[spectre] Video Vortex: Responses to YouTube (event & discussion list)

[Geert Lovink]

Video Vortex Conference: November 30 and December 1 2007, Amsterdam (NL)
Organized by the Institute of Network Cultures

First announcement, March 15, 2007

Event: http://www.networkcultures.org/videovortex/
List info: 
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/videovortex_listcultures.org

In response to the increasing potential for video to become a 
significant form of personal media on the Internet, this conference 
examines the key issues that are emerging around the independent 
production and distribution of online video content. What are artists 
and activists responses to the popularity of ‘user-generated content’ 
websites? Is corporate backlash eminent?

After years of talk about digital conversions and crossmedia platforms 
we are now witnessing the merger of the Internet and television at a 
pace that no one predicted. For the baby boom generation, that 
currently forms the film and television establishment, the media 
organisations and conglomerates, this unfolds as a complete nightmare. 
Not only because of copyright issues but increasingly due to the shift 
of audience to vlogging and video-sharing websites as part of the 
development of a broader participatory culture.

The opening night will feature live acts, performances and lectures 
under the banner of video slamming. We will trace the history from 
short film to one-minute videos to the first experiments with streaming 
media and online video, along with exploring the way VJs and media 
artists are accessing and using online archives.

The Video Vortex conference aims to contextualize these latest 
developments through presenting continuities and discontinuities in the 
artistic, activist and mainstream perspective of the last few decades. 
Unlike the way online video presents itself as the latest and greatest, 
there are long threads to be woven into the history of visual art, 
cinema and documentary production. The rise of the database as the 
dominant form of storing and accessing cultural artifacts has a rich 
tradition that still needs to be explored. The conference aims to raise 
the following questions:

- How are people utilising the potential to independently produce and 
distribute independent video content on the Internet?
- What are the alternatives to the proprietary standards currently 
being developed?
- What are the commercial objectives that mass media is imposing on 
user-generated content and video-sharing databases?
- What is the underlying economics of online video in the age of 
unlimited uploads?
- How autonomous are vloggers within the broader domain of mass media?
- How are cinema, television and video art being affected by the 
development of a ubiquitous online video practice?
- What type of aesthetic and narrative issues does the database pose 
for online video practice?

Conference themes:

Viral Video critique
Vlogging Critique
Participatory Culture, Participatory Video
Real World Tools and Technologies
Theory & History of the Database
Narrative and the Cinematic
Database Taxonomy and Navigation
Internet Video: Art, Activism, and Public Media
Evening Programme / Exhibition


Viral Video critique

YouTube made 2006 the year of Internet video. The video content 
produced bottom-up, with an emphasis on participation, sharing and 
community networking. But inevitably like Flickr being consumed by 
Yahoo, Google purchased YouTube. What is the future for the production 
and distribution of independent online video content? How can a 
participatory culture achieve a certain degree of autonomy and 
diversity outside mass media? What other motives does Google have for 
Internet video in terms of searching and advertising? After the 
purchase of YouTube, Google was asked to remove a number of clips that 
breached copyright laws. What comparisons can be made between the 
Napster incident with audio and video-sharing websites?

Vlogging Critique

This section will deal with vlogging criticism. Is video blogging a 
form of text-based blogging with other means? How can we develop a form 
of criticism, and a critical practice, that is not derogative and yet 
surpasses the anecdotal diary level? Is vlogging the next stage of ego 
boosting of the blogger, who wants to raise his or her ranking status? 
What is a video diary and how can this emerging genre be shaped? Can 
there be sophistication in ‘vlogging’? How can we overcome the 
evangelical that stresses the possibilities of gadget features? And how 
can we overcome the amateurish aesthetics of this new genre?

Participatory Culture, Participatory Video

The Web 2.0 holds the promise to create a participatory culture that 
can renew the stagnated democracies in the West. In this utopian 
approach, the user has the historical task to overcome the old regime 
of top down broadcast media and create decentralised dialogues. To what 
extent can user-generated video content be energized by presenting the 
material as citizen journalism? Is the increased user participation 
really a sign of a new political culture or is it a mere special effect 
of technological change?

Real World Tools and Technologies

In this session we will investigate the progress that open source and 
free software initiatives have made in regard to the development of the 
codex and the player that can compete with the proprietary standards 
such as Microsoft Media Player. It is not enough to critique the 
corporate takeover of MySpace and YouTube and upload alternative 
content. Increasingly the intention of programmers shifts towards 
Peer2Peer solutions in order to create a truly distributed network in 
which content can freely float around without having to use centralised 
servers. In this session we will present projects such as;

Theory & History of the Database

Searching databases has become a dominant cultural practice. Instead of 
flipping through a radio and TV guide, the cinema programme or the 
library, we browse the Internet. In this session we would like to go 
back in time and investigate the history of the computer database. What 
are the ideological underpinnings of ‘taxonomy’? What do we search when 
we perform a search? Should the aim be to overcome the fragmented 
experience of our contemporary database culture and create overriding 
meaning structures that deepen our understanding without having to 
compromise on content diversity?

Narrative and the Cinematic

Do these fragmented video databases lead to new narratives and genres? 
Does a database like YouTube evoke a skill such as continuous partial 
attention, or a contemporary disease like the attention deficit 
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)? Against the medicalization, scholars 
have put the ability of users to reassemble short stories into larger 
new narratives as a reassuring alternative that replaces old media 
skills. The bricollage is assembled by the end-user, not the producer. 
Is there a new cinematic experience?

Database Taxonomy and Navigation

How do artists relate to the possibility of building large video 
databases? Is YouTube the future of video art? Traditionally, artists 
have always worked with found footage but nowadays it has never been 
easier to access. The remix culture, online video tools and increased 
server space make it possible to create large databases in which 
complex interconnected content can be offered to the viewer. What is 
the underlining information architecture? How does one navigate Steven 
Spielberg’s video archive of the holocaust survivors? Or take the 
Dropping Knowledge project in which 110 experts answered 100 questions 
of the audience, which can be accessed as a database. The same can be 
said of large museum collections.

Internet Video: Art, Activism, and Public Media

 From 16mm film and video to the Internet and back, activists have 
always used the moving image to produce critical and innovative work. 
For many, the experimentation with visual language and critical content 
has been one and the same. In this session we will explore early 
examples of Internet video and investigate how artists and social 
movements have responded to the YouTube challenge. Is it better to 
integrate your message into large existing platforms or should we 
rather let a thousand blossoms bloom and each have our own video 
server? Online video databases like YouTube seemingly are the ideal 
artist portfolio online, with unlimited uploads and a massive audience. 
MySpace is inhabited by bands and musicians, but why don’t video 
artists and filmmakers occupy YouTube? If we look at the videos on 
YouTube, what aesthetics do we find? Is there a homogenous style that 
only builds on eyewitness tv and candid camera formats? And now that 
music videos and commercials increasingly resemble video art, can we 
define how exactly artistic practices influence the look of online 
footage? What would it mean to take YouTube Art serious? Is YouTube a 
medium and platform in itself for art works or is it merely used as a 
promotional device? Many have used YouTube to produce diary-type 
performances in which they either played themselves or pretended to be 
some character. What status do we give to such ego documents? Is 
YouTube used by artists as a tool to intervene in social and political 
issues? In this session we will present projects such as:

Evening Programme / Exhibition

Video Slamming
“Short, user-created videos are creating a new kind of watching 
experience, one more about ‘snacking’ than half-hour sitcoms.” (The 
Economist)

Much like poetry slamming the use of short video fragments has become a 
dominant mode in visual culture. Where are the video files found and 
how are they used and played with? Is ‘video slamming’ the new way of 
watching audiovisual files? This session is all about the new ways of 
watching, using, and playing with moving images: scratching, sampling, 
mixing, but also (meta) tagging, recommending etc. This session will 
feature performances, live acts and lectures.

Video Vortex Discussion List:

With this discussion list we like to gather responses to the rise of 
YouTube and similar online video databases. What does YouTube tell us 
about the state of art in visual culture? Is YouTube the corporate 
media structure of the 21st century? What are the artist responses to 
YouTube aesthetics?

General information about the mailing list is at:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/videovortex_listcultures.org

To post to this list, send your email to: 
videovortex(at)listcultures.org

This list is meant for all those interested in the topic, and will 
possibly continue after the event in late 2007.

Practical info:

Date
November 30 and December 1, 2007.

Venue
PostCS 11, PostCS building
Oosterdokskade 3-5
1011 AD Amsterdam
T: 020 - 62 55 999
www.ilove11.nl

Organized by
Institute of Network Cultures, HvA Interactive Media, Amsterdam

Editorial team
Geert Lovink, Sabine Niederer, Shirley Niemans

Affiliated researchers
Seth Keen, Vera Tollmann

Production
Shirley Niemans

For further information, please contact
Shirley Niemans, shirley(at)networkcultures.org