[spectre] Call: 9th Video Vortex conf., Lüneburg Feb/March 2013

[Andreas Broeckmann]

http://videovortex9.net


Video Vortex 9 - re:assemblies (Open Call)

28 February - 2 March 2013
Lüneburg

Video Vortex 9 – re:assemblies


The call is open until 31 August 2012
Please send us your proposals. Besides abstracts (max. 500 words) we 
encourage video teasers (max. 5 mins) and any form of short outline. You 
can send it to: vera.tollmann[at]gmx.net.



Video as an artifact always has been assembled. Now at this critical 
stage of digital video culture, it gets reassembled on a new level: 
between new affordances, attention shifts and the threat of 
over-regulation and customization, a.k.a. ‘walling’ and ‘gardening’.

An assemblage always has been a cultural form, itself consisting of 
other assemblages. Online video vortices such as Youtube, in this 
perspective, are assemblages of assemblages. On the infrastructural 
axis, we have databases, softwares, hardwares, screens, interfaces, 
protocols and server farms. In the users sphere, components are videos, 
titles, comments, tags, hyperlinks, lists and channels. Looking at the 
production level, one finds assemblages of cameras, video producers, 
filmed objects, frames, uploaders, users and audiences. Last, but not 
least, economic components like capital, money flows, corporations, 
employees, advertisers, property rights, eyeballs and statistics again 
create assemblages.

Youtube as one such agglutination is changing along with cultural 
formations of video as Google itself is strongly working on its 
reconfigurations. Powerful Asian alternatives, such as Tudou and Youku 
in China, or Nico Nico Douga in Japan, have developed significantly 
different properties according to local cultural settings and needs. 
More alternatives are constantly added, within, alongside or beyond 
Youtube, by corporations and entrepreneurs, just as much as by artists, 
hactivists and the users around the world.

VideoVortex #9 proposes that now is a time to re-engage with a 
‘structural’ analysis of online-video culture. By calling for this 
re-engagement with structural questions and an analysis of 
‘assemblages’, we point to the often loose forms of influence between 
components and processes each not fully determined by the other. Using 
this lens we do not aim to confine the analysis to particular theory 
brands (such as STS/ANT, Post-Marxist or Deleuzian approaches), we 
rather want to open up structural questions and to suggest a certain 
slicing.
Object-oriented approaches are as welcome as relational ones, critics as 
well as theorists and practitioners.

So how can we analyze and compare assemblages of online video? What new 
constellations are to be found around the video frame, be it on a 
social, aesthetical or technical level? How can we describe and 
understand recent shifts, such as commissioned channels on Youtube or 
the advent of amateur video in the news sphere? Do specific interfaces 
privilege specific forms of content and practices? Users, for example, 
encounter video hosting services in an assemblage with conventional 
television, torrents or blogs, what does this mean? What happens, if we 
extend the focus of the analysis to the integration into Google or 
Facebook, or narrow it down, to a particular assemblage of one video and 
its comments?

To ask such questions means to look and think beyond YouTube. YouTube 
itself overhauls its interface and syntax of use, with deeper 
integration into the Google-Verse, and a shift from user-generated to 
channel-commissioned content. New software, such as easy to use 
HTML5-based frameworks, open up new possibilities. At the same time ’TV 
has overflowed its boundaries’ (FlowTV). The building block of the 
network-TV-era morphs further into lists, channels, apps and 
what-have-you, driven by recommendation engines and personalized 
profiles. Big players, such as Apple, Google, NetFlix, Hulu, Amazon and 
Samsung, aim to define the future of a medium once known as television, 
still unsure whether it knocks at the window from inside the computer, 
the old living-room-screen, or from within any other gadget nesting in 
our hands and attention spaces.

Fact is, TV-Networks are still struggling with their online-strategies, 
partly rolling out their content, trying to keep control of 
TV-tradition. At the same time Internet-giants are trying to translate 
‚2.0‘-culture into immediate domination of the field of online-video, 
while open-source initiatives or micro-social DIY cultures experiment 
within pre-existing frames of distribution or their own infrastructures. 
Often this content is re-floating to the surface of the global news 
sphere, most notably in larger political events such as the Arab Spring, 
showing the new dependances between networked media content and the 
social spaces of what was once regarded as ‘the public’.

Also video assemblages across media-spheres and in time – 
video-biographies – need our attention: Egyptian or Syrian protestors 
are seen on CNN or Al Jazeera, set-top boxes stream Democracy Now along 
Fox-News, and videos get re-embedded and re-annotated in teaching 
platforms such as Sophie, Scalar and MediaThread, or in sub-curated 
diaries such as Facebook Timelines.

What could new methodologies and epistemologies for the unfolding 
video-grammars in the global videodrome look like?
Without limiting Video Vortex #9 to the mentioned approaches and 
perspectives, we particularly encourage papers, presentations and 
workshops that look at

1.)… assemblages of different videos, graphics and texts, be it in 
material or with a view to new environments of authoring or curation. 
Such an approach re-poses the question of interactive multi- and 
hypermedia in the age of html-5, Popcorn, Apps and the likes.

2.)… assemblages of content, interfaces and infrastructures, as done in 
platforms, with their changing forms and logics of circulation, thereby 
scrutinizing the profiles of media-‘flows’, ‘liveness’, ‘channels’, 
‘archives’, ‘lists’, and, addressing the current nature of visual 
experience, affection and attention, producing ‘dissolving originals’ 
and new forms of mash-ups.

3.)… socio-cultural assemblages of producers, owners, curators and 
‘audiences’. New forms of managing and staging video production, 
attempts to re-organize systems of retribution or questioning the 
conditions and social realities of video- and TV-production are of 
interest here. Issues of copyright, the re-organization of (‘imaginary’) 
capital or the ‘migration of images’ will evoke questions. The 
overarching question might be: To what extent technology, standards and 
protocols (and their symbolisms) are taking over the role of what has 
been ascribed to ‘culture’?

4.)… assemblages contributing to ruptures and revolutions: Indeed „the 
whole world is watching“ the (televisual) world being entangled in 
different real or so-called ‘revolutions’: social upheavals are 
transmitted via video, the system of the broadcast-era itself is being 
questioned and entangled in new ways, the question what it means to be 
an ‘observer’ (individually, socially or scientifically), a 
‘participant’ or a ‘witness’ (going back to the Rodney King event) is 
projected on our screen, as we realize the ‘terminal identity’ we are 
all drawn into. Questions of relevance, media positioning and ‘real 
virtuality’ are urging themselves upon us.

And of course we particularly welcome analysis which crosses and 
combines the levels outlined above – as their separation is itself owed 
to a heuristic assemblage, which can be done in this way, or otherwise.

The Video Vortex #9 team. – May 2012