On a rainy morning in Amsterdam (that demanded lots of coffee!), the Video Vortex - Responses to YouTube Conference was kicked off at Club 11. I will be blogging on the conference for movingweb, but I was also there because I have been involved with the project through my work at the Netherlands Media Art Institute where we made an exhibition with the same title and related topics. Well, the program of the conference is quite extensive, and I was very disappointed by some of the presentations today (that seemed unprepared, unfocused, had nothing new to say…a total contrast with the first Video Vortex conference in Brussels!). So I will focus on the gems of today’s presentations!
MySpaceTV is hosting a new web show of dating guru Neil Strauss called Rules of the Game.
The first episode shows two guys and their efforts to get some telephone numbers. After every episode there’s a mission for the viewers, which they are supposed to tape and upload it as a video answer.
Passing By is a NetArt project by James Tindall, using YouTube content and good coding. The theme of journey seems to become quite popular lately. (also here)
“Passing By presents two films that piece together brief segments from many different journeys into ever growing sequences of sights-seen-along-the-way, while looking out of the window of a car, a train, a plane or even just pushing a shopping trolley around the local super market.”
via Hi-Res!
During the New Cultural Networks Conference in Amsterdam (Friday 2nd of November, organized by Stifo@Sandberg), PIPS:lab presented diespace , the first internet community for people who have passed away!
PIPS:lab are a group of artists from Amsterdam based Sandberg Institute, and what they do is a mixture of new media art projects, theater, performance, (live!) music,…well, it’s really an experience and it really stirred up the audience of the conference!
“A Swarm of Angels is a groundbreaking project to create a £1 million film and give it away to over 1 million people using the Internet and a global community of members. By subscribing for £25 members become part of a revolutionary process to make an open source feature film.”
Berlin based web TV station Hobnox goes online today!
Right now they’re running four channels, all connected to youth culture. What separates them from other web tv stations is the massive amount of self produced content. They’re having a handful of hosts, running different show formats. They recruited some german MTV-faces for that. Reminds a little bit of G4, although they are shifting the focus from game-related-content to music, film and street culture.
To push the whole web2.0-participatory thing they are having a contest where you can win 25.000 Euro to realise your project!
The Blog/MySpace-Widget of German female rap-artist Sabrina Setlur is a conceptual mix of an audi/video guestbook and a fan mashup/remix of her current single (probably becoming the worlds longest music single ever).
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.
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.
Video Remixes are all over the web right now. Therefore Sony gets it’s own Remix-Website to promote three new Vaio models. You can record yourself via your webcam and the recut the material on the website. Problem is that all three example videos are quite akward. It’s not really getting better that they label these remixes as “a sophisticated mix of intelligence and elegance.”
Question is, if the theme of the Remix matches the idea of the product or if they are just following a trend?