Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube

348 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art349The Thin Line Between On and Off:a (re:)cyclothymic explorationAlbert FigurtA : - Look me right in the eyes. What do you see?B : - Myself.The Pulviscular EyeEvery human being is an integrated cinematic industry. We monitor reality, record endlessstrips of routine events, store‘em in our (visual) memory. At night this huge amount of rawmaterial is compressed and re-arranged by the unconscious; from tireless but easily distractedcameramen we temporarily become unaware but rather specific directors/editors.Dream sequences are then projected onto the black surface of our closed eyelids; a privatescreening for a single spectator, a distillate of our deepest obsessions. Sometimes disturbing,often curiously forgotten as soon as we open our eyes and log into the real world, these fragmentedsolipsistic films remain offline shadows fluttering around solid waking life. We takefor granted the subjective-point-of-view, quick-and-dirty, non-scripted and cut-less footageproduced everyday on a biocamcorder basis; asleep, we wait for the noctu[inte]rnal show(nebulously narrative and filled with spatiotemporal & visual jumps) as a funny or scary remixof these unavoidable long takes, some sort of an automatic image-digestion side project.Through cheap, easy-to-use and almost unintrusive prosumer videodevices, reality binocularsurveillance is nowadays often squared by crude, handheld, seldom edited instant-movies.The everyman, finally equipped with one or more digital eyes, rediscovers himself as anindependent cine-operator and starts to look at daily moments as possible clips to be collectedand revised in a near future. Different from their analogical progenitors (homemadevideotapes), these subterranean products are indeed quickly generated, modified and thenshared on the net; as a result, a grainy and confused galaxy of ordinary gestures is painlesslyassembled and disseminated, its creative possibilities residing in spontaneous and unpredictablepost-production strategies. Symptomatic acronym détournement: if VHS (originallyintended for Vertical Helical Scan) is now identified worldwide as Video Home System, whycan’t the Motion Picture Expert Group finally become a dispersed people’s Memory ProcessElectronically Generated, to skim and confront our saturated media horizon with? The concreteworld gets diluted on interchangeable binary strings, a soft grassroots CCTV system isanonymously established; never knowing where a camera could be, offline reality becomesstuffed with online holes, tunnels that directly replay you(r image) across the globe. Subconsciousfiltering labour is now collective, hazy déjà-vu taste characterizes Web 2.0 audiovisualexperiences. Wanna look at something familiar with someone else’s eyes? Or, conversely,wanna lend your visual files for strangers to evaluate? The physical realm is just a warehouse,sense and emotions are actually built on our mutual[ly] externalized sight/site.From Beat to BitWe’re taught how to write, read and make calculations, but not how to look (at least, at thehuman-crafted mediascape we’re just supposed to avidly consume). Even after a good centuryof moving image storytelling (with the parallel development and crossmediatic floodingof cinematic language), the average person is still not always encouraged to develop a relativeAV literacy. So, when videopencils are unexpectedly delivered among users, their mediaexposure background is far more detailed as input than the possi(a)bility of them creatingan informed, well-organized output. We’ve been nourished since birth with a constant andmassive audiovisual stream, but it’s not sure if we already experienced the possibility toscream our personal line, to optically say something. We’ve absorbed cinematic nuances thatwe’re probably not aware of; at first glance we know how to distinguish a feature film from adocumentary, or a spot from a video clip, but we’re probably not able to explain exactly how:no problem, this self-taught awa[kening]reness can be fruitfully and retroactively stimulatedonce we prosthetically switch on.Similar to what happened with the jazz revolution (where it took phonography and improvisationto bring music back to its original use as a playful and real-time artform), omnipervasivepulviscularecording will eventually break film/video’s formal and arbitrary structures– their characteristics being randomly rearranged by inexperienced but genuine hands. Oftenwithout proper formal training, the be-bop pioneers were able to effectively shake thesc[lerotized]ore-driven occidental canon precisely by jumping into the abyss of sounds withaural sensibility as their only parachute; almost a century later, via countless, exuberantdigital trumpets, optical jazz solos start to resonate in the infoscape while diegetic scr[ipt]uples melt into videostreams of (un)consciousness - relentlessy infiltrating & challengingthe mainriver. The stylish camera-stylo radically metamorphoses into a camera-biro style, away of taking [jazzy?] notes that echoes the primal ontology of video (to be – as opposed tocinema - a live technology, capturing time on the spot without necessary physical impressionor storage). As a strong comunicative/rumina(c)ting attitude is gonna redefine/remix standardprocedures, dialects and serendipities are expected to flourish at the border of academicart; videodialogues will become regular conversational practices, manifesting an increasinglyd(uctil)ynamic and pi[dgin]ctographical taste. Translating perception into pure dataflows:neither big concern for authorship or aesthetics, nor off-broadway disciplined rebellion (incase, on-narroway is the target). After the debatable era of g[lamourous]athering, here wehave some tasty but lumbering home-grown delicacies: updating from neolithic to paleolithic,it’s time for an agriculture of the eye.Tele-pyjama PartiesStarting from our very intimate surrounding, videosecretion is becoming the norm. Telepresence,in a very wide sense, coincides with telecommunications: fragments of you are allaround me, just waiting to be detected. Videopresence has virtually existed since the adventof TV, but only recently has become usable for private interactions. Thanks to the juicy lovematchbetween cheap webcams & affordable broadband connections, millions of people arenowadays videotalking. In this worldwide-scale immaterial cartography, screens seem to bethe theoretical watersheds. But what’s exactly behind and beyond‘em?