Film & Digital Video

Latin American and Spanish online videos: vendor offerings for US academic libraries

by Jesus Alonso-Regalado

Latin American and Spanish online videos: vendor offerings for US academic libraries

by Jesus Alonso-Regalado

Video: incorporeal, incorporated

by Stephen Partridge

Presented at CHart Conference, British Academy November 2005

Video: incorporeal, incorporated


‘… video has only a conceptual, and not formal connection to any... more Video: incorporeal, incorporated


‘… video has only a conceptual, and not formal connection to any previous medium…formalist research into magnetic videotape seems absurd, whereas the development of film’s photographic essence was actually the foundation of experimental film,’
Continual and changing, convergence places us (artists and audience) in a post film and video era, where digital forms (mostly) replace, substitute, or simulate the previous media. It may be worth asking whether this matters and why in the process of convergence, video has been substituted, while film has been simulated by digital technologies. To answer this question, there is a need to re-examine the development of video as a medium and its incorporation into digital form, while making some comparisons with film, and in turn, its simulation within the digital domain.

The convergence or incorporation of video with digital forms could be considered as almost complete. This distinguishes it from the photographic and material-based medium of film – even though both film and video strive to produce one similar effect – a moving image as perceived by the human brain.

Video was from the start a bastard medium – and inherited a collection of conventions and properties from earlier media including radio, theatre, and, to a lesser extent film. Sean Cubitt has further argued that ‘video is neither an autonomous medium, free of all links with other forms of communication, nor entirely dependent on any one of them’ , and that video is not singular but a collection of ‘video media’. Central to this approach was the notion of intervention into a process, manipulation of the video plane in time or space. Some specificities that have disappeared along with their associated words and acronyms include: electrovision , videotaping, VT, VTR, video shooting, video editing, and video switching.

Within the digital domain video is further merged with the adoption of the filmic conventions of picture origination, editing, aspect ratios and cinematic presentation, but remains incorporeal.

It is significant to examine the convergence between film and video by focussing on the video projector, which provides prima facie evidence of the progress of convergence in its technological form and functionality. Furthermore the optical device used for originating the images is just as likely to be a film camera as a video camera - be it digital or analogue.

The idea that the video projector has merged film and video into a new unified electronic cinema isn’t totally exact. It is still relatively easy to distinguish film from video (and especially computer derived text and vector graphics) when they are projected. Other distinctions lie within the cinematographic: the much higher contrast ratio of film stock, and the human perception of the grain of film emulsions and the film weave within the camera. However, the video projector throws light upon a screen, just as a film projector and very unlike the television tube or LCD or plasma panel, all of which are a source of light. Compared to video, film technology (referring to the camera and projector) has remained relatively stable for eighty years, despite continual small refinements and variations of aspect ratio and gauge. Early digital devices produced for the television visual effects industry such as Quantel’s Harry (1986) incorporated effects that would simulate, and impose upon the video-plane; film grain and film weave to make the resultant product (usually a TV-ad or pop video) look as though it had been shot and produced on film. The works produced by the YBAs in the nineties and the explosion in video-based art-pieces since, also point to a lack of distinction of media. Setting aside these artists’ market-led need for separation and distancing from an experimental film or video history, the works directly reflect the process of convergence.

The new approach is non-materialist – in the sense that there is little interest or even recognition in the video media or the digital media employed. The approach is inherently post-film and post-video, and points towards a convergence within a digital time and space, without medium specificity or material condition.

The total history of cinema suggests a much wider suite of technologies than the film camera and projector. Video continues as a proxy within the digital domain, while film is flattered by digital simulation of its material qualities.

A Co-Op in the Clouds: Virtualizing Student-led Video Production at Vancouverʼs Commodore Ballroom

by Joel Flynn

Accepted for the CCV 2010 Conference in Singapore ("Cloud Computing & Virtualization"), but could not attend.

In this paper, a cloud computing and virtualization initiative for co-op students will be proposed for the Commodore... more In this paper, a cloud computing and virtualization initiative for co-op students will be proposed for the Commodore Ballroom, an iconic live music venue in downtown Vancouver. Using the working title CommOPS, this initiative will be will be described as a developing case study based on the author’s past research at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts & Technology, and which now forms the basis for his applied project in the Management of Technology MBA program. The paper explores the implications of this initiative – a proposed collaborative effort between industry and academia to develop student skills in digital media production – for its two major industry stakeholders: the Teradici Corporation and Live Nation. Through the lenses of disruptive innovation and digital ecosystems, the paper leads towards the author’s proposed future work at the <PTML> technology and media research lab: specifically, development of working prototypes for industry internship positions and innovation competitions.

Travels in Intertextuality: the autopoetic identity of remix culture

by Joel Flynn

Travels in Intertextuality aims for what John Berger would call “ways of seeing” digital media artifacts and... more Travels in Intertextuality aims for what John Berger would call “ways of seeing” digital media artifacts and interacting cultural texts. Using Lev Manovich’s Language of New Media, these “new media objects” are seen through the metaphorical “coordinated set of lenses” of Michael Cole’s Cultural Psychology. In addressing issues of “writing” and identity in the digital age at the intersection of technology, art, and commerce, this highly exploratory work looks for ways to perceive “value” in remix culture through ecological models of sociocultural systems. The thesis “follows the problem” of remix through “pioneering research”, “reflective practice”, and shifting contexts for expansive learning. Emerging from significant pools of digital media, “remix value” is analysed through cultural-historical perspectives, as well as through the autopoietic perspectives of “self-making” biological and sociolinguistic systems.

Towards a multimodal literacy pedagogy: Digital video composing as 21st century literacy

by Suzanne Miller

Miller, S.M. (2010). Towards a multimodal literacy pedagogy: Digital video composing as 21st  century literacy, pp. 254-281. In P. Albers & J. Sanders (Eds.) Literacies, Art, and Multimodality. Urbana-Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

In new times of digitally accessible multimodality for designing texts for social purposes, changes are needed in... more In new times of digitally accessible multimodality for designing texts for social purposes, changes are needed in schools.  Scholars examining these trends in research have reached a clear consensus: facility with interpreting and designing multimodal texts will increasingly be required by human beings to communicate, work, and thrive in the digital, global world of the 21st century. In this article I propose a framework and a method for drawing on these new social practices and developing performance knowledge for learning in schools. In a long-term project professional development a multimodal composing project provided point-of-need support for English teachers in workshops and in their classrooms to help them expand their beliefs about literacy and critically reframe their pedagogical practices. The focus on digital video composing provides teachers and students with multimodal learning in an authentic, high-status, social and media practice with powerful attention-getting qualities and expert models in the real world. Analysis of teachers successfully integrating DV composing for students in their classrooms revealed four principles representing the key changes needed for teachers to transform the teaching and learning in their classrooms towards multimodal composing.  The components that provide teachers direction toward this reframing include: (1) providing explicit multimodal design instruction and attention; (2) co-constructing authentic purposes for representing multimodal meaning for an audience; (3) designing multimodal composing activities that invite students to draw on their identity lifeworlds as resources; and (4) creating functional social spaces for mediating multimodal learning.

Experimental Media Horizons - Syncretic and Subversive Practices

by Joey Bargsten

Virtual Presentation: ICERI 2009

This paper formed part of the foundation for my book, Hybrid Forms and Syncretic Horizons (2011), available on Amazon... more This paper formed part of the foundation for my book, Hybrid Forms and Syncretic Horizons (2011), available on Amazon at [http://badmindtime.nfshost.com/amazon2].

Performative media--including video jamming, live and networked media collaboration, and mobile-device based performance--is reaching a critical mass in digital culture. In Experimental Media Horizons, we will examine a number of outlying practices where the materials of digital culture are beginning to coalesce, and place current activity into a broader historical and aesthetic context. Included is an overview of tech requirements and performance suggestions for developing your own course.

Cool and Credible Web Video: Old Rules, New Rules, or No Rules?

by Patricia Sullivan

Co-authored with Peter J. Fadde
published in Educause Quarterly, 34, 4 (2011)

Opening = Once the province of trained professionals with expensive equipment, video production now seems open to... more Opening = Once the province of trained professionals with expensive equipment, video production now seems open to anyone. While the gatekeeping control of “broadcast quality” has been breached by the shoot-and-share culture of the web, the young people driving this new video culture not only are Internet savvy but also have grown up with intense exposure to television. Because they have absorbed conventional video production rules in much the same way native speakers absorb their language’s spoken grammar, they know when video violates television’s video grammar even if they cannot state the rules. Thus, those who self-produce instructional video for the web need to be aware of traditional video aesthetics (the old rules) that form a sort of video grammar born for the big screen, carried to the television screen, and now onto the microscreen of YouTube and mobile telephones. In addition, we see evidence that web video is using some new video production grammars and believe that producers of instructional video on the web can benefit by becoming aware of new rules as well as old rules.

The emerging grammar for the microscreen of web video proceeds along two trajectories:

    --Its first and most important goal is to avoid violating traditional video grammar and potentially losing credibility.
    I--ts second goal is to tap into new video aesthetics and potentially gain ethos with web-savvy audiences.

These goals form an uneasy merger of past and present, but one that producers of web-video instruction need to negotiate so that they remain credible (to the older video grammar) as they also reach for the cool (in the new media video grammar).

Technology and protest in Indonesia

by Alexandra Crosby

As part of the Global Information Society Report 2011 - Internet rights and democratisation

Recently, the long simmering issue of human rights abuses in the Indonesian province of West Papua has been brought to... more Recently, the long simmering issue of human rights abuses in the Indonesian province of West Papua has been brought to the boil by online video evidence. On May 30, 2010, the torture of Tunaliwor Kiwo, a Papuan farmer, and his neighbour, was recorded with a soldier's mobile phone. After being leaked to activists, the video was distributed on several sites including the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) from October. A few months later, EngageMedia released a video testimony of the torture with English subtitles. The Indonesian government was urged by Human Rights Watch and others to mount a thorough, impartial, and transparent investigation into the episode. Since October, the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has reported attacks on their website along with several other groups who featured the torture video, including Survival International, West Papua Media Alerts, Free West Papua Campaign, Friends of People Close To Nature and West Papua Unite. The torture incident, its documentation and its associated effects is useful in tracing the way video can be used in concert with human rights campaigns in raising public awareness and bringing about social change. It also raises questions around what responsibilities video makers and distributors have to their subjects and how people watch and interpret disturbing
footage.

The Gaze of Magibon: critical discourse analysis on multi-million viewed YouTube videos

by Sérgio L Tavares

Presented at Salford University, UK, June 2009. Digital Culture

This study aims to throw lights on the phenomena of self-broadcast videos, focusing on the distance between author and... more This study aims to throw lights on the phenomena of self-broadcast videos, focusing on the distance between author and the character presented on screen, on how such videos may be perceived by society and on collateral implications of this communication. In order to do that, YouTube was selected as the medium, and among YouTube users, the user Magibon was selected.


The phenomenon broadcasted by Magibon is in the eye of the storm of the miracle society is experiencing in Post-YouTube Era of self-broadcast. The “Hello, World!” message is (and it always is) accompanied by a full set of attached/embedded messages and for many reasons Magibon stands out as an icon — and official partner — of such phenomena, which provoke, amazes and disturbs the audience.

The Photographic Now: David Claerbout's Vietnam.

by Ingrid Hoelzl

Published in Intermedialites no. 17, Reproduire, edited by Suzanne Paquet, September 2001

David Claerbout’s video installation Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho, reconstruction after Hiromishi Mine (2000) questions... more David Claerbout’s video installation Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho, reconstruction after Hiromishi Mine (2000) questions the “photographic now,” the present state of photography and its new relation to the present. The piece reproduces, or more exactly recomposes, a press photograph of an American airplane shot down by friendly fire. The Belgian artist travelled to the site of the accident and took a series of photos of the landscape. He then assembled these stills into a video animation onto which he superimposed the still image of the exploding plane. The result is an image whose temporality is hybrid and whose mediality is unclassifiable. My study investigates the process of digital reconstruction and animation, and the “becoming signal” of the image, and questions the possibility of reactualizing the photographic past through digital screening.

Blast-off Photography. Nancy Davenport and Expanded Photography

by Ingrid Hoelzl

This article engages the question of expanded photography through a study of Nancy Davenport’s 2008 piece Blast-off... more This article engages the question of expanded photography through a study of Nancy Davenport’s 2008 piece Blast-off Animation, part of her multichannel DVD installation WORKERS (Leaving the Factory).
The piece comprises digital photomontages, collages made up of hundreds of still images – then animated in very basic ways’. In this, post-production has become the principal site of photographic image production. Recorded and calculated images are merged into augmented documents that no longer display an (impossible) past, but a possible present.
Digitally animated into moving stills, and displayed in the form of continuous loops, these images meet less a desire for movement than a desire for (spatial and temporal) endlessness. In including within the frame the endlessness beyond the frame, expanded photography overcomes the spatial and temporal confinement of the still – but in so doing confines photography within its supposed deficiency.
By following the conceptual and strategic threads – and pitfalls – of expanded photography, the present essay seeks to clear the way for a new, fluctuating temporality of
images – a photographic now.

Digital Filmmaking, Realism and the Documentary Mode in Recent Latin American Films: Our Lady of the Assassins (Barbet Schroeder, 2000) and Suite Havana (Fernando Pérez, 2003)

by Dolores Tierney

Abstract
Discussions about the digital image’s connection to reality (Cubitt 1999; Stam 2000) provoke a... more Abstract
Discussions about the digital image’s connection to reality (Cubitt 1999; Stam 2000) provoke a re-evaluation in our theoretical frames for conceptualizing the documentary practices of digitally shot documentary films because, quite simply, documentaries rely on a basic notion of reality. Two recent, digitally shot, Latin American films, which make use of the documentary mode, present interesting case studies with respect to rethinking realism in a digital age, because they use the digital medium to engage with the concept of different realities, ones that have a specific cultural resonance in Latin America. This chapter focuses on two of these documentaries; Cuban Fernando Pérez’ Suite Havana (2003) and Franco-Colombian Barbet Schroeder’s Our Lady of the Assassins (2000).

Microtagging Internet Videos

by Nathaniel Ostashewski

Internet videos are one of the fastest growing forms of social media, and site such as Youtube have become a common... more Internet videos are one of the fastest growing forms of social media, and site such as Youtube have become a common distribution forum of useful videoc clips for both formal and informal learning. In contrast to metatags which help users locate relevant videos, we introduce the term microtags to indicate indexing of useful information within a video clip. Microtags can come from either intentional annotations or through continuous response evaluation - a useful method used in advertising to pinpoint events that evoke particularly strong audience responses. When searching for a way to evaluate the effectiveness of media clips. This paper discusses the preliminary results of testing the method with adult and high school learners. When fully deployed this tool will enable the real time viewer evaluation of internet video formats such as Youtube. The resulting data could be used to rate the overall interest of video programs or index specific scenes for educational or entertainment contexts.

The Scholarly Impact of TRECVid (2003-9)

by Clare Thornley

Thornley, C., Johnson, A., Smeaton, A. and Lee, H. 2011.The Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.Vol.62 No.4, pp. 613-627. 

Technologies of Culture: Digital Feature Filmmaking in New Zealand

by virginia pitts

This article provides the first overview of contemporary low budget digital cinema in New Zealand, the first decade of... more This article provides the first overview of contemporary low budget digital cinema in New Zealand, the first decade of which has resulted in a body of fiction films that contest the national cinematic canon in terms of thematic and representational emphases as well as narrative and aesthetic strategies. To investigate the causes and consequences of these departures, the output and methods of New Zealand’s digital feature filmmakers are explored, revealing how shifts in creative processes and increased access to the means of production enabled by low cost, lightweight digital video intersect with the proliferating cultural affiliations of emerging filmmakers to produce change.  I thus argue that the very ontology of digital video and associated medium-specific practices are increasingly integral to culturally and aesthetically pluralistic projections in New Zealand cinema. As a consequence, I also argue for public investment in the sector and the alteration of funding policies designed for large-budget productions so that a tier of filmmaking ripe for experimentation and innovation can exist in fruitful dialogue with more mainstream fare.

Keywords: 
digital filmmaking
convergence
technology and creativity
New Zealand cinema
small nation cinema
policy
filmmaking process

Let's Play Super Rutgers RPG: Interactivity by Proxy in an Online Gaming Culture

by Kris Ligman

Presented at Game Behind the Video Game conference, Rutgers, April 2011.

This paper sets out to identify the major emerging taxonomies and prevalent media forms associated with Let’s Play... more This paper sets out to identify the major emerging taxonomies and prevalent media forms associated with Let’s Play walkthroughs as well as the prevailing interests of active LPers. In doing so, we can obtain a closer look at how LPs serve their audiences, be they oppositional historiographies using voice commentary to author a particular play experience, investigations into rare and obscure titles, deepening the play experience with hypertext documentation, or any of the other manifold LP methodologies employed to entertain, educate, inspire or archive.

Cameras Everywhere: Current Challenges And Opportunities At The Intersection Of Human Rights, Video And Technology

by Sameer Padania

Co-authored with Sam Gregory, Yvette Alberdingkthijm and Bryan Nunez of WITNESS. Published by WITNESS on 6 September 2011.

WITNESS’ Cameras Everywhere Initiative aims to ensure that the thousands of people using video for human rights can do... more WITNESS’ Cameras Everywhere Initiative aims to ensure that the thousands of people using video for human rights can do so as effectively, safely and ethically as possible. This report is based on discussions with over 40 senior experts and practitioners in technology and human rights. It presents a roadmap to emerging trends in policy and practice at the intersection of human rights, technology, social media, and business. Cameras Everywhere goes on to make specific recommendations on how important players in the new human rights landscape can take specific, manageable steps to strengthen the practical and policy environments for human rights video, and other information and communication technologies (ICTs) used for human rights.

In Pursuit of Parenthetical Pleasures (video essay)

by Kara Keeling

A video essay collaboration with Thenmozhi Soundarajan produced for PerpiTube: Repurposing Social Media Spaces, co-curated by Pato Hebert and Alexandra Juhasz.  PerpiTube is a video art show that models a purposeful, complex, and artful use of social networking technologies and the spaces that hold them. PerpiTube is in the gallery at Pitzer College from July 12 to September 6, and in perpetuity on YouTube.

This video essay updates Third Cinema's impulses to call attention to the ideological work of dominant cinema and to... more This video essay updates Third Cinema's impulses to call attention to the ideological work of dominant cinema and to push cinema to serve other interests.  Taking up Alex Juhasz's observation in her video book, "Learning From YouTube", that "YouTube is a platform for Parenthetical Pleasures,' "In Pursuit of Parenthetical Pleasures" works with and against YouTube in order to liberate an ideal of intellectual production harbored within it.

Visuelle Medien und die (Wieder-)Herstellung von Unmittelbarkeit

by Tobias Boll

Co-authored with Larissa Schindler, published in: Hägele, Ulrich / Ziehe, Irene (eds.) 2011: Visuelle Medien und Forschung: Über den wissenschaftlich-methodischen Umgang mit Fotografie und Film, Münster / New York: Waxmann