After an epic cycling adventure on the weekend (with epic = horribly unfit and adventure = getting lost), on Sunday I came down with a lovely case of something nasty. As a result, I have spent some time on the internet looking for self-help remedies. I am all for self diagnosis (aided by the internet, thank you very much), except that to my dismay I discovered that my symptoms meant I had contracted strep throat, pneumonia, depression and TB, not to mention swine flu and bipolar. I am sure to die. But  in my quest for the antidote, I stumbled upon some help – and these beautiful pieces.

Beautiful design combined with minimal bullshit and pretense is what I love best, and so this made me feel slightly better. These guys have it all. A crisp and ergonomic website, appealing ethics and ideology, and gorgeous, tactile packaging that makes me wish that advertising was more integrated with the appearance of the final product. Simply browsing the website improved my health no end. Yes, the content may be a little cad (witty, dry product banter is getting hard to sustain). And yes, it probably won’t change the world like some other things I have seen this week. But it made me feel happy, even for just a moment.

After all, sometimes even superman loses his super, and needs a little help.

This has, however, allowed me plenty of time to catch up on cleaning, reading and web browsing. Today’s treats are brought to you by the letter C. Keeping me entertained has been:

The beautiful creations of Heidi Kenney, as found on her My Paper Crane blog, have given me endless hours of giddiness. Discovered after I purchased some new kidrobot toys (a dire addiction, with no known cure).

Slightly sillier but just as giddy-inducing are the adventures of the Middleman by Bayat. Ejecting matter from the stomach thru the mouth (previewed below) has to be my personal fav.

Jewellery that looks like tasty tasty food (yes, it is an ongoing theme. Food + cute = smitten)

Fresh and beautiful music by new russian producer Oak. His lush tune Mongoose has him being compared to the likes of ASC, Electrosoul System and Mav, all regular features on my personal soundtrack.

http://treesarepeopletoo.com/media/Oak_-_Mongoose.mp3

Thank you to Science and Progress for bringing this track (released free of charge and hosted by etiket) to my attention. I have thoroughly rinsed and can also recommend this fine mix by Electrosoul System.

(Interesting also to me that all of these artists are using Myspace as their main websites. I thought myspace was so yesterday. I should really pay more attention.)

And finally, just for lols, the official ranking of offensive words. As the friend who directed me to it said, it’s science. So it must be real.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

this video is magic. Props to Blu and vimeo.

The relevance of these videos is in their comparison. Despite Jon M Chu being a film director, the clips he have produced could absolutely be described as post-industrial media. They’re messy, handheld, dirty, noisy and amateur. But you don’t really notice that (we are so desensitised to the shitty quality of youtube) until you look at m&m’s response to the challenge.

The disney queens’ dance video, in comparison, clearly uses professional equipment handled by professional staff. They have lighting, sets, implement effects, zoom and anything else they can find, but despite all this, their video still stinks. It’s got nothing on the unrefined production produced by Jon M Chu’s crew (probably one dude with his phone. A very nice phone, with a nice camera, but you get the idea).

I can’t really work out why I am drawn more to the ‘dirtier’ one than the more refined one. Is this aesthetic – dirty, noisy, handheld, real – one that we are becoming more accustomed too, and one we are appreciating more? Do we prefer to watch something we are ourselves familiar with, as a style we can produce ourselves? Or is this just an issue of street cred, that the genre needs to apply this ‘dirty’ media to retain any sense of reality and credibility (it’s the streets, you know). You watch and tell me.

But it seems to be working now, and I present to you my second functioning ezedia project (unfortunately not greatly improved from the first lol) in all it’s glory. The two lumieres are very still, in fact I realised the right one looks like a still picture. hmm. not much gwarn there at all. Think of it as a depiction of a very relaxed (super chillax), still day in the park. Which it was. Enjoy.

Following is my summarisation and initial rant on vernacular video. I am working through the essay and identifying the concepts that resonate with me, and thus that will be pertinent in shaping my manifesto.

Video has been in our homes for nearly sixty years. It is an offshoot of television, a one-to-many broadcast medium, but television’s centrality was, and continues to be, splintered with the advent of cable and satellite distribution. Video has also followed this path to become a decentralised medium. Today video technology is everywhere. It is portable and provides instant replay, reflexive qualities.

No longer the exclusive medium of specialists (journalists, artists etc) it is the peoples’ medium. It is the way that people now communicate, identify and recognise themselves, locate themselves at events and describe what happened. Video will become completely ubiquitous – the availability of video technology will mean more POVs and further democratisation the media, and will result in the growth and domination of ‘vernacular’ video.

What will it look like? It will be shorter, to accommodate shrinking attention spans and limited bandwidth. It will feature ‘canned’ music, and will encourage a remix culture. Sherman mentions the ‘copyleft’ movement. Scripted narratives and drama will be replaced by real-time, personal recounts and video diaries. As a result the content will be messy, unrefined and amateur – welcome to dirty media and its increasing credibility and ‘coolness’ – professional and perfected will no longer resonate with audiences. They will respond to the real, the raw.

At the same time, this reality will be fractured by the overuse of special effects, speeding up and slowing down – quick and dirty surrealism will direct creative use of video, we will see a ‘mash-up’ of genres of video. To combat this phenomena, ‘Video Art’ will revert more to a sanctioned and traditional style of visual art in order to define itself. In this way video art is ignoring its power as a communication device – its potential to provide feedback – and will continue to be conservative, retrospective.

Thus video artists will have to choose – retain the traditional qualities of video art as depicted through galleries and museums, or choose the challenge and chaos of video in a vernacular form. They can choose the controlled, predictable space of video art presented in conventional gallery format, or the public space, itself dominated by vernacular, colloquial, and diverse manifestations of video. Amongst millions of different voices, all with different objectives, aesthetics will still play a major role in video as an art form, in an environment where a vernacular use of video will drive content over form. But the importance of content in this arena of production is critical, in a medium where aesthetics are losing their resonance – vernacular video will be anesthetic.

Video is everywhere, as common a medium as print or television, and is available to anyone to produce from their homes and on the move. The technology not only democratises the medium through availability to the tools of production, but also through dissemination. All surfaces are potentially screens – video becomes ubiquitous. We will have to embrace it to understand and engage in new media.

To continue to practice ‘art’ in video, artists will have to not only master the vernacular form, but develop and build upon it. Not only must this video art say something, be driven by meaningful content, but it also must do so in innovative and creative ways. It must ‘earn’ its audiences by becoming more than just a product in amongst an ever increasing swarm of producers – by introducing the aesthetic to the vernacular – or risk drowning in the rising tide and noise of this new dialect of video: This is the final frontier of video art. Through this development video art will resurrect itself again and again.

Upon reflection, I had to revise my initial flippant-ness regarding online video (it does feel as if youtube has been around for forever) and look a little closer at how online video is changing viewer habits. Reviewing some statistics (yes, unfortunately a big fan of statistics), I realised I was probably part of the 19% of internet users who watches online video every day.

As a media and a method of communication, video is redefining itself extremely successfully (probably the most successfully of any medium) to integrate into the online environment by becoming shorter, disseminating faster and catering for niche markets – you can find a video of almost anything you fancy.

It’s democracy of the media – it’s free, fast, fun and other f words, and is ultimately disposable, which is an attractive attribute in an environment where information overload seems imminent. Anyone with a computer can create and share it. Anyone can have their 15 megabytes of fame, and the media industry is realising this and adjusting accordingly. Watch it, chuck it. It’s a completely different method of digesting media. And online video grows organically. People want to share it. Viral video spreads without discrimination, without powers pushing it in their direction, to their agenda. We no longer have to watch what the broadcasters tell us to.

Of course, information, entertainment and news has travelled this way for years – by word of mouth, news outlets, traditional broadcast, but never so fast, or with so many choices, allowing me to completely customise it to my needs (when, where, how and how long I watch it) and in a format that defies boundaries such as literacy (other than computer literacy) and accessibility.

I probably indulge in it at least 3 times a day. Waste of time, or simply adapting to the communication tool of the future? Why read it when I can be shown it? And more importantly, what happens when youtube gets boring? What do we do then?

And so my eyes have been opened, my senses awakened somewhat. Now I am looking out for it everywhere. Found this piece by David Fonseca, who is both a video artist and musician. It’s good fun, in that it makes you feel somewhat uncomfortable. I like it.

All done in one shot. One take, one shot.

few issues with poster image, display size (i wanted it to be smaller) but it’s a start.