that moment you achieve a certain kind of rest. A state that you would like to be in for a long time. You lose a lot of the separation that can stand between yourself as human being and nature. There are no cars rushing by and its a personal dialogue. if you want to use it as a tool for practical living: It helps me understand the processes of life and being alive’.

Von Hausswollf also mentions a connection with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: ‘There is no start, no end. A kind of eternity. You become aware of a flood in your life. It is really stimulating and perhaps a positive way of trying to… well… live’. According to Von Hausswollf, this even applies to a live performance situation, where faders tend to remind you of time. Harding responds by asking if it is perhaps a kind of metastate. Von Hausswollf: ‘If you look at a concept such as transcendental meditation. Perhaps I could do it too, but I’m too western… And I’m too f*cked up to be able to list myself. I try to find other methods to achieve this kind of calm, or… whatever’.

Nordwall
Joachim Nordwall tends to touch upon the other side of the drone music spectrum. Nordwall: ‘How do you make drone? The drone is an illusion of safety for mankind, I like to recreate a certain feeling I had when growing up. The only fun thing of growing up for me was: cheap drugs and some place me and my friend could experiment with analogue synthesizers. There was this mix of drugs and analogue drones. In my work I have realized that I wanted to recreate that room where we grew up. Yesterday (during the Paradiso performance, ed.), I wanted to fill the room with the sound. A drone is convenient to fill up the room, and filling up the room creates a kind of safety. And moreover, that specific room where life was in front of me’.

During live shows, according to Nordwall, a ‘loud volume is important and the physical aspect of the drone is very interesting. To physically feel a change can be more interesting than the mental change. You get a feeling in the stomach. You can feel some parts of the body that sometimes do not exist’. Nordwall mentions Sunn as an example of a band that is enormously loud: ‘It has an effect that will get stuck in your bones for days after’.

In the discussion afterwards, volume levels at live performances sparked an interesting discussion. Is the artist responsible for exposing people to that kind of volume? Undoubtedly, there are physical consequences of sound. However, these consequences are largely unknown to the artist. The Pitch Police says: RESPECT THE HERTZ!

Links
Report by Twan Eikelenboom – newmw.wordpress.com
Photography by Roos Menkman – http://www.flickr.com/photos/r00s

Erkki Huhtamo’s recent work deals with media archeology, an emerging approach he, according to his website, ‘has pioneered (together with others, like Siegfried Zielinski) since the early 1990’s’. At this edition of Sonic Acts, Huhtamo, together with the audience, revisited the concept of the Diorama. The keynote proved to be a valuable trip down memory lane with Huhtamo showing many examples and elaborating on their cultural context.

The Diorama was invented by Jacques Louis Mande Daguerre and Charles Marie Bouton and consisted of fast paintings, which were ‘slightly larger than an iMac screen’. Moreover, paintings were made in such a way that parts were translucent. In the early days, these diorama’s had to be visited and therefore it became a new element of urban landscape. Huhtamo mentions the Paris Diorama in this regard.

But why would the diorama be interesting for us, now, Huhtamo asks himself. Bruce Sterling mentioned the concept of “dead media”, Huhtamo however does not believe media is capable of dying: ‘I believe that it is more a transformation and adaptation. My research deals with understanding the materiality, discursive manifestations and how these layers coexist in culture, as the culture changes and evolves’. One of Huhtamo’s big inspirations to venture into the realm of media archeology, is the fact that artists sometimes seem to be aware of the traditions, go back to these ideas and draw inspiration from them.

In its purely mechanical form, The Diorama is a large viewing machine, an actorless optical illusion theatre, comprised of two main features, being firstly giant translucent and transforming paintings and secondly a mechnically rotating auditorium. Culturally the Diorama provided the world with a new word, a neologism, that many of these new spectacles had. The Diorama is no different, combining “dio” (transparent/through) and “rama” (view). Because it is actorless, Huhtamo sees a valuable connection between the rise of CGI possibilities and the Diorama: ‘Actors are more in the scenery’.

“rama-mania”
Continuing on the linguistics of the Diorama, Huhtamo mentions Balzac, who picked up a linguistic pattern from the hair salons and the cafes of Paris. Balzac provided his own list of “ramas”, including health-o-rama, frozenrama, soupe-au-rama and the goriorama. Images shown by Huhtamo of various Diorama’s and Daguerre’s paintings are available at R. D. Wood’s MIDLEY essays on the History of early Photography. An interesting development is the portable diorama, like the “desktop” version of the computer, the ‘huge and gigantic’ is eventually brought to the desktop.

Now, Huhtamo continues, ‘we are in the beginning of this dioramic transformation I’m trying to sketch’. Most important for this transformation is that ‘reality is not conceived as given, but as a construct. Reality as a product of new spectacles such as the diorama, panorama, wax museums, paris morgue, etc. This is the culture from which the diorama appears. In turn, Diorama’s themselves start to appear in painting’.

New Spaces and Urban Mobility
The Diorama in an urban context is ‘not like a home, but also not like the city screen outside. It is a place for the flaneur and movement in new spectacles’. Huhtamo mentions various examples of these flaneur-like places, such as the cosmorama. All share that they are about a mobile mode of spectatorship. Huhtamo: ‘The only way of viewing the panorama is to keep on walking / moving. Being physically in motion was taken over by cinema, however, the motion becomes virtual.

The audience is virtually moving with the scenes seen in the cinema’. Huhtamo sees a return to physical movement in the advent of portable devices. Interesting in the mixture of Diorama and movement is also the the idea of the “trottoir roulant”, the moving walkway, which was presented as a novelty in that time at the Paris world fair.It turned Paris into panoramic scene, the platform is enough to define the surroundings and change the identity of the surroundings

The Diorama even shaped its own popstar. Albert Smith travelled around with the moving diorama. His “hit” was ‘The Ascent of Mont Blanc’ which was shown an astonishing 2000 times. Objects used to create a reality effect include dogs and a Swiss chalet. In later years, various people played with the idea of the diorama. Examples of these include the 1939 Futurama by General Motors, which exhibited GM’s utopian vision of the world with streamlined buildings and, of course, as Huhtamo mentions, GM cars. In the futurama, the audience is traveling through the show. It is not static, like the diorama by Daguerre. The Diorama has been revisited.

Links
Report by Twan Eikelenboom – newmw.wordpress.com
Photography by – flickr.com/photos/shutenochdown

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I (almost) finished the Video Vortex vlog. you can check it out here

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In the foyer of the Balie, Julien Maire performed his live piece “Digit”; the writer sits at his desk with a glass of wine and a pile of paper. There are no writing tools, no pen, no typewriter, no computer. The writer uses only his hands. While stroking his paper gently, words appear out of nowhere, leaving the spectator surprised, lost and somewhat disturbed.

The texts Julien composes make me think of a mix between Dada, Concrete Poetry and a new form of écriture automatique. As a spectator I don’t know if what he is writing has any meaning, but I can see him constructing cubes, drawing twirling sentences and destroying single words. It is a beautiful puzzling sight.

On his website, Julien Maire describes his relation with Burroughs’ cut up method and his concept of the soft machine. Julien refers to his own piece as soft cinema. I wonder if there is any connection to the concept of soft cinema Lev Manovich developed.

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Moderated by Arie Altena, this part of the session the artists Jeffrey Shaw from Australia and the Dutch Marnix de Nijs talked about their work with video, ambient screens and immersive techniques. The session took off with a quote from Paul Ruiz, from the Poetics of Cinema.
(more…)

Via email I was notified that we were tagged by a blog meme, asking to write down sentences 6-8 from page 123 of the nearest book. Just coming home from Geert Lovink’s book presentation and thus having his book ‘Zero Comments‘ nearest, the quote is actually quite applicable:

The time spent interacting with media needs to be understood in terms of three distinctly different activities. The first involves the time needed to configure the machine, install, learn, and operate the software, and to become familiar with the tools for navigation. The second is the time spent with certain application related content such as blogs, e-mail, SMS, and iPods.

As a bonus I will add the 9th sentence too:

“Only after we have downloaded all the e-mail, checked intranets, and blogs do we enter the third activity, the flat, eternal time of pure communication – be it with humans or machines.”

That leaves me the task of tagging all masters of media individually (and making a blog meme network visualization afterwards). Finally, I can get some dinner and have a good talk.

This diary at Daily Kos confused me at first, because it was completely empty. No title, no text: there was nothing there. But looking at the various tags for the diary makes it clear why:

Justification for Iran War, Justification for IRAQ war, Faith-based diaries, Harry Reid’s Leadership, The Truth about 9-11, Cultists Only, John McCain Policy Map, Obama Madrassa Evidence, Rosemary Woods, 17 minutes of audio tape from the Nixon White House, Huckabee’s Missing Votes, fnord, WMDs, Impeachment Hearings, Subpoena Power, Checks and Balances, Congressional Oversight

The empty diary is now on the recommended list, and users are adding more milk-carton tags as I write.

(I promise my obsession with tagging will be over soon.)

I’ve finished a short piece on tagging as a form of classification, called Getting Things Done?

Why do tomorrow what can be put off until the day after?

I’ve been reading some classic texts on categorization and how the issue has been dealt with on the Web. User-generated tags, Clay Shirky writes, offer powerful, more “organic” alternatives to traditional forms of classification. Here I discuss tagging and some of the known problems with it, before relating the latter to a short case study on the ‘todo’ and ‘toread’ tags on del.icio.us.
Continue reading here.

Both authors contribute strongly towards the definition of freedom, and misconceptions of freedom within a networked society.
Galloway argues that the founding principal of the net is control, not freedom. [Galloway, p142]
But it is a different kind of control than we are used to; it is a control that is based on openness, inclusion, universalism and flexibility. Protocol is theoretically based on a contradiction (rhizomatic versus hierarchical). In a ‘reality check’ this contraction also becomes visible: for Protocol to be politically progressive, it must be partially reactionary [Galloway, p143].
Galloway is proving the misconception of the Internet being an anarchistic free environment and shows that in order to be free it needs structure. Protocol is this shaping force, and can also be seen as management style for life. Therefore it is more political than just technical. Moreover, Galloway wants to demystify the net and show its ruling basics, which are more similar to life itself than we think.
Chun’s larger argument is that we need to analyze the dichotomy between control &
freedom. Cyperpunk represents both at the same time, thus gets beyond this contrast.
She is looking for representations that are more useful than the paranoic fantasies of total control or freedom. In doing so, she takes a broader, more encompassing view on the matter discussed. Chun argues that different and often-conflicting agoraphobic cover stories – which combine freedom and control – underpin representations of fiber-optic networks as public. All these narratives assume that individuals precede public spaces, so that vulnerabilities result from contact with corrosive public air.
Fiber optics expose and involve us with others before we emerge as users.
In Keenan’s words: fiber optics allow for publicity, and publicity functions as a language; language allows for presentation and representation.
Chun goes further, by stating that fiber optics are more than merely a language, they act as a language that cannot be seen or heard. Where classical media studies assume computer-mediated communication, it actually is on its own, only sporadically allowing humans to read it; it creates an archive that defies our senses.
Moreover, users are not operating individually; they are actually being used.
Chun phrases that cyberspace is a literary attempt to narrativize, map, to know this seemingly unwelcome public [Chun, p250]. Chun has stated ways in which control-freedom has thrived on a paranoid knowledge that focuses on the technological rather than the political, and that relies
on racial profiling [Chun, p290]. Freedom has more to it than its often-metaphorical meaning. Freedom exceeds rather than complements control and is a spacing that constitutes existence; it is not the lack of relation, but the very possibility of relation; it cannot be separated from fraternity or equality. Freedom does not produce anything; it is a self-initiating being. The dream of an ever-giving, never displacing well of generosity uncannily resonates with the Internet as infinite capitalism. ‘Freedom entails a decision of life and death’ because biopower has been made symbolic.
A link is made to Kittlers’ claim that humans no longer have a singular claim to language, but it is moving towards machines, where programmability replaces free will. Not willing to go that far, Chun states that we do have a role in creating machines and their languages in the future. In order to do so, we must reject current understandings of freedom that make it into a gated community and we must explore the democratic potential of communications technologies, that stems from vulnerability rather that control; we must seize freedom with determination.

Questions
In retrospective, some questions remain unanswered, like what kind of Internet is envisioned by both authors? Yes, we do have to take a different approach in looking at our (post?) control society, and it apparently is not the open, free place it wants us to believe it is, but what then needs to be done to make it an open, public space? Are fiber optics democratic space, and need they be? Where Galloway would state that the non-interpretative protocol will sort itself out, always looking for the ideal, universal state, these questions will answer themselves in time, Chun would state that a mayor shift/ review has to take place if we want the Net to become a true public space, and that in a public space, the value lies in vulnerability, where we need to decouple the political from the technical.

Literature
“Protocol – How Control Exists after Decentralization” by Alexander Galloway.
“Control and Freedom – Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics” by Wendy Chun.

The last few weeks it has been in the news numerous times; in Guangzhou, South China, snow and ice storms have stranded tens of millions of people, most of them migrant workers traveling to their families to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Since the storms began on January 10 officials have tried to keep more travelers from coming to the stations by closing them off in order to prevent riots. Furthermore the government has urged migrant workers to cancel their travels for the New Year. (more…)

Deleting your MySpace page is painful. You had friends, too few or too many. It had taken over your life, or you wish it had. Was your profile stale? Were you too active? The morning after International Delete Your Myspace Account Day elfriendo gives you a new look.

elfriendo.com – “Taking the work out of social networking”

elfriendo is a new MySpace related service, founded on 30 January 2008, on the occasion of the International Delete Your MySpace Account Day, as a remedy.

These days one hardly has time to fill in one set of fields before another update request comes in. elfriendo reduces the number of form-filling steps to a bare minimum, without sacrificing quality or depth. People used to neglect their profiles, leaving them stale and deficient. elfriendo offers fresh sets of interests and an active look for your profile.

elfriendo’s business is profilization – professionalizing, optimizing and automating your profile on MySpace, the world’s largest social networking site. elfriendo is a service that keeps your profile active fresh.

√ You can have a profile generated for you on the basis of just a few interests.

√ You can create a profile on the basis of another profile, and that person’s group of friends.

√ You can tweak your profile by comparing it to another profile’s network, raising or lowering your compatibility.

elfriendo is a Web 2.0 compliant European start-up company, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Yes! Take me there

What is elfriendo?
elfriendo is a MySpace related service. It’s designed for people who have no time to fill in a profile, or would like to save time blending in with other fans of a certain interest. You can use elfriendo to measure compatibility of profiles and interests, to make a profile based on your interests, or to have a profile makeover when you feel your profile is no longer properly representing you. The outcomes are suggested fields, ready for you to tweak and customize.

more FAQ

For the Danube Telelecture series, Sean Cubitt ( “Immersion, Connectivity, Conviviality”) and Lev Manovich (“After Effects, or Invisible Revolution”) gave lectures and discussed the topic of Remixing Cinema: The Future and Past of the Moving Image. Cinema as a visual phenomenon has accelerated increasingly over the last decades. Technical achievements at the material level like new participatory models driven by the melting of Internet, Databases, TV and Cinema are setting new standards and bringing a new dynamic to the black-box of the movie theater.

Remixing, Coding, Remapping, and Recombination of visual manifestations are revolutionizing the narrative form of film – new societal phenomena, like the VJ scene, generate immersive viewing spaces and new forms of moving image distribution. The domain of video, film, computer and net-based installations stands on the threshold of a material revolution: do they bring a new aesthetic? Revolutionary possibilities in camera and projection techniques offer increasingly faster development cycles that also allow for innovative image languages. New historical perspectives of the cinematic revue coalesce with innovative interpretations of our visual consumer culture and foretell future developments. What can be expected … what are the consequences?

The lectures and debates are now available at http://www.donau-uni.ac.at/dtl-archive

The closing session of the conference was named video slamming and consisted of screening famous youTube favorites, interviews with video performers Emile Zile Sam Nemeth, Tatiana de la O, and Rosa Menkman and the actual video performances. All this hosted and mc-ed by Sabine Niederer and Michael Stevenson.
Stevenson kicked off the session by raising the question whether youTube has an added value?
Most youTube movies are watched secretly during office hours, in cubicles. But is this not also working, being productive, but in another fashion? The movies shown prove this point. An added value within this context of collective watching, not secretly in your office cubicle, but in a kind of cinema-theater setting.

This worked out really well (good idea for cinemas struggling to get visitors; just show YouTube favorites!). Below a picture of the first movie, of course about cats.

a full list of the movies shown can be found here:
Its oh so quiet Bjork/Cats
zzz is playing grip
Two Girls one cup reaction + commentary
Goto80 Pilgrims Progress
Flying Dog
Blonde Redhead/Miranda July
Two Girls one cup reaction 2
zizek toilet ideology
Kant attack ad
Human Tetris performance
Scorcese and Hitchcock Key to Reserva
Dramatic hamster
Philippines Thriller
aphex twin and Maya Deren
Chris Crocker Leave Britney Alone
Lass Gjertsen – amateur
Dog mix

(thanks Michael and all the contributers for sending in your favorites!)

After this very entertaining session and a short break, the upcoming video performers were interviewed.
First up was Emile Zile. The story behind his performance is a thorough research into shared pictures and movies of the deceased. On sites like Flickr and YouTube, he searched for keywords “miss you” or ” missing you” and showed the pictures on the song “I’ll be missing you”, by Puff Daddy (which is of course originally from Sting).

Next to be interviewed was Sam Nemeth from the Waag Society, He showed some of the first interviews via live web video as one of the many research projects the Waag is into. Nemeth stated the importance of working these technologies and alternative forms of video for both artists and viewers.

Tatiana de la O, who also presented earlier that day on the conference, explained her self-programmed video- slamming application. She used the open-source visual programming platform called PureData Her main drive being the need for more freedom and possibilities in costumizing a video mixing tool and finding new ways of video performancing.

Finally, Rosa Menkman was interviewed. In her master thesis, she is researching the Glitch. A glitch is a ‘so called’ mistake within technology and digital tools. Think of mistakes in HTML code, compilers or codecs, crashing applications, dead links, blue screen errors and so on. While we as users often experience this as an annoying wrongdoing and/or failing of technology, Rosa interprets this in a whole new, eye-opening way, namely as poetry of machinery. In her performance, self-made videos of glitches are shown. The beauty of the glitch and the poetry of machinery became very clear in an aesthetically overwhelming performance.

In sharing some concluding words, the video slamming session gave some content examples of many topics discussed during the conference, where the role of video artists, curators, spectators and copyrighters are now facing the challenge of the crowds and the heavy saturation of (cheap) tools and possibilities for production and distribution of video. Are there still pearls to find in all the rubbish, and is that, then video art? Or do we need to re-think the whole definition of video? The Slamming session showed some very nice aspects and responses of dealing with 2.0 YouTube culture.

All pictures by Anne Helmond

Richard Grusin has a video up called 1-20-09. Along with some others, Grusin has ‘entertained’ the fear that the Warner act of 2007 will keep George Bush in office next year (something Bush could do relatively easily and arbitrarily by claiming a state of emergency based on classified information). Grusin is putting his theoretical concept of ‘premediation’ to the test, wondering if the exposure of this scenario can pre-empt it, actually eliminating the possibility of it occuring. If premediation was able to make the Iraq war seem like a foregone conclusion, can this same tactic be used to fight back?

via Shaviro

Do you think Participatory Culture is all about friendly cooperation? Fans flocking to Star Wars conventions or squad based play in the latest MMORPG? The Participatory Culture session at the international Video Vortex conference in Amsterdam, proved that practices such as “cutthroat capitalism” also belong in this category. And how can, from an Asian instead of a Eurocentric perspective, the changing concept of authorship be understood when everyone can build new meaning upon an original work? This session provided practical examples as well as theoretical context.

Tilman Baumgärtel: Cutthroat Capitalism in South East Asia
First presenter Tilman Baumgärtel, currently teaching at the College of Mass Communication of the University of the Philippines in Manila, discussed piracy and intellectual property in South East Asia. Having organised the Asian Edition conference, which deals exactly with this subject, Baumgärtel can be regarded as an expert on these ‘social economics of piracy’. Surprisingly, however, these questions do not involve Internet and P2P data communication. Baumgärtel explains: ‘Asian piracy is still largely based on disk because there aren’t a lot of fast internet connections and modems’.

To give the audience an impression of the context, Baumgärtel shows a trailer of Malaysian film Ciplak (translation: Fraud). This independent film deals with the subject of piracy and it is one of the few comedies that is accessable to audiences in the region, also because indie films usually deal with ‘more serious subjects’. In the production process of Ciplak, creativity was necessary because of the low budget. For example, everyone worked on the movie free of charge, a camera was bought that came with 10 free mini-DV tapes and IKEA lamps were used for lighting.

Malaysian piracy started in the 1980s with the advent of VHS pirating and continued in the 1990s with VCD pirating. Baumgärtel: ‘Piracy started as a counter-movement against poor distribution. In Europe you can find almost anything, in Asian countries, however, films are hard to find.’ Only Hollywood films, or films starring Jackie Chan, make it through to cinemas and the legal distribution circuit. Baumgärtel: ‘This changed with VHS and BetaMax piracy. Some of the film makers feel that they are so indepted to the pirates, that this group is already thinking about contacting pirates so they can use their distribution channels. Internet is not a factor in this yet because of low speeds’.

These distribution channels are inventive and constitute a grassroots movement. In order to provide consumers with product, fishermen are smuggling masterdisks in the belly of tunafish. Global piracy is a consequential response to global economy, Baumgärtel: ‘The recent process of privatization has taken its part in facilitating piracy’. And continuining: ‘This is globalization from below. It is not about legal organisations, but illegal outfits. This movement represents globalized business and takes advantage of infrastructures. It is the counter image of legal illicit globalization we are seeing right now’. A term Baumgärtel mentioned in response to questions afterwards, perhaps exemplifies this movement most vividly. This is about ‘Cutthroat Capitalism’.

Ana Peraica: Food markets and copyright infringement
In her presentation, Ana Peraica, freelance curator and theorist mostly engaged with video and new media, gives an analysis of the growin archive of illegal material with a focus on Croatia. Why this region? Peraica: ‘Croatia is a really interesting region, because piracy is not really regarded as a crime’. She continues: ‘The problem of copyright was introduced to Croatia in 1991, before that it was still silent online. Today you can find illegal copies, for example, on the food market’.

On a more personal note I came across this example on a recent trip to Split, Croatia. Boulevards were crowded with stands selling illegal copies of the newest computer games and Hollywood films. Once installed, games were often older versions of the same franchise and films turned out to be bad recordings of cinema screens. Peraica: ‘I would like to show some examples in my presentation today, but the problem is that this would be illegal here. There is no agency that hunts down piracy in Croatia, they simply don’t bother about objections of copyright’.

Continuing, Peraica asks herself the question: ‘Is everyone who possesses a video camera and publically exposes video, automatically a video artist?’ Both an interesting and strange case, exemplifying duality in this question, is that of Croatian popstar Severina. She recorded a pornographic video of herself that got published online without her consent, she claimed copyright and stated that is was video art. Severina’s lawyer also stated that home video pornography is video art. The court’s response was that it was nothing innovative and therefore not video art. Severina lost this case, but at the same time she saw her popularity rising. The lawyer also put forth that it was invading privacy, the court responded by stating that she recorded it herself.

‘What is still video art?’ Peraica continues. Does it have to be innovative and perhaps even elitist? Peraica: ‘Popular culture is recycling elite culture, but is it still art?’ In her final words, Peraica concludes that is hard, if not impossible, to define art as something downloaded from YouTube versus institutionalized art.

Dominick Chen: Redefining Authorship from an Asian perspective
In his presentation Dominick Chen, who leads Creative Commons Japan and is JSPS Fellow Researcher at the University of Tokyo and NTT InterCommunication Center, aims to propose a redefinition of authorship itself: ‘How can we gain understanding of data generation and distribution in the light of systems?’ And more specifically, how to go through this Eurocentric idea of individual authorship, or commons? Chen aims to redefine the ‘commons’ from an Asian point of view. Especially with regards to the chain of creativity, where Asian culture differs greatly from its European counterpart.

Chen starts with an example of piracy and participatory culture in India: ‘When you buy a DVD in India, through a Chinese hack, you can get three stories: English, Chinese and Indian. Because translation of subtitles is really bad, you get three different stories based on one film’. Another example of a big Japanese market where you can secondary work of comics, anime and novels, Chen: ‘ There are about 50.000 participants who are selling product themselves, they gather to buy eachothers works that have been derived from original works.

The result is ‘fifty million Yen of economical effect in just three days’. Contributing to an original artwork, going from monologue to dialogue, is an essential part of Japanese culture. Chen: ‘Creativity is considered as reflective to the original author, contributors don’t care about being part of the chain of creativity’. This is exemplified in the fact that on Japanese Wikipedia, 80% of users are acting anonymous. This is the exact opposite of Wikipedia use in the United States. Chen: ‘This chain of creativity, based on anonymity mous is very characteristic of Japanese culture.

Looking back, Chen remembers 2007 firstly as the year of the fight between users and existing shareholders of the broadcasting industry. Secondly, 2007 saw the birth of the metadataplatform, which Chen calls ‘a critical point in classical User Generated Content’. Envisioning 2008, Chen firstly sees an explosion of open contents and, secondly, the rise of the ubiquitous platform of data and creation, such as the iPhone and the Nintendo DS. A third essential vision for 2008 is the recursive stratification – indefinite division into subgroups- of web API with the appearing of “API’s of API’s”. Fourth, Chen predicts a ‘war over openness, which platform can be more open than the other one?’

As an example of Japanese culture and the chain of creativity mentioned earlier, Chen shows Japanese videosharing service Nico Nico Douga. By analyzing this video service, Chen wants to clarify what creativity is in this whole situation. He concludes that comments are ‘becoming constituents of the original work, affecting both authorship and spectatorship. It is a shift from dialogue to symlogue, because narrative control is shared and over time content is nurtured, fermentative’. As examples of symlogue, he mentions M.C. Escher’s Drawing Hands, where both hands share narrative control and are also fermentative of nature. On Nico Nico Douga, a movement has emerged that uses original material and builds upon it by using, for example, the VOCALOID sound plugin.

Chen emphasizes that he doesn not want to focus on horizontal effects, or the chain of creativity, but he asks himself the question of ‘how to open this up on a vertical level?’ For a recent exhibition, Chen cooperated with a well-known Japanese author, who wrote a new book on the spot. New chapters could be downloaded through the Internet. Chen: ‘Normally it is considered embarassing to show how a writer writes. By showing this process, a new relationship between reader and author is created’. Chen also shows a recording of twenty-four hours of editting on a single Wikipedia page. This ‘opening up of revision’, is what Chen regards as the next step in opening up the ‘commons’. It exemplifies the ‘open ecology of digital contents’ and ‘fermentative ecology’ that Chen mentions in his final words.

Report by Twan Eikelenboom
All photography by Anne Helmond

This part of the conference is dealing with curating online video and was moderated by Vera Tollmann. The main question was why filmmakers and artists working with moving images don’t occupy Youtube as the perfect way to archive and distribute their work and to reach larger audiences. Bands and musicians inhabit Myspace, but why don’t use artists the online databases as a perfect place for their portfolios? And if artists were going to do so, what would happen with the curator? Would there be something left to do for him?

(more…)

The final speaker for the session Cinema and Narrativity was visual artist Dan Oki. In contrast to Jan Simons and Thomas Elsaesser, who drew on ‘old media’ to analyze the Web, Oki’s talk focused on how the database can benefit future cinema research and production.

He began, though, by giving his perspective on issues that came up earlier in the conference. First, on the video artists’ unwillingness to go online, he says the situation is similar to an earlier one, when filmmakers ignored video art. But it is not just a case of being afraid of the new. Nor is the problem compression (limits on video quality), but how the Web enforces its own spatial and temporal logics. He discussed the problem of sculpting time – this is of course key to cinema and video, from editing to exhibition, and artists will have to figure out how this changes online. (What Oki meant exactly by this I’m not sure, and would appreciate comments on that.)

Oki then turned to the concept of the database and its relationship to cinema. He argues that cinema is a database, whether digitized or not. Film theory generally takes the ‘shot’ as its starting point, but a better one may be footage: 35mm stills, sound files, and so on. He gives examples, including Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (and I would add the equally excellent film, The Wild Blue Yonder) to show how great cinema can result from re-purposing footage. How can we use new media to nurture this kind of filmmaking? Oki says that cinema archives should be made up of footage rather than (just) films, allowing for splicing by future directors.

Databases can also help researchers make more sense of the history cinema. By importing film ‘metadata’ – cast, crew, locations, etc. – on a large scale, one can map aesthetic developments and innovation in cinema. This would help overcome the default option of attributing change to the singular visions of directors, or ‘auteurs’.

Oki’s two suggestions , archiving ‘footage’ rather than films, and creating databases for research purposes, are a useful translation of Manovich’s well-known theory of database as symbolic form into practical targets. It remains to be seen whether these will be taken up by archivists and get support from the right institutions. Then, the question will be where it will take cinema and film theory.

The presentation given by Jan Simons is called Weddings, Cities and Colors via tagging.
Simons has performed a short study into user generated content and user generated indexing. With a background in cinema and narrative, Simons is interested in tag activity and the problems of tagging in searching an ideal model of readers/speakers. Very often these models are defined on introspection, where it is assumed that minds of other people work just like your own. The internet and 2.0 provides us with the way users of the internet think and relate; it gives us traces of their thinking. What If tags that users attach could tell us something about how the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ actually works?

Simons presents a rapid-prototyped- kind of research, a proof of principle via Flickr. Flickr was chosen as object of study due to its tagging system which is a blind tagging system (so no recommendations. the tags used are really thought of by users themselves. Flickr also gives a tagclouds and provides clusters of tags. Lots of prelimenary research is already done in this sense).
The main question is how people categorize their thoughts and experiences. Within folksonomy he trouble is to know what users actually mean – do they have the same concept of the words and the content they put on flickr? Some problems with terms concerning tagclouds are mentioned (NYC NY and New York, for instance, leading to thesame content).
Within a tagcloud only nouns (no verbs) are used. The most popular tags in a graph creates a powerlaw graph. The most popular tags are japan, NY and wedding.

Tags are messy categories. Polysemy is a major problem (e.g. place-names) as well as synonemy (e.g. fall, autumn, city and urban) and homonomy. It gives an unrelated meaning (e.g. rock meaning stone, but also a music genre) The level of categorization is also a problem (from generic to specific). Another obvious problem is that of spelling. San is often used for instance, but what does it mean? San Francisco, or San Diego? San is split up, the same occurs with New York; New becomes a tag.
There are also users who abuse tags. One user for instance used all the popular tags from flickr and hooked it to his photo. Flickr says: use more than one tag to increase its searchability. He did, very literally. Other types of misuse are that of adding very strange tags in order to avoid censorship. This misuse pollutes the tag system. There is a difference in “in” and “about” England, for instance. Tags are unreliable as guide.

Simons continues by talking about the approach in looking at tags. Tags as labels for things, or names for objects or places. When you look at correspondence, tag and tagged – nouns and adjectives – tell something about the properties of the object. Tags are never used in isolation. Lots of users use Flickr as a backup system for their own pictures. (as a kind of life insurance). This private use is often used without tagging. This also pollutes the tag system.
Categories of tags:
1 geographical tags. names of countries (largest cat.) states cities,,. where california is the most popular.
basic level terms are most commonly used
2. by events. Querying via events (christmas, holiday) shows activity that is linked to that event.
3 by nature of the object.
These are the most used categories.

About tag semantics: most popular is temporal metadata that is copied with the picture (the camera holds this information).
This gives an argument structure (time, location, event).
A distinction exists between nuclear arguments (core) and satellite argument (more general). Via this information, one can see that they follow a very basic semantic structure.
In order to complete the categorisation, a distinction is made between states and events. Within events, there is also the event of making the picture (picture of an event or of a state. where to put this?). Now we can distinguish the manner of photography and the instrument. Another problem now is polysemy: does color say something about the picture or the objects in the picture? If you apply linguistic analysis to tags, we see that tags are highly structured and very consistent. They follow a pattern of natural language. This is very important in understanding and interpreting the content (in this case, pictures). This could tell us a lot about what users conceive of the world via their pictures/ videos.

Q&A: users give meaning to pictures, narratizing it. The idea is that inner speech evokes mini-narratives.
How can we use the semantic results from this research? Simons replies that Flickr was used as a research objects due to it being concised and accessible (more than YouTube). This research shows that users have a more sentence-like approach to tagging than just labeling. This is what it shows, possibly one could project this onto youTube, although youTube is a different medium.
Vocabulary of the amateur photographer? Isn’t that what this research shows? Simons replies: Yes and no, events do happen a lot around the photograph itself. Tagging is biassed by activity that users have in common on Flickr, which is in this case photography.

Picture by Anne Helmond

‘Constructive instability’ is how Condoleeza Rice described the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in the summer of 2006. It’s a term that brings to mind tropes of globalization – maybe a synonym of precarity, or the state that produces a desire for sustainability. Thomas Elsaesser uses it to describe the kinds of experience engineered on the Web, especially through collaborative filtering. He asks how our experience of the new forms of artificial life – “or art made more life-like” – known collectively as Web 2.0, might help us think about the whereabouts of ‘the human’ in the new ‘posthuman’ landscape.

In the mode of Web flâneur, Elsaesser took his questions to YouTube. Starting with the notion of ‘collapse’, he followed a semantic trail that led from the Honda Cog advertisement to the film it references (Der Lauf der Dingen), on to a Japanese television show and, finally, world championship domino tipping. The collective efforts of users, software, statistics and sorting algorithms presented him with a path through YouTube, one that wavered consistently between the joy of epiphanies and a constant threat of entropy. But rather than understand this pathway in the new media lineage of hypertext, Elsaesser turns to the language of cinema.

Elsaesser’s talk centered around Der Lauf der Dingen – the 1987 film created by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss. The famous film is a 29 minute long take that follows an elaborate cause-and-effect machine made of a range of heterogeneous materials – planks, tires, candles, and so on. The film is hard to stop watching, and gains its suspense from an engineered potential for failure – its ‘constructive instability’.

Elsaesser uses the translation ‘The life of things’ rather than the official one, ‘The way things go’, and connects the film’s tension between balance and collapse to life online. The Web flâneur finds pleasure in the added value of Web 2.0 – its own versions of adaptive evolution – but there’s always another collapse, the anxiety of oncoming entropy, “the evolutionary dead-end”. Ontologically, the path through YouTube might be likened to a digital picaresque novel. It is an episodic narrative of loosely connected elements – not random but on its way there. A constructive instability whose attraction relies on that which destroys it. Going to back to his initial question, Elsaesser says that failure is the all too human factor that underlies the new forms of so-called posthumanism.

Elsaesser’s talk was itself a series of ‘aha’ moments – for me, a real highlight of the conference – and I’d never manage to capture it all in a blog post. I tried not to mangle his ideas too much, but I’m not so sure. (If his paper is published online I’ll make sure to link to it here.)

This session is the most concrete session of today. The focus is on practical views on online video from the perspective of speakers’ practices. How do video artist, activists, programmers and curators deal with copyright issues, publishing and distributing videos? Main issue addressed in this session relates to the most ideal alternative platforms that can be created for online video. What are the differences and similarities compared to YouTube? How do these alternatives deal with open source software and p2p processes? And how do they deal with user agreemenst and proprietary software? Why not YouTube?

Moderated by Seth Keen, the speakers in this session will investigate developments in the field of open source software in creating alternatives to proprietary software like Windows Media Player. Through investigating p2p alternatives and open licenses, both users and programmers aim to create a truly distributed network, in which content can freely float around without having to use centralized servers and sign strings of user agreements. Moderator Seth Keen and Geert Lovink developed the concept of the Video Vortex conference together.

All photo’s by Anne Helmond

Michael Smolens – Cross-cultural communication through real-time translation
Last minute addition to this session and first up is Michael Smolens. His main interest lies in cultural needs around the world and how digital technology can provide new means for cross-cultural communication. A documentary like 9/11 Truth shows the impact one documentary can have on public opinion. It is not hard to imagine there are numerous movies around the world with similar impact but are not accessible due to language issues. His project aims to use open source-wikipedia like software to make every movie available in all languages, in all kinds of formats. His project dotSUB does this by making use of RSS in 24 languages. It is basically a real-time translation tool on the Web. This project shows a sensitivity for cultural significance. Language is impediment in understanding other cultures but can also be a barrier that creates misunderstandings.

Matthew Mitchem – Video Social: Amateur video and virtuosity in collaboratively produced media
Matthew Mitchem shows a political/activistic clip “A Cold Day in DC” that reflects on the second inauguration of the Bush administration. This documentary was his first involvement in making videos. With a background in philosophy and an interest in politics, he positions himself as a political video maker.

What are YouTube alternatives? Matthew explores this question by looking at the first answer that comes to his mind: television. In his presentation Matthew argues lines between television and online video are blurring in two ways. First of all, the boundaries between old and new media are blurring because YouTube is becoming a popular source for mainstream media to reflect upon. One consequence is that YouTube is getting more political importance. The video “Vote Different” shows a 1984ish movie based on a 90ties Apple commercial. The maker was slightly related to the Barack Obama campaign and was fired after this video got enormous airtime. During the Hurricane Katrina, CNN advised people to stay in doors, but requested viewers if they did get out anyway, to take their video camera with them. Eye reports or citizen journalism via videos were a substantial part of the CNN reports on Katrina.

For this conference Matthew decided to become a YouTube addict and got involved with commenting and replying. He shows an online video concerning Hillary Clinton and repetition. The video “Hillary Clinton: Favorite Word” shows a very narcissistic Hillary Clinton (lots of “i’s” and “me’s”). Right after the interview this video was online. Most hits for that video were on the next day. Since there were a lot of videos responding to that interview it was difficult to get many hits. If you want to be viewed tag well. The point he makes is that YouTube has become part of the political project, not separated form it.

Secondly, he argues television is not at all that distinct from YouTube because there are numerous sites that provide channels or topic specific online videos, including Godtube, Gospeltube, Ning, Channelme.tv. They are basically a ‘filter’ for online videos. In the example of Ning, you can create your own social networking site (under a license agreement) Also, Channelme.tv, is quite big and allows for alternative use. From this television perspective we don’t need to construct more alternative to YouTube because public access television is already available through these filter-like sites. These sites are often built on top of mayor sites like YouTube.

His project Multitude.tv is one such examples that provide means for Web users to create and share their filtered channels. Multitude.tv is recently redesigned and now makes use of a WordPress-like cms called Joomla! Joomla! works on database management and FTP. The benefit is that you can use your own user agreements and it has the-same functionality as YouTube, with lots of open source plugins. You can basically create your own YouTube. Unfortunately he didn’t elaborate on Multitude.tv much. Questions from the audience were mostly about Multitude.tv which provided him with the possibility to elaborate on this project. Multitude.tv is a also a filter-like project, like for instance Godtube and has multiple channels. Since they also make use of YouTube content and therefore also transferring copyright with the content they copy to their site, there was also a question relating to this. How do they deal with that? The answer was simply put: they don’t. They don’t have lawyers, mostly because they are not as financially attractive as YouTube. Furthermore, when they receive complains about a specific movie being copyrighted they remove it. Another interesting question was about the collaborate aspect of the project. When Matthew and his colleagues were filming “Cold Day in DC” they saw that lot of people were filming. Although they were only ones making feature documentary about second inauguration, there were a lot of citizen journalists. Multitude.tv is also a platform to create collaborative group where these videos can be collected and shared.

Valentin Spirik – Open source ways of producing, distributing and promoting online video
Valentin Spirik is part of P2pFoundation.net. He approaches alternative ways of producing, distributing and promoting online video by looking at free and open-source software like 3D modeling/animation application Blender and open-media platforms and tools. Valentin is film maker and into collecting and filtering open source video tools. In the last couple of years his focus moved to online distribution. He discusses open source software by talking about the ways he as film maker promotes, uploads and distributes own videos. Providing a kind of HowTo for finding ways into existing alternatives to YouTube. With this he hopes people to be inspired and find alternatives to YouTube. His method of working with online video is illustrated with examples such as “Indiworks Channel” which involved remixing video, 3D animation and vlogging.

His first recommendation is to have a blog. Valentin uses uses WordPress, but it can also be Blogger or another blog software platform. The downside of WordPress is that it cant embed Blip.tv videos because of some security issue in the code. Only YouTube and Google Video can be embedded which is not a good thing. Valentine prefers Blip.tv over YouTube because it supports creative commons license which YouTube does not. Blip.tv also support more file types next to Flash which is the only type YouTube supports. Before using Blip.tv he used Archive.org. Archive.org is an important site because it is a free and big digital library. Archive.org doesn’t charge for storing videos. They only make you agree that people are able to download your video. In the open-source pond his video’s can still be found such as his first (half) feature film “Vincent“. Valentin makes an interesting remark about online video distribution. The notion that everything is getting faster and smaller and easier is only half the story. The other side of the story is slow distribution via the internet. In traditional cinema movies go away can not be seen again.Archive.org for instance lets you see movies and files over and over again, when you want to; it allows you to distribute your movie into eternity. And for free. This argument taps into the argument made by Florian Shneider that the Web is not about real-time but rather about “anytime wherever”.

Nicely complementing the previous speaker who talked about ‘filters’ for online videos, Valentin discusses a possibility for creating alternatives to YouTube by creating channels. On Videobomb.com you can bookmark favorite videos and make playlists. After making a playlist, you can create a feed and it becomes basically a channel. In aggregators such as Getmiro.com you can can submit your channel. Before this possibility of creating channels existed he used Ourmedia.org. Ourmedia.org is very simply put a community built on top of Archive.org. This was actually an ‘alternative to YouTube’ before YouTube existed. These alternatives are both mainly about link copying. In linking it to your own site, you create your own video channel – a very strong and easy alternative to YouTube. This is great for independent film makers because you can create your own channel. According to Valentin there is no excuse left to not post your stuff online. On the p2pfoundation.net wiki on the Audiovisual Guide page, there are all kinds of documentation on ways how to get your stuff online.

By showing trailer mash-up between terminator and E.T. “The Real Digital Revolution” Valentin shares his thoughts on copyright issues. The mash-up is a commentary of what is going on online. Concerning copyright, this trailer has some discussions around it. The power of video is that you can show it. Strange is that we are allowed to quote text, but not video. While the thing is with videos that you have to show them, not talk about them. To not be able to show videos is absurd.

The last open source solution Valentin addresses is Blender, which is a 3D application. You can even change the code if you want. While the commercial version of software like this costs between 2000 and 5000 dollars and the code cannot be changed. Blender is free and works. To demonstrate Blender Valentin ends with a preview of a Blender-made movie that is not yet finished called “Vivaldi-rock”.

Philine von Guretzky – Bridging the gap: Redefining the platforms for moving image
Berlin based Philine works with an organization called Tank.tv. Online gallery Tank.tv is dedicated to showing video artist in different contexts. It is an alternative to YouTube specifically for video artist. The artworld is at a change this moment, also in video art. Recently video art is been made more available, blurring the line between traditional art categories. Tank.tv is experimental and acts as an online gallery especially for independent and new artists. Since 2003 they have been online and mayor changes are happening now. The number of viewers increase, content increases, and ways of working change.

Artists and traditional galleries initially were afraid for publishing online because it would devalue the work and make it easy to copy. Tank.tv is now more accepted within institutions and they curate shows a couple of times per year in collaboration with other institutions. The videos shown online are reduced to three minute-videos and in museums (such as Tate Modern), on a big screen, full videos are shown. Together with Park.nl Tank.tv has also curated for a whole year an Urbanscreen in the south of Amsterdam. No commercials, just video art.

In what way is Tank.tv really different than YouTube? First of all videos are not embeddable on sites. They have the philosophy that it is more respectful to the piece and more about the piece itself when it is shown on this curatorial site. Some artist don’t want to be shown next to a funny kitten movie and Thank.tv provides a platform for such artists. The strength of Tank.tv lies with the group as such. It is a small curated amount. Copyright issues are not a problem for this alternative and dealt with rather easily; the artist signs that its not Tanks.tv’s problem if it turns out to be a video that is copyrighted by someone else.

Ian White wanted to create a list of lists of videos. They are an online gallery that only show what is admitted. Therefore you are invited to submit to the list of lists. Best is on minidvd for submission.

Jay Dedman – Show-in-a-box, WordPress video distribution system
Presentation of videos is very important for online works and media activists. Open source and sane copyrights are also important. Jay Dedman and college Ryanne Hodson have developed Show-in-a-box, a tool that makes WordPress better suitable for WordPress. With the goal of creating the ultimate videoblogging platform by providing WordPress installs, this alternative builds on YouTube and WordPress.

In asking for a revolution in online video, he claims that it already happened. YouTube is a revolution. However, “YouTube makes my work look bad”, that is the main problem. Although this argument for an alternative to YouTube sounds similar to the argument made by Philine, Jay does not argue for presenting the pieces he makes as stand alone videos. Jay considers himself a storyteller and requires good quality for his videos. Showinabox.tv. mixes your WordPress site with good video displaying. Most storytellers are not familiar with php, html etc. so they really need tools otherwise they will get left out. Voices need to be heard. What he considers problems concerning online video can be solved by adjusting WordPress. A blog works well for text, but not really for video.

Jay started to make a list with critical thinkers, film makers to see how they deal with distributing and presenting videos and the problems they come accross. Momentshowing.net was the blog he started with. The blog format looks like a diary and it is almost impossible to find old videos except on date search or clicking through the archive. As more speakers have addressed in this conference, it is important for video artists videos can be found “anytime wherever”. Because video archiving and searching does not work good, the blog does not serve this need.

As a second example he shows Politicalvideo.org, a political video scraper that allows you to mix these videos. The blog does not allow video to easily work with it: too much text-based. For visual creators, a blog often does not suffice and support creativity. Also when vlogging is about raising money for visual projects, donating via paypal for instance, again a blog is not ideal. For this to work they even needed to hack WordPress.

Another project deals with getting 8mm movies online, still difficult to find a format that handles these files. The Show-in-a-box project is about volunteers that create open source plugins in order to create a good alternative YouTube that does not scramble with your quality. A first pilot is Ryanishungry.com. It is a blog, but offers different video formats and shares (called VPIP, video paste in place). Point to make is that video artists need to get involved in the creation of new media tools. Pledge drive features plugin for WordPress is about also financially helping each-other out (because youTube isn’t gonna!).

Tatiana De La O – Independent media
Tatiana approaches alternatives to YouTube yet from another way. Not addressing YouTube alone, rather the Web 2.0 revolution as a whole. Tatiana is part of Indymedia, however she is not representing them. It is the first open independent open source publishing site and she wants to talk about how they are different to the 2.0 revolution. Independent media sites are looking at web 2.0 with two different attitudes. On the one side they want to learn to network the different producers better and spread good material better. On the other, narcissism and individualism of the blogosphere is seen as counter productive by most of the activist programmers.

Sites like Indymedia and Archive.org are about seriousness of the information that is on display. They are often event-driven and reactive to reality. Independent media are mostly run by volunteers and reactionary. The problem is that they are sometimes anxious that the police will come and shut their servers down and they do not have that expensive professional software. This does not always makes them look as professional as commercial Web 2.0 sites. It is however not so that Indymedia is unstable and Flickr or YouTube is stable. The police can also remove your video from YouTube.

2.0 is about friends of your contact list. The advantage of 2.0 sites is that you can control the feedback, It is gentle, more stable, more fun. In many independent media sites one cannot do this. She makes a point about content politics, taking democracy to media production. Her main argument against 2.0 is that it takes down democracy. People that like kittens and fun are free on YouTube. People that are serious or political not always. Who is adjusting content? What is democracy? Something unequal. Just like 2.0? A pervert thing in Flickr is that they have sneaky ways of hiding content by not showing tags in searches. If your pictures are dirty they get tagged nipsa which means it can not be found in a search. If you admit to Flickr your picture is nipsa yourself, only that picture is removed from the search results. When Flickr find out themselves, then the whole account is removed. This is about diverting information (agency and control). Old-school politics are transferred onto media sites. Indymedia did Web 2.0ish things as well, but called it open-publishing.

Tatiana ends her talk with 2.0 lessons. Indymedia were fighting for revolution and people went to 2.0. Their first reaction was “why! have you seen the licensing!”. The first lesson is that they learned not to be jealous. People use the tools they can use and they will use it (YouTube, Flickr). Why fight it? Secondly they think more about syndicating content via YouTube. Try to talk more with users what features they like (not too much though). About marketing and means, they want to make revolution irresistible! if content is elaborated, it gets more attention. Still, it has to be quick. Lots of open source and free software is emerging. We are now preparing tools for this new revolution. We show what we are doing. They are not reactive to market (2.0 buzz), but to what people are doing.