Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube

24 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics25the next direction of big money, trend research completely overlooks and neglects the factthat there might be another answer. Fortunately, this is not the only perspective on things tocome. Once, the question of ‘what should we do’ fell in the domain of ethics. And thereforethinking about the possibilities of video must not restrict itself to exploitable trends, but mayalso envisage a utopian perspective on visual possibilities, even if a vision of this kind maylook almost as delusive as the beginning.Frames within Frames – Windows andDoorsAndreas TreskeReferencesAgamben, Giorgio. The Open, Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2004.Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990.Deleuze, Gilles. The Time-image, London: Athlone, 1986.Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Routledge,2002.Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture, Cambridge, Mass:MIT Press, 2005.Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, London: Continuum, 1975.Greenberg, Dan Ackerman. ‘The secret strategies behind many “viral” Videos’, TechCrunch, 22 November2007, www. techcrunch.com/ 2007/11/22/the-secret-strategies-behind-many-viral-videos/.Innis, Harold. Empire and Communication, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture, New York: New York University Press, 2006.Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999._____. Aufschreibsysteme 1800/1900, München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1995._____. Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenchaften, Paderborn: UTB Einleitung, 1980.Lazzarato, Maurizio. Videophilosophie, Berlin: b_books, 2002.Lovink, Geert. Zero Comments: Elemente einer kritischen Internetkultur, trans. Andreas Kallfelz,Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2008.Manovich, Lev. The Theory of New Media, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001._____. ‘The Myth of user-generated content’, Lev Manovich blog, 23 November, 2010, manovich.net/2010/11/23/the-myth-of-user-generated-content/.Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude, London: Continuum, 2008.Müller, Corinna. ‘Variationen des Kinopgramms. Filmform und Filmgeschichte’, in Corinna Müller andHarro Segeberg (eds) DieModellierung desKinofilms, Munich, 1998.Pasquinelli, Matteo. Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2008.Staiger, Janet. ‘The Hollywood Mode of Production to 1930’, in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, KristinThompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, London:Routledge, 1988.von Uexküll, Jakob. Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen / Bedeutungslehre,Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956.Doors, windows, box office windows, skylights, car windows, mirrors, are all frames inframes. The great directors have particular affinities with particular secondary, tertiary,etc. frames. And it is by this dovetailing of frames that the parts of the set or of theclosed system are separated, but also converge and are reunited. 1As Anne Friedberg stated in The Virtual Window, the frame within a frame or the shotwithin a shot is a ‘common figure’ in cinema. 2 The moving image is formally split into parts,re-composed and re-centred through an additional act of framing, that is equal to an exaggeration.The ‘cadrage’ (framing) includes a second ‘cadre’ (frame) replacing the traditionalway of cutting to the object to be seen. The viewer does not enter the image by way of single‘cadrages’; rather, a multiplicity is presented online and is constantly available; not onewindow, but a sum of windows. While split screens have historically been used to mark andseparate spaces in cinema, frames within frames create a new element in the narrative orfictional world.It has become evident that, in the past, frames as both objects and as concepts have influencedthe way that people have perceived, communicated, and acted. In this short essay, Iwill attempt to extend theories of cinematic framing to the presentation of the moving imagein digital environments and devices. Here again, my interest in the impact of the diversedevelopment of screens and the emergence of online video upon the composition and creationof moving images and narratives is focused upon the application of formal theoreticalapproaches to existing forms of online video and the interfaces through which videos areembedded or presented. Do we need to reassess the conception of frames as windows ordoors when considering the position of the viewer in relation to online video? Does the actof framing remain relevant to online video, or is it merely an outdated theoretical approach?In his first book on cinema, Gilles Deleuze describes the cinematic frame as an informationsystem. As David Goldberg states, for Deleuze a cadre, or frame, in a film is a ‘set which hasa great number of parts, that is of elements, which themselves form subsets’. ‘Actors, locations,sets, lighting, sound, angles, durations and special effects all constitute the informationin the frame’, which ‘makes it legible, and something that bears potential meaning for the1. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image, London: Continuum, 2004, p. 14.2. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, Cambridge: The MIT Press,2006, p. 200.