[artinfo] Video Vortex: Responses to YouTube (event & discussion list)

[Geert Lovink]

Video Vortex Conference: November 30 and December 1 2007, Amsterdam (NL)
Organized by the Institute of Network Cultures

First announcement, March 15, 2007

Event: http://www.networkcultures.org/videovortex/
List info: 
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/videovortex_listcultures.org

In response to the increasing potential for video to become a 
significant form of personal media on the Internet, this conference 
examines the key issues that are emerging around the independent 
production and distribution of online video content. What are artists 
and activists responses to the popularity of 'user-generated content' 
websites? Is corporate backlash eminent?

After years of talk about digital conversions and crossmedia 
platforms we are now witnessing the merger of the Internet and 
television at a pace that no one predicted. For the baby boom 
generation, that currently forms the film and television 
establishment, the media organisations and conglomerates, this 
unfolds as a complete nightmare. Not only because of copyright issues 
but increasingly due to the shift of audience to vlogging and 
video-sharing websites as part of the development of a broader 
participatory culture.

The opening night will feature live acts, performances and lectures 
under the banner of video slamming. We will trace the history from 
short film to one-minute videos to the first experiments with 
streaming media and online video, along with exploring the way VJs 
and media artists are accessing and using online archives.

The Video Vortex conference aims to contextualize these latest 
developments through presenting continuities and discontinuities in 
the artistic, activist and mainstream perspective of the last few 
decades. Unlike the way online video presents itself as the latest 
and greatest, there are long threads to be woven into the history of 
visual art, cinema and documentary production. The rise of the 
database as the dominant form of storing and accessing cultural 
artifacts has a rich tradition that still needs to be explored. The 
conference aims to raise the following questions:

- How are people utilising the potential to independently produce and 
distribute independent video content on the Internet?
- What are the alternatives to the proprietary standards currently 
being developed?
- What are the commercial objectives that mass media is imposing on 
user-generated content and video-sharing databases?
- What is the underlying economics of online video in the age of 
unlimited uploads?
- How autonomous are vloggers within the broader domain of mass media?
- How are cinema, television and video art being affected by the 
development of a ubiquitous online video practice?
- What type of aesthetic and narrative issues does the database pose 
for online video practice?

Conference themes:

Viral Video critique
Vlogging Critique
Participatory Culture, Participatory Video
Real World Tools and Technologies
Theory & History of the Database
Narrative and the Cinematic
Database Taxonomy and Navigation
Internet Video: Art, Activism, and Public Media
Evening Programme / Exhibition


Viral Video critique

YouTube made 2006 the year of Internet video. The video content 
produced bottom-up, with an emphasis on participation, sharing and 
community networking. But inevitably like Flickr being consumed by 
Yahoo, Google purchased YouTube. What is the future for the 
production and distribution of independent online video content? How 
can a participatory culture achieve a certain degree of autonomy and 
diversity outside mass media? What other motives does Google have for 
Internet video in terms of searching and advertising? After the 
purchase of YouTube, Google was asked to remove a number of clips 
that breached copyright laws. What comparisons can be made between 
the Napster incident with audio and video-sharing websites?

Vlogging Critique

This section will deal with vlogging criticism. Is video blogging a 
form of text-based blogging with other means? How can we develop a 
form of criticism, and a critical practice, that is not derogative 
and yet surpasses the anecdotal diary level? Is vlogging the next 
stage of ego boosting of the blogger, who wants to raise his or her 
ranking status? What is a video diary and how can this emerging genre 
be shaped? Can there be sophistication in 'vlogging'? How can we 
overcome the evangelical that stresses the possibilities of gadget 
features? And how can we overcome the amateurish aesthetics of this new genre?

Participatory Culture, Participatory Video

The Web 2.0 holds the promise to create a participatory culture that 
can renew the stagnated democracies in the West. In this utopian 
approach, the user has the historical task to overcome the old regime 
of top down broadcast media and create decentralised dialogues. To 
what extent can user-generated video content be energized by 
presenting the material as citizen journalism? Is the increased user 
participation really a sign of a new political culture or is it a 
mere special effect of technological change?

Real World Tools and Technologies

In this session we will investigate the progress that open source and 
free software initiatives have made in regard to the development of 
the codex and the player that can compete with the proprietary 
standards such as Microsoft Media Player. It is not enough to 
critique the corporate takeover of MySpace and YouTube and upload 
alternative content. Increasingly the intention of programmers shifts 
towards Peer2Peer solutions in order to create a truly distributed 
network in which content can freely float around without having to 
use centralised servers. In this session we will present projects such as;

Theory & History of the Database

Searching databases has become a dominant cultural practice. Instead 
of flipping through a radio and TV guide, the cinema programme or the 
library, we browse the Internet. In this session we would like to go 
back in time and investigate the history of the computer database. 
What are the ideological underpinnings of 'taxonomy'? What do we 
search when we perform a search? Should the aim be to overcome the 
fragmented experience of our contemporary database culture and create 
overriding meaning structures that deepen our understanding without 
having to compromise on content diversity?

Narrative and the Cinematic

Do these fragmented video databases lead to new narratives and 
genres? Does a database like YouTube evoke a skill such as continuous 
partial attention, or a contemporary disease like the attention 
deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)? Against the medicalization, 
scholars have put the ability of users to reassemble short stories 
into larger new narratives as a reassuring alternative that replaces 
old media skills. The bricollage is assembled by the end-user, not 
the producer. Is there a new cinematic experience?

Database Taxonomy and Navigation

How do artists relate to the possibility of building large video 
databases? Is YouTube the future of video art? Traditionally, artists 
have always worked with found footage but nowadays it has never been 
easier to access. The remix culture, online video tools and increased 
server space make it possible to create large databases in which 
complex interconnected content can be offered to the viewer. What is 
the underlining information architecture? How does one navigate 
Steven Spielberg's video archive of the holocaust survivors? Or take 
the Dropping Knowledge project in which 110 experts answered 100 
questions of the audience, which can be accessed as a database. The 
same can be said of large museum collections.

Internet Video: Art, Activism, and Public Media

 From 16mm film and video to the Internet and back, activists have 
always used the moving image to produce critical and innovative work. 
For many, the experimentation with visual language and critical 
content has been one and the same. In this session we will explore 
early examples of Internet video and investigate how artists and 
social movements have responded to the YouTube challenge. Is it 
better to integrate your message into large existing platforms or 
should we rather let a thousand blossoms bloom and each have our own 
video server? Online video databases like YouTube seemingly are the 
ideal artist portfolio online, with unlimited uploads and a massive 
audience. MySpace is inhabited by bands and musicians, but why don't 
video artists and filmmakers occupy YouTube? If we look at the videos 
on YouTube, what aesthetics do we find? Is there a homogenous style 
that only builds on eyewitness tv and candid camera formats? And now 
that music videos and commercials increasingly resemble video art, 
can we define how exactly artistic practices influence the look of 
online footage? What would it mean to take YouTube Art serious? Is 
YouTube a medium and platform in itself for art works or is it merely 
used as a promotional device? Many have used YouTube to produce 
diary-type performances in which they either played themselves or 
pretended to be some character. What status do we give to such ego 
documents? Is YouTube used by artists as a tool to intervene in 
social and political issues? In this session we will present projects such as:

Evening Programme / Exhibition

Video Slamming
"Short, user-created videos are creating a new kind of watching 
experience, one more about 'snacking' than half-hour sitcoms." (The Economist)

Much like poetry slamming the use of short video fragments has become 
a dominant mode in visual culture. Where are the video files found 
and how are they used and played with? Is 'video slamming' the new 
way of watching audiovisual files? This session is all about the new 
ways of watching, using, and playing with moving images: scratching, 
sampling, mixing, but also (meta) tagging, recommending etc. This 
session will feature performances, live acts and lectures.

Video Vortex Discussion List:

With this discussion list we like to gather responses to the rise of 
YouTube and similar online video databases. What does YouTube tell us 
about the state of art in visual culture? Is YouTube the corporate 
media structure of the 21st century? What are the artist responses to 
YouTube aesthetics?

General information about the mailing list is at:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/videovortex_listcultures.org

To post to this list, send your email to: videovortex(at)listcultures.org

This list is meant for all those interested in the topic, and will 
possibly continue after the event in late 2007.

Practical info:

Date
November 30 and December 1, 2007.

Venue
PostCS 11, PostCS building
Oosterdokskade 3-5
1011 AD Amsterdam
T: 020 - 62 55 999
www.ilove11.nl

Organized by
Institute of Network Cultures, HvA Interactive Media, Amsterdam

Editorial team
Geert Lovink, Sabine Niederer, Shirley Niemans

Affiliated researchers
Seth Keen, Vera Tollmann

Production
Shirley Niemans

For further information, please contact
Shirley Niemans, shirley(at)networkcultures.org