Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube

72 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move73Among the participating works, there was a clear predominance of video remixes (musicalor not), homemade performances (re-enactments, lipdubs, stunts) and out-of-context excerptsof movies, television shows and adverts – all forms of production favoured by the wideavailability of digital equipments for video capture and editing. This material, which mightbe termed an online genre, suddenly exists in the contemporary media ecology, due to thefact that the network does not pose the same formal, legal and economic resistance of theestablished media channels.In general, the festival’s program was unpretentious, and accepting of amateurism. Eventhough both characteristics prevailed within internet video at that time, they certainly do notrepresent the limits of the medium. Certain works prepared with a lot of technical expertiseby professional creators could only become public by way of the internet. Good examplesare The Mashin’ of the Christ (2004), 6 by the musical group Negativland, and O Destino deMiguel (2005), 7 made by young employees of the Globo Network. The former is a musicvideo that uses scenes from Passion movies, while the latter is a short film entirely madeof scenes of the feature Shakespeare in Love (1998), re-edited and redubbed by famousBrazilian actors. The expenses involved in distributing such pieces through traditionallyregulated channels makes them unfeasible. Besides, there would be a huge unevennessbetween the volume of real production involved and the juridical marathon to negotiate imagelicensing. 8Works which use the internet as their means of distribution have to conform to the constraintsof the medium – if not actively, at least as a collateral effect of their online propagation.Nowadays, when the medium restrictions are looser and even HD (high-definition) videos arestreamed, it is more difficult to notice such effects. Nevertheless, they were clear in 2005,when normal Brazilian connection bandwidth did not exceed 256kbps. As a national production,O Destino de Miguel is highly representative: the film version found on the internet iscompacted to a very low resolution (160x120 pixels) in order to allow online dissemination.We might argue, then, that this work is completely different from a supposed DVD variant, ora working file, which would have normal NTSC resolution (720x480 pixels).Each version of the movie causes a particular effect on the audience, and these effects arein some measure determined by the restrictions of their platform of distribution. The higherresolution of the DVD allows for a more transparent image. Allied to the proficient voice dubbing,O Destino de Miguel possesses a professional aura, so that the film could pass for anofficial parody of the original Shakespeare in Love. The low-resolution version, on the otherhand, foregrounds the processes that are constitutive of the image. As the pixels and compressionartefacts become apparent, the normal separation between dynamics of materiality6. ‘The Mashin’ of the Christ’, http://www.negativland.com/mashin.7. ‘O Destino de Miguel’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tsa5id0Ywb8/.8. In this regard, J.D. Lasica uses the example of Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation (2003), adocumentary whose production cost no more than $220. After paying for the rights of music andvideo clips so that the film could be commercially released, this figure rocketed to $400,000. SeeJ. D. Lasica, Darknet, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2005, p. 84.and information is disturbed. The precarious movie image is suggestive of a degree of disorderbetween the layers of the circuit: whether it is the public audience or the video image,something is out of place.However, just as it restricts the size of the video file, limiting its resolution and promoting akind of aesthetics of compression, the web medium also defines the structure in which thevideo is shown. Normally, such a video will be viewed through a video player software windowor portable media player viewfinder, small frames in which the low-resolution is not obvious.Thus, the difference between the web’s and the cinematographic film’s platforms of distributionseems to erase the difference between their respective versions, and the circuit disorderin web video is not clearly perceived.By transmitting web videos on the ‘big screen’, the Low Resolution Film Festival aimed preciselyto accentuate the singular aesthetic qualities of film and web video. Enlarged on the‘silver screen’, the low-resolution image appears as a description of its constitutive process;far from the analogue outline of a figurative scene, it appears as an uneven field of colourblocks – which is precisely how the compression algorithm organizes the video information.This is similar to looking at a television screen under a magnifying glass; instead of viewingan enlarged image, we receive its analysis – a reticule of coloured points.The other way the festival attempted to foreground the physical restrictions that the webmedium imposes upon video was by organizing its competitive categories according to afictitious ‘kilobytage’. 9 Referring to the size of the video files in kilobytes, this classificationis a parody of the traditional métrage, the length of a film in meters. As the métrage enablesthe duration of the projected movie to be calculated, it is an important means of organizingfilms both within the theatre program and the film projector’s reels. Yet, this volume makesno difference on the internet. A web server is not limited by the number of hours of movingimage it can stock up, but by the amount of data it can store and transmit. Thus, the timethat matters on the web is precisely that of transmission, a direct function of bandwidthand file size – which in turn, is defined both by the length of the video and its resolution. Asbandwidth and the duration of the video are the most determinate parameters in this operation,the best way to optimize web video distribution is precisely by reducing its resolution: alonger video can occupy proportionally less data, and thus be transmitted faster, if its framesize is smaller. Hence, the data size is the main reason why the restriction of resolution playsa signifying role in the existence of web videos. Therefore, it was defined as the classifyingcriterion for the participating works.Found Forms, Propagated InformationCertainly, in a movie theatre, the internet video is in laboratorial condition. Its usual dynamicsof consumption are destabilized; as these dynamics overlap with a video’s mode of production,they define a good deal of the work’s significance and value. After Duchamp, it could besaid that internet videos are objets trouvés within the media ocean, re-found each and every9. A criterion that is also particular to demoscene competitions.