Blogs

some thoughts on personal videoblogs and comparisons to written blog entries

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).

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thoughts on studies of trends of communities

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?

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Happy Birthday fireworks

Auckland's SKYTOWER turned 10 today so they turned on the fireworks this evening.
Happy Birthday Darren :)



Happy Birthday fireworks 01/02/2006

click on the image to goto the video player page

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Nam June Paik

[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.

Nam June Paik's studio http://www.paikstudios.com/index.html announced over the weekend:

"Nam June Paik passed away at his Miami home at 8:00pm EST on Sunday, January 29th, 2006. Funeral information to be announced."

Auckland skyline

Auckland's summer skyline was amazing over the city this evening. The camera doesn't do the colours justice!


Auckland city skyline 29/01/2006

click on the image to goto the video player page

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Tactical media in Brazil summary mind map

a summary of the Sarai Reader 04 paper called "The Revenge of Lowtech : Autolabs, Telecentros and Tactical Media in Sao Paulo" by Ricardo Rosas.

the freemind mind map tactical_media_in_Brazil.mm is attached - this contains html links or expand / collapse the xhtml version below

http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/ is the new Sarai Reader link - they've changed their website and all the links have changed

http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/04-crisis-media/55ricardo.pdf is the new link for the article

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naming rights

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.

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filtering colours

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.

electrofringe / tina 2005 - mind map + photos

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.

attached is the freemind pdf file or electrofringe2005.mm freemind file

photos from the event can be viewed @ my flickr tina2005 tag

Expand - Collapse

or here's a screenshot of the freemind file :

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mondo 2000

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:

mondo articles from the well (link updated : original link broken 25/09/2008 : http://www.well.com:70/1/Publications/MONDO )

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old bookmark files - 1998

I've been looking at some old files on my backup hard drive and came across my old bookmark files.

08/12/1998 bookmarks

15/12/1999 bookmarks

12/07/2000 bookmarks

+ address book

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quicktime smil movie

On the videoblogging maillist, Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen wrote a webapp called Linkubator to create a SMIL movie from your uploaded quicktime movie file. You can also add a 'bug' to it with a link back to your site or topic.

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:


quicktime smil movie


click here to download

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Global Dimming

A vlog entry about Global Dimming.


This media file's URL: Link

BBC Global Dimming transcript - page archived 18/04/2010

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Bangalore sport

A vlog entry from my trip to Bangalore...


Bangalore sport

click on the image to goto the video player page

colours of Auckland countryside


Colours of Auckland Countryside

click on the image to goto the video player page

I've been spending the Christmas break learning more about interactive quicktime, max/msp and isadora for creating music and video and publishing them on the net. Below is the first piece I've created. I went a bit overboard on the effects in Isadora but it's an original piece and I learnt from it so I'm happy with it overall from a learning experience point of view.

How I created it:
- first I took videos with my dvd camera
- then I used DVDx to convert the .vob files to mpeg2 files which quicktime could open. when I installed winamp a couple of weeks ago, I noticed it can display video now also, though strangely, sometimes the winamp videos were upside down whilst they played correctly orientated in quicktime. (perhaps I used strange setting whilst encoding?)
- then I imported the video into isadora, and patched up a storm whilst trying out some of the effects
- I can only save 5sec clips from isadora as I'm using the trial version whilst I work out if I'll use it regularly in future. I'm hoping to learn how to do similar tasks in jitter (max component) as I'll have more control of what I'm doing, even though it's very quick and easy to get things done in isadora without having to know the code. still yet to decide on this.
- once I had the processed video clips, I opened them in quicktime again and joined them together - hence the rough edits
- then I made a couple of text tracks in quicktime and added these in. I tried out the eZediaQTI app whilst learning about the text tracks but decided on doing them manually in quicktime and editing the controls with notepad.
- next, I opened the gps data music patch I made in max/msp and ran it with the soundwalk recordings I made the other week whilst at Mission Beach in Auckland. unfortunately, the mic was picking up a lot of noise from the wind blowing past the mic pickup so there's a lot of distortion. I filtered some of this out in audacity and flattened the audio into one track.
- then I added the audio track to the video with text quicktime movie
- then uploaded the finished piece to archive.org using ourmedia and viewed source on the movie's ourmedia page & copied the quicktime player code here

well, I'm sure there's a quicker way of doing it! which requires less processing and time, but this was an exercise in creating an original piece from start to finish. as you can tell, I'm not a designer or very good programmer either, but I'm happy to finish number one. here's hoping the subsequent efforts will improve and be done more efficiently. I could have used the original unprocessed videos but they seemed a little plain. need to find the right balance I guess..

here's a screen shot of the isadora patch:

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