Weezer’s music video for their new single Pork and Beans fetures lots of YouTube Stars like Chris Chrocker, the CokeMentos guys or Miss Teen South Carolina.
“There are now approximately 30 million surveillance cameras in the United States generating more than 4 billion hours of footage every week. And the numbers are growing. The average American is now captured over 200 times a day, in department stores, gas stations, changing rooms, even public bathrooms. No one is spared from the relentless, unblinking eye of the cameras that are hidden in every nook and cranny of day-to-day life. By shooting his feature entirely from closed-circuit viewpoints (but actually shot with Hi-end cameras - the “dirty” look was created in post-production!), director Adam Rifkin wants to bring forward the question: “who are we when we don’t think anyone’s watching?”
via Diagonal Thoughts.
“Next To Heaven’s Rob Parrish retires to his video laboratory and downloads public domain films from http://www.archive.org. He then writes and records short monologues based on the images from the films, and then re-edits the films to the newly recorded narrations. The result: Unique short videos (aka “video bonbons”) that are full of flavor!”
via NewTeevee
Brusells based ARGOS centre for art and media is organizing a conference called “Video Vortex: Responses to YouTube“, where I will contribute a speech on “The Artist moving (through) the web - new forms of artist’s production and distribution on the Internet”.
“Over the past years the moving image has claimed an increasingly prominent place on the internet. Thanks to a wide range of technologies and web applications it has become possible, not only to record and distribute video, but to edit and remix it on-line as well. With this world of possibilities within reach of a multitude of social actors, the potential of video as a personal means of expression has arrived at a totally new dimension. How is this potential being used? How do artists and activists react to the popularity of YouTube and other �user-generated-content� websites? What is the impact of the availability of massive on-line images and sound databases on aesthetics and narrativity? How is Cinema, as an art form and experience, influenced by the development of widely spreading internet practices? What does YouTube tell us about the state of art in visual culture? And how does the participation culture of video-sharing and vlogging reach some degree of autonomy and diversity, escaping the laws of the mass media and the strong grip of media conglomerates?”
The conference is part of the Open Archive #1 program from 29.09.-10.11.2007, which will feature ARGOS extensive collection of video works and media art.
The guys at pirate cinema berlin have pulled off an new movie database called 0xdb, which connects lots of different data available on the net.
“The 0xdb is a rather unique kind of movie database. It uses a variety of publicly accessible resources, like search engines and file-sharing networks, to automatically collect information about, and actual images and sounds from, a rapidly growing number of movies. What the 0xdb provides is, essentially, full text search within movies, and instant previews of search results.”
The part of the quote which should call for your attention is “full text search within movies”. If you type in a sentence, the database shows you every movie where this sentence appears and even the particular scene!
Further amazing features are an visualition tool for every film and a connection to google maps, which show you locations, where the movie was shot.
Read a detailed review at Know Future.
Dennis Kopf has done some re-edits of some YouTube-Clips - see them here. A very intelligent artist’s comment on the usage of YouTube.
“Users have powerful tools for publishing and distributing content at their fingertips, and they show us:
Ass. Wiggly, bare, fat, American ass. Regardless wether its motivation emerged from the overload of casting shows, or music videos showing dancing titts in slow-motion; people tend to use YouTube to show what they can do, and boy can them gurls shake dat booty meat. Instead of getting distracted by the hot underaged ass jigglin to crunky beats the viewer can now reflect on the whole format of these home-made booty clips. Naturally the question arises wether the low-brow use of the given tools is what media firms are trying to achieve; or isn’t there a reason why TV is so stupid?”
Link via OH!
On the first look arranging three YouTube videos next to each other seems pretty odd, but as I was exploring the You3b site I recognized the potential of it.
The combination of three thematically connected or contrasting videos can be quite interesting. (See Metanoise as an example). Changing the volume of the single clips even gives you more variations, therefore it almost feels like a live djing tool. If you guys find more interesting montages on the site, let me know.
Many of you might now Jonathan Harris, but as he has a portfolio site up for some weeks now I’d like to point you to his works.
“Jonathan Harris is an artist and storyteller working primarily on the Internet. One part computer science, one part anthropology, and one part visual art, his work seeks to explore and understand the human world through the artifacts people leave behind on the Web.”
Out of his many amazing ideas I was deeply impressed by We feel fine - an exploration of human emotions when I saw at OFFF 2006 for the first. As most of his works it uses data sources on the web to show cultural/social doherences.
“Alec Crichton - cinematic art experimental film surrealixtic fine arts tv poetic poem experimental arts film”
Did you see the “DejaVu” Movie with Denzel Washington, where they took photo- and videodata to construct a complete 3d view of a crime scene? Sounds like Sci-Fi? Then check out the demo of the photosynth-technology. They scan photos from any given database (e.g. Flickr) and ananlyze them for similarities to construct 3d models of any given space.
You can even test the application live on the web here.