trees are people too

Apologies, oh blog. I have been neglecting you! Trying to do work, school and wii-fit all at the same time has its disadvantages. It’s getting hot in here!

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.

A good place to start my analysis and understanding of a manifesto was with this simple definition:

Manifestos are thus often referred to in a political context, although the artistic connection is inescapable – artists themselves will hold certain political views and values and tend to align themselves with particular agendas, and these will influence a ‘manifesto’.

They span a number of different contexts, media and industries/practices, and seem to be approached with varying degrees of seriousness and playfulness. I think what is in it and the form it takes is irrelevant, as long as it assumes the intent of the artist/s – conveys what they think it should.

I have come across a few while researching, and these have been both collaborative and solo. Open manifesto is a collaborative project collecting the thoughts and musings of graphic designers, the freestyle art manifesto is a fantastic collective of guidelines that is derived from the values behind hip hop, but could apply to any form of expression, and the splasher manifesto discusses a collective’s desire to vandalize street art. I have even discovered a librarian’s manifesto on youtube.

So this gives me a start, but I have no idea whether I am on the right track. More and more it seems the manifesto could be moulded into any shape that I might want it to be. I’ll keep you updated on further findings.

oh la la.

we made it, and uploaded it good. but I am struggling to get the poster image to load, for no apparent reason except to spite me I am sure.

We’ll take this up later.

What do we need to think about?

Tom Sherman: The ideas in his essay ‘vernacular video’ will be the basis of our manifesto…

We will need to look at other creative ‘manifestos’ to get our head around what a manifesto is.

We will need technical skills: ezedia, compression, quicktime, cropping, image capture etc.

I will start by seeking out magnificent manifestos for reference, allowing me to identify exactly what a manifesto is, how it differs from other forms of communication and what exactly it will mean for me. Stay tuned.

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.

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.