“VideoDefunct is a Collaborative Research project by Seth Keen and Keith Deverell, with the aid of David Wolf at RMIT University Melbourne Australia. The project is an experimental work that focuses on producing a hybrid form of video blog. Currently as a work-in-progress, a number of prototypes are being developed in the open source blog publishing system WordPress. A key objective of the project is to explore the way video is presented within the structure of a blog from a ‘poetic’ perspective.”
One of the projects I saw at ARGOS:
“Artist Peter Horvath (CA, 1961) has experimented with photo montages for years, and in the domain of web technology he is essentially investigates how to enhance the qualities of his photo work beyond the two-dimensional context. In his current work he develops a web of fragmentary story lines, a framework of multi-coloured mosaics from which a ’spectator’ can draw his own history by navigating. According to Horvath the web reflects the ongoing process of making choices, through which we appropriate the world around us, and as such it is the ideal medium to investigate the notions of identity, subjectivity and consciousness.”
Art made for - and only available on - the peer to peer networks.
The original artwork is first shared by the artist until one other user has downloaded it.
After that the artwork will be available for as long as other users share it.
The original file and all the material used to create it are deleted by the artist.
”There’s no original”
P2P Art is an artproject from Swedish artist and filmmaker Anders Weberg.
1000 Stories is a project by Florian Thalhofer and Mark Simons.
Starting in New York on October 1, Florian Thalhofer, a new-media artist and documentary filmmaker from Berlin, will travel all over the United States by motorcycle (generously provided by BMW), while U.S. filmmaker Mark Simon will travel throughout Germany by car. During their month-long journeys, each filmmaker will write about his experiences, collect stories, and conduct interviews, all of which will be posted daily at www.1000stories.com � their video log.
Their route will be determined by interested folks in the U.S. and in Germany who reply to their �Americans wanted�/ �Germans wanted� ad on the web. Readers are invited to get in touch via www.1000stories.com to suggest itineraries and potential interview candidates and to comment on the project.
via Seth Keen.
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.
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!
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.
Vague Terrain is digital arts quarterly and the current issue reflects on the culture of sampling.
“Specific fragments are foregrounded and implicit in that selection is the exclusion of countless other memories and moments. The endgame in the act of sampling, whether reconsidering the familiar or resurrecting the forgotten, is to create an arena for discourse.”
The contributions range from experimental short films, text, images to music. I especially liked the piece “Driving” of video artist Chrsitan Marc Schmidt and IPODecosystems of dNASAb.
Mario Klingemann spoke at the OFFF festival this weekend.
He presented some of his digital found footage experiments, where he uses data from the internet and recombines them in his flash experiments. The piece Flickeur is very atmospheric and suggestive, creating a very poetic work of net art.
“Flickeur (pronounced like Voyeur) randomly retrieves images from Flickr.com and creates an infinite film with a style that can vary between stream-of-consciousness, documentary or video clip.”
Island of Consciousness is a further development of the concept, together with sound artist Oleg Marakov.