The on-line video program that we have compiled for V/J12, follows the red threads that run through the festival. It consists of an eclectic collection of lectures, amateur video, desktop recordings, surveillance footage, TV, commercials, advertising, feature films and news clips.
A pleasant side-effect of the choice to work with on-line video is the self evident logic of presenting different types of material side by side. The web is a collage machine and also in this program amateurism, reportage, anomalies mix with specialism, documentation and fiction. It is with pleasure that we no longer see an exclusive attribution of visual genres to social groups, disciplines, sectors.
Performative Instructions
Nearly every operating system has a graphical interface in which the office-work metaphor is strongly present: The ’desktop’ is the working surface on which you stick your notes, where your letters, sketches and pictures are piling up, waiting to be archived in your neatly ordered folder structure.
Desktop-recordings or screen grabs are a mainstream genre of instruction video. For a software instruction, a written test is not always the most handy, fastest or most effective method. Easier is to navigate your viewers by capturing a moving image of the mouse movement, which can be copied and repeated. Fuse that with a home made voice-over, mix in some geeky jokes and there you have your very own stereotypical desk-top recording.
Many of these elements are present in early experiments with speech and movement as interface.
The dominance of the desktop model was not only victory for a type of metaphor. It tied workers to their desks and allowed for a continuation of ruling hierarchy and order on the work floor where man passes his written instructions to the performative executing machine. Suppose ’movement’ would have pushed through as mainstream interface, would office buildings now have looked like Wii-fitness spaces ?
Brave attempts have been taken to employ desktop recordings as a genre of fiction, but that has not proven to be very a successful formula (yet?). Irc chat text, web cam image and the background noise of ticking of fingers on keyboards appear to be tough ingredients for a contemporary variation on the sit-com.
Life and nature of data
Obtaining access to on-line services and data in digital networks involves passing through numerous technical protocols. Accord some boxes, type your email adress, verify a code, submit to ip address checks; this all renders the signature redundant. The hand written signature derived its reliability partly from the illegibility of the drawn name. The spontaneity and ’schwung’ with which the signature was executed was a parameter for integrity, proved that the same gesture had previously been carried out countless times before by the same hand, identifying its master without a doubt as the original author.
In the shadow of grey literature
The web is flooded with descriptions, logs, reports, that are not claimed as ’authors’ texts. While feeds appear as news paper articles, writings by civil respondents disappear in designated marginal comment boxes. We are trained to interpret subtitles as the translation of what is spoken on TV or in a film. We read comments as inferior remark to the main article. But what if they swap place? What if transcription reformulates the content?
Origin and status of the material
Over the last years the use of Open Content licenses has increased significantly. Asking users to apply a license allows hosting-sites such as Archive.org, Blip.tv, Wikimedia Commons to advocate re-use of material on their servers.
Open content licenses (such as the Free Arts license and the variants of the Creative Commons license) emphasise the right of the author to share his / her work with others. This contributes to an ecology of exchange in which copying, sharing and redistribution are central as opposed to the prohibition, protection and restriction that comes with the copyright that applies by default. Applying a license adds to a dynamic that is coherent with the networked characteristics of the web, a dynamic that is increasingly threatened by media-companies and copyright collecting societies.
This program takes as a premise that films and videos are primarily made to be seen. We chose for a mixed bag of Open Content and copyrighted films. Some films are copied with respect to their licenses, sometimes we asked permission of the right holders, and some video’s are embedded from commercial websites.
Active Archives annotation-units
During the festival new videos will be added and others might be deselected. Visitors can add comments, descriptions, transcriptions, translations and other texts to the video’s in the V/J12 Screening Room. By applying keywords, video fragments can be selected, connected and grouped. Text is a way to make accessible the content of video files for search engines, study, interpretations and re-mixing.