Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube

324 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art325Upload to Shot 1166 by Greg Gallagher, USA.rea, Japan, Thailand, Pakistan, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, the Russian Federation, Serbia,Israel, and Lebanon. Their role was to translate the call into their languages and to organizeuploads in their parts of the world. My first upload was not from a foreign correspondent,and came with an email with the subject heading ‘Here’s something I did’. It was a barechestedman in a sports jacket dancing and lip-synching with an entire Scene (#13) in thebackground. I was afraid I had launched YouTube. I made my first rule: I couldn’t uploadmyself. On 24 August 2007, someone uploaded an image of a cat in the title sequence.I banned it from the site, wanting to discourage similarly meaningless uploads, but I alsomade a rule that I would accept all uploads except those that completely disregardedVertov’s film.Upload to Shot 1166 by Greg Gallagher, USA.era; an underground metro replaces a train (shot 1246); a screen grab of final-cut softwaresubstitutes for the editing room (shot 331). Today there are also camerawomen: shots 129and 130 show a woman on a bicycle arriving to chauffeur a woman with a movie camera,matching the two shots in which Vertov’s cameraman sets off for work with formal precision.Other gender-specific interventions include a video grab from Mulholland Drive 8 oftwo women kissing (shot 803), women getting married (shots 386-89), and the words LeninClub replaced by Women’s Club (shot 1085). There are stills replacing moving images, andvice versa. For shot 441, the close-up of an eye, 18 people have uploaded exact matches,but someone from Beijing also uploaded the close-up of a mouth. There are digitally constructedimages: rectangles aligning to replicate the image of man with a movie camera (shot1166); the modular animation of parts of a building interprets Vertov’s superimposition of twohalves of a city street (shot 290); the mound the cameraman climbs in shot 19 is replacedby a mobile phone displaying the video it captured. There is stark social reality: a woman inBangkok sewing outdoors with a mask over her mouth (shot 589). There are lo-res and hidefuploads, more evidence of today’s socio-politico-economic conditions. The cameramanis the army of kinoks envisaged by Vertov and his montage, now software-enabled, changeson a daily basis.When I launched the project in August 2007, I was focused on exploring the capabilitiesof the internet to achieve world-wide collaboration. I had divided the film into one minutescenes to facilitate browsing, and imagined uploads for every shot in Vertov’s experimentaldocumentary. Recognizing that most of my contacts are from the West, I commissionedforeign correspondents in parts of the world my communications don’t reach: China, Ko-8. Mulholland Drive (dir. David Lynch, 2001).With less than three months between the commission and the premiere in October 2007, theinitial stages were an especially bumpy ride. The translation from film/video to the internetis still alien to older generations, as well as to many in non-Western countries. I received32 emails in one day from someone in Tel Aviv who was learning to compress and uploadfiles. In Belgrade, access was paid for by the hour, a major disadvantage for a project thatneeds browsing. On our end we couldn’t handle one minute uploads: I had to ask people toresubmit their scenes as short clips, a tedious task (for them). Seeking more diverse uploadsin the form of citizen journalism, I searched YouTube for people who had uploaded currentevents – soldiers in Iraq for example – asking them to put their uploads into the project,even suggesting where they might fit. I did the same when Hurricane Katrina hit. I sent blindemails to seemingly relevant organizations in Africa. None of these strategies worked; I stillhave only one upload from the entire continent of Africa, and this was submitted by a CBCreporter living in Montreal.In 2008, as the remake was beginning to gather steam, I started giving workshops worldwide:they confirmed what we already know about the digital divide, a term we seem to have forgotten.In the 1990s, the phrase denoted a lack of access to the technology. While this problemstill exists, the next step is imagining what can be done with it – a stage which requiresknowledge and exposure. At a presentation I gave in the Information Sciences Departmentat Tsing Hua University in Beijing, the graduate students were fascinated that anyone wouldindependently come up with such a project. In workshops in both Beijing and in Tokyo, Idiscovered that few students had ever uploaded video to the internet. Because these workshopswere in the context of film classes, students had to learn to compress files. Those wholater used their mobile phones as capture devices were thrilled by instant gratification; still,that use of the mobile was novel to them. In Bogotá, the workshop moved from the universityclassroom full of computers to a hallway in a different building where the connection speedmade uploading possible. Though there was access to smart classrooms, these generallywere not in Fine Arts or Film departments. I might add that all the above conditions still existin parts of New York City where I live, but they are ignored by a general public in favour ofthe latest gadgets.For months after the project was online, uploads were six degrees of separation. They camefrom film/video-makers I knew, people on common interest listservs, and from foreign correspondentsI had commissioned. I myself was impressed by the matches or interpretations.