There's been lots of discussion on the vlogtheory yahoogroups list about videoblogging - debates over content, medium etc. I've done up a quick mind map (using sourceforge freemind) to try to collect my thoughts. it may not be completely in line with the ideas of the group, but could be useful as a starting point to capture thoughts, for me at least. I haven't included everything yet, but it's a start.
here's another email sent to vlogtheory yahoogroups list on some thoughts and conversations I've been having today.
thanks for the replies guys.I find observing and loosely analysing communities really interesting. human behaviour in groups I guess. online behaviour is a particular interest.
(likely another non topic message, so delete now if not interested)
ok, it's a really hot sat afternoon here now (Auckland) and I've just returned from lunch and taking photos of street art & graf so have turned on the aircon and am emailing to cool down. at lunch I mentioned videoblogging to my friend, who hadn't really heard of it or realised it had a name. but one of the conversations was the difference between personal blogs and personal videoblogs. the main differentiation I see, is that written blogs (or even books), is really the little voice in your head speaking - letting it have a voice, whereas video diary entries are more real as you see the persons expressions and location not just descriptions of it. so you (the viewer) can connect differently to it. ie almost real vs imaginary, though not imaginary in the context of made up, but rather descriptive / virtual reality open to interpretation - the reality inside your mind compared to reality that you see. (prob not explaining this properly, perhaps I should have had the camera running at the time of the conversation as it was more coherent then).
I sent this email to the vlogtheory yahoogroups list, posting here to keep track of it.
Hi everyone, to change the topic slightly, and I'm not sure if it's really videoblogging theory or related per se, but one thing I like to notice is the changing moods and behaviours of when different technologies or interests are taken up. I've never done actual studies on it, so my thoughts are purely from observations, but I've seen it happen across many fields. do you know what academic studies there might be on these things?
[quote]
..a work from 1973 called A New Design for TV Chair. In it, Paik appropriated an image from a 1940s popular-science magazine that depicts the home viewer of the future watching television. Television had already become a monopolistic industry that was a conduit for advertising, a "communication" industry that operated on a one-way street of information. But in A New Design for TV Chair, Paik posited his own questions to project an alternative future for television:
DO YOU KNOW...?
How soonTV-chair will be available in most museums? How soon artists will have their ownTV channels? How soon wall-to-wallTV for video art will be installed in most homes?
Paik envisioned a different television, a "global groove" of artists' expressions seen as part of an "electronic superhighway" that would be open and free to everyone.The multiple forms of video that Paik developed can be interpreted as an expression of an open medium able to flourish and grow through the imagination and participation of communities and individuals from around the world. Paik, along with many artists working as individuals and within collectives through the 1960s 14 and 1970s to create work for television as well as for alternative spaces, challenged the idea of television as a medium and domain exclusively controlled by a monopoly of broadcasters.
[/quote]
This piece, taken from Nam June Paik's website was written by John Hanhardt of the Guggenheim Museum. I think it's an apt description and I wonder if Nam June Paik would have been happy to see the recent videoblogging community and works becoming more popular on the internet.
reading more saria website articles. from what I can tell whilst reading the Ibarat 01 publication, life in the colony follows different rules than in the cities. local communities are tight-knit. lanes and streets become named after the locals, businesses who inhabit them or are even based on a purely descriptive nature. I suppose this is how early settlement streets in Australian cities were named also - that's why there are so many church streets with churches, railway parades next to the railways, bridge streets with bridges, hill lanes with hills etc. the Indian stories remind me of the City of God / City of Men movie/series where the kids go about creating a map of the favela they live in and the dramas and ego flattering they go through to offer naming rights to prominent community members.
it'd be interesting to see the work Sarai is doing whilst in country if I get the chance. they have a range of projects with visiting contributors as well as in-house fellows working in different areas.
it looks like my next work project is in Delhi, India so I've been reading more of the sarai website contributions. the Cybermohalla scratchbook is quite interesting - a collection of writings, thoughts, images and texts from the members contributing at the Compughar. many of the people are from the villages and settlements. it's interesting to read their thoughts and observations of the spaces they live in.
I've finally gone through the bag I brought back from electrofringe / this is not art 2005. haven't had time to write it up, so I'm trying a mind map from sourceforge's freemind instead.
have you ever wanted to build your own being? free it from pain, regret, niggling doubt? well now you can... in a new multimedia experiment conducted over four large screens, synarcade audio-visuals will allow a select group of people to construct their own version of a responsible moral citizen
a group exhibition incorporating soft sculpture and design by emerging australian and international artists. the works are inspired by the aesthetics of plush toys and their relationship to human behaviour, investigating social norms and a darker side of 'cuteness'
OneSixty Characters – An exhibition exploring children’s nursery rhymes/songs, games and storytelling from around the globe OneSixty Characters began by sending out a call worldwide requesting people to text message, via their mobile phones, a line or a fragment from a nursery rhyme or childhood song that was associated with a game
Finding my old bookmark files has made me nostalgic for the early computing days when everything was new and exciting and full of possibilities. One of my favourite magazines back in the early 90s was Mondo 2000. It was hard to get - only a few places in Brisbane stocked it, actually only two that I recall and even then it was occasional. By the time I got round to subscribing to the magazine it had finished being published and I lost my subscription renewal to the cause so to speak. At the time, it was cutting edge and the full gloss images and interviews with leading thinkers made it a great read. R.U. Sirius who was the editor of the mag has a podcast these days and can be found around mondoglobo.net. Here's a collection of links to mondo 2000 stuff:
It works really well! I took a look at the file that was created to see how it works. The attached file, linkubatorMovie.mov is the file I created using Linklubator.
I wanted to see how you could reference a couple of movies which had different urls and have them play, along with text and audio (mp3 file) coming from yet again different sources. Here's the test movie:
