[artinfo] Video Vortex Conference Amsterdam, January 18-19

[Shirley Niemans]

Video Vortex: Responses to YouTube
International Conference

Date: January 18-19 2008
Location: PostCS11, Amsterdam <http://www.ilove11.nl>http://www.ilove11.nl
Registration: 
<http://www.networkcultures.org/videovortex>http://www.networkcultures.org/videovortex


Video Defunct, vlogging workshop
Date: Thursday January 17 2008, 13.00 - 17.00
Location: Netherlands Media Art Institute, 
Amsterdam 
<http://www.montevideo.nl>http://www.montevideo.nl


Video Slamming, evening program
Date: Saturday, January 19 2008, 20.00 - 23.00
Location: PostCS11, Amsterdam <http://www.ilove11.nl>http://www.ilove11.nl
Free entrance with a conference day pass or passe partout


Video Vortex is an initiative by the Institute of 
Network Cultures, in collaboration with Argos 
Brussels and the Netherlands Media Arts Institute.

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 imminent?
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 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.

Presentations by:

Tom Sherman, Geoffrey Bowker, Andreas Treske, Tal 
Sterngast, Stefaan Decostere, Helen Kambouri, 
Tilman Baumgärtel, Ana Peraica, Dominick Chen, 
Thomas Elsaesser, Dan Oki, Jan Simons, Rosemary 
Comella, Thomas Thiel, Sarah Cook, Patrick 
Lichty, Emma Quinn, Matthew Mitchem, Valentin 
Spirik, Florian Schneider, Philine von Guretzky, 
Tatiana de la O, Jay Dedman

Themes:

Online Video Aesthetics
Looking at the videos on YouTube, what aesthetics 
do we find? Is there a homogeneous style, and can 
we define how artistic practices influence the 
look of online footage?

Participatory Culture
Web 2.0 promises new levels of participatory 
culture. The user has the potential to overcome 
centralized top-down media and create dialogue. 
Is the increased user participation a sign of a 
new socio-political culture or is it a mere 
special effect of technological change?

Cinema and Narrativity
Do fragmented video databases lead to new 
narratives and genres? Does a database like 
YouTube evoke new media skills? The bricolage is 
assembled by the end-user, not the producer. Does 
this add up to a new cinematic experience?

Curating Online Video
From 16mm film and video to the Internet and 
back, artists have always used the moving image 
to produce critical and innovative work. This 
session will investigate how artists and curators 
have responded to the YouTube challenge.

Alternative Platforms and Software
This session will trace developments in the field 
of open source software, P2P alternatives and 
open licenses. Both users and programmers aim to 
create a truly distributed network, in which 
content can freely float around without having to 
use centralized servers and sign strings of user 
agreements.

Evening programme: Video Slamming
Much like poetry slamming the use of short video 
fragments has become a dominant mode in visual 
culture. This evening session is all about the 
new ways of watching, using, and playing with 
moving images, such as scratching, sampling, 
mixing, (meta)tagging and recommending. 
Performances by Emile Zile, Tatiana de la O and 
Rosa Menkman, presented by Michael Stevenson and 
Sabine Niederer.

Video Defunct vlogging workshop
by Seth Keen and the Video Defunct Collective. 
Can blogs and/or blogging be tools for creating a 
new type of net based art? Video Defunct is an 
experimental work that focuses on producing a 
hybrid form of video blog. Currently as a 
work-in-progress, a number of prototypes are 
being developed in the open source blog 
publishing system WordPress. A key objective of 
the project is to explore the way video is 
presented within the structure of a blog from a 
'poetic' perspective. The workshop focus is on 
artistic approaches towards vlogging and explores 
the questions raised in the Video Vortex.2 
exhibition. Thursday Jan 17 from 13.00 - 17.00, 
Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam. 
Please note: Register for the workshop at: 
<http://www.montevideo.nl>http://www.montevideo.nl.

Register for the conference at: 
<http://www.networkcultures.org/videovortex>http://www.networkcultures.org/videovortex
Register for the vlogging workshop at: 
<http://www.montevideo.nl>http://www.montevideo.nl
For more information, please contact Shirley 
Niemans, 
<mailto:shirley at networkcultures.org>shirley at networkcultures.org.

++
Institute of Network Cultures
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