[rohrpost] Video Vortex #9: re:assemblies of Video, 28/2 - 2/3

[Vera Tollmann]

The 9th edition of Video Vortex will start this Thursday in Lüneburg!


Video Vortex #9
Re:assemblies of Video
28 Feb. – 2 March 2013
Lüneburg, Germany
Centre for Digital Cultures
Leuphana University
 

The conference asks how can we analyze and compare assemblages of online video?  Besides speakers, performances and workshops we already announced - among them Beth Coleman and Nishant Shah - we would like to introduce to you a further set of speakers and topics: 

Joshua Neves, Gabriel Menotti and Filippo Spreafico find different ways to organize filters and frameworks for glimpses of online video. Neves pleads for adopting new thinking for each video assembly, a multiplicity of video theories. The method of Menotti to access the videosphere is through curation. Even more hands-on is Spreafico’s video montage, which simultaneously shows his „local“ and „personal“ view on information.

Along the activism-journalism-civic media axis, Sascha Simons scrutinizes the phenomenon of amateur video witnesses along lines of  circulation, credibility, and mobilization. Margarita Tsomou takes the protests on Syntagma Square in Athens in 2011 as her familiar example to explore the visual affectivity of bodies and social spaces in a performance lecture.
Besides covering movements of majorities inserting itself in existing social structures, video can be seen as a literal social beast reflecting the dark side of amateur video production. Nelli Kambouri and Pavlos Hatzopoulos look at the blistering video propaganda of the Greek fascist party Golden Dawn.

At this critical stage, contested video networks have to deal with attempts to subsume cultural production and consumption under brand and corporate authorities. Coders and developers of VLC, FFmpeg, Pan.do.ra and P2P Next gather at Video Vortex to exchange concepts and strategies to keep video formats, codecs and archives available to the commons.

Video as part of the learning sphere is likewise contested: MOOC(s) are rising as a new promise for democratizing education or just as effective market reach. Hybrid Publishing Lab and guests from Coventry University will discuss critically how videos get re-embedded and re-annotated in teaching platforms.

Financing of film, television and video projects reflects the logics of the new assemblages. Media industry and users alike are expecting multiplatform-ready narrative forms. Three case studies of the Moving Image Lab mirror these challenges and will be discussed alongside Dystopia, an interactive web film, to reflect what new terrains and demands are showing up in media production.

Andrew Clay translates the challenge of social media right within a format of academic presentation. Surrounded by three video projectors and using the interaction of participants, he will immerse a talk on social film into the format social film. The social force of copresence and sharing in a state of crisis is what interests Deborah Ligorio in her art project Survival Kits.

Certainly social video is about the mirroring of social visions. This February in Cairo, the artists Kaya Behkalam and Azin Feizabadi together with curator Jens Maier-Rothe conceived a performative lecture on the very notion of »projection«. Jasmina Metwaly from Mosireen Collective – who organized Tahir Cinema, open air projections of mobile video during the egyptian revolution –, will respond with her insights and experiences in facilitating and screening political video.

How much citizen reporters rely on personal engagement, skills and persistence, is shown by the film High Tech Low Life by Steve Maing, a cinematic portait of two Chinese video bloggers.

Video Vortex #9 in general traces new digital video culture, its users, spectators and producers by looking at criss-cross effects between neighboring domains, tracks and turfs of video. The way users made digital culture a part of their real life is illustrated in the ‚video meme’ "Digital Natives" by artist Renée Ridgway.


Participants: Beth Coleman, Seth Keen,  Edwin, Thomas Østbye, Andreas Treske, Stephanie Hough, Martin Katić, Theresa Steffens, Arndt Potdevin, Robert M. Ochshorn, Nan Haifen, Viola Sarnelli, Boris Traue, Achim Kredelbach , Dalida María Benfield, Renée Ridgway, Gabriel S Moses, Nishant Shah, Margarita Tsomou, Sascha Simons, Nelli Kambouri, Pavlos Hatzopoulos, Joshua Neves, Gabriel Menotti, Filippo Spreafico, Caroline Heron, Jonathan Shaw, Jan Gerber, Sebastian Luetgert, Elric Milon, Sascha Kluger, Jamie King, Stefano Sabatini, Peter Snowdon, Miya Yoshida, Boaz Levin, Azin Feizabadi, Kaya Behkalam, Jens Maier-Rothe, Jasmina Metwaly, Left Vision, Katja Grundmann, Graswurzel.tv , Björn Ahrend, Timo Großpietsch, Vito Campanelli , Robert M. Ochshorn, Alejo Duque, Lucía Egaña Rojas, Andrew Clay, Stefan Heidenreich, Deborah Ligorio,  Cornelia Sollfrank, among others


The full program can be found here on videovortex9.net

VV9 is organized by Leuphana University’s Moving Image Lab and Post-Media Lab. A portion of VV9 also constitutes the first part of the ANALOG event series, sponsored by the university’s Centre for Digital Cultures.

VV9 is funded through Innovation Incubator, a major EU project financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the federal state of Lower Saxony.