trees are people too

Claustrophobic?

My attention was drawn today to this amazing story. In 1999, Nicholas White was inadvertently (actually, when would it ever be otherwise) trapped in an elevator for forty hours. Oh the agony. Surely half of the world’s worst nightmare. Certainly mine.

More interesting is the video that captured the whole thing. Not only is this video fascinating to watch (I admit the music helps), but it is also presented in a rhizome format with the four recordings all playing simultaneously. I know this is a pretty abstract parallel I am drawing, but it is interesting to note how the action in all four screens contributes to the overall viewing experience. It’s quite surreal. It also contains some elements of the lumiere – fixed camera, constant with no edits. If you removed the music, the speeding up and cut it at 60 seconds, voila!

Ok, fine. It’s just hella interesting, ya?

A reflection on the Lumiere manifesto. This seems like quite a puritan approach to me, although that might also indicate a suspicion and avoidance of pleasure, and I do not think this is the idea.

Rather, it is not just the method of creating the videos, but also of considering, involving your audience that creates a Lumiere experience. The Lumiere manifesto changes the way viewers (or shall we say viewer, as these videos are designed to be watched alone) interpret the art by forcing them to engage, to dedicate some of themselves to it.

Initially the Lumiere manifesto seems inherently one-sided, biased towards the filmmakers wants and reliant on their perspective, but the manifesto also argues that the film cannot become meaningful, will not resonate, unless the viewers invests themselves in it. This is done by keeping the technical constraints extremely rigid, resigning the video to a simplified consciousness of the medium it is portrayed in – it plays, it stops, you watch it. By keeping the piece pure, simple, clean and uncluttered as such, confining it to a space we can all recognise (but which alone possesses no meaning), the video should be accessible to all active, consenting viewers. A Lumiere video – spontaneous, reflexive – juxtaposes an unadulterated, almost natural, view of the world, but with the attributes of a technology that is completely the opposite. The viewer cannot choose but to consider these elements.

The Lumiere manifesto argues that effects, zooms, audio, edits all distract the viewer. They create meaning, direct narrative, steer the piece. In turn, the viewer becomes idle, pedestrians, not participants. They become readerly. The creator’s perspective becomes the dominant and inescapable paradigm.

And this is what makes Lumiere writerly. A piece that is so simple allows you to ask, demand something of your audience. It becomes a two way transition (should the viewer consent to participation) and each transition with the video, each transaction will be different to the last.

This lends itself so beautifully to the online video environment, in which the video can be disseminated endlessly but with each viewing remaining one on one, personal and private. As such, everyone with a computer can access Lumiere – not just the interpretive, philosophical properties, but the physical also.

Unstructured and spontaneous, yet simple, clean, almost natural. These are the concepts I keep coming back to.

The lumiere video concept is not one I am very familiar with, but one I am looking forward to finding a bit more about – I have stumbled upon numerous references to it while researching videoblogging, most recently on this excellent blog by Andreas Haugstrup Pederson, a communications student based in Denmark.

Not only can this man build a mighty fine quicktime plugin, but he is also something of an aficionado on Lumiere.

Research on lumiere cinema has provided a handy segue into his work and blog, both of which offer insightful and comprehensive commentary on videoblogging.

So, what has Andreas told me so far?

Rules of Lumiere

The rules are as follows:

This makes it easy to create, but difficult to conceptualise.

I am still researching the philosophies behind the lumiere format, named after the Lumiere brothers. Incredibly simplified, I think the concept is to recreate film within the constraints that the Lumiere brothers experienced – i.e. limited time, equipment and effects. These were the ‘natural limits’ of Lumiere cinema. The premise therefore keeps the film itself technically simple – to not distract with edits, effects, zooms and cuts, and to capture spontaneity. Rather than being compared to or in competition with other styles of film and video, the Lumiere concept is designed to ‘complement perspective film and observer documentary’.

The Lumiere Manifesto argues that the principles followed in Lumiere film ‘are essential to our existence as artists, media producers, visual creatures, and world citizens’. One of the most interesting of these qualities is accessibility. As the Manifesto advises (and one might note that this is in principle) ‘Lumiere films require no explanation and are accessible to any audience with patience and an acceptance of the world we share.’

With that exact notion in mind I will try and create my Lumiere rhizomes. I want the individual videos to ‘require no explanation’ and to be accessible, but also the overall work to make some sort of sense. As such, I must think about the relationship between the two movies to the viewer and to each other, as well as the context of the media they are displayed in.

Instead of starting with a grand plan, an end in sight, as I usually would, I am going to start with nothing and see where it takes me. Stay tuned.

SO, moving on. Lets make a book a blog.

My two primary features of a blog were that it a) has allows the user to interact and customise and b) that a blog is transitory, temporary and constantly changing and updating.

So, for a book, video or audio to be more blog-like, it might possess these features:

Keshanee also mentioned the fact that books (as blogs) would be searchable, you would be able to search through all content for what you are after, which is a fantastic point I hadn’t thought of – the interactivity should let us control where we go and what we want to see….

This is just a few, among many many qualities of a blog you could argue could be applied to the mediums of books, video and audio. Hopefully all my indulgence in blogs will lead me to more.

BUT having said all that, I might also make my blog slightly more book like, in that it can be marked… technology such as this already exists (and is great fun) in ‘whiteboard’ websites such as skrbl, an online collaboration tool.

Maybe? I don’t know. As far as I am concerned, the more involved the better. bring on the remix.

Week 4 task.

Contemplation within squares? I wanted to discuss ‘square’ within the constraint. And did so quite literally, it seems.
It got me thinking about using text and print (static media) in moving picture and video (dynamic media) and how I might be able to (and probably will have to) use this in my manifesto.

The music is Source 1 by ASC, courtesy of subvert central.

Ok. Well, leading on from my previous post, i had another read of the brief for our manifesto. Looks like a may not be able to discuss any media that is not time based after all. Perhaps bye bye books. (What about ebooks or something like kindle? hmm??)

The interactive work will be a manifesto. It will present your manifesto about the future of time based (video and/or audio)
media. This can be specifically in relation to online media or it can be broader and include time based media in general.

Discussing (visually, audibly, textually) my perspective and views on the future of time based media in relation to Tom Sherman’s article on video media should be ok. But I will certainly want to go broader than the online context to time based media in general. Can I take it even further into the context of all media in general? Or is that getting a bit too ambitious? (Read:stupid).

I guess in terms of this weeks task I’m back to square one. (I am on fire today)

Await with bated breath to see what unfolds.

Brainstorming for this weeks task, i am going to try more to look at these tasks in the context of the final manifesto, my manifesto on the future of time based media.

To look at the future of time based media, I am going to have to also consider where it came from. The past of not just time based media, but all media. How time based media is rendering other media obsolete.

This weeks media discussion is on squares. Two things immediately popped into my head – frames and books. Frames within a book? Books within a frame? How on earth can I make these two inanimate things interesting? Books are particularly interesting to me in terms of media because of the argument that they are becoming obsolete and due to their position as a static media, the opposite of dynamic like video or audio, and certainly not time based (at least not in the way we are considering it).

But there are so many ‘square’ things around!! Perhaps I am being to restrictive in my thinking. Did you know that ‘square’ has not less than 37 definitions in the dictionary?? I need to start thinking a bit more outside the square, I think. (Oh the irony).

Perhaps I shall still begin with books. I do love them so, obsolete or not.

In his manifesto, Vernacular Video, Sherman is passionate about video and its development as a medium. I had never really considered it this way.

‘Video is now a medium unto itself, a completely decentralized digital, electronic audio-visual technology of tremendous utility and power…not the exclusive medium of technicians or specialists or journalists or artists – it is the peoples’ medium.’

Not only accessible to more receivers than ever before (and increasing), video can transmit a message more efficiently than any other communication system – instant playback of recorded events viewable almost immediately. More than stop, start and rewind, this is upload, download, edit, alter, define, contribute and dispersion of a medium and communication system like never before. And everyone can use it.

All surfaces? I like that. The world is your whiteboard.
It’s actually all pretty incredible, really. 25 years ago you would be lucky to borrow a friends home camcorder that was size of a house for dubious ‘wedding video’, now every person at the wedding will be recording it.

Of course, these are not examples of video in its most artistic and literary form. But as Sherman notes, the change in the technology is altering the form of video itself, and this in turn will affect video as art. The evolution of the technology offers development in video art that is unprecedented among other media. the possibilities are endless, in terms of customisation, collaboration, experimentation, creation. it’s exciting, whether perceived from an artistic, cultural or informative sense.

‘…the twenty-first century will be remembered as the video age’, and it’s available on your mobile phone, right now.

(n.b: a rambling first reflection. excuse me)

I have been using flash as the codec for my latest video installations on my blog. This was because the plugin I was using (podpress) was struggling to display the MP4 files for some reason. I am really anal about these things and it was giving me the sh*ts.

Our discussion in class alerted me to fact that flash was by no means an ideal codec – the primary problem I would have with it is that it restricts the playing of your media file to a limited amount of media players (even though I think it looks very nice).

Never to fear, I am now aware of two new players, embed quicktime (or is it quicktime embed??) and Vpip, both of which I will have installed asap, allowing me to hopefully publish videos with greater ease and in the preferred format. Great news for all.