Video Vortex: Moving Images Beyond YouTube

Mass Ornament by Natalie Bookchin - Documentation of HD video installation with 5.1 surround sound. (See also Kristina Schlosser, "The Twenty-First Century Tiller Girls of YouTube in Natalie Bookchin's Mass Ornament', UCDAVIS MA presentation, 2010] And also read: Brian Willems, 'Increasing the Visibility of Blindness: Natalie Bookchin’s Mass Ornament' and 'Natalie Bookchin and Blake Stimson, 'Out in public: Natalie Bookchin in Conversation with Blake Stimson' linked to below.

Film Studies For Free is thrilled to present a link to the second of two Video Vortex Readers (both freely available online): Moving beyond YouTube (large PDF), which has just been published to coincide with the Sixth Video Vortex conference now taking place in Amsterdam.

The first VV Reader (Video Vortex: Responses to YouTube, eds. G. Lovink, S. Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute for Network Cultures, 2008) was previously flagged up by FSFF. And this blog also posted on the wonderful presentations (all available for online viewing) from the Fifth VV conference.

With its own interest in web cinema and digital film and video studies, FSFF is a great admirer of the work associated with Video Vortex and the Institute of Network Cultures. It very much hopes its own author will be able to attend next year's conference to catch some of this great work in person.

Here's the opening section of Geert Lovink's 'Introduction' (and below this, the Reader's table of contents), so that you can see the important issues raised and explored by this latest, excellent collection:

This second Video Vortex Reader marks the transition of online video into the mainstream. Staggering statistics of hypergrowth no longer impress us. Discussing a possible online video project for the first time in late 2006 in Melbourne with Seth Keen, the topic was still a matter of ‘becoming’. One collaborative research project, six conferences and two anthologies later, the Video Vortex project seems at a crossroads. Massive usage is not an indication of relevance. Heavy use does not automatically translate into well-funded research or critical art practices. Is the study of online video, like most new media topics, doomed to remain a niche activity – or will we see a conceptual quantum leap, in line with the billions of clips watched daily? So far, there is no evidence of a dialectical turn from quantity into quality. It is remarkable how quickly both pundits and cultural elites became
used to online video libraries containing millions of mini-films. In our ‘whatever’ culture nothing seems to surprise us. Who cares about the internet? Continuous technological revolution, from social networking to smartphones, seems to have numbed us down. B-S-B: Boredom-Surprise-Boredom. Instead of an explosion of the collective imaginary we witness digital disillusion – a possible reason why online theory has had a somewhat unspectacular start. The low quality of YouTube’s most popular videos certainly indicates that this platform is not a hotbed of innovative aesthetics.
           What are the concerns here? Was will das Medium? Are we condemned to fight over the exact percentage of user-generated content in comparison to remediated film and television material? Will online video remain a jukebox item that is passed from one social network to the next? Have we all switched from zapping to searching? Should we approach the potential of YouTube culture from the plasma screen angle? Is the final destination to be found in the living room, where the online video logic starts to compete with cable and free-to-air television? Is online video liberating us from anything? Instead of trying merely to measure this ever-changing field, we can also try to define future scenarios. Let’s dig into the destiny of online video and discuss three possible directions [...].  [Geert Lovink, 'Engage in Destiny Design: Online Video Beyond Hypergrowth: Introduction to Video Vortex Reader II', in Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles (eds), Video Vortex Reader: Moving Images Beyond YouTube (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011) p. 9]

VV2: TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Geert Lovink, 'Engage in Destiny Design: Online Video Beyond Hypergrowth: Introduction to Video Vortex Reader II'

THEORY and AESTHETICS

• Stefan Heidenreich, 'Vision Possible: A Methodological Quest for Online Video'
• Andreas Treske, 'Frames within Frames - Windows and Doors'
• Robrecht Vanderbeeken, 'Web Video and the Screen as a Mediator and Generator of Reality'
• Vito Campanelli, 'The DivX Experience'
• Sarah Késenne, 'Regarding the Sex, Lies and Videotapes of Others: Memory, Counter-Memory, and Mystified Relations'

IMAGES ON THE MOVE

• Gabriel Menotti, 'Objets Propagés: The Internet Video as an Audiovisual Format'
• Andrew Gryf Paterson, 'From a Pull-down Screen, Fold-up Chairs, a Laptop and a Projector: The Development of Clip Kino Screenings, Workshops and Roles in Finland'
• Jan Simons, 'Between iPhone and YouTube: Movies on the Move? '

COLLECTION CASE STUDIES

• Sandra Fauconnier, 'Video Art Distribution in the Era of Online Video'
• Evelin Stermitz, 'ArtFem.TV: Feminist Artistic Infiltration of a Male Net Culture'
• Mél Hogan, 'Crashing the Archive/Archiving the Crash: The Case of SAW Video’s Mediatheque'
• Teague Schneiter, 'Ethical Presentation of Indigenous Media in the Age of Open Video: Cultivating Collaboration, Sovereignty and Sustainability'

ASIA ONLINE

• David Teh, 'The Video Agenda in Southeast Asia, or, ‘Digital, So Not Digital’'
• Ferdiansyah Thajib, Nuraini Juliastuti, Andrew Lowenthal and Alexandra Crosby, 'A Chronicle of Video Activism and Online Distribution in Post-New Order Indonesia'
• Larissa Hjorth, 'Still Mobile: Networked Mobile Media, Video Content and Users in Seoul'

TECHNOLOGICAL APPROACHES

• Matthew Williamson, 'Degeneracy in Online Video Platforms'
• Andrew Clay, 'Blocking, Tracking, and Monetizing: YouTube Copyright Control and the Downfall Parodies'
• Tara Zepel, 'Cultural Analytics at Work: The 2008 U.S. Presidential Online Video Ads'
• Rachel Somers Miles, 'Free, Open and Online: An Interview with Denis Roio aka Jaromil'
• Alejandro Duque, 'Streaming Counter Currents: ‘W.A.S.T.E’'

POLITICS and HUMAN RIGHTS

• Sam Gregory, 'Cameras Everywhere: Ubiquitous Video Documentation of Human Rights, New Forms of Video Advocacy, and Considerations of Safety, Security, Dignity and Consent'
• Elizabeth Losh, 'Shooting for the Public: YouTube, Flickr, and the Mavi Marmara Shootings'

ONLINE VIDEO ART

• Brian Willems, 'Increasing the Visibility of Blindness: Natalie Bookchin’s Mass Ornament'
• Natalie Bookchin and Blake Stimson, 'Out in public: Natalie Bookchin in Conversation with Blake Stimson'
• Linda Wallace, 'non-western and garland'
• Perry Bard, 'When Film and Database Collide'
• Cecilia Guida, 'YouTube as a Subject: Interview with Constant Dullaart'
• Rosa Menkman, 'Glitch Studies Manifesto'
• Albert Figurt, 'The Thin Line Between On and Off: a (re:)cyclothymic exploration'

APPENDICES

• Video Vortex Conferences
• Video Vortex III in Ankara
• Video Vortex IV in Split
• Video Vortex V in Brussels 
• Video Vortex VI in Amsterdam

The New 'Cinema of Attractions'? Andrew Clay on Web Cinema

'Web cinema: Mind the Gap!' by Andrew Clay

Film Studies For Free was extremely impressed by the quality of the above presentation, one of a number of excellent papers (all now online) given at the latest Video Vortex conference in Brussels.

[In t]he past two years, the [Video Vortex] conference series - which focuses on the status and potential of the moving image on the Internet - has visited Amsterdam, Ankara and Split, growing out into an organized network of organizations and individuals. Time for an interim report, perhaps. [VV] asked some participants of the first Video Vortex editions and publication, as well as new ones, to reflect on recent developments in online video culture.

Over the past years the place of the moving image on the Internet has become increasingly prominent. With a wide range of technologies and web applications within anyone’s reach, the potential of video as a personal means of expression has reached a totally new dimension. How is this potential being used? How do artists and other political and social actors react to the popularity of YouTube and other ‘user-generated-content’ websites? What does YouTube tell us about the state of contemporary visual culture? And how can the participation culture of video-sharing and vlogging reach some degree of autonomy and diversity, escaping the laws of the mass media and the strong grip of media conglomerates?

In the videoed paper embedded above, as in his wonderful essay 'BMW Films and the Star Wars Kid: 'Early Web Cinema' and Technology' in the 2008 collection Cinema and Technology, Andrew Clay takes an in-depth look at the current state of online cinema. He asks what will happen to web cinema as we shift from learning to see and how to feel to learning how to participate in this new electronic space of modernity?

In the talk, Clay examines many important 'participatory media' issues such as the phenomenon of cinematic 'prosumption' and the rise of the digital 'caméra-stylo'. His talk is wonderfully illustrated with clips. You can also read some of his brilliant work on these issues in the article linked to below:

• Andrew Clay, 'Cinema 2.0: A Swarm of Angels', The Art Book, Volume 17, Issue 1, 2010 (p 72-73) pdf

FSFF thinks that it is well worth keeping an eye on Andrew Clay's work: he is currently Senior Lecturer in Critical Technical Practices at De Montfort University, Leicester and programme leader of BSc (Hons) Media Technology in the Faculty of Computing Sciences and Engineering.

Tune in to Antenna

[Film Studies For Free will be sorry to say goodbye to Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker/Spider-Man...]

Film Studies For Free wanted to let its readers know about Antenna, a very stimulating blog from graduate students and faculty in the Media and Cultural Studies area of the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Here's what this relatively new site says about itself:

Antenna is a collectively authored media and cultural studies blog committed to timely yet careful analysis of texts, news, and events from across the popular culture spectrum. The site regularly responds to new works and developments in television, film, music, gaming, digital video, the Internet, print, and the media industries.

Antenna is intended to address a broad public inside and outside the university walls. Within those walls, though, it further intends to bridge the gap between scholarly journals, which remain the paradigm for scholarly discourse but too often lack the ability to reply to issues and events in media with any immediacy, and single-author media scholar blogs, which support swift commentary but are limited in their reliance upon the effort and perspectives of individuals. Coordinated by a group of writers who draw on a variety of approaches and methodologies, Antenna, therefore, exists as a means to analyze media news and texts, both as they happen and from multiple perspectives.

Antenna is currently operated and edited by graduate students and faculty in the Media and Cultural Studies area of the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Although, while in its current stage, the content published on the site is written largely by members of that program, Antenna is currently in the process of expanding our author team, and we hope eventually to include contributions and comments from a diverse collection of writers.

Antenna’s goal is to create a forum in which readers and contributors participate in active, open, and thoughtful debate about media and culture.

Antenna is designed to respond quickly to events, and thus rather than be published on a set, periodic schedule, Antenna updates its content continually. Because Antenna is interested in timely responses, we encourage short entries. Extensive presentation of evidence is not required, though supplementary links are encouraged.

With its extremely lively house style, and wide-ranging topics, FSFF thinks Antenna has a great future ahead of it. For examples of some good film-related posts, it recommends you check out the following to start with:  

• 'Smells Like an Ethnically Divided Teen Star System' by Mary Beltrán  

• 'THWIP!+CTRL+DEL (on the rebooting of the Spider-Man franchise)' by Derek Johnson    

• 'Egregious Product Placement: The Invention of Lying' By Erin Copple Smith

You can also follow Antenna's updates on Twitter.