Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube

VideoVortexReader IIMovingImagesBeyondYoutube

2 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeMoving Images Beyond Youtube 3Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTubeEditors: Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers MilesCopy Editor: Nicole HeberDesign: Katja van StiphoutCover Image: Team Thursday, RotterdamPrinter: Ten Klei, AmsterdamPublisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2011ISBN: 978-90-78146-12-4ContactInstitute of Network Culturesphone: +3120 5951866fax: +3120 5951840email: info@networkcultures.orgweb: http://www.networkcultures.orgOrder a copy of this book by sending an email to:books@networkcultures.orgA PDF of this publication can be downloaded freely at:http://www.networkcultures.org/publications/inc-readersJoin the Video Vortex mailing list at: http://www.listcultures.orgVideoVortexReader IIMovingImagesBeyondYoutubeEdited byGeert Lovink andrachel somers milesINC Reader #6Supported by: the School for Communication and Design at the Amsterdam Universityof Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam DMCI). The Video Vortex Readeris produced as part of the Culture Vortex research program, which is supportedby Foundation Innovation Alliance (SIA - Stichting Innovatie Alliantie).Thanks to Andreas Treske, Dan Oki, Bram Crevits and the Video Vortex SteeringCommittee for their valuable input and editorial support. Thanks to our Culture Vortexpartners: MediaLAB Amsterdam, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision,Netherlands Media Art Institute, Virtueel Platform, VPRO, Amsterdam City Archives,Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, IDFA, and the Urban Screens Association.(http://networkcultures.org/culturevortex/)Special thanks to all the authors for their contributions, and to Nicole Heberfor her copy editing.This publication is licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Netherlands License.To view a copy of this license, visit:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/nl/deed.enNo article in this reader may be reproduced in any form by any electronicor mechanical means without permission in writing from the author.

12 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics13the high drop-out rate, but more likely it is the single media ideology (in this case recordedvideo signals) most of us are encapsulated by that prevents us from making the perverseconnections that are overlooked by business engineers.During the first years of online video research, most attention was dedicated to HenryJenkins’ uncritical appraisal of ‘participatory culture’, and to the ‘cult of the amateur’response. Despite the criticism supplied by figures such as Cass Sunstein, Andrew Keenand Jaron Lanier, the ‘most watched’ logic is still dominant in the academic cultural studiesapproaches. Instead of deploying pessimistic judgements against optimistic marketeertalk, it could be more interesting to closely investigate the messy online reality. In the early1970s Jean Baudrillard defined mass media as ‘speech without response’. These days,messages only exist if they are indexed by search engines, retweeted with shortened URLs,forwarded through emails and RSS feeds, liked at Facebook, recommended through Diggor, we must not forget, commented on the page itself. Media without response seem to beunthinkable. The second Video Vortex Reader takes you to this second stage of the onlinevideo experience. Enjoy!ReferencesBaudrillard, Jean. Cool Memories: Volume 1, trans. Chris Turner, London; New York: Verson, 1990.Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture, 2nd edition, New York: Routledge, 2009.Vision Possible: A Methodological Questfor Online VideoStefan HeidenreichBeginningsEarly CinemaBeginnings are delusive. When the Lumière brothers invented cinema, they were in a hurry– and not only because so many others were about to come up with the same idea. In fact,one year before their famous first screening in 1895, short movie clips were already on displayin Edison’s slot-machines, and Edison’s engineer William Dickson had even proposedprojecting these moving images. This could be considered another origin of moviemaking.But the story of cinema took another turn than that which the Lumière brothers anticipated.They were convinced that the moving image would become just another of the short-livedspectacles seen at fairs and markets. Their business idea consisted of the simple plan toreach as many areas as possible with traveling teams before competitors could show up,and before the attention of the public shifted to another attraction. So they conceived anincredible apparatus designed to record, develop, and project the short clips. They trainedtheir cameramen and sent them out to all parts of the globe. That is the reason why there areso many very early films from different places on earth. But when the cinema became a bigindustry, the Lumière brothers were caught by surprise and dropped out.Very soon after the Lumières’ first movie projectors were set up in theatres, people startedto screen programs of short clips. During the early years, cinema underwent considerablechanges, not only aesthetically but also in the way movies were produced. The famous turnfrom documentaries to fiction is closely linked to demand surpassing supply. This, in turn,led to a wave of professionalization. Soon, early cinema looked like a clumsy predecessor ofthe smooth continuity introduced by the editing technology to come.Early YouTubeGiven the unpredictable history of moving images, can the history of early cinema teachus anything about the future of online video? The speed of globalization and the shortduration of the early movies due to technical constraints are two of many characteristicsshared by early online video and early cinema. Plenty of formal similarities can be found,from the short formats to the focus of attractions and mishaps. There are even similaritiesbetween the different genres assembled in the programs of early cinema and YouTube’sclassifications. 1 But mere comparison can be a trap, because the early phase of cinemadid not disclose much about what happened to its future. Contrary to the assumptions of1. See in detail Corinna Müller, ‘Variationen des Kinopgramms. Filmform und Filmgeschichte’,in Corinna Müller and Harro Segeberg (eds), Die Modellierung des Kinofilms, Munich, 1998,p. 43.

14 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics15some media theorists, these initial moments – ‘Urszenen’ – do not reveal much about thefuture. Therefore, one might rather need to ask: What are the lies early YouTube is tryingto tell us about the coming of online video? One fact seems certain: in the decades ahead,our contemporary online video culture and its gadgets will look as clumsy as early cinemaappeared in comparison to what followed. In hindsight, all early films look like predecessorsand incomplete exercises. If this is what we can learn from the comparison of early cinemaand early YouTube, the main task consists of anticipating possible perspectives from whichto look back to our present situation.MethodAfter InterpretationWhen investigating culture, one is accustomed to engaging in a process of interpretation.When researchers write about works of art, literature, theatre, music, or cinema they addlayers of comments. They try to understand. But understanding is a strange activity. Itrequires something to be understood, and so it seems naturally to direct attention towardsthe past. Rituals of understanding seem to be tied to history. But historicization itself, as justone of many models of organizing an archive, spread to all kinds of disciplines only around1800. 2 Throughout the 19th century, the memory and historicization of cultural heritageconstitutes one of the crucial steps in establishing a legitimate national identity.This shift is accompanied by another crucial turn concerning the invention of the subjectin the modern sense. Institutional rituals of understanding were always grounded on theassumption of a divide between the figure of the creator and the passive believer. Thisdivide reappeared under different names: artist vs. beholder, author vs. reader, god vs.believer. However, the divide has not been as wide at all times, and in relation to all institutions.Before 1750, the disciplines later to be replaced by the humanities taught rhetoric,dialectics, and grammar, which meant teaching to read and to write at the same time.When the humanities in the modern sense were established around 1800 they followedthe exegetic model of theology. Ever since, it has been taken for granted that artists donot understand, whilst academics don’t know how to write or paint or make music. And toreturn to the question of the subject, a term which had meant a person sub-jected to thestate’s power, now entered the scene of illumination and had to be educated in the newlydevised read-only-mode.The split between writing and reading eventually came to be viewed as an achievement ofthe academic reforms in the 18th century. From then on, academic education had to servethe institutional needs of the newly built nation states, shaping their cultural identity andproviding for apt bureaucrats. The aesthetic education so emphatically favored by Schillerturned into a governmental effort. However, the discursive control enforcing the separationof practice and theory has weakened significantly in the last decade. With the decliningpower of the states one has to ask why we continue to have a cultural theory that follows the2. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London:Routledge, 2002, pp. 235-240.restrictive mode of understanding only, and separates itself from practice. In fact, the presentsituation almost obliges the humanities to overcome the division between interpretation andproduction. 3Media TheoryIn the mid-1980s, most likely at the peak of technological diversity amongst analogue, halfdigitaland fully digital new media, the traditional humanities in Germany were disrupted bya new focus on technology. Regrettably, what had the potential to lead us out of the trap of abackwards-looking orientation and the split between theory and production soon fell prey tothe usual course of academic trends. Less than ten years after Friedrich Kittler introducedthe new approach to German literature studies, he was forced to acknowledge the ubiquitouspresence of the term ‘media’. 4 Subsequently, the initial impulse was lost in the operationalprocedures of academic administration. The term media turned into a discretionary keywordwithout theoretical specificity, but with the powerful promise of generating money for research.And most of the books considering media theory fell back onto an intellectual terrainfrom which Kittler had initially tried to depart. 5 The philological method of interpretation andthe self-restriction to history prevailed. That is the main reason why media theory rarely hadmuch to say about media after 1950, let alone the internet. 6Yet, Kittler’s initial impulse would have allowed for something more. The backbone of thisapproach was Kittler’s newly established cross-breeding of Foucault’s discourse analysis witha media theory as envisioned by Marshall McLuhan. Foucault focuses on epistemologicaland institutional settings and investigates figures or phenomena such as the author, thegaze, or the archive, according to their rules and practices. Technology remained a fieldwhich Foucault almost entirely excluded from his considerations. But the general approachof discourse analysis allows media and materiality to re-enter the picture. This is the use thatKittler makes of McLuhan’s theory of technology. By stating that ‘the medium is the message’,McLuhan claims that any content may primarily fulfill the conditions of a specific technologicalsetup. In that sense, McLuhan’s approach resembles the perspective of Foucault, withthe only difference being that the Canadian sociologist speaks of technology whereas theFrench philosopher speaks about discourse. Both meet in questioning the conditions for theexistence of a statement, or of information.One of the most striking failures of the theoretical approach of subsequent media theory wasits inability to recognize the upcoming importance of the internet in the 1990s. Instead, mostof the disciples of media theory bothered merely with technical considerations concerningthe progress of computing powers. This led to the delusion that simulation would lead the3. The recent cuts in the funding of U.K. universities speak a clear language here. How to react tothat, remains in question.4. Friedrich Kittler, Aufschreibsysteme 1800/1900, München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1995, p. 523.5. See Friedrich Kittler, Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenchaften, Paderborn: UTBEinleitung, 1980, pp. 7-13.6. Geert Lovink develops this point in Zero Comments: Elemente einer kritischen Internetkultur,trans. Andreas Kallfelz, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2008, p.145.

16 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics17way, with the replacement of reality by a still-to-be-defined virtual world. Both the miscalculationsof the near future and the ignorance toward the internet were rooted in the fallacies of asimplified idea of linear historicity and the progress in computing power. When the expectationsof these theories proved inconsequential for the real world, most proponents withdrewto their academic careers, and returned to history, pre-history and an archaeology of media.After MediaMedia no longer determine our situation, as they did when Kittler first formulated his position.7 This is not because they have lost their power to define. In fact, media have ceasedto exist, at least in their plurality. There are not many media left, but only one medium, asdifferent media have converged and fallen prey to a single network of computers. Therefore,the appearance of new media no longer continues to shape our situation. The media wars ofthe past are over. If we look at the basics of technology now, there is not much change ahead,and no diversity that would merit a closer theoretical observation. The current changes anddevelopments are initiated by other factors like gadgets, network architectures, databasesand applications.Despite this post-media situation, the original impulse of media theory as an approach thatenhances discourse analysis with a perspective on technology can still provide for a validmethodological basis. Of course, this method still comes with its own assumptions. One ofthe most discussed points of medium theory was its so-called technological determinism.The argument as such is based mostly on a misunderstanding. Saying that media defineour situation does not equal the statement that they completely determine it. Defining inthis respect rather means giving a systematic background for a variety of possibilities. Thesituation resembles an ecological system, where the conditions of climate and terrain definean environment for very many different species. In the same sense a technological systemprovides an environment for many different types of data, formats and contents.On the other hand, early German media theory proposed a clear perspective on the relationof the social sphere to the media. At their fundamentals, the field of media were thought tobe detached and independent from social activities. This is one of the core points at whichmedia theory strictly separates itself from other related approaches, such as Bruno Latour’sactor-network-theory. It is well known that one can describe any type of media as socially constructed.After all, technologies are invented, constructed, and built by humans. Thereforetaking the media a priori seems to make a slightly unrealistic claim. However, consideringthe history of media, the claim can be supported by viewing the separation as an effect of adiscursive break separating a discourse of technological invention from the social use latergiven to that invention. Historical evidence supports the claim that the discovery of a newtechnology was never dependent merely on human desire or social need, but mostly happenedwithin a different discursive field before being more generally applied. The decisivestep to bridge the gap between technical research and social practice required the figure of a7. Kittler’s statement was that ‘Media determine our situation’. See Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone,Film, Typewriter, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, p.xxxix.bricoleur who was active on both sides of the divide, as exemplified by Daguerre, Edison, ormore recent figures such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. 8Separating the two discursive fields of the social and the technological comes with the advantageof being able to observe both without interference. From this axiom, it follows that thereis not something one could call a social use of media. Whatever social activities unfold in andthrough media essentially constitute a mis-use; or in other words, a practice contradictingthe initial phantasies or purposes of technology. Far from postulating a strict technologicaldeterminism, the assumption of a technological a priori only prepares the ground upon whicha great variety of data can circulate. 9 Instead of starting with a social a priori, one is able todescribe the social sphere as a result of technologically shaped communication. Thereforemedia constitute the social sphere, and not the other way around. And media constitute afield of stability from which a coming environment can be imagined.Hermeneutic Circle, Opposite DirectionMost roads allow for two-way traffic. The hermeneutic circle is no exception to that rule. Onealways has to enter the circle from a given present situation, with a certain intention and withprejudices about what is to be understood. 10 In the circle we go back and forth between thewhole and the particular, the single work and its environment, and the work of art and thehistorical situation it finds itself in. In doing so, we aim to understand both better, and in theend also our own situation. Driving this circle backwards would involve reference to worksto come, in their singularity as much as in their environment. Of course, the work does notyet exist; all we can do is to imagine it as a possible outcome. In order to facilitate that, oneneeds to anticipate an environment in which it could appear and survive. But this comingenvironment needs to be imagined, just as imagination is required to reconstruct the past.The point of departure remains the same. But what needs to be understood lies ahead.Future as well as past situations constitute a horizon for understanding. Going backwardsthrough the hermeneutic circle, we still operate in front of the same horizon. Does the cominglandscape differ from the one we left? We look at both from our present situation: as muchas we imagine the horizon of the past in order to understand past works, we may imagine ahorizon of coming possibilities. In the end it is us, writing and reading, who by imaginationunderstand something about the present. Seen in hindsight from the possibilities ahead we8. This of course contradicts Jonathan Crary’s claim that the invention of photography wasprefigured by a turn of attention: ‘My contention is that a reorganization of the observer occurs inthe nineteenth century before the appearance of photography’. Instead the argument would runthe opposite way. It was the same use of technology that first created the conditions for the turnof attention towards the inner vision, as with Purkinje and Goethe, and then led to the randomdiscovery of photography by various inventors at the same time. See Jonathan Crary, Techniquesof the Observer, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990, p.14.9. This argument connects to a recent trend of materialist approaches within philosophy. Similarproblems are extensively discussed, especially regarding the term arche-fossil, an artifactpreceding all human perception, in Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, London: Continuum,2008, p. 16.10. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, London: Continuum, 1975, p. 270.

18 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics19can not only conceive a possible work, but also look nostalgically back at our present. Howclumsy and outdated will the coolest smartphone and the latest app appear when viewed 10years from now? Perhaps this is what Maurizio Lazzarato means when he states: ‘We need anostalgia for the future’. 11 But this nostalgia should operate not within the realm of time, butwithin a sphere of possibilities. Our world creates relations of being that comprise a varietyof possibilities. 12 One can imagine these possibilities without relying on a concept of history.They remain possibilities, with no time-stamp, as options for an undefined future. This imaginationwould allow us to turn a discipline of understanding hitherto solely preoccupied withthings past, to engage with things to come.In constructing a possible world we may need to pay attention to an often overlooked factor.Whenever we watch a video, our eyes always tend to follow the moving object; the unchangedbackground is largely neglected. That is one of the reasons why a cut from movement tomovement escapes our attention. We have the impression of gliding smoothly over the visualdisruption. The correlate to this attitude is the approach of trend-research, which focuses entirelyon moving targets. But in order to see the full picture, and to be able to project from thepresent to its future possibilities, all those parameters that remain unchanged are as worthyof attention as are moving objects.EnvironmentAn Ecology of CommunicationThe term environment is not meant to evoke a strictly biological world, nor am I referring tothe current metaphors of bios discussed in relation to theories of bio-politics. Nor is it usedbecause it is simply ‘one of the most expressive terms language currently has to indicate themassive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns andmatter’. 13 Instead, I want to propose to return to the notion introduced by the biologist Jakobvon Uexküll in his model of ecology. 14 In his sense, an environment connects the physicaland material conditions with the sensual perception and actions of a living being. The environmentconsists of a world full of constraints and possibilities, perceived by the senses andthe memory of a living organism. An ecological system is not meant to create an unspecifiedinterconnectedness, but has a very precise definition. 15Technical media can be seen to constitute an environment in which data of different typescirculate almost as living beings, specified by codes, protocols, and formats, and by the typeof connection these establish with humans. The social sphere is not excluded from this world,11. Maurizio Lazzarato, Videophilosophie, Berlin: b_books, 2002, p. 81.12. Of course, a model of that type includes a different idea of temporality, which relates back to veryold models such as Nicolas of Cusa: Trialogus de possest, 1460.13. Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture, Cambridge,Mass: MIT Press, 2005, p.2.14. For an introductory reading see, Jakob von Uexküll, Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tierenund Menschen / Bedeutungslehre, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956, p. 30.15. With political implications, as Giorgio Agamben has shown in The Open, Stanford, CA.: StanfordUniversity Press, 2004, p.39.but appears only behind the input and output of the circulation of information. Both data andhumans are embedded in a situation characterized by technological, economic, and politicalconditions. These constraints affect the ecology of communication, just as the climateconditions affect the natural environment. This comparison implies that climactic factors arerelatively impermeable to eco-systems, even though rare interdependencies might occur.Reversible, IrreversibleThe time of ecology differs radically from the modern idea of historical time, with its linear,progressive movement. Uexküll subscribes to the historical model put forward by Leopoldvon Ranke, according to which each epoch stands for itself, and applies it to his own conceptof an ecological system. 16 This claim cannot easily be transferred to technological environments,as we see two distinct phenomena in relation to time and duration in this sphere.On the one hand, we do see progression in relation to technological developments. Moore’slaw, according to which the quantity of transistors that fit on an integrated circuit will doubleroughly every two years, is one of the most famous progressions. And even if his law does nothold true indefinitely, it is safe to assume that computers will increase in processing speed,rather than slow down. On the other hand, the biological elements of the equation, such asthe human body, can be taken as more or less unchanged.Between these two sides are a field of rapidly changing phenomena, of which some engagein a game of progress or at least claim to do so, others appear only temporarily, and othersremain stable. Some events are irreversible, others are reversible. Thinking in terms of reversibilitycreates a very different idea of the future compared to the modernist myths of progress.A model of progress looks for irreversibilities only. But the imagination of a possible ecology ofcommunication must build on the balance of reversibilities and irreversibilities.Institutions and EconomyImposing a fixed structure on time is linked, on a macro level, to the administration of thearchive, and, on a micro level, to the division of labour. This has always been a matter ofinstitutions: the temple, the state, or the company. One might even reverse this relation, andpropose that institutions – both empires 17 and companies – were invented and could onlyexist as entities that structure and reign over time.What has this point to do with online video? Video operates in time. But this time is not justthere. It is created as an interwoven pattern of duration stretching over very different distances.As much as the length of the feature film was something that emerged at a certainpoint in cinematic history, the historical model of the description of film and other arts itselfemerged at a certain moment in the past. Economic entities require a different approachtowards time than institutions such as the nation state. Whilst, for the latter, historical time isalmost a precondition of its own existence, the company needs only to secure an operationaltime that extends from investment to return.16. Uexküll, Streifzüge durch die Umwelt von Tieren und Menschen, p. 150.17. See Harold Innis, Empire and Communication, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950.

20 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics21From this basic relation derives a certain bias regarding content. Whilst the content ofthe classical arts, as theatre, visual art or music, always had to legitimize itself against thehistorical horizon – and the disciplines of understanding formed part of this process ofjudgement – the capitalist and commercial arts were legitimized through their success onthe market. Both incentives clashed throughout the 20th century, leading to almost opposingaesthetic results. In the recent past a third model emerged, which followed neither theparameter of early 19th century state culture, nor the 20th century model of commercialculture.Aesthetics and ProductionProduction ModesDescribing the development of Hollywood Cinema, Janet Staiger identified three major elementsinvolved in what she termed the ‘Hollywood mode of production’. These were: ‘1) thelabor force, 2) the means of production, and 3) the financing of production’. 18 During thefirst four decades of the cinema industry, various modes replaced each other. Positions andprofessions such as cameraman, director, or producer imposed their own regimes upon theset. Out of engineering companies, cinemas, and distributors grew the larger institutionsrunning the business. The names of the screenwriter, of the company, of the actor, and ofthe director are still advertised to the public, but mainly for marketing reasons. From shortscenes, to staged events and chase sequences, narratives eventually turn into featurelengthmovies. As Staiger’s model makes clear, technical changes were closely related toaesthetic and formal solutions.The possibility of comparing these early forms to the short formats of contemporary YouTubevideo is indeed appealing. But such a simple comparison would lead to false conclusions.History does not repeat itself on every level. The forces that drive history are comparable,insofar as they depend on basic technological means and human desires. Therefore, uncoveringpatterns of repetition requires a degree of abstraction. It is possible to generalizeStaiger’s tripartite model of film production to online video, if we take ‘generalize’ to meanreconsidering her patterns and figures, comprehending the modes in more general terms,extending their application beyond the historical example and, if necessary, adding parametersomitted due to the specificity of early cinema.This project becomes even more urgent as business models based on reproduction arereplaced by economies of attention and participation. From the perspective of discursivemedia theory, the terms attention and participation do not arise independently, but rely ontechnological parameters. The focus on attention arises with a turn in the relations of supplyand demand, which has suddenly shifted the bottleneck of scarcity to the user’s side.Participation, and what is often called Web 2.0, depends on improved computing poweron the server-side of networks. Thus, the terms participation and attention frame technicaldevelopments in anthropocentric speech. This is not to state that the terms are misleading,but we do need to be aware that the turn towards attention and participation is not somethingthat users all of a sudden voted for. Rather, it is an effect of an altered technical setup.Aesthetics of ArtThe production mode of art dates back to pre-industrial manufacturing, and managed to preservemanual forms of 19th century production against the upcoming commercial culture.Without the steady support of state-funded institutions such as the museum, the theatre,or the opera this mode would most likely have vanished. The state did not only provide theeconomic basis for art, but also the ideological and discursive frame. In a state-run system,ultimate value does not consist in marketable success, but in the admission of the authorand its work to the institutions of national cultural heritage. Many of the myths of modernismare built on the figure of the starving artist, who achieves fame and glory after their death.Obviously, this story adapts Christian mythology to modern conditions.At first, the moving image was not affected by the modernist conception of art, thriving in acommercial environment. It was only during moments of crisis that the aesthetic value of artwas emphasized and activated. On these occasions, the regime of modernism was extendedinto cinema. The film d’art of early cinema borrowed plots from classical literature in order toentice a better educated public. However, this movement quickly failed at the box office. Weare still waiting for something similar to happen on YouTube. However, the experimental filmsof the 1920s and 1930s which attempted to apply modernist aesthetics to cinema were moresuccessful, at least viewed within the modernist framing of art. Directors such as Sergej Eisenstein,Hans Richter, and Dziga Vertov figure significantly in canonical histories of cinemato this day. There are even cinematic histories that openly neglect commercial aesthetics andrestrict their view strictly to artistic modes of production. 19Lev Manovich attempts to transfer the operational mode of cinema to new media in general.‘The theory and history of cinema’, he writes, ‘serve as the key conceptual “lens” thoughwhich I look at new media’. 20 In fact, Manovich does not consider cinema in general, but focusesmainly on the experimental movie artists of the 1920s, such as Vertov. But that narrowfocus overlooks one often disregarded fact: such movies were neither very successful, nordid they have a great impact on the development of film aesthetics. They remain an isolatedside-stream of film production, mainly addressed to an art public. Art and avant-garde moviesoperate under the regime of history, which was inflicted upon art in the early 19th centuryand remained valid throughout the reign of modernism. Their aesthetic contradicts whatestablished itself as the dominant form, and is still evident in contemporary cinema. Instead,avant-garde film-makers relied on the available and well tested modern methods of painterlyabstraction and experimental style. And they achieved what they aimed for: no success interms of revenue, but a secure place in the history of (art) cinema.18. Janet Staiger, ‘The Hollywood Mode of Production to 1930’, in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger andKristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960,London: Routledge, 1988, p.89.19. For example Gilles Deleuze, The Time-image, London: Athlone, 1986. No surprise, from him‘the history of cinema is a long martyrology’, p. xiv.20. Lev Manovich, The Theory of New Media, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001, p. 9.

22 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics23Aesthetics of CommerceThe commercial mode of production initially emerged with technical media and the possibilityof technical reproduction. This holds true for the printing press used for books, and foretchings. But the technical media in the age of capitalist production unleashed the ultimateproductivities of this model only when gramophone and film turned music and images intoindustrially produced goods. The basic aesthetic constraint of this mode consists in the necessityto adapt to an industrial production scheme and to establish success in the marketplace.This concentrates cultural production upon popular forms, or generates the quest fornew popular forms. The pressure to concentrate on successful formats soon led to a processof aesthetic and formal homogenization. Nevertheless, it took more than 20 years until themovie industry stabilized into the dominant form of the feature-length film. It is probably notmere accident that this took roughly one generation: it seems that only after one generationhas been completely socialized within a new medium can an appropriate and optimizedaesthetic response be found.The now dominant Hollywood style of narration, with its smooth continuity, can be seen asa result of a process of adaptation intimately linked to the distribution system and the economicfeedback given at the box-office. The system lacks the strong singular personality ofthe artist, even though the director imitates this figure to a certain degree. In contrast to theartistic mode, whose results can be described very well along an impulse of distinction, thecommercial mode is completely encompassed by a process of adaptation.Aesthetics of the LinkAfter the breakdown of both models – that of a dominant history and of modernism on oneside, and the economy of reproduced culture on the other – we might well be witnessinganother mode of production in the making. And, just as the commercial mode has not fullyreplaced the artistic mode, this new mode will not entirely replace the others. This new modefollows the logic of the link. It creates value through links and it operates as a facilitator oflinks. The only institution by which it is powered is the internet itself. So far it has had only anegative impact upon markets, and no perceptible impact upon the museum and art world.The inherent value would be characterized not by sales and revenue, but in the followingformula: V=v,n,p, where V(value) is a product of ‘its performance and application (v); thenumber of its multiplications and replica (n); the sharing rate of the value among the peopleinvolved in the process (p)’. 21 It is far from clear if this recent development eventually marksa transition to a different mode of production or will become a mere transient disruption tothe commercial mode, to be integrated within it at a later point. 22Three different options seem to be available under the present conditions of the link mode.The first is the attempt to maintain the commercial model as its main source of revenue, thescarcity of distribution, disappears. This could only be enforced by contra-factorial jurisdictionand would lead in the end to a more or less complete control of web traffic. Fortunately,the prospects for this attempt seem to be dire. The second way to handle the transition wouldbe to affiliate web culture parasitically with the present economy. This would allow for thedevelopment of new cultural forms, albeit under the condition and the pressure of massdistributionunder which the current wave of participatory activities would most likely suffertremendously. Instead of a user-generated culture we would see the rise of new dominantcommercial forms in the near future. This process of commercialization and adaptation canalready be observed at work. In a widely discussed post, Dan Greenberg 23 presented hisstrategies for the commercialization of online video. Next to an aesthetic that focused mainlyon re-adaptability and a quick emotional response, the video has to be embedded in a widernetwork of links. This ‘linkability’ was regarded as the main source of success. This outcomeseems to be the most likely, however, beyond those two already widespread modes, a thirdalternative comes into play. This builds on the continuous feed of data from participating andactive users, leading to a collaborative visual production.Thus, the possibilities of online video can be envisaged in three exemplary forms, whichall might exist in parallel. There will be the parasite mode, which might borrow from theaesthetic of games and talk shows at the same time. Collaborative practice will be channeledinto a fixed time structure in order to create marketable data. The event will be oneof the few remaining points at which scarcity can be preserved. Therefore the event will bebranded, and its time and image space sold to advertising companies. A second format willbuild on the increasing embeddedness of images in the real world. This process is facilitatedby a growing segmentation of the image into a composite of various layers of metadata andlinks. The contents of the images will be made accessible by symbolic encoding, such asautomatic tagging, face-recognition and other symbolic appropriations of the visual. Once webecome accustomed to these images, it will be very difficult to recall a state when the visualworld was not constantly warped by a layer of data. There remains the third possibility of acollaboratively created visual world. 24 This world would be built, like Wikipedia or the newerWikiLeaks, on the surplus-work of users. It will consist of a connected visual space, in whichnarrative and authorship may manifest themselves occasionally when needed. Depending onthe survival of the institutions of historical time, one might even return to a historicization ofthis process in the name of art.However, the coming images must not be left to the entrepreneurs and their quest for revenue.Today, almost any answer to the question of ‘what should we do’ is justified by economicpurposes. Thinking about the future has, at least for certain classes, taken the formof a business-plan. It decays into short-term visions which treat the future almost as a kindof fate which will inevitably lead us to the next business opportunity. In its urge to anticipate21. See Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers,2008, p. 96, in reference to Enzo Rullani’s Economia della Conoscenza, 2004.22. As data seems to indicate, see Lev Manovich, ‘The Myth of user-generated content’, LevManovich blog, 23 November, 2010, manovich.net/2010/11/23/the-myth-of-user-generatedcontent/.23. Dan Ackerman Greenberg, ‘The secret strategies behind many “viral” Videos’, TechCrunch, 22November, 2007, www. techcrunch.com/ 2007/11/22/the-secret-strategies-behind-many-viralvideos/.24. See the section entitled ‘The Art of World-Making’ in Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture, NewYork: New York University Press, 2006, p.113.

24 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics25the next direction of big money, trend research completely overlooks and neglects the factthat there might be another answer. Fortunately, this is not the only perspective on things tocome. Once, the question of ‘what should we do’ fell in the domain of ethics. And thereforethinking about the possibilities of video must not restrict itself to exploitable trends, but mayalso envisage a utopian perspective on visual possibilities, even if a vision of this kind maylook almost as delusive as the beginning.Frames within Frames – Windows andDoorsAndreas TreskeReferencesAgamben, Giorgio. The Open, Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2004.Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990.Deleuze, Gilles. The Time-image, London: Athlone, 1986.Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Routledge,2002.Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture, Cambridge, Mass:MIT Press, 2005.Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, London: Continuum, 1975.Greenberg, Dan Ackerman. ‘The secret strategies behind many “viral” Videos’, TechCrunch, 22 November2007, www. techcrunch.com/ 2007/11/22/the-secret-strategies-behind-many-viral-videos/.Innis, Harold. Empire and Communication, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture, New York: New York University Press, 2006.Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999._____. Aufschreibsysteme 1800/1900, München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1995._____. Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenchaften, Paderborn: UTB Einleitung, 1980.Lazzarato, Maurizio. Videophilosophie, Berlin: b_books, 2002.Lovink, Geert. Zero Comments: Elemente einer kritischen Internetkultur, trans. Andreas Kallfelz,Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2008.Manovich, Lev. The Theory of New Media, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001._____. ‘The Myth of user-generated content’, Lev Manovich blog, 23 November, 2010, manovich.net/2010/11/23/the-myth-of-user-generated-content/.Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude, London: Continuum, 2008.Müller, Corinna. ‘Variationen des Kinopgramms. Filmform und Filmgeschichte’, in Corinna Müller andHarro Segeberg (eds) DieModellierung desKinofilms, Munich, 1998.Pasquinelli, Matteo. Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2008.Staiger, Janet. ‘The Hollywood Mode of Production to 1930’, in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, KristinThompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, London:Routledge, 1988.von Uexküll, Jakob. Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen / Bedeutungslehre,Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956.Doors, windows, box office windows, skylights, car windows, mirrors, are all frames inframes. The great directors have particular affinities with particular secondary, tertiary,etc. frames. And it is by this dovetailing of frames that the parts of the set or of theclosed system are separated, but also converge and are reunited. 1As Anne Friedberg stated in The Virtual Window, the frame within a frame or the shotwithin a shot is a ‘common figure’ in cinema. 2 The moving image is formally split into parts,re-composed and re-centred through an additional act of framing, that is equal to an exaggeration.The ‘cadrage’ (framing) includes a second ‘cadre’ (frame) replacing the traditionalway of cutting to the object to be seen. The viewer does not enter the image by way of single‘cadrages’; rather, a multiplicity is presented online and is constantly available; not onewindow, but a sum of windows. While split screens have historically been used to mark andseparate spaces in cinema, frames within frames create a new element in the narrative orfictional world.It has become evident that, in the past, frames as both objects and as concepts have influencedthe way that people have perceived, communicated, and acted. In this short essay, Iwill attempt to extend theories of cinematic framing to the presentation of the moving imagein digital environments and devices. Here again, my interest in the impact of the diversedevelopment of screens and the emergence of online video upon the composition and creationof moving images and narratives is focused upon the application of formal theoreticalapproaches to existing forms of online video and the interfaces through which videos areembedded or presented. Do we need to reassess the conception of frames as windows ordoors when considering the position of the viewer in relation to online video? Does the actof framing remain relevant to online video, or is it merely an outdated theoretical approach?In his first book on cinema, Gilles Deleuze describes the cinematic frame as an informationsystem. As David Goldberg states, for Deleuze a cadre, or frame, in a film is a ‘set which hasa great number of parts, that is of elements, which themselves form subsets’. ‘Actors, locations,sets, lighting, sound, angles, durations and special effects all constitute the informationin the frame’, which ‘makes it legible, and something that bears potential meaning for the1. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image, London: Continuum, 2004, p. 14.2. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, Cambridge: The MIT Press,2006, p. 200.

26 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics27viewer’. 3 From the point of view of film-making, framing refers to the objects in a shot. Whensetting up a shot, the frame includes a composed selection within its horizontal rectangle,thereby excluding other elements. The act of framing results from the personal choices andconscious processes of the film-maker, and affects the audience’s cinematic experience. Theimage presented onscreen is effected through the size and shape of the frame, its definitionof onscreen and offscreen space, among other factors:Whatever its shape, the frame makes the image finite. The film image is bounded, limited.From an implicitly continuous world, the frame selects a slice to show us, leavingthe rest of the space offscreen. If the camera leaves an object or person and moveselsewhere, we assume that the object or person is still there, outside the frame. Evenin an abstract film, we cannot resist the sense that the shapes and patterns that burstinto the frame come from somewhere. 4The traditionally educated film-maker, a student of a film school or academy, will be taughtto consider the frame as a window to the outside world – the world of the narrative, story,fiction. Of course, the concept of the frame as a transparent window onto an external realityis deeply influenced by André Bazin. Although this concept has come under critical attacksince at least the 1980s, the concept of the frame has been revivified not only by Deleuze,but through our daily practice of conceiving of our interface with the world of informationas a window. 5When making a film, one is confronted by the question of how to fill this window. One becomesaware of the window itself, as it becomes filled with forms, shapes and objects whichare themselves composed of other forms, shapes and tones. The film-maker wants the audienceto concentrate upon his or her specific arrangement, or composition. Sooner or later,however, the film-maker realizes that there is not only one window, but several. These windowsare similar or absolutely different. There is not one window through which to look at theworld, but a world full of windows – everywhere one sees windows, as already framed objects,or objects to-be-framed. In his classic 1939 article, translated as ‘The Cinematographic Principleand the Ideogram’, Sergei Eisenstein offers a directive regarding the frame or windowa film-maker is working on. 6 In this article, Eisenstein was very much influenced by hisresearch into Japanese culture. According to Eisenstein, the Japanese film-maker would usemultiple shapes, rather than a single square, as a frame: ‘the pupil cuts out from the whole,with a square, and a circle, and a rectangle -compositional units: He frames a shot!’ 73. David Goldberg, ‘EnterFrame: Cage, Deleuze and Macromedia Director’, Afterimage 30.1 (2002):8-9.4. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, New York: McGraw-Hill; 8thedition, 2007, p. 187.5. Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Filmtheorie zur Einführung, Hamburg: Junius Verlag,2007, p. 48.6. Sergei Eisenstein (1949), Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, New York: Hartcourt. Trans. JayLeyda, 1969.7. Eisenstein, Film Form, p. 41.In essence, it is through cutting out that a shot is framed; the shot is the smallest unit of thefilm picked-out by the camera. 8 When setting up a frame in the process of film-making, onemust always deal with the energy inside and outside of the frame. By ‘energy’, I mean thegraphical or visual tension produced by the relation of the objects to each other: their formsand shapes, their relative sizes and tones, their proximity to each other. Distance is a furtherdimension. How will the object be placed? Will it appear to be close, or far away? What is therelation of the object on screen to the viewer in front of the screen?In film or television production the size of a shot is defined in relation to the human body.Close-ups, medium shots and long shots are a set of precise points of cutting: a close-upalways contains the head and shoulders of the subject, a medium shot cuts above or belowthe knees, and a long shot includes a full figure. German people involved with film sometimesrefer to the medium shot as ‘American’, as the image border is exactly above the knee ofthe protagonist in the classic Western. Another kind of shot is called the ‘Italian’, as it showsonly the eyes in extreme close-up, an image often used by Italian directors in the so-called‘Spaghetti-Western’. Of course, stylistic variations are always possible.The more strongly an object is framed, the more it is separated, emphasized and focused.Whether a group of people is depicted in a single shot, as a whole, or whether the individualsare depicted singly, in separate shots and angles, is a matter of dramatic significance. Thelines forming the rectangle of the frame can function to isolate each character, or not. For thefilm-maker, the problem of active framing is not what is inside the frame, but what is outside.The film-maker must create a frame that frames an outside – a world outside of the frame, insuch a way that this outside world continues to exist beyond the lines of the frame. The slicedframe not only refers to the existence of an outside, but also to its absence.Frames appear with the 15th century and with the development of one-point perspective.Leon Battista Alberti conceived of the Renaissance framing system as a means to rationalizevision through mathematics. One-point perspective was and is used to produce the illusion of athree-dimensional world on a two-dimensional plane. Paintings become transportable objectsisolated from the walls around them. Ownership is declared for each painting. The framed objectbecomes a space of representation and a surface upon which the imagination works. Theframe of a traditional painting is a clearly defined border. The lines of a frame are the reason8. In this context, it is worth considering a point made in a footnote of Sean Cubitt’s The CinemaEffect: ‘In a note to Nizhny’s Lessons, Montagu comments on kadr, “This Franco-Russian word,etymologically connected perhaps with the graphic aspect of the shot, its composition andcompositional limits, must never be translated “frame” (Nizhny 1962: 169, n.35), distinguishingin another note between ‘The “frame” of a shot, its borders within which it is composed on theone hand; on the other the “frame” or single static image of which many compose the shot.Russians apparently sometimes use ‘rama’ (non-technically) for the second kind of frame, butthey also use “vyrez” or “cut” for the section of the whole possible view-field extracted or “cutout” by such a frame” (ibid.: 171, n.46). On the one hand, the cut acts on the plane of thescreen, isolating the scene depicted from what lies on the right or left, or above or below it. Buton the other, the cut is a slice through the z-axis or axis of vision perpendicular to the pictureplane’. Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005, p. 390.

28 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics29that we experience most pictures as closed spaces; the image or picture exists only inside theframe. Images in magazines, on television, on the walls of our apartments, and in museums allhave closed, non-extensive, non-transparent borders. As Bazin writes, if there is an impressionof spatiality included in the framed image, then this spatiality points towards the inside:Space, as it applies to a painting, is radically destroyed by the screen. Just as footlightsand scenery in the theatre serve to mark the contrast between it and the real worldso, by its surrounding frame, a painting is separated off not only from reality as suchbut, even more so, from the reality that is represented in it. Indeed it is a mistake tosee a picture frame as having merely a decorative or rhetorical function. The fact thatit emphasizes the compositional quality of the painting is of secondary importance.The essential role of the frame is, if not to create at least to emphasize the differencebetween the microcosm of the picture and the macrocosm of the natural world in whichthe painting has come to take its place. This explains the baroque complexity of thetraditional frame whose job it is to establish something that cannot be geometricallyestablished - namely the discontinuity between the painting and the wall, that is tosay between the painting and reality. In other words the frame of a painting encloses aspace that is oriented so to speak in a different direction. In contrast to natural space,the space in which our active experience occurs and bordering its outer limits, it offersa space the orientation of which is inwards, a contemplative area opening solely ontothe interior of the painting. 9For Bazin, the edges of the cinema screen are not equal to the frame of a painting – rather,they are analogous to the edges of a mask. In a similar vein, Noël Carroll differentiates photographsfrom paintings in the following way:You can always ask, of an area photographed, what lies adjacent to that area, beyond theframe. This generally makes no sense asked of a painting. You can ask these questionsof objects in photographs because they have answers in reality. The world of a painting isnot continuous with the world of its frame; at its frame, a world finds its limits. 10The distinction is clear. The moving image achieves its difference through the process ofscreening. The screen is not like a canvas, rather, for Carroll and Bazin it is a piece of realitythat does not exist at the time of the screening. Deleuze picks up on and actualizes Bazin’scentral theory. For Deleuze, the frame is determined through the formation of sets or ensembles.The image on the screen is extracted from the rest of the world spatially, but more especiallytemporally. Shots express the qualitative change of sets. These sets divide and multiply.The movement-image is an image of changing space or space covered. 11Of course, from the perspective of a practitioner, the screen is graphically limited. But thereare a variety of graphical techniques to break these constraints through positioning, size,tone and color inside the image or on the screen. The screen also breaks its boundariesthrough object movements and directional shifts inside the frame. As a simple example,let us imagine that we see an object moving from left to right. When the object reaches theright-hand border, our eyes will immediately jump back to the left side of the image, becausewe are used to writing from left to right and stopping at the right-hand edge of the paper. Ifthe object moves from right to left, it takes the viewer longer to return to the image. If theobject moves up, we continue to attend to the area above the frame, as this is always theregion of our dreams; if the object moves down, we instantly jump back inside the frame. 12We are tempted to compare the cinematic experience with our natural vision. In everydaylife we can turn our heads or move in order to see beyond objects and borders. The frameof the cinema screen prevents us from taking this action and therefore forces us to imaginethe outside the film.A scene in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) plays intriguingly with this limitation.The film’s director of photography, William Fraker, recalls the scene in which Rosemary, whois played by Mia Farrow, allows Ruth Gordon to use the phone in the bedroom. Fraker himselfattempted to frame the shot from Rosemary’s position in the living room, as she looks throughan open door to the woman making the call. However, Fraker writes:Roman looked through the viewfinder and said, “no, no, Billy. Move to the left”. I movedto the left until all I could see were her feet hanging over the edge of the bed. I thoughtRoman was crazy until I saw Rosemary’s Baby in a theatre, and watched some 400people in the audience leaning to the right as though they were trying to look aroundthe door jamb to see what she was doing. 13The composition of this shot in Rosemary’s Baby builds a frame within a frame. Polanskireduces the space inside the image to strengthen the visual effect. The additional actof framing becomes equal to an exaggeration. There are numerous examples of this typeof frame-within-a-frame composition in key scenes in cinema. In Tystnaden (‘The Silence’,1963), director Ingmar Bergman uses the figure of frames within frames. He films throughdoorways, so that the vertical separations introduced by the doorways symbolize the emotionaldistance between the sisters who are the film’s protagonists. The final scene in TheSearchers 14 presents the viewer with a similarly constrained image. With the camera insidethe farmhouse and Wayne outside, Wayne directs a final look back at the farmhouse – a lookthat also seems directed towards the spectator – before heading into the exposed landscapeof the American West. Or, consider the shot in The Graduate 15 in which Mrs. Robinsonseduces Ben Braddock. Her bent knee forms a triangle, a window through which we look9. André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume 1, trans. Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1967, p. 165.10. Noël Carroll with Jinhee Choi (eds) Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, Malden: BlackwellPublishing, 2006, p. 70.11. Gregory Flaxman (ed.) The Brain Is the Screen, Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000, p. 19.12. Johannes Müller, unpublished lecture notes taken by Andreas Treske, Munich: HFF, 1992.13. Yazan Düd, ‘Kareler 2: Rosemary’s Baby’, Eylem Planı – Bildigim ˘ Kadarının Anlatabildigim ˘Kadarı, http://www.eylemplani.com/kareler-2-rosemarys-baby/.14. The Searchers (dir. John Ford, 1956).15. The Graduate (dir. Mike Nichols, 1967).

30 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics31at Ben, the focal point. In this case, the composition is not based on the imprisoning andisolating effects of vertical and horizontal lines. The common element in all these scenes isthat the frame within-a-frame both articulates and separates; facilitating a smooth transitionbetween inside and outside.In addition to the frame-within-a-frame, the multiple frame and multiple screen formats areable to juxtapose multiple points of view. As Friedberg notes, ‘While the single-screen movingimage offers multiple perspectives through the sequential shifts of montage and editing,the multiple-frame or multiple-screen moving image offers the same via adjacency andcontiguity’. 16 In this context, a discussion of Mike Figgis’ 2000 film Timecode is essential. Inthis film, Figgis constructs an experimental narrative from a screen divided into four frames.The story unfolds in parallel, with each frame showing different events in real time. The actionculminates in a final scene in which all four frames, and all four narratives, come together.In the DVD version of this film, the viewer is able to interact with the film by choosing whichframe will be accompanied by a soundtrack. In this way, sound opens up yet another dimensionof the frames, as the viewer becomes aware of the way in which Figgis uses the soundto guide the viewer through the four parallel narratives.To this point, the discussion has remained within the context of the ‘classical screen’. Andyet, modern visual culture is characterized by the existence of a virtual space enclosed withina frame, and situated within our everyday space. The frame, therefore, separates two coexistingspaces. 17 While television, video, telephone and the internet converge, multiple framesproliferate. Single screen devices already embed multiple screens. In a way, it is only thephysical object that is single. A computer screen, a telephone, and a television each providemultiple frames through which to interact with sounds, images, or typographical elements.These windows can collapse into a single moving image, or expand into a sequence of adjacentmultiple frames, either closely or loosely related to each other. A single image mightbe re-sized, so that it contains the dimensions of a full cinematic representation. The arrangementof single windows or framed images might be arranged in a simple, left-to-rightreading order, or rearranged so as to simulate a three-dimensional space, from which onecan select with the tip of a finger. In 2010, most web browsers remain in a two-dimensionalpresentation. Online video is represented by key frames or images, each of which is selected,marked and extracted. These images act as summaries of, placeholders for, and links to digitizedmoving images. They are both tagline and proposal. Beside these key frames are otherboxes, which link to related images or moving image content. It seems logical to analyse suchbrowser windows in terms of their graphical content, and the principles of graphic design.Nevertheless, thinking cinematically enables us to account for the fact that the frames withina larger frame – the browser – are placed in a meaningful relationship of adjacency. Thisrelationship might convey information, aesthetic pleasure, or both. To better understand howthis works, it might be helpful to consider another form of visual narrative – that of comics.Will Eisner describes comics as sequential art: ‘When part of a sequence, even a sequenceof only two, the art of the image is transformed into something more: The art of comics!’ 18 Heelaborates upon the concept of a comic as a sequence of frames:The fundamental function of comic (strip and book) art to communicate ideas and/orstories by means of words and pictures involves the movement of certain images (suchas people and things) through space. To deal with the capture or encapsulation ofthese events in the flow of the narrative, they must be broken up into sequenced segments.These segments are called panels or frames. They do not correspond exactlyto cinematic frames. They are part of the creative process, rather than a result of thetechnology.As in the use of panels to express the passage of time, the framing of a series of imagesmoving through space undertakes the containment of thoughts, ideas, actions,and location or site. The panel thereby attempts to deal with the broadest elements ofdialogue: cognitive and perceptive as well as visual literacy. The artist, to be successfulon this non-verbal level, must take into consideration both the commonality of humanexperience and the phenomenon of our perception of it, which seems to consist offrames or episodes. 19For the comic artist, the panel is a device that controls the flow of narrative. The panel is acontainer and a timer. Its border is an element of the visual language, the frame a structuralsupport with an emotional function. And yet, the real border is the border of the page, themeta-panel that encapsulates the visual narrative as a whole: ‘Comic panels fracture bothtime and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closureallows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality’. 20A browser constructing an online video site is influenced by variables such as user choice,tags and comments. The single video is framed in such a way that it is viewed in relation to arange of linked contents, as well as comments and quotations. It is framed to stay inside thewindow. As a frame, the browser provides a closed context; an area with a rigid border. It isa clearly marked entrance. The digital window provides a filter to narrow the ever-expandinguniverse of moving images. That is, the design of browser windows has failed to confront whatactually happens after a user enters the space – the possibility of gaining access to an evermultiplyingnumber of windows. Some online video providers allow the user to look inside thevideo through image placeholders; others allow us to look at related preferences. New AppleInc. applications use a graphical interface called ‘Cover Flow’, a sorting wheel of images in a3D presentational context (as I may call it here) not only moves us towards the images, butmoves these placeholders or openings towards us. Flipping and tipping on images, bookmarks,documents, or icons results in a leap of the graphical object or image representation16. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, Cambridge: The MIT Press,2006, p. 202.17. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002, p. 99.18. Quoted in Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: Harper Collins,1994, p. 5.19. Will Eisner, Comics & Sequential Art, Florida: Poorhouse Press, 1985, p. 38.20. Will Eisner, quoted in McCloud, Understanding Comics, p. 67.

32 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics33as a window towards us and, even if this is not the case as yet, around us. Through theinteraction with the device the frame of each single image is technologically overwritten, asour interaction simulates or replaces the movement of our head, as we seek to look aroundthe corner. Now, a single fingertip enables us to look through the doorway, to gain access, ina sense, to that which Rosemary was prevented from seeing.As new applications and devices are developed, frames are multiplying. Cinema evolves froma flat space with only one direction. Familiar formats, such as the cinematic moving image,are just one element within new databases and digital object – that which is shaped, formed,gestaltet. Rather than being destroyed, older formats will need to coexist, in a kind of modular,or set-like arrangement, with newer formats. In some ways, the merging of media hasbeen observable for a long time. For example, linear narratives increasingly open themselvesto spatiality. The limits of the frame are not respected anymore. Rather, open structures arefavoured. Television series such as Lost expand the narrative universe in multiple directions.Lost does not seek to answer only one question, it consists of an ever-expanding universeof questions. Rather than distracting the audience, the confusion within this universe keepsthe viewer in front of the screen. Through continuous and intensive mediatization, variousforms increasingly influence each other. The lines between distinct media forms are blurring:movies are based on video games and games on movies; the question of sequence becomesirrelevant when cultural forms become modular.According to Peter Greenaway, ‘There is no such thing as a frame in the natural world – it isa man-made, man-created device’, and, he continues, ‘If the frame is a man-made device,then just as it has been created, so it can be un-created. The parallelogram can go. 21 Ascrude as it is, the system of one-point perspective became the ruling ideology, as I have describedin relation to painting and cinematic space. In this essay, I have been concerned withthe way that new digital forms multiply frames or windows, and blur the distinction betweenpresentation and reality. Technical images draw attention to the act of framing itself. Theseframes or windows and doors might be best characterized as openings. These openings canact like windows or doors, but can also be frames with closed borders. These borders blockthe ability of the image to extend into an imaginary space. Their direction is always towardsthe inside. In this way, the frame’s borders become decorative; an operation on a surface, atextured map, which is also an image.the possibilities inherent within these devices remain mere glimpses, already these devicesare able to detect how they are held, and can arrange the screened information space accordingly.The screen in real space merges with the controller interacting with the gameworld.How to fill the space opened by such devices is still the question faced by their designers,makers or producers. It seems obvious that the device and its location and usage will affectthe forms it screens, plays, presents. Online video presents itself in small chunks. It will dependon the technical capabilities of the network what kind of chunks of information – and amovie is a big chunk of organized information – the device opens to the fingertip. In conclusion,I would like to cite a passage of Vilém Flusser’s work that I believe reflects powerfullyupon this issue:Among other things, an image is a message. It has a sender and it searches for an addressee.This search is a question of its portability. Images are surfaces. How does one transportsurfaces? It all depends on the physical bodies on whose surfaces the images are affixed....Recently, something new has been discovered. Disembodied images, “pure” surfaces, andall the images that have so far been in existence can be translated (transcoded) into imagesof a new kind. In this situation, the addressees no longer need to be transported. These picturesare conveniently reproduced and transmitted to individual addressees wherever theymight be. However, the question of portability is a little more complicated than it has beendescribed here. Photographs and films are transitional phenomena somewhere betweenframed canvases and disembodied images. There is, however, one unambiguous tendency:images will become progressively more portable and addressees will become even moreimmobile. 22A final phenomenon that deserves mention is the increasing transportability of the movingimage. New devices such as the iPhone, iPod, and in particular the iPad constitute mobilephysical containers or bodies for the moving image, whereas the cinematic screen has alwaysbeen a geographically fixed location. And, whereas the analogue 35mm film of a single movieis about 30 kilometres long and weighs several kilograms, the mobile digital device can notonly store several movies, it can access an enormous cinematic library. The iPad directs theviewer towards a multiplicity of meaning beyond the simple play function. Although many of21. Peter Greenaway, Cinema Militans Lecture 2003, 28/09/2003, http://petergreenaway.co.uk/essay3.htm.22. Vilém Flusser, Images in the New Media, in Andreas Ströhl (ed.) Writings, Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 2004, p. 70.

34 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics35ReferencesBazin, André. What is Cinema? Volume 1, trans. Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press,1967.Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007.Carroll, Noël and Jinhee Choi (eds) Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, Malden: BlackwellPublishing, 2006.Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005.Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema I: The Movement-Image, London: Continuum, 2004.Düd, Yazan. ‘Kareler 2: Rosemary’s Baby’. Eylem Planı – Bildigim ˘ Kadarının Anlatabildigim ˘ Kadarı,http://www.eylemplani.com/kareler-2-rosemarys-baby/.Eisenstein, Sergei. (1949) Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, New York: Hartcourt. Trans. Jay Leyda.,1969.Eisner, Will. Comics & Sequential Art, Florida: Poorhouse Press, 1985.Elsaesser, Thomas and Malte Hagener. Filmtheorie zur Einführung, Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2007.Flaxman, Gregory (ed.) The Brain Is the Screen, Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, Minneapolis:University of Minnesota, 2000.Flusser, Vilém. Images in the New Media, in Andreas Ströhl (ed.) Writings, Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 2004.Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006.Goldberg, David. ‘EnterFrame: Cage, Deleuze and Macromedia Director’, Afterimage 30.1(2002): 8-9.Greenaway, Peter. Cinema Militans Lecture 2003, 28/09/2003, http://petergreenaway.co.uk/essay3.htm.Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002.McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: Harper Collins, 1994.Web Video and the Screen as a Mediatorand Generator of RealityRobrecht VanderbeekenIn order to learn more about web video, this article does not begin with its peculiarities, buttries to grasp its cultural backdrop by considering the screen as a virtual invader in our dailylives, which sometimes even seems to assume control. It aims to challenge the claim that theaudiovisual screen of television, cinema, video, and web video is but a window onto the world.A screen is not a neutral display of fact and fiction in addition to what a person can experienceon their own behalf. Rather, it has a massive effect on the constitutive relation betweena viewer and the world she or he lives in. It manipulates this relation in a double manner: itmediates our perception of reality, and it generates another reality in a new, mediated environment.Early film spectators once believed that they could become infected when they sawsick people on the screen; yet the days when the screen was clearly misunderstood to embodyreal objects are long gone. Today, the screen is no longer something special or strange‘out there’, but rather something close to us, and everywhere. The screen has become humanized,it is now accepted as an ordinary part of our everyday environment. Because ofthis shift in the locus of our psychological perception, the screen becomes immanent andubiquitous, and hence more influential. As a familiar object, the screen invades our existenceboth radically and constantly, and yet its influence passes unnoticed. At the same time, thescreen is evolving into new technological forms that generate a remarkable and eye-catchingreality of their own, a new world. Web video plays a significant part in this evolution.The Screen as MediatorEclipsing, Interpassivity and Truth-proceduresWhat do we take as real nowadays? Ideally, an analysis of the influence of audiovisual mediaon our perception of reality should be based upon a comparison between our perception beforeand after the rise of audiovisual media. Of course, such an approach is problematic, dueto the difficulty of retroactive reconstruction of past perceptions of reality. 1 What we do know,however, is that a general feeling of detachment has become predominant today: experiencing‘reality’ includes the experience of the loss of reality – that is, the lack of a transparent,undeniable and convincing manifestation of reality.In what sense does the screen, as that which inserts itself in-between subjects and their environment,create a loss of reality? In its innocent version, the screen is but a ‘window on theworld’ that provides the viewer with audiovisual material, containing facts as well as fiction.Put differently, it is an extension of man that displays representations and interpretations of1. From a philosophical perspective, every perception of reality is ‘mediated’ in terms ofembodiment, common worldviews, personal opinions, etc. In this article the term ‘mediation’primarily revolves around the impact of audiovisual media.

36 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics37the world we live in (facts), as well as visualizations of other people’s fantasies (fiction). Theproblem with this definition is that the screen does not just provide additional information;it is not a neutral supplement to what we experience with our own senses. On the contrary,the doubling of visual representation implies severe conflicts and competition between thepersonal and artificial. Rather than just representing our world, audiovisual media radicallymediates our perception of reality, including our perception of ourselves and our relation toothers. To a large extent, the screen dictates how we perceive reality.A first illustration of how the screen acts as a mediator can be termed eclipsing: the overshadowingof experience by the artificial experience provided through audiovisual media. Thescreen exposes us to places we have never visited, so that when we actually do visit theseplaces, such encounters initially seem unnatural, alienated, or fake. 2 The experience feelswrong because we are confronted with a double vision: the information we detect immediatelywith our senses versus the conceptualizations we recall from audiovisual media. Hence,the screen has made it largely impossible for us to experience famous places and people asthey are: that is, unmediated. 3A second result of mediation is that which Slavoj Žižek and Robert Pfaller have termed‘interpassivity’. 4 This concept refers to the latent manipulation of the viewer. As an exampleof interpassivity, Žižek often refers to canned laughter on television shows, which both decidefor the viewer what is funny, and stand in for our own laughter. The viewer, having delegatedtheir agency to the media, remains completely passive. Audiovisual media such as televisionnot only reassure the viewer that the world is (still) out there; they also provide a means todelegate or even dispense with personal activity and responsibility. As Žižek demonstrated in2. The video artist Marine Hugonnier made a nice documentary essay on this issue called TheLast Tour (2004), a fictional documentary about the closing of the natural park around the SwissMatterhorn. The idea is to shut down this mountain area and give it back to our imagination.In this way, after some time, it might be possible again to purely experience this area withoutspontaneously recalling touristic postcard-images that eclipse our personal perceptionwith depictions of a Disney-like theme park. For an extract of the video see, http://www.marinehugonnier.com/.3. Eclipsing is not exclusive to audiovisual media. Texts, novels or drawings also have an eclipsingfunction with respect to personal experience. However, the abundance of mass mediavisuals obviously generates such an overall impact that eclipsing becomes an explicit andwidespread phenomenon. Also, in the case of text, we gather descriptions and ideas rather thanstraightforward visual representations and constructions. When textual information conflicts withthe actual sensual information obtained in our encounters with people, situations or places thatwe have not previously experienced, we normally (ideally?) adopt a ‘scientific’, empirical stanceand adjust our opinions to overrule the previously formed images. Such conflicts (which actuallyonly ‘eclipse’ in a metaphorical sense) are clearly different from audiovisual eclipses because thelatter largely obstruct an encounter with the initial, unmediated phenomena and thus impedesufficient falsification afterwards.4. See Robert Pfaller, ‘Interpassivity and Misdemeanors: the Analysis of Ideology and the ŽižekianToolbox’, International Journal of Žižek Studies, 1.1 (2007): 33-50; and Slavoj Žižek, ‘TheInterpassive Subject’, Centre Georges Pompidou, Traverses, 1998, http://www.lacan.com/zizekpompidou.htm.his 2006 documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, the cinematic screen is not a blankslate onto which we project our dreams and fantasies; it is a dark netherworld that showsthe viewer what to fantasize about and how to think. It is the screen that moulds the subject,teaching it what to love, what to hate, and what to desire. The ultimate consequence is theshift from the active citizen taking part in life to the passive spectator locked into the screen.The problem with such a spectatorial mode is that, even in interim off-screen periods, webegin to look at our world from the outside in.A third illustration of mediation concerns the function of audiovisual media as a ‘truth procedure’.Whereas eclipsing concerns the transformation and augmentation of natural perception,and interpassivity describes the delegation of agency, this third process addresses ourtrust of the screen as an authority. That which is sufficiently visible within the news media isseen as that which both exists, and is true. Conversely, what is not mentioned in the media isnot only forgotten and ignored, but also considered doubtful. After all, if it really happened,why is it not in the news media? Therefore, news media are not just reporters but are alsoprivileged indicators of what really happens, thereby creating their own Photoshop reality,and not only in a literal sense. 5From a political perspective, understanding the news media as a truth procedure is highlysignificant. It is for this reason that most political conflicts turn into media battles. In suchcases, the media are not only indicators but important actors. A splendid documentary essayaddressing this issue is Johan Grimonprez’s Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1998). 6 The film portrays ahistory of plane hijackings through the visual bombardment of a montage of found televisionimages. Amongst other points, it shows how the earliest hijackings were used as a symbolicaction to call attention to a political struggle. As the voiceover states, hijackings graduallybecame more and more aggressive in order to increase their impact, so that ‘0ne has toget killed in order to get noticed by the media these days’. Considering that this video wasreleased four years before 9/11, its visionary character is impressive. Given the increasing importanceof political visibility in the news media, the Twin Towers attack seems to be the logicalnext step. It is provoked and propagated by the same media that fully controls its iconic5. On the initiative of the conservative Fox News TV-commentator Glenn Beck, thousands of peoplegathered in front of the White House in Washington on August 29th, 2010 for what was meant tobe a ‘restore honour rally’. Paradoxically, Beck billed his event as ‘non-political’ despite the factthat Tea Party celebrity Sarah Palin was the central guest. This event not only nicely illustratesthat news media are a truth-procedure; they not only manipulate the news but are also capableof creating a new reality that corresponds with their insinuations. The magic power of the newsmedia: words become images, images become a state of affairs. Strangely enough, despite themany things that go wrong today, hardly any good cause can mobilize protesters any more. ButFox TV’s agitators can easily motivate lots of people to rally for empty issues (who is againsthonour anyway?) with the underlying goal of raising an audience for themselves (and to showon television how this audience is against the current government, unfortunately, without reallyknowing what that government really stands for). Weeks later, there finally came a counterprotest. But this pro-Obama rally was also initiated by media celebrities: the TV comedians JonStewart and Stephen Colbert.6. The film can be seen online on http://www.ubu.com/.

38 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics39recollection: we all recall the same images of the impact. At the same time, we often wonder:is this real, or is it Hollywood? Paradoxically, iconoclasm as a possible, critical strategy for theviewer to resist such media indoctrination is no longer an option here, for the subject alreadyconcerns a tabooed political and ideological iconoclasm.Web Video as a Catalyst of the VirtualAudiovisual online applications such as vlogs, webcams, podcasts, and user-generated videowebsites intensify the mediating impact of the screen, shifting it into a higher gear. Letus then consider web video’s impact on the three phenomena discussed above. The phenomenonof eclipsing is intensified by web video reports – abundant, easily accessible, andlargely free of charge – in a twofold way. In the global, unique and ungovernable spread ofan enormous number of images, a huge amount of new visual information is produced aboutpersons, places and events that were heretofore unnoticed or ignored. Put differently, webvideo enhances the representation of the multiple aspects of our daily lives in a recorded version,and hence increases the reach of the shadow the virtual casts over the real. But thereis more. The novelty of web video is of course the opportunity to ‘Broadcast Yourself’, whichgenerates a multitude of personal recordings on similar topics. For example, the web allowsaccess to multiple travel logs of people visiting the same destinations; thus, a variety of amateurrecordings of the same places of interest, accidents, concerts and other spectacles. 7This personalized multiplicity might prima facie be understood as an antidote to the phenomenonof eclipsing, as it substitutes the singular iconic image with a multitude: a diversedatabase of information that clashes with the stereotypical media icon. For instance, insteadof the typical picture postcard image of the pyramids, we now have thousands of images, shotfrom every possible angle and at almost every moment of the day, and always including otherpeople within the image. Nevertheless, this democratizing multitude enforces rather thanneutralizes eclipsing, as the image of the pyramids increasingly tends to coincide with thevirtual imaginary generated by tourism and mass media. Put differently, because this multitudebecomes so familiar to us, the authentic political, religious and social aura possessed bysignificant places threatens to disappear behind the iconic image. The site becomes a placefor sightseeing and nothing else: a three-dimensional picture, totally absorbed into our publicculture of spectatorship. 8Web video also advances the phenomenon of interpassivity. To give just a few examples: insteadof travelling to congresses and conferences for ‘live’ participation, many people prefer7. A video work that nicely illustrates this personalized multiplicity is The Final Countdown (2010) ofthe Belgian artist Koen Theys. It consists of a collage of YouTube clips featuring people replayingthis famous pop tune. While every recording of the band Europe is omitted, the diversity offound footage remains extraordinary: parents filming their kids that vainly try to master a musicinstrument, play-backers performing in front of their webcam, music band rehearsals, orchestrasplaying a classical performance for a wide audience, etc.8. The shift from public place into pictorial monument could be linked to the notion of simulacra.However, as will be discussed in the next part, there is a crucial difference. A simulacra is ‘acopy of a copy’, a self-referential piece of reality created by audiovisual media, as an example.By contrast, cases of eclipsing involve an epistemological shift, e.g. from an authentic place into3D imaginary.to ‘attend’ the online streaming of the lectures in-between times; we watch web commentariesupon art exhibitions instead of visiting them ourselves; at birthday parties we allow onlineclips of people singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to sing for us; we put forward our views of politicaland social issues on vlogs while failing to act directly in the real world; we allow YouTube gagsto replace our own jokes. In short, while Web 2.0 invites us to ‘immigrate’ to virtual worlds,first via funky avatars and later with our Facebook ego-profile, real-life interaction is delegatedto a virtual substitute.The fact that ever more people feel less inhibited about communicating personal informationon the internet reinforces this virtualization. Whereas a vast amount of early web video wasposted with nicknames and showed pets, cars, babies and so on, many people have turnedthe camera around, and are literally broadcasting themselves. Despite the active ‘lean forward’attitude of editing, uploading, sharing, poking, connecting, replying and updating, ourdigital presence entails a vast amount of interpassivity: first-order experience is postponed, oreven replaced by virtual activity. The younger generation is particularly vulnerable to alienationand detachment, as demonstrated by the Hikikomori, who are socially withdrawn Japaneseyouths. This is not only because young people are the largest consumers of online content,but because they have not had the chance to experience a truly non-digital life – unless,that is, their education included ‘digital detox’ days in order to avoid a complete loss of thereal feelings of living.However, as with eclipsing, the many-sided applications of web video not only stimulate theprocesses of interpassivity, but generate a whole new realm. Take the phenomena that mightbe labelled as ‘digital shrink syndrome’, so well illustrated in the video work Because We AreVisual (2010) by Belgian artists Olivia Rochette and Gerard-Jan Claes. By means of a collageof found vlog-footage, the artists depict a beautiful parataxis of the motivations for vlogging:the urge to be seen; the thrill of being part of ‘the media’; the wish to be in touch with a virtualcommunity; the need to complain to or argue with the anonymous ‘big other’; self-realization.The artists also, however, depict the extent to which the webcam serves both as social substitutionand as therapy. Another girl tries to prove her love for her girlfriend by expressingher emotions in daily vlogs. This visual version of the love letter expands its psychologicalcomplexity: besides the attempt to convince the beloved, and to convince oneself of one’spowers of seduction, there is now the anonymous web community as a witness. The digitalother is no longer just witness, but the actual audience that allows the vlogger to narcissisticallydemonstrate oneself as a passionate being. Here, the role of the beloved switches fromthe subject matter of the love letter, to an occasion for the lover to gain control. Instead ofbecoming lost in the desire for someone else, self-love increases. The beloved takes no partin the vlog, either because she is unaware of it, or because she does not exist. These arecases of interpassivity because they lead the virtual event to become the main goal, whilethe real life situation is reduced to an alibi. The virtual event gains independence from life:it turns into an artificial, yet psychologically necessary, structure that creates its own reward.Finally, we confront the phenomenon of the truth-procedure. Obviously, amateur videos (albeitbroadcast on television or available online) have a massive effect on media and politics– one need only think of Osama Bin Laden’s video messages, amateur footage of ‘terrorist’

40 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics41act upon it. This is exactly why the institutional power of Wikileaks (and all the attention it getsfrom other news media) is so important, and also why it is so heavily under attack. It is simplytoo hard to deal with it on one’s own. Instead, we indulge in the spurring movement of theweb: we keep on clicking, investigating, searching for new information, until we forget what itwas that we discovered. 9 We tend to ignore the uncomfortable truth. Or we resign ourselvesto it, as one of the many dissonances of life.Still from Because We Are Visual (2010). Courtesy of artists Olivia Rochette and Gerard-Jan Claes.attacks, or the incriminating documents on WikiLeaks. Whereas documentary film seemsto have lost its truthfulness in the era of docusoaps, mockumentaries and reality television,amateur video often retains a nostalgic air of a truthful visual document. Footage such as theassault of Rodney King, which provoked the Los Angeles riots, has the air of an uncut andshocking reality, especially when we find such footage ourselves among the sea of videos onthe web. What is special about web video documents is that their credibility depends on theviewer’s willingness to accept their authenticity, as there is no guarantee that they are notstaged or manipulated. Authenticity, then, become a matter of personal belief. In spite of theirauthority, we often distrust professionals paid by news services. Conversely, we are willing tobelieve amateurs because they are people just like us. In this respect, there is a crucial shiftin the way the screen functions as a truth-procedure. The critical viewer developed a healthysuspicion of television networks – because we were dependent on their authority, mistrustbecame an important strategy. We learned to ask: What do they want us to believe? Are theyholding back something? Is there an important lobby involved that tries to conceal informationfor the viewer? In the case of the web, however, the truth is often not just ‘out theresomewhere’; it is often simply there, repeatedly, right in front of our eyes.For the most part, our browsing attitude seems to prevent us from putting two and twotogether: we gather bits and pieces of information, but forget to come to a conclusion. In away, the surfer’s experience often mimics CCTV. We are constantly observing everything, everywhere,but the incentive to reflect properly and respond accurately to what we are seeingremains absent. Despite the attempts of activists to organize grassroots movements, such asweb communities fighting for web neutrality, and committed Facebook groups, the collectivelevel remains virtual, a big but blind mob. Thousands of page views, yes, but nothing else –just an anonymous collection of individuals that silently share some information. As a result,world leaders such as President Bush and his ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or his denial ofthe U.S. Army committing torture can fool the public by claiming that ‘further investigation isneeded’, even while the damaging information is out in the open on the web. World leadersand business oligarchs get away with their deceptions because there is no genuine collectiveresponse, only dissent between believers and non-believers. For many years, activistsdenounced the funding given by the Total Oil corporation to the military junta in Burma. Hereis a clear-cut case for activism which would normally be quite effective; almost everybodyis against this brutal dictatorship, and we all can easily take action by means of a boycottof Total Oil. Nonetheless, because of the abundance of news information, commercials andentertainment programs, the activist potential perished within a kind of collective amnesia. 10The ‘good cause’ is shouted down by the clamour of the mass media. In sum, as a democratizedmedium, web video takes part in a process of the virtualization of truth. Ultimately, thisleads to a situation of schizophrenia: a lot of hard facts circulate freely, but on an individualbasis it is hard to accept them as such. The mediation of truth seems to have shifted frommanipulation, to fragmentation, and finally to castration.The Screen as GeneratorFrom Document to SimulacraHow can the screen generate its own reality? First of all, screen images are in themselves newfeatures: they are newly created elements that invade our world and provide virtual exten-The problem is that such encounters became a subjective matter. For instance, when webump into a confronting web video report, this ‘truth’ is not revealed to us on a public level, asin the case of television. Despite the fact that a lot of companions online might have discoveredthe same information, its disclosure is not genuinely ‘public’ as, due to the solitariness ofthis experience, a collective response largely remains absent. Despite the frequently successfuland important ‘power to the people’ ideology of the web, there is usually no actual outcryin which we can take part: no demonstrations in the streets, no journalists continuouslyinvestigating and reporting the issues at stake. Because of the lack of collective response, weare usually unable to really accept the disclosure of the confronting information, let alone to9. Thomas Elseasser has developed a clarifying analysis of the web user’s paradoxical state ofconsciousness: ‘Right next to the euphoria and epiphany, then, there is the heat-death ofmeaning, the ennui of repetition and of endless distraction: in short, the relentless progress ofentropy that begins to suck out and drain away all life’ See Thomas Elsaesser, ‘“ConstructiveInstability”, or: The Life of Things as the Cinema’s Afterlife?’ in Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer(eds) Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures,2008, p. 30.10. For more information: see the documentary Total Denial (www.totaldenialfilm.com) or go tovideo.google.com/videoplay.

42 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics43sions. Concerning the ontological status of these images, it is important to recall the radicalshift from seeing the image as a document to seeing the image as a simulacrum. In the earlydays of cinema, a film image was often conceived as a document of reality, it contained a‘true piece of reality’. 11 With the rise of video in the 1960s, the naturalist view returns withrespect to amateur footage. Since Sony introduced the first handheld camera, the 1967Portapak, a huge amount of amateur film has been shot, with the intention of creating atestimony of real life, by which I mean our daily reality, rather than the reality shown on filmor in television. Since the early years of video, many artists have used the handheld camerain an attempt to expose mass media manipulation, for example by making guerrilla-TV, whichis broadcast to a counter-public sphere. Or they used the handheld camera to explore theso-called ‘extra-medial’ – that is, life excluded from the big events in the news media, thoseleft aside in remote areas and back alleys.However, partly because of successful movies such as the Blair Witch Project (1999), theamateur image has completely lost the privileged status of documentary evidence. Meanwhile,all audiovisual images have become invested with the aura of animation. In the lastdecades, the omnipresence of the television image in particular has given rise to a commonbelief that film footage is not, and cannot really represent reality, since it is too self-referential.Rather than reality, the image refers only to other images and interpretations. Plato’s conceptof the ‘simulacra’ is often employed to emphasize this newly autonomous status of images.Whereas philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean Baudrillard ascribe the negativemeaning of a distorted or lost reality to the term, Gilles Deleuze has foregrounded thepositive dimension of the simulacra, as a vehicle of ‘becoming’ that is able to create newextensions of reality. 12 In a similar vein, Nicolas Bourriaud’s essay ‘Postproduction’ discusses11. It would be a clumsy reduction to state that early cinema in general takes the film-imageas a document. The French cineaste Georges Meliès, for instance, became famous for hisexperiments with the magical hocus-pocus potentiality of the film medium. Early cinema alsoincludes many other examples of experiments with phantasmagoria and a so-called ‘cinema ofattraction’. On this point, see Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectatorand the Avant-Garde’ in Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (eds) Early Film, British FilmInstitute, 1989. It could be argued, on the other hand, that these ‘attractions’ were so effectivethanks to the fact that the cinema-image had an enigmatic aura of realness in those days.Furthermore, the factual objectivity of a film-image was often taken for granted in the days ofearly cinema, which is clearly no longer the case in our contemporary post-cinema era. Thisnaturalist view is, for instance, prevalent in the theatre work of Erwin Piscator from the 1920s.Putting the screen on stage, for Piscator, results in playfully letting real life enter uncut into thefictive spectacle in the playhouse. According to this view, the film image not only represents butalso incarnates reality. Today, staging the screen, in the plays of the Wooster Group for instance,clearly has another function: the film-image becomes a scenographic prop, a walk-on, a fictionalprotagonist in the play.12. See Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Reason in Philosophy’ in Twilight of the Idols, 1888,http://www.handprint.com/SC/NIE/GotDamer.html#sect3; Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra andSimulations’ in Mark Poster (ed.) Selected Writings, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988,http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html; Gilles Deleuze,Difference and Repetition, Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1968.Johan Grimonprez. Still from Looking for Alfred (2005). Courtesy of Zapomatik/Film & Media Umbrella.a tendency arising within the fine arts in the 1990s. 13 According to Bourriaud, in this decadeartists became ‘prosumers’: they consume in order to produce. In the very act of prosuming,artists are ‘semionauts’ that travel through different worlds of meaning. In a contemporaryculture saturated with meaningful images, artists are like DJs that appropriate existing styles,cultural spheres, and images. They make their own playlists by means of cutting, pitchingand cross-fading between images and meanings. An excellent illustration of this tendency isJohan Grimonprez’s 2004 video Looking for Alfred. Although this work does not display anyfound footage, the images evoke the iconography of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, by using hismovies as a backdrop. They reveal the uncanny, authentic, and elusive spirit of Hitchcock bymeans of afterimages that comment on his movies, or even seem to take revenge upon them.From Hyperreality to EmulationWhile images come to constitute their own reality, they also influence off-screen reality. Thisbrings us to a second illustration of how the screen acts as a generator. I have mentionedthe phenomenon of eclipsing, which is an effect of the multitude of media that shape andfilter the original event so that we can no longer experience it in an unmediated fashion. Inphilosophy, such epistemological twists may be referred to in terms of hyperreality, particularlyin reference to Jean Baudrillard’s restricted and negative articulation of the concept in‘Simulacra and Simulations’. In Baudrillard’s view, the world we live in has been replaced bya copy world, a generic Disneyland, where we seek simulated stimuli. 14 Two distinctions withinthe concept of hyperreality are relevant to my argument.13. Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. NewYork: Lukas & Sternberg, 2001.14. Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’.

44 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics45Firstly, according to Baudrillard, the term hyperreality denotes the difficulty of distinguishingbetween reality and fantasy. However, since the depictions displayed by audiovisual mediaare not just fantasy but also include much accurate information as well as interpretations andcommentary, the fundamental tension is of a different order. The combination of the naturalperception of reality, the mediated perception of reality through the screen and the familiaritywith realms of simulacra, results in the perception of reality as a hyperreality. This inevitablyimpedes a return to unmediated perception (eclipsing) but it does not imply that hyperrealityis mere semblance in the form of an inflated version of reality. On the contrary, experiencinghyperreality can equally be an intensified and thus a very real experience in which exploration,recollection and imagination come together, and open up dimensions of perception thatwould otherwise be impossible to access. In this sense, hyperreality is the experience of akind of super-reality in which a plenitude and diversity of reality are present. 15Secondly, Baudrillard includes certain constructed objects and events within the concept ofhyperreality, such as Disneyland, which mimics fiction, or places such as Las Vegas or Dubai,which are intended to substitute for fantasy and imagination. In this way, Baudrillard notonly places the exceptional similarity of these superficial places in a gloomy and moralisticperspective, he also compares two radically different dimensions: our modified perception ofreality as a result of audiovisual media, and the materializations that are inspired by audiovisualmedia. These reproductions of virtual entities are literal illustrations of how the screenacts as a generator. They are attempts to create a reality that is more familiar, more ‘real’ thanreal, in the sense that it more closely resembles the reality we know from the screen. So,whereas Baudrillard argues that simulations such as Disneyland demonstrate that reality isbecoming a fiction, the exact opposite is taking place: fiction is becoming real. Stated differently,the virtual produces a surplus of reality. In this respect, it is significant that Disneylandwas constructed by film producers and set designers rather than architects.What is special about such entities (the fake and real things generated by the screen) is theirontology: they begin as simulations of virtual objects and become emulations, which competewith reality instead of copying it. Emulations can therefore be understood as offering resistanceto imitation, instead pursuing the creation of something radically new. In this respect,they embody an alternative reality situated between the virtual and the real. Or, we might saythat they produce a surplus from that which is simultaneously really there and truly virtualby nature. Although the intention to create emulations can be found throughout art history,contemporary emulations embody extra dimensions. 16 A good example is the design of Dutch15. A good example to illustrate this is the video work Plot Point (2007) by artist Nicolas Provost.This piece consists of footage that is randomly filmed in the streets of New York without anystaging or acting. Thanks to montage and the addition of audio, however, Provost manages tocreate a specific cinematic suspension. As a result, the video is completely penetrated withthe atmosphere of popular movies and police series. Nonetheless, what we see is not just thestreets of New York as a familiar film set but a city that discloses itself in an updated version,demonstrating how the originality of reality easily exceeds what we know from fiction.16. As an example, recall the installations of the Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda (www.ryojiikeda.com) orthe digital paintings of Robert Seidel (www.robertseidel.com).architect Lars Spuybroek, 17 whose sculptures are to be understood first and foremost asvirtual entities: the digital concept has ontological priority. The actual buildings are illustrationsor instantiations of virtual spaces. Whereas simulations, as an authentic expression ina fake setting, result in a truth without reality, an emulation produces a new reality, a realitywithout truth. That is, it is not truly there. Or rather, it is there only as a diversion of the virtualin physical space.From Virtual Reality to AR/MRBesides simulacra and emulations, the screen may also be transformed into new modesof reality thanks to new media developments. As objects, the cinema and television screenhave literally been invading our everyday world for decades. Whereas the audiovisual screenhas become an ordinary, and even a vintage, object in our screen culture throughout theyears, contemporary post-cinema developments revive the 19th century pre-cinema fascinationfor phantasmagoria. Throughout the history of technology, the ‘shock of the new’has followed its own trajectory: the thrill of a ghost story has evolved from Chinese shadowplay to magic lanterns; 18 the Eameses’ multi-screen architecture to Virtual Reality. 19 As newtechnologies give rise to an all-encompassing screen that includes the television tube, thecomputer display, and the telephone among many others, the image frees itself from thetraditional 2D screen. Whether it is due to small, built-in versions installed in all sorts ofdevices or to mega projections on façades of urban buildings, screens become increasinglymobile. The development of CAD software and graphics hardware enables the constructionof computer-simulated environments that allow us to navigate inside an image by means ofhead-mounted displays, for example. Subsequently, the audiovisual image can be resurrectedin our surroundings by means of spatial holograms or interactive projections, hencecreating a post-virtual reality.I will discuss three ways in which the invasion of images that have escaped the monitorscreen manifests. Firstly, there are the developments in ubiquitous and mobile technologythat are sometimes referred to as Web 3.0. If Web 2.0 stands for social software, the thirdgeneration covers, among other things, the development of new digital utilities like iPhones,domotics, search engines, smart cctv, wear-cams, and lifecasting. Due to these applications,the web will seem to colonize ever expanding territory of our daily world by means of wanderingscreens. At the same time, the traditional screen has become scattered and duplicated,as have its images. A second development is that of so-called augmented reality (AR). As acombination of the physical world and computer generated data, AR is a layered reality inwhich the screen disappears into the environment and vice versa. AR represents a radicalturning point with respect to audiovisual media considered as virtual invaders. If the rise of17. For images see www.nox-art-architecture.com.18. For an instructive overview see, Tom Gunning ‘The Long and the Short of It: Centuries ofProjecting Shadows, From Natural Magic to the Avant-Garde’ in Stan Douglas and ChristopherAemon (eds) Art of Projection, Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, (2009), pp. 23-36.19. For more information see, Beatriz Colomina ‘Enclosed by Images: the Eameses’ MultiscreenArchitecture’ in Stan Douglas and Christopher Aemon (eds) Art of Projection, Ostfildern,Germany: Hatje Cantz, (2009), pp. 36-57.

46 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics47webcams transforms the living room from a private place into a public film set, with AR bothpublic and private space becomes a 3D blue screen for a plethora of virtual features. Futuredevelopments of AR include computer screens that are gesture or eye-operated, so thatcontrol icons and program windows appear as virtual devices in real space (3D Web) or asinteractive 3D virtual objects with adjustable shape and appearance.So-called mixed reality (MR) represents a third development in the audiovisual media landscape.MR could be described as a new, synthetic environment with mixed objects and subjects,partly physical and digital. MR differs from AR not only because the layers are mingled,but because new features might pop up. For example, MR often involves hidden objects thatare made visible by means of machine-eye vision, such as visual images in surgery that makeuse of medical scans, or visual images used in military warfare that are based on data fromnight vision equipment. Such high-tech devices do not generate analogue reproductions butregister data and present it in coded visualizations. Often, the interactive system employs aGPS application which restricts its operational use to a particular location. In other words,like global positioning, MR can be omnipresent, which makes it difficult to distinguish fromun-plugged reality. The virtual and the real become as one, generating 3D visibility in whichdigital features interact with audiovisual recordings. Therefore, MR takes the transformationof the ‘lay-back’ television watcher from ‘lean-forward’ web surfer a step further. Suchimmersive, generative and ubiquitous devices provide an opportunity not only to activelyexplore, but to modify, expand and create a new environment. This shift generates a radicallynew psychological condition: instead of withdrawing into a television or computer monitor,as a kind of Cartesian cocoon through which we live daily life from a secure yet uninvolveddistance, we are challenged to become inventive actors within a mixed reality in which wehave individual and instant access to numerous applications. This new psychological conditioninevitably triggers a fusion: the experience of presence in an AR/MR confluence requiresa hands-on agency that is not compatible with the rational and passive (self-)reflection of anobserver. AR/MR agents eventually become one with robot vision and take part in the creationof a mediated and mixed world.In conclusion, not only is the screen poised to disappear into the environment, we will alsotend to become absorbed into the new pictorial environment generated by the expandedscreen. A notion such as the passion for the virtual clearly connotes something different inthis newer context. The laid-back enjoyment of escapism in a clean virtuality, containing nokernel of the real, now seems to be counterbalanced by the excitement and anxiety of theinescapable fusion of the real and virtual. This enigmatic amalgamate is invading our environment,and we are about to be locked into it.Web Video as a Response, and an In-betweenIn closing, let us return to web video. Concerning simulacra as self-referential entities, theweb in general, and web video in particular, intensify the culture of the copy, for it providesits users free access to an immense database of ready-to-use information. Shareware, opensource software and digital piracy bring about the multiplication of duplicates, mutants andmashups. In this way, the intrinsic relationship of ‘original’ to ‘imitation’ is weakened, in a twofoldsense. First of all, in a digital realm, the significance of the initial material instantiation isrendered obsolete – only image and meaning count. Second, doubled forms become equivalent.This is apparent in the case of self-made web video remakes. From the perspective ofthe individual, a re-editing or re-enactment of a web video might become more valuable andauthentic than the original, not only because it is personalized, but because it contains extralayers of meaning. Appropriation and reproduction are creative acts that allow the singular toovercome the universal.A brilliant illustration of this process is Zachary Oberzan’s theatre performance Your Brother,Remember? (2010). As aptly described in the accompanying text of the play,Oberzan splices and dices home videos, Hollywood film footage and live performance.As kids in rural America, Zachary and his older brother Gator loved making parodies oftheir favourite films, most notably Jean-Claude Van Damme’s karate opus Kickboxer,and the notorious cult film Faces of Death. Twenty years later, estranged from hisfamily, Zack returned to his childhood home to re-create these films, shot for shot, asprecisely as possible, but now seen through a twenty-year lens of emotional and physicalwear and tear. 20At the end of the performance, after the audience have viewed a sparkling mix of remakes,either live on stage or on video, they are presented with the startling video of Jean Claude vanDamme re-enacting Zachary’s story. Suddenly, the order is reversed: the subjective survivedand lives on. In cases like these, Baudrillard’s looming phantom of the simulacra seems tohave been superseded by the individual’s compulsion to copy. The urge for repetition andredundancy, the so-called Freudian death-drive, here clearly functions as a vital and primalforce of survival.The phenomenon of hyperreality can also be extended to web video. Of course, the abundanceof web video enhances the experience of our daily lives as a layered reality, repletewith citations and references to our audiovisual culture. However, web video also triggers thephenomenon of hyperreality in a medium-specific way. The format of web video consists ofsmall viewing boxes accompanied by dynamic information, such as intruding para-images,flickering hypo-text, and pop-ups. Hence, as a medium, web video encourages a new mentalcondition in which attention is spent upon monitoring heterogeneous and ephemeral information.The viewer needs the skills to skip irrelevant information and avoid distraction. At thesame time one needs to be aware of details and momentary features. In short, the viewer’sperception amounts to a vigilant, personal montage and assemblage of data and codes.This new condition implies a radical shift from what might be termed centralized attentionto subtextual reading, both visual and literary. Given the many hours we spend online, thisacquired condition of motley concentration is not easily dispensed with when we are offline,as we easily adopt a similar attitude of omitting and editing data according to our currentneeds and interests. This often results in a bizarre state of being in which we enjoy a kind ofself-determination, gifted with a hopeful power to resist the art of manipulation, but at the riskof becoming lost in a disconnected and solitary live world.20. For more information and to see the trailer visit: www.zacharyoberzan.com.

48 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics49be exchanged for permanent live streaming on wandering screens, and, thanks to the newapplication Facebook Places, you can share where you are and who you are with in realtimeusing your mobile device. In 2007, Google Earth was launched, with the enthusiasticpromise that the satellite-function will soon provide up-to-date and full coverage. In 2008,the TruVision T-5000 T-Ray Camera, capable of seeing through clothing and certain kinds ofmaterial infrastructure, was released for private sale. According to the promotional website, 21the T5000 is compact, rugged, portable, easy-to-use and ‘completely safe’. But what if thistechnology is combined with our public CCTV infrastructure, let alone an online platform likeGoogle Earth? How then, will the full exposure of our private life be averted, if it turns out thatthe technical devices at our disposal really are so ‘compact’, ‘portable’ and ‘easy-to-use’? Inshort, sooner or later, every user will become socially and psychologically confined within acomplex mixed reality. But to end on a positive note, once we have become ‘imprisoned’, thesame mixed reality could very well also bring some relief. Take Mohamed Bourouissa’s experimentalfiction film Temps Morts (2009). The film represents a correspondence betweentwo people, one who is imprisoned and another who is not, as a montage of mobile phoneregistrations. With this film, Bourouissa presents a hopeful prospect: thanks to new media,detention is counterbalanced by a free and intensive circulation of communication, includingimages and clips of a world ‘outside’.Still from Your Brother, Remember? (2010). Courtesy of artist Zachary Oberzan.Finally, web video is also a significant in-between in the overall evolution towards a mixedreality. The ability to ‘Broadcast Yourself’ is not only blurring the distinction between privateand public, it connects people together in a public and virtual realm. And it does so in anincessantly increasing manner, constantly breaking down the limitations of time and space.For instance, vlogs can already be transformed in a kind of life-logging, Skype-sessions can21. www.TruVision.com.

50 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics51ReferencesBaudrillard, Jean. ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, in Mark Poster (ed.) Selected Writings, Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1988.http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html.Bourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, NewYork: Lukas & Sternberg, 2001.Colomina, Beatriz. ‘Enclosed by Images: the Eameses’ Multiscreen Architecture’ in Stan Douglas andChristopher Aemon (eds) Art of Projection, Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, (2009), pp. 36-57.Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1968.Elseasser, Thomas. ‘“Constructive Instability”, or: The Life of Things as the Cinema’s Afterlife?’, inGeert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds) Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam:Institute of Network Cultures, 2008, pp. 13-33.Gunning, Tom. ‘The Long and the Short of It: Centuries of Projecting Shadows, From Natural Magicto the Avant-Garde’, in Stan Douglas and Christopher Aemon (eds) Art of Projection, Ostfildern,Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2009, pp. 23-36._____. ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in Thomas Elsaesserand Adam Barker (eds) Early Film. British Film Institute, 1989.Nietzsche, Friedrich. ‘Reason in Philosophy’, in Twilight of the Idols, 1888.http://www.handprint.com/SC/NIE/GotDamer.html#sect3.Pfaller, Robert. ‘Interpassivity and Misdemeanors: the Analysis of Ideology and the Žižekian Toolbox’,International Journal of Žižek Studies, 1.1 (2007): 33-50.Plato. The Sophist. http://philosophy.eserver.org/plato/sophist.txt.Žižek, Slavoj. ‘The Interpassive Subject’, Centre Georges Pompidou, Traverses, 1998. http://www.lacan.com/zizek-pompidou.htm.AcknowledgementsThe author would like to thank the editors for their helpful remarks and Chris Chemerchak for proofreading.Special thanks are offered to Johan Grimonprez, my colleagues of the Royal Academy ofFine Arts (KASK), University College Ghent (i.e. Hilde D’haeyere, Edwin Carels) and Dominiek Hoens(Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht) for the inspiring discussions.The DivX ExperienceVito CampanelliSince the launch of Napster in 1999, more than 10 years of the diffusion of file-sharingplatforms have radically altered the modalities of distribution, and the fruition of cultural objects.1 From this standpoint, the question that arises for me is: How is aesthetic perceptionaffected by the altered distribution and production of cultural materials exchanged in P2P(peer-to-peer) networks? I believe that this issue can be approached from two points of view:first, these practices seem to preclude new forms of aesthetic experiences that I have termed‘disturbed’; second, it is also possible to observe an increasing taste for imperfection in thebroader media system. By identifying the historical premises of these two developments, Iwant to trace the distinguishing features of the new aesthetic sensibility being formed beforeour very eyes. This analysis is dependent on a series of examples, each of which leads me tothe hypothesis that a taste for imperfection is growing in all fields of visual culture, includingcinema, art, pornography and advertising. As we credit truthfulness only to imperfect imagesand sounds, we have increasingly developed a sort of generalized distrust of the cold perfectionof the cultural industries.Imperfect Cultural ObjectsWatching a movie downloaded from the internet offers a wide range of experiences. There arecountless grades of quality available, all of which are strictly dependent on the processes aparticular video file has gone through in order to be made ready for downloading and sharingin a digital environment. To make things clearer, it is necessary to make a distinction betweenfiles realized directly from an original support, such as Screener, DVD-Rip, Disk image, orHDTV-Rip, and the so-called cam. In the first case, what we usually have is a simple copyof material already in a digital format, which has been compressed through special codecsso as to be able to fit into the often limited bandwidth of a domestic connection. Camming iscompletely different: cam files are realized by recording screen images with a camera. Mostof the time, cams are videos recorded by a compact digital camcorder inside a movie theatre,but there are many other different, and more imaginative, modalities. 2Cams are the product of a remarkable chain of processes intervening between analogue anddigital formats. In fact, even if the shots are captured on film, editing and post-production nowtake place in a digital format. Subsequently, the digital images are re-converted to film, so1. This paper is adapted from a talk given at Video Vortex 4 (Split, 21-23 May 2009) and theresearch on the aesthetics of web forms which has resulted in my book, Web Aesthetics: HowDigital Media Affect Culture and Society, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam and Institute of NetworkCultures, Amsterdam, 2010.2. See Wikipedia for a fuller definition and description of cams: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam_(bootleg).

52 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics53that they can be distributed and screened in cinemas – cinemas in which ‘pirate cameras’record the screened images, thus returning them to a digital format. This ‘stolen’ recordingis later compressed into a file small enough to be shared over P2P networks. While there isnot time, here, to discuss the heroic cinema-goer who ‘conquers’ the film by producing apersonal copy of it, we should at least take a moment to credit him or her with contributing tothe distribution of cultural forms. What is important, when discussing cams, is to understandthe role of qualitative variables other than film compression modalities. More specifically, let’sconsider two factors in depth. First of all, the quality of the recording, which largely dependson the camera used, its position in the movie theatre, and the degree to which the cameracan be held steady. The second factor is the presence of extraneous noise in the recording,which will be present unless the recording can be made through a direct connection to theaudio source. Otherwise, the sound will be conditioned by the circumstances of the fieldrecording, including the diffusion and refraction of sound waves by the physical architectureof the cinema. When watching a movie downloaded from the internet, the quality is alwayscompromised by the file compression. When watching a cam, however, there are an evengreater number of overlapping levels – far more than the creators of the film could haveconceived or planned for.Disturbed Aesthetic ExperiencesOne variable is the position of the camera inside the theatre. Obviously, a lateral position resultsin a rather unusual spatial perspective, especially with respect to the classical central framingmodel, which we have inherited from painting, the cinema, television and computer screens.According to this classical model, the spectator is ideally positioned centrally with respect tothe item they are viewing. The lateral position which distinguishes some cam videos is usuallyconsidered the result of random factors, such as the cammer arriving too late to the cinemato take a centrally located seat. What must be emphasized is the extent to which these factorsare outside the control of the film’s director, and are instead the result of an external point ofview upon the film. Another level superimposed on the film is the background noise whichcharacterizes many cam videos. Generally speaking, audio quality depends on the positioningof the camera’s microphone towards the loudspeakers in the theatre. And yet, however well itis positioned, the effect will be quite similar to placing one’s head inside a box – the refractionof sound within the cinema produces a constant echo, which gives rise to the sense that thesource of the sound is moving continuously closer to, and away from, the listener. The moststriking aspect of the sound is, however, the background noise that mingles with the film’saudio: laughter, handclapping, coughing and the ‘Shushes!’ one often hears at the cinema.All these disturbances become part of the digital file which will be shared from computerto computer through a P2P connection. They are intrusions that, blended with the originalwork, create a new work. On the one hand, this could be taken to give rise to a feeling thatone is watching the film inside a cinema. On the other hand, cams may be read in light oftheir intrinsic potential to superimpose original empathetic elements onto the film itself. Thisis a new unicum, in which individual authorship and collective authorship blend together in acompletely random way – these new factors are unpredictable and unintended, yet unique,signs of a specific time and place. Here, I will focus my attention on the moment of fruitionof cultural products shared on the internet. Domestic viewing of a film downloaded from theinternet is a familiar product of the ‘home cinema’ phenomenon. What distinguishes watchinga movie downloaded from the web from other domestic formats such as DVD or Pay TVis the overall drop in quality of the experience. The cost of the compromise between qualityand file size becomes clear to the individual when they actually play downloaded content. Wemight say that the less a user ‘pays’ in terms of time downloading a file, the more they will paywhen watching it, due to the interference caused by the loss of data. And we keep on sharing‘corrupted’ digital materials even while perfectly aware of their inevitable – we might even say,necessary – imperfection.The absence of barriers to the free flow of cultural digital materials seems to have become amore important value than the quality of the aesthetic experience itself. In this light, I believewe should ask: What is the value of a disturbed aesthetic experience? There are many theorieslinking the sense of beauty to the presence of imperfection as an escape from insignificance,triteness, or indifference, as is the case in the work of the Lithuanian-French semiologist AlgirdasGreimas, 3 for example. However, if we look to the past for historical precedents to helpus understand present phenomena, we encounter real problems. What is new about the behavioursin play here prevents any direct connection with previous experience. I would liketo suggest, therefore, that we need to focus on the concept, rather than the agents, of disturbance.If we think of the 19th century, and the disturbance to aesthetic enjoyment caused byindustrialization, the birth of the metropolis, and the presence of masses of people, we quicklyunderstand how familiar the concept of disturbance is within the history of aesthetics. As weknow well, and as Baudelaire so wonderfully demonstrated, 4 the unease caused by the dinof the modern city is also a source of inspiration, and even constitutes the opportunity for anew form of art. Following in Baudelaire’s footsteps, one author who clearly understood thetransformations triggered by modernity was Walter Benjamin, who developed the ‘theory of theshock’; German poet Rainer Maria Rilke also attended to the unbearable noise and chaos of themetropolis – Paris, in his case. 5 However, considering the artistic avant-garde of the previouscentury, it is the Futurists that undoubtedly offer the most interesting insights into the aestheticvalue of disturbance. I am thinking, here, of the importance given to noise in Futurist music,and more particularly of the painter Luigi Russolo’s position. As expressed in L’arte dei rumori(The Art of Noises), 6 Russolo’s thesis is that the multiplication of machines entails an increase3. Algirdas J. Greimas, De l’imperfection, Périgueux: Pierre Fanlac, 1987.4. Baudelaire writes: ‘I was crossing the boulevard in a great hurry, splashing through the mudin the midst of a seething chaos, and with death galloping at me from every side, I gave asudden start and my halo slipped off my head and fell into the mire of the macadam. I was fartoo frightened to pick it up. I decided it was less unpleasant to lose my insignia than to get mybones broken. Then too, I reflected, every cloud has a silver lining. I can now go about incognito,be as low as I please and indulge in debauch like ordinary mortals. So here I am as you see,exactly like yourself’. Charles Baudelaire, Perte d’auréole, 1865, trans. ‘Loss of Halo’, in CharlesBaudelaire, Paris spleen, trans. Louise Varèse, New York: New Directions, 1970, p. 94.5. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Gong’ (1925), in Stephen Mitchell (ed. and trans.) Selected Poetry of RainerMaria Rilke, New York: Random House/Vintage, 1989, p. 282.6. Luigi Russolo, L’arte dei rumori, Milan: Direzione del Movimento Futurista, 1913; The Art ofNoises, trans. Ben Barclay, New York: Pendragon, 2005, available at http://www.thereminvox.com/article/articleview/117.

54 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics55in sources of disturbance, and a concomitant increase in our ability to distinguish between amultiplicity of noises. Rather than being simply imitated, Russolo insists that we must ‘combinethem according to our imagination’. 7 Clearly, for Futurists, disturbances are both a constitutiveelement of artistic practice and of the aesthetic experience itself. Another Futurist, GiacomoBalla, translates the concept of sound in visual terms, combining with and superimposing abroken line onto a curved one, so as to produce a ‘line of speed’. This solution, along with theanalogy between painting and music, are echoed in the work of Wassily Kandinsky. In his 1926work Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane), Kandinsky specifically refers to thedissonance between a curved line and a broken one, seen as an element of irregularity, ofbreach, of interference- basically, an element that interrupts perceptual continuity. 8Disturbed Aesthetics and SocietyAt this point, it should be clear that the concept of a disturbed aesthetic experience is notnew at all. While admitting, as Lev Manovich claims, 9 that interference resulting from selectivecompression will tend to disappear as technology evolves, we must consider that we arecurrently faced with two different models of digital cultural production: on the one hand the‘model of perfection’ represented by those digital supports, such as CD, DVD and Blu-Ray,that promise the best possible quality in terms of reproduction and archiving of digital data; onthe other, the ‘model of fluidity’ which puts the value of exchangeability before that of quality.Such models assume, in addition, two politically antithetic positions: adhering either implicitlyor explicitly to market rules; or the total denial of those same rules.Within this struggle, it appears to be economic factors that play the most significant role. Infact, the cost of the more ‘noble’ or better quality supports leads large numbers of people to7. Russolo, L’arte dei rumori.8. See Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, trans. Howard Dearstyne and Hilla Rebay, NewYork: Dover Publications, 1979. I discuss the subject of disturbance in aesthetic experience atlength in Web Aesthetics: How Digital Media Affect Culture and Society,9. Manovich writes: ‘rather than being an aberration, a flaw in the otherwise pure and perfect worldof the digital, where not even a single bit of information is ever lost, lossy compression is the veryfoundation of computer culture, at least for now. Therefore, while in theory, computer technologyentails the flawless replication of data, its actual use in contemporary society is characterized byloss of data, degradation, and noise’. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 2001, p.55. Manovich, with the words ‘at least for now’, refers to a near futurein which new compression techniques will further limit the loss of data, or alternatively, the speedof the connections will make it unnecessary to compress a file before sharing it on the internet.In commenting on my presentation of an original core of this essay, during the internationalconference Video Vortex 4 (Split, 21-23 May 2009), Manovich pointed out that technology is,today, close to offering the transmission of video with a quality that tends to perfection throughfaster internet connections. However, these projects are still at an experimental level, andtherefore have no impact on a significant mass of users and, even when they do, it is easy toimagine that they will create a new kind of digital divide between people (primarily U.S. citizens)admitted to the benefits of these new technologies and Third World users that will continue for along time to exchange imperfect materials. Ultimately, until this scenario is realized in practice,we will continue to share ‘impure’ digital materials, recognizing the inevitability, almost thenecessity, of this imperfection.opt for the model of fluidity. This scenario highlights a breach in society with respect to aestheticenjoyment itself. On the one hand, there is a more or less large group of individuals whocan have access to aesthetic experiences that strive towards perfection. On the other hand,there are an increasing number of people who are obliged to cope with disturbed experiences.We are, therefore, witnessing new mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion with important differencesfrom the recent past. Traditionally, the poorer classes have simply been excluded fromfull access to culture. The digitization of cultural products and their proliferation on the internetseems to complicate this reality. As long as they have a broadband internet connection, lesswealthy people have a greater opportunity to access cultural products, even if those productsare more imperfect due to amateur processes of reproduction and archiving of digital data.Here, we face a reality that has many problematic aspects. P2P networks, along with otherforms for the distribution of ‘pirated’ material, allow the cultural industries to spread the dominantcultural model to people and communities who might otherwise have been excludedfrom it, whether because of their social position, or because they have freed themselves fromthe slavery of television for the sake of more modern addictions. At the same time, an opposingforce emerges: through P2P networks and those practices linking to what are laughablytermed ‘non-authorized copies’, small dissenting minorities are given access to new and importantforms of cultural production. Since these products have been created to oppose, orat least have been conceived outside the dominant moulds or ideologies, such products aresystematically excluded from the major film distribution and international television networks.Being able to access non-authorized sources allows us to hear voices alternative to thosewhich bombard us from the mainstream. It also allows us to stay in touch with our culturalmemory, over and above those rare occasions when a window opens in the traditional mediaand allows us a glimpse of something worthwhile. If I want to see a film by Lang, Vertov orBuñuel, why should I have to wait until some under-financed minor local film festival managesto organize a retrospective once a year? Indeed, why pay $20 to Amazon to watch the film,when I can simply type the director’s name into eMule’s search area, and see what other usershave posted for sharing? In addition, video pirating can play an important role in encouragingthe production of independent videos. As Tilman Bäumgartel reports, this is the case inSouth East Asia where there has, in recent years, been an incredible explosion of independentproductions. 10A New Aesthetic SensibilityIt is perhaps possible to radicalize the symmetry between digital tools and independent productions.The hypothesis I would like to verify is that the use of digital tools in relation tocinema, and the consequent lowering of product quality, are not necessarily a consequenceof the small budgets of young independent directors. Rather, I believe we are in the midst10. Tilman Bäumgartel, ‘Media Piracy and Independent Cinema in Southest Asia’, in Geert Lovink andSabine Niederer (eds) Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of NetworkCultures, 2008, p. 266. See also Tilman Bäumgartel, ‘The Culture of Piracy in the Philippines’, inShin Dong Kim and Joel David (eds) Cinema in / on Asia, Gwanju: Asian Culture Forum, 2006.Available at: http://www.asian-edition.org/piracyinthephilippines.pdf.

56 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics57of a new aesthetic positioning – one which, as usual, is picked up by the antennae of artistsbefore becoming obvious to all. 11 The first point to make is that, if economics were the onlyfactors in play, we could not explain why several important European directors have madeuse of low-cost digital technologies when they had the economic means to be use the mostsophisticated analogue technologies. Of course, one might object that in the most emblematiccase, that of Dogma 95, the decision to flexibly interpret the ninth rule (that is, to seeAcademy 35mm film as the standard solely for film distribution), was dictated by the need torespect the third rule, which holds that shooting must be done with handheld cameras (notexactly an easy task with the heavy 35mm). One might thus be tempted to dismiss von Trier,Vinterberg, or Kragh-Jacobsen’s choices to shoot in digital format as merely the result of themore manageable DV. One could also object that, in the case of the Blair Witch Project 12 orthe more recent Cloverfield 13 it is only a narrative expedient. One could also talk of a purelystylistic exercise in the case of Giuseppe Bertolucci’s Probably Love. 14 Indeed, we couldcontinue indefinitely to provide reasons for directors’ decisions not to use film, even whenthey could afford to do so. However, I believe it is quite clear that these are all conscious aestheticchoices, which have nothing to do with the finances available to the production. In myopinion, it is only by accepting the fact that both independent and mainstream directors areopting to use DV cameras and other low-level technologies with respect to international filmstandards as an explicitly aesthetic choice, that we can begin to understand the motivationsbehind such decisions.Certainly, there is a broad fascination with everything digital. Perhaps, however, this is alsoan attempt to produce images which resemble those that are increasingly shaping the tastesof the general public. Indeed, the contemporary visual landscape is constituted by YouTubevideos, films downloaded on P2P networks, television news footage from around the globe,the Islamic terrorist propaganda videos shown on Al-Jazeera, the Twin Towers footage shoton amateur video cameras by shocked bystanders, homemade porn videos posted by jiltedlovers, and by the wobbly images produced by the millions of webcams pointing, it seems, ateveryone, everywhere, these days.Thus, we have a visual landscape characterized by low-resolution images, which are sometimesjumpy, sometimes grainy, and almost always badly lit. This is indeed a disturbed landscape,but one much closer to life than the images depicted in the glossy perfection of themedium of film. Immersed for hours on end in this continuous flow of low-resolution images,it is inevitable that our aesthetic tastes will be affected. Before our very eyes, a new aestheticsensibility is being formed: one which favours speed, immediacy and realism over refinedperfection; the documentary attitude over fiction; Lumière over Méliès. In sum, directors’11. As Marshall McLuhan stated: ‘The artist picks up the message of cultural and technologicalchallenge decades before its transforming impact occurs’.Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw Hill,1964, p. 65.12. The Blair Witch Project (dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999).13. Cloverfield (dir. Matt Reeves, 2008).14. Probably Love (dir. Giuseppe Bertolucci, 2001).preference for DV over the traditional film camera makes sense as an attempt to be closer toreality - obviously not to reality itself, but to reality as it is appears to us through the media,and through digital media in particular. As it is the only reference we have, this reality shouldnot be subject to judgement, but must be imagined and lived to the full, in the sense that itsimages must in some way be reproduced.Brian De Palma’s Redacted (2007) explores the ‘non-truthful truth’ of video and film images,and offers valuable reflections upon many of these points. Its brief opening sequenceis paradigmatic: a smooth camera movement descending from above (a classic cinematicimage) is overlaid with the recording date (a classic handycam image). Following this is atitle in a semi-professional graphic, while the colloquial voiceover of a soldier (who is alsothe film’s protagonist) states that he is the author of the recording itself; after which a highlyamateurish tracking shot ends with the protagonists looking collectively into the camera;and finally with a freeze-frame. . As this incipit demonstrates, the film is something likea Hollywood milk-shake of DV footage, YouTube fragments, wannabe documentaries andindie parodies. What is particularly worth noting is De Palma’s ability to capture the phenomenonwhich has so radically modified the aesthetic perception of film viewers; he playsat alternating and superimposing classic cinema aesthetics with the DIY aesthetic that hasexploded along with the global spread of digital video cameras. De Palma is fully awareof the present dominant aesthetic. In fact, the very theme of the film, which is the war inIraq, makes this play of alternating and superimposed aesthetics necessary, as the absoluteuntrustworthiness of embedded journalists has made it normal to look for bits of ‘real’ truthonly in that unofficial footage ‘grabbed’ by brave reporters, often at risk of their own lives. Atthis point, we are used to attributing truthfulness only to low-resolution images, such as thegrainy, blurred images from a mobile phone or from a tiny hidden video camera. De Palmademonstrates that he is fully aware of all this, and he stages an intelligent representation ofour present circumstances.Contemporary media art testifies to precisely this evolution of aesthetic taste. Here, wemight consider Julien Maire’s Low Resolution Cinema (2005), a project which presents anabstract vision of the geographical space of Berlin. 15 Using various techniques, includingdrastic resolution reduction, images are decompressed and projected into 3D space. Thisis achieved by a special projector using two black and white, half-broken Liquid CrystalDisplays (LCDs), so that only the upper or lower part of the image is visible. The LCDs constantlymove back and forth, towards and away from the projector’s light source – whichitself alternates between back and forth movements. The effect produced by this complextechnique is of images so de-stratified that they evoke the scrolling lines of code seen inThe Matrix trilogy, or the tight printing of characters produced on the scroll of a dot matrixprinter. In Low Resolution Cinema, the perfection of cinema film images becomes a blurredmemory, but the magic of cinema, that prodigious illusion produced by moving images,remains absolutely intact.15. See: http://julienmaire.ideenshop.net/project5.shtml.

58 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics59Victor Liu’s Delter (2002) offers us an explicit magnification of the rough nature of images indigital movement. 16 Liu produced software able to extract the data between two frames ofan MPEG video. By visualizing only the inter-frames, the objects of the images that form thevideo become deleted, leaving only a weak trace, a phantom of the movement that was there.In this project, Liu therefore exposes the data structure that accomplishes the process ofcompression. He reveals a scheme that was created to be read and interpreted by machinesalone. By observing this structure, it is possible to observe the phenomenon of man becomingmachine (the last stage of our aim of replacing it), through the reconstruction of the wholemovement in the images deprived by Delter of their own objects.Another interesting project is Swedish artist Anders Weberg’s Unpixelated (2009). The ideabehind this artwork arises from the fact that in Japanese porn, it is required by law (article175 of the Japanese Penal Code) that the male and female genitalia be blurred to obscureit from sight. The pixellation or mosaic blurring of the sexually explicit area is referred to asbokashi. Hence, in Unpixelated, Weberg utilizes software that reconstructs the blurred areaon censored pornographic films, returning it to its original state. Once this software is applied,a mosaic blur is then applied to the rest of the image, leaving only the once censored pubichair or genitalia to be viewed clearly. 17A Taste for ImperfectionIf the analysis of these works seems to support the hypothesis that a taste for imperfectionis spreading within all fields of visual culture, further confirmation comes from the rise of anew rhetoric based on the ‘aesthetic of imperfection’ in the field of advertising. One exampleis the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising campaign for Maryland Cookies: ‘Imperfect, but you lovethem’. 18 Another is the Italian campaign for the new BMW series 5 ‘Nessuno è Perfetto’ (Nobodyis Perfect), which shows the car being admired by a woman with a large nose and anotherwith a chipped tooth. 19 Yet another example is the touching praise of small flaws whichmake a person perfect in the ‘Beautifully Imperfect’ campaign, financed by the SingaporeMinistry of Community Development, Youth and Sport. 20 I have deliberately chosen casesfrom disparate areas of culture in order to demonstrate clearly the business world, too, isattempting to appropriate the concept of the truthfulness of flaws. The desire for irregularity,for the breaking of symmetry, characterizes the spirit of our times. If it is this that the publicviews as ‘authentic feeling’, we should not be surprised if communication experts try to dresstheir messages and products in a cloak of authenticity.tion). In my opinion, these forms of production occupy a central position because they disrupta model of sexuality based on the obsessive repetition of inconsistent narrative routines.Slavoj Žižek summarizes the formula effectively: a plumber knocks at the door of a lonely,sexually provocative woman who, after her sink has been fixed, suggests that there is anotherhole that needs to be fixed. 21 In its display of stolen private moments, and the rare forms ofartistic pornography, amateur pornography restores the connection with the imagination thathas been censored by mainstream pornography. In these cases, viewers are stimulated totry and imagine a narrative line that links what they see with what precedes that moment.They are therefore free to imagine the life of the protagonists, the events that took placebefore the explicit act they are witnessing. In other words, they are using their imagination.Such realities function as important antagonists to the porn industry’s attempt to crystallizean aesthetic of desire.As with news of the war in Iraq, the user of pornographic material seeks a little bit of truthfulnessin low-resolution, amateur digital videos. As the feeling is that high-resolution porn videosare too distant from reality, the industry seeks to regain its market share by imitating theamateur aesthetic – thereby reinforcing the trend towards disturbed aesthetic experiences. Itis possible to state that the praise of imperfection is increasingly the zeitgeist. Our time creditstruthfulness only to imperfect images and sounds, developing a sort of generalized distrust ofthe cold perfection of the cultural industries, in fields as diverse as cinema, the news media,new media art, and advertising.However, any analysis of pirated cultural products shared on the web is incomplete withoutan analysis of one of its statistically dominant forms: pornography. It is worth highlightingthat the internet enables access to a striking number of materials for amateur production(whether they are shared with the approval of their creators and producers is another ques-16. http://www.n-gon.com/delter.17. http://www.unpixelated.org.18. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vusmtmBRLWU.19. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NvBrsW17fM.20. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I3ZmNKYma0.21. Slavoj Žižek in, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) by Sophie Fiennes. A two-hourdocumentary scripted and presented by Žižek.

60 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics61ReferencesBaudelaire, Charles. Perte d’auréole, 1865, trans. ‘Loss of Halo’, in Charles Baudelaire, Paris spleen,trans. Louise Varèse, New York: New Directions, 1970.Bäumgartel, Tilman. ‘Media Piracy and Independent Cinema in Southest Asia’, in Geert Lovink andSabine Niederer (eds), Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute ofNetwork Cultures, 2008._____. ‘The Culture of Piracy in the Philippines’, in Shin Dong Kim and Joel David (eds), Cinema in /on Asia, Gwanju: Asian Culture Forum, 2006.Greimas, Algirdas J. De l’imperfection, Périgueux: Pierre Fanlac, 1987.Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw Hill, 1964.Rilke, Rainer Maria. ‘Gong’ (1925), in Stephen Mitchell (ed. and trans.) Selected Poetry of RainerMaria Rilke, New York: Random House/Vintage, 1989.Russolo, Luigi. L’arte dei rumori, Milan: Direzione del Movimento Futurista, 1913; trans. Ben Barclay,The Art of Noises, New York: Pendragon, 2005.Regarding the Sex, Lies and Videotapesof Others: Memory, Counter-Memory,and Mystified RelationsSarah KésenneAccording to Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, ‘with the appearance of new technologies, youalways get a pornographic element. There’s always a desire to relate in a physical way tothese technologies’. 1 Last year, when I read a terrifying story in the newspaper about a girlthat killed herself after her ex-boyfriend sent nude pictures of her to classmates and friends,I recalled Tuymans’ statement. We might take the net genre of ‘ex–girlfriend revenge movies’,which are sad imitations of celebrity sex-tapes, of which Paris Hilton’s P2P (peer-to-peer) hitis probably the most famous example, as an extreme example of how our viewing is affectedby shifting parameters of intimacy and remembrance. These 21st century pop videos aresimultaneously shocking, touching and fascinating; exhibiting a bizarre mix of tendernessand cruelty, familiarity and exposure. And yet, this kind of user- generated content is rathertypical for the increasingly ‘mobile’ internet. Rather than circulating on open platforms suchas YouTube or Vimeo, these videos are sent between the portable communication devices ofpeople who know each other. Even if they are published on the net, these videos are takenoffline before the mainstream media picks up on the controversy. What is found online aresoft porn imitations of ex-girlfriend revenge movies, the origins of which remain obscure.Robert Devriendt, Victimes de la passion, 2010, Courtesy Galerie Baronian-Francey en Galerie Hervé Loevenbruck.These imitations are imagined experiences of authenticity. They include normal girls in Americanliving rooms, wearing girlie underwear and stripping, dancing, shaking, and imitatingMTV clips. Sometimes, the girls talk back to the camera, often after being encouraged by thecameraman/boyfriend, who stays out of the frame. The suggestion is of a close bond betweengirl and cameraman, one of trust and playful desire, which is reinforced by the low-resolutionwebcam quality and the hand-cam shakiness. The attractiveness of these images arises fromtheir suggestion of authenticity, and the pleasure of voyeurism. And yet, the promotional bannerof a porn website makes the set-up all too clear: these living rooms are also porn sets; thegirls porn actresses; their lovers bullies. In this way, we live the mise-en-scène of the everydayas a production line of appropriated media performances.1. Jan Braet, ‘“Wat hab je nu Geschilderd?” “Niks!”’, in Knack, 13 May, 2009.

62 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics63The MPEG4 cell phone circles of teenagers are interesting sites of investigation becausethey point to contemporary ways of viewing and remembering. They reveal the way in whichthe contemporary meaning of transgression depends upon the degree to which networksare open or closed, and on the control and ownership of distribution channels. However,distribution continues to interact with the power of the image – both its morality and memoryfunction.If amateur images are at the nexus of this dynamic between economic and socialrelationships, ex–girlfriend revenge movies are even more radical points of convergence. Tothink adequately about the contemporary networked image, we need to go beyond classicalconcepts of cinematographic identification and activist politics of participation.The Amateur ExceptionWhat happened between browsing through our family albums at home, and clicking on Facebookimages in our offices? Before they were put on the internet, amateur images constitutedan exceptional 20th century viewing experience. When an image is put online, this exceptionalquality is lost.Mekhitar Garabedian, M.VERDONCKLAAN, 2003, videoprojection, DVD, 8’40’’. With Vergine Karaguezian, soundby 80000 (Kwinten Callens). Courtesy of the artist andhoet bekaert gallery.Multiplication is a key feature of the photographicimage. As we all know, just as WalterBenjamin predicted, the industrializeddistribution of photographic images had amajor impact on 20th century art. Throughthe publicity of print, news media and television,it became a mainstream, everydayexperience to look at pictures of people onedid not know. Each photograph thus holdsthe promise of total exposure and distribution,and of a separation between the sitesof filming and viewing.In the mass communication media of the 20th century, amateur images subverted this industrialprinciple of photography. Although private photos could be as exposed and heavilydistributed as other images, they often stayed locked away in closets, albums and purses.The relation we had with these images was strong and intimate. We knew the people andthe places in the picture, and the people who took the photograph. From a contemporarystandpoint, 20th century amateur photography and film stand out as the last possible intimateand authentic viewing experience possible. These media suspended the total exposureof the photographic image; the meaning of amateur images was this unfulfilled promise ofdistribution.find in this new situation? What does it mean to look at your own posted private images? Canthe current craze of amateur activity also be explained as a longing for the loss of ‘familiarviewing’? And finally, can the renewed closure of networks provide what we are looking for?Susan Sontag and ‘Mystified Relations’In her classic work On Photography, 2 American philosopher Susan Sontag concluded with acall for ‘an ecology of images’, censuring the visual stimuli with which a consumerist societyassaults us. Twenty five years later, returning to the subject of visual representations of warand violence in Western culture, Sontag admits to the futility and impotence of her earlierdemand. Soon after it was published in 2003, Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others becamea key text for art students. 3 In this later work, Sontag makes a sinister parallel, demonstratinghow the Western gaze was determined by representative programs of suffering and warin Western art history. Sontag makes it clear that this analysis extends to photography ingeneral: in the end, ‘images of cruelty’ exemplify the act of ‘looking’ itself; the subject/objectrelation in each image entails a voyeuristic stance.Although it might seem outdated in relation to 21st century user-generated content, Sontag’sfocus on the viewing experience and the distributive principle of photography continuesto be relevant to network culture. In essence, Sontag’s work is an attempt to describe themainstream Western viewing experience, which is defined by the worldwide distribution ofmedia images. Sontag described how the Western television viewer is disconnected from thesuffering of the people depicted in media images, leading to a conflict between watchingand acting that causes apathy and frustration. 4 Sontag puts the very existence of any bondbetween the viewer and the subject of the image, including that of empathy or identification,into question. Instead, the relation the viewer has to media images is analysed in terms ofdistance and indifference. According to Sontag, we simulate a spatial relation between viewerand victim where there is none, a mystification that is immoral: ‘The feeling of being presentwith the suffering of others, made possible by images, suggests that there is a connectionbetween faraway victims and the viewer: this is mystification of what we really can do’. 5Sontag also denounces the ‘immorality’ of images which lead to the de-subjectification ofwhat is depicted. Quoting Virginia Woolf‘s description of a corpse in a Spanish civil warphotograph, which could be equally taken for a woman or a pig, Sontag points to the factthat suffering victims are powerless because they are unknown and nameless. In our visualculture, only celebrities are known by their names; all others are degraded to representativesof their race, age, profession or ethnicity. 6 It is thus clear that each photograph, due to itspotential for distribution, has the power to make the subject it depicts into an anonymousobject. As Sontag writes:User-generated content and social networking sites such as Facebook ‘corrected’ this situation.Today, amateur images no longer represent an exception to the photographic principlesof multiplication and distribution. Let’s say that the situation was ‘normalized’ into a state oftotal exposure. This raises several questions. Can there be intimacy in the viewing experienceonce amateur images have entered into the public space? Most of the time, our connectionto the people and places in these pictures is entirely random. What kind of intimacy do we2. Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977.3. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Penguin Books, 2004.4. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 97.5. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p.105.6. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 59.

64 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics65The more faraway, exotic or unknown the place is, the more we will be confronted withrecognizable death people, suffering and dying in a direct way... . We want to see farawaysuffering. We don’t want to see suffering that is near. The other is somebody whois seen, not somebody who sees. 7In this sense, undistributed analogue family pictures might be seen as the ‘negatives’ of newsmedia images. The intimate experience of viewing family albums or home movies contrastssharply with Sontag’s description of the voyeuristic viewing experience entailed by war photography.Although amateur images no longer constitute an exception to the photographic paradigmof exposure and distribution, most of us act as if nothing has changed. Facebook profitsfrom this fiction of shared intimacy by turning a circle of friends into a pool of voyeurism andexposure. Such images result in a kind of simulated familiarity. These new shades of access,exposure and closure within private and public spheres are far from the intimate experienceof viewing 20th century amateur images. It is precisely this ‘suspended voyeurism’ that wasat stake in the public debate regarding the ‘do’s and don’ts of Facebook.The Dos and Don’ts of FacebookAt a certain moment, one could hear discussion on streets, trains and in bars regarding the exhibitionismand voyeurism of making private pictures visible to colleagues and half-strangers.What is fascinating is the way in which the shooting, uploading and viewing of 21st centuryinternet users is balancing the effects of the multiplication of viewing contexts. New productionand distribution technologies, including lighter and cheaper cameras and free, fast and easyediting software and internet platforms helps to reunify the locales for filming and viewing.Jasper Rigole, Paradise Recollected, Single Channel video,8mm-film transferred to video, 33min, 2008.Sontag has discussed the democratizingimpact of 1960s film technology, which allowedwar photographers using light, portableand cheap cameras to come closer totheir subjects. Without the close-ups and‘on the spot’ images these cameras madepossible, Sontag points out, the impact ofphotographs of the Vietnam war on Americanpublic opinion could never have beenso powerful. For Sontag, however, thiscloseness nevertheless creates imaginaryrelations between objects and subjects thatblock the progress towards real intervention.One might say that contemporary technologies have lead us to a similarly ambiguous situation.Democratic recording and editing technologies do reunify the acts of viewing and film-7. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 69.ing. Should we conceive of this process as the creation of endless possibilities for recognitionand familiarity, or is this better described in Sontag’s words, as ‘a mystification of what wereally can do’?Roland Barthes’ Counter-memoryAmateur pictures were exceptional in terms of memory: as the only photographs that couldactually be memories, they served to connect pictures to real experiences and places. Thiswas not true for most other photographic images. The lack of memory which goes with mostphotographs stands in the way of an intimate viewing experience. Yet it seems that a picturewill do everything it can to give rise to a feeling of familiarity within the viewer. The potentialfor distribution inherent within the photographic medium comes with another consequence:that of counter- or blocked memory.According to French philosopher Roland Barthes, photographic images are to a certain extentable to redirect, add, rewrite or replace memories. 8 Thus, Barthes’ radical concept ofcounter-memory states that photographic images are able to simulate proximity to reality, orindexicality, and are able to block remembrance: the counter–memory –image points to thefact that you remember something you did not experience. When the image starts to behavelike a memory, it is simulating the missing link between what you see and what you remember,and between the contexts of viewing and filming.Sontag’s concept of the mystified relation between television viewer and war victim may bearticulated with Barthes’ concept of counter-memory. Whereas Sontag condemns the fictionof the relationship between subject and object posited by the viewing of the photographic image,Barthes foregrounds the power of the image to give rise to a memory of what the viewerdid not experience. Even while such imaginative mechanisms became implicated with themajority of viewing experiences, amateur pictures preserved the authenticity of viewing aphotographic image. Uploading private pictures puts an end to this unique situation.When the real experiences behind user-generated content are injected with the fictions of‘blocked memory’ and ‘mystified relations’, the inevitable result is a voyeuristic playground.Now that they can be viewed by millions of strangers in a single click, amateur pictures havelost their exceptional power to create an intimate viewing experience as a ritual of remembrance.It is to be expected that images will increasingly manipulate our own highly personalmemories of daily life; one can already see people assuming poses and cameras viewpointsthey recall from films and other media. In the case of image recognition technology, memorybecomes completely defunct.We can see private images of strangers, and strangers can see our own private images.Without the connection to memory, it is impossible to predict how an image will be viewed.As Sontag states, ‘There’s no way to know what the effect of a picture will be’. 9 Is the current8. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, London:Vintage, 1993.9. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 121.

66 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics67‘archive fever’ a way to deal with these anxieties? Or are we done with ‘the question of likenessor unlikeness’? 10 Did the loss of these exceptional viewing conditions set loose the lasthidden controversies of the photographic medium?Sex, Lies and VideotapeIn recent years, there has been a tendency for the increased closure of networks, as usershave become more reflective regarding what to share online, and with whom. At first glance,this might seem to return us to the authentic, intimate viewing of amateur pictures in theprevious century. For example, the countless MPEG4 and JPEG files of friends, family andlovers exchanged over mobile phone networks seem to stay very much ‘in the family’. Thereis, however, no turning back; the transfer of images between camera, personal hard drive,and network will come to seem ever more natural and instantaneous in the future.The highly personal testimonials produced in the early days of YouTube have given way to thekind of informational trash that one experiences as a dense, endless, fragmentary hallucination.Newsreels, film trailers, porn teasers and other second-hand media are received on thesame platform as educational films, as personal and private content departed for platformssuch as Facebook. Meanwhile, the concomitant of the proliferation of networked media devicesis a heightened awareness of privacy. Users begin to adjust and limit access to theiruploaded photos, and make their content more difficult to find. We become better trained inthe mise-en-scène of our media performance and presence on the net, playing our roles foran anonymous and imaginary global public.Ex-girlfriend revenge movies also demonstrate the impossibility of returning to the past. Theincreasing closure of networks is subverted by its own means, as teenagers remix all theingredients of contemporary viewing into a dangerous cocktail. Ex-girlfriend revenge moviestear apart the most intimate viewing experience one can imagine: a girl undressing in frontof the boy she loves.Ex-girlfriend revenge movies represent the fulfilment of the photographic promise of distribution.As secret ‘wallet pictures’ of a naked girlfriend are made available to a broader public,they become de-subjectified; the object of a voyeuristic gaze. However, the relations betweensubject and object are not mystified as they are in the war photography discussed by Sontag.In the case of ex-girlfriend revenge movies, the immorality lies precisely in the fact that theviewers of the images do know the girl in some way. When the privileged access that oneperson (the boyfriend) has to the image is extended to a selection of ‘acquaintances’, thepact of the filming is broken. The exception previously constituted by the amateur situationis perverted by its own conditions. Just as Sontag claims, the distance between viewing andfilming context does not allow a sentimental relation, so it is immoral to suggest that it does.The meaning of this image lies in the altering of a viewing experience from radical familiarity,to a radical, incestuous kind of voyeurism.10. Florian Schneider, ‘Theses on the Concept of the Digital Simulacrum’, in Anselm Franke (ed.)Animism (Volume 1), Berlin; New York: Sternberg Press, 2010, pp. 54-56.The photographic principle of ‘blocked memory’ also plays a part here. Ambiguous accessentails confused functions of remembrance. Lack and presence of memory define the meaningof these visuals. The schoolmates of the girl have no memory of the scene, but they knewthe girl. While being filmed, the girl must have been filled with fear of a future interpretation,a future screening by uninvolved viewers. Meanwhile, the porn surfer querying ‘ex-girlfriendrevenge movies’ remembers the media controversy, and maybe his own amateur tapes, buthas never seen the girl who is being imitated by the porn actress.Ex –girlfriend revenge movies present themselves as the cruellest form of memory. Imagesintended to constitute highly intimate memories end up symbolizing blackmail, betrayal andrevenge. Perhaps these are, in the end, closer to traces and testimonials of reality than thenostalgic fictions that were their original intent. They are images without memory. As JeanBaudrillard writes: ‘Today it’s the real and not the map whose vestiges persist here andthere in the desert’. 11 According to the French philosopher, it is no longer necessary tolook for manifestations of the virtual – we should, rather, be attentive for traces of the real.Ex-girlfriend revenge movies seem to be both a violent eruption of the real, and rituals ofremembrance dedicated to the loss of the real.Outro: Alternatives to Simulation?This analysis has been grounded in the cultural moralism that has reigned over postmodernart theory since the 1960s, extending from Guy Debord’s sharp, situationist, and anti-capitalistanalysis of the ‘society of the spectacle’ and Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the Simulacrum.Both theorists conceived of a society in which the explosion of photographic images leadsthe signification of images to dominate all other forms of meaning, irrevocably distorting ourrelationship to reality. In an analogous but distinct way, Sontag’s conception of the immoralityof a mystified, simulated relation between a viewer and a victim polarizes reality and its simulation.Debord’s, Baudrillard’s and Sontag’s images of a passive and frustrated viewer is continuedby contemporary network theory, in which the user is also depicted as subordinated todominant ideological and commercial powers. For example, Geert Lovink has described theloneliness and narcosis entailed by social networking platforms. 12Is it possible to frame user-generated content differently? In Le Spectateur Émancipé,Jacques Rancière opposes the polarized separatism that characterizes theories of contemporaryexperience. Instead, he puts forward a concept of an emancipated, active viewer. 13 His‘desimulation’ is based on a critique of contemporary theatre and performance. The Frenchphilosopher claims that the democratic potential of the physical gathering of spectators andplayers is overestimated. In fact, he points out, theatre makers such as Artaud and Brechtwere developing stage strategies to break the illusive immersion of the theatre viewing experienceto stimulate this revolutionary dimension of the gathered crowd. And yet, Rancière sees11. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 1995, p. 197.12. See for example: Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, London:Routledge, 2007.13. Jacques Rancière, Le spectateur émancipé, Paris: La Fabrique éditions, 2008.

68 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics69no solution in the techniques of ‘distance’ and ‘suppression of distance’ they used. As analternative, Rancière proposes a model in which democratic emancipation is not based onthe group gathering but on the individual trajectory or narrative of everyday experience. Hebelieves that freedom is located in the very capacity of the viewer to associate and dissociate:L’emancipation comme réappropriation d’un rapport à soi perdu dans un processusde séparation. (...) C’est dans le pouvoir d’associer et de dissocier que résidel’émancipation du spectateur, c’est -à -dire, l’émancipation de chacun de nous commespectateur. 14In addition, Rancière writes that,ReferencesBarthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, London:Vintage, 1993.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 1995.Lovink, Geert. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, London: Routledge, 2007.Rancière, Jacques. Le spectateur émancipé, Paris: La Fabrique éditions, 2008.Schneider, Florian. ‘Theses on the Concept of the Digital Simulacrum’, in Anselm Franke (ed.) Animism(Volume 1), Berlin; New York: Sternberg Press, 2010, pp. 54-56.Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Penguin Books, 2004._____. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977.L’emancipation commence quand on comprend que regarder est aussi une actionqui confirme ou transforme cette distribution des positions. Le spectateur aussi agit,comme l’élève ou le savant. Il observe, il sélectionne, il compare, il interprète. C’est ceque signifie le mot d’émancipation: le brouillage de la frontière entre ceux qui agissentet ceux qui regardent, entre individus et membres d’un corps collectif. 15In the abilities of the spectator to look and show, and in the intermingling of spectators andproducers, Rancière sees emancipative power. This point of view deserves further analysis.How much of the ‘spectator’ remains in the paradigm of the ‘user’? What kind of new relationsbetween viewing, acting and thinking are out there?14. Rancière, Le spectateur émancipé, p.23. Author’s translation: Emancipation, as a reappropriationof the relation with oneself, is lost in a process of separation. (...) The emancipation of thespectator resides in its ability to associate and dissociate, in other words, the emancipation ofeach of us as a spectator.15. Rancière, Le spectateur émancipé, p.19. Author’s translation: Emancipation begins when oneunderstands that looking is also an act confirming or transforming the distribution of positions.The spectator also acts as a pupil or as a scholar. He observes, selects, compares and makesinterpretations. That’s what the word emancipation means: the interference of the bordersbetween those who act and those who look, and between individuals and members of acollective.

70 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move71Objets Propagés: The Internet Video asan Audiovisual FormatGabriel MenottiThe boundaries of an audiovisual language are commonly defined by their platform ofinscription, as in film or video. These physical underpinnings prescribe certain operationsof production that are a product of determinate elementary characteristics of the medium.However, as different audiovisual media converge, the practices they foster become mingled.Even though some traditions of production persist, works made for cinema, homevideo, television broadcast and even mobile phones can now be manufactured in virtuallythe same way, using very similar technologies. As we adopt digital technologies for mediaproduction, what really seem to set the boundaries of an audiovisual format are the dynamicsof consumption, understood not only as a particular viewing regime, but as the wholestructure of diffusion employed – intentionally or not – into bringing the work to the public.This could be a crucial signal that, as media theorist Vilém Flusser states, it is the mode ofdistribution that transforms a work into a praxis. 1 Otherwise, we may be engaging with themore systemic notion of materiality proposed by N. Katherine Hayles: ‘an emergent propertycreated through dynamic interactions between physical characteristics and signifyingstrategies’. 2Nonetheless, platforms of inscription are losing the specificity entailed by a particular medium,and the system of diffusion and consumption is being transformed. Any parameterdefined by the platform of inscription can be reformed by the interface of consumption.The place where this process can most easily be grasped is the World Wide Web, wherethe most diverse audiovisual pieces are transformed into ‘internet videos’ and subjected tothe dynamics of digital social networks. The horizon of these networks, we might say, is theInternet phenomenon: ‘the propagation of a digital file or hyperlink from one person to others... organically, voluntarily, and peer to peer, rather than by compulsion, predetermined path,or completely automated means’. 3This essay attempts to characterize the internet video as a format in and of itself, typified notby a specific language or subject, but by its particular logic of distribution. This logic operatesas a succession of détournements, which take an audiovisual form out of its original contextand push it ever forward, re-signifying it progressively. This progression transforms excerptsof feature films, home videos, and other pieces into autonomous works, based on the au-thorization of peers. Likewise, as they foster another, distributed regime of creation, internetvideos call upon a different regime of visuality.The Low Resolution Film Festival: A Research MethodologySince not every audiovisual form found on the web shares the same paradigm or codification,one might wonder to what extent it is possible to specify a format based on the characteristicsof the medium. This was one of the primary concerns in the conception of the Low ResolutionFilm Festival, a competitive exhibition of internet videos organized by the Brazilian filmsociety Cine Falcatrua, and held in December 2005. The strategies employed in the Festivalconstituted the original subject of this research.Cine Falcatrua (Portuguese for ‘hoax’ or ‘scam’) originated as a film society in the endof 2003. The group was formed by undergraduate students of the Federal University ofEspírito Santo, who organized free weekly screenings of audiovisual works – mostly featurefilms downloaded from the internet, months before they were released in Brazil. In June2004, this activity led to a cease-and-desist notice issued by Brazilian film distributors,along with a lawsuit against the University for copyright infringement. From this point on,even though it did not suspend its ‘pirate’ screenings, Cine Falcatrua began to organizeevents and workshops that explored other aspects of the dispute between traditionalcinema and new media ecologies. The Low Resolution Film Festival was one of the firstof these events.Celebrating the ‘almost-anonymity’ of the internet and proposing to ‘map all its original contentand blame the guilty ones’, the Festival might seem an unusual tool for the exploration ofinternet video. By 2005, when the Festival was held, video competitions focusing exclusivelyon online content such as Fluxus 4 and Anima Mundi Web 5 had been in existence for fiveyears. However, contrary to events constituted by web-based exhibitions, the Low ResolutionFilm Festival proposed to screen internet videos in the offline structure of a conventionalmovie theatre. Within this architecture, the internet video would be isolated and framed in thesame way of the fictional short, video art or any other standard format, and could thereforebe defined in relation to them.The decision to use this distinctive form of presentation for web video constituted the corestrategy of the Low Resolution Film Festival. By placing unauthorized internet content in directconflict with the hyper-regulated cinematographic institution, the festival emphasized theinherent characteristics of the format of internet video. The few parameters stated in the callfor works concerned conditions of authorship and awarding, and the only explicit restrictionwas against ‘screeners or Hollywood blockbuster CAM recordings’. Besides that, any videowas valid within the normal limitations of the medium: the material should be found on theweb, and should be sent for pre-selection by email.1. Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Anthony Mathews, London: ReaktionBooks, 2000, p. 53.2. N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother was a Computer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, p. 3.3. The definition is from Wikipedia: ‘Internet Phenomenon’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Phenomenon.4. FLUXUS, http://www.fluxusonline.com.5. Anima Mundi Web, http://www.animamundiweb.com.br.

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.

74 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move75time they are watched. However, what differentiates a web video within the information landscapeis not the combination of an artist’s gesture with the legitimizing power of the galleryenvironment, but the amazement that a spectator can feel as they watch a video. As viewersre-transmit the video to others, the substance of the video is transformed into continuousflux – something like an underwater current, indifferent to tidal forces.By and large, internet videos share the condition of that which Duchamp termed a readymadeobject. What defines their autonomy is a procedure of clipping and remediation, whichhas a lot to do with the potential for convergence of digital information networks. Most videosare nothing more than audiovisual fragments extracted from other channels and thrown ontothe internet. In their natural environment, the video goes unnoticed: Maldita Cachaça 10 isjust another bizarre news report; Vaca Matrix 11 one among many scenes of the feature filmKung Pow! Enter the Fist; 12 Nintendo 64 Kid 13 is simply the domestic record of a Christmascelebration. However, as they are extracted from their original channels and propagatedthrough the unauthorized pathways of the internet, these fragments acquire another nature.Just as the new framing reshapes the video’s meaning, it also affects the very dispositionof the audience towards it. The public begins to regard the fragment as an individual form,distinct from its usual context. Likewise, the role of the audience is changed, as it becomesresponsible for the dissemination of the images.Upon finding a video on the internet, the spectator is immediately presented with the possibilityof distributing it further, by attaching it to an email, embedding it in a website, or creatinganother link. 14 In a medium that lacks sanctioned channels, and in which every user is apotential editor, this is not a frivolous decision. To propagate an internet video is substantiallydifferent from recommending (or not) a blockbuster to your acquaintances. Within the traditionalcinematographic circuit, personal campaigns do not have much power against thebroadcast or film industry’s multi-million dollar marketing budgets, unless they are mired intheir own institutions, such as journalism. If one spectator pretends that a movie does notexist and hides it from his restricted social circle, the movie will still be available for viewingin multiplexes everywhere. In contrast, internet users actually carry out the distribution of avideo. As they forward it, they create a particular circuit within a larger network. As the videocan be better perceived in P2P (peer-to-peer) architectures such as the BitTorrent protocol,the public is not just the final receiver of information, but also constitutes its very carrier.Moreover, the viewer wields an active function in this transport structure – just as in a gameof Chinese whispers. By choosing not to retransmit the video received, a user enfeebles itscircuit of distribution, partially neutralizing the dissemination of the work. This kind of decisionreceives its share of disapproval from the file-sharing communities’ code of conduct,10. Maldita Cachaça’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk8cdaarjNs.11. ‘Vaca Matrix’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39dn9meNqHA.12. ‘Kung Pow!’: Enter the Fist (dir. Steve Oedekerk, 2002).13. ‘Nintendo64 Kid’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFlcqWQVVuU.14. It is interesting to notice how the practice of forwarding as a form of curating/indexing is alsobecoming crystallized in the increasingly popular platforms for social bookmarking (del.icio.us)and tumblelogging (StumbleUpon, Tumblr).where it is termed ‘leeching’. However, in general, leeching is precisely what happens: thegeneral public does not care about forwarding information for its own sake, not because itis opposed to it, but because it is not committed to. The user simply adopts the stance of anormal spectator.The agency through which a work passes each time it is forwarded is a positive one: not toretain, but to let flow. In this sense, internet videos are distinct from readymades, as everydayobjects distinguished by the pedestal upon which they are placed, and by a definitivegesture. While the readymade’s figure stands out against a profoundly altered background,an internet video is the result of the constant reconfiguration of figure and background bythe small, recurrent gestures of a multitude of users. Such images appear less as forms thanas information, and their function is eminently phatic, as they constitute their channel andmaintain their public at the same time.A Regime of Dissolved AuthorityIt seems remarkable that some works are, in an almost accidental way, able to overcomesuccessive layers of spectatorial inertia in order to become massive phenomena. Such phenomenado not conform to the dispersed topography of the web. Quite the opposite: theycontest such topography, creating a spatial norm where there are only plateaus, islands, anddeteriorated terrains. In other words, the internet video describes the striation of the networkstructure. Such a way of occupying the medium is characteristic of computer viruses, whichspread from one network to another, infecting terminal after terminal. This similarity in behaviourhas lead to the characterization of popular internet videos as ‘viral’. However, there isa very important difference between viruses and viral videos: the mechanism for propagationof the virus is part of its nature, embedded in its code. A worm will forward itself automaticallyto all the contacts of the contaminated individual’s email, in spite of the recipient’s decision.The propagation of a video depends on the conscious action of the original recipient, andtheir will to become a transmitter.Whatever it may be that motivates this action, it seems far too contingent to be systematized,especially in a work of this length. Nonetheless, it should be clear that this motivation is notinherent within the video piece or the channel, but within the user. The transmission of aninternet video does not occur passively, by osmosis. It depends on the conjoined – albeitdisarticulated – action of a series of agents. This more generalized procedure characterizesthe internet video as a format. It is not a discursive practice but an assertive one, worthy ofthe title of curator, who endorses and revalidates the work. Even so, we could say that it is noless authorial than the original détournement that created the work in the first place, whichit mimics in each stage. As she propagates a video, the user reframes it, accentuating itsimportance and increasing its presence. It is these successive re-framings that will producethe medium’s procedural gestalt.In this manner, the authorship of an internet video becomes diluted throughout the processof its distribution. The more it spreads, creating precedents for remixes, mashups, andalternative versions, the more the video becomes a collective, almost folkloric manifestation.One person might make an animation, send it to their friends, and find it a few days later in

76 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move77a public discussion forum – its distribution completely beyond the maker’s control. At thisstage of the process, the term ‘author’ is a complete misnomer; the original creator suddenlyoccupies the position of yet another spectator. Within this process, the role of transmitters isso important that they assume a vague position of authority over the works. This authority ismore easily perceived if we refer to the Low Resolution Film Festival in 2005, a time whenthe title of ‘internet video-maker’ was such a dubious one that I have been obliged to place itin quotation marks. The creator of a given video is sometimes inadvertent, but almost neveracknowledged: the only reference to the origin of the work is to the channel through whichit became public – often, popular indexing directories such as BoingBoing, 15 Fark, 16 or theBrazilian Kibeloco. 17 In this context, the legitimacy of audiovisual material depends on thedensity of its casting, which is peered rather than broad. Digital networks follow a very peculiarlogic of popular authentication. Even the Google algorithm, which functions as an onlineNorth, is driven by it: a website gains search relevance the more it is linked by others.As this mechanism collides with those of established channels, ‘internet celebrities’ appearwithin the pages of important New York newspapers. A classic collision is that of WilliamHung, a rejected contestant of television show American Idol. In 2004, the video of his failedaudition appeared online, was viewed by millions of viewers, and made him more famousthan he would have had he won the show. 18 Afterwards, Hung returned triumphantly totraditional media, received a recording deal and released three albums. Ironically, his successwas provoked by the same images that the producers of American Idol had employedto dishonour him. Extracted from its original context, the video became a mechanism thattransformed the failed singer into a celebrity. There is no doubt that the same sequence ofimages had become a different thing.The Low Resolution Film Festival attempted to apply this dynamics of authentication to thecinematographic milieu. According to the festival’s regulations, it was not necessary to be theauthor of a video to send it to the competition: it sufficed to take responsibility for it – a termthat possesses a significant degree of uncertainty. If more than one person sent the samevideo, it instantly became a collective work. What was being judged were not individual creations,but different ways of exploring the internet.Regimes of Active VisualityIn the years that followed the Low Resolution Film Festival, the increase of bandwidth, thecreation of lighter video codecs such as Adobe Flash Video, and the growing popularizationof services such as YouTube, 19 Google Video 20 and Vimeo 21 have begun to crystallize onlineaudiovisual practices into an almost regular circuit. As the internet is turned into a widespreadmedium for audiovisual works, the definition of internet video as a process that describes itsown informational distribution still holds true. The online work and its author seem to beincreasingly fixed within standard channels of distribution. In a platform such as YouTube, allvideos are linked to the user who publishes them, and this user is in turn is linked to otherusers, either as contacts or subscribers. Therefore, the main location of these works is inthe user’s page, which can be classified by a distinctive status such as director. The systemcreates logs of activity, and any dispute over originality can be resolved by referring to parameterssuch as the date of upload or the number of views. The platform, then, results in acertain degree of stabilization of identities.As it accumulates metadata such as tags, comments and replies – in other words, as itbecomes intertwined with the platform’s own informational structure – a video is furtherlocalized. This can be extended to diegetic references to the platform’s interface (resultingin meta-linguistic works such Dave dancing at my bday party); 22 as well as to the creativeemployment of its video database (for example, in the mashup project ThruYou); 23 its usercommunity (as in the lonelygirl15 web series); 24 or interactive possibilities (as in the infamousInteractive Card Trick). 25 In all of these cases, the video becomes inextricable from itsoriginal location, as any displacement would disrupt the work’s particular significance andbehaviour. The experience of lonelygirl15, for example, could never be conveyed without theillusion of intimacy created by the closeness to its user-character. In the same way, it wouldbe pointless to download Interactive Card Trick, a work that resorts to YouTube’s in-videohyperlink possibilities, and watch it in a conventional media player software – or, worse yet,in a Film Festival. The only effective way to propagate such videos is as a direct, online linkto their URL. Therefore, it is effectively impossible to remove the videos from their originalcontext, as they carry their context with them.Embedding the videos in another webpage does not isolate them from a platform such asYouTube – quite the contrary. The image is overlaid by the site’s watermark, advertisements,and links to other videos in its database. It is as if, through the embedded video, the wholeof YouTube infiltrates a separate webpage. In this way, the invasive platform reinforces itsauthority over the works; an implicit form of control that is made explicit by its capacity to banuser accounts, take videos offline and block the access of certain countries. Could it be thatthe fixed characteristics of these platforms constitute the specificity of the medium, a kind ofsubgenre of internet videos? Or have the platforms as a whole attained the status of concretetechnical objects, from which the awareness and value of individual pieces of work can nolonger be detached? 26 One could presume that either hypothesis indicates the evolution ofonline media away from an unstable visuality into a new form of spectatorship. However, earlymodes of engagement with internet video were equally medium specific. The regime of dis-15. BoingBoing, http://www.boingboing.net.16. Fark, http://www.fark.com.17. Kibeloco http://kibeloco.com.br.18. ‘William Hung She Bangs’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zcc8dTqflh8.19. YouTube, http://www.youtube.com.20. Google Video, http://video.google.com.21. Vimeo, http://www.vimeo.com.22. ‘Dave dancing at my bday party’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVm_HJ_ax8o.23. Thru-you, http://thru-you.com.24. LonelyGirl15, http://www.lg15.com.25. ‘Interactive Card Trick’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbEei0I3kMQ.26. Gilbert Simondon [1958], On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. N Mellamphy,London: University of Western Ontario, 1980.

78 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move79solved authorities still characterizes another important platform for online media distribution:the 4chan image board. 27 Based on the Futaba Channel, 28 4chan is a popular Japaneseforum for image sharing. It was launched in October 2003, a couple of months before theterm ‘Web 2.0’ was first published. 29 Currently, 4chan receives at least 1.5 million uniquevisitors a month. 30 In spite of being older than YouTube, it still retains a very loose regime ofauthority and participation. A striking difference between the sites is that there is no needto register to use 4chan, allowing users to post images straight away in any of its 44 boards.The images are published in the order of upload, creating a linear flow of threads that defiesrandom navigation. In any case, the platform does not hold long-term archives: most of theboards are limited to eleven pages and, as soon as a thread reaches the bottom, it disappearscompletely. 31These restrictions lead to the site’s simplicity of use and very high refresh rate. Having nodatabase or community structure such as profile pages, 4chan exists as a lively arena ofinformation. In minutes, the content of a board might have changed completely. Some imagespersist – but if they are always about to disappear, and the only way to make themendure is by bumping their thread, reposting or recreating them, to what extent should theybe considered stable forms? Not surprisingly, a great deal of internet ‘memes’ – such asLOLcats, 32 Rickrolling, 33 and the Advice Dog 34 – originated in 4chan. However, in this naturalenvironment, such folklore should not be considered auto-replicating, wide-spreadinginformation. These images and their variations consist of nothing less than the very activityof the users as they participate in the channel. The lack of a registration requirement createsan additional difference between 4chan and other platforms for online media distribution:in 4chan, complete anonymity is the rule, not the exception. Hence, there are no individualimages or authors, just the channel; no community, just a public. The authority of 4chan authorityis not imposed in the same way as YouTube’s, since it is the very activity of the publicthat secures the channel’s integrity. The anonymous masses produce 4chan as they inhabitit, by viewing, transforming and reposting images. Once again, we are confronted with anessentially phatic form of mediated experience.ter example would be Punho dos Brothers, 37 a drawing of a fist made of ASCII characters,posted in user scrapbooks of the Orkut social network. It comes accompanied by a statementexplicitly ordering the receiver to ‘forward it to five brothers’, or else they ‘would be no brother’(sic). This is dynamic information, meant not only to be seen, but also propagated. Indeed,the process generated a number of variants, such as Hadouken dos Brothers and Luís XVIdos Brothers, with the same purpose.From these examples, we can conclude that the particular paradigm foregrounded by theLow Resolution Film Festival remains a significant reference point for the investigation notonly of online platforms, but of media in general. The circumstances of early internet videoand the 4chan image board show that there is a correspondence between the dissolution ofauthority and the engagement of the public with the processes that constitute the channel.These situations entail different forms of mediated experience and objects, which should notbe analysed according to the parameters used to judge more stabilized conditions, in whichthe distinction between the channel and the operations of the user are clear.The peculiarities of internet videos acquire very different meanings if they are approachednot as inherent characteristics of ‘viral’ works, but as a result of the dynamic engagement of apublic with technique. To illustrate the contemporary relevance of such dynamics, it is worthmentioning that 4chan’s creator Christopher Poole (‘moot’) was voted the most influentialperson of 2009 in TIME magazine’s traditional election, beating the likes of President Obamaand Oprah Winfrey. 38 To show how these dynamics disrupt our normal criteria of judgmentand critique, it is essential to point out that the result of TIME’s election was caused by anexploitation of the voting system by 4chan’s anonymous users. 39 Therefore, when we areaware of the concurrence between media paradigms, the difference between them can beilluminated – as the Low Resolution Film Festival attempted to do. When we ignore the concurrence,we run the risk of being seriously mislead and owned – just as TIME magazine was.This regime of visuality becomes clearer in the nature of images such as the Rage comics 35and Tenso sequences, 36 which are not intended solely to be viewed, but transformed andreposted. Their significance arises from this particular mode of propagation. An even bet-27. 4chan, http://www.4chan.org.28. 2chan, http://www.2chan.net.29. Eric Knorr, ‘The Year of Web Services’, CIO, Dec 15 2003: 90.30. Joshua Benton, ‘How 4chan shows the challenge of monetizing a big online audience’, NiemanJournalism Lab, 17 Feb 2009, http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/02/how-4chan-shows-thechallenge-of-monetizing-a-big-online-audience.31. ‘FAQ’, 4chan, http://www.4chan.org/faq.32. ‘I Can Haz Cheezburger?’, http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Lolcats.33. ‘Rickroll’, http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Rickrolling.34. ‘Advice Dog’, http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Advice_dog.35. ‘RAGE’, http://encyclopediadramatica.com/FU.36. [TENSO], http://sites.levelupgames.com.br/FORUM/RAGNAROK/forums/t/337660.aspx.37. ‘Punho dos Brothers”: conheça os mais divertidos,http://virgula.uol.com.br/ver/noticia/lifestyle/2009/03/25/119623-punho-dos-brothers-conhecaos-mais-divertidos.38. ‘The World’s Most Influential Person Is...’, Time Magazine, 27 April, 2009,http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1894028,00.html.39. Paul Lamere, ‘Inside the precision hack’, Music Machinery, 15 April, 2009,http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/15/inside-the-precision-hack.

80 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move81ReferencesBenton, Joshua. ‘How 4chan shows the challenge of monetizing a big online audience’, Nieman JournalismLab, 17 Feb, 2009, http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/02/how-4chan-shows-the-challenge-ofmonetizing-a-big-online-audience.Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Mathew Anderson, London: ReaktionBooks, 2000.Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother was a Computer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.Knorr, Eric. ‘The Year of Web Services’, CIO, Dec 15, 2003.Lamere, Paul. ‘Inside the precision hack’, Music Machinery, 15 April, 2009, http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/15/inside-the-precision-hack.Lasica, J. D. Darknet, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2005.Simondon, Gilbert [1958]. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. N. Mellamphy,London: University of Western Ontario, 1980.‘The World’s Most Influential Person Is...’,Time Magazine, 27 April, 2009, http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1894028,00.html.from a Pull-down Screen, Fold-upChairs, a Laptop and a Projector:The Development of Clip Kino Screenings,Workshops and Roles in FinlandAndrew Gryf PatersonThe pull-down screen, the fold-up chairs, the sound-system, laptop, projector and popcornwere all placed in the public underground passageway, in the hope of coaxing people out oftheir usual pathways, and encouraging them to sit down and watch video clips they mighthave never seen before. The billboard proclaiming ‘Jii Hutikka’s Clip Karavaani!’ was the beginningof ‘Clip Kino’ in Helsinki: a self-organized social event consisting of screenings heldin public spaces. Yet the event did not feature full-length or even short films, but video clipsand documentaries found online.Since this event in 2007, described above, I have initiated and facilitated similar events. Thisactivity was and is motivated by my interest in participatory and social processes as an artistorganizer,and as a pedagogue of online and digital media culture. Between 2003 and 2005,I was involved in developing a pioneering online media-sharing platform called Aware, 1 andin designing and coordinating workshops encouraging people to upload images and videos toa shared database. Since 2005, the online environment for video has changed immensely. Ihave observed the nascent practices I explored earlier developing into mainstream practices– with venture capital, good interface design and technical prowess – to become an aspectof millions of people’s everyday sharing, productive and consumptive media experiencesonline. As a facilitator who had organized workshops about media uploading and sharing, myinterest in online media shifted towards an awareness of what is going on ‘there’: what you, I,they, and we are watching online; opening up discussions related to online media, copy andremix culture; but also in how to create a space for different groups to encounter each other,and reflect upon their practices and interests.Currently, online websites such as Viral Video Chart 2 rank and keep track of videos incountless embedded posts to blogs, while curated video clip features now regularly occurin specialist media magazines and newspapers, for example in the U.K. newspaper TheGuardian. 3 In response, artists and media researchers have formed new specialist forumsfor engaging and researching online video. Within my own field of interest, that of critical mediaculture, was a mailing list and a travelling conference initiated by the Institute of Network1. John Evans, Markus Ort, Andrew G. Paterson and Aki-Ville Pöykiö, Aware platform (2003-2005,offline since 2006), Helsinki, http://apaterso.info/projects/aware/aware_schematic.pdf.2. ‘Viral Video Chart’, Unruly Media (2006-), London, http://viralvideochart.unrulymedia.com/.3. ‘Joy of Six’ sport-clip series / ‘Clip Joint’ movie-clip series, Guardian Online (2007-),http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/series/joyofsix, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/series/clipjoint.

82 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move83Cultures in Amsterdam. The series of conferences named Video Vortex 4 began in 2007, andshared Clip Kino’s aim of bringing together varied perspectives and practices: artistic, aesthetic,research-oriented, reflective, exploratory, and experimental. Of course, an essentialpart of understanding what is ‘there’ online is watching video clips. In 2007, I imagined ClipKino as a screening event that could bring people together to watch and come to understandonline video. The following elaborates the development of Clip Kino, from that roll-downscreen onwards, charting many of the different venues, contexts, themes and organizationalforms which have moved Clip Kino towards a shareable set of roles, guidelines and ambitionsthat may be adopted and adapted by others.Clip Karavaani, November 2007During the ‘Self-organising and Networking’ course I was teaching at the MAA Art School(Taidekoulu) in Suomenlinna, Helsinki, 5 I gave six students an assignment. Inka Jurvanen,Emilia Liljeström, Sera Martikainen, Marianne Mäkelin, Mikko Mällinen, and Tessa Siira wereasked to create an almost zero-budget ‘clip-kino/micro-cinema’ event to take place in publicspace, as part of the Valon Voimat (Forces of Light) Festival, held in November 2007. Overthe 10 years it had been in existence, Valon Voimat had aimed to ‘research the urban spaceand its use during the darkest period of the year’, promoting site-specific urban interventions,specifically involving ephemeral and static light installations, fire-arts and mixed-media clubevents. 6 That year, the festival was focusing on site-specific works held near the city’s singleunderground metro line.Within this context, the student group formed a project called Clip Karavaani. They createda fictional master of ceremonies called Jii Hutikka (Finnish for Joe Tipsy), who despite neverturning up for the events, had interest in hobo/nomadic lifestyles, caravanning, elk-huntingand avant-garde films. The theme chosen for all the Clip Karavaani screening events was‘road movies’ and, behind the guise of Jii Hutikka, the students crafted an aesthetic, homebrewstyle of communication for a series of four ‘cinema on the road’ events, that took placeover a one week period in three different locations: an underground metro passageway, aprivate design studio, and a public media library. 7To yield clips for presentation, the group entered the term ‘road movies’ into video sharingwebsite databases, such as YouTube and Internet Archive. The screenings were curated bythe group collectively nominating clips, which they then rated and edited into a screeningorder. Some clips were played according to the context of the location, such as the ‘helsinkimetro sunset’ clip in the underground passageway; others, such as the ‘kerouac readingon the road’ clip, followed each event. Ripped from their original online viewing platform,4. Video Vortex (2007-), http://networkcultures.org/videovortex/.5. Andrew G. Paterson, Self-organising and Networking MAA Course, Taidekoulu MAA, Helsinki,October-December, 2007, http://orgcult.wikidot.com/selforg.6. Valon Voimat Festival (2007), Helsinki, http://www.valonvoimat.org/archive/HTML_2007/.7. Emilia Liljeström, Sanna Martikainen, Marianna Mäkelin, Mikko Mällinen, & Tessa Siira, ‘JiiHutikka’s Clip Karavaani’ project, Valon Voimat Festival, Helsinki, 21-28 November, 2007,http://apaterso.info/projects/clipkaravaani/.approximately 15 to 20 clips representing a very heterogeneous interpretation of the themewere played at each event. One member of the group lined up the video in the player, anotheradjusted the volume to suit. In the second and fourth Clip Karavaani events, a large whitecardboard image of a pointing hand diverted passersby into the unusual fold. The audiencefor each event was about 10 to 20 people, and there was free popcorn for everybody.The Clip Karavaani screenings followed a tradition of grassroots, specialty cinema clubs,and video activist screenings 8 using distributable formats such as Super-8, VHS and DVDformats. The ‘one night only’ nature of the Clip Karavaani events, including the forever-absentvagabond director Jii Hutikka, imparted a circus-like theatricality to the proceedings. Thegroup’s consideration of the relationship between context and content meant that Clip Karavaanibore similarities to the ‘Social Cinema’ project by Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska,albeit at a smaller conceptual and technical scale. During the London ArchitecturalBiennale in 2006, the Social Cinema project ‘turned unbuilt spaces into auditoria’, so that‘films about, set in, or commenting on London and its architecture were stunningly projectedupon the city itself’. 9Outdoor screenings, often held as part of festivals or summer seasons, operate outside of theusual cinema, room or social hall context. A good example of the success of this model hasbeen Rooftop Films in New York. 10 However, unlike these cinematic social events, the contentscreened during Clip Karavaani consisted solely of video that could be freely downloadedfrom popular media sharing platforms. 11 The screening list emerged from the video sharingdatabase, according to a simple keyword search. Videos were returned according to thetags they had been given, and then according to the subjective choices made by individualswithin the organizing group. What was shown in public was not determined by ownership orby negotiation of access rules, but by a search-engine and a subjective process of selection.Seeders N Leechers R Us, January-March 2008Clip Kino emerged from a residency application I made in March 2007 to Eyebeam Art andTechnology Center, New York, 12 in which I proposed to facilitate a space for young peopleto show and celebrate online content. Fortunately, the application was accepted, and theproject Seeders N Leechers R Us ran between January-February and May 2008. 13 Eyebeamwas known for its progressive youth program, such as the Digital Day Camp, After-SchoolAtelier and Girl’s Eye View activities for middle and high school students. Since 2000, these8. ‘How To Do A Video Screening’ (last updated 2004), Video Activist Network, San Francisco,http://www.videoactivism.org/howscreen.html.9. Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska, Social Cinema project, The London ArchitecturalBiennale (2006), London, 17-24 July, 2006, http://www.chanceprojects.com/node/37.10. Rooftop Films (1997-), Brooklyn NYC, http://rooftopfilms.com/about_history.html.11. Videovideomaker websites, Wikipedia,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_sharing_websites.12. Andrew G. Paterson, Residency Proposal to Eyebeam Art and Technology Center (2006), NewYork, http://apaterso.info/projects/seedersnleechersrus/eyebeam-proposal.html.13. Andrew G. Paterson, ‘Seeders N Leechers R Us’ project (2008), Eyebeam, New York,http://apaterso.info/projects/seedersnleechersrus/.

84 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move85activities had brought together artists, youth, and New York’s dynamic cultural forms, suchas remix, fashion and hip-hop. Experts in new media and technology, and in hacker, sustainabilityissues and open source culture in particular, were thrown into this mix. 14 This context,with reference to critical U.S.-based cultural and legal reformism, activism and education incopyright issues was used to develop the Clip Kino concept. 15The aim of the Seeders N Leechers project was to explore peer-to-peer (P2P) culture in collaborationwith young people, with the title of the project taken from BitTorrent 16 protocol: theslang terms for key roles in P2P file-sharing refer to the original uploader who provides theoriginal file as a ‘seeder’, and the downloader who ‘leeches’ the content from the network.The BitTorrent protocol is also a form of encoded cooperation: when you begin downloadinga file, you are also by default helping others, by making the file more easily available tothem. My hope was that the workshop, exploring and sharing of video clips between us as agroup, would give us the roles of being ‘seeders’ and ‘leechers’ of content, shared throughface-to-face interaction.On arrival in New York, I structured a program of events for the teenage students-in-residenceat the centre: Tahj Banks, Glen Moore, and Jayquan Harris from Brooklyn, andWandy Marcano from the Bronx. All had attended the previous year’s Digital Summer Campworkshops at Eyebeam, were aged between 17 and 19 years old, and were given a studentsalary for attending Eyebeam twice a week after school. Each week, for a period of twomonths, we held one ‘leech’ screening in between two ‘seeding’ workshop sessions. Thesesessions sometimes included other artist residents of Eyebeam, and involved discussion ofmedia awareness, local and youth representations in online video, copyright, remix, andcreative commons approaches to media, P2P networks, and how to organize a screeningevent. Furthermore, we shared links to videos, which we watched together in physicalmaterialspace. Over my period of residency, this process of exchange shifted from one thatwas initiated by me to one that was increasingly about the students sharing material with me,and then to others in Eyebeam.The outcome of the workshop process was a Clip Kino screening event called Teen Mashup,of which all the content was curated and arranged by the teenagers. As the title of the eventsuggests, the screening consisted of videos chosen according to the teenage students’ interests,and represented homemade music production, shock magicians on television, and14. Research in Education Project Archive, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center (2000-), New York,http://eyebeam.org/research/education.15. For the background to these issues, see: Fair Use & Copyright Resources, Centre for SocialMedia (2005-), American University School of Communication, Washington DC, http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/fair_use/; Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature andFuture of Creativity, London: The Penguin Press, 2005, http://free-culture.cc/; Free Culture:Students for Free Culture (2003-), http://freeculture.org/; Kenneth McLeod, Freedom ofExpression: Resistance & Repression in the Ages of Intellectual Property, Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 2007, http://www.freedomofexpression.us/.16. Seeder and Leecher definitions on BitTorrent vocabulary, Wikipedia,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_vocabulary.different hip hop or gang representations of New York. During this event, one of the audiencemembers asked a student, ‘Did you contact the video clip uploaders about whetherit was ok to screen their video?’ The answer (‘no, we didn’t because...’) managed to satisfythe questioner, and indicated to me that the student had gained a level of online medialiteracy. The Seeders N Leechers R Us project extended the pedagogical aspect that hadgiven rise to Clip Karavaani, in order to tackle the debates surrounding copy, file-sharing,and sampling cultures, and which helped to shape my future and current pedagogicalactivity.Kirjasto 10, February-December 2008After the Clip Karavaani project’s choice of venues, Kirjasto 10 public library 17 in the centreof Helsinki appealed as a location in which we could hold regular screenings. The libraryfocused on music and media, had installed audiovisual presentation facilities, and promoteditself as a place ‘for consuming, creating and displaying culture’. 18 Having conferred with theLibrary’s staff, I began a program of screenings in 2008 in the Kirjasto 10 venue entitled ClipKino Helsinki. 19 Although there was no budget for these events, as a library user, I was allowedto use the facilities without charge. On all occasions except one, I invited contacts andcolleagues to arrange 40-60 minute-long screening of video clips on a theme of their choice.Between video clips, the volunteer ‘guest-host’ curators 20 were expected to contextualize theclip, or explain their reason for selecting it.Different themes were presented which were either geographically and socio-culturally specific(Australia-New Zealand, New York, Eastern Europe); media-specific (music representations,subtitled clips); genre-specific (youth, avant-garde art videos, animations, anarchistclips), or based on the topic of online media politics. 21 In many cases, the audience wasdetermined by the theme or the curator selected. When I couldn’t find someone to make anevent—almost no one replied to the open call for ‘guest-hosts’—I curated the event myself,in order to keep up with the negotiated calendar of events with the library.I also knew that I was operating in a legal ‘grey-zone’, and was uncertain as to how I shouldpublicize these events. In early-to-mid 2008, it was not clear to me whether it was legal to17. Kirjasto/Library 10 (2005-), Helsinki, http://www.lib.hel.fi/kirjasto10.18. K. K. Salminen Lämsä, & M. Repo, ‘Library 10 and meetingpoin@lasipalatsi: New Kinds ofLibrary Services in Helsinki City Centre’, Scandinavian Public Library Quarterly, No. 4. (2005):20-23, http://www.splq.info/issues/vol38_4/vol38_4.pdf.19. Andrew G. Paterson, ‘Clip Kino Helsinki’ project (2008-), various locations, Helsinki, http://clipkino.info/ or http://apaterso.info/projects/clipkino/.20. Clip Kino Helsinki guest-host curators at Kirjasto/Library 10, between February- December, 2008:Projekti Sosiaalikeskus (FI), Joanne Richardson (RO), Wojtek Mejor (PL/FI), ‘Orgcult’ Students atStadia Polytechnic: Toni Niemisalo, Akseli Virtanen Joni Happonen, Juhana Lindström, SanteriPakkanen and Teemu Lipasti (all FI), Špela Semion (SI/FI), Kari Yli-Annala (FI), Ann Morrison(NZ/FI), Eyebeam Students-in-Residence: Tahj Banks, Glen Moore, Wandy Marcano, andJayquan Harris (remote, all US), Guild of Bonsai Hackers (UN/FI), Sonja Baumer (remote, US),Andrew Paterson (SCO/FI).21. Clip Kino Helsinki Archive webpage, http://apaterso.info/projects/clipkino/archive.html.

86 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move87show videos located on a proprietary/privately-owned platform such as YouTube in a publicinstitution. 22 What might be the social norms of behaviour in Finland within this age of audiovisualcopyright? 23 For this reason, the Clip Kino Helsinki events were promoted within atrusted network of contacts via email, although the library also promoted the events on theirwebpage, electronic noticeboards, and information desks. Not surprisingly, attendance waslow: sometimes as little as 3 people attended, but occasionally the audience numbered over20 when the event was advertised especially well. In terms of audience numbers, the mostsuccessful event at the library (22 people) was Wojtek Mejor’s presentation on the theme‘Animation from the East’. 24 Mejor designed a poster for the theme, and placed them at allthe city’s ‘free’ advertising locations. 25At the end of the project, my thoughts as a facilitator-producer were centred upon promotion:firstly, upon how to attract people to attend the events themselves; and secondly, uponhow to encourage people to attend a library for a screening event. There were many relatedquestions: Who is the person curating the screening? (I hoped this person attracted somefriends, peer-group). How interesting is the theme? (I hoped the theme could attract a groupof people interested or curious to attend a screening about it). What were people coming tosee? (I didn’t wish to reveal the titles via email or links that people could just look up onlineat home instead of attending). After facilitating 11 Clip Kino events at Kirjasto 10, despite thelow attendance and publicity, I learned these were all important questions to keep in mindwhen organizing and promoting a Clip Kino event.Emerging Media Platform, January 2009By the end of 2008, I decided not to continue with the events in Kirjasto 10, choosing to focusupon other projects. I did accept invitations present the Clip Kino format in other contexts,which allowed the platform to develop. The first invitation to present a Clip Kino event outsideHelsinki came in March 2009, and I was invited to organize an event in the Tampere suburbof Pispala. As part of the Vilkkari Off Film Festival, a self-organized event by the autonomouscultural centre Pispala Contemporary Art Centre, 26 I presented a session reflecting upon thedevelopment of Clip Kino, and a ‘best of’, of the videos I had seen. 27 This indicated to me22. Since I learned with support and guidance of Heikki Poroila, Information Specialist (Music),HelMet / Vantaa Library, about the legal context in Finland of such screenings. The followingstatement was made available from December 2008: Andrew G. Paterson, ‘Clip Kino HelsinkiLegal Navigations’, 11.12.2008, http://clipkino.info/extra/clipkino_legal_fi_english_111208.pdf.23. Ville Oksanen, Five Essays on Copyright in the Digital Era, Helsinki University of Technology/TurreLegal, Helsinki, 2009. http://www.turre.com/publications/.24. Wojtek Mejor, ‘Animation from the East’ Clip Kino event, Kirjasto 10, Helsinki, 28 May, 2008,http://clipkino/hosts/wojtek-mejor.html.25. Wojtek Mejor, ‘Spreading Posters in Helsinki’ Google Map (2008),http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=101316200690604386308.00044e0c75ccf18c595a8&t=h&z=13.26. Vilkkari Off Film Festival (2006-), Pispalan Nykytaiteenkeskus (Pispala Contemporary Art Centre),http://www.hirvikatu10.net | http://www.pispala.fi/vilkkari-off/.27. Andrew G. Paterson, Clip Kino Pispala: Places of Communication, Pispala Nykytaiteenkeskus,Tampere, 7 March, 2009, http://www.clipkino.info/hosts/hirvikatu10.html.the value of a summary event at the end of each year of activity, reflecting upon the issues oforganizing or presenting online video as public-use.In May, a Clip Kino event was held within the ‘Emerging Media Practices and Environments’symposium 28 at the University of Art and Design Helsinki. This occasion clearly made thecase for the Clip Kino format as a research tool. As part of their doctoral research, SannaMarttila and Petri Kola curated a screening with the theme ‘Open Video’, using clips to illustratetheir argument. 29 A common feature of Clip Kino events is what might be called a‘broken screening’: rather than a non-stop reel of video, there are gaps for context, introduction,comments, and opinions from both selector and/or audience to encourage the use ofthe format as a research and discussion tool. In reflection, Martilla and Kola emphasized thevalue of co-curating a screening to investigate the field of inquiry, and of the dialogue involvedin selecting and ordering video in the service of an argument or ‘illustration’ of their research.A third opportunity arose later in the year, when I was invited to present within an exhibitioncalled Todellisuuden Taju (A Sense of Reality) at Hyvinkää Art Museum. 30 Curated by artistTeemu Mäki, the exhibition contained artworks both within the art museum and situatedaround the town centre, and included several public performances. The curatorial themeasked philosophical and political questions about our everyday lives: How do we actuallylive? What really happens? How ought we live? My self-defined challenge for the invitationwas to select clips for a Clip Kino event around a theme suggested to me by Mäki’s curatorialstatement: ‘Hyvinkää on ‘poikkeuksellisen tavallinen’ suomalainen pikkukaupunki’ (Hyvinkääis an ‘abnormally normal’ Finnish town). I searched online video sharing sites for examplesof the location-specific (Hyvinkää), and concepts of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’. At the publicscreening event, with laptop, data-projector and speakers, I presented my selection to asmall audience in the art museum: a mix of representations of place, but also of differentsubcultures online which ‘spun off’ from what I found, where I searched, what I linked to,and what I imagined before arriving to Hyvinkää for the first time. 31 This event illustratedthe potential for the Clip Kino format to augment formats such as that of an exhibition witha layer of content that draws upon the broad range of the online media environment. In thiscase, there were mingled images of art installations, motor-sport, death metal and pop videos,documentaries of everyday life, commercial advertisements, and avant-garde art videos.Towards the end of 2009, a new venue was found for Clip Kino Helsinki. The Ptarmigan ArtSpace, in the Vallila region of Helsinki, aims to ‘house ideas that exist outside of the realm ofthe traditional and provide a space for adventurous and challenging scenarios. Whether it be28. Emerging Media Practices & Environments Symposium, ARKI Research Group, Lume TV Studio,University of Art and Design Helsinki, 27-29 May, 2009, http://arkisampo.uiah.fi/emerging/.29. Petri Kola and Sanna Marttila, ‘Open Video’ Clip Kino event, Lume TV Studio, Helsinki, 25 May,2009, http://clipkino.info/hosts/emerging_arki-taik.html.30. Teemu Mäki (curator), ‘Todellisuuden Taju’ Exhibition, Hyvinkää Art Museum, Hyvinkää, 12 June– 30 August, 2009, http://www.todellisuudentaju.com/.31. Andrew G. Paterson, ‘Clip Kino Hyvinkää: Todellisuuden Taju’ Clip Kino event, Hyvinkää ArtMuseum, Hyvinkää, 30 July, 2009, http://clipkino.info/hosts/hyvinkaan-taidemuseo.html.

88 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move89performance, visual art, or interactive work, we hope for Ptarmigan to be a home for challenging,innovative projects’. 32 The first Clip Kino event there was guest-hosted by Jon Irigoyen inNovember 2009, with the theme of ‘Cyberpunk’ 33 . Ptarmigan’s random collection of secondhandchairs, the pull-down screen, laptop and borrowed data-projector, reminded me of JiiHutikka. It seemed to me that his imaginary wanderings with Clip Karavaani, dreamed up byTaidekoulu MAA students two years previously, had come full circle. The exciting little venueof Ptarmigan, half-public and half-private, was a good place to situate Clip Kino for a while.Over the years, the different screening venues had only partly suited the format. But themix of people who turned up to appreciate Jon’s cyberpunk selection seemed about right: amixture of friends, ‘learned’ enthusiasts, associates of the art space, some regular Clip Kinoattendees, and some people who were merely curiousevent. She shared an eclectic range of clips, including soldiers dancing like Michael Jackson,performance art parodies of Britney Spears, real life journalism on the ‘Dog Girl’, and JudithButler’s feminist theory of performativity. Later in the summer, Pispala Contemporary ArtCentre organized and curated a Clip Kino event with the theme of the Boreal Forest. 37 Theworks selected included clips from popular Hollywood films, activist promotions, machinima,and forest workers’ own recordings of their use of the machinery of the forest industry. This‘Forest 2.0’ event included a jury who were invited to give comments and feedback upon theselections, encouraging other comments from the audience. The process of video selection,and one machinima clip in particular, were the inspiration for the organization’s ‘SecondForest’project, a Second Life model of a Finnish forest, and a virtual setting for discussion aboutthe use of South-Asian migrant labour for berry picking in Finland.Multicultural Viewing, January 2010In January 2010, Clip Kino Helsinki received its first sustained funding to produce events,thanks to a successful application to the Finnish Arts Council’s multicultural arts fund. Asgrant applicant, I proposed to begin a new program of Clip Kino events in Helsinki overthe year, which would bring together different cultural and sub-cultural backgrounds, andexplore different themes and content. Furthermore, as in the case of Ptarmigan, the associationsof the host organization would bring guest-host screening curators with differentagendas to the platform. The first event took place in March 2010, as part of the ‘Herbologies/Foraging Networks’ program of the Pixelache Festival. 34 At Ptarmigan, Nina Nordström andI curated an event on the subject of ‘foraging’, either as finding wild food in the countryside,or dumpster diving in the city.In April, Ptarmigan’s London-based artists-in-residence Model Court showed scenes fromfilms with legal themes, which inspired their practice of documenting and engaging withreal life court representations. 35 Model Court had often presented their work in the format ofclips, and their experience and approach elicited an extended discussion about how courtproceedings are represented in film, with the background awareness that video materialsfrom real life court cases are rarely accessible to the public. From my perspective, ModelCourt’s event fitted easily into their usual contemporary art practice and communications,to the point that the Clip Kino model could be interpreted as a familiar curatorial framework.In May, Sari Kivinen, an ethnic Finn raised in Australia and currently living in Helsinki, exploredthe themes of identity construction, imitation and ‘copies of copies’ 36 in her Clip KinoThe multicultural agenda, which supportsmultiple points of view, was manifest in twoworkshops held in Helsinki during 2010:one involved a youth centre and Finnishteenagers of mixed backgrounds, anotherinvolved asylum-seeking residents of aninner-city refugee reception centre. 38 Thefirst event was a three month workshopand screening series called Katalyytticlips,which explored online media culture,as seen and found in video sharingwebsites, 39 with eight young Finnish men.Working with Nuorten Toimintakeskus (the‘Forest 2.0’ Clip Kino event by Mikko Lipiäinen andMarkus Petz, with invited jury and audience at Ptarmigan,Helsinki, July 2010.Happi Youth Activity Centre) as a paid freelance youth worker, my objective was to findvideo cultures that could catalyze new youth media programs and workshops. This processfollowed a similar path to the Seeders N Leechers workshop in New York, which anemphasis on mashups, animations, machinima clips, and those related to pirate and copyculture. Two events resulted from these workshops. A screening event called Hapen Hevijamit(Happi’s Heavy Jam) was initiated by a member of the group, Antti Ranta, who wasorganizing a live music event at the Centre. 40 In the interludes between young heavy/blackmetal bands from Helsinki playing on stage, videos were shown in a seating area locatedquite literally ‘on the side’ of the event. The second Katalyytti-clips event was a selectionof the most popular content found during workshop sessions, and included content32. About Ptarmigan webpage (2009-), Ptarmigan Art Space, Helsinki, http://ptarmigan.fi/.33. Jon Irigoyen, ‘Cyberpunk’ Clip Kino event, Ptarmigan, Helsinki, 19 November, 2009,http://clipkino.info/hosts/jon-irigoyen.html.34. Nina Nordström and Andrew G. Paterson, ‘Foraging!’ Clip Kino event, Ptarmigan, Helsinki, 17March, 2010, http://www.pixelache.ac/helsinki/herbologies-foraging-networks/clip-kino-foraging/.35. Model Court, ‘Model Court presents’, Clip Kino event, Ptarmigan, Helsinki, 7 April, 2010,http://clipkino.info/hosts/model-court.html.36. Sari Kivinen, ‘Copies of Copies’ Clip Kino event, Ptarmigan, Helsinki, 19 May, 2010,http://clipkino.info/hosts/sari-kivinen.html.37. Mikko Lipiäinen and Markus Petz, ‘Forest 2.0’ Clip Kino event, Ptarmigan, Helsinki, 28 July,2010,http://clipkino.info/hosts/forest.html.38. Refugee Hospitality Club (Punavuori & Kallio) Facebook group, September 2009, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=104158903532.39. ‘Katalyytti-clips’ wikipages, Nuorten Toimintakeskus Happi wikpages, Helsinki,http://happi.nettiareena.fi/wiki/index.php/Luokka:Katalyytti-clips.40. Petrus Ahola, Atte Collan, Karim Degheidy, Omar Fasolah, Mikko Pänkäläinen, and Antti Ranta,‘Katalyytti-clips presents.. Hapen Hevijamit’ Clip Kino event, Nuorten Toimintakeskus Happi,Helsinki, 04 July, 2010, http://clipkino.info/hosts/katalyytti-clips1.html.

90 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move91that is generically popular with teenagers, such as mashups, absurd humour, flash- andextreme-loops, and ‘films-in-5-seconds’. With a huge pizza order, and group of teenagersvisiting from the youth centre in Tallinn, Estonia, the second ‘Katalyytti-clips’ event becamea cross-national exchange of appreciation, enthusiasm, and ‘one-up-manship’ as to theworst music video ever. 41The second workshop took place over a one week period, in Helsinki’s Kallio neighbourhoodbasedRefugee Reception centre, which mostly houses men in their twenties while theirFinnish asylum or refuge applications are processed. In Helsinki, a loose volunteer networkhas been facilitated via Facebook. Entitled the ‘Refugee Hospitality Club’, the network offersoccasional activities and goods to residents in the inner-city refugee reception centres. InOctober 2010, myself and friend Päivi Raivio, who are both members of the ‘club’ offered aClip Kino workshop and screening event as a social activity to the residents. We spent timewith the residents in the local library, searching for videos for an internal screening event, andfor a possible public event for other members following posts on the Refugee Hospitality Cluband Clip Kino webpages. We attended the library three times a week with 13 male residentsof the centre, from Kurdish Iraq and Iran, Afghanistan, Senegal, Gambia, Somalia, Russiaand Kosovo. Some of the men only turned up once, some came for more than one session.Over the sessions, the men shared with us and with each other, a varied selection of videos,including music (traditional, pop, ethnic and global), museum memories and postcardvideos from their homelands, funny sketches such as Laurel and Hardy, sleepy-but-fierce‘babushka’ and fighting stick men. 42 We had the impression that the group enjoyed the timespent watching and sharing videos, despite the communication limitations, and we managedto share laughs, and appreciation of the choices made.Throughout 2010, the Clip Kino project was sustained by the multicultural award. It allowedfor some remuneration for the time spent by myself and others organizing events, and offereda modest fee for ‘guest-host’ curators of Clip Kino events, and a small budget per eventto print flyers or posters. It supported the extra time necessary to work with groups of peoplewho were not part of my own social or professional networks, and facilitated the presentationof their selections from the audiovisual internet to a public of some sort. Social networkingsites including Facebook and Twitter have been used to accumulate a list of people who followthe events. However, although the ubiquitous usage of Facebook for organizing eventsin Finland is undoubted, its effectiveness for actually bringing people to events is still opento question.Nevertheless, the continuity of practice has successfully supported the negotiation of newvenue options in Helsinki. Sites presenting various presentation and performance eventsemerging later in the year were bar-club Cafe Mascot, which supports left-field live music,41. Petrus Ahola, Atte Collan, Karim Degheidy, Omar Fasolah, Mikko Pänkäläinen and AnttiRanta, ‘Katalyytti-clips presents.. Selections, reflections & projections’ Clip Kino event, NuortenToimintakeskus Happi, Helsinki, 07 July, 2010, http://clipkino.info/hosts/katalyytti-clips2.html.42. Refugee Hospitality Club, ‘Kallio Reception Centre Selections’ Clip Kino event, Kallio Library,Helsinki, 13 October, 2010, http://clipkino.info/hosts/refugee-hospitality-club.html.and second-hand bookshop Arkadia International. In the future, when Clip Kino events areplanned it will be possible to offer guest curators a variety of Clip Kino-friendly venues, whichhave different profiles of attendees, audiences and means of publicity. At the time of writing,there are ‘winter buds’ emerging in Turku (Åbo), current co-European capital of culture in2011, where a facilitator-producer other than myself aims to take up the project of organizinga new series of events. As the initiator of an organically developed, open and evolving project,I have been waiting and hoping for such ‘forking’ to happen.Clip Kino Guidelines for Organizing Screening EventsOver the years I have been organizing and facilitating Clip Kino events in Finland, the roles,relationships, responsibilities and expectations have evolved, but have also become clearerand more solid over time. To summarize some of the points made so far, there are four keyconstituents involved in the ‘single screening’ event process: the host venue; the organizer orfacilitator; the guest-host(s) or curator(s) of the screening; and the audience.The host venue is the physical location of the event. The venue may have the equipmentnecessary for a screening event, which includes a projector/LCD TV, laptop, adaptors, audiospeakers or sound system if necessary, and ideally an internet connection. In addition, thehost venue’s network for publicity can make a big difference to the outcome of the event, dependingon the match between the topic of the screening, and the members of this network.The Clip Kino organizer, producer or facilitator (a role I have largely taken, even when takingother roles as well) arranges and secures the host venue, and ensures that the necessaryequipment to make a screening event is available. Of course, this is achieved in negotiationand cooperation with the host venue. The organizer also manages general communicationsfor Clip Kino publicity, including sharing login details for the website archive and administrationor posting rights (for example, to Facebook) where appropriate. The organizer helps theguest-host or curator with skills and techniques for presenting, and raises the issue of thelegal ‘grey-zone’ that exists in relation to common video sharing platforms. Lastly, the organizermay introduce and contextualize the event itself, take responsibility for gathering the listof clips to be screened, and make this available on the relevant Clip Kino archive within aweek of the event.The Clip Kino guest-host(s) or curator(s) of an event is responsible for sourcing 40-60 minutesof video from the internet, based on a theme or subject of their choice. Based on thistheme, they then provide text and images to be used in publicity for the event one week inadvance of the event taking place. If the event is a workshop, however, this will probably bearranged by the event organizer or facilitator. However, in selecting the clips for screening,the guest-host/curator agrees that if the video clips used are not already online, they willupload them before the event takes place. They should agree not to show materials whichare illegal, such as racist images or hardcore pornography, or which violate human or animalrights. Thus far, due to the involvement of the facilitator with the guest-host as the event takesshape, it has not been necessary to make this requirement explicit. On some occasions,however, it has been useful to give advance warning if materials are unsuitable for underageaudiences, or if they may shock or disgust audience members. It is worth reminding the

92 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move93curator to respect the audience, who have turned up without knowing exactly what they areabout to see. On the day of the event, the screening list is shared with the organizer so that itcan be archived and published after the event has taken place.Lastly, but no less importantly, is the Clip Kino audience. Because of variable guest-host/curator(s) of the screening event, the audience will be different at each event. Sometimes,the audience will vary greatly, according to the theme, the guest-curator, the venue, the person’ssocial network, the level of publicity for the event, and even the season and the weather.It is vital to keep in mind that the audience is attending the event for reasons that may in partbe unknown, but usually also on the basis of trust, interest, enthusiasm, friendship, good will,open-mindedness, and curiosity.Private Viewing in Public: the Example of Upload CinemaUpload Cinema 43 is a project that is similar to Clip Kino in some ways, but different enoughto offer a useful counterpoint to the narrative just outlined. I believe Upload Cinema indicatesnot only the popularity and potential success of online videos presented offline, but alsoclarifies the value of Clip Kino, despite the small scale it has maintained over the last coupleof years. Upload Cinema is a social cinema platform which began in Amsterdam in October2008, and has now spread to other locations, in The Netherlands especially. Initially, theproject was developed by Barbara De Wijn and Dagan Cohen as a future use for the oldestfilm theatre in The Netherlands, De Uitkijk. The project is sponsored by the advertising agencyLowe/Draftfcb, and takes the bold step of using a real cinema as a venue. De Wijn and Cohencreated a members-only viewing club, ‘Upload Cinema’, for screenings of online content,from YouTube in particular. ‘Upload Cinema’ has been a candidate for many different weband creative industry competitions. As noted in the ‘background’ webpage for their WebbyAwards entry, their case is based on the shifting media environment and regeneration of ‘old’forms: in The Netherlands, small cinemas have shrinking audiences, even while interest infilm and film-making is increasing, not only in terms of distribution, but in terms of productionand consumption. 44 There is a new theme each month at Upload Cinema, to which ‘theaudience can submit films; an editorial team selects the best and compiles a ninety minutesprogram, which is screened at movie theatres and special venues’. 45 Thus, the organizersbenefit from selections made by an extended online audience. In other words, they use thatwhich social media journalist Jeff Howe has termed ‘crowdsourcing’: ‘the act of taking a jobtraditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to anundefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call’. 46 They are connectingtheir member’s actions – browsing and watching clips online – with visiting their own website,and pasting in nominations for videos.What I believe is common to Clip Kino and Upload Cinema is the motivation to drag the normalized‘private’ activity of viewing and sharing downloaded content on one’s own computer(at least in Western nations) into public space. Both turn private use of media into publicuse, and have the potential to increase debate and appreciation about that content. I haveconsistently framed the aim and activities undertaken by Clip Kino as pedagogical, in termsof ‘media environment-awareness’ or ‘direct action media literacy’. I continue to use this approachas a format in my own teaching, and highlight this as a link at the top of the project’sfront webpage. 47 In my opinion, the face-to-face meetings of people plus screen have beenan important and valuable feature of Clip Kino events. Despite minimal funding and lowparticipation or attendance to events, it is the exploration of this factor of presence that hasmotivated to continue over the years; both in relation to online media, and in the encounterwith another person’s choices in relation to media.On the internet, anonymous exchange and communications have pushed us in many fantastictrans-local directions, and released hyper-fast torrents of value, opinion and supportthrough chat and discussion forums. Sadly, however, many abusive ‘reply-comments’ havealso been shared. In contrast, the Clip Kino project aims to provide a social event platform forrespectful sharing through on-site corporeal presence.To conclude, Clip Kino constitutes a small, temporary offline space for encounters aroundwhat others (you, we) watch online. For myself, the experience of organizing or facilitatingClip Kino events for the last three years have kept me interested and ‘contemporary’ in relationto online media and its issues, as well as allowing me the pleasure of getting to knowmany different individuals and groups in an offline context.Clip Kino:http://clipkino.info43. Upload Cinema (2008-), Amsterdam, Den Haag, Rotterdam, http://www.uploadcinema.nl.44. Upload Cinema Webby Awards entry, background text (2009), http://www.entry-site.nl/webbyawards/uploadcinema/background.html.45. About webpage, Upload Cinema (2008-), http://www.uploadcinema.net/about.php.46. Jeff Howe, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the crowd is Driving the Future of Business, NewYork: Crown Business, 2008. Original blog with similar name since 2006: http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/.47. Andrew G. Paterson, Clip Kino Pegagogical Statement webpage (2008), Helsinki, http://clipkino.info/pedagogical-statement.html.

94 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move95ReferencesFair Use & Copyright Resources, Centre for Social Media (2005-), American University School ofCommunication, Washington DC, http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/fair_use/.Howe, Jeff. Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the crowd is Driving the Future of Business, New York:Crown Business, 2008.Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity, London: The Penguin Press,2005, http://free-culture.cc/.McLeod, Kenneth. Freedom of Expression: Resistance & Repression in the Ages of Intellectual Property,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, http://www.freedomofexpression.us/.Paterson, Andrew G. Clip Kino Helsinki Legal Navigations. Self-published, 2008, http://clipkino.info/extra/clipkino_legal_fi_english_111208.pdf.Oksanen, Ville. Five Essays on Copyright in the Digital Era. Helsinki: Helsinki University of Technology/Turre Legal, 2009. http://www.turre.com/publications/.Salminen Lämsä, K. K. and M. Repo. ‘Library 10 and meetingpoin@lasipalatsi: New Kinds of LibraryServices in Helsinki City Centre’, Scandinavian Public Library Quarterly, 4 (2005): 20-23,http://www.splq.info/issues/vol38_4/vol38_4.pdf.Between iPhone and YouTube:Movies on the Move?Jan SimonsDigital Movies: On- and Offline VenuesThrough a fortunate coincidence – or was it really a coincidence? – the advent of 3G cellphones equipped with photo and video cameras occurred almost simultaneously with the riseof YouTube, one of the icons of Web 2.0. In 2004, two thirds of all mobile phones shippedworldwide were camera phones; YouTube was officially launched in the U.S. in November2005, with local versions launched in Europe, Latin America and Asia in 2007. These twodevelopments could not but meet, as the camera phone made every owner a potential filmmaker,and YouTube provided a free platform to publish, distribute and exhibit self-mademovies. The rest, one is tempted to say, is history. But is it?On the one hand it is: in 2006 YouTube announced that more than 65,000 videos were uploadedevery day, and that it received about 100 million views per day. In 2010, YouTube is thelargest online video provider in the U.S., with a market share of 43% and more than two billionviews per day. It is the third most visited website on the internet behind Google and Facebook,with 70% of its traffic coming from outside the U.S. and hundreds of millions of videos viewedon mobile devices every month. 1 Of course, not all content on YouTube is produced by amateurfilm-makers and quite a lot comes from professional and commercial film companies andtelevision broadcasters, much of which is copyrighted material uploaded ‘illegally’. Althoughfigures are hard to come by, DIY movies, many of which are made with cameras built-in tomobile devices or computers, seem to constitute the bulk of YouTube’s supply.On the other hand, the mobile phone movie has certainly found its way to other venues, suchas a fast-growing festival circuit dedicated to cell phone movies, variously termed ‘pocketmovies’, ‘cellular movies’, ‘pocket cinema’, ‘Ciné Pocket’, ‘Movil Film’, ‘Mobi Fest’, ‘Shorts’,to name a few. Just a few years after what was allegedly the first mobile phone movie festival,in Atlanta in 2004, almost every major city around the globe had its own mobile phone moviefestival. In addition, many established film festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival,the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, the Edinburgh InternationalFilm Festival, the Rotterdam International Film Festival and even the Festival deCannes opened sections dedicated to this ‘new kid on the block’. 21. ‘conScore Releases May 2010 U.S. Online Video Rankings’, http://www.conscore.com/Press_Events/2010/6/comScore_Releases_May_2010_U.S._Online_Video-Rankings;Mark Metekohy, ‘YouTube Statistics’, on Viralblog, May 17th, 2010,http://www.viralblog.com/research/youtube-statistics;and, http://website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/17/youtube-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/.2. Daniel Terdiman. ‘A Celebration of Cell-Phone Film’, Wired 30 August, 2004,http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2004/08/64698;see also http://mobifest.net/festivals/ or http://mobilizedtv.com/mobile-film-festivals.

96 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move97Predictably, both local and international versions of these events were launched, sponsoredand promoted by cell phone manufacturers such as Nokia, the uncontested marketleader in the 3G cell phone era prior to smartphones, with Samsung, Vodafone and othersdesperately seeking content for their hardware and services. Accordingly, these festivalsopened their entries up to actual and potential DIY film-makers among the owners of 3Gcell phones, as well as to ‘directors, other professionals, students and spectators’, in orderfor them ‘to anticipate, explore and question this new field of creation’, as the first edition ofthe Paris Festival Pocket Films in 2005 put it. 3 This formula is revealing in and of itself: themobile film was an invention ‘before the fact’. These terms and the events created aroundthem did not refer to a newly emerging phenomenon that needed to be identified andlabeled, but functioned to fill a void created by what was at that point, a new technology.This rapidly emerging – and now gradually dissolving – festival circuit fulfilled two purposes,other than providing content for mobile phone manufacturers and telecom providers. Firstof all, it prevented the relatively conservative film culture from missing out on possible futuredevelopments opened by new technologies, some ten years after the changes broughtabout in independent film-making by the advent of relatively cheap and portable digitalvideo cameras. In other words, it was hoped that the mobile phone camera could meet itsown Lars von Trier. Indeed, in 2005 the South African film-maker Aryan Kaganof producedSMS Sugar Man, allegedly the first feature length movie entirely shot with mobile phonecameras. 4 Second, by opening cinema screens to entries by anyone who felt the desireto make their mobile phone movies public, the mobile phone festival circuit might allowthe relatively closed milieu of film-makers and producers to follow the flow of an upcomingparticipatory culture, and create something like a ‘Dogma 2.0’. 5However, with these two functions came a double agenda. The rise of the mobile phonefilm festival circuit can also be considered an attempt to incorporate new technologies anda select company of talented and innovative film-makers into the already existing structuresand operations of cinema. The major strategic function of the mobile phone film festivalcircuit may very well have been to adapt the ‘cinematographic field’ to new technologies,players, and practices, and at the same time to seal it off against the ‘cult of the amateur’that lead to the prominence of YouTube. 6 From a systems theoretical point of view, the3. ‘Cinema at your fingertips’, Festival Pocket Films Paris, 2005 edition,http://www.festivalpocketfilms.fr/english/archives-98/article/2005-edition.4. Other titles also lay claim to the honorary title of ‘first feature length mobile phone movie’, suchas Dutch film-maker Cyrus Frisch’s movie Why Didn’t Anybody Tell Me It Would Become ThisBad in Afghanistan (2007). The first major movie to be distributed exclusively through mobilephones is (claimed to be) Rage, directed by Sally Potter and released in 2009. The confusion isprobably due to the temporal gap between the shooting of SMS Sugar Man in December 2005,and its release in 2008.5. There is indeed a short-lived Dogma Mobile International Film Festival. On Dogma and Larsvon Trier, see Jan Simons, Playing The Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema, Amsterdam:Amsterdam University Press, 2007.6. Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture. New York:Doubleday, 2007.burgeoning of a mobile phone film festival can be seen as part of an adaptive strategy inwhich the ‘institution of cinema’ had specialized over more than a century: preservationthrough innovation. A response to YouTube, indeed. If this is true, one might ask whetherthe gradual dissolution of the mobile phone film festival circuit in the last couple of years isa symptom of the success of this strategy, or of its failure. Was the mobile film festival circuitthe avant-garde of a 21st century film culture, or the rearguard of a new digital mediaculture? Or, to rephrase the question in yet another way, do mobile phone films belong tocinematic or to digital culture?Pocket Films: Movies at your FingertipsIn a modernist way of thinking, champions of mobile phone films expected that new technologieswould bring new modes of film-making and new, cinematic forms, formats, stylesand stories. Mobile phone film festivals would provide professional, as well as prospectiveand wannabe film-makers, with a playground upon which to experiment with new tools,and to explore their affordances as well as their limitations. Since the mobile phone filmwas not an already existing type or genre of film, but rather an idea conjured up by the arrivaland rapid distribution of the 3G cell phone, the first question to answer was: what is amobile phone film? The answer turned out to be far from simple.A glance at the ‘Call for Entries’ of some of the major mobile phone movie festivals revealsthe confusion around the definition of mobile phone movies. The German Mobile FilmFestival and the French Festival Pocket Film state that ‘pocket films’ or ‘mobile films’ aremovies shot with mobile phone cameras (‘films tournés avec téléphone mobile’ and ‘Filme... die mit einem Mobiltelefon gedreht wurden’), whereas the Toronto festival Mobifest definesmobile movies as ‘made-for-mobile movies’. 7 Films made with mobile phone camerasare not necessarily made ‘for’ display on a mobile phone, even if this ‘new tool’ is, as theParis Pocket Film Festival states in the announcement of its first edition in 2005, the firstdevice ‘that is camera, projector, and broadcast screen (écran à diffusion) at the sametime’. 8 The same festival nevertheless presents a section ‘Films pour Grand écran’ (Filmsfor the Big Screen’ and ‘Films pour écran de poche’ (Films for the Pocket Screen), whilethe Canadian Mobifest has a category of ‘Animation’ next to a category ‘Shot on Mobile’.These categorizations suggest that not all mobile phone movies are shot on mobile phones,and that not all mobile phone films are shot for the ‘pocket screen’ of the mobile phone. AsFrench film theorist Roger Odin writes in an essay about the ‘pocket film spectator’, filmsshot with mobile phones are cinematic films, (‘Les films tournés avec téléphone mobilesont des films de cinéma’), since they were conceived for the big screen. 97. Mobile Film Festival: http://de.mobilefilmfestival.com/teilnahmebedingungen.php; Festival PocketFilm: www.festivalpocketfilms.fr/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=4&var_mode=recalcul; Mobifest:http://www.mobifest.net/home/.8. http://www.festivalpocketfilms.fr/archives/edition-2005/.9. Roger Odin, ‘Le “Pocket Film Spectateur”’, Festival Pocket Films, 2009, http://www.festivalpocketfilms.fr/communaute-42/reflexions/article/le-pocket-film-spectateur-par.

98 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move99To complicate matters, although it is possible to shoot, show and distribute movies witha mobile phone – mobile phones allow users to upload movies and photos directly toYouTube, Flickr, or social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace – between shootingand showing, there is usually a stage of post-production and editing, for which mobilephones are not very well equipped. The German Mobifest allows mobile movies to beedited ‘either on or outside of the mobile phone’ (‘Die Filme können innerhalb oder außerhalbder Telephone geschnitten werden’) and the Brussels festival Ciné Pocket stronglyrecommends its prospective submitters edit their movies, which must be shot using amobile phone, on their computers (‘Mais il reste souhaitable de copier et de monter le filmsur ton pc’). 10 Editing, however, means a lot more than the selection and arrangement ofshots, and usually comprises the addition of sound, titles, color adjustments, filters, virtualcamera movements, split screens, double exposures, and – since the computer is agnosticabout the origins of the data it processes – the creation of special effects and computergenerated images. In this case, what does the phrase ‘made’ or ‘shot with a mobile phonecamera’ actually mean? Many of the entries of each of the mobile phone festivals are, asone of the aforementioned categories of the Toronto Mobifest made clear, animations thatwere entirely created on computers, not shot using a camera at all.If production and post-production techniques do not provide a very strong basis for distinguishingmobile phone movies from other types of film, perhaps the mobile phone movieshould describe ‘movies made for the mobile phone’. The term ‘pocket cinema’ seems topoint in this direction, evoking the portability, mobility, and easy digestibility of the ‘pocketbook’, which we currently refer to as the paperback. Of course, any book can be publishedin hard cover as well as in pocket book format, and many classical texts have been publishedas cheap pocket book editions for a wide popular readership. But since the pocket book wasdesigned to be carried around and read in circumstances that did not particularly favour along and concentrated read, such as commuting, pocket books encouraged the emergenceof easily digestible, highly formulaic and forgettable literary genres such as the detectivenovel, the thriller, and adventure, horror and romantic love stories. Although none of thesegenres is exclusively published in paperback format, these genres represent the prototypicalcontent of the paperback, as is evident in any airport bookshop. The prominence of thesegenres in the pocket book department, however, has more to do with pragmatic considerationsof literature most suitable for reading in particular circumstances than with the materialsand technologies used for their production.Could the same be said about ‘pocket movies’? In principle, any movie could be displayedon a mobile phone screen, or any other portable device. Apple’s (American) iTunes Store, forinstance, offers movies, television shows, music videos and computer games for downloadingand playback on iPhones, iPods and iPads, implicitly demonstrating that ‘mobile movies’are no longer and actually never have been restricted to cell phones, although only the lattercombine the functions of recording and screening movies. Nevertheless, nobody has evercalled these downloadable objects ‘mobile movies’ or ‘pocket movies’, even when they are10. http://cinepocket.lescorsaires.be/spip.php?article40.offered in a special iPhone or iPad format. Most of these films, television shows and musicvideos were produced for a theatrical release or for screening on a television set or homecinema technology with large, high-resolution screens, which will soon be able to competewith the quality of a cinema screen. As with the pocket book, for reasons that are partlytechnological but mainly pragmatic, these audiovisual objects, though in principle playableon mobile devices, do not qualify as pocket movies.Although mobile devices are usually marketed and considered high-tech appliances, theirimage quality still lags behind the quality of cinema, television, and even computer screens.Not only is the size of mobile phone screens much smaller, they have a relatively low resolution,slow frame rate, and a limited color range compared to LCD and plasma TV screens,or the ‘silver screen’ of the cinema. Moreover, mobile phones and other portable devices areusually used to watch movies ‘on the go’, in circumstances quite similar to those in whichpeople read pocket books: when waiting for a plane, a train, or a bus, during a journey, in theholidays, at a beach. That is, they are viewed mostly in situations that are not very suitablefor total immersion into the fictional world of a feature film, or the extended argument of adocumentary movie, because they are filled with competing sensations, such as distractingevents, other people, tasks and duties that require attention, and poor lighting conditions,such as reflecting sun beams.It is tempting to transform these technological and pragmatic limitations into medium specificaesthetics, which would specify the distinctive features of the mobile phone movie.In the early stages of the mobile phone movie, typically modernist attempts were made toidentify these qualities. For example, Australian new media consultant and producer JulianaPierce christened the mobile phone display ‘the fourth screen’, suggesting that movies hadfound yet another window next to the cinema screen, the television and video screen, andthe computer screen. Pierce also observed that ‘Wide shots, pans, surround sound, moodlighting and anything with too much detail is almost no go for mobile movies’. 11 Accordingto German critic Reinhard W. Wolf, the small size of the mobile phone display makes theuse of close-ups almost mandatory, while the low frame rate is prohibitive for fast editingand fast movements of both characters and camera, and the limited colour range imposesthe requirement of working with large and brightly colored surfaces. 12 Moreover, since thesound capacities of mobile phones are also modest compared to the high fidelity equipmentof today’s movie theatres and home cinemas, and given the often noisy environments inwhich mobile phones movies are viewed, pocket movies should not rely on dialogue or intricatesound effects either. Given the circumstances in which mobile phone movies are mostlikely to be watched, and the technological constraints such as the limited storage capacityof most mobile devices and bandwidth of wireless internet connections (if available at all), itis not surprising that early critics recommended mobile phone movies be short and have a11. Juliana Pierce, ‘Feature: The Fourth Screen’, Off The Air: Screenrights’ Newsletter, August 2005,http://www.screen.org/pdfs/about/offtheair/2005/ota0805.pdf.12. Reinhard W. Wolf, ‘Micromovies – Kurzfilme für die Westentasche, Teil 1’, Shortfilm.de DasKurzfilmmagazin, January 2, 2006, http://www.shortfilm.de/index.php?id=414&L=0&0=.

100 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move101simple storyline with a clear, preferably surprising closure. As Australian film-maker Joe Mialepointed out, micro-movies should be ‘caricature based’ rather than character based. 13According to these recommendations, Isabella Rossellini’s mini-series Green Porno 14 fits thebill for the perfect pocket movie. The two series consist of eight very short movies, each ofthem featuring Rossellini in the male part of a couple of insects, and explaining and executingthe sexual act of that species. Rossellini wears simple, brightly coloured costumes, andperforms in similarly simple and brightly coloured sets, so that the images are reminiscentof children’s drawings, and appear to be a mixture of live action and animation. Each filmends with the fulfillment of the sexual act and its sometimes lethal consequences – a clear,sometimes funny, but always surprising form of closure. With this playful dialectics betweenchildish representation and adult content, ecological education and pornographic curiosity,Green Porno allegorizes the tension between the new but technologically immature ‘fourthscreen’ of mobile devices and its adult counterparts, cinema and television.Although produced with the ‘fourth screen’ of mobile devices in mind, the Green Pornoseries exemplifies the ambiguous status of the pocket movie. It was not shot with mobilephone cameras, but in a professional film studio with professional film equipment. Neitherwas it made for exclusive distribution for mobile devices. The series garnered its fame in theindependent film festival circuit, and is available only in streaming format from the SundanceFilm Festival website and, as is to be expected today, on YouTube. 15 Rossellini herself is theoffspring of the Italian neo-realist film-maker Roberto Rossellini and the Swedish movie actressIngrid Bergmann, and became famous through her roles in films such as David Lynch’sBlue Velvet and Wild At Heart and Dutch film-maker Jeroen Krabbé’s Left Luggage. Thus,her Green Porno series was treated as an offspring of the cinema-as-we-knew-it rather thanthe harbinger of something new, 16 as are most micro-movies or pocket films. Or, to remain inGreen Porno’s own terms, as a reproductive rather than procreative form.Critics and producers such as Pierce, Wolf, and Miale might take the constraints of themobile phone as the basis of a distinctive mobile phone movie aesthetics, yet this aestheticsis itself a relatively small subset of the stylistic and formal repertoire derived from the venerabletraditions of classical Hollywood and European art cinema. 17 The mobile phone moviemerely ‘remediates’ the familiar forms and formats of preexisting ‘old media’ of cinema and13. Quoted in Terdiman, ‘A Celebration of Cell-Phone Film’. For similar ‘basics’ of mobile phone filmmakingsee Neil Curry, ‘Film-maker Shares Secrets of Great Mobile Phone Movies’, CNN, March20, 2009, http://articles.cnnn.com/2009-03-20/entertainment/mobilemovies.toptips_1_mobilephone-video-quality-regular-camera?-s=PM:SHOWBIZ.14. Green Porno, Isabella Rossellini, Jody Shapiro and Rick Gilbert (Producers), U.S., 2008,downloadable at: http://www.sundancechannel.com/greenporno/.15. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkm3CCX1_xk.16. Blue Velvet (dir. David Lynch, 1986); Wild At Heart (dir. David Lynch, 1990); Left Luggage (dir.Jeroen Krabbé, 1998).17. For a more recent version of this argument, see Benoît Labourdette, Tournez Un Film Avec VotreTéléphone Portable,Editions Dixit, 2008.television. 18 Film theorist Roger Odin highlights the remediating function of mobile phonefilms in general, and mobile phone film festivals in particular. For Odin, the mobile phone filmremediates the loss of the indexical bound of the cinematic image to the real by heighteningthe viewer’s awareness of the materials, techniques and procedures used in digital filmproduction. In his view, the mobile phone movie is to contemporary mainstream cinema whatavant-garde and experimental film was to the mainstream cinema of old. 19 The mobile phonemovie’s main function is to remind the spectators of contemporary digital cinema of Godard’sfamous dictum from the sixties of the previous century: ‘Ce n’est pas une image juste; c’estjuste une image’.Although these attempts to formulate a mobile phone movie aesthetics tend to specify it interms of the limitations of these movies’ intended window of display, or its hoped for effect onthe spectator rather than in terms of the mode of production, they cover a small portion of thewhole spectrum of actual practices and virtual possibilities involved. On the one hand, theseapproaches fall victim to the superficial similarities between recording or watching movieson mobile devices and domestic or cinema screens. On the other hand, they cleave to themodernist idea that media technologies generate their own specific aesthetic properties andrequirements. When approached from the perspective of digital media, mobile phone moviesstart to look quite different.Moving Images: Images on the Move.After Pierce’s formulation of the fourth screen, critic Alex Munt has categorized the mobilephone display together with the computer screen as ‘S’ (for ‘small’) next to the ‘M’ (mediumsized)wide-screen television, the L (large) 2D theatrical cinema screen, and the XL (extralarge) sized 3D cinema screens, as in Imax cinemas. 20 Yet another critic, Ted Brown, hasclassified the mobile phone display as a ‘“third” digital screen’ that comes after the first,analogue, cinema screen, and the second, electronic, television screen. 21 Whether theseforms of categorization take size or technology as the criterion for classification, they functionfirst of all to demonstrate how futile, volatile and transient any divisions have becomesince screens began to leave their dedicated niches in cinema theatres and living rooms. Atthis point, screens have become so ubiquitous that any categorization that takes the cinemascreen as its starting point looks like a hopelessly old-fashioned attempt to preserve the cinema’sprivileged status.It is the omissions from these categorizations that are more telling: ‘urban screens’, the hugedynamic billboards that increasingly adorn the streets, squares, and public spaces in urbanenvironments; ‘skinned walls’, or buildings with video walls; wide-screen televisions in public18. The term ‘remediation’ is taken from, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation:Understanding New Media, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999.19. Odin, ‘Le “Pocket Film Spectateur”’.20. Alex Munt, ‘S, M, X, XL: The Question of Scale in Screen Media’, Flowtv 6.8,http://flowtv.org/?p=809#.21. Tod Brown, ‘Isabella Rossellini Does Bug Porn’, Twitch, January 1, 2008, http://twitchfilm.net/site/view/isabella-rossellini-does-bug-porn/.

102 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move103spaces or public transport to transmit information, advertisements or entertainment; videowalls used at rock concerts or sports events; the small screens of navigation systems; DVDplayers and game consoles in cars and boats to keep the kids quiet, or the guests busy. TimesSquare and Piccadilly Circus are no longer the only places ‘augmented’ with audiovisual information.In the rare cases in which there are no screens in one’s immediate environment,one still has a mobile phone, iPod or iPad to turn to.The reason for the selective blindness of the aforementioned categorizations is quite obvious:their primary criterion for selection was not size or technology, but content. The categoriesonly cover screens that are used – or are described as being used – for the screening of movies,whether these are feature films or micro-movies. This categorization fails to do justice thecontemporary variety of screens and content, and demonstrates how narrow one’s view maybecome if new media are approached from the perspective of already existing media – mediaabout to be ‘remediated’. We have seen the proliferation of screens in homes, offices, shoppingmalls, stadiums, museums, bars, waiting rooms, airports, train stations, coaches, planesand trains. Screens come in all sizes and forms, and in private as well as public spaces. Asthe moving image itself leaves its dedicated habitats – the cinemas and living rooms – thesebecome display windows, among many others. With this migration, the moving image acquiresnew forms and functions. Feature films and television shows become special cases of the ubiquitousand multi-functional moving image that has become the icon of today’s ‘visual culture’.Ironically, outside the cinema or the living room, the moving image is often subject to technological,practical and pragmatic constraints quite similar to those identified for pocket films byearly critics Pierce, Miale, and Wolf. Images displayed on mega screens, such as image skinsand urban screens, often suffer from difficult to control lighting conditions, noise from theirimmediate environments, and competition from events, incidents, traffic, and other screens,all of which vie for the attention of the passersby. Relatively low resolution, low frame ratesand poor lighting conditions make detailed images, panoramic landscapes, the use of subtlecolours, fast camera movements and fast editing as much a ‘no-go’ as they were said to befor mobile phone movies. In addition, the images on these huge screens often come withoutsound, both because it would drown in the surrounding noise, and add to the often alreadyloud noise in urban environments.Moreover, the attention span of the urban passerby is perhaps even shorter than that of themobile phone user. The city dweller tends to be ‘on the move’, and has to divide their attentionover a multitude of sensorial, social, and commercial impressions at once: in a cognitiveand perceptual sense, the urban passerby is permanently ‘multi-tasking’. For quite similarreasons to mobile phones, then, the content displayed on such screens had better be short,bright, and instantly intelligible, and animations, commercials, and very short movies suit theconditions of mega-screens best. Thus, the constraints identified for mobile phone moviesare not specifically bound to the technology or the size of the display, but rather to the practicalconditions in which moving images are viewed. As a consequence, genres that used tolead a very marginal existence at best in cinema and television as we knew them have gainedprominence on both mega and micro-screens. Animations, music videos, shorts, and commercialshave become mainstream.The multitude of screens that populate the world are no longer exclusively dedicated tomovies, as they were when located in cinema theatres. Mobile phone and computer screensare mostly used for reading or typing SMS messages or emails, taking written or photographicnotes, browsing the internet, playing games, making calculations, consulting maps, orsearching for addresses or telephone numbers. Now, both mega screens and the micro-sizedscreens of mobile phones and portable devices are – as are those of desktop and laptop computers– used to display text messages, graphics, animations, photographs, maps, drawings,news reports, advertisements, entertaining distractions, traffic information, crowd control instructionsat huge public events, live reports of sports matches or political rallies – along withart works, ‘pocket movies’, and other DIY products made and uploaded by whoever feels likesharing their talents with a larger audience. 22Of course, this ecumenical cohabitation of diverse content has been made possible by thedigitization of most media. Because all these media share the same digital language of onesand zeros, they do not only co-exist, but begin entering into all sorts of new configurations,happily mixing and exchanging properties, procedures, forms and formats that used to beconsidered specific particular media. Digital technologies have turned computers into thatwhich Lev Manovich has called a ‘meta-medium’ that not only combines ‘cinematography,animation, computer animation, special effects, graphic design, and typography’, but alsomake formerly ‘autonomous’ media exchange and remix ‘fundamental techniques, workingmethods, and ways of representation and expression’. 23 Since the arrival of the GraphicalUser Interface (GUI), for instance, procedures that were formerly typically cinematographic,such as zooming and panning, were transferred to almost all applications. The representationof content in windows on computer screens allows users to scroll up- and downward, panfrom left to right, and zoom in and out of particular details. In a sense, one could say that allmedia have become ‘moving images’.Cinema itself has been deeply transformed by this process of hybridization. It has becomedifficult to tell a frame’s live action from its animated parts, sharp cuts between shots havebeen substituted with undetectable transitions between frames, and the art of editing is nolonger to select and arrange shots into scenes and sequences, but to de-compose and recompose,analyse and synthesize pixels and layers into dynamic images, of which every partcan be changed separately and constantly, without regard for temporal boundaries. Sincethe beginning of film history, the shot or still photograph has been considered the basicunit of the cinematographic language – yet it no longer plays a significant role in digital imageprocessing. A film semiotician would be hard pressed to apply Christian Metz’s famous‘Grande Syntagmatique’ – a taxonomy of film segments that are identified by clear temporal22. See Jeroen Beekmans, ‘Turing Times Square Into Art Square’, The Pop-Up City, 21 December,2009, http://popupcity.net/2009/12/turning-times-square-into-art-square/; Mirjam Struppek,‘Urban Screens – The Urbane Potential of Public Screens for Interaction’, Intelligent Agent 6. 2:‘Interactive City’, http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/vol6_No2_interactive_city_struppek.htm.23. Lev Manovich, ‘Understanding Hybrid Media’, 2007, http://www.manovich.net.

104 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move105and spatial discontinuities – to today’s movies. 24 Shots, sequences, and habitual ways ofediting have not completely disappeared; the majority of contemporary Hollywood movies stilluse these methods. Yet, this way of editing has just become one option, a ‘mode of narration’amongst many others.So-called ‘PowerPoint Movies’ are examples of ‘meta-movies’ that draw on a mix of traditionaland novel modes of narration. The most famous example is probably Al Gore’s An InconvenientTruth, 25 which includes graphs, maps, statistical information, photographs, drawingsand movie images; Michael Welsh’s educational YouTube movies The Machine is Us/IngUs and An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube are also good examples. 26 Not surprisingly,PowerPoint movies can be found among mobile phone film festivals as well, such asDavid Bakker’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, which summarizes the 624 pages of BillBryson’s book in just four minutes, and was entered into the 2008 edition of the Groningenfestival Viva La Focus. On a different note, the cell phone movie Objets à Usages Multiples isshot and edited in a rather conventional way, but satirizes the current convergence of mediaby showing everyday utensils being used for different purposes than those for which they hadbeen designed. Of course, so is the ‘smart’ mobile phone itself, nowadays. 27Among many others, another example of ‘remix’ mobile phone movies is Henry Reichold’sFree Run, submitted to the Paris Festival Pocket Films in 2007. 28 After opening with adocumentary shot of a mass of passengers of the London subway leaving the elevator andwalking towards the camera, we see a collage of moving and still images, films, photographs,animations, drawings and postcards of London landmarks and traffic, through which the protagonistnavigates on a skateboard. This film cleverly summarizes the history of cinema: fromthe opening shot, which is an obvious allusion to the Lumière brothers’ film Sortie des UsinesLumière, which itself epitomizes the industrial era, to the remix mode of the movie itself,and the highly individualized, idiosyncratic and subjective ways of locomotion of the skateboarder,which symbolize the post-industrial and postmodern era, and its digital informationand communication technologies is represented by. Free Run demonstrates that nowadays,moving images are made equally with computers as with cameras, if not more so. Moreover,although submitted to a mobile phone film festival, Free Run certainly has not been madewith a mobile phone, nor is there any reason to assume that it should be exclusively displayedon mobile phones. Rather, Free Run offers a ‘pocket history’ of the cinema.24. Christian Metz, Essais Sur La Signification au Cinéma, Tome 1, Paris: Klincksieck, 1983.25. An Inconvenient Truth (dir. Davis Guggenheim, 2006).26. Michael Welsh, The Machine Is Us/Ing Us, 2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE, An Anthropological Introduction To YouTube, 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU&feature=channel, David Bakker, A Short History ofNearly Everything, 2008, http://www.vivalafocus.nl/archief/2008/films/a-short-history-of-nearlyeverything-3gp.27. Objets à Usages Multiples (Multi Purpose Objects) (dir. Delphine Marceau, 2008). http://www.festivalpocketfilms.fr/films/article/objets-a-usages-multiples.28. http://www.festivalpocketfilms.fr/films/article/free-run.PowerPoint movies do, however, exemplify the transition to ‘cinema outside the cinema’ inanother sense. Outside the walls of the cinema auditorium, the main function of (mixed)moving images is no longer to tell stories, to present characters with which an audience canidentify, or to represent a world of events, adventure and romance in which an audiencecan be immersed. On the contrary, outside the cinema theatre, moving images are used toinform, to entertain, to seduce, to impress, to persuade or to shock. That is, their main taskis communication rather than representation. Moving images have become part and parcelof an urban and architectural environment in which the ‘lessons of Las Vegas’ – where thedesign of a building serves to communicate rather than to reveal the building’s structure andfunction, as the principles of modernist architecture would have it – have become generalwisdom and where communication presides over representation. 29 And since the urbanand everyday environment is full of stimuli that compete for our attention, communication onscreens outside theatres or living rooms had better be bold rather than subtle: Eisenstein’sapproach of film editing as a ‘slap in the face’ for the spectator is more pertinent to contemporaryvisual culture than Bazin’s concept of the film image as a reflective redemption of thereal. And because the first thing an image has to communicate is that it is there in the firstplace, the medium has in a very literal sense become the message.Research into keitai, that is, 3G phone use in Japan and South-East Asian countries such asSouth Korea, has shown that users send photographs or videos to peers, family members orcolleagues to ask for advice on the choice of clothes, instructions for a task at hand, to bringan interesting event or amusing anecdote to their attention, or to simply let them know thatthey are thinking of them. In many of these cases, the particular content of these messagesis less important than or even peripheral to, the actual intention the message is meant toexpress: communication presides over representation. 30 Again, this has less to do with theparticular medium or technologies that are being used to produce and distribute them, butrather with the pragmatic and practical circumstances under which these images circulateand communicate.iPhone and YouTubeWhere does this leave the mobile phone movie, in terms of cinematographic type or genresof film? First of all, it seems quite obvious that the mobile phone movie partakes in a moregeneral process of ‘remediation’ that is not restricted to cinema, but extends to media in general.The moving image has become one of the raw ingredients of the digital meta-medium:not only can it be mixed and mingled with all other media, but its production, storage, distribution,and exhibition are no longer tied to specific channels and windows. That is, mobilephone movies are certainly not movies produced with mobile phone cameras: the majorityof entries of mobile phone movie festivals contain computer generated animations, specialeffects, and collages of non-cinematic pictures, graphics, texts, and typography. Nor aremobile phone movies especially suitable for display on mobile phones alone. Since the mo-29. Roberto Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. Learning From Las Vegas: TheForgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001.30. Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe & Misa Matsuda (eds) Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phonesin Japanese Life, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2005.

106 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move107bile phone display shares technological and pragmatic constraints with other non-cinematicscreens, they circulate just as easily among urban screens, image skins, monitors in publictransport, portable devices, and screens in public places and shopping malls. One reasonfor the gradual dissolution of the mobile phone movie film festival circuit may very well be thedissolution of the mobile phone movie into a more general digital media culture.One aspect of the mobile phone film festival circuit that has received very little comment isthe ‘sociological’ basis of its participants. Not only are the organizers and jury members ofmost of these festivals members of the professional media culture – be they film-makers orproducers themselves, film critics, or curators of film museums – but the formats, modes ofpresentation and qualities of most of the entries into the festivals betray a more than amateurinvolvement in film-making. Although the professional backgrounds of the entrants are hardlyever mentioned, the video’s titles, framing, editing, sound effects, and production values suggestthat the competitors have had professional training, and experience in handling scripts,actors, staging, film equipment and editing software. In this sense, it is revealing to comparethe entries into mobile phone festivals such as the Brussels Cinépocket or the Paris FestivalPocket Films, with the Groningen festival Viva La Focus, which recruits its submitters fromthe region of Groningen. Whereas the former festivals host movies of quite professional quality,the latter hosts movies of DIY makers, mostly high school students and other youths fromthe Groningen region. The relation of the former to the latter is that of Vimeo to YouTube:festivals moderated by professional gatekeepers versus an open platform, with no professionalstandards to filter its entries. It is probably not coincidental that mobile phone moviessubmitted to mobile phone film festivals can usually not be found on YouTube.Insofar as the primary function of mobile phone film festivals appears to be to incorporate anew mode of film-making into that of traditional cinema, the festivals seem to be fighting alost rear-guard battle. The mobile phone movie is part of a digital mediascape, rather thanan expansion of, or appendix to, cinema. Odin’s observation, recall, was that the ‘pocketfilm spectator’ is a reflective spectator who comes to contemporary mainstream cinema withquestions in mind about the means and technologies of production. This means that themobile phone movie and the mobile phone movie festival circuit is a playground, or trainingground, in which prospective film-makers and film spectators can prepare themselves forthe ‘free run’ into the future of digital meta-media. In that sense, the mobile phone festivalcircuit can be seen as an opening to the future, and its gradual demise a sign of its success.ReferencesBolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, Mass.:The MIT Press, 1999.Brown, Tod. ‘Isabella Rossellini Does Bug Porn’, Twitch, January 1, 2008,http://twitchfilm.net/site/view/isabella-rossellini-does-bug-porn/Beekmans, Jeroen. ‘Turing Times Square Into Art Square’, The Pop-Up City, 21 December, 2009,http://popupcity.net/2009/12/turning-times-square-into-art-square/.Curry, Neil. ‘Filmmaker Shares Secrets of Great Mobile Phone Movies’, CNN, 20 March 2009,http://articles.cnnn.com/2009-03-20/entertainment/mobilemovies.toptips_1_mobile-phone-videoquality-regular-camera?-s=PM:SHOWBIZ.Ito, Mizuko, Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda (eds) Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phonesin Japanese Life. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2005.Keen, Andrew. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture. New York: Doubleday,2007.Labourdette, Benoît. Tournez Un Film Avec Votre Téléphone Portable, Editions Dixit, 2008.Manovich, Lev. ‘Understanding Hybrid Media’, 2007, http://www.manovich.net.Metekohy, Mark. ‘YouTube Statistics’, Viralblog, 17 May, 2010,http://www.viralblog.com/research/youtube-statistics.Munt, Alex. ‘S, M, X, XL: The Question of Scale in Screen Media’, Flowtv 6.8,http://flowtv.org/?p=809#.Metz, Christian. Essais Sur La Signification au Cinéma, Tome 1, Paris: Klincksieck, 1983.Odin, Roger. ‘Le “Pocket Film Spectateur”’, Festival Pocket Films, 2009,http://www.festivalpocketfilms.fr/communaute-42/reflexions/article/le-pocket-film-spectateur-par.Pierce, Juliana. ‘Feature: The Fourth Screen’, Off The Air: Screenrights’ Newsletter, August 2005,http://www.screen.org/pdfs/about/offtheair/2005/ota0805.pdf.Simons, Jan. Playing The Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema, Amsterdam: Amsterdam UniversityPress, 2007.Struppek, Mirjam. ‘Urban Screens – The Urbane Potential of Public Screens for Interaction’, IntelligentAgent 6. 2: ‘Interactive City’,http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/vol6_No2_interactive_city_struppek.htm.Terdiman, Daniel. ‘A Celebration of Cell-Phone Film’, Wired, 30 August, 2004,http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2004/08/64698.Venturi, Roberto, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas: The ForgottenSymbolism of Architectural Form, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001.Wolf, Reinhard W. ‘Micromovies – Kurzfilme für die Westentasche, Teil 1’, Shortfilm.de Das Kurzfilmmagazin,January 2, 2006, http://www.shortfilm.de/index.php?id=414&L=0&0=.On the other hand, the mobile phone film festival circuit can – and probably must – be seenas an attempt to draw a boundary between the professionals of the moving image makingbusiness and the rising tide of DIY film-making culture epitomized by YouTube. The messagethese festivals intend to broadcast is that, although economically and theoretically the practiceof film-making has become within anybody’s reach, it takes more than a mobile cameraand cheap and user-friendly software to make interesting movies. In this sense, in spite oftheir open invitations to submit movies, these festivals are attempts to close off the ranks ofthe professionals to the DIY amateurs knocking at their door. In that sense, too, these festivalsare a response to YouTube. It remains to be seen whether the gradual dissolution of themobile phone film festival is a sign that this battle, too, has been lost.

108 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies109Video Art Distribution in the Era ofOnline VideoSandra FauconnierThe Birth of a Video Distribution CollectionIn 1978, Dutch television producer René Coelho made an unconventional decision thatwould change his life and career forever. He opened up his house in Amsterdam to artists,allowing them to showcase their work and receive assistance with production. These artistsall had one thing in common: they worked with video, a medium not yet accepted by museums,festivals and other ‘mainstream’ art venues. René Coelho’s home gallery, baptizedMontevideo, would quickly grow into one of Europe’s most prominent venues for experimentalvideo and media art. 1Montevideo, in its early days, must havefelt like a community or club. It was a veryactive social hub, thriving upon a networkof people who were deeply engaged withvideo art. Many international artists, includingsome who would become established inlater decades, such as Bill Viola, Gary Hilland Woody and Steina Vasulka, visited Amsterdamand Montevideo in the 1980s in orderto produce and present their work. 2 OfRené Coelho in Montevideo.course, Montevideo also played an importantrole for Dutch video and media art. The organization had a strong relationship with AKI,the video art department at the art academy in Arnhem, from which many artists who graduatedwho would later become established names in the field. Montevideo also co-producedand presented many Dutch video installations.Woody Vasulka in Montevideo.The production and presentation activities at Montevideowere a first step; Montevideo also looked at other ways topromote and disseminate video art, and building a collectionof single-channel video works and installationswas a logical next step. From the beginning, it was a distributioncollection: works were rented out to art venuesall over the world and were presented internationally. Inthis way, Montevideo extensively promoted video art, andgenerated a bit of income for itself, as well as royalties forthe artists in its collection.Over the years, Montevideo and its collection merged with other institutions, most notablyTime Based Arts, the video artist network related to Amsterdam’s performance and contemporaryart centre De Appel. In 1998, Montevideo/Time Based Arts was renamed theNetherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk). Since 1993, Montevideo – and later NIMk – havealso been at the forefront of research into video art preservation. In 2010, NIMk is workingon a third phase of the ongoing preservation of Dutch video art heritage, actively safeguardingits own and other institutions’ collections. 3 At this moment, NIMk’s distribution collectionis the largest in Europe, and at the heart of the institute. The distribution collection consistsof more than 2,000 titles of single-channel video works and installations by more than500 international artists. Over the years, the organization has slowly expanded its activitiesto include other or ‘newer’ media arts: not only single-channel video and installations, butalso internet-based, software- and hardware-based work. 4 However, this article will focus onsingle-channel video.Cataloguing and Promoting Video ArtWhat follows focuses on the online presence of NIMk’s collection in the context of current developmentsin networked media, including online video, Web 2.0 and shifts in copyright andthe distribution of cultural content online. It is written from the perspective of an insider andemployee of NIMk: I am an art historian who specializes in the online presentation of culturalheritage, and I work for NIMk’s collection and Mediatheque. I have also been involved in theCulture Vortex research project, which is discussed further in a later section of this text, ascoordinator for NIMk’s research line.1. A very brief history of the Netherlands Media Art Institute is available on our website:Netherlands Media Art Institute, History NIMk, http://nimk.nl/eng/history-nimk. There is also anintroduction to the history of NIMk’s collection at: Netherlands Media Art Institute, History of theCollection, http://nimk.nl/eng/history-of-the-collection. Longer essays describing the turbulenthistory of video art in the Netherlands are Rob Perrée, ‘From Agora to Montevideo’, in JeroenBoomgaard and Bart Rutten (eds) The Magnetic Era, Rotterdam/Amsterdam: NAi Publishersand Netherlands Media Art Institute, 2003, pp. 51-77 and Sebastian Lopez, ‘Video Exposures:Between Television and the Exhibition Space’ in Sebastian Lopez (ed) A Short History of DutchVideo Art, Rotterdam: episode publishers, 2005, pp. 13-24.2. Information about past activities and events, and video registrations from Montevideo’s andNIMk’s history are available via NIMk’s online catalogue: http://catalogue.nimk.nl.Non-professional online access to NIMk’s collection is complementary to professional, ‘physical’distribution, which is NIMk’s specialization. In the past, Montevideo and NIMk have3. Information about NIMk’s video preservation projects and research can be found at, http://nimk.nl/eng/preservation/.4. In 1990-1993, Montevideo organized Imago, a travelling exhibition of video and mediainstallations, curated by René Coelho, which visited nine countries in Europe and Asia.Netherlands Media Art Institute, Imago, http://catalogue.nimk.nl/site/event.php?id=592. Imagoincluded several interactive and hardware-based works, installations by Bill Spinhoven andJeffrey Shaw, among others. During the 1990s, new media works became an increasinglyprominent part of exhibitions organized by and at NIMk.

110 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies111Montevideo catalogue by Gábor Bódy, 1984.promoted the distribution collection via presentations, promotional videotapes and DVDs,and catalogues. Montevideo’s first catalogue, which was of course initially produced in print,was designed by Hungarian director and video artist Gábor Bódy in 1984, 5 and was a workof art in itself: a U-matic videotape box filled with large ‘library cards’ describing artists andworks in the collection. A second, more traditionally designed catalogue in book form waspublished in 1996.Besides print catalogues, the organization also regularly produced (and still produces) previewtapes and DVDs of recent works in the collection, and organizes special events, screeningsand – especially in the 1990s – travelling exhibitions of works from its collection. 6 Regularsubmissions to international film, video and media art festivals are also part of NIMk’spromotional strategy.In the 1990s, as networked media and especially the internet became increasingly important,NIMk expanded its mission to include the digital, online promotion and disseminationof its collection. As a supporting institution for media art, NIMk provides online access toits own collection and to the video art collections of various other Dutch cultural institutions.We use digitization and online access to make media art as visible and accessibleas possible, to emphasize its importance, and to facilitate research and education – whilerespecting the specific characteristics and role of media art itself. The process of digitizationin order to provide online access began in the mid-1990s. A custom-made collectionmanagement system was developed in Delphi, based upon a solid MySQL database.5. Gábor Bódy’s ‘tape catalogues’ are briefly described on Media Art Net, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/kassettenkatalogen/ and can be seen as an early attempt to reconcilethe use and specifics of a new artistic medium (video at that time) with a book format.6. Imago (1990-1993), mentioned in footnote 4, was the first travelling exhibition organized byMontevideo. The successor to Imago, The Second, Time Based Art from the Netherlands, startedat the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and then travelled to Mexico, Taiwan, Japan, Budapestand Prague from 1997 till 2000. Netherlands Media Art Institute, The Second, Time Based Artfrom the Netherlands, http://catalogue.nimk.nl/site/event.php?id=612.NIMk’s online catalogue, http://catalogue.nimk.nl.At the same time, a public interface to this content management system was built, firstunder the name Cyclope, later Catalogue. This public interface, NIMk’s online catalogue,is now available on http://catalogue.nimk.nl. 7In 2002-2005, as part of the research project Content in Context, 8 NIMk digitized its distributioncollection for viewing and DVD reproduction purposes. For this digitization process,the MPEG2 format was chosen, as it was and is still an acceptable viewing format, and is theright format to be used for DVD reproduction of the works. More recently, in 2007-2009, thePlay Out project 9 has enabled even more works from various Dutch media art collections tobe digitized and made accessible, including highlights from NIMk’s reference collection andarchive, ICN, de Appel, the Kröller-Müller Museum and the Groningen Museum.NIMk’s content management system, currently named WatsNext, and online catalogue provideaccess to the collection via lists of agents (people and organizations), subjects, andevents, with corresponding artworks and documentation. Additionally, the content managementsystem provides information accessible to NIMk staff only, such as the details of carri-7. Some technical and historical background about NIMk’s digitized collection, catalogue andcollection management system can be found in Gaby Wijers, Content in Context, Amsterdam,2005, http://nimk.nl/_files/Files/contentincontext_wijers.pdf.8. Content in Context, http://nimk.nl/eng/content-in-context.9. Play Out, http://nimk.nl/eng/play-out.

112 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies113ers (the physical ‘containers’ of the works, namely videotapes and files), distribution-relatedadministrative information, and an address database.In 2010, NIMk’s online catalogue still very much reflects the idea of a printed video art catalogue;it is a static website with a late-1990s look and feel. Compared to many other video artdistributors, however, NIMk offers a special feature: most works in the distribution collectioncan be previewed via the catalogue website. As I write, only 30-second excerpts of the works arepublicly available, but, as I discuss below, it is hoped that this policy will change in the future.Since 2005, staff members and interns at NIMk have manually created short excerpts fromall works. At first, the original MPEG2 excerpts were converted and published in RealVideo. In2009, however, it became clear that many up-to-date browsers and computing platforms didn’tsupport RealVideo by default anymore, and most of the excerpts were converted to Flash.At the same time, the full-length MPEG2 videos were converted to lower-quality streamingMPEG4 files, with a watermark for password protected educational use. However, thiseducational online distribution service is not very broadly known or used at this moment. Inaddition, browser and plug-in support for streaming MPEG4 files is currently dwindling; theformat was originally chosen because such files are more difficult to download, but is not aviable option for the future and the format is under revision at the moment. Evidently, NIMkkeeps a close eye upon open source developments in video formats and codecs and alternativesto Flash, such as HTML5. Unfortunately, none is presently widely enough adoptedacross browsers and platforms; therefore, pragmatic solutions are chosen and in all cases,the priority is to make video files as widely accessible as possible.Digitization of collections, and the production of a database and an online catalogue werefirst steps towards making the heritage of Dutch media art and video art more accessible andvisible. NIMk has built a solid national digital infrastructure as a foundation for the disseminationof media art now 10 – but the next steps need to be taken, and many challenges remain.Culture Vortex: User Research for an Online Media Art CatalogueIn the spring of 2010, NIMk participated in a research project entitled Culture Vortex, thatdeals with the online distribution of creative material. 11 The Culture Vortex project seeks theanswers to two contemporary problems: What are viable distribution and business modelswhich will help to generate income for an online cultural heritage? And, how can an audiencebe developed into an elaborate network culture, encompassing audiovisual collections andpublic institutions? For NIMk, this project came at the right time – NIMk’s online cataloguefor its collection, as described above, needs a design and strategic update, and was used asa case study in this research project. NIMk is interested in making its catalogue richer andmore dynamic, providing useful and eventually participatory features to its varied users. Furthermore,NIMk’s distribution activities are challenged by current developments in online culture,and the organization is looking for ways to diversify and improve its distribution services.The Culture Vortex project allowed NIMk to perform research into the relationship betweenits users and its collection and catalogue. In April-June 2010, NIMk interns Janneke Kampand Lorena Zevedei used a variety of research methodologies to map the interests of severaltypes of potential users of NIMk’s collection. 12 It is less useful to think of users or the ‘public’in abstract terms than as a very diverse network of stakeholders. For lack of more appropriateterminology, we will stick to the term ‘users’ for now.People approach online video art for a variety of reasons, including their interests and orientation,whether professional or personal. Within these diverse perspectives, three main usergroups can be distinguished:– Makers (in NIMk’s case: artists in the distribution collection) are the copyright holders ofthe work. They care very much about the context and quality of presentation of their workand hope to generate some income from their hard work.– Professionals are usually mediators of the video work. NIMk works extensively with curatorsand programmers of other cultural institutions, film and media art festivals and otherart events. Curators can turn to NIMk staff for personal advice on the selection of works,and eventually rent work from NIMk’s distribution collection for presentation in their ownevents. Educators also fit into this category; lecturers and teachers in art history, culturalstudies, media studies and other disciplines may want to include video art in their curriculumand present it during their lectures and study programs.– Non-professionals are the diverse group of people who are not professionally involved inmedia and video art. However, many of these individuals are specialists or professionalsin a related area, or will become professionals in the area of media and video art. Thesepeople are generally not interested in the politics and distinctions between institutionsand collections, and might not care very much about the art world at all. But most peopledo enjoy interacting with culture in some way; many of them produce it as well. At somepoint in their lives and careers, they might develop an interest in, or be touched by certaincultural artifacts, including video art.In the Culture Vortex research project, researchers Zevedei and Kamp used several methodsto learn more about the three user groups described above. Desk research was undertakenin order to list, compare and evaluate similar online resources, including catalogues, archives10. This infrastructure was built especially during the Play Out project, mentioned earlier.11. Culture Vortex is a RAAK program – a collaboration between professionals from the public,cultural and educational sectors. Culture Vortex was initiated by the Institute of NetworkCultures (Hogeschool van Amsterdam) and includes a consortium of various Dutch culturalinstitutes, including the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, NIMk, Virtueel Platform andAmsterdam City Archives. The Culture Vortex website and blog are on the Institute of NetworkCultures website, http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/culturevortex/.12. The research was conducted mainly from a workplace situated at MediaLAB Amsterdam, locatedin the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA), a lab environment where students develop variousinteractive media projects. Janneke Kamp and Lorena Zevedei were coached by MargreetRiphagen from MediaLAB Amsterdam and Institute of Network Cultures, Sandra Fauconnierfrom NIMk and Aske Hopman, interactive media consultant and educator at MediaLABAmsterdam.

114 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies115and platforms of media art by other institutions and initiatives, in order to showcase bestpractice and look for inspiration. In addition, both researchers conducted interviews withseveral artists, both from NIMk’s collection and beyond it: artists in distribution and not indistribution; upcoming and established artists; men and women artists; artists of variousages. An online questionnaire was provided to NIMk’s 3,000 Facebook friends; 166 peopleresponded. Usability tests of the current online catalogue were conducted at the UsabilityLab of the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. Finally, a dense and very productive expert meetingwas held on 3 June 2010, with the members of the Culture Vortex consortium and otherexpert invitees from the fields of Dutch new media, media art and cultural heritage.While these research methods focused on NIMk’s online catalogue only, many of the observationsand findings of the project have foregrounded more general and strategic questions, bothfor NIMk’s mission as an institute, and for the field of media art and culture as a whole. 13 Thefindings may change NIMk’s relation to all three groups of stakeholders: makers, professionaland non-professional users. The final sections of this essay reflect upon some directions NIMksees for the future, emphasizing observations that will be useful and interesting to a broaderaudience as well. It is important to note that NIMk has not begun to develop a new onlinestrategy for its collection at the time of writing; therefore, some of the potential described belowremains unfulfilled, and some of the points reflect my personal opinion.Some Observations and DirectionsThe Legacy of Web 2.0In the Culture Vortex project, Zevedei and Kamp compared several media art collection websites,online archives and platforms. 14 What was striking was that most of these containedbarely any typical Web 2.0 features, such as user profiling, free tagging and folksonomies,the ability to add comments and reviews, or to edit, reuse or embed content. This seemsparadoxical. Many organizations in the broader cultural field, such as audiovisual archives,museums, libraries and general archives are already quite advanced in this area and havebeen very eager to jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon. 15 Meanwhile, in the media art world,with its technically advanced artistic production and the tech-savvy staff in many organiza-13. The research report of NIMk’s contribution to Culture Vortex: Janneke Kamp and LorenaZevedei, Culture Vortex Program Line Public 2.0, Amsterdam, 2010, http://networkcultures.org/culturevortex/2010/07/01/final-report/.14. See the research report referred to in the previous footnote. Some of the evaluated websitesbelong to similar video distributors (Electronic Arts Intermix, http://www.eai.org; Video DataBank, http://www.vdb.org; Lux, http://www.lux.org.uk), some are connected to general mediaart institutions and initiatives (Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, http://www.zkm.de;Database of Virtual Art, http://www.virtualart.at; Rhizome, http://www.rhizome.org), some areWeb 2.0 services used by artists or run by cultural institutions (Vimeo, http://www.vimeo.com;ArtBabble, http://www.artbabble.org).15. Two examples of Web 2.0 initiatives by cultural institutes evaluated in the context of the CultureVortex project are ArtBabble, http://www.artbabble.org, an artistic video platform maintained byvarious prominent art institutes internationally, and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, ArtTube,http://arttube.boijmans.nl. Both are artistic, museum-led initiatives that aim to provide analternative, and a curated answer to YouTube.tions, the adoption of Web 2.0 features is far less apparent. I do not think this is mere coincidence:many people who are professionally active in media art are also quite aware of thecomplex political implications of Web 2.0 applications. For example, many of those who arepresent on social networking platforms for practical or research reasons remain very criticalof them. This ambivalence applies to NIMk – for example, while the organization has an activepresence on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, it also hosts artists-in-residence AymericMansoux and Marloes de Valk, who develop a critical response to Facebook games. 16 This isa pragmatic, rather than an ideological stance; hopefully, we will apply the same pragmaticand balanced attitude to the development of the new online presence of the NIMk collection.In general, we are lucky that as of mid-2010, the hype surrounding Web 2.0 has waned atleast a little. Some developments that were sped up by Web 2.0 are unstoppable, however,and have both positive and negative consequences. The possibilities for social networkingonline have become more diverse; an extremely wide variety of cultural activity is bloomingon the web; and many (more or less knowledgeable, more or less informed) people are ableto publish their work with ease. Other aspects of Web 2.0 plainly warrant suspicion: privacyissues, for instance, or the looming dispute over net neutrality, or the corporate monopoliesor oligopolies, as in ‘the googlization of everything’. All need to be watched closely. In anycase, for a networking organization like NIMk, valuable lessons can be learned from bothaspects of Web 2.0.The Online Availability of Video ArtNIMk works closely with many of the artists represented in its distribution collection. Whatthe 500+ artists in NIMk’s distribution collection have in common is that they mainly workwith video. Most have received formal training in an art academy, position themselves withinthe context of the contemporary visual arts, 17 and attach great importance to the quality andcontext of the presentation of their work. With this profile, NIMk’s artists are seemingly quitedifferent from the millions of active users and producers of online ‘folk’ video on platformssuch as YouTube and Vimeo. In general, video art seems to strikingly distance itself from thelow-threshold, gritty, vernacular cultural production on Web 2.0 video platforms. Yet, perhapsthe distinction is not as sharp as it seems – for this reason, it is interesting to investigate theway in which video artists present themselves online. 1816. Mansoux’s and de Valk’s artist-in-residence project is entitled Naked on Pluto: http://nimk.nl/eng/naked-on-pluto.17. This is closely linked to the mission of NIMk and (formerly) Montevideo, which places itselfexplicitly in the context of contemporary art – not experimental film, which is characterized by adifferent discourse and presentation circuit. During the past 10 years, NIMk has also increasinglypositioned itself in the context of (new) media art, a domain that again maintains a differentdiscourse from contemporary art: media art focuses much more on discussions about the role ofmedia in society.18. See, for instance, various essays and lectures by Tom Sherman, analysing the relationshipbetween video art and vernacular (online) video. For instance Tom Sherman, ‘VernacularVideo’, in Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds) Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube,Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008, pp. 161-168.

116 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies117The video artists in NIMk’s collection deal with the online accessibility of their work in quitedifferent ways. They have very diverse ideas about content and presentation, about the role ofthe artist and of institutions, and about their options and possibilities when it comes to earningan income for themselves. Their attitudes vary from extremely protective to totally open. Someartists, such as Marina Abramovic, don’t want their work to be available online at all. Someartists, such as Lernert & Sander, publish a lot of their work online – full-length, no excerpts –and are eager to use platforms like YouTube and Vimeo. Other artists withdraw their work fromdistributors and archives when they become established – for example, Bill Viola, whose earlywork was in distribution by NIMk and other international distributors, was withdrawn fromdistribution several years ago. Other artists, including Hooykaas/Stansfield, offer their entireoeuvre to archives. Many artists are convinced that online exposure will help them find moreavenues for presentation and increase their income. On the other hand, they fear loss of incomeas well – they are afraid that low-quality, pirated copies will lead their own, uncontrolledlife online via pirate and torrent sites, and that these will take the place of the ‘real’ work. 19In any case, most emerging and mid-career artists actively promote themselves online. Asurprising number of them use platforms like YouTube and Vimeo. A quick, quantitativeinventory of 72 recent artists in NIMk’s distribution collection 20 (artists from whom work hasbeen taken in distribution between 2005 and 2010) 21 provides some interesting insights. Ichecked whether each artist maintained a website where they show or document their work,and whether they use YouTube or Vimeo. Of these, 81% do have an artist website, 17% havea YouTube account, and 15% a Vimeo account showing full-length work. Surprisingly, theseartists are not only the youngest, but can be found in all age groups, and it is mainly midcareerartists who structurally maintain an artist website. Most of the artists active on YouTubeor Vimeo don’t actively promote the availability of their work there, and not many receive commentsfrom ‘general’ users. There are, however, a few notable exceptions. A good exampleis the British artist collective Semiconductor, whose work is technically and visually stunning.Semiconductor receive many admiring comments on Vimeo, many of them probably fromviewers who might otherwise not visit or see Semiconductor’s work in a contemporary artcontext. 22 A similar observation can be made of Dutch artists Lernert & Sander, who produce19. The online accessibility of video art – the situation in 2009 – was described in the (Dutchlanguage)end report of the research project Play Out, which focused on uncompresseddigitalization of video art but which also included some research on accessibility. See Gaby Wijersand Yola de Lusenet (eds) Play Out, Amsterdam, 2009, http://nimk.nl/nl/play-out-eindverslag;refer to pp. 11-12 for a short chapter on online access to video art. The essay concludes with thestatement: ‘We find ourselves at a turning point. It is high time to show, and open up, the Dutchvideo art collections’.20. This small quantitative inventory was conducted by Sandra Fauconnier, and was performed afterfinalizing the Culture Vortex research by Janneke Kamp and Lorena Zevedei. The results havenot been published earlier.21. These works and artists – recent additions to NIMk’s distribution collection – are listed on theNiMK website: New works in the collection, http://nimk.nl/eng/collection/new-works-in-thecollection.22. Semiconductor is an artist collective of Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt. Semiconductor, http://semiconductorfilms.com. Semiconductor on Vimeo, http://vimeo.com/semiconductor.music videos and short clips for television in addition to video art. Their short video worksare humorous and accessible, but definitely not simplistic, and receive quite a bit of positiveattention on Vimeo. 23 However, these two examples are exceptions; most artists active onVimeo or YouTube have a small but dedicated following of ‘fans’ or keep their account verylow-key and only use it for embedding the video in their personal website.Ironically, NIMk itself is restricted in its ability to show video artists’ work online, both bycopyright restrictions and the artists’ own wishes in terms of piracy and presentation qualityof their work. As mentioned above, in its online catalogue, NIMk presents short, 30-secondpreviews of all works in the distribution collection. However, usability research undertakenby Culture Vortex has confirmed earlier research and the common-sense view that both professionaland non-professional users hope and expect to find full-length video. 24 As a widelyaccepted art form, video art is increasingly mentioned and taught in education, and is moreand more frequently the subject of research and journalism. 25It is ironic that NIMk would run into trouble if it published full-length videos of establishedartists in its collection, whereas a semi-illegal website like Ubuweb 26 publishes some of theseartists’ works anyway. 27 Ubuweb is an interesting case: its ‘rogue’, and yet simultaneouslyhigh-profile and respected status, allows it to ‘get away with’ actions for which establishedinstitutions would be severely reprimanded or even litigated against. Ubuweb is highly regardedbecause of the extremely high quality content it serves in the area of experimentalfilm, contemporary art, audio art and video art, and therefore many artists tacitly agree withhaving their work available there, even if it is blatantly pirated according to the letter of currentcopyright legislation. Perhaps it is even an honor to be included on Ubuweb.NIMk has a strong tradition of following artists’ wishes in terms of making video works accessibleonline, and has, with the significant change in the online video landscape, planned totake action to develop a more diverse and up-to-date policy. In the first months of 2011, allartists in NIMk’s distribution collection will be once again presented with the announcementthat we would prefer their work in NIMk’s distribution collection be made available in itsfull-length version, but in preview quality and with watermark. Artists will of course have theopportunity to opt out of this, and to decide upon the level of accessibility for their work. Inthis way, NIMk hopes to encourage a slow but steady increase in the public availability of itscollection, while still working very hard on helping its artists in distribution receive a reasonableincome for their work via mediation for professional presentations.23. Lernert Engelberts and Sander Plug, http://weloveourwork.com. Lernert & Sander on Vimeo,http://vimeo.com/user1341816.24. Kamp and Zevedei, Culture Vortex Program Line Public 2.0, p. 33.25. Gaby Wijers and Yola de Lusenet (eds) Play Out, p. 12.26. Ubuweb, http://www.ubu.com.27. Some early performance works by Marina Abramovic ´ can be viewed on Ubuweb: MarinaAbramovic, ´ http://www.ubu.com/film/abramovic.html. Some works from the 1970s and early1980s by Gary Hill are also on Ubuweb, Film & Video: Gary Hill, http://www.ubu.com/film/hill.html.

118 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies119Business Models: Memberships and MicropaymentsIn the meantime, the Culture Vortex research has generated a lively discussion about businessmodels for video art and for online cultural heritage in general. New business modelshave become an important topic, both for commercial parties and for non-profit institutions.This is due to the fact that online media are challenging ‘older’, non-networked incomemodels; yet this development is also informed by an economic and political climate in whichpublic and private funding for non-profit institutions is dwindling. NIMk is also consideringstrengthening its distribution activities and finding new formats for presentation and incomegeneration.For NIMk, it has been very helpful to look for inspiration elsewhere. Many suggestions foralternative income models emerged from the Culture Vortex expert meeting held on June 32010. 28 This expert meeting, with participants from a variety of organizations in the Dutchcultural sector, was especially fruitful in generating creative ideas for features and businessmodels for NIMk’s collection. One participant, Jaromil Rojo, who is very active in opensource development, presented a list of typical business models that exist for open sourcesoftware, many of which can be translated to other fields. 29 For example, the main businessmodel for open source software is so-called ‘supportware’: users don’t pay for the softwareitself, but they do pay for technical support. In a similar way, an organization like NIMkcould think about more creative ways to monetize its expertise – the specialized knowledgeand service from its staff and network – rather than its assets, the collection itself.Another spark of inspiration came from the popularity and acceptance of micropayments foronline digital content. The use of micropayments has increased significantly in the past fewyears, especially for mobile applications, music and ebooks. In a similar manner, NIMk couldthink about producing and presenting specific, exclusive content online – partly with worksfrom the NIMk collection, partly beyond – and to make these specially curated shows availablefor a small fee or micropayment. 30Membership models were also mentioned. According to this model, people who pay fora yearly NIMk membership would be granted access to a selection of exclusive activities,both online and offline. This is a strategy which might hold a lot of promise, but which alsoneeds quite a bit of experimentation and fine-tuning. Are people willing to pay for onlinecontent in the long term? Even when an immediate benefit and connection to the makersis made clear (for instance, when renters or buyers are informed that a large percentageof their payment goes to the artists directly), it is not clear that people are willing to pay.However, a membership model would be a logical step for a networked organization likeNIMk to take. Until a few years ago, a system of membership that provided discounts fortechnical assistance and the use of post-production facilities was already in place. Artistsin NIMk’s distribution collection automatically became members for free; others had topay a small yearly subscription fee. Such a model is probably quite logically translatableto the current situation and to online programs and services. 31 NIMk and other media artorganizations distinguish themselves by the high level of technical and practical expertisethey offer to artists and other professionals in the field. This expertise applies to other areas,such as scouting for new work by interesting artists, and curating programs about currenttopics or for targeted audiences.Context and MediationThe idea of creating more specially curated online programs and activities points to a specialquality that many cultural institutions and initiatives share: they are often specialized, andpossess a tremendous expertise, in one particular area. For example, some members ofNIMk’s staff keep a close eye on interesting new developments and promising young artistsin the field of media art in the Netherlands. Other staff members – including the author ofthis article – possess a sound art historical background and are good at explaining media artto a non-professional audience, connecting it to contemporary art, technical developmentsand to emerging social phenomena. NIMk also has employees who are specialized in boththeoretical and practical aspects of video post-production, open source software, video editingand preservation. In those instances in which NIMk lacks expertise in a specific area,the organization can count on its vast network of partner institutions and friendly individuals.The strength provided by these two assets – expertise and a great network – might becomeeven more important in the future. NIMk might come to think of its collection as an opportunityto inform and teach people about media art and specific topics, and as a vehicle forsocial networking in the media art field.Recently, NIMk has developed ‘guided tours’ through its collection. In the online catalogue,users can find specially curated selections of works about specific topics. Sometours were created on the occasion of a current exhibition at NIMk. 32 These tours are afirst, experimental step towards developing more diverse ways to use NIMk’s expertise andnetwork to make its collection more interesting and visible.In the near future, NIMk has plans to develop online resources, including a collection of articlesand guided tours with and through its collection; and perhaps some educational texts orvideos that introduce media art to a non-professional audience. With the Media Art Platform,an online social networking site for the field of media art field, 33 NIMk has experimented witha platform for the exchange of expertise and for networking. At this point, the attempt hasbeen only partly successful, but many lessons can be drawn from the difficulties we haveencountered. A renewed online strategy for NIMk’s collection will ideally include both functionsin a useful way.28. Kamp and Zevedei, Culture Vortex Program Line Public 2.0, pp. 34-49.29. Kamp and Zevedei, Culture Vortex Program Line Public 2.0, p. 51 for an overview of all opensource business models listed by Jaromil.30. Kamp and Zevedei, Culture Vortex Program Line Public 2.0, pp. 34-49.31. Rhizome, http://www.rhizome.org, is a New York-based nonprofit media art website which hasbeen working with a membership model for many years already – quite successfully apparently.32. Netherlands Media Art Institute, Catalogue: Tours, http://catalogue.nimk.nl/site/tours.php.33. Media Art Platform, http://www.mediaartplatform.org.

120 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies121artists to have their work placed and contextualized within a collection, particularly if thatcollection is interesting or renowned.Due to time constraints, the role of the curator has not yet been thoroughly researched byNIMk. At the time of writing, a questionnaire targeted towards curators and programmers forart venues and festivals is being undertaken, which seeks to find answers to a set of questionsabout curators’ work process and interests. Which channels do curators mainly usefor finding and evaluating artworks for their future shows? Does the discovery and selectionof new work occur mainly via personal networking, physical visits to festivals, biennials andexhibitions, or does online research play a significant role? Are art journals and magazinesstill important, or is their influence declining? How can an organization such as NIMk be mosthelpful to them?In any case, the Culture Vortex user research has confirmed to NIMk that its added value liesin the unique assets it possesses: expertise and networks, as described above, and in thequality that the NIMk label attaches to works in its collection. Whatever the outcome of thequestionnaire submitted to curators, NIMk will probably benefit from renewed promotion ofits collection, and of bringing it to the media art sector’s attention again via specially curatedprograms, and via specific, personal services, both face-to-face and online.NIMk online catalogue, guided tours through the collection.Middle MenIn the past decade, video art distribution activities in general have slowly declined. This isnot only a reality for NIMk’s collection but for other video art distributors. 34 A similar phenomenonis apparent in many fields that traditionally function as ‘middle men’, especially inmusic, the newspaper business and scientific publishing. 35 When content becomes moreeasily available online, it becomes less unique, and both makers and users benefit from amore direct relation that bypasses the mediating function of middle men. In media art, it isincreasingly the case that curators and programmers of festivals, screenings and exhibitionswill bypass distributors and contact and negotiate with artists directly. For artists themselves,this development has both advantages and drawbacks. It is great that their online presencegives them the opportunity to be visible and easy to find. At the same time, the need toarrange and maintain contacts with curators directly might increase their workload; distributorstypically take a lot of this type of work out of an artist’s hands and are often in a betterposition to negotiate reasonable artist fees. Furthermore, it would be beneficial for many34. Many participants of the yearly video art distributors meeting during the International FilmFestival Rotterdam 2010 shared this observation.35. Helge Tennø is a Norwegian researcher who specializes in online marketing and who describesthe changing markets (and often failing marketing strategies) in the cultural industry, inpublishing and consumer products. Helge Tennø, http://www.180360720.no/ The changing fieldof scientific publishing – with the strongly emerging open access movement which bypasses thescientific publishing industry – is extensively promoted, researched and commented upon byPeter Suber, Lawrence Lessig, Stevan Harnad and others.In a renewed online catalogue, it would be very helpful for curators to be able to store theirpersonal selections and preferences, and to be automatically alerted when new works fromtheir favorite artists, or that concern their own specialist topics, are distributed. Perhaps itwould be beneficial for curators and researchers to temporarily promote their own events andacademic writing via NIMk’s catalogue, if they are using work from the NIMk collection. ForNIMk, this would showcase the breadth of potential applications of its collection; for curatorsand researchers, this is an additional means of promotion.Non-professional AudiencesThe research conducted in the Culture Vortex program also generated discussion and newideas concerning the non-professional audiences that might be interested in NIMk’s collection.Until recently, the online presence of NIMk’s collection – the online catalogue – hasbeen targeted mainly towards professional users. However, the NIMk collection containswork that might interest many people who would not call themselves art lovers, or who havenever heard of NIMk. At the present time, all cultural organizations need to prioritize theeffort to reach people outside the usual circles of art lovers and connoisseurs. They mustmake it possible to expose media art to anyone who might be touched by it – perhaps as anoccasional, spontaneous and serendipitous discovery, but perhaps also in a structural way.The introduction of media art to a wider audience can take place in a number of ways. Forcultural institutions, it can be very beneficial and refreshing to organize activities outside theircomfort zone, via unusual channels. NIMk has organized specially curated programs for culturaland music festivals. For example, in 2004 and 2006 NIMk introduced its collection tomany thousands of people with a program entitled The Big M, which screened works from

122 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies123the NIMk collection inside a specially designed, inflatable tent. 36 We aim to repeat this typeof activity in 2011 and later years; at this moment, NIMk is seeking funding to develop andprogram the Media Art Mobile, a foldable container structure in which workshops and screeningscan be organized on location. 37 For the Media Art Mobile and for other uses, NIMk hopesto develop an accessible interface to its collection, through which it will be possible to discoverworks intuitively: works connected to a specific emotion or theme, for instance.An integral characteristic of online video culture is the re-use and embedding of content.The success of services such as YouTube and Vimeo is to a large extent due to the ease withwhich people can embed video from these services in sites that are relevant to them, suchas blogs or social networking sites. At this moment, no online collection of video art has thiscapacity, not even a pirate site like Ubuweb. It would be interesting for NIMk to seriouslyconsider developing this capacity, at least in those cases in which the artist agrees to it.Finally, many cultural institutions today are busy looking for new target groups. NIMk mightconsider the role of video art in newer or wider contexts: for example, on urban screens; orin situations in which people are simply ‘killing time’, such as healthcare or public transport,and can benefit from visual content with added value. But media art can also speak to veryspecific audiences: lately, a NIMk exhibition with sound art held at the 2010 Sonic Actsfestival in Amsterdam triggered the attention of a group of otorhinolaryngologists (ear, noseand throat specialists). An upcoming exhibition that concerns games and public space mightspeak to a diverse audience of geeks and gamers.Lessons for an Online Media Art CatalogueWhat, then, are the most important principles to guide the development of NIMk’s online collection?The following guidelines also reflect my opinion on what are the most valuable waysto deal with online cultural heritage in general.IntegrationIn order to thrive, a specific cultural heritage needs contextualizing within art criticism, andwithin the social developments it thematizes or responds to. It is a challenge to ensure thatour cultural heritage is appropriately contextualized: the success of online video platformsis partly due to the fact that the videos can be embedded elsewhere; the videos are alsodiscoverable because they are part of playlists or can be found through recommendations.For online collections of cultural heritage, the challenge is to make the works as reusable aspossible within current frameworks of copyright legislation. In this sense, NIMk can learnfrom online video platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo, and look at what is increasinglybecoming common practice even for television broadcasters’ online video archives. NIMk’scollection should receive much more attention when videos, hopefully in full-length versionswith artists’ permission, can be embedded elsewhere, especially in weblogs and on socialnetworking services.36. The Big M, http://nimk.nl/eng/big-m.37. Mediaartmobiel Presentation, http://nimk.nl/eng/mediaartmobiel-presentation.We also need to ask whether it still makes sense to see a collection as a separate entitywithin an art organization’s activities. For NIMk, the collection is part of almost all activities,and the history of the organization is intricately linked to it. Furthermore, research undertakenwithin the Culture Vortex project has demonstrated that many people don’t find thecollection’s separate website, primarily because it is called ‘catalogue’. And it is quite illogicalthat NIMk’s main search engine does not produce results from the collection at all – onlyfrom the general website. It is important that an organization’s website links to work in thecollection as much as possible, and to use a collection and/or archive in a lively way, as acontext for the present.Networking and InteroperabilityI have already described the importance of developing special, and sometimes exclusive,online programs in order to maintain artistic and cultural heritage. A collection can be keptfresh and lively when it is temporarily connected to developments elsewhere; for NIMk, thiscan take the form of specific artist presentations and curated programs about a variety oftopics and in a variety of formats, probably with a scope that goes beyond NIMk’s core collection.While broadening its scope, NIMk can emphasize its unique role as a quality filterand a network hub. A collection of works is a vehicle for social networking; making the life ofa collection visible demonstrates its relevance to a broader context.Furthermore, collections of cultural heritage are not islands. Between various collections,nationally and internationally, there are both commonalities and differences in interest andfocus. Stronger networking between different resources and collections is a logical next step.For instance, it would be very useful for artworks in different collections to be interlinked morestrongly, or to be able to discover and research the oeuvre of a single artist using informationfrom many different collections at the same time.Interoperability between online collections and archives has been on the agenda for quitesome time. The Semantic Web held the promise of decentralized, automatic, machinegeneratedconnections between websites in similar domains, yet this vision has proven to beunrealistic. 38 At this moment, several large-scale national and international projects provideinteroperability between collections in a centralized way. The Europeana project is a goodexample of such an initiative. 39 In 2008-2009, NIMk participated in the GAMA project, aEuropean gateway to archives of media art, 40 which provided valuable lessons in makingour collection available in an international context and in creating an international infrastructurefor media art. It would be very beneficial for a healthy public domain and networkculture in general if decentralized models of connecting online heritage were to take root.38. The World Wide Web Consortium’s overview site for Semantic Web developments is available atWorld Wide Web Consortium, Semantic Web, http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/.39. Europeana, http://www.europeana.eu.40. Gateway to Archives of Media Art, http://gama-gateway.eu. GAMA is a search engine and websitewhich provides access to media art from eight European organizations: NIMk, Argos (Belgium),Ars Electronica (Austria), C3 (Hungary), Filmform (Sweden), Heure Exquise! (France), InstantsVidéo (France) and SCCA (Slovenia).

124 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies125Microformats are slowly beginning to play a role here. 41 Linked Data, a lightweight alternativeto Semantic Web protocols proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in 2009, is also an interestingdevelopment to follow. 42Concluding RemarksAt this point in time, the principle conclusion I would like to draw is one mentioned previously:in a changing field of online video and the proliferation of user-generated content,art organizations and collections can act as a quality filter, a much-needed mediator, anda network hub. Although the current economic and political climate renders the positionof many cultural organizations precarious and transitional, at this moment we are the onlyagents who can guarantee that online cultural heritage, and especially media art and videoart, will remain accessible in a sustainable and beneficial manner. Commercial and/or semiillegalplatforms such as YouTube, Vimeo and Ubuweb, and the practices of file-sharing andpiracy are of course also prominent providers of such heritage. Yet, it is highly questionablewhether they are interested in the benefits for artists and society at large. Cultural institutionsare much better placed to balance the interests of all the stakeholders involved, and providea solid, long-term option.ReferencesKamp, Janneke and Lorena Zevedei. Culture Vortex Program Line Public 2.0, Amsterdam, 2010,http://networkcultures.org/culturevortex/2010/07/01/final-report/.Lopez, Sebastian. ‘Video Exposures: Between Television and the Exhibition Space’ in Sebastian Lopez(ed) A Short History of Dutch Video Art, Rotterdam: episode publishers, 2005.Perrée, Rob. ‘From Agora to Montevideo’, in Jeroen Boomgaard and Bart Rutten (eds) The MagneticEra, Rotterdam/Amsterdam: NAi Publishers and Netherlands Media Art Institute, 2003.Sherman, Tom. ‘Vernacular Video’, in Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds) Video Vortex Reader:Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam, Institute of Network Cultures, 2008, pp. 161-168.Right now, many art organizations are looking at the changing landscape of networked technologies,and identifying challenges and developing suitable strategies. So is NIMk. As anintermediary for media art, NIMk adopts a pragmatic attitude when dealing with tensionsbetween openness, publicness, ethical choices and accessibility. In our choices for technicalsolutions, we are pragmatic, without losing track of the ethically best solutions. In termsof content, we attempt to balance the interests of artists and the public. For makers, animportant question at this moment is how to generate a sustainable income when artistic production,promotion and distribution go digital. For the public, a healthy, rich and qualitativepublic domain is at stake; it is beneficial for society in general, for education and research,when as much as possible high-quality cultural content is easily findable and discoverable,and preferably even available for free re-use and re-appropriation. NIMk defends both interests,which it actively tries to balance and reconcile, with a strong and prominent missiontowards accessibility.41. See Microformats, http://microformats.org/. Some examples of microformats are hCard fordescribing people and their address information, and hCalendar to describe events.42. Linked Data was promoted by Tim Berners-Lee at TED 2009: TED.com, Tim Berners-Lee on theNext Web, http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html. See also LinkedData, http://linkeddata.org/.

126 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies127ArtFem.TV: Feminist Artistic Infiltrationof a Male Net CultureEvelin Stermitzproject, ArtFem.TV empowers women artists, highlights their works within the context ofgender issues, and broadens the discourse about art and feminism in a new media context.The question of a dedicated artistic space raised in 1929 by Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’sOwn’ is reconsidered by cyberfeminists towards the end of the same century, and seen in thecreation of this project. Furthermore, ArtFem.TV aims to subvert the commercialized systemsand structures of broadcast television.To understand the background of ArtFem.TV, it is necessary to examine the history of feminismin relation to art. Feminism and feminist art finally came to the forefront in the late1960s, a time of liberation and political struggle, during which there was public debate thatenabled a re-thinking of the position of women in society. Women were encouraged to actand react in public ways, and art, as a primarily public issue, became a powerful vehiclefor feminist discourse. The main questions asked were: What makes women different frommen?; and with respect to art, what makes women artists and women’s art different from thatproduced by men? In their art, women reflected upon patriarchy in social systems, in history,in art history and in current affairs. While feminists fought an uphill battle, feminist issuesgained prominence, first in the U.S., Great Britain and Germany, and have spread to manyother nations and cultures since the 1970s.ArtFem.TV, Screenshot 2011. Images courtesy and copyright of individual artists.ArtFem.TV 1 is a form of online television programming that brings together art and feminism.The basic aim of the video-based web portal is to foster the involvement of women in the arts,to nurture women’s artworks and projects, and to create an international online televisionscreen presenting the creativity, images and voices of women. ArtFem.TV is a non-profit,artist-run, Internet Television (ITV) and media art portal I founded in 2008, and have sincethen curated, edited and maintained as an artistic cyberfeminist project. ArtFem.TV is anartistic hyperspace for the images and statements of women artists that would be otherwisehidden on popular media sites.The term ‘feminist art’ can be misleading, as the word feminism is often inaccurately connectedto a struggle against men, but feminism is definitely not sexism. In relation to art, theterm ‘feminism’ should be used in the sense of understanding art from a female perspective.Although this does not exclude feminist struggles, it is more concerned with the recognition ofa female position, or rather a subject position. This position is constituted by a critical engagementwith gender issues and views art as a socio-political matter. As an artistic cyberfeminist1. www.artfem.tv.In the 1970s, the so-called second-wave of feminism emerged, along with its message that ‘thepersonal is political’. The position of women was seen to be inextricably linked to a patriarchal,commercialized, oppressive culture, and their social, sexual and personal struggles were seento be embedded within such a culture. 2 In the 1980s, the conflict between the two basic approachesto feminism - integration and separation – led the focus to shift from equity to difference.This third-wave approach became strongly affiliated with the academy, and increasinglytheoretical, as it developed into the academic research fields of women’s, gender, and feministstudies. According to Charlotte Krolokke and Anne Scott Sorensen, third-wave feminists are‘motivated by the need to develop a feminist theory and politics that honour contradictory experiencesand deconstruct categorical thinking... .They embrace ambiguity rather than certainty,engage in multiple positions, and practice a strategy of inclusion and exploration’. 3Third-wave feminism is inspired by and bound to generational shifts wrought by the new globalworld order, the fall of communism, new threats of religious and ethnic fundamentalism,and the dual risks and promises of new info- and biotechnologies. It is characterized by local,national and transnational activism in areas such as violence against women, trafficking, bodysurgery, self-mutilation and the overall ‘pornofication’ of the media. 4 Gender became a discursivepractice in a social matrix, inclusive of the emerging movements of queer and transgender2. See Charlotte Krolokke and Anne Scott Sorensen, Gender Communication Theories and Analyses:From Silence to Performance, Thousand Oaks, London and New Delhi: Sage, 2006, p. 10.3. Krolokke and Sorensen, Gender Communication, p. 16. Krolokke and Sorensen also discuss thenotion of ‘transversal politics’, writing that ‘What defines transversal politics is not only the factthat differences in nationality, ethnicity, or religion - and hence in agenda - are recognized butalso that a commitment to listen and participate in a dialogue is required’, p. 20.4. Krolokke and Sorensen, Gender Communication, p. 17.

128 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies129politics. From this perspective, there arose notions of cyborgs and avatars as new models ofsex and gender made possible by new media. 5 According to Krolokke and Sorensen:While concerned with new threats to women’s rights in the wake of the new global worldorder, it criticizes earlier feminist waves for presenting universal answers or definitionsof womanhood and for developing their particular interests into somewhat static identitypolitics ... Third-wave feminists want to avoid stepping into mutually oppressive staticcategories, and they call for acceptance of a chaotic world, while simultaneously embracingambiguity and forming new alliances. Thus, third-wave feminisms are definednot by common theoretical and political standpoint(s), but rather by the use of performance,mimicry, and subversion as rhetorical strategies. 6It is generally accepted that in the patriarchal heritage of Western culture, the preponderanceof art made by males and for male audiences often transgressed against females, orused females as passive objects. The male studio system excluded women from training asartists, and the gallery system kept women from exhibiting and selling their work, as well asfrom being collected by museums (albeit somewhat less so in recent years). In an articlewritten in 1971 titled, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’, Linda Nochlin gaveimpetus to the publication of numerous histories of women artists. 7 The ensuing momentumtowards feminist scholarship concerning women in the arts was tremendous, and affordedgreatly overdue recognition to many women artists. Re-thinking the work of Rousseau andKant, feminists began to identify canonical ways of thinking about what makes for ‘greatness’in art, and recognized that ‘this “greatness” always seems to exclude women’. 8 As CynthiaFreeland states:The feminist asks how canons have become constructed, when, and for what purposes.Canons are described as “ideologies” or belief systems that falsely pretendto objectivity when they actually reflect power and dominance relations... .Perhapsinstead of creating a new and separate female canon, we need to explore what existingcanons reveal. 9While the first two decades of feminist art are seen as a revolt against male artists and theirpolitics of production and consumption, and target the male-created gaze and male-dominatedsociety. Presently, female artists are concerned with the position of women and womenartists in a socio-cultural context that is no longer defined as a revolt against patriarchal systems,but is accepted as a debate concerning the disclosure and deconstruction of sex andgender in a patriarchal system, and reflects both the construction and discourse of gender5. Krolokke and Sorensen, Gender Communication, p. 18.6. Krolokke and Sorensen, Gender Communication, pp. 17-18.7. Linda Nochlin is an American art historian, university professor and writer of feminist art historystudies. Linda Nochlin, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, ARTnews (January1971): 22-39, 67-71.8. Cynthia Freeland, Art Theory, New York: Oxford University Press , 2001, pp. 88-89.9. Freeland, Art Theory, pp. 88-89.ArtFem.TV, Screenshot 2011. Images courtesy and copyright of individual artists.within an historical context. The diverse history of the relationship between feminism and art,and the vast body of work that has and continues to be created out of such socio-political andcultural contexts, led to creation of ArtFem.TV.As a background on the technological avenue that lead to the development of the ArtFem.TVproject, in 2006 I joined one of the earliest artist-run video art net portals [PAM] PerpetualArt Machine, 10 and became familiar with alternative forms of displaying artistic video worksonline. I found [PAM] a great invention and also a valuable community, facilitating globalexchange between video artists and enabling their works to be viewed without complicatedsearches for video art. In the ensuing years, the video art platform CultureTV 11 emerged,along with other platforms such as Souvenirs from Earth TV, 12 a channel for film and videoart, or UbuWeb: Film & Video, 13 all of which opened up new horizons for artistic online video.Technical implementations facilitated and supported this movement: upload and downloadtransfers became cheaper and faster, and improvements in the compression of video dataenabled better viewing quality. All of this increased my enthusiasm for video art on the net,and for creating a different net aesthetics, leading to ArtFem.TV in 2008.The structure of ArtFem.TV’s site design and its interface were developed as a collaborativework by Torbjoern Karlevid and Vincent Van Uffelen in the frame of their strategic designstudio NOVA, 14 based in Austria and London. The structure of the site as an online media10. [PAM] Perpetual Art Machine, http://www.perpetualartmachine.com.11. CultureTV, http://www.culturetv.tv.12. Souvenirs from Earth TV, http://www.souvenirsfromearth.tv.13. UbuWeb: Film & Video, http://www.ubu.com/film/.14. NOVA, http://www.novainteractive.at.

130 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies131platform is divided into several channels: ‘Women Artists’ presents portraits of the artists;‘Single Channels of Women Artists’ showcases the artists along with a comprehensive rangeof their artworks; ‘Exhibition’ presents documentaries of exhibitions; and other channels entitled‘Video Art’, ‘Performance’, ‘Sound Art & Music’, ‘Activism’, ‘Report’, ‘Documentary’,‘Short Film and Movie’ present different aspects of women’s artistic practice. Using buttonson the left of the screen, users can choose between these different channels. The design ofthe site is clean and reduced, to avoid an overload of information, and to foreground the videoworks themselves. The website itself is hosted by mur.at, 15 an association that supports net.art by offering free web hosting for artists and their web-based projects.ReferencesFreeland, Cynthia. Art Theory, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.Krolokke, Charlotte and Anne Scott Sorensen. Gender Communication Theories and Analyses: FromSilence to Performance, Thousand Oaks, London and New Delhi: Sage, 2006.Nochlin, Linda. ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ ARTnews (January 1971): 22-39, 67-71, reprinted in Amelia Jones (ed) The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, New York:Routledge, 2003, pp. 229-233.In 2010, ArtFem.TV hosted about 400 video works by more than 90 women artists fromaround the globe, including video art works, performance art documentation and videosabout artists such as Martha Rosler, Nina Sobell, and Pipilotti Rist . A variety of users from thefields of academic research and curating have responded to the site’s feminist emphasis as avaluable resource. ArtFem.TV’s website has been exhibited as an online installation at variousfestivals and venues, and presented at various symposia, 16 and not only within explicit feministcontexts so as to make feminist issues and feminist art as widely accessible as possible.At its broadest lengths, the aim of ArtFem.TV is to offer insight into feminist issues and theirrelation to art, to as wide an audience as possible. Images support society and culture, butimages also reference society and culture. Understanding media as social processes in additionto its status as conduits of communication or mechanical devices, it is possible to see theimpact that media have upon changing cultural values and social practices in a globalizedworld. Media are an effect of economic systems and the forces of market production, whichsupport and stabilize a traditional, ancient dyadic system of male and female by the exclusionof gender - ArtFem.TV attempts a cyberfeminist break with a male dominated net culture andmedia landscape, highlighting women’s distinctive points of view in art and media works, aswell as the accessibility and promotion of these works, in an inclusive, democratic way.15. Verein zur Förderung von Netzwerkkunst, Graz, Austria, http://www.mur.at.16. See: http://www.artfem.tv/ArtFem_TV/, for a list of exhibition/festival/symposium presentations ofArtFem.TV.

132 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies133Crashing the Archive/Archiving theCrash: The Case of SAW Video’sMediathequeMél HoganThere is a looming paradox in the way culture is created, circulated, and conserved and preservedfor posterity. On the one hand it is present, visible, and shared; on the other, it is of thepast, stored away, and protected both against and for the future. In debates about the web’spotential and its limitations, this paradox resurfaces time and again. Nowhere is this discussionmore present than in attempts to characterize the online repository as archive, despitethe invariably ephemeral nature of the digital. 1 To ground this paradox, and to reveal somethingmore profound than mere ‘tension’ between the material and immaterial in the politicsof preservation, I look to Canada’s first large-scale online video art repository as a case study.SAW (Sussex Annex Works) Video’s Mediatheque was launched in 2003, and included 486independent Canadian video art works in an online repository. Predating YouTube by twoyears, and reaching a terabyte of content, the Mediatheque is an important project, as it islocated at the intersection of independent video art, internet studies, and archival theory. In2003, the sheer volume of video in the Mediatheque ‘made the internet tip’, as the son of theproject’s digital archivist, Anatoly Ignatiev, so aptly described it. 2In May 2009, there was a server crash that made the project vanish, 3 as nothing of the backendserver was backed up. In June 2009, SAW Video’s summer intern, Tiffany Tse, sent out aletter to video artists to inform them that both the SAW Video site and the Mediatheque portalhad ‘gone down’. The letter was written to explain the server crash, but also anticipated theMediatheque’s rebuilding. However, since this outreach effort, a notice has been posted onthe SAW Video website that diverts users: ‘Due to circumstances beyond our control, theMediatheque will be down until further notice. We apologize for any inconvenience’. 4 Currently,in 2011, plans are underway to recreate a Mediatheque, but in a new light, ratherthan attempting to hastily reconstruct it based on fragments of what it once was. As the term‘circumstances beyond our control’ implies, many factors are involved at different levels inthe construction and maintenance of such a large-scale online archive. According to DouglasSmalley and Michael Lechasseur, technicians who worked on the Mediatheque project, ahard drive failure was the root of the server crash. While SAW Video is ultimately responsible1. See: http://www.ugent.be/en/news/bulletin/memory.htm and http://www.archipel-project.be/2. Anatoly Ignatiev, private correspondence, 2010.3. The Mediatheque has a soft launch in 2003, and an official launch in February 2004. For detailssee, http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/visualarts/visualarts.aspx?iIDArticle=900.4. http://sawvideo.com/.for the Mediatheque’s crash, its reliance on external support invariably extends the responsibility,in the same way that the grandeur of the project, when it was up and functioning, wasshared. However, no fingers have been pointed: the ‘who’ and ‘what’ of the crash became amere by-product – if not an expected consequence – of the digital online realm.Nevertheless, corporate affiliations and legal parameters are involved in the server crash,which is often relegated to a mere technical failure. This holds true not only for the Mediatheque,but for many if not all similar initiatives in Canada, such as Vidéographe’s ViThèque.com and Vtape’s artvideo.museevirtuel.ca – both of which remain largely under-documented.Until quite recently, these projects were delayed or (temporarily) offline, but no documentationis readily available to assess the problems they encountered or the solutions that allowedthem to resurface. 5 Because of this lack of documentation, not much can be done to arguefor a new approach to video preservation and distribution online.The web has now been activated long enough to have large-scale projects come to life andcome to crash. 6 Documenting the Mediatheque’s demise, piecing together fragments of alost digital repository, is an exercise that characterizes our era. As exemplified by the Mediatheque,and several other Canadian online video art repositories, there is no better timeto explore the web’s potential for defining and redefining the role of the online repository asarchive, and its capacity for presenting new modes, models, and definitions of preservation. 7Looking to older, pre-Web 2.0 initiatives also provides invaluable insight into the affectivelabour poured into these early archival renditions. 8 Finally, the urgency of such work lies inthe state of these projects: because the Mediatheque is no longer online, it cannot generatethe interest of artists, curators, historians, and researchers, despite its symbolic and culturalsignificance for Canadian video art history.Between December 2009 and June 2010, I had the opportunity to discuss the Mediathequeproject with many of the people implicated in the project, both currently and at its inception.Working with current SAW Video Director, Penny McCann, I co-curated a public screeningof the now defunct Mediatheque collection at Groupe Intervention Video (GIV) in Montréal.The screening was held in November 2010, along with a ‘live’ month-long online showcaseat wayward.ca. This off/online exhibit was intended to begin the revival of the Mediatheque,generate a wider discussion around the last decade of video art online from a predominantlyCanadian viewpoint, and to further document the project. Here, I also aim both to revive5. http://artvideo.museevirtuel.ca/ remains offline (February 2011); http://vitheque.com launched inMontreal in May 2010 after years of delay. See photos of the launch at,http://www.flickr.com/photos/vitheque/.6. See Mél Hogan, ‘Cashing and Crashing the Mediatheque’ FlowTV.org, 21 May, 2010, Online:http://flowtv.org/2010/05/caching-and-crashing-the-mediatheque-mel-hogan-concordiauniversity/.7. See Felix Stalder, ‘Copyright dungeons and grey zones’, from: nettime-l Digest, Vol 7, Issue 10,sent: 15 April, 2008.8. For a definition of affect see, Brian Massumi, ‘Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect,Sensation’, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

134 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies135and document the project, and to comment on the state of video art online as an extensionand permutation of the archive, in a Canadian context and beyond. Documenting the Mediatheque’scrash and its pending revival serves as a springboard into a larger conversationabout the intricate and, as I argue here, paradoxical nature of online archives. More precisely,such projects demonstrate that the technical is always mitigated to some extent by andthrough the interplay of cultural, legal, and archival parameters.Making the Cut: Becoming a Video ArchiveWhether it is considered to represent an institution or a process, the word ‘archive’ is a disputedterm. As I will argue here, one sense of the term informs the other. Broadly defined, thetraditional archive is an ongoing intellectual effort to categorize, classify, organize, store, andpreserve certain historical narratives, based on principles of acquisition and the appraisal ofarchivists. 9 The internet has transformed our conceptual relationship to the archive, as a spacethat can be entered, visited, perused, and where objects can be touched, seen, and experienced.To some extent, the qualitative time/space dimensions that defined the archive havebeen superseded by the qualities of speed, access, and online, networking capabilities. Manyof the archive’s foundational concepts are being reassessed: value, access, and preservationare not only re-conceptualized in light of online media, but are disrupting the meaning of theiroffline counterparts, too. In other words, the focus lies not in the material/immaterial binary,but in how the digital online invariably disputes and challenges the definition of the archive.As there is no universal definition of what constitutes an archive, there is no objective way toassess the extent to which the Mediatheque is an archive. In Canada, there are no parametersthat define an archive, and thus small and large-scale initiatives, both off and online,can claim to constitute an archive. Although some university archives, provincial archives,and Library and Archives Canada have legislated mandates that determine what will be collected,arts and community-based archives have no legal compulsion to exist and as suchhave not imposed structural or procedural rules or policies. 10 The openness of the conceptof the archive is key to understanding the impact of online technologies upon the definitionand role of archives and archivists.9. For a few key theorists who question the role of the archive from post-colonial, queer, andfeminist perspectives see, jake moore, ‘Brief: Matricules (parts 1 and 2) Database and archiveproject: Studio XX the first 10 years’, DPI Online 7, 11 October, 2006, http://dpi.studioxx.org/demo/?q=fr/no/07/brief-matricules-database-and-archive-project-studio-xx-first-10-years; AnnCvetkovich, ‘In the Archives of Lesbian Feelings: Documentary and Popular Culture’, CameraObscura, 17 (2002): 107 – 147; Anjali Arondekar, ‘Without a Trace: Sexuality and the ColonialArchive’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14 (2005): 10-27; Ra’ad in Janet A. Kaplan‘Flirtations with Evidence: The Factual and the Spurious Consort in the Works of The Atlas Group/Walid Raad’, Art in America, 92.9 (2004): 134-139; Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media,History and the Data of Culture, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006; and Marlene Manoff,‘Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines’, Libraries and the Academy, 4.1(2004):9–25.10. See, Mél Hogan correspondence with Scott Goodine, Provincial Archives of Alberta personalcorrespondence, March 2007, from ‘Archiving Absence: a queer feminist framework’, MAThesis, Concordia University, Montréal, 2008.Arising from an initiative to account for and archive emerging video technologies, the Mediathequepilot project, Independents On Line (IOL), was first proposed in 2002, and aimed tostream the work of independent Canadian video-makers and film producers. Drawing fromthe SAW Video collection, which spanned 20 years of video production in the Ottawa-Hullregion of Canada, the IOL initiative would archive the collection through the digitization of approximately500 works in one year. As the project gained momentum, its name was changedto ‘Mediatheque’ to reflect the bilingual intentions behind the project, and to meet fundingrequirements. On paper, just three months were allocated to what was a massive undertaking.In this astoundingly short time, a database had to be created, an interface designed,works digitized, works collected, contracts signed, partnerships solidified, among many othertasks. Due in no small part to the budgeting magic of Kevin Morris, the project director, theplan was realized. As Morris puts it, ‘you’ve gotta work it – you’ve gotta juggle all the time andborrow from your own self’.This original proposal by SAW Video to the Department of Canadian Heritage was to archivethe SAW Video collection through the digitization of some of its older works in various videoformats. SAW Video’s works dated back to the late 1970s, and many were and remain storedin non-archival conditions, suffering from limited budgets, storage space, access to facilitiesand equipment, and know-how. According to Morris and the Mediatheque’s appointed digitalarchivist Anatoly Ignatiev, the grant to build the Mediatheque was specifically for archival purposes.While SAW Video could not claim to meet any of the basic requirements of the materialarchive, it could and did demonstrate to its funders that the web offered an extension andsubstitute to material definitions of storage, preservation, and access. If more people wereable to access rare works, the result would be a larger and less predictable cultural conversation.Preservation, in this case, was not primarily if at all about long-term care of the files, butrather about extending the ‘lives’ of the works showcased as facilitated by the online realm.According to Morris, SAW Video was an unlikely recipient for this archival grant. Canadahas a vast and rich video art history, much of which culminates in numerous locally-focuseddistribution centres. For example, the Centre for Art Tapes in Halifax, 11 VIVO in Vancouver, 12VTape 13 in Toronto, Video Pool in Winnipeg, 14 Video Femmes in Québec, 15 Groupe InterventionVideo and Vidéographe 16 in Montréal all had equally or more established video artcollections. Vtape in particular was and remains the best-equipped institution for cleaningtapes, migrating works, format shifting, and for video material preservation more generally.The particulars that led to SAW Video receiving the grant over these other institutions remainunclear, and became as much a challenge as an opportunity for the recipients. But, accordingto Morris (who drafted the proposal, and whose views were later reinforced by McCann),the Mediatheque had appeal because it was pitched as an archive rather than a circulation11. http://www.centreforarttapes.ca/.12. http://videoinstudios.com/aboutus.php.13. http://www.vtape.org/.14. http://videopool.typepad.com/video_pool_history/.15. http://www.videofemmes.org/accueil/.16. http://www.videographe.qc.ca.

136 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies137tool; a showcase and display portal rather than a substitute for offline distribution. Thus, itmay have been its positioning as a non-distributive entity that led SAW Video to be backed forthe Mediatheque over other more ‘qualified’ distribution centres.The proposal was to digitize its deteriorating material collection, with a focus on showcasingolder local works, as a means of preservation, and to give many of the works a second life.However, the actual project strayed quite far from its stated mission. Consequently, it gavethe notion of preservation an alternate meaning to that which was proposed and fundedunder the archival banner. Instead of limiting the project to the digitization of its collection,SAW Video opted to create a ‘living archive’ that redefined the central tenets of archiving:storage, display, and preservation. Spinning the idea of the archive to include the mobility ofartists and the circulation of their works outside the region, Morris proposed a more flexiblevision of the local, and of what the internet afforded in terms of a coherent artistic community.Morris also took into account the potential for artists to interact and participate through theMediatheque, which was something that the traditional material archive did not emphasize.In short, how to maximize the web’s potential for video art in Canada became a combinationof the visionary drives of Lechasseur, Morris, Ignatiev, Smalley, and later, McCann, alteredand adapted to the continuously changing technoscape. 17As is common to government-funded initiatives, the Mediatheque was also directed to functionas an educational tool. In the follow up on the Partnership Grant Report from CanadianHeritage, several questions revolved around the use of the Mediatheque by educators, andtheir access to documentation about the works and the usage of the database. The Mediathequewas to have a component that would ensure its relationship to a broader (if notyounger) audience, essentially proving its utility as a repository of rare and significant worksthat both promoted and conserved bilingual Canadian culture. To achieve this aim, it was essentialto provide artistic, cultural, and historical context for the works. According to McCann,this important conceptual component of the database was never actualized to its fullest potential.Instead, context was relegated to an oversimplified drop-down list within the Mediathequeinterface, without possibility to curate, organize or make cross-connections betweenworks. So, whereas the first incarnation of the Mediatheque was instrumental in collecting,categorizing, and digitizing content for the collection, the curatorial potential of the web wouldbe more fully realized in McCann’s reconfiguration of the project in 2011.To generate content for the living archive, SAW Video collected works through an open calldirectly from artists, video distributors, and co-ops across the country. 18 Of $350,000 dol-17. See Arjun Appadurai ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, inM. Featherstone (ed.) Global Culture, London: Sage, 1990, pp. 295-310.18. McCann explains that the open call was an issue for a site that defines itself as an exhibitionspace. Because the works were not curated or ’chosen’, the works were by default organizedaccording to traditional archival categories without much insight to the who and why of anyparticular work or any aforementioned idea of how certain works speak to one another. On theflip side, the open call meant the project was open to all video artists, amateur and establishedalike.lars budgeted for the project, $100,000 dollars was dedicated to the acquisition of rights forshowcasing the videos. 19 The enormity of this sum is reflected in the detailed attention paidto copyright and artists’ fees in the elaboration of the project. What was described by McCannas a ‘mad dash’ for artists’ fees ensued, as the Mediatheque promised artists a sum of $200per video regardless of length, exhibited for a three-year period through the Mediathequeportal. 20 Artists were limited to 12 independent works on the original Mediatheque project.Completed, the project featured 486 works by 238 artists from across the country, of which412 were ‘local’ and 25 were French titles. If Ignatiev’s and Morris’ memories serve right, fewof the submitted titles were turned down from entry into the Mediatheque. Those that werenot included were pieces that the committee felt unfit for presentation for either aesthetic ortechnical reasons, or videos pulled out by the creators themselves. However, the parametersaccording to which some works were rejected remain vague across the interviews conducted.While Morris claims that set standards were in place to ensure the quality of works, guidelinesabout this part of the process do not exist. Artists submitted works, new and old, and cashedin on the rare occurrence of being paid for un-curated and un-commissioned work.The rest of the budget would pay for administrative and technical contracts, supplies andequipment, storage and streaming, digitization, training, and resource development. Despitethis capital, stemming in large part from Canadian Heritage, the steps involved in organizingthe Mediatheque project were numerous and gruelling, as there was no model upon which tobase a project which was innovative by definition. Not only did a database of the works needbe constructed and conceived, but contracts with the artists had to be drafted and signed.The technical and logistical aspects of the project were interdependent, and a great effortfrom both sides was required to catalogue, insert metadata, digitize, burn DVD-ROM copies,encode, and finally upload content to the site. Much of this labour had to be calculated interms of ‘minutes and hours’ for various funding reports; a quantification which failed to accountfor the important affective basis of the project – the component that lingers on longestafter the portal itself went offline.The Mediatheque’s digital archivist Ignatiev recalls coming to work at SAW Video before theinternet was even installed. Just a few years later, he is credited with developing the digitizationprocess for the project. Because the initiative was unprecedented, Ignatiev created a systemthrough trial and error, testing compression and encoding rates and various formats. Thefinal report on the project states that digitization occurred in ‘real time’, such that 10 minutesof footage would require 10 minutes to be converted, averaging approximately 5,000 minutesfor the entirety of the collection, for an average duration of 10 minutes for each video. Burningthe digital file to DVD, however, would require double the time per video, and encodingwould demand as much as four times that amount. As is also stated in the report, these times19. According to the Executive Summary of the project, the total expenses of the project amountedto $570,614, with contributions from Canadian Heritage ($382,917), the Canada Council of theArts ($25,000), corporate sponsor Xstream Labs ($90,600), and funds from fundraising effortsand SAW Video’s operating revenues (estimated at over $72,000).20. The length of videos determined their worth based on television broadcast rates – this is still thesystem in place for many screenings and festivals.

138 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies139were calculated on the basis of the equipment available, and such times diminished as a secondcomputer became available for processing. Yet, this second production post often led toerrors in consistency: ‘In terms of technicians, we discovered that more than one technicianworking on more than two workstations at a time leads to errors in meta-tagging, missing tapequality errors, incorrect adjustments during digitizing, etc’. 21 The human labour involved insuch a large-scale online project cannot be understated, and in as much as human passiondrove this project, human error is an important element to consider as well. With the adventof faster DVD burners, greater processing speeds, etc., the process would invariably becomesmoother, less costly, and more efficient as technician became more familiar with the technologies,processes, and tasks. By 2003, once the workflow was in place, a minute of videotook on average one hour to go online from its original format.Seven years later, wayward.ca curators (Nikki Forrest and I) in collaboration with McCann,had to access the DVD-ROMs – the material back up for the Mediatheque – in order to selectworks for the screening at GIV. For us, this was a moment that revealed much about the archivalframework of the Mediatheque. The collection was in .avi format, stored on DVD, andall files played back properly on the computers at SAW Video. However, the material backup was quite unconventional: works were divided into parts, so that the 4.7 GB of space oneach DVD in the collection was maximized. In other words, the size of the DVDs, not the videofile size, determined its storage. Works that were larger than 4.7 GB were cut into segmentsand stored onto separate DVDs, with each segment carefully noted in Ignatiev’s handwriting.Ignatiev’s view on the matter was that these video files could easily be re-assembled usingvideo editing software, in order to re-create the work in full. It was also a method that wastedno DVD storage space, so that fewer DVDs overall were used for the material storage of theMediatheque collection. However, it also means that video works are fragmented, and moredifficult to utilize from a curatorial point of view. Thus, the method raises interesting questionsabout the link between use – as a heterogeneous concept – and preservation tactics.The video files for the Mediatheque currently exist in proprietary .avi video format, compressedfor web streaming, and doubled to data DVD-ROM format in a higher quality .avi. Avery small number of the works in the Mediatheque collection are distributed elsewhere, andbecause uncompressed screening copies were not part of the project, high quality ‘originals’are not accounted for in the Mediatheque. In this sense, the Mediatheque project was onethat viewed the online repository as an entity unto itself, rather than a mirror, complement,or addition to any material version of a collection. The Mediatheque, then, is a prime casestudy for an archive that functions on the basis of the web and privileges wide access overlong-term material preservation of the files. This task was relegated to the artists themselves,who could either keep their own archives or have their works stored in official repositories.21. SAW Video IOL Final Report (no date), p.2.Launching the Video Archive… Into CyberspaceA local (Ottawa) internet start-up, iSi Global, 22 provided server management and free bandwidthfor the project. In 2003, wide access meant access to bandwidth; however, the costsexceeded the financial capacity of any self-sustaining artist co-op. As iSi Global was the localrepresentative for the software, the Mediatheque was to stream video using the Real Playerplug-in. 23 In 2002-2003, the .avi format may have seemed as viable an option as the ubiquitousFlash does today. 24 However, corporate ties were essential to the project. SAW Videocould not afford the streaming costs for a site that was visited by over 5,000 people a month,and for a demand for numbers of works in excess of 116,000. 25 This meant that a corporatepartnership facilitated the project, with iSi Global allocating bandwidth for approximately300,000 hits averaging 10 minutes each. 26The public launch of the Mediatheque took place in 2004, after a soft launch in 2003. Becausevery little video was streamed online in Canada at the time of the launch – widespreaduse of video online through YouTube would take place in 2005 – the project was as large inscope as it was highly anticipated. The final assessment by SAW Video describes the promiseof the Mediatheque:we have built a backbone that can support virtually unlimited growth in the numberof productions that can be streamed and the number of resources that can be added;that is, a deluxe system that can meet future needs and requests, and that can accommodatechanges and improvements as demanded. 27The Ottawa Xpress report of the launch quotes Douglas Smalley, SAW workshop coordinatorand technical assistant at the time, defining the Mediatheque as ‘an archival repository ofindependent video art of all genres’. Smalley adds: ‘Unless you go to screenings you won’tget to see works of art like this anywhere’. 28 Thus, the rarity of the works and the singularityof the Mediatheque were highlighted through the successful launch of the first project of itskind in Canada.Digital ValueThe longevity of the project—six years online—meant that the repository would outlivethe original three-year non-exclusive streaming contracts signed with artists. According to22. http://www.isiglobal.ca/.23. http://www.real.com/.24. http://gizmodo.com/5454115/first-youtube-now-vimeo-how-html5-could-finally-kill-flash-video.25. Letter to artists from Penny McCann (no date). Letter given to me by Penny McCann at SAWVideo.26. Despite the server crash on SAW Video’s end, SAW Video and iSi Global remain on good termsand are considering a future partnership.27. Final IOL Report, p.7.28. Artswatch, ‘SAW Launches Huge Website’, March 4, 2004, http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/visualarts/visualarts.aspx?iIDArticle=900.

140 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies141 29 30 31SAW Video’s Mediatheque ‘homepage’ recuperated from the Wayback Machine. 29SAW Video’s Mediatheque “FAQ page” recuperated from the Wayback Machine. 31McCann, few artists decided to pull their works from the site upon termination of their originalcontracts: of the 486 works on the website, 300 remained. According to McCann, thisnumber provides ‘a substantial foundation upon which to build a permanent digital archive’. 32Presently, the Mediatheque owns the non-exclusive rights – under copyright – to showcasethe works online for an indefinite period of time, even while the site is down.SAW Video’s Mediatheque ‘search and archive categories’ recuperated from the Wayback Machine. 30While copyright is not in itself a system for determining the remuneration of creators, it iscertainly an important discursive element in determining the value of online media, includinglevels of access. Copyright also underpins much of the cultural specificity of access and preservation,which in Canada too often get subsumed under U.S. viewpoints. Canada’s recentlyintroduced Copyright Reform Bill C-32, which would weaken copyright law, has generatedmuch debate in newspapers and blogs. 33 Although his arguments require more nuance ina Canadian context, one of the main issues connecting Lawrence Lessig’s influential andimpassioned critique of a permissions-based culture, and his argument for a compellingdistinctionbetween artists who create for money and those who create for love 34 to variousCanadian copyright theorists and activists such as Michael Geist and Laura Murray, is the29. http://web.archive.org/web/*sa_/http://sawvideo.com. SAW Video/website design by LeifHarmsen. Permission to publish by SAW Video director, Penny McCann.30. http://web.archive.org/web/*sa_/http://sawvideo.com. SAW Video/website design by LeifHarmsen. Permission to publish by SAW Video director, Penny McCann.31. http://web.archive.org/web/*sa_/http://sawvideo.com. SAW Video/website design by LeifHarmsen. Permission to publish by SAW Video director, Penny McCann.32. New Directions for the Médiathèque in 2006–2007, personal correspondence with PennyMcCann (2010).33. http://www.faircopyright.ca/, http://www.jeremydebeer.ca/,http://www.faircopyrightforcanada.ca/, http://www.michaelgeist.ca/.34. See Lawrence Lessig, ‘How creativity is being strangled by the law?’ TED Talks, posted 16 March,2007, http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_ creativity.html; ‘The Read-Write Internet’ in Lessig 2.0 blog, 17 January, 2006, http://www.lessig.org/blog/2006/01/the_readwrite_internet.html; ‘Creatives Face a Closed Net’, Financial Times, 29December, 2005, p.11, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d55dfe52-77d2-11da-9670-0000779e2340.html; and Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture andControl Creativity. London: Penguin, 2004.

142 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies143notion and reassertion of fair and balanced copyright legislation. 35 This view understandsthe foundational philosophy of copyright as being about creation and access by future generations.Copyright is therefore deeply implicated in definitions of preservation and accessonline, and how these assign and delimit (digital) value.In 1975, Canada became the first country to pay exhibition fees to artists, after successful lobbyingby CARFAC (Canadian Artists’ Representation / Le Front des artistes canadiens). CAR-FAC’s lobbying also resulted in the federal Copyright Act Amendment, which recognizes artistsas the ‘primary producers of culture’ and gives artists legal entitlement to exhibition and otherfees. 36 Presumably, CARFAC and video art distributors across the country will detail online exhibitionand screening fees in the near future. However, this issue remains contentious, giventhe grey zones within copyright legislation, and the lack of strategies for remuneration proposedby those who oppose the strict policing of the online realm. The lack of control over a Canadiancontext currently presumed possible on the web (by video art distributors more generally),including means to generate income for video artists online, keeps matters confused betweenthe incredible potential of the web to provide unparalleled access, and the threat that openaccess poses to historical and cultural context, and value rooted in scarcity and authenticity.Because there is generally a two-year window for video works to be featured in festivalsand circulated by distributors, the value of the works is undoubtedly a factor in the artists’decisions to continue to showcase their work in the Mediatheque, without fee, after thethird year. 37 The online environment prioritizes the circulation of culture and its preservationthrough popular use and open access and, and in many cases, through practices of appropriationand remix as both homage and critical response. Online culture is defined by what itprivileges: the recursive nature of cultural circulation in and through the web is thus centralto new definitions of preservation. This is made manifest by the Mediatheque, which showcasednot only archival works, but undistributed and rare works that would probably neverotherwise be seen by the general public or arts community. As no original screening quality35. See Michael Geist (blog), http://www.michaelgeist.ca/; ‘Preserving Printed and Digital Heritage’,BBC News 22 January, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6287181.stm; and ‘Geist:Software piracy charges against us unfair’, The Star, May 9, 2010, http://www.thestar.com/business/article/807097--geist-software-piracy-charges-against-canada-are-unfair’. Also seeLaura J. Murray ‘Protecting ourselves to death: Canada, copyright, and the Internet’, FirstMonday, 9. 10 (2004), online : http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_10/murray/index.html andhttp://www.michaelgeist.ca/.36. http://www.carfac.ca/.37. This second life for video art works is situated between the two-year festival/gallery circuit andworks deemed historical or rich in archival value, such as collections from the 1970s, is oneworth exploring in more detail, as it constitutes the entirety of the Mediatheque video collection.These works, flanked by assigned value periods, may point to one of the more important insightsabout online distribution and showcasing. Through this, digital value could be defined as aconcept that accounts for the various ‘lives’ of media such as video, and perhaps, attribute valueto these works in limbo–between these two periods. In this way, new and historical works onlinemight be stripped of the value of their scarcity, while works older than the festival circuit allows,but far from historical, could gain digital value online.hard copy exists as part of the Mediatheque, to be materially conserved for posterity, preservationfigures differently within this archive. In the case of the Mediatheque, if it is indeed anarchive, preservation is access, despite what the archival ideal may be. 38According to Morris, however, the Mediatheque is a collection of ‘loss leaders’; that is, thevideos are offered for free online, so that they might lead the viewer to a larger body of theartist’s work which could, in turn, stimulate income. However, as part of the crashed Mediatheque,these loss leaders are also imbued with the cultural capital emitting from the project’sarchival aura. The Mediatheque’s video works have taken on a new value – that of inaccessibility– as part of this now defunct online repository of rare works. The crash, in essence,generates the cultural value of the collection.There is consensus at SAW Video that, for the duration of its six years online, the Mediathequewas never fully embraced by the video arts community, either in its target regionor beyond. While Morris explains this lack of involvement and appropriation by the communityas mere disinterest in the web by video artists, many debates have since arisen fromthe idea of showcasing video art online, pointing to its growing popularity. Questions aboutmaintaining, generating, and attributing value online, without efforts to redefine creativity andpreservation in this new context, are paradoxical at best. Ironically, it is the crash that mayultimately generate more attention and accrue value to the collection, as archival value islargely informed by rarity, scarcity, and historical context.Concluding RemarksAt the present time, McCann and SAW Video are actively seeking to restore the Mediathequeproject. The loss of the original Mediatheque is important – yet so too is the project’s potentialfuture. In attempting to remodel itself, the Mediatheque is no longer alone; video streamingtechnologies have greatly improved, and venues have emerged, if not culminated in YouTubeand Vimeo. Along with these new large-scale user-generated repositories come new modesof activating the archive, largely conceived through participatory, affective, and immateriallabour. 39 Based on the intensely draining experience of the custom-made and experimentalarchiving approach taken by Ignatiev and Morris in 2002, this newer trend towards diffuseand participatory contributions may be a welcome innovation.As McCann explains, one of the goals for the new Mediatheque is to improve the resolutionof the video works for online viewing. 40 While video streaming standards do not exist per se,38 See Geert Lovink, ‘Back from Gent–Notes on Memories of the Future’, net critique by GeertLovink, 26 June, 2010, http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/2010/06/26/back-from-gentnotes-on-memories-of-the-future/.39 See Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto Press,2004.40 However, despite wanting a Mediatheque showcasing better quality versions of the works, therewere no originals demanded of the Mediatheque project, and so the small Real Player format arewhat is left. This could simply mean that future works are showcased using a better format andresolution, and that older works be left as trace and showcase of the Mediatheque’s history.

144 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies145Flash, HTML5, and other open video formats have greatly enriched the online (and mobile)video sharing and viewing experience. Of course, better quality increases the risk that thenecessity and desire for a material collection and material circulation will be eradicated. Thepros and cons of unfettered distribution, the value of video works circulating online, andcopyright and artists’ fees are issues that were rather more understated in 2002. This shift isone clear example of the interlocking natures of technology with cultural, legal, and politicalideals, worth serious attention in future studies.What has, and can, become of a project so ‘ahead of its time’ reveals a great deal aboutthe possibilities and limitations of independent repositories within particular social and historicalcontexts, such as that of the legacy of video art in Canada. 41 In retrospect, what wasconceived of as an online archive in 2002 may not have met all necessary requirements.Conversely, what may not have been an attempt to ‘make history’ in 2002 today seems aremarkable feat for SAW Video. 4241 My point of departure for this issue is always the reflection posted here: Felix Stalder ‘Copyrightdungeons and grey zones’ From: nettime-l Digest, Vol 7, Issue 10, sent: 15 April, 2008, http://www.nettime.org.42 In response to this, wayward.ca will showcase online for one month ten works from theMediatheque project and a screening is scheduled for November 2010 at Groupe InterventionVideo (GIV) Montreal to discuss the future of the project.ReferencesAppadurai, Arjun. ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, in M. Featherstone(ed.) Global Culture, London: Sage, 1990, pp. 295-310.Archipel, ‘Memories of the Future’ June 25, 2010,http://events.ibbt.be/en/archipelmemoriesofthefutureArondekar, Anjali. ‘Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive’, Journal of the History ofSexuality, 14 (2005): 10-27.Artswatch, ‘SAW Launches Huge Website’, March 4, 2004,http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/visualarts/visualarts.aspx?iIDArticle=900.boyd, danah. ‘Taken Out of Context’, PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2008.Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom,New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. Downloadable at www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks.php/Download_PDFs_of_the_book.Canadian Heritage, ‘Canada’s New Government Supports Vidéographe’s Cultural DigitizationProject’, 2007, http://www.pch.gc.ca/pc-ch/infoCntr/cdm-mc/index-eng.cfm?action=doc&DocIDCd=CR071130.Cumming, Laura. ‘Moving Images Stay in the Dark: Why are Video Artists so Reluctant to Show theirWork on the Internet?’, Guardian U.K. online, 10 January, 2007,http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/artblog/2007/jan/10/movingimagesstayinthedark.Cvetkovich, Ann. ‘In the Archives of Lesbian Feelings: Documentary and Popular Culture’, CameraObscura, 17 (2002): 107-147.Geist, Michael. ‘Preserving Printed and Digital Heritage’, BBC News 22 January, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6287181.stm._____. ‘Geist: Software piracy charges against us unfair’, The Star, May 9, 2010, http://www.thestar.com/business/article/807097--geist-software-piracy-charges-against-canada-are-unfair.Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture, Cambridge, Mass.: MITPress, 2006.Herrman, John. ‘First YouTube, Now Vimeo: How HTML5 Could Finally Kill Flash Video’, Gizmodo,January 21, 2010, http://gizmodo.com/5454115/first-youtube-now-vimeo-how-html5-couldfinally-kill-flash-video.Hogan, Mél. ‘Cashing and Crashing the Mediatheque’, FlowTV.org, 21 May, 2010,http://flowtv.org/2010/05/caching-and-crashing-the-mediatheque-mel-hogan-concordia-university/.Kaplan, Janet A. ‘Flirtations with Evidence: The Factual and the Spurious Consort in the Works of TheAtlas Group/Walid Raad’, Art in America, 92.9 (2004): 134-139.Lessig, Lawrence. ‘How creativity is being strangled by the law?’ TED Talks, posted 16 March, 2007,http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_ creativity.html._____. ‘The Read-Write Internet’ in Lessig 2.0 blog, 17 January, 2006,http://www.lessig.org/blog/2006/01/the_readwrite_internet.html._____. ‘Creatives Face a Closed Net’, Financial Times, 29 December, 2005, p.11,http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d55dfe52-77d2-11da-9670-0000779e2340.html._____. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and ControlCreativity. London: Penguin, 2004.Lovink, Geert. ‘Back from Gent–Notes on Memories of the Future’, net critique by Geert Lovink, 26June, 2010, http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/2010/06/26/back-from-gent-notes-on-memories-of-the-future/.moore, jake. ‘Brief: Matricules (parts 1 and 2) Database and archive project: Studio XX the first 10years’, DPI Online 7, 11 October, 2006, http://dpi.studioxx.org/demo/?q=fr/no/07/brief-matriculesdatabase-and-archive-project-studio-xx-first-10-years.Murray, Laura J. ‘Protecting Ourselves to Death: Canada, Copyright, and the Internet’ First Monday,9.10 (2004) http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_10/murray/index.html.

146 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies147Prelinger, Rick. ‘On the Virtues of Preexisting Material - A Manifesto’ Subject/Object, 9 November,2008. http://subjectobject.net/2008/11/09/on-the-virtues-of-preexisting-material-a-manifesto-byrick-prelinger/.Stalder, Felix. ‘Copyright Dungeons and Grey Zones’ nettime-l Digest, Vol. 7, Issue 10, 15 April, 2008.Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London, Pluto Press, 2004.Ethical Presentation of IndigenousMedia in the Age of Open Video:Cultivating Collaboration, Sovereigntyand SustainabilityTeague Schneiter‘When we are ancestors, we will be a product of our actions’. 1We are in the midst of a pivotal moment for online video – the tools for creating and disseminatingvideo online are now prolific, and video sharing sites have encouraged an entire movementtowards user-generated content. Content, tools and platforms continue to proliferate,making the world of online video one of significant and ongoing change. A recent Nielsen reportreleased this year revealed that approximately 70% of global online consumers now watchonline video. 2 As video creation and video sharing become ubiquitous, the web has become abattlefield, with the constant conflict typically framed as a struggle for digital freedom againstdigital censorship. Online video has created an ecology of uncharted openness; punctuatedby the fact that it has become common for people to share and create videos without therelevant copyright permissions. Governments 3 and companies attempt to restrict informationand unchecked usage on the web, while independent organizations fight for freedom ofinformation, transparency and fair use. In an important victory for free culture advocates, theElectronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) this year won three exemptions to the Digital MillenniumCopyright Act (DMCA), effectively ‘carving out new legal protections for consumers who modifytheir cell phones and artists who remix videos – people who, until now, could have been suedfor their non-infringing or fair use activities’. 4 The workings of the net seem to require constantsparring between those in possession of distinctive ethical value-systems: proprietary vs. open1. Honiana Te Puni Love & Neavin Broughton, ‘Tuku Reo, Tuku Mouri: Information technologyin the strategic revitalisation of Te Reo Maori o Taranaki (Taranaki Maori dialect) in AotearoaNew Zealand’, Information Technologies and Indigenous Communities Symposium, AustralianInstitute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSI), Canberra, Australia, 2010.2. ‘How People Watch – A Global Nielsen Consumer Report’, Nielsen Wire blog, 4 August,2010. http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/report-how-we-watch-the-global-state-ofvideoconsumption/.3. According to the OpenNet Initiative’s website: ‘Drawing on arguments that are often powerfuland compelling such as “securing intellectual property rights,” “protecting national security,”“preserving cultural norms and religious values,” and “shielding children from pornography andexploitation,” many states are implementing extensive filtering practices to curb the perceivedlawlessness of the medium’, About Filtering, OpenNet Initiative, http://opennet.net/about-filtering.4. ‘EFF Wins New Legal Protections for Video Artists, Cell Phone Jailbreakers, and Unlockers:Rulemaking Fixes Critical DMCA Wrongs’, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 26 July, 2010, http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2010/07/26.

148 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies149source, intellectual property protection vs. public domain, stringent digital rights managementvs. digital commons, and open vs. restricted access.In the midst of this sparring, the movement to embrace openness for digital tools for videois off to a running start. In 2009, the Open Video Alliance, a ‘coalition of organizations andindividuals committed to the idea that the power of the moving image should belong to everyone’5 held its inaugural gathering, with 800 attendees in person and 8,000 online participants.The 2010 conference saw 950 attendees, 160 presenters, and, again, an estimated8,000 viewers online. Also, in 2009, the Association for Moving Image Archivists initiatedtheir first Open Source Committee, which focuses on developing open source solutions fordigital moving image preservation and presentation on the web. These efforts are evidenceof the increasing acknowledgement of the need to find answers to the vast range of oftencomplex questions that emerge with online video technologies and shifts in practices of mediaconsumption. The fact that video distribution and presentation is increasingly migratingonline, a medium which by nature encourages openness and sharing, is re-structuring theprocesses of knowledge dissemination itself. Increasing access to media, as well as movesto create openness in coding and software that are behind video distribution online, are twoimportant yet distinct sides of the same coin. However, in the midst of this opening, the rightsof some internet users are being pushed to the side.Indigenous media – that is, media created by and about First Peoples – can raise issues thatdo not fit as easily into the typical dichotomy between ownership and openness. This posesquestions about the full, or uncritical, embrace of openness. If it is not properly managed,free, open, and highly mutable methods of video dissemination could have profound impactsupon Indigenous knowledge and media dissemination. In this article, I will mostly focus onarchival videos that depict traditional culture, documenting cultural tradition, language, andstorytelling. It is important to note that these potentially culturally sensitive images and formsare distinct from the content produced by various Indigenous communities and individualswho are presently creating moving images. Nevertheless, the two forms converge in theirneed to be self-managed and controlled by Indigenous practitioners.The Age of Open[ing] VideoThe attempts to create openness on the web – open sharing, open remixing, open networks,open democracy, open content, open licenses, and ‘the commons’ – may automatically seemlike ethical practices, as they work in the interest of universal access to all human knowledge.However, when we take into account that there are, in fact, many diverse cultures – especiallytraditional and Indigenous cultures – struggling to maintain their distinct knowledgesystems, which are engrained in distinctive cultural values and endangered languages, theidea of entering all knowledge into a vast soup appears more problematic, for much of thecultural context and tools for cultural interpretation are lost. There is potential for distinctcultural practices to become blurred, and for lack of context to lead to misinterpretation andeven denigration of Indigenous cultures. In this era of rapid change – of climate change,5. See the Open Video Alliance’s ‘About’ page: http://openvideoalliance.org/about_ova/.corporate takeover and technological advancement – Indigenous groups are fighting to preservecultures, languages, ways of life, and knowledge systems that differ dramatically fromnon-Indigenous forms. Continuing to fight a pervasive history of misrepresentation and institutionalizationof media on the part of museums and archives, Indigenous groups are notonly reclaiming the means of production, but of preservation and presentation. The smalland large-scale repatriation efforts undertaken by cultural institutions to return objects anddocumentation to the Indigenous communities in which they were created are a testamentto the importance of Indigenous people controlling and managing their own heritage materials.6 Some of this material, such as video recordings of sacred ceremonies, is not meantto be viewed by non-initiated people either within or outside the Indigenous community.So, when museums and archives make efforts to digitize films recorded by anthropologists,missionaries, scientists, photographers, or explorers and repatriate them to communities, ifthey make them accessible in ways that are counter to Indigenous knowledge formations,the same power imbalances can be reinforced. A long history of colonialism, bolstered viathe control of media production and access, means that Indigenous and other marginalizedmedia must be self-managed.Because it is ‘the commons’ 7 that decide what resources should be shared as a society, inaccordance with what is assumed to be good for a generalized public, the principles thatemerge from the movement towards openness online do not necessarily suit Indigenouspeople, and their diverse ways of knowing and living. Within the rhetoric surrounding a videocommons is a universalist assumption that all media should be freely available to all users.According to researcher Kimberly Christen, co-developer of two innovative digital archivesdesigned around Indigenous protocols, ‘In their critique of the current “romance of the publicdomain”, legal scholars suggest that the prevalent commons talk, especially among theadvocates of a digital commons, ignores the multiple disparities between those assumed tomake up the commons’. 8 Christen goes on to point out that intellectual property regimesmisrepresent the nature of knowledge allocation and distribution within Indigenous knowledgesystems. 9 Many Indigenous cultures abide by cultural protocols, forms of cultural exchange,and knowledge management that can be significantly different from Western forms;for example these protocols may be collective, based on ‘systems of accountability’, 10 orconnected to the land. For some Australian Aboriginal groups, certain knowledge, stories,songs, dances, and ceremonies are only meant for initiated members of the community, sothat knowledge is classified according to the groupings of gender, age, and level of initiation.6. Institutions such as the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies,Australia’s National Film and Television Archive, and the Smithsonian Museum of the AmericanIndian, are beginning to acknowledge the traditional owners of the material they hold in theircollections. They are doing so by small and large-scale physical object and digital repatriationschemes, as well as working with Tribal advisors and collaborators.7. I am using the term ‘commons’ in the sense of universal participation.8. Kimberly Christen, ‘Gone Digital: Aboriginal Remix and the Cultural Commons’, InternationalJournal of Cultural Property 12.3 (2005): 332-333.9. Christen, ‘Gone Digital’, p. 333.10. Christen, ‘Gone Digital’, p. 333.

150 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies151There is also a cultural tradition of not speaking the name of loved ones who have died. 11Addition ally, the languages of many Indigenous groups do not have written forms, or areembedded within so much culturally specific knowledge that they are difficult to translateor make meaningful to outsiders. Thus, when we acknowledge the diversity of knowledgesystems, and that those systems need to be differently and separately managed, the ideaof sharing everything becomes not only unattainable, but undesirable. The need for culturaldistinctiveness, cultural rights and cultural protocols suggests the need for coordinated, specificstrategies for video presentation that may not fit harmoniously within the overwhelmingoutcry for universal openness. Not everything is meant to be shared, remixed, or turned intoa meme.It is perilous to assume that, since mainstream culture seems to be slowly migrating towardsan acceptance of universal openness, all content will or should be Creative Commons, freelyaccessible, usable, shared, or remixed. However, as media tools and use proliferate both forIndigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, these protocols for viewing are shifting in relationto the technology. Indigenous online video demonstrates that cultural tradition and protocolsare constantly in Flux, as are the digital commons themselves. To assume that technologyis constantly evolving towards the future, whilst traditional cultures are in stasis, is fictitious.According to Christen,The allure of studying indigenous uses of new technologies lies in the juxtapositionof two seemingly contradictory elements: the past-oriented, romantic notion of indigenouspeoples who are somehow in modernity but not of it, set against the futureoriented,equally romantic notion of new technologies as the signifier of a progressive,fast-paced, global modernity... .For a contradiction to be imaginable, it must functionin a given set of standards and practices: this one says that indigenous people cannotbe simultaneously traditional and modern, technologically savvy and politically astute,materially oriented and authentically indigenous. That logic is wrong. 12Online Indigenous media portals and digital archives have the potential to activate the simultaneityof tradition and ongoing change within contemporary Indigenous culture. When thetools are accessible, audiovisual objects such as videos, audio, and photos which documenttraditional (and ever-evolving) cultural practices and language can be easily shared online oroffline by web-based technologies, thereby empowering and enfranchising Indigenous individualsand communities. As David Nathan notes, the online environment ‘has reconstitutedthe balance between visual, oral and textual modes of presenting information in a way thatsupports cultural perspectives’. 13 To take this point further, it might be argued that video anddatabases, being based less on the written word and more on oral and visual ways of knowing,are particularly suited to Indigenous knowledge representation and dissemination. Thedatabase allows for the organization of information in new and multiple ways, and thus allowsIndigenous knowledge to be structured and presented on its own terms – whether visually,or according to metadata fields based on Indigenous knowledge. Additionally, improvedmetadata, enhanced by users with specific cultural knowledge, protects material againstmisinterpretation and misappropriation.As the landscape of Indigenous video online is constantly in flux, we can ask the followingquestions: How can we make use of an ecology of openness while at the same time protectingIndigenous knowledges? In upholding protocols and restricting cultural information forspecific groups, can we at the same time denounce censorship? How can we make an argumentfor Indigenous peoples (or ethnic groups) being able to maintain culture (by keepingcertain parts of it for initiated members of the community) in ways that do not work againstuniversal access to knowledge? Is open Indigenous video an oxymoron? The landscape ofopen video presents us with the possibility of offering Indigenous media on its own, evershiftingterms. This article is only a small contribution to what must be a widespread, collaborative,inventive, and ongoing discussion between all stakeholders in online video. It seeksto open up critical areas of discussion about technical and cultural protocols of openness,property, and propriety.The Proliferation of Indigenous MediaIndigenous communities and individuals have been engaging in media creation for decades,for more reasons than can be counted. Video has been used as a tool for human rights struggles,artistic expression, cultural and language preservation, and for delivering forth Nativevoices to and between local and global arenas. Despite the long history of media creationfrom countless communities, Indigenous issues continue to be marginalized within publicdebate, resulting in unequal distribution of resources and even human rights violations. Additionally,interviews; recordings of ceremonies, stories, songs and dances; documentaries;fiction films; video art; testimonies; animation; new media art, and many other forms of mediacreation, whether created by anthropologists in the 1890s or by Indigenous video artists today,all have an important place in the history of moving images that relate to Indigenous peoples,as well as the history of moving images more generally. These might include interviews,recordings of ceremonies, stories, songs and dances, documentaries, fiction films, video art,testimonies, animation, new media art, or other forms of media creation. To leave this contentout of the collective memory, simply because of its politically charged or complicated nature,would be yet another iteration of colonialism. In most cases, material that is not appropriatefor public display (which is usually not content created by Indigenous artists, but rather visual11. But with the advent of recording technologies and now new digital technologies, this practicecontinues to shift. For more on this, please see: ‘On Not Looking: the Ethics of Aesthetics inOnline Exhibits’, Invited presentation as part of the University of Rochester’s Visual and CulturalStudies Program’s conference, Visual and Cultural Studies the Next 20 years, Rochester, NY,October 2, 2009.12. Christen, ‘Gone Digital’, p. 318.13. David Nathan, quoted in Martin Nakata, ‘Indigenous Knowledge and the Cultural Interface:Underlying Issues at the Intersection of Knowledge and Information Systems’, IFLA Journal, 28(2002): 287.

152 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies153images taken by anthropologists or researchers since the time of contact), 14 still has a needto be preserved and made accessible to communities themselves.However, as the distribution of Indigenous media is becoming more and more common, thelandscape seems to be shifting. The scores of Indigenous individuals, collectives and communitieswho are creating content more prolifically than ever before do not only have accessto more avenues of distribution in the growing number of festivals and events centred aroundIndigenous media, 15 but also in the emerging use of online media. One historic yet recentexample of this emerging use of online video took place in 2008 when independent Inuit filmproduction company Isuma Productions went online with their interactive multimedia platformIsumaTV. 16 The platform was created out of a need by Inuit, Aboriginal, Métis and otherFirst Nations film-makers to have independent means of distributing their work. Inequitableaccess to national distribution and broadcast licensing for Inuit or Aboriginal-language filmsin Canada makes it difficult, if not impossible, to have more films financed or produced. IsumaTV’smultimedia platform for global Indigenous media, has a variety of content, functionalities,and projects. It allows users not only to record, store and present content, but to shareand create an active community around Indigenous knowledges, languages, experiences,opinions, ways of life, and around issues that traverse the local and the global. Once calleda ‘YouTube for Indigenous media’, it is now a trusted repository of important Indigenouslanguage, cultural and political content, which in its first fifteen months had 7.5 million hitsfrom over 40 countries. IsumaTV is innovative, in that it provides free tools for users to uploadmultimedia content posted to channels based on the categories of community, organization,artist, issue, or project, among others.Although IsumaTV’s Inuit and other First Nations users seem to be more interested in publicaccess and openness than in private or limited access, the platform also has the capacity tomake any information private. This capacity is only available to people who are designated‘members’ of a channel: private channels allow information to be ‘open’ to a specific communityof users but ‘closed’ to all other users. IsumaTV also offers tools to share contentwithin the general public, or with a community of choice. Furthermore, IsumaTV is workingon hybrid combinations of online and offline means of distribution, such as using local servernetworks to make sure that Indigenous people are able to access content in poorly connectedareas. IsumaTV’s moves to create increased openness via broadband solutions that improveaccess and allow users to define their own sets of openness demonstrates one way of negotiatingthe tensions that exist between access and restriction.[Open] Indigenous VideoWithin the more specific contest of online video, the seemingly inherent and at times overvaluedconcept of openness has important ethical implications for Indigenous content. Partof the mission of the newly formed Open Video Alliance is to facilitate the creation of ‘amore decentralized, diverse, competitive, accessible, interoperable, and innovative futureof video’. 17 The Open Video Alliance, a collective venture between an ad-hoc group of organizationsdedicated to fostering the growth of open video, including the Yale InformationSociety Project at Yale Law School, Kaltura, who are the developers of the world’s first fullopen source online video platform, the Participatory Culture Foundation, who are the creatorsof the open source Miro internet video player, and iCommons, hope to contribute to a muchneeded shift toward greater access and the free and open use of media in everyday life. Inthe context of Indigenous video online, the recent emergence of the concept of open videoand its defining principles – such as combating censorship and upholding ‘universal accessibility’– have important implications for Indigenous content, because of the aforementionedvariety of knowledge systems and cultural protocols, which differ greatly depending on thecommunity in discussion. Critical issues emerge when considering the potential free andopen distribution of Indigenous online video content, including issues of the sacred, safetyand security (especially when media tools are used during times of civil unrest), and Indigenousintellectual property differences.These issues are highlighted in the case of images taken without permission which also violateIndigenous cultural protocols, such as films of sacred cultural ceremonies recorded byanthropologists, or pictures of deceased persons that are too ‘sorrowful’ 18 to view. Imagesof such a sensitive nature require a media landscape that provides autonomous control overthis content to those pictured, or their relatives and ancestors, especially for the goal of makingpositive cultural or community use out of problematic material. The cultural, political andethical dilemmas of moving images and their potential consequences demand understandingfrom online video practitioners. Thus, they might conceive of ways that open practicesmight help to actually expand cultural sovereignty, increase awareness in the field of onlinevideo, assist projects in becoming more sustainable, and enable such powerful modes ofsharing and collaboration to encourage wider culturally and epistemologically sensitive accessto Indigenous content.Somewhat surprisingly, upon its birth, the open video movement had already begun to be apart of the conversation surrounding ethics and Indigenous content. The 2009 Open Video14. A good example of this is when ceremonies are recorded without permission. One notableexception is in the situation of Aboriginal Australian visual media, images of individuals who havepassed away become too painful to view, regardless of how the images were taken.15. In 2009, Toronto’s imagineNATIVE Film + Media Art Fesitval, now considered the world’s largestand most prolific indigenous film festival, had a record number of attendees: 11,561 people intotal attended festival events. Information from Violet Chum (Festival Assistant), e-mail messageto author, February 26, 2010.16. IsumaTV: www.isuma.tv.17. Open Video Alliance public wiki, http://openvideoalliance.org/wiki/index.php?title=Some_principles_for_open_video.18. While it’s true that images of the dead can also be sorrowful in a western context, in thosecontexts this does not usually restrict their showing. However, in Aboriginal and Torres StraitIslander communities, seeing an image of or speaking the name of a deceased person is usuallynot done out of respect, and because of an overwhelming feeling of pain felt by the grievingfamily. Many films in Australia are required to have a title card warning Aboriginal and TorresStrait Islanders to ‘use caution viewing this film, as it may contain images or voices of deadpersons’, an act of respect for their cultural views.

154 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies155Conference, in conjunction with the Open Video Alliance, hosted a panel entitled ‘HumanRights and Indigenous Media: Dilemmas, Challenges and Opportunities’. An introductionwas given by WITNESS Hub Manager Sameer Padania regarding the intersection of openvideo with ethical concerns relating to human rights, and more specifically to Indigenousrights. In the context of human rights video documentation, Padania raised the questionof whether a culture of openness can be supported when it comes to concerns of consent,dignity, representation, and security for Indigenous communities. Subsequently, NYU’s FayeGinsburg spoke about the movement of media technologies into Indigenous communities,and the effectiveness of video for visibility, such as the use of camera by Indigenous groupsas protection by recording injustice and mistreatment. However, she also acknowledged thedanger of open video when it comes to cultural protocols that vary between Indigenous communities.As a first step, Ginsburg recommended conversation about what is ethically acceptableand what is not. Ideas regarding cultural protocols are proliferating, with the interest inethics of presentation garnering interest and support. Quite a few academics and practitionersare focusing on this area, including Kimberley Christen, and the Association of Tribal Archives,Libraries, and Museums, including their associated events. The issue has also beenaddressed in the cultural protocols developed in collaboration with the Australian Institute ofAboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies 19 and the Society of American Archivists.The Problem of AccessOnline public domain and open access information resources, knowledge, and media areproliferating. And yet, despite the intense focus upon openness – open content and opensource – access to online video is actually closed in a number of ways to many potentialIndigenous viewers, users and sharers. Currently, those most frequently accessing Indigenousmedia online are often researchers or non-native people with high-speed broadbandor satellite connections. Many Indigenous people living in remote settings do not have accessto adequate bandwidth to stream video at high-speed, and those in rural or urban settingssometimes do not have adequate access to computers. In Igloolik, a town with a populationof about 1,500 in the remote Nunavut territory in the Canadian Arctic, maximum downloadspeeds of 762 kb/sec are available at $400 Canadian per month: a rate that is 65 timesslower than in Montreal or Ottawa at five times the price. And unfortunately, low bandwidthnorthern communities who are already 365 times behind cities like Ottawa or Montreal incost-per-kilobit see the size of this gap grow every year. 20 Limited technological infrastructureon reservations and in remote communities means that potential users and user communitiesattain limited benefit from innovations in online video. These same limitations alsorestrict offline, community-centred uses of video. 21This lack of media infrastructure, when combined with the remoteness of communities, hasgarnered some interest from researchers and even film-makers (such as those at IsumaTV),who are able to make a case for national and international philanthropic and university fundingand resources. As a result of these partnerships, a number of extra-institutional digital places/archives for cultural heritage preservation have been emerging in the last few years, especiallyin Australia and North America. Culturally appropriate databases based on Indigenous knowledgesystems have been created, built, and maintained both online and offline, in collaborationwith archival professionals, information scientists, anthropologists and programmers.Many of these projects are increasingly open source, demonstrating the recognition of theneed for sharing the tools that have been created specifically for Indigenous cultural heritagemanagement, allowing an open system for creating the structure of ownership. These effortshave come at a time when there is an increasing awareness on the part of cultural institutionsthat Indigenous content belongs to its cultural owners, including a large number of repatriationefforts. However, like any other media, the magnitude of content exceeds the limited technologicalinfrastructure possessed by many Indigenous communities, especially if there is nofunded archivist or researcher to assist them. For most Indigenous communities, once contentis repatriated, a lack of further resources prevents them from making it accessible.The most ethically and epistemologically robust way to preserve Indigenous heritage is throughcommunity collaboration, especially in the design of the infrastructure and contextualization ofthe content. This is the case, for example, in projects developed by engineers, designers, ethnographers,and developers - including Ramesh Srinivasan, Kimberly Christen and her team,as well as others. 22 These innovative projects have been created out of the need for peopleto access content in culturally appropriate ways. They illustrate how both offline and onlinemodels are able to be maintained whilst upholding ethical and culturally appropriate presentationof media content. In 2003, development began for Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive, anoffline digital archive housed at the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre in Tennant Creek,Northern Territory, Australia. The archive allows content to be uploaded, managed, sharedand annotated through a specific set of cultural protocols designated by the Warumungucommunity. As a browser-based digital archive for multimedia content that emphasizes ‘access’,‘accountability’, and ‘cultural protocols’ that drive the way people interact with content,Mukurtu is highly successful in its use of Warumungu cultural protocols to facilitate accessto content. In using those protocols, the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari website explains, ‘thearchive mirrors a system of accountability in which many people engage in the responsiblereproduction and transmission of cultural knowledge and materials’. 23 Its database structure,user-friendly visual interface, and interactive features (such as a profile-based content delivery19. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives and InformationServices was published in 1995 by ALIA. It was endorsed by the Aboriginal and TorresStrait Islander Library and Information Resource Network (ATSILIRN), has been looked to indeveloping other protocols globally, and is available in full online: http://www1.aiatsis.gov.au/atsilirn/protocols.atsilirn.asn.au/index0c51.html.20. Norman Cohn, DIAMA: Digitizing the Inuit and Aboriginal Media Archive 2008-09 Final Report,funding report, 1 August, 2009, p. 29.21. Such as content management systems that are created only for local, community use.22. See the project descriptions in: Ramesh Srinivasan, ‘Tribal Peace – Preserving the CulturalHeritage of Dispersed Native American Communities’. Paper presented at the biennaleInternational Cultural Heritage Informatics Conference: Digital Culture & Heritage, Haus derKulturne der Welt, Berlin, August 31-September 2, 2004, www.archimuse.com/publishing/ichim04/4763_Srinivasan.pdf; Kimberley Christen et al., ‘Digital Dilemmas, Cultural Solutions:the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive’, project description, 29 January, 2008,.www.mukurtuarchive.org/doc/mukurtu_press_release_02_08.doc.23. Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive, http://www.mukurtuarchive.org/about.html.

156 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies157system, and user-generated content groupings) allow users to navigate through content andarrange items according to their own categories, add tags and comments, and make their ownaccess copies. These systems, by being restricted to members of the community, allow usersto form their own safe public spaces around media content.Extending upon the software created for Mukurtu, Christen and her collaborators subsequentlycreated the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal (PPWP). Instead of a browser-based offlinedigital archive, PPWP is online, as the Plateau tribes are physically located across threestates, and because the material users wanted access to was held at regional and nationalcollecting institutions. This is an online digital archive space that allows Plateau peoples’cultural materials, which are held in Washington State University’s special collections and inthe Museum of Anthropology, to be curated by Plateau Tribes. 24 The PPWP website notesthat the software, using extensive administration features, provides each tribe with ‘controlover their content, narratives, tribal knowledge, metadata fields and categories’ so that ‘Tribaladministrators and tribal users can add additional knowledge to the portal materials on anon-going basis through the dynamic back-end features’. 25 Collaborators involved in bothprojects are currently developing the Mukurtu software tool into an open source, standardsbasedarchive and content management tool geared to the specific cultural protocols andintellectual property needs of indigenous communities globally. 26Another innovative project created out of the need for specific cultural needs is Ara Irititja.Ara Irititja (‘stories from a long time ago’) is a community-based digital archive and softwareinitiative designed at the request of Pitjantjatjara / Yankunytjatjara (Anangu) peoples in SouthAustralia. 27 Officially commenced in 1994 to repatriate ‘lost’ material for Anangu, and tomake it available and participatory at the community and personal level, the project haseffectively drawn family and community members of all ages together, through the use ofmultimedia content. The innovative software is presented visually, organized according toIndigenous standards, in native languages wherever possible, and protects and/or restrictsaccess to private and sensitive materials, such as images of people who have passed away,and information relating to men’s and women’s business. 28 Over time, other Aboriginal communitiesand related organizations, such as the Koorie Heritage Trust in Melbourne, the24. Plateau tribes are the Indigenous people of the Plateau or Intermontane region of westernCanada and the United States.25. Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal, http://libarts.wsu.edu/plateaucenter/portalproject/design.html.26. Check the Mukurtu website for updates regarding the new software tool: http://www.mukurtuarchive.org/.27. For more Information see, www.irititja.com. John Dallwitz, Douglas Mann, Sally Scales, SabraThorner; Dora Dallwitz. ‘Ara Irititja’, Information Technologies and Indigenous CommunitiesSymposium, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS),Canberra, Australia, July 14, 2010. Video documentation of the event available on the AIATSISwebsite: http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/research/symposia/Digi10/presenters.htm.28. This cultural protocol has to do with Men and Women having different roles in society and inceremonies; these roles vary from language group to language group. Some ceremonies arefor men only, others are for women only, and both men and women have their own particularSpiritual and sacred objects: http://www.indigenousaustralia.info/culture.html.Northern Territory Library System, and the Sisters of St John of God in Broome, have begunto use the Ara Irititja software in order to organize their own content.To further its reach, this year the Ara Irititja project is launching server/browser-based knowledgemanagement software that will be available for purchase to other communities internationally,and adaptable to their specific needs. The purchaser of the license will have controlover software development, enabling extensive changes to be made to the interface, to dataentry fields and to functionality, according to the specific needs of the community. For interestedcommunities to make major adaptations to Ara Irititja, they of course need to havefunding allotted to pay a programmer, train for community maintenance, and ideally to supportmembers of the community, especially elders, to advise about cultural protocols. Withthe right support, communities will be able to make serious graphic and structural changes,as well as create individual ‘profiles’ under such headings as ‘people’, ‘flora’, ‘fauna’, ‘places’,‘events’, ‘activities’, ‘cosmological narratives’, ‘stories’, and ‘historical stories’. These headingscan be deleted, added and re-named to suit the needs of any community. The new softwarealso allows content to be categorized as ‘open’, ‘sensitive’, or ‘sorrow’, according to culturalprotocols. And since the updated Ara Irititja is web-ready, content can be curated, and ‘open’content may go online (but not necessarily be made ‘public’), 29 whilst sensitive content willremain available only to community members where the software is running. The new softwarealso enables archive users to annotate material with text or even with audio or videocomments. This new functionality removes the necessity for the written word, and allowsusers to record their knowledge in their own words and language. This has the potential toencourage not only knowledge about multimedia content, but increase the archive of videoand audio material of endangered Indigenous languages.All three of these web-based archives for multimedia materials – IsumaTV, Mukurtu and AraIrititja – exemplify the use of web-based database technologies and customized informationalarchitectures to provide digital archives that foreground user-centred design, networking, andsharing potential. Though the software used for these projects is not specific to video, it representssome interesting moves toward increased sovereignty and collaboration using webbasedtechnologies. It also demonstrates how internet access and online knowledge-sharingcan contribute directly to Indigenous livelihoods and can actually be productively aligned withtraditional Indigenous knowledge systems and protocols. Though adaptations to the architecturemay still require the assistance of a software developer, both the Ara Irititja and Mukurtuarchive projects are moving towards the development of tools that are economically sustainable,open source, or both, and thus may help serve global Indigenous communities. Theseefforts also demonstrate how local, community-focused projects are opening themselves upto more global forms of collaboration.To summarize, as more and more Indigenous media makers create content, and as museums,archives, and other cultural institutions rapidly decentralize their collections and ac-29. If a community chooses, open content can be designated by senior elders or other knowledgeholders. The new Ara Irititja will most likely be on an intranet - an online network that is keptprivate by multiple levels of security.

158 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies159knowledge Indigenous protocols and rights to ownership through repatriation, there is anincreasing need for tools and strategies to make fruitful use of the growing amount of content.In fact, the moves of Ara Irititja, Mukurtu and IsumaTV to think creatively about how theirparticular uses of technology might serve Indigenous communities globally brings to mindtwo Inuit principles in particular: Qanuqtuurunnarniq 30 is the concept of being resourcefulto solve problems; Piliriqatigiingniq is the concept of collaborative relationships or workingtogether for a common purpose. In the digital era, Indigenous peoples and their advocatesare thinking resourcefully about future pathways, and exploring new methods and technologiesto enable cultural and linguistic revitalization.Indigenous communities have used video and online technologies to respond to challengesin representation, cultural preservation, language endangerment, and other political and culturalgoals. The aforementioned projects are examples of how openness in sharing solutionsand technologies can have positive effects for Indigenous knowledge, cultural sustainability,and cultural revival. However, although significant progress has been made, these effortsare dispersed and disconnected, and their impact has arguably been limited in comparisonto the vast amount of global Indigenous-related video. The lack of a global alliance, sharedtools, and standardized cultural and technical protocols that are able to cater to non-standardIndigenous cultural protocols is impeding further development. In order to make use of thetechnologies available, and to protect Indigenous cultural protocols and ways of knowing, theworld of online video needs to invest in collaborations that will facilitate, develop and sharesovereign and sustainable solutions. The benefits of congregating (if not entirely unifying) dispersedefforts into an alliance or network of interested parties (under Indigenous control withnon-Indigenous and institutional supports or supporters from the online video and moving imagearchiving worlds) are great. There is also a need for an open source management systemor tool for Indigenous video that is adaptation-ready. The Mukurtu team’s development of thenew Mukurtu software, which will be an open source standards-based archive tool for globaluse, shows that significant steps are being taken, but they require further support if the diversecommunities across the globe are to benefit. Sustaining these projects is difficult, as they relyon governmental, philanthropic and university funding, which can be sporadic and limited.Unfortunately, in the fields of moving image archiving or online video, the knowledge neededto digitally archive and make Indigenous heritage accessible is not yet widespread. 31 In NorthAmerica, a strong start has been made with the aforementioned panels at the Open Video30. Chris Corrigan, ‘What is Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit?’, 16 August, 2010, http://chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/?p=2875.31. A blogger named ‘Russell’ on the archiving blog Records Junkie seems unaware of indigenousepistemological differences, and therefore does not see why indigenous content should ever beunder restricted access: ‘No one, Native American tribe or not, has any legal right to force thearchives to limit access to the materials ... I do not believe that cultural awareness or sensitivityto cultural norms or mores should dictate 1) who owns materials from different cultures or 2)who controls access and use to these materials’. See: Russell, ‘Who Owns Cultural Materials’,Records Junkie, blog posted 30 January, 2010, http://recordsjunkie.blogspot.com/2010/01/whocontrols-cultural-materials.html.conference, as well as the development of the Native American Archives Roundtable for theSociety of American Archivists (SAA), and their subsequent work with supporters 32 on theProtocols for Native American Archival Materials. 33 However, as protocols and standardsaddressing Native American material are neither widely known or used by the moving imagearchives or online video community, nor specifically focused on online moving image material,there is still a gap to be filled, especially for cultural institutions that have holdings thatrelate or belong to Indigenous groups who would like to make the material accessible.However, the networking and knowledge-sharing capabilities that the web affords do providethe opportunity to develop numerous partnerships between activists, advocates, researchers,archivists, elders, technologists, community members, and programmers. In order forIndigenous peoples to reclaim culture on the net, the new sets of video tools and practicesbeing developed need to be more broadly accessible. To develop these tools and practices, itis necessary to encourage the development of a network which would draw together all constituentsand stakeholders from the open video movement: Indigenous media, (Indigenous)intellectual property, information science, and Indigenous libraries and archives. 34Based upon the formal experiments and technical successes of recent local projects, thenetwork would most likely have three essential features. A central node would exist as anonline platform and have a channel structure to allow the formation of different knowledgecommunities/committees surrounding various issues, such as intellectual property and bestpractice. Secondly, a blog containing information on Indigenous protocols for archiving andaccess would expand in-depth knowledge on special interest areas to media workers developinglocal projects, and providing close-up snapshots of project achievements and innovationsworldwide, as well as advocating for varied cultural needs. And finally, a series oftraining events and conferences would expand and share knowledge on a variety of topics.In addition, members of the network could write guest blogs for YouTube’s politics blog, inorder to share the importance of Indigenous ethics and online video, just as WITNESS andYouTube have formed a partnership to increase awareness of the role of online video inhuman rights advocacy. 35 These efforts would increase cultural understanding of issues pertainingto online video, and the use of open technologies to achieve cultural goals for com-32. The development of the protocols was also supported by the Society of the Council forthe Preservation of Anthropological Records, the American Indian Library Association, theInternational Indigenous Librarians Forum, and the American Association for State and LocalHistory.33. The Protocols were devised from different professional ethical codes from the Society ofAmerican Archivists, American Association for State and Local History, American AnthropologicalAssociation, and the Oral History Association; a number of significant international declarationsrecognizing Indigenous rights, including several now issued by the United Nations; and theground-breaking Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives andInformation Services.34. Such as those involved in the American Indian Library Association; Tribal Archives, Libraries, andMuseums; and the Global Indigenous Television Network.35. See: ‘Protecting yourself, your subjects and your human rights videos on YouTube’, 21 June,2010, http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/06/protecting-yourself-your-subjects-and.html.

160 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies161munities with distinctive cultural needs, as well as partnering communities with the softwaretools and programmers that are most suited to them. The network would be a way foster andintegrate Indigenous knowledge into the field of online video. Although thus far its efforts haveconcentrated more on open access to media, the existing global Indigenous media networkIsumaTV could be the perfect online site for gathering those with the specialized knowledgeand common goals that are necessary for more epistemologically sensitive, collaborative,sovereign, and sustainable access to Indigenous video.While it might be difficult to find the additional labour required to maintain this global network,in the long run the network would prevent unachievable and under-resourced ‘reinventionsof the wheel’ at the local and global levels. Although such an alliance might appear to threatenthe sovereignty of individual communities, archives and networks, the proposed networkwould allow distinct cultural groups to maintain their own protocols, while sharing methods,tools, systems, and best practices. The value of such a network would be its independencefrom anyone institutional context. As part of the network, each organization could choose theirdegree of involvement and collaboration with other groups, individuals and communities.ConclusionIf we understand the age of open[ing] video as one of increased and improved access, itbecomes possible to imagine open video and Indigenous video existing harmoniously. Isopenness inherently a public good, or does it depend on the way openness is instigated? Ascontent, tools and platforms continue to proliferate, the world of online video can adapt tomeet the needs of Indigenous communities. This is especially necessary because the needsof such communities are neither uniform, nor perfectly conducive to open standards per se.In fact, they are incredibly diverse: protocols do not only differ from community to community,but from family to family. The needs and expressions of knowledge, tradition, and livingcultures are constantly evolving. But as the possibilities of web-based customizable toolsevolve with them, Indigenous people will have more power to decide what becomes openlyaccessible to the public, thereby exerting continuous self-determined ownership of their ownhistories and cultures. Online video practitioners have a cultural responsibility to respectand nurture the fact that Indigenous cultural heritage ultimately belongs to the knowledgekeepers, elders, communities, and individuals who have maintained their own systems ofknowledge for thousands of years.References‘About Filtering’. OpenNet Initiative. http://opennet.net/about-filtering.Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services, http://www1.aiatsis.gov.au/atsilirn/protocols.atsilirn.asn.au/index0c51.html.Christen, Kimberley, et al. ‘Digital Dilemmas, Cultural Solutions: the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kariArchive’, project description, 29 January, 2008. www.mukurtuarchive.org/doc/mukurtu_press_release_02_08.doc.Christen, Kimberly. ‘Gone Digital: Aboriginal Remix and the Cultural Commons’, International Journalof Cultural Property 12 (2005): 315-345.Cohn, Norman. DIAMA: Digitizing the Inuit and Aboriginal Media Archive 2008-09 Final Report, fundingreport, 1 August, 2009, 1-14.Corrigan, Chris. ‘What is Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit?’, 16 August, 2010, http://chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/?p=2875.‘EFF Wins New Legal Protections for Video Artists, Cell Phone Jailbreakers, and Unlockers: RulemakingFixes Critical DMCA Wrongs’, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 26 July, 2010, http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2010/07/26.Hodgin, Rick. ‘60% of world’s population now has cell phone, highest ever’, TG Daily, 2 March, 2009,http://www.tgdaily.com/trendwatch-features/41586-60-of-worlds-population-now-has-cell-phonehighest-ever.‘How People Watch – A Global Nielsen Consumer Report’. Nielsen Wire blog, 4 August, 2010. http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/report-how-we-watch-the-global-state-of-video-consumption/.Nakata, Martin. ‘Indigenous Knowledge and the Cultural Interface: Underlying Issues at the Intersectionof Knowledge and Information Systems’, IFLA Journal, 28 (2002): 281-290.Scales, Sally. ‘Ara Irititja and Beyond’, Information Technologies and Indigenous Communities Symposium,Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islandes Studies (AIATSIS), Canberra,Australia, July 13, 2010.Srinivasan, Ramesh. ‘Tribal Peace – Preserving the Cultural Heritage of Dispersed Native AmericanCommunities’, paper presented at the biennale International Cultural Heritage Informatics Conference:Digital Culture & Heritage. Haus der Kulturne der Welt, Berlin, 31 August-2 September,2004. www.archimuse.com/publishing/ichim04/4763_Srinivasan.pdf.Despite constant battles for funding, the aforementioned multimedia Indigenous heritageprojects have devised creative solutions in order to address the needs for Indigenous selfdeterminationand sovereignty. Collaborative and participatory activities around video andtechnology have the ability to stimulate social, cultural, political and economic growth in Indigenousindividuals, groups, communities, and cultures. However, organizational and structuralmodels of collaboration need to be developed to give critical (in both senses of the term)support to unstable open content creation, and the ideals and realities of access. Developingtechnical and cultural protocols for such a distinct, diverse, and critical set of content as onlineIndigenous video will require that we extend available tools to those who do not currentlyhave access to them. In order to achieve ethical openness, we must invest in an online videoecosystem that cultivates collaboration, sovereignty, and sustainability.

162 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online163The Video Agenda in Southeast Asia,or, ‘Digital, So Not Digital’David TehIn the last decade, increasing access to digital video (DV) technology has transformed independentfilm practices in Southeast Asia. Not surprisingly, commentaries on the profusion ofDV have tended to highlight the new conditions of production – the ‘democratizing’ effect ofready access to cameras and desktop editing software – or the new landscape of distributionemerging from piracy, the proliferation of festivals, and online networking. Both phenomenaserve to make indie film much more visible in the region, and beyond it. But the aestheticsinvolved with this new DV activity are seldom the focus of critical attention. This oversightmay be forgivable, considering the long shadow that older, pre-digital film aesthetics still castover the field of moving images. Indeed, the most obvious tropes of a (Western) digital aesthetic– hypermedia, interactivity, recombinatory or network aesthetics – are largely absent.So what are the characteristics of digital video-making in Southeast Asia? How do they differfrom other places? And how might these differences inform our understanding of what DV is,or could be, in a global context?When digital films from this region do advertise their digitality, the result tends favour lo-fiover hi-fi; candid rather than ‘staged’ production; single-channel real footage over digitalmanipulation. In short, Southeast Asian video-makers seem either resistant or indifferent tothe very aspects of the digital that have appealed to so many of their counterparts elsewherein the world. With reference to recent video work from several Southeast Asian countries, I willtry to identify some signs, both overt and implicit, of a digital consciousness in DV practicesin the region. I will argue that the video agenda is shaped as much by the new economics ofdigital media – which are global – as by local realities and media histories, in which representationcontinues to outweigh simulation, and the presence of voice seems more pertinentthan matters of form.I will begin with a regional survey – a kind of field report – to highlight the widely varying conditionsunder which moving images are being made, and are finding their way online. Sucha survey is necessarily rough and inconclusive, but it can at least suggest some directions inwhich to look for a regional digital aesthetic. Video Vortex readers will note that my focus ison offline activity: most of the artists discussed here consider themselves independent filmand video-makers, a few are video artists; very few make what we would call ‘networked art’.The reasons for this are several. In part, it reflects my own experience as a curator. But it alsosays something about the ends to which moving images in general, and digital images in particular,are being used in this part of the world. Media analysts have seized upon the impactsof digital media on the socio-political landscapes of Southeast Asia: viral SMS is transformingpresidential politicking in the Philippines; in Indonesia, DIY porn made and shared on theiPhones of young celebrities yields scandals that embarrass the country’s Islamic moral or-thodoxy; Malaysian bloggers are forming alliances to defend their new public sphere againstgovernment intimidation and corporate media interests. Yet, the extent to which these developmentsmight differ from those in other places remains to be seen.Networked art, meanwhile, remains a fringe activity, barely visible in most of the region. Whyhave artists not taken to the web as a native medium? The reasons are diverse, and varygreatly from place to place. Art schools, where they exist, are dominated by modernist paradigms(as in Thailand and the Philippines) under which even video has yet to achieve muchrespectability or investment, let alone net art. Where new media have been prioritized, as inMalaysia, policies strongly emphasize their use for vocational training. And in other places,access to the requisite bandwidth – to say nothing of web literacy – is still a privilege enjoyedby few. So while the region as yet has no network video aesthetic, this is not to say there areno video networks. Artists and other video-makers are using the web assiduously for communitybuilding, research and inspiration, documentation and debate, and to connect withother artists and new audiences at home and abroad. Indeed, this social dimension could bethe more telling – in some countries, class and social histories can be seen to have shapedthe medium’s role in contemporary culture more than technical, industrial or art histories.Indonesia’s strong activist and alternative media networks are a case in point with their rootsstretching back through the nation’s birth in the 1940s and into the colonial era. 1 Theirresurgence during the 1980s and 1990s provides an important template for today’s videonetworks, where artistic and activist modes often merge. By contrast, in Thailand, wheremedia activism has had less purchase on the public sphere, it has also remained largelyestranged from art. Insofar as video networks exist in Thailand, they are a new invention anda site for middle class identification more than progressive social engagement. I will return tothis comparison below, but a broader exploration of video networking in the region will have toawait further study. For example, it would be fruitful to consider how, as bandwidth grows andvideo-enabled devices become ubiquitous, these social networks might need to be reconfigured.What will video networking look like after Web 2.0? Will we see the emergence of aregional media art clique, or will local dynamics continue to prevail over international trends?If there is little regional coherence in the ways DV is deployed online, there are patternsemerging in the ways it is discussed. In particular, the expansion of indie film-making hasushered in readymade vocabularies from elsewhere. The marriage of regional studies withfilm and cultural studies yields predictable results: blinkered national-industrial historiography;fixations on narrative and popular subject matter; copious sociological studies of identity;a general allergy to ‘art’; and so on. The annual Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference(ASEACC), roaming and independent, embodies both the openness and enthusiasm, andthe limited critical arsenal, of the regional discussion. Precious little attention is given to mattersof form. The fact that most of the material considered is made on video rather than filmhas done little to displace the governing premises of global (read: Euro-American) cinema1. In the early 20th century, activist media were instrumental in adopting what would later becomeIndonesia’s national language (Bahasa Indonesia, now spoken throughout this archipelago ofover 700 language groups), based on the local form of Malay. See Adrian Vickers, A History ofModern Indonesia, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 60-62.

164 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online165discourse. But rather than dwell on these limitations, we might instead ask a different question:For what other purposes are people using these media? For DV is used in ways that arespecific to place, and this specificity has slipped through the discursive filter of film studies.I began to ask this question in my research for Unreal Asia, a program of video work fromSoutheast Asia that I co-curated with Gridthiya Gaweewong for the 55th International ShortFilm Festival in Oberhausen in 2009. This program posed questions that also frame thepresent essay: Is there such a thing as ‘realism’ in Asian moving image cultures? What wouldactuality look like – what would be its syntax on screen – if it was informed by Confucian familyvalues, Asian paternalist dictatorship, the vicissitudes of migration and displacement, orthe kinds of deep hybridity that characterize religious and ethnic life in this region? Informedby superstitious mediation, rather than optical rationality? And if film never quite had the‘indexical’ relation to the Real it has enjoyed elsewhere, what then should we make of thepreponderance of observational modes in Southeast Asian video-making, across documentary,fictional and experimental fields? Such epistemological considerations are especiallypertinent in places where the appeal of video – and thus the spirit in which it is often embraced– is not so much that one can make moving images more readily, but that one mightnow make them at all, with film having been prohibitively expensive for most of those nowusing DV. It follows that studies structured by film’s economies and aesthetics will be lessuseful than those that identify and proceed from a regional ‘program’ of DV itself. How doesthis technology channel lived experience, or for that matter, spiritual life? What can it show?Regional BackgroundAt the Video Vortex forum in Split, 2 I was asked to give some background about ‘policies andstrategies’ affecting online video in Southeast Asia. This is difficult, for two reasons. One isthat, in much of the region, there are no such policies, or at least, the ones that most affectonline video were designed for older media (as with many national censorship regimes) orin another place (as with ‘global’ standards set by multinational media corporations). Wherenew media policies have emerged, they tend to be geared towards cultural policing, or arecosmetics applied to national economic facelifts. In any case, they do not reflect a consistentregional situation – and this itself points to a second, more profound problem: Southeast Asiadoes not really exist. Rather, it is a slippery, historical fiction born of the mid-century militaryexigencies of Western colonial powers. It makes little sense in geographical, cultural, religious,or linguistic terms. The 40 years of self-conscious regional association through ASEAN– no less a child of the Cold War – has brought little if any cohesion. Global capital tends tomake these nations competitors, rather than a unified bloc.It is not surprising, then, that Southeast Asia is characterized by a very uneven network geography.The terrain ranges from the wealthy island republic of Singapore, wired to the hiltand broadly post-industrial; through to developing/stumbling economies such as Thailand,Indonesia and the Philippines; and to more or less closed or offline societies such as Laos andMyanmar. There is little to tie these places together structurally. The ‘knowledge economy’means anything from outsourced animation farms and call-centres to the hopeful repackag-ing of raw commodities for tourist or export markets. The rhetoric of creative industries, whereit has landed, tends to be top-down and tokenistic if not downright fraudulent. In any case,the term is dying a quick and natural death – hastened by the global economic downturn – inplaces where ‘industry’, for most, still means the real leap from farm to factory. Just about theonly structural attribute shared across this region is authoritarianism, which remains the rulerather than the exception, and there is no general correlation between freedom of expressionand economic development. Much of the region operates under a perennial, thinly disguisedstate of exception, with repressive ‘internal security’ laws lurking just beneath the shiny, neoliberalsurface. Yet, authoritarianism does not always curtail alternative media activity, whichoften passes below the radar of state power. The chief problem here is perhaps not hardwarebut software: the state of education in general, and critical media literacy in particular, is dismal.It is likely that in the great, global, innovative and unwired future, Southeast Asia will havelittle if any say in how new technology is designed, developed and administered.Authoritarianism seems to be most severe at each end of the infrastructure spectrum. Despiteshowing recent economic promise, Vietnam does not rank far above Laos and Cambodiathanks to decades of authoritarian communism. The state in Myanmar we might call ‘freelyrepressive’, as was demonstrated in the dreadful aftermath of Cyclone Nargis in 2008. Singaporeis beginning to make gestures towards a careful, top-down liberalization, though its mediacontrols are nothing short of Draconian. The web is expanding the possibilities for politicaldiscourse there, in an orderly, Singaporean fashion. And yet, when ‘citizen journalist’ MartynSee made Speakers Cornered, a video documenting a very tame public protest staged duringthe 2006 IMF/World Bank meetings, the video was banned, See’s equipment confiscated, andSee himself subjected to interrogation and fifteen months of police investigation. The work isavailable on YouTube, and depicts the awkward, passive-aggressive ballet danced betweenthe paranoid state and its polite, repressed citizens – a ballet in which DV cameras are bothdancers and choreographers. 3 The video was not conceived for the web, but is nonethelessvery much a product of the net-video era, in which some distribution of controversial materialis guaranteed in any place with (at least) liberal pretensions. The episode underscores one factabout the role of video in the region: the unfaltering importance of the camera as witness, afunction it serves not just in sousveillance, but also in fictional, experimental and ethnographicfilm and video. And this ought to problematize the premature conclusion drawn by somescreen culture theorists that the evidentiary moving image died when the digital was born.Malaysia presents a more nuanced case: network expansion has been eagerly pursued aspart of national economic planning, especially since the founding, in 1996, of the MultimediaSuper-Corridor, and has coincided with the decline of the Malay majority that hasgoverned since independence in 1957. With a growing interracial bourgeoisie less beholdento older, racially defined interests, the Malay political elite has been obliged to give onlinediscourse more latitude than it has older media. However, Malaysia has the added problemof a state-sanctioned religious zeal – also on the rise in Indonesia – that polices cultural channelsclosely. Despite this control and strict media laws, the web sees some vigorous debate.2. http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/videovortex/past-events/video-vortex-split.3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY1ilenkPaM.

166 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online167In both Malaysia and Singapore, it’s fair to say that the web enjoys more latitude than liveculture; and that online, text enjoys more latitude than image.Indonesia is the most interesting site for video activity, with an ever-growing constellationof local video clubs, community art and media groups and activist collectives. It was thusthe obvious site for the Transmission workshop, a five-day camp focused on web-basedvideo distribution. To my knowledge, Transmission was the only meeting with some regionalscope. 4 This strength is mirrored by a rich blogosphere in Bahasa Indonesia, a languagethat facilitates translation with respect to both European languages (to which its Malay corehas been permeable for centuries) and data, thanks to its Roman alphabet. Still, video’smigration online has been slow, due in part to the country’s scattered geography, but alsoto network instability which has made large uploads difficult for years, even in large urbancentres. 5 The Philippines has similar problems with access, infrastructure and centralization.However, NGO (non-government organization) and activist networks have made someonline headway there too.However difficult it may be to define Southeast Asia, it may yet prove to be a meaningfulframe for examining screen culture. But as yet, the subject is so under-studied and thefield so nascent, that broad strokes are necessary to prompt further debate and research.While the technical and cultural landscapes are so varied, no formal or stylistic overviewwill be of much use. But we might try to discern the video agenda – or the ‘program’ ofvideo – in this region. I have in mind here something akin to that which Vilém Flusser calledthe ‘program of photography’, though perhaps with less focus on the Apparatus and moreon the Functionary and the Technical Image: an agenda visible not just within the frameof a medium in action, but in the socio-technical parameters within which video is made.It is these parameters that are likely to reveal some regional patterns. 6 Who has access toDV, as producers or consumers? How is it distributed, and how does it relate to other, oldermedia? What does DV make possible that was not possible under earlier technical paradigms?And if this activity is so little informed by video’s first-world history, or the specialcharacteristics that mark a digital aesthetic in the West, what are the local conventions andhistories that inform its production and secure its legibility? Before attempting to answerthese questions from a regional standpoint, I will focus on the case with which I am mostfamiliar, that of Thailand.The Video Agenda in ThailandBy comparison with its neighbours, Thailand’s infrastructure is not bad. Communicationsand transport were priorities of the U.S. military’s Cold War gift economy, and continue tobe essential for the sake of industry, trade and tourism. Even at Thailand’s rural extremities,connectivity is fairly broad, if not particularly broadband. But looks can be deceiving: despitethis infrastructure and its relatively free press for much of the 20th century, Thailandis one of the worst offenders when it comes to censorship of the web. This is especiallythe case since the rise of media tycoon and Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and hissubsequent military overthrow in 2006. In Thailand, the uptake of popular platforms suchas web-boards, blogs, YouTube, and social networks like Myspace and Facebook has assumedepidemic proportions, but has secured only modest gains for the public sphere.Self-censorship is hardwired into the public culture; repressive measures are backed by allpolitical parties and are typically enforced in the name of loyalty to the monarchy. One canhardly keep track of all the websites, individuals and online publications – both anonymousand high-profile – that have fallen foul of the country’s medieval lèse majesté laws. As thecountry faces a looming royal succession crisis, censorship has become more acute, andthe mass media are cowering from years of free-speech rollback. An intense struggle overbroadcast infrastructure flared up during the recent political showdown that culminatedwith the military’s bloody dispersal of red-shirt protestors from central Bangkok in May. Thissuggests that while online dissent is growing and closely monitored, its strategic importanceis still secondary to that of broadcast media. It is a telling irony that one of few respectableintellectual journals in the Thai language, the leftist Fah Deo Garn, and its new offshootArn magazine, digest much of the critique that can only happen fleetingly online, yet theylargely confine themselves to the less threatening scale of indie print media. 7When it comes to the moving image, Thailand’s commercial movie industry is prolific, if notespecially interesting, and provides many independent players with professional experienceand income. DV has certainly broadened access to video, but the vast majority of video ismade by the middle class, for the middle class. Economically and politically speaking, thisgroup is far from homogeneous. Geographically it is more uniform, confined mostly to thelarger cities, with little penetration of poor or rural communities. Ethnically, there is a notablepreponderance – as elsewhere in the region – of the mostly urban descendants of diasporicChinese, who enjoy some economic and educational advantage; but Sino-Thais are unlikelyto identify as such, and even less likely to make films from that standpoint. Thailand has loose4. Held in Sukabumi (West Java), May 2008, http://transmission.cc/txap. For an overview of video’scentral place in Indonesia’s emerging visual cultures, see Krisna Murti, Essays on Video Art andNew Media: Indonesia and Beyond, Yogyakarta: IVAA, 2009.5. Nevertheless, the density and diversity of Indonesia’s video networks are unparalleled in theregion. For an overview, see KUNCI Cultural Studies Center and EngageMedia, Videochronic:Video Activism and Video Distribution in Indonesia, research report, Collingwood: EngageMedia,2009.6. Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, London: Reaktion Books, 2000.7. This situation raises an interesting side issue, namely, that repression is carried on not accordingto the procedural push-and-pull of laws governing trade, publishing or free speech, but in thehysterical, symbolic/sovereign discourse of national emergency – the ‘special case’ that hasbecome the norm – triggered by the ancient legal fantasy of an identity between sovereign andpeople (whereby a threat to his person is tantamount to a threat to the nation). To be fair, thisblade cuts both ways, as in the country’s duplicitous stance on intellectual property. The WorldTrade Organization provides (under TRIPS) for local exceptions to global IP protections in casesof ‘national emergency’, and it is this same sovereign exception that Thailand has exploited, forinstance, in compulsorily licensing pharmaceuticals for the treatment of HIV/AIDS. It seems thataccess to information is, in some general sense, a sovereign concern, a proposition that deservesfurther study.

168 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online169but enduring networks of indie film-makers, in which expertise, equipment and organizationaleffort are pooled and shared. 8 Many are plugged into international festival and fundingloops, yet the principle audience is still local, and gathers around both grassroots and morecommercial festivals. Online channels are far more important for community building andpromotion than they are for the actual dissemination of DV work.By comparison, ‘new media art’ is almost invisible. In a recent paper on new media art inThailand, I could highlight only a handful of Thai artists working with new media in reflexiveways. 9 A paper on Thai internet art would have been a very brief affair indeed. Even the fewwho engage with network thinking seem compelled to ‘realize’ their ideas offline, in more tangiblephysical forms. Here, the pop-media projects of Wit Pimkanchanapong are exemplary.In these works, video, computer graphics and mobile and locative media converge not invirtual space, but in the very physical, social spaces of the shopping mall and the rock festival.Wit is Thailand’s most conspicuous new media artist, but even in his practice, the webis only really a channel for promotion and documentation. Much of the work of conceptualistPratchaya Phinthong, who would never claim to be a new media artist, revolves around socialand technical systems of knowledge dissemination. In his 2006 installation Alone Together,Pratchaya created a quasi-domestic space in the gallery where visitors could watch cult andart movies from a DVD library, as well as duplicate films to take home, or add to the libraryfrom their own collection – a kind of offline peer-to-peer network. Again, new media thinking(in this case concerning international film piracy and its local market nuances) gravitatestowards shared, physical space, and the face-to-face encounter.Some analysis of recent video works – one mounted online, the other a ‘capture’ of onlineculture for offline exhibition – will illustrate the limitations that characterize network aestheticsin Thailand. The first was by the lauded indie film-maker, Anocha Suwichakornpong.The 2008 work Kissing in Public invited Thais to video themselves kissing in public, and toupload and share the video via a blog. Anocha made a pilot kissing short, to kick-start theproject, which she described as ‘an exercise in socio-cultural politics’. Video was cast as thewitness, evidentiary and transparent: ‘At the time where all eyes in Thailand and the mediafocus on national politics, we’d like to open up space, not only for debates, but real practices,on how the personal can and should be political, especially at this transitional period in Thaihistory’. 10 But the timing of this attempt to distribute authorship was awkward. To make thestreet the battleground for the defiance of social norms seems an oddly naïve choice, giventhat Bangkok’s middle class – the only conceivable audience for such a work – was at thetime rapidly becoming apathetic and desensitized to the street-protests that were shuttingdown parts of the city for months on end. That the site of this gesture would two years laterbecome a literal battleground, claiming 89 lives, only compounds the irony. Why even put8. These pools are perhaps less formal, and certainly less ethnically diverse, than those highlightedby researcher Gaik Cheng Khoo in neighbouring Malaysia. Gaik Cheng Khoo, ‘Just Do-It-(Yourself): Independent Filmmaking in Malaysia’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8.2 (2007): 227-247.9. Presented at the ASEAN Art Symposium, Silpakorn University, Bangkok, 2008.10. http://kissing-in-public.blogspot.com/.this material online? A cynic might see the privileged haute-bourgeoise parading her liberalcredentials for her backers on the international festival circuit, transgressing a cultural taboothat few of her compatriots seem to consider a problem. It is true that public displays of affectionare considered improper in conservative Thailand; what is less clear is that anyone cares.Indeed, the idea did not exactly catch on; the only takers seem to have been a performancecollective made up of young expatriates. Is this civil disobedience, or a form of elitist cosmopolitanism?If nothing else, it is a good demonstration of the narrow scope through which thenetwork’s potentials are seen. 11The lively indie film scene, of which Anocha is a leading figure, confirms this limitation.What is striking is that from this almost entirely digital field, the output is on the whole so notmulti-mediatized, so not networked, so not interactive, so not non-linear, so not recombinatoryor appropriative. That is, that ‘digital’ aesthetics, at least as they have been theorizedin the West, do not seem to have gained a foothold amongst people using similar tools andsoftware. Indie video-making tends to be personal, the work of an auteur, and appreciablyless observational than elsewhere in Southeast Asia. To explain this fact, it helps to considerthe peculiarities of documentary in Thailand. Classical documentary is done poorly and seldom,yet a few recent efforts deserve mention: a long-form take on the conflict in Thailand’ssouthern provinces directed by Manit Sriwanichpoom, Ing K. and outspoken senator, KraisakChoonhavan, Citizen Juling (2008); Panu Aree’s The Convert (2006) about inter-faith marriage,also shot largely in the south; and Pimpaka Towira’s The Truth Be Told (2007), a Davidand Goliath tale of a young journalist sued to within an inch of her life for defamation bythe Thaksin regime. These are the best of a bad bunch. All were independent productions;all ended up in the cinema, but in festivals only; and none really aspired to wider, commercialdistribution. All deployed a resolutely ‘objectivist’ documentary idiom, effacing thefilm-makers’ authorial and editorial presence and eschewing voiceover, with plenty of mobileand handheld camera work; and all, it seems worth noting, are essentially biographical narratives.The epistemological assumptions of these works, the sort of viewing they imagine,are those of celluloid documentary film. This is a romantic-journalistic idiom that leaves intactthe evidentiary claims of a medium it no longer actually employs – often without the rigouror transparency that bolstered such claims elsewhere. It seems that in Thailand, the movingimage either channels the romantic vision of the bourgeois individual, aspires to the veracityor authority of a public record, or both.11. Cf. Malaysia, where the witticisms and visual puns of Amir Muhammad’s video essays, forinstance, prod at the lighter and darker sides of Malaysian political culture. His scripts (andsubtitles) import the idioms of blogging, the timing and aesthetic of the chatlog. (See, e.g., hisMalaysian Gods, 2009.) Yet as in Thailand, network aesthetics may not have penetrated muchdeeper than this. Recent online video projects such as One Malaysia (an array of artists andpersonalities fighting racism by pooling their sentimental nationalism), and an ostensibly politicalshort film platform called 15 Malaysia, plug into the viral and link-based economies of Web 2.0,and are emblematic of the emergent multi-racial cosmopolitanism (on which, see Khoo, op. cit.).The ethos here, like the state’s, is more entrepreneurial than activist, harnessing the web as a PRvehicle and a site for ethical consumption, rather than a new logic of production, disseminationor aesthetics. An analogous program in Bangkok, meanwhile – the Thai Film Foundation’sNothing to Say (Pridi Banomyong Institute, October, 2008) – was a determinedly offline affair.

170 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online171This partly explains, or at least corroborates, the unreflexive way in which video has migratedto the network. While digital video is increasingly viewed online, its aesthetics are generallynot web-native. Its primary destination is still the indie film festival and, in some cases, thegallery. The interface it imagines is live, spatial and social, rather than remote, distributedand hypermediated. This is not due to a lack of equipment or skills, but to a hangover fromold media that leaves the program of video harking back to a photo-journalistic past, and tothe unfinished business – we might say the unrealized modernity – of indexicality. It is perhapsfor this reason that Thailand’s outstanding video-makers are those working deliberatelyat the blurred border between documentary and fiction, as in the community-embeddedpractice of Uruphong Raksasad, for example, or Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s landmarkficto-documentary Mysterious Object at Noon (2000). This blurring may be traced back atleast as far as 1970s social realism, and probably even further. 12 The country’s leading videoartist, Araya Rasjdamrearnsook, also tests documentary aesthetics, probing both the shockpotential of the objective record, and the moving image’s more subtle effects on truth andidentity. 13In general, this blurring has been less about fictionalizing documentary forms – a play favouredby several prominent Malaysian video-makers – than it has been about the leakage ofdocumentary modes and aesthetics into fictional forms of film-making. Yet both paths lead tothe kind of video vérité that is often rewarded on the European festival circuit, where cinemais once again punctured by real life, by non-professional actors, and by a visible productionapparatus. This candour is probably the chief characteristic linking moving image practicesin Thailand to those elsewhere in the region. It resonates with the ‘mixed reality’ of pioneeringcelluloid film-makers such as Filipino Kidlat Tahimik, Indonesian Garin Nugroho, andCambodian Rithy Pan; but also to the general flourishing, more recently, of observationalvideo-making.Bystanders or Observers?Across Southeast Asia, the most obvious impact of DV technology is its different temporaleconomy: DV demands less discipline, and tends to allow its subjects to perform, their storiesto unfold, in their own time. Scripts become more a series of propositions – starting pointsfor a negotiation with reality – rather than a strict program to be executed. The camera tendstowards interrogating its surroundings, rather than overcoding that environment with significationor narrative. DV’s affordability has led to a surge of observational film-making, by artistsand non artists alike. New windows have opened onto everyday life, and onto sites of conflict12. David Teh, ‘Itinerant Cinema: the Social Surrealism of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’,(forthcoming).13. Video has been present in the Thai art since the 1980s, but its historical proximity toperformance (another neglected, fringe practice in Thailand) perhaps explains the paucity ofreal-footage and documentary video in Thai contemporary art to this day. While DV appearsmore and more in galleries, there are still very few calling themselves ‘video artists’, the mediuminstead having been absorbed – though tentatively and not everywhere – into the toolbox of the‘fine artist’, without really challenging the art school’s disciplinary structures.and struggle. But if, as I have suggested, the video agenda still includes the witness function,this does not seem to have limited the different ways of looking entailed by DV practice in variousplaces. A clear divergence is notable between Thailand and Indonesia, for example, onethat may be characterized with the figures of the bystander and the observer. The bystanderis incidental to the action; the observer is more like a monitor, a feedback conduit, and neverneutral. The former inevitably carries the pejorative connotation of a passive sort of viewing,while the observational stance may be considered a more active footing on which to makeimages – a tendency much debated in anthropology, as the latter has been disabused of itsearlier, objectivist aspirations. 14Viewing recent Thai video practice through this filter, one notices a very obvious trend: theThais making and circulating videos, whether these are playful or po-faced, seem to share asense of impotence in the face of their country’s ongoing political woes. This will not surpriseanyone familiar with the political inertia and disillusionment of the Thai bourgeoisie. Yet it isstriking that for members of this class, a confident grip on the DV apparatus does not seem toimprove their purchase on civic affairs. They are almost always positioned on the sidelines – asthe term bystander suggests – in their treatment of political events. The Thai national character,a normative phantasm shared by foreign and Thai commentators, with few disagreements,is said to mandate indirectness. The result on screen is metaphor or allegory, ranging from theearnest to the puerile. When video-making does become confrontational it is liable to deteriorateinto caricature and counter-propaganda, without the sense of purpose that makes goodagit-prop good. The more typical response is to drop the seriousness.The second work I will examine, while exemplary of political impotence, suggests that theobservational tendency also takes specific local forms. There are two main components toNawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s six-minute video, Bangkok Tanks: 15 the background is a fuzzytelevision screen bearing the unmistakable talking head of Thaksin being interviewed on BBCWorld. This image is overlaid by an MSN Messenger chat log in Thai (with English subtitles),of a conversation amongst a group of high school students. The conversation took place on 19September 2006 – the day when, with the country paralyzed by protests against Thaksin, theThai military unseated him in a bloodless coup d’état. The kids pass on gossip and hearsayabout the events unfolding in the city around them and, most disarmingly, they chat about itseffects on them: they speculate about likely restrictions of media and communication channels;they joke about their alarmist parents and grandparents stockpiling domestic supplies;they rejoice at the prospect of a day off school. Remarkable for its candour, Bangkok Tankspurports to be a document, but not a documentary. The correspondence here between actualityand the moving image is incomplete: the latter pretends to show something ‘as it was’,the DV viewpoint fixed and uninterrupted, yet it makes no particular claim to transparency orobjectivity. The credits tell us the text comes from a chat log on a given day; but we don’t knowif it is a slice of a single, un-staged exchange, or to what extent it has been edited, if at all.14. On this debate, see for example Eliot Weinberger, ‘The Camera People’, in Charles Warren (ed.)Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,1996.15. Bangkok Tanks (dir. Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, 2007).

172 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online173The appearance of non-film ICTs (information and communication technologies), in this casethe online chat, within the moving image is unusual in Thai indie video. Yet while it exposes alocal culture of use, and the interplay of online with older media such as broadcast and wordof mouth, the network does not actually structure the work at all – it is merely thematized ina single channel short video. The discernible digital manipulation of the moving image is notcommon either, at least outside the field of animation. Other photo-media, especially photographsand television, appear frequently within both narrative and experimental videos. Butthese other sources are seldom mainlined – that is, their frame almost always remains visibleand distinct from that of the camera/screen. One might say they are represented, rather thanchannelled. This suggests that more direct appropriation – a cornerstone of DV aestheticsin other places – is somehow incompatible with the kind of authorship evolving around themedium in Thailand, and this is another reason Bangkok Tanks stands out. 16In most discussions of digital media, a hypermedia image is something other than an observationalone, if not directly opposed to it. I would argue that Nawapol’s video, although itchannels multiple sources, is ultimately observational. It is a non-evidentiary recording of ahistoric moment, packaged as an irreverent oral history. If such pseudo-documentary strategiesstand out in Thailand, it is because they do at least call into question the epistemologicalassumptions video inherits, but also adapts, from analogue film. There is less of a challenge,however, posed to networked media. The kids’ indifference to the country’s political implosiontells us nothing about the wider digital ecology in which their chat sits, one subject toendemic state and self-censorship.In Thailand, the uptake of digital formats has not, by and large, been accompanied by a scrutinyof those tools, or of their specific politics and aesthetics. Networks provide a certain socialcontext, rather than an actual locus, for the rising tide of DV activity. However, this is not thecase everywhere in Southeast Asia, especially not where activist and community media networksare stronger. The opportunities the web presents for video-makers have been more fullyrealized in situations in which media literacy lies high on the socio-political agenda of users.Such networks are particularly strong in Indonesia. Interestingly, they have developed here asmuch through engagement with mainstream broadcast media culture as in opposition to it. Arecent volume of articles by pioneering Indonesian video artist, Krisna Murti, gives some senseof the dynamism and openness of the younger generation. 17 Venzha Christiawan, a founder ofthe House of Natural Fibers new media lab in Yogyakarta (Central Java), favours the acronymDIWO – ‘do it with others’ – as if to raise the stakes of the DIY mentality that already prevailsin Indonesian alternative media scenes. The thrust of such workshop-oriented organizationsis not towards extending the audience for DV but, perhaps in keeping with an earlier spirit ofpost-broadcast media, to redefine the sender. If the video agenda in Thailand conforms to16. In any case, the general paucity of digital appropriation is peculiar in a country renowned,in virtually every other medium – from comic books to statute law, from painting to industrialdesign, from music to fashion – for appropriation, copying, adaptation, piracy, knock-offs andjust about every form of cultural pilfering imaginable. Perhaps the unimaginative recycling thatreigns in commercial cinema has given appropriation a bad name.17. Murti, Essays on Video Art and New Media.what Castells called ‘networked individualism’ (a networked form, that is, of ‘sociability’), theshapes it takes in Indonesia look more like what Ned Rossiter calls ‘organized networks’ - theyare ‘transdisciplinary distributive and collaborative’. 18 This distinction is broadly confirmed bycomparing the authorial modes that prevail in each country.By way of a speculative conclusion, I will propose one further filter for identifying a regionaldigital aesthetic: voice. Again, this term deserves a local spin, for ‘voice’ has a rather differentinflection in places where oral culture still prevails, or at least where it has not receded in theface of modernity to the extent that it has in the West. That modernity has invested voice withthe politics of identity, as something ‘inalienable’ belonging to the individual subject, graduallyrecognized and secured by the modern state. This politics of voice does illuminate importantstruggles in Southeast Asia, and giving voice is integral to the video agenda. It would not,however, prejudice these efforts to note that in places where a politics based on expressionsof individual will is neither native nor entrenched – and where the state has largely been andlargely remains its antagonist rather than its guarantor – the concept of voice denotes somethingfar more quotidian, variable, and shared. In such contexts, voice is just as likely to be avehicle for the proliferation and scrambling of identity codes. What might such a proliferationmean for a broader, regional video agenda?Video Voice: Towards a Regional ProgramI have suggested that the documentary form in Thailand betrays a certain ‘biographic’ romanticism.In Indonesia, DV has also borne witness to a flood of biographical material, but withtelling differences: gone is the heroic subject, fighting losing battles with state, authority orprejudice; life stories are typically subjective rather than pseudo-objective; the subjects areordinary rather than exemplary. Of the Thai documentaries cited above, all the film-makersare based in the metropolis of Bangkok, making films about provincial subjects. In contrast,Indonesian film-makers tend to opt for what is close to them, focusing on familiar and localsubject matter. Their narratives are often incidental rather than deliberate, attuned to whatSiegfried Kracauer has called the ‘found story’. The latter are far too numerous to survey here;a few examples will have to suffice. Steve Pillar’s Irama Hari (Rhythm of a Day, 2008) is ashort, wordless documentary about Jakarta’s street vendors, splicing the refrains with whichthey attract customers into a fugue of ‘found sound’. Andang Dan Sarjo (Andang and Sarjo,2004), by the Forum Lenteng collective, is an eight-minute oral micro-history, lifted from aneveryday encounter (a haircut) with a mobile barber. And in Pengajian at My School (IslamicStudies Club at My School, 2007), four young girls interview each other about the need formore dynamic pedagogy in their religious education.Although this selection indicates some bias towards socially marginal subjects, the latterusually relate to the film-maker, rather than to some heroic archetype, and their role is oftenparticipatory. To these, we could add countless videos generated in the workshops of18. Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society, Oxfordand New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 129-, and Ned Rossiter, Organized Networks:Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers and Institute forNetwork Cultures, 2006, pp. 13-14.

174 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online175Jakarta’s biennial OK Video Festival, and from scores of similar initiatives across the archipelago.The authorial envelope is pushed by grassroots video clubs, NGOs and communityvideo workshops – models unthinkable in the era of celluloid – or activist projects organizedaround specific issues of community concern. Of course, the preference for local immediacyis not accidental, and such organizations play their part in determining the video agenda. Yetin Indonesia, to put the DV camera in the hands of marginalized and poor people somehowseems an obvious thing to do; and whether these initiatives overstep class boundaries ornot, the overall effect is a staggering multiplicity of voices. 19 In general, indie videos are notcircumscribed by the imagination of an individual video-maker, in marked contrast to theircounterparts in Thailand. Video’s existential or phenomenological phase – exemplified by theexperiments of, say, Bruce Nauman or Vito Acconci, and characterized by Rosalind Kraussas a kind of narcissism – seems to have been passed over in favour of a more popular modeprivileging an actuality constituted socially, rather than individually. 20 Perhaps this representsa new kind of reflexivity: social media don’t just depict the social, they begin to presupposecollective articulation. The ‘program’ of video here dilates to encompass its constitutive socialbonds. Even if the latter are strongly informed by network technologies, online disseminationis perhaps neither necessary nor sufficient for the validation of this sort of production. Whoneeds networked video, when there are video networks?The devolution of authorship is just one symptom of the proliferation of voices. Digital mediaalso widen the range of tones available to the individual, as in the work of John Torres, anemerging digital auteur from the Philippines. Torres’ images are remarkable for their unpolishedcandour. His unstaged, clearly non-industrial manner of production yields a kind ofdigital personal realism, distinct from the celluloid social realism that looms so large in thePhilippines’ film history. Torres’ videos exemplify the economy of ‘always-on’ digital media,culled from a constant, unscripted recording of quotidian life. His DV camera sits within awider ecology of convergent media – PCs, mobiles, dictaphones and voicemail, radio, television,karaoke, and the web – which are both channelled and represented in his loose, poeticnarratives. For a film-maker whose subject matter is relentlessly personal, this de-gearing ofauthorial unity is pivotal. For while it may have the style of an auteur, Torres’ video direct ismarked by what Jacques Derrida terms démultiplication: a proliferation of channels, voicesand tones. Derrida formulated this idea in an essay on ‘the apocalyptic tone’ in philosophy,and again in The Postcard – a book ‘stuffed with addresses, postal codes, crypted missives,anonymous letters, all of it confided to so many modes, genres, and tones’, in which headopts a diaristic, and at times a very personal voice. 21 In Torres’ own very personal videomemoirs,we find a similar form of tactical distraction or encryption, a diffraction of identity inkeeping with an era of total digital diffusion.Consider Torres’ response to a question from late critic and curator Alexis Tioseco, about themultiplying voices in his feature-length video, Todo Todo Teros (2006):AT: You have the narrative running through three channels – the voice-over, the onscreentext, and the images themselves. What inspired your use of on-screen text andis there a logic to its utilization? At times it contains the first person I … Is there a reasonthat you chose not to read these statements instead?JT: In the film I talk about being constantly under surveillance, so along with the characters,I try to communicate not just through voice but also through written word, SMS,song, performance, drawn images, and even gibberish/invented language… I don’tknow, maybe all the wiretapping and the “mother of all tapes” coming out in the newshave prepared me to resort to this mode of storytelling (laughs). 22It is unclear what, exactly, Torres is implying about the relationship between ‘surveillance’and the media he lists. Notably, however, the proliferation of formats is seen to promoteidentification between the film-maker and his subjects. The auteur’s response to the end ofprivacy is, perhaps paradoxically, the media equivalent of speaking in tongues, a multi-vocalchannelling that undermines the unity of a single, authorial voice.In his recent ‘Altermodern Manifesto’, super-curator Nicolas Bourriaud observes that today’sartists are ‘starting from a globalised state of culture’, one of the chief indices of which islanguage. Thanks to ‘increased communication, travel and migration’, he writes, ‘[m]ulticulturalismand identity is [sic] being overtaken by creolisation ... This new universalism is basedon translations, subtitling and generalised dubbing’. 23 My own survey of DV usage broadlyconfirms this view; language and translation are pivotal sites of aesthetic play in DV practiceAsia-wide. Yet I would not accept the conclusion Bourriaud wishes to draw from this: thathybridity (‘creolisation’) constitutes some kind of ‘universal’ project. For if digital media arefacilitating translation and understanding, they are just as often used to thwart communicationand foreground its failures.19. In addition to those already cited, key networks include community video facilitators KampungHalaman and photo-media collective MES 56 in Yogyakarta, ruang rupa in Jakarta and CommonRoom in Bandung. The penchant for lateral social engagement may even be partly attributable,ironically, to certain policies of the authoritarian state. E.g., rural-urban exchanges, instituted bySuharto’s militarist New Order government in the 1970s and 1980s, formed a kind of templatefor the strong NGO sector that was instrumental in bringing this regime down in the 1990s.These grass-roots networks had become channels for a generation of activists barred from directparticipation in the political sphere. See Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia, p. 197.20. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, October (Spring, 1976).21. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1987; and ‘On a newly arisen apocalyptic tone in philosophy’,in Peter Fenves (ed.) Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant,Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1993.22. Torres is referring to an eavesdropping scandal involving the Philippines President during anelection campaign: http://www.criticine.com/interview_article.php?id=22.23. Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Altermodern Manifesto’, http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/manifesto.shtm. See also his catalogue essay in Altermodern: Tate Triennial 2009,London: Tate Publishing, 2009.

176 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online177Such interventions against communication can be found in both Thailand and Indonesia. IfDV gives new currency to the vox populi – a form linking journalism to ethnographic film andoral history – it is also frequently an accessory to the deliberate warping of such feedback, byartists seeking to prevent the ethnographic subject from communicating as such. Thai examplesinclude Prateep Suthathongthai’s Explanation of the Word Thai (2007) which featuresreadings of Thai history in an ethnic minority language, rendered phonetically in subtitles;and Marut Lekphet’s Burmese Man Dancing (2008), which takes Thai stereotypes aboutBurmese immigrants drawn from a vox pop survey and subjects them to an arbitrary translationinto the unintelligible Symbol font. Both works turn on a translation that derails communication.In Indonesia, we find a similar typographic ploy in Muhammad Akbar’s Noise(2008). In this work, the monologue of a Japanese exchange student is rendered – again,phonetically – in Sundanese, the widely spoken dialect of the artist’s hometown, Bandung.In fact, this language’s neglected script derives from Kanji, and thus has more in commonwith written Japanese than with Bandung’s other, dominant scripts, Romanised Bahasa andSanskrit-based Javanese. These works remind us that language can be both a lubricant anda retardant of inter-cultural exchange. 24 Voices are subjected to a kind of formal scrambling,recalling the cross-cultural slippage of karaoke - ironically, Asia’s pop-cultural lingua franca.Against the hybridization Bourriaud sees as symptomatic of some new (but not that new)internationalism, I would posit instead a wider logic of démultiplication. In mistranslation,and de-couplings of the oral from the written, the video image finds greater amplitude – vocalrather than visual – without necessarily taking on the hypermediation associated with digitalconvergence elsewhere.How might such practices reflect on the epistemological status of DV in Southeast Asia?If my earlier proposition of a ‘non-evidentiary’ recording is sound, then the proliferation ofvoices would serve neither communication nor representation, but perhaps a collectivizationof history’s emergent channels. That the output of such collective expression should benon-evidentiary suggests one possible framing for a regional video agenda: video-makers arerefusing to play the game of absolute truth or indexicality. Rather than attempting to meetauthoritarian discourse or official history on its own turf – to ‘speak truth to power’ – theyprefer to put the new medium to work amongst themselves. This helps to explain why theoutput is overwhelmingly narrative – narrative knowledge, in these cultures, still reigns overanalytic or theoretical knowledge – but also why it is so often observational, since one needn’tfeign objectivity when the object is one’s own milieu. Finally, it suggests that for these users,DV’s greatest potential lies in its capacity to plug into, and channel, the older, oral modes ofexchange that mass and broadcast media have largely passed over.ReferencesBourriaud, Nicolas. Altermodern: Tate Triennial 2009, London: Tate Publishing, 2009._____. ‘Altermodern Manifesto’, http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/manifesto.shtm.Castells, Manuel. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society, Oxford andNew York: Oxford University Press, 2001.Derrida, Jacques. ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’, in Peter Fenves (ed.) Raisingthe Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida,Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993._____. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1987.Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography, London: Reaktion Books, 2000.Khoo, Gaik Cheng. ‘Just Do-It-(Yourself): Independent Filmmaking in Malaysia’, Inter-Asia CulturalStudies 8.2 (2007): 227-247.Krauss, Rosalind. ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, October, (Spring, 1976): 50-64.KUNCI Cultural Studies Center and EngageMedia, Videochronic: Video Activism and Video Distributionin Indonesia, research report, Collingwood: EngageMedia, 2009.Murti, Krisna. Essays on Video Art and New Media: Indonesia and Beyond, Yogyakarta: IVAA, 2009.Rossiter, Ned. Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions, Rotterdam: NAiPublishers and Institute for Network Cultures, 2006.Teh, David. ‘Itinerant Cinema: the Social Surrealism of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’, (forthcoming).Vickers, Adrian. A History of Modern Indonesia, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2005.Weinberger, Eliot. ‘The Camera People’, in Charles Warren (ed.) Beyond Document: Essays on NonfictionFilm, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996.24. See also Ariani Darmawan’s Still Life (made in 2006 with Hosanna Heinrich), in whichmiscommunication is a metaphor for inter-communal conflict, as four women have an absurdargument in four different languages.

178 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online179A Chronicle of Video Activism andOnline Distribution in Post-New OrderIndonesiaFerdiansyah Thajib, Nuraini Juliastuti, Andrew Lowenthaland Alexandra CrosbyIn Indonesia, the relationship between social movements and the technologies of online videodistribution has reached a very exciting phase. 1 The exhilaration felt in 1998, at the end ofthe repressive era of Suharto’s New Order, created a unique sense of momentum for activistsworking with new technologies. In particular, the sense that video could directly impactlocal, regional, national and global politics remains strong. However, as activists begin todevelop more tactical approaches to changing technologies, how their videos will be distributedbecomes a recurring question. The many answers to this question arise from anarray of conflicting interests, ideologies and identities emerging from what can no longer beviewed as a single unified movement. Yet, alongside this divergence of approaches is theconvergence of existing forms of cultural production and distribution, mediated by advanceddigital technologies.Access to video production tools, the internet and mobile technologies, while still limited inIndonesia, is increasing dramatically. The proliferation of video production and the burgeoningonline sphere has introduced new ways of communicating that intensify the connectednessof agents from from different settings – including those initiating movements for socialchange, and those who would have once been considered the subjects of such movements.The writers of this article come from two organizations, KUNCI Cultural Centre and Engage-Media, both of which are firmly placed within the movement for social change, actively manipulatingemerging technologies for activist purposes. In our ongoing work, we have begunto chart how a range of activist organizations are engaging with online video technologiesin the Indonesian context, addressing issues that emerge from the interplay between socialmovements and technology, and exploring the potential and limitations of online video distribution.We have worked with participants within Java and Bali, as video production anddistribution activities are still concentrated in this part of Indonesia. Arguably, this is due tothe uneven development of the country’s communication infrastructure, which is very muchbound by the scope of market activity. We are, however, aware that video-based activities areburgeoning outside these islands even as we write. While this account is limited in geographicalscope, we hope that it becomes a solid point of departure for further research.We begin with a brief history of video activism in Indonesia, showing how and why some of the1. This article is a summary from Videochronic: Video Activism and Video Distribution in Indonesia,2009, KUNCI Cultural Studies Center (http://kunci.or.id) and EngageMedia, a collaborativewriting by Ferdiansyah Thajib, Nuraini Juliastuti, Andrew Lowenthal and Alexandra Crosby. Thecomplete PDF version is available in both English and Indonesian from:http://www.engagemedia.org/videochronic.offline methods of distribution have developed, and revealing the beginnings of some waysto map the different approaches to distribution. We then move into a discussion of onlinedistribution, arguing that while the prospects for strongly networked digital distribution are immense,there are still many barriers, both technological and cultural in nature.Video in Shifting MediascapesMany analyses have pointed to how technologies have helped to mobilize dissent within Indonesia’snational political landscape, in particular leading to the demise of Suharto’s threedecadeauthoritarian government. 2 One prominent example is the role the internet has playedas an alternative civic space allowing political engagement to bypass the control of the nationstate.3 Before the internet, however, video in its early stages was already beginning to alter theway that society constructed images of itself.According to theorist of globalization Arjun Appadurai, it is through visual information producedwithin ‘mediascapes’ that audiences can experience and transform ‘imagined lives,their own as well as those of others living in other places’. 4 In Indonesia, these mediascapescan be traced back to the early 1980s. At this time, video technology entered into and thrivedamong a new middle class, that was rapidly increasing thanks to an economic growth periodresulting from the New Order’s boom in state-sponsored natural resource exploitation. Thisperiod was marked by the popularity of ‘imagined lives’ on screen: Indian Bollywood movies,Hong Kong action series, and local films were consumed on Betamax and VHS videocassettes, and distributed by outlets called penjualan/persewaan or palwa (sales/rental). Theconsumption of these images contrasted sharply to the way video technology was simultaneouslybeing manipulated by the state. Audiovisual content in Indonesia was implicated in theIndonesian nation-building project through the establishment of the first national televisionnetwork Televisi Republik Indonesia (TVRI), and later by the launch in the late 1970s of thePalapa communication satellite. Both technologies became a means for Suharto’s New Orderregime to extend its political authority, sugar-coated with developmentalist logic.Like many New Order cultural policies, however, the government’s approach to video wasfraught with contradiction. As stated in the preliminary study on the history of video in Indonesia,Video Base, the analogue video period lasting from the 1970s to the late 1990s wasmarked by the increased use of videocassette recorders (VCR), which the state decided hadthe potential to endanger its dominance. From that point, the New Order took anticipativemeasures to contain and control video-related practices, ranging from censorship and theintroduction of new taxes on the sale and screening of video cassettes, to the classification of2. Krishna Sen and David T. Hill, Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia, Australia: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000, pp. 195-217.3. Merlyna Lim, ‘Lost in Transition: The Internet and Reformasi in Indonesia’ in Jodi Dean, JonAnderson and Geert Lovink (eds) Reformatting Politics: Networked Communications and GlobalCivil Society, 2006, pp. 85–106.4. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalizations, Minneapolis, USA:University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p.35.

180 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online181videos to prevent piracy. 5 Aware that video is inherently a powerful medium of communication,the authoritarian government also exploited the new technology to sustain its hegemonyby producing and disseminating images and information that reinforced its domination. Thiswas conspicuous, for instance, in the anti-communist propaganda film Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The Treachery of the 30th September Movement/Indonesian Communist Party), annualscreenings of which were compulsory every September on national television, in commercialcinemas and in all Indonesian public schools. 6In the late 1980s, the production and consumption of analogue video images was increasedby the advent of private television stations. The stations showed a variety of content, but theformat that dominated were the serial dramas named sinema elektronik (electronic cinema)or sinetron, akin to ‘soap operas’. The ubiquity of sinetron coincided with an increase invideo-production practices. Krishna Sen and David Hill have shown that between 1991 and1994, when the celluloid-based Indonesian film industries went into rapid decline, featurelengthvideo production rose by almost 50 per cent. 7 Shortly after, in 1995, video productionexperienced another boost when digital video (DV) cameras were released onto the market forrelatively low prices by manufacturers such as Sony, JVC, Panasonic, among others. 8 Beingmuch cheaper than the previous analogue models, the recording technology became accessibleto more diverse sectors of Indonesian society.From this chronological account, we witness how everyday video practices in Indonesia displaythe interconnection of production, distribution and consumption. While we may be ableto trace the linear development from analogue to digital technology, and from expanding televisionbroadcast to increasing quantity of video production, the same pattern does not appearin all aspects of consumption and distribution. The pattern of video consumption and distribution,from video cassette technology, to laser disc, to VCD in about 1997 and then DVD about2003, 9 engaged the public in an uneven way, rather than as a single audience. Only somesteps in this development, such as the cheaply reproduced VCD, increased access for thosefrom lower economic classes and those living in rural areas. Although the picture quality issignificantly lower than DVD, VCD is still widely used in Indonesia because both the player andthe disc are much cheaper. The mass distribution of pirated VCD and DVD materials underIndonesia’s official legal radar has also extended the scope of consumption beyond the divisionsof economic class. 10A new conjunction in video-based practices emerged in the approach to the 1998 politicaluprising, and in the recovery from it. This experience showed video-makers the power ofaudiovisual representation and dissemination to generate extensive socio-political changes,by mobilizing people in support of particular causes. The residue of Suharto’s dictatorship,in which people’s experiences and memories of being used as objects of repression weredeeply inscribed, was that media participation and first-person storytelling became crucialagendas to pursue. Viewing video as a profound and flexible medium, activists are promptedto adopt it as a means of social recovery and transformation. Thus, post-Suharto Indonesiasaw an unleashing of media production and distribution, both commercial and non-profit.With regional areas in Indonesia gaining more autonomy, calls for information decentralizationand democratization became more widespread. Increasing consumption of cable television,computers, the internet and mobile phones, along with growing numbers of local stations,brought mediated events further into people’s lives. From an activist perspective, this disseminationwas perceived to have the potential to foster participation and broaden the agenda forsocial change. In this context, the DV camera functioned as a kind of personal technology thatallowed the operator autonomy and power over the production of content, which spurred thepractice of citizen media.In the approach to the Reformation, the media explored for supporting the cause of socialjustice was not limited to video. On the internet, communication media such as chat roomsand mailing lists flourished as forums for discussion that could circumvent militaristic staterepression. Also, under the umbrella of the anti-New Order movement and the discourse ofchange, several accomplishments were made by alternative print media in the form of communitynewsletters. 11 The forms of distribution taken by these oppositional media, informallyand anonymously using existing social networks, contributed to the formation of the hybridvideo distribution networks, which are discussed below.Sketching a Map of Video ActivismDeparting from the above historical outlook, we can begin to sketch a map of video activismin Indonesia today. The video-based activism observed in this project has taken a range ofpositions and includes individuals and groups from different social backgrounds, with differentideologies, approaches, sites of intervention and audiences. Here we identify three main practicesthat currently exist: (1) activism working to transform grassroots communities throughparticipation in video production (from here on addressed as ‘grassroots video activism’); 12 (2)5. Forum Lenteng, Videobase: Video-Sosial-Historia, Jakarta, Indonesia, Pusat Informasi DataPenelitian dan Pengembangan Forum Lenteng, 2009.6. Forum Lenteng, Videobase: Video-Sosial-Historia.7. Krishna Sen and David T. Hill, Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia.8. Dimas Jayasrana, ‘Fragmen Sejarah Film Indonesia’, unpublished article, 2008. The summarytext titled ‘A Fragmented History: Short Films in Indonesia’ is available from, http://www.clermont-filmfest.com/00_templates/page.php?lang=2&m=72&id_actu=494&id_rub=&mois.9. Dimas Jayasrana, ‘Fragmen Sejarah Film Indonesia’.10. Nuraini Juliastuti, Understanding Movie Piracy in Indonesia: Knowledge and Practices of Piracy,University of Amsterdam, unpublished thesis, 2008.11. Nuraini Juliastuti, ‘Whatever I Want: Media and Youth in Indonesia Before and After 1998’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7.1 (2006): 139-143.12. The organizations that appear to have shared similar repertoires of grassroots activism are:Kampung Halaman, based in Yogyakarta, Central Java, works with youth living in what KampungHalaman term the ‘transitional districts’ using participatory video; Etnoreflika, also in Yogyakarta,works among socially marginalized communities, according to their motto: ‘cameras for thepeople’; Kawanusa has been based in Bali since its foundation in 2004; while Ragam was theinitiative of documentary film-maker Aryo Danusiri, formed to promote video as a medium forcross-cultural exchange among different indigenous communities.

182 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online183activism based on tactical 13 initiatives that produce video aimed at influencing public perceptionand key decision-makers (from here on addressed as ‘tactical video activism’); 14 and (3)activism based on technological experimentation and deconstruction of imagery as a meansfor shifting the relation between the audiences and the medium (from here on addressed as‘experimental video activism’). 15It is worth noting here that the above distinctions are the result of an effort to envisage the differentdimensions of video activism, rather than to pigeonhole them. 16 Rather than being mutuallyexclusive, these three realms of video activism are situated along a spectrum of discreteyet interwoven practices, which shift according to technological and ideological dynamics.However, we are interested in rendering these activities at their points of coalescence in orderto relate these shifts to broader social movements.The first group work and interact with specific communities to intervene at specific sites,while the latter two formations tend to be more mobile and flexible in their interventions.Although some groups adopting video-based approaches are independent entities, manyof them are also embedded within other social change organizations that share common visionsand agendas. 17 Some major political differences can also be identified from the distinctapproaches of each group. In our focus-group discussion with video activists in Jakarta,Maruli from UPC expressed his concern about community video practices becoming a wayof ‘flirting with new media’. In a particular traditional community in Java, whose environment13. The term ‘tactical video’ here is an extension of Michel de Certeau’s concept (1984), whichdistinguishes strategic and tactical actions in the domain of popular culture. Theorists andactivists David Garcia and Geert Lovink extended de Certeau’s concept of tactics to the field ofmedia activism, by identifying a class of producers who amplify temporary reversals in the flow ofpower by exploiting ‘spaces, channels and platforms’, necessary for their practices. http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors2/garcia-lovinktext.html.14. This grouping encompasses video-makers who are engaging with tactical uses of video contentproduction and distribution. Included in this group are: Offstream, established by Lexy J.Rambadetta and focusing on documentary work; KoPI, which is based in Bandung, West Java,and also working in the documentary genre; Fendry Ponomban and Rahung Nasution, who,aside from forming Jaringan Video Independen (JAVIN), also independently produce videos withpolitical content; Maruli Sihombing, who is active at the Urban Poor Consortium (UPC); andGekko Studio, in Bogor, West Java, which concentrates on environmental issues.15. This group includes ruangrupa, a Jakarta-based artist initiative founded in early 2000 in Jakarta;VideoBabes, formed by three female video artists based in Bandung, West Java. In Semarang,Central Java, Importal works to open alternative public space for video works. The final group inthis category is Forum Lenteng in Jakarta which specializes with introducing video techniquesamong youths and collaborative development of audiovisual research methods.16. In the interviews conducted, we asked the respondents where their activism fitted in withcontemporary movements, and received many nuanced reflections. Only a few video activistscould give a clear label to their practices, while most located themselves within a diverse range ofmovements and contexts.17. For instance, Gekko Studio collaborates on projects with environmental NGOs, and Etnoreflikahas partnerships with organizations assisting marginal communities such as street kids and sexworkers.was at risk due to plans to develop a cement factory nearby, community video organizers hadchosen to work with the community to produce a video – a process that Maruli consideredinappropriate considering the time available to produce a community-based video and theurgency of the situation faced by the community. This situation prompted Maruli to take theinitiative to make an independent campaign video on the issue so that the information couldstart to circulate publicly, and advocacy for the case could be initiated right away. 18We raise this example to point out that the steps taken by Maruli and the grassroots videoactivists he criticizes, while different in form, need not be perceived in opposition to it. Suchfriction can be viewed as creating momentum towards a common end: the production ofinformation that counters that distributed by the local government and the corporation developingthe cement factory. Conducted simultaneously, video facilitation at a communitylevel, production of socio-political content, and efforts to popularize video-based technologiesconstitute a new configuration in which video becomes a means to collectively transform society.The key question is whether the collective activism in this field can sustain the strategicinteraction and communication among different factors required to open broader political opportunities.Can video-based activism in Indonesia form a coherent and supportive network?How might online tools be employed to assist in such a formation?Most of our informants have shown hesitance toward, if not outright rejection of, the idea ofworking together as a single strategic network across the three categories we identified. Themain reason identified for this hesitance was the limited capacity of groups to function as anetwork, especially when it comes to the availability of human resources. For example, YogaAtmaja from Kawanusa pointed to the lack of available staff to open and manage networkingactivities, as the group is already exhausted by its existing commitments working withcommunities. More pertinent still are the significant political differences between the variousgroups. The organizations discussed here are in no way homogeneous, and run the gamutfrom alternative commercial enterprises, to medium-scale NGOs, to all-volunteer radical activistcollectives. Additionally, issues of conflicts of interest between actors have often taintedexisting networks or led to the disbanding of early network formations. While the technologiesthat enable the easy creation of sophisticated networks are available, without a shared politicalvision for the purpose of the network, it could not be successful; an affinity for the mediumof video and a political commitment alone are insufficient.Even so, the activists interviewed did not dismiss the possibility of partnerships with othergroups with similar interests. However, how soon the relationships could be built remainsuncertain, as a convincing video-networking model that can inform the activists of how tomove forward is yet to appear. The success story of the student movement in toppling theNew Order government in 1998, for instance, although organized through networks of disparategroups, is considered by many as too fluid to be characterized as an example of anestablished network.18. This video is available from: http://engagemedia.org/Members/maruli/videos/gunungkendheng1.avi/view.

184 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online185Networking challenges are also evident within the global social-justice movement, with whichmany of the groups in this study intersect. As has been argued by Manuel Castells, 19 theglobal formation of social movements has been profoundly transformed by the intensificationof communication. Traditional movement structures have been abandoned as new informationtechnology allows for resource mobilization, information-sharing and action-coordinationon a larger and faster scale. Furthermore, Jeffrey Juris 20 notes that the emergence of thecultural logic of networking among global social-justice activists, which is facilitated by digitaltechnologies, not only provides an effective method for the organization of social movements,but also represents a broader model for creating alternative forms of organization.However, the insights of such observers of global internet culture have not yet shed light onhow digitally mediated social networking can be appropriated in non-Western countries suchas Indonesia, where insufficient technical infrastructure and a range of different culturalbackgrounds produce distinct challenges for social movements. Certainly, the underdevelopedinternet infrastructure did not hinder the proliferation of political dissent in Indonesia in1998. 21 And yet, the establishment of horizontal networking between activists in the digitalsphere to sustain such dissent is not yet manifest, even though internet infrastructure is nowfar superior and much more widespread than it was in 1998. Bandwidth may still limit thepossibilities of video, but most other media can take reasonable advantage of the currentinfrastructure. This lack of networking is indicated by the almost complete lack of hyperlinksbetween groups surveyed on their respective websites, even though hyperlinks have beenavailable as a technology for more than 15 years. Clearly, the issue is not merely the availabilityof the tools, but the strategic and imaginative implementation of such. How can anapproach to the technology that is more confident, playful, creative and grounded in localcontexts be manifested?Calibrating Hybrid Distribution MethodsWhether the responsibility for distribution is assumed by the video-makers themselves, supportedby offline programs such as festivals, screenings or exhibitions, based on commercialopportunities, or developed through online channels, the challenges are significant. Thisdiscussion is based on the assumption that an established form of independent distributionis yet to be created in Indonesia. The groups studied view the possibility and necessity ofsuch a model differently, simultaneously inventing new schemes, referring to systems alreadyemployed abroad, taking advantage of mainstream screening services, or even choosing notto distribute their work at all. The problem of distribution is inseparable from the challenges ofaccess to technology. While the ideologies associated with each are interrelated, we approachthe video distribution schemes in two sets of practices, offline and online.Layar Tancap, Community Television and Other Offline ChannelsIn Indonesia, various offline methods of distribution are still more popular than online methods,both because of the limitations of internet infrastructure already outlined, and becauseof the rich culture of social events and communication that already exists across the country.Some of the most common methods of distribution are screening programs, festivals, exhibitions,television broadcasts, home-video distribution and hand-to-hand distribution.For activists, alternative screening methods outside mainstream venues have been politicallyas well as practically motivated. 22 Screenings become peripheral projects, using a range ofindoor sites as well as layar tancap (literally ‘freestanding screen’), and are often held outdoorsin sports fields or other open spaces. Combine Resource Institution uses this methodand adds an interesting twist to it, by downloading related videos from YouTube to use in thescreenings. Screenings are also held in foreign cultural institutions, independent cinemahouses,art galleries, campuses, political centres, village halls, or even more privately, amongfriends in boarding houses or family homes.Some of the video activists, such as KoPI, Offstream and VideoBabes, frequently send theirwork to festivals and exhibitions in Indonesia and overseas. Some groups hold their ownfestivals: Kawanusa has been organizing the Community Video festival in Bali since 2007;ruangrupa in Jakarta has been producing OK.Video biannually since 2003. In the meantime,there are a very large number of video festivals operating around the world, and they oftenform a central focus for video-makers. The focus on this method, however, can prevent videomakersfrom formulating broader approaches to distribution. Online distribution of a videois sometimes an obstacle to being invited to festivals that, even in this age of massive onlinedistribution, will sometimes refuse to screen films that can already be found online.Television broadcast as a mechanism for distributing video has not been discounted by producersand distributors of non-mainstream videos. However, as indicated by Sofia Setyotriniof In-Doc (an agency working for the development of local documentary films), royalty feesfor screening on television constitutes a considerable obstacle. National television stations donot provide royalties to independent video-makers because they regard the video materialas non-profit in nature, and claim that video-makers should be grateful for the free accessthey gain to wider audiences. These reasons are accepted by some groups, such as Gekko,which views cooperation with television stations as an effective strategy for broadcastingenvironmental concerns.Many video activists feel that distributing their work through mainstream and commercialchannels undermines the antagonistic nature of their work, although this view has the flowoneffect of limiting their distribution. On the other hand, too much attention to the possibili-19. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1997.20. Jeffrey S. Juris, ‘Networked Social Movements: Global Movements for Global Justice’, in ManuelCastells (ed.) The Network Society: a Cross-Cultural Perspective, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar,2004, pp. 341-362.21. Merlyna Lim, ‘From War-net to Net-War: The Internet and Resistance Identities in Indonesia’,The International Information & Library Review 35.2-4 (2003): 233-248.22. One reason attributed to the number and variety of independent screening programs inIndonesia is the slowness of commercial cinema networks (e.g. 21 Group) to adopt digitalprojection technologies that would allow for the screening of video as well as film. This has meantthat video-makers, whether activists or not, have initiated their own screening programs ratherthan rely on mainstream opportunities.

186 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online187ties of using mainstream television as a distribution mechanism can overlook the potentialof alternative channels currently developing on a local level, such as the burgeoning mediaof community television. 23 Between the ongoing discourses concerning community televisionand video activism, there exists some kind of communication gap. On one side, thecommunity television organizers experience difficulty maintaining consistent programmingdue to a lack of supply of material; on the other, video-makers claim a lack of channels todistribute their works to the public. The creation of online databases of video content couldgreatly facilitate interaction between content producers and those running local televisionstations, particularly if both parties utilized technologies that made it easy to transfer large,high-resolution files, such as FTP and BitTorrent, so those downloaded videos could then bebroadcast. Downloading a high-resolution, one-hour video might take a whole day, but thisis still dramatically faster and cheaper than sending it via post, with the added benefit of asearchable database of content.The economic dimension of offline distribution is also engaged by groups and individualsselling their work in the form of hard copy DVDs or VCDs. The Marshall Plan, an independentDVD label created specifically for Indonesian alternative films, readily took up this method,and has been creating video compilations which it distributes through its own networks andscreening programs since 2008. However, some problems emerge rather quickly with thismodel. In order to be direct and open in the selling of independent videos in DVD format,the group faces daunting regulations. Dimas Jayasrana of The Marshall Plan explains thatin distributing their products to outlet franchises that sell DVDs, ‘The DVD products need tohave a minimum of 1000 copies, meaning they need to be pressed commercially insteadof duplicated on a small scale’. Furthermore, ‘All the products need to have an attached taxribbon issued by the Film Censorship Board’. Given that anti-censorship is a key feature ofan independent video movement, censorship regulations thus become another barrier incirculating alternative video works to the public.Most groups choose to tap into existing commercial distribution networks that simply ignoregovernment regulations, such as those of Minikino, Boemboe Forum, HelloMotion andFourcolourfilms. 24 By developing consignment systems with distro (independent music andclothing shops) or other alternative outlets such as bookstores, they are able to supply smallnumbers of copies according to demand. Given the bureaucratic challenges of legal legitimacy,this model suits the present situation better, however it doesn’t necessarily enablevideo-makers to support themselves financially.Another example of offline distribution is used by VideoBattle in Yogyakarta, which has beendisseminating its video compilations as disc sets since 2004. VideoBattle selects and compilesfive-minute videos from entries of any style in an effort to challenge preconceived ‘genres’.The format used by Video Battle is VCD, due to its accessibility and low productioncost, which means that the videos, branded in collectable sets, can be sold at low prices.23. For example, the emergence since 2002 of community television stations such as Grabag TV(Central Java), Rajawali TV (Bandung), and Bahurekso TV (East Java). See Hermanto, 2009.24. Alex Sihar, ‘Prospek Distribusi Film Alternatif di Indonesia’, Ikonik 1 (2007): 33-42.The video-makers selected are encouraged to duplicate and sell copies of the compilationfor their own profit. While the VCD distribution VideoBattle offers is relatively limited, its openendorsement of duplication has contributed to its recognition not only within Indonesia, butalso by international audiences including those in Australia and Europe.Viewing the structural complexity of mass video distribution in light of their own limited resources,some activists develop distribution models based on personal or institutional relationships.One interesting form this has taken is the manual distribution method used byOffstream’s Lexy J. Rambadetta who, apart from festival and television distribution, oftenuses a barter system rather than monetary exchange for his videos. Many groups also tradetheir own videos for those produced by other activists, generating an underground economythat keeps people up-to-date with trends in video content and style. This form of distributionis supported by a range of video library spaces, such as that maintained by VideoBabesmember Ariani Darmawan at Rumah Buku in Bandung, where the public can consistentlyhave access to recently produced work.While small in scale, these hand-to-hand distribution methods take place frequently, andcontinue to develop as activists prioritize public access to a range of information. Rather thanmaking them obsolete, online video distribution has the potential to enhance these methodsand become part of the infrastructure of such initiatives.Online Distribution: Prospects and BarriersFor many video activists in Indonesia, technical barriers have prevented the prioritization ofonline distribution. The greatest technical problem is limited bandwidth, particularly outsideurban centres. Many audiences trying to view online video are faced with an intermittentstream of images, which is both tiring and boring. For the producer or distributor, uploadingthe video takes a very long time, and often fails altogether. These issues, however, arereflective of the common approach to online distribution. While there are many ways to usethe internet as part of a holistic distribution strategy, the user expectation is built around aYouTube-style experience, in which videos are viewed immediately through a browser.One massive challenge activists face is keeping up with rapid changes in the technologicallandscape. Internet usage in Indonesia has soared in the last decade. Data indicates that thenumber of users has risen from 1.9 million in the year 2000 to 25 million in 2007, assistedby the flourishing warnet (internet cafe) businesses and the deregulation of the 2.4 GHz bandin Indonesia, which lead to the expansion of Wi-Fi access. 25 As of 2009, the number of usersmay well be up to 30 million. Of these, however, only 0.08 per cent have home broadbandaccess, due to its relatively high cost. 26 A home connection may cost between 300-800,000rupiah a month (US$30-US$80), which is more expensive, on average, than in places such25. Imam Prakoso, Conditions of Communication Environment for Freedom of Expression inIndonesia, Combine Resource Institution and Global Partner Associated, UK (unpublishedversion), 2008.26. Marc Einstein, ‘Predictions for Indonesia’s telecommunications market’, The Jakarta Post,07/28/2009. Also available from, http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/07/28/predictionsindonesia039s-telecommunications-market.html.

188 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online189as Australia, where the average income is far greater and internet speeds much faster. Mostpeople access the net through the warnet or through cheaper dial-up connections, whichare monopolized by the state-owned telecommunication company, Telkom. However, rapidchanges to online infrastructure in Indonesia mean that statistics such as these are notrelevant for long. The Indonesian Government has reportedly called for tenders to operateWorldwide Interoperability for Microwave (WiMax), 27 which may allow for speeds up to60Mbps. Currently, WiMax in Indonesia has begun trials, but the official roll-out is uncertain.Yet, if the project is realized, it would dramatically change the online landscape in Indonesiaand directly increase the viability of online video. While the technology is limited at present,both speed and access to the net have the potential to improve continuously. Video activistswould do well to take full advantage of these future possibilities.Aside from broadband limitations and the need to lower the cost of internet access, theever-increasing size of video files is also a concern. While it is becoming easier to shoot veryhigh-resolution footage, it is difficult to deliver high-resolution versions of long videos online inIndonesia, given the internet speeds. The fragility of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) as atransfer mechanism also hinders this, with connections often breaking down during upload.Both a conceptual and technical change in approach is required: on the technical side, toenable access and develop the skills to use technologies such as BitTorrent and File TransferProtocol (FTP) for uploading and downloading larger videos; and on the conceptual or productionside, to develop formats oriented towards the web that may be shorter in duration orthat focus on the downloading rather than streaming of content.This issue could also relate to the euphoria that often surrounds video production in Indonesia,which generally celebrates the spirit of do-it-yourself video-making, which relegatesdistribution and reception to the bottom of the video-maker’s agenda. According to Hafiz ofForum Lenteng, this condition is symptomatic of a society that has only recently been liberatedfrom a regime that strongly hegemonized information-production processes. Hafiz addsthat attempts by community members to stream these activities towards more socially constructivepractices are also increasing. Also, skills such as scriptwriting and editing are rare,and resources in Indonesian scarce. On the other hand, Ade Darmawan from ruangrupapoints out that the limitations of online formats could actually inspire video-makers to explorenew ways to create video content that is specific to an online viewing experience, so that theymight abandon, for example, traditional narrative structures.In some cases, the tentative attitude towards online video distribution can be traced to publicperceptions of the rise of internet technology. For example, Kampung Halaman co-founderDian Herdiany describes how members of some of the communities they worked with (especiallyparents) refused the group’s proposal to install internet facilities in their village, andcited the risk of exposure to pornographic materials as a reason for refusing. In this instance,the moral panic saturating national debates about the internet had also influenced localcommunities. This case illustrates the difficulty in working across a wide spectrum of internet27. ‘RI to have WiMax Soon’, The Jakarta Post, 19/05/2009/.literacy. Between those who are constantly exposed to the internet, such as activists, NGOworkers, and media professionals, and those who are not, a cultural chasm exists – a localmanifestation of what has been globally termed ‘the digital divide’. 28 Despite the celebratoryaccounts of a global technology revolution, some local video activists respond quite criticallyto the prospect of online distribution. Yoga from Kawanusa points out that the inequality inaccess to information technology can, in turn, establish new power relations between information‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’:Video distribution is prioritized among community members for its “ceremonial” aspects;to achieve public recognition of their work. They want their videos to be launched at anevent attended by people they know. We are talking about people living in the villages.They don’t have access to the internet, and perhaps they don’t need to have any. Whypublish the videos online if they don’t know who is accessing them? If we insist on doingso, who will actually benefit? Of course, the answer is: those who are already literate.In this sense, it makes sense for grassroots activists to prioritize offline connections. Formany, the immediate concern is to have the video works collectively appreciated at the siteswhere they are made. But most activists consider facing the challenges of the internet aspart of their social justice mission. Various critiques 29 regarding the risk of social divisionsreproduced by unequal relations of knowledge and power point out that issues other thantechnology need to be considered in the attempt to democratize video for social change.Aspects such as the society’s cultural readiness to interact with new media, the divergenteconomic settings of grassroots communities, and the various desires and approaches toconsuming information are some of the issues that cannot be addressed simply by procurementof media technology or technical-content training. New media require advancedstrategic applications.The lesson from Indonesia is that the fluidity and flexibility of technology is instrumentalto the various coalitions, movements, and identities in play. This has not only led to empowermentand democratization, but has also served to reproduce relations of dominanceand exclusion, such as is promoted by fundamentalist religious groups. 30 Along with thesetrajectories, which are certainly incongruent with the goals of the activists discussed in thisresearch, we can also anticipate increasingly banal content flooding the internet. The ubiquityof mainstream video sharing services such as YouTube and Facebook, and the rapidspread of 3G-based video on mobile phones, has become an arena so extensive that socialjusticeand environmental video content is outshone by terabytes of information. Postingwork online is not enough for activist content; an audience must then view it – and then,ideally, take some form of action.28. See David J. Gunkel, ‘Second Thoughts: Toward a Critique of the Digital Divide’, New Media &Society 5 (2003): 499–522.29. See Sassi Sinikka, ‘Cultural Differentiation or Social Segregation? Four approaches to the DigitalDivide’, New Media & Society 7.5 (2005): 684–700.30. Merlyna Lim, ‘Lost in Transition: The Internet and Reformasi in Indonesia’.

190 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online191Many of the online videos that grab the public’s attention are those that expose footage of corruptionand dirty politics, violence and pornography. On one side, this new media landscapehas been made manifest in the digital convergence currently prevailing in which ‘amateur’video agencies, including forms of citizen journalism, increasingly flow across media, rangingfrom television and mobile phones to the internet. On the other hand, the forms, themes andcontent of these flows quickly become limited – if not homogeneous – as they are shaped bythe expectation of immediacy and the available technological features. Through new distributionmodels, activists propose to punctuate these flows of amateur videos with social changecontent that already exists in offline forms so that audiences can become more receptive tothe diverse range of video works available.Regarding the issue of audience receptiveness to information through online video, Ade Darmawanfrom ruangrupa has called for more advanced strategies in designing online videointerfaces. One strategy would be to employ a ‘curatorial logic’:Basically, online video sharing channels need to provide clearer frameworks to assistthe audience in contextualising the work being presented. Given the immensity ofcontent flooding the internet nowadays, how are we going to attract audiences relevantto specific topics presented in the videos? If there is no curatorial explanation, I thinkthere won’t be much difference in the experience from watching YouTube.In addition to the need to democratize access through structural provisions, it is clear thatstrategies are required to address the particular cultural characteristics of the internet inorder to not only allow, but also enable equal public participation. One element that is lackingis a local, successful example of online distribution being used to garner a wide audience orto generate real change, an example that others could find convincing and worth replicating.Given this range of technical, economic and socio-cultural barriers in relation to online videodistribution, the practices of Indonesian activists must be tactical. As far as having an onlinepresence, almost all the groups represented in this research have their own website, andcommunicate through email, instant messaging, mailing lists, and forums as well as publishingweblogs. Kampung Halaman, Etnoreflika, Ragam, Gekko Studio, Offstream, Javin, UPC,and Forum Lenteng all use social networking sites such as FaceBook and Multiply, andupload content to existing online video sharing sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, and DailyMotion.Also emerging are more specific online video sharing spaces such as Video Battle, andEngageMedia.Even within these common ways of using the internet, each group generates different culturalpractices. To the grassroots video activist embedded in local communities, resource mobilizationis focused on community empowerment. Even though the groups integrate informationand communication technology into their daily activism, the basis of their interaction withcommunities is often based on face-to-face contact. Therefore, the distribution of the videosproduced tends to also be through physical means. To realize the goals of online distributionrequires additional support and access to hubs that would enable ongoing connectionsbetween the communities and diverse networks of global social movements.For tactical video activists, online distribution is seen as one of many ways to launch theircontent publicly. Aware of the multiple barriers to reaching Indonesian audiences, activiststurn to internet distribution to target audiences in other parts of the world. By uploading theirwork to their own websites or video services, whether on general-use sites such as YouTube,DailyMotion or specific ones such as EngageMedia, they remain optimistic about the availablechannels to garner international solidarity on the issues presented in their works. Moreover,these activists, as explained by Rahung of JAVIN, believe that by disseminating theirvideos to a global audience, they increase the opportunities to gain resources for ongoingproduction of social-justice videos.Online distribution is strategically adopted by some experimental video activists who viewdistribution processes, both offline and online, as yet another way in which to experimentand interact with forms of media. Forum Lenteng, for example, encourages the community ofparticipants from the Akumassa project to embed their videos in a dedicated blog and to addcomments and notes to encourage discussion about the content. For online video sharingservices, several new distribution schemes are being developed. In Yogyakarta, Video Battleis developing online methods to expand the distribution of their compilations, as one solutionto the difficulties they experienced with offline distribution and to encourage more videoart productions. The group is optimistic about online distribution, and has created a videosubscription channel enabling video podcasting in Miro and iTunes, as well as the ability towatch Flash video versions directly from their website. 31The technical and cultural challenges discussed here are just some of the issues impactingthe many methods of distribution demonstrated by the groups in this research. One of thecommonalities between the video projects discussed and their distribution systems is thatboth explore new terrain for the groups and communities involved.What Do We Want? When Do We Want It?For various reasons, none of the groups presented in this research work together as ahorizontal offline or online network in more than an informal sense. However, each set ofvideo activists has formed a basis for collective action. In our thinking, if this collectiveframework could be harnessed to form a coherent network, the chance to create changesin the public sphere, or even at a structural level, would be greatly increased.Although we are fully aware that working as a network does not guarantee a smooth processfree from tension and conflict, we do think that both existing and new networks couldbe directed towards mobilizing resources to respond to the variety of obstacles to theproduction and distribution of video content. However, the fact that the technology existsand certain groups have an affinity for video is not enough to form effective networks.Networks must begin from common political goals and shared understandings, some ofwhich we hope to have identified through this research. Online distribution tools and communicationspaces can be an effective means to create network constellations, to form31. See: http://video-battle.net.

192 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online193common identities and build collective endeavours that create the foundations for strongermovements towards social change.Concerns over the lack of an effective model became one of the main obstacles in translatingexisting local frameworks into a network of movements. Ade Darmawan of ruangrupa, for example,has qualms about the idea of realizing a digitally based network without more groundwork,especially considering how new virtual communication is in comparison with traditionalpatterns of communication. This conclusion clashes with theories which view the internetas the perfect tool for facilitating the formation of a networking structure that supports ahorizontal organizational logic. 32 To argue about whether offline or online development mustcome first would throw us back into the classic dispute concerning eggs and chickens. Wefeel that different technological applications need not be framed as substitutions for preexistingrelationships; more often than not, online and offline modes can complement each other.It is interesting to compare the above projects to the Indymedia experiments, 33 which havebeen emblematic of the effective configuration of a wide-reaching social-justice network, usingdigital technology that complements and contributes to a movement’s work as a whole.The Indymedia experiences of networking at a global level have demonstrated digital repertoirescharacterized by participatory principles, independent infrastructures, open-contentand resource sharing, which have radically contributed to the strengthening of movementson the ground. How can we learn from the successes and failures of these previous attempts,and create future iterations of effective networking in Indonesia and beyond?logic of networking discussed above. Neither one single approach to the internet, nor thecreation of a single network, will improve the distribution and effectiveness of activist video inIndonesia. As the groups described in this research continue their important work of usingvideo as means of addressing social justice, human rights, cultural and environmental issues,online distribution of such video will undoubtedly be part of their future. The last 10 yearshave shown that adjusting to internet-distribution models, for politicians, commerce, creativeindustries and mainstream media, among others, is absolutely necessary to establish andmaintain a global and local presence. We believe the same to be true for activists.Networks are needed to enable people to come together to overcome many of the obstaclesdiscussed above, as well as functioning as a strategic end in themselves. The networkingframework can allow for diverse modes of distribution, that effectively respond to burgeoningforms of media convergence and the different capacities of participating groups and individuals.Networks should encourage the sharing of knowledge and skills and the pooling ofresources, in order to enhance the effectiveness of political formations and to apply politicalpressure to achieve improved social or environmental conditions. In that sense, networksare both the outcome of improved communications and political effectiveness, and also thenecessary basis for them.A network of video-makers could enable the creation of a locally managed activist videosharing space, which might prove more responsive to local needs than the variety of internationaloptions and commercially oriented spaces. These possibilities will be explored asthe experiences and insights of those experimenting with online spaces and their networkingpotential grow. We anticipate that the future of video activism will involve a strategic andtactical approach to online video distribution, as a way for video activists to move toward the32. See for example Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996;and Jeffrey S. Juris, ‘Networked Social Movements: Global Movements for Global Justice’.33. Jeffrey S. Juris, ’The New Digital Media and Activist Networking within Anti-CorporateGlobalization Movements’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science597 (2005): 189–208. See also Victor W. Pickard, ‘United yet Autonomous: Indymedia and TheStruggle to Sustain a Radical Democratic Network’, Media Culture Society 28 (2006): 251.

194 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online195ReferencesAppadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalizations, Minneapolis, USA:University of Minnesota Press, 1996.Castells, Manuel .The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996._____. The Power of Identity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley, USA: University ofCalifornia Press, 1984.Forum Lenteng, Videobase: Video-Sosial-Historia, Jakarta, Indonesia, Pusat Informasi Data Penelitiandan Pengembangan Forum Lenteng, 2009.Garcia, David and Geert Lovink. ‘The ABC of Tactical Media’, http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors2/garcia-lovinktext.html.Gunkel, David J. ‘Second Thoughts: Toward a Critique of the Digital Divide’, New Media & Society 5(2003): 499–522.Jayasrana, Dimas. ‘Fragmen Sejarah Film Indonesia’, unpublished article, 2008. Summary text titled‘A Fragmented History: Short Films in Indonesia’ is available from: http://www.clermont-filmfest.com/00_templates/page.php?lang=2&m=72&id_actu=494&id_rub=&mois.Juliastuti, Nuraini. ‘Whatever I Want: Media and Youth in Indonesia Before and After 1998’, Inter-AsiaCultural Studies 7.1 (2006): 139-143._____. Understanding Movie Piracy in Indonesia: Knowledge and Practices of Piracy, University ofAmsterdam. unpublished thesis, 2008.Juris, Jeffrey S. ‘Networked Social Movements: Global Movements for Global Justice’, in ManuelCastells (ed.) The Network Society: a Cross-Cultural Perspective, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2004,pp. 341-362._____. ‘The New Digital Media and Activist Networking within Anti-Corporate Globalization Movements’,Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 597, 2005, pp. 189–208.Hermanto, Budhi. ‘Sejarah Pertumbuhan Televisi Komunitas di Indonesia’ in Muzayin Nazaruddindan Budhi Hermanto (ed.) Televisi Komunitas; Pemberdayaan dan Media Literasi. Jakarta, Indonesia,Combine Resource Institution, Program Studi Ilmu Komunikasi FPSB UII and Jakarta ArtsInstitute, 2009.Lim, Merlyna. ‘The Internet, Social Network and Reform in Indonesia’ in N.Couldry and J.Curran(eds) Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World, Lanham, MD, USA: Rowmanand Littlefield, 2003, pp. 273–288._____. ‘From War-net to Net-War: The Internet and Resistance Identities in Indonesia’, The InternationalInformation & Library Review, 35 (2003): 233-248._____. ‘Lost in Transition: The Internet and Reformasi in Indonesia’ in Jodi Dean, Jon Anderson andGeert Lovink (eds) Reformatting Politics: Networked Communications and Global Civil Society,London: Routledge, 2006, pp. 85–106.Pickard, Victor W. ‘United yet Autonomous: Indymedia and the Struggle to Sustain a Radical DemocraticNetwork’, Media Culture Society 28 (2006): 315-336.Prakoso, Imam. Conditions of Communication Environment for Freedom of Expression in Indonesia.Combine Resource Institution and Global Partner Associated, UK, unpublished version, 2008.Sen, Krishna and Hill, David T. ‘Wiring the Warung The Global Gateways: The Internet in Indonesia’,Indonesia 63 (1997): 67–90._______. Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia. Australia: Oxford University Press, 2000.Sihar, Alex. ‘Prospek Distribusi Film Alternatif di Indonesia’, Ikonik 1 (2007): 33-42.Sinikka, Sassi. ‘Cultural Differentiation or Social Segregation? Four approaches to the Digital Divide’,New Media & Society 7.5 (2005): 684–700.Still Mobile: Networked Mobile Media,Video Content and Users in SeoulLarissa HjorthIn each location, what constitutes the ‘online’, and hence online video, is different. These areshaped by technological, socio-cultural, linguistic and governmental factors – to name just afew. In technologically innovative locations such as Seoul, where fourth generation (4G) mobilemedia has been a reality since 2006, participation in the online takes a particular form.For example, it is not uncommon to find public spaces such as subways filled with peoplewatching videos on Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB), commonly known as mobile TVor as ‘Takeout TV’ (TU Media).By March 2010, more than 48 million people owned mobile phones in Korea 1 or, in otherwords, more than 90% of Koreans possess a mobile phone. A more recent trend is to own twophones, being dubbed the ‘second mobile phone era’. 2 With approximately 94% of Koreanshaving a high speed internet connection 3 and being considered the leader in 3G (third generation)mobile technologies, 4 Korea provides a complex and technologically sophisticatedmodel for 21st century technocultural practice. In 2005, South Korea (henceforth Korea) wasthe first location to launch and successfully implement DMB and thus the nation became amodel for global stargazing for 21st century media. From older women congregating aroundone DMB watching television dramas, to young lovers watching music clips, to boys playingonline games, the diversity of the multimedia experience of the online via mobile media is obvious.These types of mobile media practices demonstrate the creative ways in which onlineculture in Korea is embedded with the collective nature of spaces – be they public or private.One look around and we can see many forms of interaction with online content. These activitiestransgress the mobile and immobile, public and private, and the young and the old.Seoul has long demonstrated a high degree of engagement with the multimedia capacitiesof mobile media – from camera phones, video and games – often resulting in the citybeing showcased as one of the greatest images of 21st century networked mobile media.A significant element of this revolution of mobile media and its attendant forms of engage-1. KCC (Korean Communications Commission) May 2010, Statistics of subscribers of wired/wirelesscommunication service in Korea, http://www.kcc.go.kr/user.do?mode=view&page=P02060400&dc=K02060400&boardId=1030&cp=1&boardSeq=29191.2. JI Lee, ‘Opening new era of 2 mobile phones per person in Korea’, Asia Economics 2009,http://www.asiae.co.kr/news/view.htm?idxno=2009010207554653133&nvr=3. OECD 2009, OECD Broadband Portal 2009, http://www.oecd.org/document/54/0,3343,en_2649_34225_38690102_1_1_1_1,00.html.4. Research and Markets 2009, South Korea-Mobile Market-Overview & Statistics,http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/915801/south_korea_mobi.

196 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online197ment has been the rise of user created content (UCC) and user generated content (UGC).However, beyond this image of technologically savvy mobile media literates is a complex andculturally-specific model of online participation. From camera phone self portraits (selca)and DIY videos uploaded to the main social networking system (SNS) Cyworld minihompy,to online games played in computer rooms (PC bangs), the technoculture of Seoul providesa nuanced and vibrant online culture that perpetually engages with its offline practices. Thespecific growth and deployment of such media as camera phones by both industry and usersin Korea has created a particular online culture with its own type of networked visuality.This technoculture weaves the online with the offline, the mobile with the immobile. Oneway of understanding this online phenomenon is through the difference between UCC andUGC. While the former denotes the user’s agency in the creation process — that is, the userbecomes a ‘produser’ 5 — the latter is marked by the user’s role as a node in the circulationprocess. In short, UCC is made by the user, while UGC is circulated by the user.In Korea, the rhetoric of UCC has been foregrounded since the demonstrations of ‘peoplepower’ which led, for example, to the election of ex-President Roh in 2002, to the protestsagainst the importation of beef from the U.S. in 2008, and which are evinced by democraticmedia such as OhMyNews, which pioneer models of citizen journalism. While Korea’s modelof networked, mobile media can be seen as indicative of the ‘smart mob’ 6 phenomenon,other narratives of media agency and civic engagement are being played out. I argue thatthese dominant and undercurrent narratives of online practice are best understood throughthe paradigms of UCC and UGC. In particular, through this paradigm I will discuss andcontextualize the unique characteristics of Seoul’s online video culture. In order to do so, Iwill first outline the specifics of Korean technoculture, such as the pivotal role played by thedominant social networking system Cyworld minihompy, and then camera phones, in therise of online video. Following this will be a discussion of findings from preliminary fieldworkconducted in 2009 in Seoul to explore the reality of agency and performativity surroundingthe online UCC and UGC.Being Mobile: Locating the Korean TechnoscapeIn Korea, internet and mobile telephonic spaces are helping to progress Korean forms ofdemocracy. For Korean sociologist Shin Dong Kim 7 and anthropologist Haejoang Cho, 8 therise of a specific type of democracy in Korea has been supported in part by new technologiessuch as mobile phones. In particular, in Seoul one can find two types of youth sociality predicatedaround two convergent technological spaces: firstly that of the mobile phone (‘handphone’ or handupon), and secondly that of the internet through virtual communities such asCyworld’s minihompys, and online multiplayer games often played in the social, communalspaces of the PC room, such as PC bang. This usage of technological spaces is not aboutsubstituting the virtual for the actual, it is rather about supplementing actual relationships.The relevance of the technology is intrinsically linked to the maintenance of face-to-facesocial capital.As a burgeoning centre for innovative technologies and with a conspicuous usage of technologiesin the everyday, Korea’s capital Seoul could be viewed as a showcase of technonationalism.The projection of ‘dynamic Korea’ (the tourism slogan used from 2005–2007) isone that has fused the notions of Korea’s power as a nation with that of technological innovation.With over 20,000 PC bang gracing the second levels of most commercial buildings, andwith over one third of Korea’s population spending hours everyday in Cyworld minihompy,one could be mistaken for believing that online identity and relationships were surpassingoffline sociality. Although Koreans do, in general, place a great deal of trust in technologicalspaces such as the internet as sites for reliable information and democratic communication,the online is still no substitute for offline sociality. It should also be noted that this trust islinked to the fact that users have to lodge their offline citizenship details when joining an SNSlike minihompy or online games.For Kyongwon Yoon, the rise of handupon technology in Korea after 1997 was linked tothe rise of youth cultures, and the often-subversive use that saw youth labelled ‘Confuciancyberkids’. 9 Parallels can be made between the ‘youth problems’ associated with the riseof mobile technologies in both Korea 10 and Japan, 11 and the reorientation by governmentand industry to rectify the negative press. However, there is another side to the youth media‘problem’. As Cho has observed, the increasingly competitive culture around education andyouth — in which only a few will succeed — has lead to a new generation of ‘losers’. 12 Muchof this competition is played out through media deployment: the successful ones use the mediato enhance their upwardly mobile lives, whilst the unsuccessful often absorb themselveswithin media in which they can live out their desires and fears.As Yoon’s ethnographic study of young people’s use of mobile phones noted, the mobilephone helps to reinforce physical contact and exchange. 13 In Hjorth’s and Heewon Kim’sethnographic study on youth using Cyworld’s minihompy community, it was found that virtualconnecting was always about the need and desire to be connected on various levels and5. The word ‘produser’ denoting the synthesis of ‘producer’ and ‘user’. Axel Bruns, ‘SomeExploratory Notes on Produsers and Produsage’, Snurblog, 3 November, 2005, http://snurb.info/index.php?q=node/329.6. Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: the Next Social Revolution, Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2002.7. Shin Dong Kim, ‘The Shaping of New Politics in the Era of Mobile and Cyber Communication’, inNyiri K (ed.) Mobile Democracy, Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2003, p. 325.8. Hae-Joang Cho, ‘Youth, Internet, and Alternative Public Space’, presented at the UrbanImaginaries: An Asia-Pacific Research Symposium, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, 2004.9. Kyongwon Yoon, ‘The making of neo-Confucian cyberkids: representations of young mobilephone users in South Korea’, New Media & Society, 8.5 (2006): 753-771.10. Kyongwon Yoon, ‘Retraditionalizing the Mobile: Young People’s Sociality and Mobile Phone Usein Seoul, South Korea’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 6.3 (2003): 327-343.11. Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda (eds) Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobilephones in Japanese life, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2005.12. Hae-Joang Cho, ‘Youth and Technology in Seoul’, Inter-Asia Cultural Typhoon conference, Tokyo,June, 2008.13. Yoon, ‘Retraditionalizing the mobile’.

198 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online199never about substituting for face-to-face contact. 14 Thus, the overlap between virtual andactual was inevitably about offline relations and connections. For example, functions such as‘search people’ allow users to reconnect with old friends they have lost contact with.In Florence Chee’s persuasive ethnography on PC bang and the politics of online multiplayergames, she argues that these spaces are social spaces that are viewed as ‘third spaces’between home and work. 15 For Korean youth, most of who still live at home before gettingmarried, these third spaces operate as private spaces in which to connect with other people.As Jun-Sok Huhh observes, PC bang ensured the success of online games in Korea by nurturingboth the culture and the business side of the industry; thus the online game is seen assynonymous with the PC bang. 16 According to Hee-jeong Choi, the bang is an independentspace for the sharing of ideas that is ‘static in form, yet flexible in functionality’. 17 In otherwords, the bang does not have a predetermined purpose — instead, the occupants sharingthe space actively determine its use. 18Given Korea’s strong techno-nationalism, which boasts of some of the best joint governmentand industry policies, 19 much work has been done on making positive press between innovativemedia usage and Korean culture. The role of technology is bound up in the way inwhich Korea exports its mobile technology products such as Samsung and LG globally, aswell as the way in which the local market of 48 million people consumes local technologiesand service providers. Parallel to the industry and governmental regulations that nurturedJapanese local industries and ensured innovation on a global scale, the consumption of mobiletechnologies in Korea is tightly bound to explicit and implicit forms of nationalism. Thehardware and software components are made in Korea, serviced by Korean telecommunicationcompanies, and with conservative estimates of 78% penetration rates, the Korean mobilephone success story has taken global centre stage.The dominant SNS, Cyworld minihompy, is a great example of an online space that not onlyintersects with the offline but provides numerous sub-spaces (or bangs) to archive and share14. Larissa Hjorth and Heewon Kim, ‘Being There and Being Here Gendered Customising of Mobile3G Practices through a Case Study in Seoul’, Convergence, 11.2 (2005): 49-55.15. Florence Chee, ‘Understanding Korean Experiences of Online Game Hype, Identity, and theMenace of the “Wang-tta”’, presented at DIGRA 2005 Conference: Changing Views-Worlds inPlay, Canada, 2005.16. Jun-Sok Huhh, ‘Culture and Business of PC Bangs in Korea’, Games and Culture, 3.1 (2008):26-37.17. Jee-Hoang Choi, ‘The City, Self, and Connections: Transyouth and Urban Social Networking inSeoul’, in Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Therese Anderson and Damien Spry (eds) Youth, Societyand Mobile Media in Asia, London, New York: Routledge, 2009, p. 93.18. Jee-Hoang Choi and Adam Greenfield, ‘To Connect and Flow in Seoul: Ubiquitous Technologies,Urban Infrastructure and Everyday Life in the Contemporary Korean City’, in Marcus Foth (ed.)Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-time City,New York: IGI Global, 2009, p. 27.19. David. M. West, Global e-government, 2006. Providence, Rhode Island: Center for Public Policy,Brown University, 2006.offline experiences. 20 From the uploading of selca with friends, to images and videos of foodcooked or eaten, to virtual objects given to each other’s miniroom (a virtual room in whichfriends’ avatars can visit and share), Cyworld minihompy provides one centralized form ofthe online amongst all the other SNS services (i.e. me2day, which is like Twitter). As one ofthe longest standing SNS globally, Cyworld minihompy has withstood various trends and hasmaintained a stronghold in Korea. While ‘global’ sites such as YouTube and Twitter may beused, it is often the minihompy where UCC is shared and UGC disseminated.Cyworld’s success has been, in part, attributed to dominant lifestyle trends in Korea, suchas the ubiquity of high-rise blocks of flats and the easy accessibility of broadband coverage.The importance of Cyworld is demonstrated by the fact that over one-third of Korea’s 48 millionpeople regularly use their own and visit their friends’ minihompy. In Cyworld friends arecalled ilchon, a concept once used to denote one degree of distance from family membersin a traditional Korean kinship (i.e. one’s mother is one chon). Cyworld has re-branded itscyber-rooms with the notion of ilchon and non-chon to infer ‘friends’ and ‘non-friends’. Ilchoncan gain a greater degree of access to their fellow ilchon’s information and be invited to visittheir cyber-room; non-chon can only gain cursory access.As a broadband ‘centre’ with the world’s highest penetration rates and fastest speeds, Korearepresents a prime example of innovative convergent mobile technologies. 21 The successof DMB and mobile media such as camera phones has seen Korean companies such asPandoraTV and afreeca allow users to have their own broadcast channel that they and otherscan view on their mobiles and computers. This growth in UCC content and distributionsystems is also marked as a period in which Korean users are shifting from being definedby activities such as ‘scooping’ or per-na-ru-gi (i.e. copying or transferring of other people’scontent — UGC) to new patterns of actively creating their own content. 22 The coordinationbetween mobile and computer usage of the internet to access and update SNS has seen theemergence of new forms of UCC in Korea. 23 This phenomenon is partly linked to changes inthe expressive and communicative practices of users, as well as to the ways in which industryis trying to emphasize the importance of UCC. Indeed, for industry, UCC in its various formsstill provides free content that can be used to gain the attention of audiences.20. Unlike in many western contexts in which Facebook has dominated as the SNS, in Korea it has beenCyworld minihompy. Cyworld was started by four KAIST (Korean Advanced Institute of Science andTechnology) graduates in 1999, using modest means. It was acquired by telecommunications giantSK in 2003 for $8.5 million USD. Starting with only 450,000 users in 1999, Cyworld minihompy’ssubscription has now reach more than 25 million users in March 2010 — or more than 55 timesmore users. Whilst minihompy’s heyday has been and gone, it is still the dominant SNS.21. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2006) OECD broadband statistics:http://www.oecd.org/sti/ict/broadband; OECD 2009, OECD Broadband Portal 2009, http://www.oecd.org/document/54/0,3343,en_2649_34225_38690102_1_1_1_1,00.html.22. Soohyun Yoo, ‘Online Community and Community Capacity’, in Gerard Goggin & Mark McLelland(eds) Internationalising Internet Studies, Routledge: London, 2009, pp. 217-236.23. S. J Yang and Y.J. Park, ‘A Study on the Motivation and the Influence of Using PersonalCommunity’, Journal of Consumer Studies 16.4 (2005): 129-150.

200 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online201However, even if it is made by users, in Korea UCC isn’t necessarily user-driven. This haslead to a situation in which companies pay a so-called user to make something that looks ‘authentically’UCC, which is then circulated as UCC that can indirectly advertise the company.Another model of this industry-driven UCC is the competition organized by public Korean buscompanies, in which they advertised for users to create UCC around bus stories, in order towin various prizes. 24 In the case of public transport, it is not surprising to find a lot of UCCmade within the spaces of both trains and buses, given that for most Seoulites traveling for atleast one hour to and from work or school is not uncommon.In fieldwork conducted in September 2010 (following up on research done in 2009), thisdifference between UGG and UCC was further highlighted through curious examples of UCC.When one thinks of UCC, one tends to picture the numerous viral images of singing anddancing we find on YouTube. However, in Korea, UCC has taken a slightly different route, inpart engineered by the vicarious ICT (information and communication technologies) industries.For some, UCC is synonymous with UGC – there is much forwarding of favourite URLsabout celebrities, or interesting hobbies like cooking. For others, UCC is an example of 21stcentury creativity — something they hold in great regard. When we asked respondents if theyhad made UCC, some had; others wanted to but had not. When asked why not, they repliedthat they felt their skills were not good enough. For these respondents, it was important thatwhat they uploaded looked good, otherwise they wouldn’t upload it. They noted that UCCtakes much time and skill, and that they felt they couldn’t compete with many of the expertsmaking UCC. This discussion highlighted that in Korea UCC isn’t characterized by DIY techniques;rather, it is a form of creativity that requires the skills of very talented individuals.The idea of needing much time, creativity and talent to make UCC in Korea has meant manyyoung people feel unable to participate in the creation of online content. Instead, they happilyforward other people’s UCC. In the highly competitive world that is contemporary Koreansociety, many young people feel the pressure to succeed at everything they do. The idea thatUCC could just be something one has fun with and plays with doesn’t strike a cord with manyyoung people. Instead, if you are going to participate in making online videos you need talent.One young female respondent, a freshman, spoke about some of the seniors who had madesome great UCC and then went on to establish their own media company. This company, M-MEDIA Works, 25 began being employed by companies to create mock UCC – that is, mediathat looks like UCC made by everyday users but is in fact commissioned by companies to sellsomething. From there, the company has gone on to produce music clips for famous singers inKorea. For this young respondent, these students’ leap from amateur to professional via UCCwas inspiring, and gave her significant insights into the changing nature of media techniques.Even she had been employed by a company, 7eleven, to write a pretend blog about someof their products. Since that job, she has become suspicious of the authenticity of so-called24. For examples of UCC competitions in Korea see the following: http://award.ts2020.kr/; http://ucckahp.com/ucckahp/; http://experience.koreabrand.net/season4_summary_01.asp?lang=en;http://tvpot.daum.net/project/ProjectView.do?projectid=419; http://www.metro.daejeon.kr; http://contest.jobkorea.co.kr/Contest/List.asp?cate=0109.25. www.m-media.co.kr/xe/about.‘ordinary’ blogs and UCC. This blurring between user-made and industry-made UCC is clearlyspearheaded by the case study of the Korean girl doing a Lady Gaga song via an iPhone video,which has attracted much attention. 26 Is it a clever form of UCC? Or viral marketing for iPhone?The particular and unique conditions for online video in Korea are shaped not only by socioculturalfactors, but also by the vicarious local ICT industries. Companies such as Samsungand LG have long been leaders in convergent ICT media, especially in terms of the mobilephone. The success of the mobile phone as a vehicle for producing and consuming contentin Korea is unmistakable. It is not uncommon to see both young and old people participatingin online media, especially videos, via mobile phones. For Jung Youn Moon, the subwayis such an important space for various everyday activities that it can be seen as ‘mobilebang’. 27 That is, it is a communal space that has numerous significant functions in the lives ofSeoulites. Much of this is coordinated through mobile media to provide a variety of multimediaexperiences and interactions. The rise of the camera phone in Korea has been pivotalin both changing and documenting shifts in everyday life in Seoul. Given that Korean companiessuch as Samsung were some of the first to pioneer high-resolution camera phoneswhose images could be easily sent to online sites such as minihompy, it is not surprising thatKorea has witnessed an active networked visual culture. 28Picture This: Networked Visuality in SeoulSince the first camera phone was introduced into the Korean market in 2002, the cameraphone has evolved into an important part of everyday mobile media. 29 Parallels can be madebetween the rise of the webcam and ‘reality’ aesthetics associated with the handheld camerain television and film, and the rise of the camera phone and sharing internet communitiessuch as Cyworld, MySpace and YouTube. As a convergent communicative media premisedon the logic of gift-giving, the various ways in which camera phone images can be ‘stored’,‘shared’, and ‘saved’ 30 are relevant to how the images are read and contextualized. With thelow-resolution giving greater ‘authenticity’ and ‘realism’ to the ‘voice of the people’ aesthetic, 31the camera phone provides a glimpse into the user’s personal world — a genre and techniquethat remains consistent despite the rise of high-resolution and superior lenses.26. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzh2UygPwDU&feature=player_embedded.27. Jung Youn Moon, The Mobile Bang: visual depictions of the subway, Master’s thesis, RMITUniversity, June, 2010.28. See Dong-Hoo Lee, ‘Women’s Creation of Camera Phone Culture’, Fibreculture Journal 6 (2005),http://journal.fibreculture.org; Dong-Hoo Lee, ‘Re-imaging Urban Space: Mobility, Connectivity,and a Sense of Place’, in Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth (eds) Mobile Technologies,Routledge: London/New York, 2008, pp. 235-251; Dong-Hoo Lee, ‘Mobile Snapshots andPrivate/Public Boundaries’, Knowledge, Technology & Policy, 22 (2009): 161-171; Larissa Hjorth,‘Being Real in the Mobile Reel: A Case Study on Convergent Mobile Media as Domesticated NewMedia in Seoul, South Korea’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into NewMedia Technologies, 14.1 (2008): 91-104.29. Lee, ‘Mobile Snapshots and Private/Public Boundaries’.30. Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe, ‘Camera phones changing the definition of picture-worthy’,Japan Media Review, 2003, http://www.ojr.org/japan/wireless/1062208524.php.31. Hjorth, ‘Being Real in the Mobile Reel’.

202 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online203In March 2006, Samsung released a ten mega-pixel camera phone in Korea that would revolutionizethe ‘digital divide’ between the quality, and thus content, allowed by camera phonesand stand-alone digital cameras. One of the dominant differences in the relationship betweenthe two was linked to the depiction of, and association with, official and unofficial occasions.The camera phone was always there, both literally and metaphorically ‘on hand’ to capturethe trivialities of the everyday. 32 By contrast, the high-resolution stand-alone camera was purposelybrought along to events deemed ‘special’. As Ilpo Koskinen has noted, camera phonespartake in ‘the aesthetic of banality’; 33 in other words, by taking images of the everyday, cameraphones images represent a ‘common banality’ 34 that is ordered by ‘vernacular creativity’. 35A second difference related to the context for sharing. As Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabehave observed in Japan, camera phone imagery are contextualized by what they see as thethree S’s: sharing, storing and saving. 36 Camera phones have ‘sharing’ built into their logic,with quick functions such as MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), Bluetooth and the facilityof uploading to a blog almost instantly. By contrast, the digital camera had to be takento an often stationary computer before the content can be uploaded. The launch of the tenmega-pixel camera phones represented the connection of these worlds. No longer would thecamera phone images just be trivial and ‘fun’; they had the potential to be printed in highresolution,blurring the world between amateur and professional digital photography. Theintroduction, in 2007, of a new breed of quasi-professional camera phones that have professionallenses and capabilities such as LG viewty, which allows users to create and edit moviesand upload to UCC sites such YouTube, along with workshops and competitions for UCC,highlighted the visible push towards making Korea global leaders in UCC. However, despiteall these advances in screen technology that provides users with state-of-the-art technology,the aura of banality – that is, low-resolution images of the everyday – still reigns. Such contentpredominates to the extent that the authenticity of UCC is still very much linked to the banalityof its content and images. However, as noted earlier, often this banality can be deployed as atechnique in industry created UCC.The significance of camera phones in the rise of UCC can be noted in one of the biggestphoto sharing SNS, Flickr. 37 Even though there are famous brands of stand-alone cameras,32. Ilpo Koskinen, ‘Managing Banality in Mobile Multimedia’, in R. Pertierra (ed.) The SocialConstruction and Usage of Communication Technologies: European and Asian Experiences,Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2007, pp. 48-60; Lee, ‘Women’s Creation of CameraPhone Culture’.33. Koskinen, ‘Managing Banality in Mobile Multimedia’.34. Mørk Petersen, Common Banalities, PhD thesis, ITU, Copenhagen, Denmark 2008.35. Jean Burgess, ‘“All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong to Us”? Viral Video, YouTube and theDynamics of Participatory Culture’, in Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds) The Video VortexReader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008, pp.101-110.36. Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe, ‘Everyday Contexts of Camera Phone Use: Steps TowardsTechnosocial Ethnographic Frameworks’, in Joachim Hoflich and Maren Hartmann (eds) MobileCommunication in Everyday Life: An Ethnographic View, Frank & Timme: Berlin, 2006, pp. 79-102.37. http://www.flickr.com.the Apple iPhone is the most popular camera among Flickr users. 38 This popularity couldbe symbolic of SNS UCC in general. Moreover, given the prevalence of camera phones incontemporary networked visuality, one might argue that its particular characteristics are impactingupon photographic practice generally.Dong-Hoo Lee’s ethnographic work on camera phones usage in Korea has demonstrated thatthese practices can reinforce female empowerment, and allow for new ways of seeing andcreating. 39 As Lee notes, by 2004 mobile phone penetration rates were around 75%, with36.1 million people owning one or more handsets. The role of the phone and mobile mediain Korean everyday life is all-pervasive, with users upgrading their phones every ten monthson average. In 2004, 73% of the handupon sold were equipped with built-in digital cameras,and by the beginning of 2006 it was virtually impossible to buy a handupon without the integratedcamera. As Lee and Sohn note, the changing representational codes and accessibilityof image making and distribution technologies are affording opportunities to groups that werepreviously excluded from that domain of production, particularly women. 40 In their study, Leeand Sohn found that women were more active in adopting new multimedia functions of themobile phone, and that their willingness to adopt such functions was significantly strongerthan men’s.With Korea’s status as the most broadband-enabled country in the world, the relationshipbetween online and offline is seamless, even if offline communication is still valued morehighly. Online virtual communities such as Cyworld minihompy are used by both young andold, and play a significant part in most people’s everyday lives. The role of UCC and UCG inCyworld is significant. Many of the still and moving images uploaded to Cyworld are done sovia mobile phones. Online videos are watched and forwarded while users are on the move.These images are often forms of UCC that operate as snapshots of everyday life. Accordingto Moon, 41 there are around 6.2 million photographs uploaded to Cyworld everyday, manyof which are camera phone images. Through UCC, consumers become active co-producersof mobile media. 42 With the ubiquity of camera phones, images of the banal and significantcan be easily taken, saved and shared at increasing speed. From citizen journalism, to themimicry of media in the form of paparazzi-style shots of friends and everyday objects, cameraphones play a pivotal role in the types of UCC images and video that are being shared.However, after the arrest in April 2009 of blogger Park Dae-sung, known as ‘Minerva’, andalso as the ‘Prophet of Doom’, for his posts that presciently commented on the financial administrationof President Kim, many younger Koreans were suddenly seeing the democratic38. Petersen, Common Banalities.39. Lee, ‘Women’s Creation of Camera Phone Culture’.40. Dong-Hoo Lee and Soo-Hyun Sohn, ‘Is there a Gender Difference in Mobile Phone Usage?’, inS.D. Kim (ed.) Mobile Communication and Social Change conference proceedings, South Korea,October, 2004: 243-259.41. Iris Moon, ‘E-Society: My World is Cyworld’, BusinessWeek Online, September 26, 2005, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_39/b3952405.htm.42. Hjorth, ‘Being Real in the Mobile Reel’.

204 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online205space of the online transformed into a government-regulated dark space. According to somereports, Minerva was charged and acquitted for spreading false information that supposedlyintentionally depressed market sentiment. 43 Minerva even predicted events in the foreignmarket, including the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It is in light of the Minerva incident that Iconducted fieldwork in Seoul to see what users were thinking about participation in the onlineand the fate of UCC.Snapshots: A Case Study of UCC and UGC by Users in SeoulIn September 2009, I visited Seoul to conduct fieldwork consisting of focus groups and oneon-oneinterviews with 50 users aged 18 to 35 years old. In September 2010, I returned to interviewboth previous and new participants about their online practices. In the second studythe age group was widened to include respondents up to the age of 60. In the 2009 study, thespectre left by the Minerva incident was felt by some respondents who had, after the arrest,become hesitant to disclose too much personal information online. In over five years of studyof media usage in Seoul, this was the first time that such tentative attitudes had been voiced.In the 2010 fieldwork, the relationship between UCC and UGC became more apparent, withusers clearly understanding the difference between the two, and industry increasingly tryingto deploy UCC as part of its advertising strategy. The idea of industry-driven UCC couldbe viewed by many as an oxymoron; after all, isn’t UCC supposed to be something that isuser-driven and speaks of the user’s thoughts and desires, rather than re-packaged industryadvertisements? Put differently, isn’t UCC supposed to be indicative of a 21st century pushtowards ‘conversational’ media, rather than of the 20th century pull of ‘packaged’ media?One way to comprehend UCC is through the rise of personalization. According to Clay Shirky,the personal has been hijacked, shifting from a space between people to an adjunct of technologies.44 Indeed, new media technologies such as mobile media and social media do deploythe notion of the personal in complex ways — from material customization of hardwareand software to being, in a McLuhanesque sense, an immaterial extension of the owner. 45These processes of personalization recruit new types of labour that are predominantly social,creative, affective and emotional. As Julian Kücklich observes in the case of gamers whomodify games, the labour is underscored by a notion of ‘playbour’. 46 Playbour, as a form ofUCC, involves the active user/gamer’s deployment of creative, emotional, affective and socialforms of labour, which is then transformed into economic capital for the industry.43. John Abell, ‘South Korean “Prophet of Doom” Blogger Acquitted’, Wired, April 20, 2009, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/04/south-korean-pr/.44. Clay Shirky, ‘Here Comes Everybody’, presented at the Aspen Ideas Festival, June 30-July8, 2008, Aspen Colorado, http://fora.tv/2008/07/06/Clay_Shirky_on_Social_Networks_like_Facebook_and_MySpace#chapter_01.45. Larissa Hjorth, Mobile Media in the Asia Pacific: Gender and the Art of Being Mobile, Routledge:London, New York, 2009.46. Julian Kücklich, ‘Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry’, FibrecultureJournal 5, 2005, http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/kucklich.html.Epitomized by UCC, cartographies of personalization are best understood through the relationshipbetween media convergence and intimacy. They are marked by the shift fromthe mobile phone, as a means of communication, to mobile media as a form of creativityand expression, and the consequent production of new forms of gendered intimacy andlabour. Personalization is linked to, and expresses, the attendant and varied forms of social,geographic, technological, economic mobility. It also reflects emerging forms of genderedlabour, and the more intimate or ‘affective’ forms of labour just described. Personalizationtakes material and immaterial forms that converge as they manifest at the micro level of theindividual and the macro levels of communities, and national and transnational relations.Through the rise of mobile media characterized by the appearance of the active user, newforms of mobility, intimacy and labour occur. The transformation of everyday users into photojournalistswas highlighted by the rise of netizen media such as online OhMyNews, and theelection of President Roh in Korea. These examples demonstrate shifts in labour and citizenagency, where unofficial imaging communities become part of official media expressions. AsManuel Castells et al. observe, ‘communication can be both instrumental and expressive’. 47With tools such as texting, emailing, camera phone imagery, video and sound, the mobilephone provides many vehicles for self-expression. These forms of expression play acrossindividual, social and cultural levels at once. Such practices as texting can ‘express social inequalities’48 concurrent to creating ‘an amplification of inner subjectivity’. 49 These practicescan be found in online cultures, expressed in how and what people watch, make and share.The significance of personalization was apparent in the focus group sessions and interviewsI conducted in 2009. Through mobile media, online videos are accessed by people of allages, anywhere, anytime. As one male, aged 25, noted:I think in my opinion, the Korean environment of mobile or video is very developed.The mobile phone is very important to many people. It is part of their identity. Manypeople use it, regardless of age. Many Korean middle-aged people are very connectedto internet through the mobile phone. It’s cheap and many people are using the mobileand video. It is common to see young and old people using the mobile phone to view(online) videos. If they like it, then they comment and pass it onto friends.One of the areas that led to discussions about UCC and UGC was the changing relationshipbetween the amateur and professional. This was particularly the case in terms of powerblogging,in which blogs have so many followers that they become powerful enough to earnmoney for their makers. In Seoul, powerblogging is marked by the movement away fromovertly political subject matter to a kind of ‘personal is political’ ethos, in which we find‘wifebloggers’ blogging about such things as cooking. 50 Successful wifebloggers can not only47. Manuel Castells, M. Fernandez-Ardevol, Jack Qiu and A. Sey, Mobile Communication andSociety: A Global Perspective, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007, p. 153.48. Raul Pertierra, Transforming Technologies: Altered Selves, Philippines: De La Salle UniversityPress, 2006, p. 100.49. Pertierra, Transforming Technologies, p. 101.50. Dong-Hoo Lee, ‘Wifebloggers’, Crossroads, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, June, 2010.

206 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online207make money from the blogs but also gain contracts for books and television series. Powerbloggersare known for their ‘professional’ media, both still and moving. But the idea thatthese powerbloggers are professionals defeats the point. Rather powerbloggers, whilst makingdifficult things like cooking look easy, do so through the guise of the amateur. Here wesee how the labour involved in powerblogging is absorbed into an image of playbour — whenin reality, many wifebloggers have to be of a certain class to afford the time to powerblog. Asone female respondent aged 32 stated:I started following a cooking powerblogger. What I liked about her was that she wasn’ta cook — she was just a mother, just like my mother. They can use the online to notjust be in their home but many people’s homes. If they are really popular they can earnmoney through a book publishing deal. This has created a booming area in Korea —how to be a powerblogger. Many people want to be a powerblogger, but few can. Itis very inspirational — my mother and aunt follow such blogs and also want to writeone to earn quick money from companies that advertise on the blog... Sometimes thecompany tries to find some bloggers, good bloggers, and then just use the bloggerscommercially because they can gain access to the right audience.When asked about the difference between UCC and UGC, the discussion shifted to whetherthe online was viewed as an avenue for the expression of personal or public opinion. Thisalso evoked the discussion of the need for increased media literacy in wading through themass of online material. As one male respondent aged 22 observed:Many people today use blogs to share the content — what they are good at, or whatthey have. This can be videos they have made or watched and want to share. Sobasically everyone does it. The main drawback is that there is too much information.So you can’t decide sometimes what to watch… sometimes you will just watch a fewmoments of many things… [Interviewer: So it’s hard to know what’s good and what’sbad?]… Yeah, what’s real and what could be false information. So I think this changerequires people to be smarter and more sensible about when they use the information.I think that’s a drawback…But that could be a good thing, it makes people smarter andsensible about information…It’s also much easier to form an opinion online if there’sless pressure. And I think that’s a good change overall.The above respondent’s comments about watching little bits of many things reflects notonly a general 21st century screen engagement characterized by what Chris Chesher calls‘glaze’, that is, in between the filmic gaze and television glance culture regimes . 51 However,it is also indicative of Chal-na-jok: whilst ‘Chal-na’ means ‘instant’, ‘jok’ refers to a ‘tribe’ – afeature observed in the INNOCEAN report. 52 When asked about UCC in relation to creativity,one female respondent aged 28 stated:51. Chris Chesher, ‘Neither Gaze nor Glance, but Glaze: Relating to Console Game Screens’, SCAN:Journal of Media Arts Culture, 1.1 (2004), http://scan,net.au/scan/journal.52. DK Lee, ‘Catch the digital new tribes, “Chal-na-jok”’, Yonhap News, http://app.yonhapnews.co.kr/YNA/Basic/article/new_search/YIBW_showSearchArticle.aspx?searchpart=article&searchtext= &contents_id=AKR20100417073700003.On sites like me2day or Twitter so much information, writings or images are from someone’s(mini)hompy or blog. I mean it’s not original, just reproduced. This reproduction is abig feature of online content today. Often I get sent the same content from various people.For another female, aged 22, online content was about selling a type of offline image. Shenoted the amount of time many of her friends spent uploading images and videos to theirminihompy to give an image of a lifestyle. Another respondent, a male aged 24, concurred:I remember reading an article that says they don’t post their daily lives. They post tomake people believe that they have certain a lifestyle. For instance, most people don’ttake photos of some shitty restaurant. They only take pictures of some fancy places…So despite the everydayness and banality of mobile media in its constitution of online content,much of the banality is actually rehearsed, conspicuous consumption. For another respondent,a female aged 33, blogging and being online was about the personal. She often uploadedcontent and posted purely for her own consumption. She also spoke of an example in whichUCC inspired more UCC:There was a guy who became famous for imitating the famous singer Rain 53 by videoinghimself dancing to his songs in the train and uploading them to sites such asYouTube and Naver [the dominant portal site in Korea]…Once he created one andbecame well-known he then made another. In the next one, people in the train nowknew him from the viral video and they laughed and videoed him. This time there werevarious videos of the same event, taken by the many people in the train. I liked that itwas about people sharing the joy of the experience.Indeed much of the UCC on sites such as YouTube is about ‘ordinary’ users celebratingpopular cultural vehicles such as music clips in their own way. Two of the key features of thisUCC are both its ‘vernacular’ and ‘situated’ creativity. 54 By mimicking UGC like famous musicclips of popstars, users can make UCC that speaks to many other users. For another user, thecompulsion to personalize media and make UCC isn’t just a fun thing but rather somethingshe feels obliged to do. Here we see the other side of the gift-giving culture of online participation,whereby users have to add material and comments in order to maintain a presenceonline. This was highlighted by one female respondent aged 24, who stated:I am studying Media at University so I use the computer a lot and also my cell phone,I cannot live without my cell phone. I always turn it on and not only text messagingwith my friends but also allowing things—dictionary things. I also use my Cyworld alot and I can’t live without it. Actually, in the daytime, I play with my friends and takepictures and at night I upload. I use it all the time. I have no choice. It is somethingmy friends and I do. But I am only ‘active’ (i.e. making UCC and uploading) when it’srelevant to me.53. ‘Rainism’ UCC in the subway, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGA-UuddjX8.54. Burgess, ‘“All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong to Us”?’.

208 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online209For another respondent, a female aged 27, her usage of, and participation in, the online hadchanged. While at one time she used minihompy to upload photos and videos, she now usesit for social reasons:I don’t make UCC anymore. I used to use minihompy for expressing myself by uploadingsome photos because I like to take photographs and I want to store them in one space.So minihompy was used for an archiving and sharing space from around 2005. But afterthat, as minihompy became more popular I use that more essentially for social purposes.Many of the respondents used both minihompy and peer-to-peer (P2P) to download videosand music. One female respondent, aged 31, spoke of her scepticism about such material:I see a lot of things where I’m not sure if it is UCC or UGC because you see a lot ofpeople upload lots of images, and figures, and stuff. But most of them are usually usingTV shows as their reference. Sometimes I’m not sure because it’s such a recipe thatit’s hard to know if UGC material is originally UCC or something from a company. Manycompanies these days use ads that are like UCC.ConclusionUnsuccessfully introduced in 2006, the reintroduction of mobile video calling in 2010 hasbeen more popular. It will be some time before we see the impact of this application on thetypes of online video people upload and share. On the one hand, we could argue that it willgenerate more familiarity and interest in using video. On the other hand, it could be arguedthat video will then be viewed as direct communication rather than as expressive, as muchof the shared online video is today.In this paper I have located Korean online video culture within its specific type of networkedvisuality. As I have argued, the technoculture that is Seoul weaves the online with the offline,the mobile with the immobile. One way of understanding this online phenomenon is throughthe difference between UCC and UGC. The UCC/UGC paradigm that underscores muchof online video culture globally has a particular flavour in Korea. With a voracious industryand sophisticated technoculture, Seoul presents a curious landscape for considering therelationship of UCC to the user and industry. Rather than UCC being essentially user-driven,increasingly it is becoming industry-driven. While many users can’t necessarily distinguishbetween UCC and UGC, the difference is being further blurred by advertising posing as UCC.This shifts the role and function of UCC dramatically, from being a tool for the user’s expressionand storytelling, to just another vehicle for advertising. This, in turn, shapes how usersengage and relate to UCC and online video cultures.In this paper I have discussed online video in the context of Seoul’s vibrant technocultureand techno-nationalism, which has seen much of online video being watched and shared inhybrid spaces, such as the subway or bangs, or through DMB. 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210 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches211Kristof Nyiri (ed.) Mobile Democracy, Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2003, pp. 317-326.Kim, H. ‘Korea is leading in the e-world [News in Focus]: From personal to government systems, thenation is a model for other countries’, Joong Ang Daily, 2010, http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2918498.Koskinen, Ilpo, ‘Managing Banality in Mobile Multimedia’, in R. Pertierra (ed.) The Social Constructionand Usage of Communication Technologies: European and Asian Experiences, Singapore:Singapore University Press, 2007, pp. 48-60.Kücklich, Julian. ‘Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry’, Fibreculture Journal5(2005), http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/kucklich.html.Lee, Dong-Hoo. ‘Wifebloggers’, Crossroads Conference, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, June, 2010._____. ‘Mobile snapshots and private/public boundaries’, Knowledge, Technology & Policy, 22(2009): 161-171._____. ‘Re-imaging Urban Space: Mobility, Connectivity, and a Sense of Place’, in Gerard Goggin andLarissa Hjorth (eds) Mobile Technologies, Routledge: London/New York, 2008, pp. 235-251._____. ‘Women’s Creation of Camera Phone Culture’, Fibreculture Journal 6 (2005), http://journal.fibreculture.org.Lee, D.K. ‘Catch the digital new tribes, “Chal-na-jok”’, Yonhap News, http://app.yonhapnews.co.kr/YNA/Basic/article/new_search/YIBW_showSearchArticle.aspx?searchpart=article&searchtext=&contents_id=AKR20100417073700003.Lee, J.I.. ‘Opening new era of 2 mobile phones per person in Korea’, Asia Economics 2009, http://www.asiae.co.kr/news/view.htm?idxno=2009010207554653133&nvr=.Moon, Iris. ‘E-Society: My World is Cyworld’, BusinessWeek Online, September 26, 2005, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_39/b3952405.htm.Moon, Jung Youn. The Mobile Bang: Visual Depictions of the Subway, Master’s thesis, RMIT University,June, 2010.Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2006), OECD broadband statistics: http://www.oecd.org/sti/ict/broadband.OECD 2009, OECD Broadband Portal 2009, http://www.oecd.org/document/54/0,3343,en_2649_34225_38690102_1_1_1_1,00.html.Pertierra, Raul. Transforming Technologies: Altered Selves, Philippines: De La Salle University Press,2006.Research and Markets 2009, South Korea-Mobile Market-Overview & Statistics, http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/915801/south_korea_mobi.Shirky, Clay. ‘Here Comes Everybody’, presented at the Aspen Ideas Festival, June 30-July 8 2008,Aspen, Colorado, http://fora.tv/2008/07/06/Clay_Shirky_on_Social_Networks_like_Facebook_and_MySpace#chapter_01.Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: the Next Social Revolution, Cambridge MA: Perseus, 2002.West, David. M. Global e-government, 2006. Providence, Rhode Island: Center for Public Policy,Brown University, 2006.Yang, S. J and Y.J. Park. ‘A Study on the Motivation and the Influence of Using Personal Community’,Journal of Consumer Studies 16.4 (2005): 129-150.Yoon, Kyongwon. ‘The Making of Neo-Confucian Cyberkids: Representations of Young Mobile PhoneUsers in South Korea’, New Media & Society, 8.5 (2006): 753-771.______. ‘Retraditionalizing the Mobile: Young People’s Sociality and Mobile Phone Use in Seoul,South Korea’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 6.3 (2003): 327-343.Yoo, Soohyun. ‘Online Community and Community Capacity’, in Gerard Goggin & Mark McLelland(eds) Internationalising Internet Studies, Routledge: London, 2008, pp. 217-236.Degeneracy in Online Video PlatformsMatthew WilliamsonAt the 2010 International Experimental Media Congress held in Toronto, Canadian artistMichael Snow sat on a panel entitled ‘The Place of Medium’. In response to a commentabout his film Wavelength having been watched on YouTube 50,000 times, Snow comparedwatching his films online to seeing a ghost, and stated that those people had not actually seenthe film at all. When discussing media migration, 1 the question of online viewing is lumpedtogether with other concerns about form, but how is the line drawn between videos on onewebsite or another? In our day-to-day interactions with online video, does it matter whether weare watching the ghost of Michael Snow’s Wavelength on YouTube 2 or Tudou? 3 Can KeyboardCat 4 be watched on break.com, ebaumsworld.com or collegehumour.com with the same effect?Are other practices, such as projects that comment on online culture, affected by whois hosting them? Surely if there is a case to be made for the significance of format in regard toSnow’s film, there is one to be made for Charlie Schmidt and his deceased cat Fatso.In many discussions of video sharing culture, the only service mentioned by name will beYouTube. YouTube is arguably the generic trademark for online video, yet it is far from generic.While it is reasonable to begin the discussion with YouTube, we have reached a pointat which the plurality of hosting options, and the importance of these options to the wholeof online culture, requires exploration. For a working definition of video hosting, Wikipediaprovides a definition broad enough to encompass many sites, stating that: ‘A video hostingservice allows individuals to upload video clips to an Internet website. The video host will thenstore the video on its server, and show the individual different types of code to allow others toview this video’. 5 A fast and easy index of sites can be found on Wikipedia, 6 as can chartsshowing some of the differences between sites. 7Online video is used in a lot of different ways: vlogs, remixes, amateur special effects, andyour mom’s vacation videos will all find a home somewhere. Some of the larger video sharingsites play host to a great number of overlapping communities, but others will only toleratespecific behaviours and forms of video. For example, Flickr accepts video, but only if it isbelow 90 seconds in length.1. Alain Depocas, Jon Ippolito, and Caitlin Jones, (eds) Permanence Through Change: TheVariable Media Approach, co-published by the Guggenheim Museum and The Daniel LangloisFoundation for Art, Science & Technology, 2003.2. ‘wavelength’ (dir. Michael Snow, 1967) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzPwuP6AmCk.3. ‘ Wavelength.(Michael.Snow).1967’, http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/UkBCsMeL6qI/.4. ‘Charlie Schmidt’s “Keyboard Cat”! - ORIGINAL!’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J---aiyznGQ.5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_hosting_service.6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_sharing_websites.7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_services.

212 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches213Clay Shirky’s presentation at the 2005 Long Now conference 8 discussed ‘degenerate’ systemsof classification and archiving: systems with a high level of redundancy, or overlap.Shirky offered the example of a city as a highly degenerate system. Rather than having onearea for residents and one for business, people can work and live in a number of differentareas. This means the city can accommodate the preferences of different people, and is resilientto re-zoning and other geographic changes. A second example offered by Shirky is theRosetta Stone, which was discovered in 1799. As the stone has the same text written in threedifferent languages, it possesses a degree of redundancy that eventually made it possible torecover the lost languages.My own example, online video, possesses more degeneracy than it can handle. WhileYouTube has become the generic brand of online video, droves of video hosting sites caterto similar but overlapping groups of users. This degeneracy creates cultural artifacts that arethemselves worthy of preservation and consideration. Why does a user choose one site overanother?These sites have numerous identical or similar features, functions and design elements thatbind them together as a genre. Each, however, is the product of a complex negotiation ofsocial, cultural and technological influences. In a work entitled Here Comes Everybody 9 ,Shirky describes three factors at play: a ‘plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptablebargain for the user’. These terms — promise, tool, and bargain— used in the context ofvideo are not necessarily the most authentic to his original coinage, but will be used throughoutthis essay (though not in that order) as they are useful in identifying the differences andsimilarities between online video sharing systems, between disparate platforms.As Sean Cubitt has pointed out, ‘there is no exchange of moving pictures without standardisationof the codecs on which the various proprietary players can function’. 10 Such isthe importance of the video sharing service as a tool. Subtle technical differences in codec,scripting, and resolution can have enormous implications for the unique possibilities of aplatform, and can have significant political implications. The users of X platform expect theconvenience offered by Y platform. Because codec specifications are connected to many differentorganizations, each with their own agenda, they cannot be ignored in this discussion.And yet, because the impact of proprietary codecs are for the most part ignored by the userbase of most sites, codecs only become involved in the negotiation between the user and thesite when they are part of the underpinning of the community, such as with EngageMedia, avideo sharing organization and website that is specifically devoted to social and environmentalchange. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the recent divide that has emergedbetween HTML5 and Adobe Flash. While I will not discuss the finer points of that debatehere, the decision by Apple to not support Flash on its popular iPhone platform, 11 and thesubsequent decision of a number of sites to experiment with HTML5, demonstrates howpolitical the technical details of video formatting can be. Vimeo, Dailymotion, and YouTubehave the resources to experiment with HTML5 so that they can gain market share by servingmobile devices, but smaller players may not have those resources. Those that operate withdifferent goals have less to worry about, or can afford to wait until the technology becomesmore popular. While standardization makes these exchanges possible, different configurationsmake each service unique.As I opened with reference to the legendary Michael Snow – whose structural film Wavelengthwas the roundabout inspiration for this essay – this is an appropriate point at whichto discuss the technological influences upon what might be termed ‘structural online video’.There are many historical and contemporary examples of media art that play with the limitsof the technology available. Two good examples of structural impulses on YouTube are ‘TheShortest YouTube Video Ever’ 12 and its companion ‘Longest video on YouTube!’ 13 Just asSnow’s Wavelength centres on a long zoom into a photograph of the sea, the two YouTubevideos mentioned take the technical limits of their medium to an equally absurd conclusion.The capacities of different codecs to limit file size also comes into play in the creation of onlinevideo, giving rise to a compression arms race for the longest video capacity. There are atleast five videos claiming to be the longest, with the reigning champion clocking in at over 36hours. On the other hand, the shortest video is limited by the constraints of video editing andexporting. As it is impossible to go below one frame, one user has created a video that playsupon the multiple meanings of the term ‘short’, 14 creating a video with the shortest height,rather than length – a move of which I am sure Snow would approve. Here we see the principleof degeneracy at work. The longest video on YouTube is 24 hours, and on Vimeo it is justtwo hours – but that is like comparing apples and oranges, for Vimeo’s structural tendenciesare towards production technology. Vimeo has positioned itself as a site for video enthusiasts,and as such the technical possibilities and restrictions are significant. For example, groupson the site are often devoted to specific cameras. This creates a number of videos that existonly to show off technological ability. 15The bargain aspect of online video is complicated, but one way to look at it is through therelationship between the site creators and site contributors. Relationships between usersare incredibly important, but the primary contract underpinning all others is the end useragreements or terms of service. Terms of service documents are important for understandinghow a service is guided by its owners, thereby leading and limiting the behaviour of the userbase through official standards of conduct. Each service or site has its own agenda, which isoften commercial, but can occasionally be altruistic. The agenda may be expressed in visu-8. Clay Shirky, ‘Making The Digital Durable’, The Long Now Conference, San Francisco, California,November 14th, 2005.9. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody:The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, New York:Penguin Press, 2008.10. Sean Cubitt, ’Codecs and Capability’ in Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds) Video VortexReader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008, p. 46.11. JR Raphael, ‘Apples’s iPad and the Flash Crash’, http://www.pcworld.com/article/188185/apples_ipad_and_the_flash_clash.html.12. ‘The Shortest YouTube Video Ever’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVxhaBU7sOI.13. ‘Longest video on YouTube’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmoeXjsVzTk.14. ‘Shortest Video On YouTube!’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4Cw80OhBv8.15. ‘RED 4K TEST’, http://vimeo.com/6618681.

214 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches215ally implicit ways such as design, or through explicit content restrictions and terms of servicepolicies. Differences can cut across long-standing political divides, evidence of which can beseen in open source discourse. Just ask EngageMedia, who have developed Plumi, ‘a freeand open source video sharing platform for building your own online video community’. 16With tools such as these, micro-communities can run their own hosting services that neverengage with the dominant practices of YouTube. There are no Keyboard Cat videos here.To briefly consider a site with quite different aims, Pornhub provides a link to its ‘18 U.S.C.2257 Records Keeping Requirements Compliance Statement’, 17 as is required by all producersof pornographic content. This section of the site also notes that the owners of the siteare not the ‘primary producer[s]’ of content on the website, and that the content is perhapsnot ‘100% accurate’. They stress that they follow procedures to ensure that all content isprovided by adults and depicts adults. They also provide links in their terms of service to lawsregarding child pornography and assert the seriousness in which they treat this matter. Not allsites make their terms so obvious, yet this example helps underscore how officially encodedthe behavioural limits are of these sites.Discussing the differences between Facebook and MySpace, social media researcher danahboyd states that ‘aesthetics are more than simply the “eye of the beholder” - they are culturallynarrated and replicated’. 18 Although boyd is discussing a different form of social media,the importance of interface design and personalization options applies to the present subject,because the options offered to users by those who run the site represent the bargain everyuser enters into. Compared to the behemoth YouTube, which offers a wealth of personalinformation on the profile page, and customizable color schemes, other sites like Vimeoare clean and consistent. The example I will focus on here, Megavideo, is also designedwith little opportunity for personalization or personal information, with only a list of videos,comments, friends and a few other personal details available. A large number of users haveessentially blank profiles. Megavideo employs a three-tiered membership structure: Nonmembers,Members, and Premium. Non-members have access to a time-limited amount ofvideo; they can watch 72 minutes of video before having to take a 52-minute breather. Membershave the same limited access to video, but are able to post their own videos. PremiumMembership offers a slew of benefits, including file hosting, ad-revenue sharing, and priorityfor streaming and converting video. Most interestingly, a Megaupload Premium Membershipoffers access to the ‘rewards program’, which offers points when people view your videos.Rewards are redeemed by decreasing the cost of membership and, at the highest levels, incash. While this is not uncommon, it is important to consider in light of accusations againstthe site for copyright violation. 19 A user named yuridvm currently has the most viewed videoon Megavideo. Viewed more than two million times, the video depicts a trio of young menattempting to perform a dance move, and ends with one of the men landing on his face. Thisvideo also appears on YouTube, and at first sight appears to be much less popular on thissite. However, closer inspection reveals that all of this user’s videos are derived from popular‘viral’ videos that are available on YouTube. It seems that the appeal of rewards points encouragesa different type of sharing than is usually seen: the user is using curated material toincrease their viewership. This example, among many others, demonstrates that Megavideois a community that values ‘stats’ above all else.At this point, we have a set of technological limitations backed up by a large body of legalese.In addition, we have a social contract, either explicit or implicit, which modifies the user’sbehaviour. The promise offered by a video service is the basic premise for participating.Some of the promise of a particular platform can be attributed to branding and managerialoversight. Given the complexity of large sites, where there might be a wide variety of reasonsto participate, the size of the community itself can be a part of the promise. For example, sciencestage.comis best summed up by its tag line ‘Streaming Knowledge, Advancing Careers’.The promise here is financial mobility, and the emphasis upon knowledge as opposed toinformation. Vimeo positions itself as a haven for original content, as their introductory statementsmake clear: ‘Vimeo is a respectful community of creative people who are passionateabout sharing the videos they make. We provide the best tools and highest quality video inthe universe. See for yourself and Join today!’ Launched in late 2004, Vimeo currently has acommunity of over 3 million users.Henry Jenkins states that ‘YouTube’s value depends heavily upon its deployment via othersocial networking sites’. 20 This is equally true of other sites. Since the presence of onlinevideo pervades almost all corners of online activity, the promise can be something that isexternal to the site itself. The way that a particular online community views itself often has alarge part to play. As we have seen with Megavideo, the incentive can be money, attention,or both, but there are other factors involved. As Isabel Pettinato states, ‘a negligible numberhave achieved a place among the Top Ten of most-viewed videos’. 21 There are a numberof tiers of participation and while getting over a million hits may be a goal for some, it is notnecessarily the prize for all. If a video seems inane or banal to you, it probably means that youare not a part of the community. Participation and communication within these parametersare values in and of themselves.16. http://www.engagemedia.org/about-us.17. http://www.youporn.com/2257.18. danah boyd, ‘Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace’, ‘ViewingAmerican class divisions through Facebook and MySpace’, Apophenia Blog Essay, 24 June,2007, http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html.19. wconeybeer, ‘Streaming video websites creating new piracy challenge’, http://www.myce.com/news/streaming-video-websites-creating-new-piracy-challenge-34604/.20. Henry Jenkins, ‘Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube’, Henry Jenkins Weblog,28 May, 2007, http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/05/9_propositions_towards_a_cultu.html.21. Isabel Pettinato, ‘Viral Candy’, in Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied (eds) Digital FolkloreReader, Stuttgart: Merz & Solitude, 2009.

216 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches217The poem ‘I love my Motherland’ originated on the message board Tianya.cn, and quickly becamea viral hit spawning many remixes. 22 This exchange, however, took place for the mostpart on Chinese video sharing sites Tudou and Youku, whereas there was much less of animpact on Western sites. Tudou.com is a video sharing site based in the People’s Republic ofChina, and is one of the most popular non-English sites for video sharing. Their recent moveinto the creation of original content 23 for their own site – created in an episodic televisualstyle – shows that their interest is in a traditional broadcast relationship. A low viewership for acommercial program would be quite embarrassing, but in the face of this particular community,personal video sharing is less important. At the extreme end of this scale is Zeroviews.biz, a blog that shames YouTube videos that have not received a single view. Ironically, bypromoting these videos, or even just by finding them, zeroview.biz negates their value as havingbeen unwatched. 24 The specific promise of YouTube (broadcasting) steers expectationsof high viewership. A zero views blog for Vimeo or Tudou would not nearly be as interesting,as the implicit arrangement is not predicated on popularity. 25The most obvious difference between platforms is language. For example, Rutube 26 operatesin Russian, but popular memes like Standing Cat 27 and Double Rainbow 28 are still foundthere. Thus, sites do not exist in a vacuum, even across the easily prescribed boundaries oflanguage. ‘Lipdubs’ which began on Vimeo 29 , have spread across all platforms. The samecan be said of popular YouTube memes such as Keyboard Cat and Double Rainbow. The watersare indeed quite murky when trying to differentiate between communities, and draw easylines of classification. Even on sites considered ‘mainstream’, 30 these lines are blurred. In astudy of anime music videos, Mizuko Ito has found that, although the practice of creating andsharing these clips had moved to other video sharing sites, 31 the centre of the communitycontinues to be animemusicvideo.org. When community behaviours occur across a numberof different sites, it is clear that community has become more important than medium.Having considered a number of video sharing platforms, it is possible to see that the highlevel of degeneracy is key to the continued growth of online video as a cultural practice. Inorder to understand the effects of video sharing, it is important to observe it at a macroscopiclevel that takes into account all forms of practice. There is a danger in branding YouTube (oreven one particular community on YouTube) as typical of video sharing culture. The choicesavailable in video sharing sites are typical of ‘long tail’ economies. 32 In fact, freely availablePHP scripts allow anyone who is reasonably tech-savvy to run their own video sharingwebsite. 33 It is important to note that in each instance of this culture taking hold, there is anegotiation between the social and technological rules of participation.Applying Shirky’s concepts of tools, bargain and promise to the context of video helps toidentify similarities across disparate platforms. The messy technological, social and emotionalpromises are the life or death of any site. The reasons not to be ‘mainstream’ have tobe enticing, offering opportunities that cannot be reasonably attained elsewhere. As Shirkypoints out, ‘it is now cheaper to keep things by accident than to delete them on purpose’. 34The increased cost of medium specificity cannot be recouped by appealing to quality. Theplurality of available circulation methods provided by different platforms means that concernsrelated to the medium have been superseded in importance by the needs of a community. Inother words, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.In response to Michael Snow’s statement, Kevin McGarry states: ‘As an immaterial thing, howa moving image looks constitutes what it is, and what concern could be more primary thanwhat the thing is?’ 35 Although I am not arguing for medium specificity, I am suggesting that‘what the thing is’ is only as important as its availability. To be inaccessible is to be invisible.Moving to a landscape that takes media migration for granted offers video culture the opportunitiesfor growth in audience participation and awareness that outweigh other concerns.22. Fauna, ‘I love My Motherland’ Poem Rejected, Becomes Viral Hit’, http://www.chinasmack.com/2009/stories/i-love-my-motherland-poem-viral-hit.html.23. ‘Tudou “That Love Comes” Original Drama Series Debut’, http://www.prnewswire.com/newsreleases/tudou-that-love-comes-original-drama-series-debut-105015184.html.24. ‘Zero Views: Blog Celebrates The Best Of YouTube’s Worst’, videos, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/27/videos-0-views-viral_n_697455.html.25. This recalls early self-referential video art, such as Vito Acconci’s Theme song, athttp://blip.tv/file/3608518, or Richard Serra’s Television delivers people, http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/c-R1GWCHAn8/.26. rutube.ru.27. , http://rutube.ru/tracks/3687916.html?v=14cb1a677afea4a4009d2ef69acf8d27.28. , http://rutube.ru/tracks/3424781.html?v=8daab3c65a03f62bc44fdb13d717526c.29. ‘Lip Dubbing: Endless Dream’, http://www.vimeo.com/123498.30. Mizuko Ito, ‘The rewards of non-commercial production: Distinctions and status in the animemusic video scene’, First Monday 15.5 (2010),http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2968/2528.31. Edited anime television shows and movie set to music.32. Chris Anderson. ‘The Long Tail’, Wired, October 2004,33. http://www.mediamaxscript.com/Video-Hosting-Script.34. Clay Shirky, ‘Private, Public, and the collapse of the Personal’, in Lauren Cornell, MassimilianoGioni and Laura Hoptman (eds) Younger Than Jesus: The Reader. New York: Steidl & Partners,2009.35. Kevin McGarry, Medium Quality: The 2010 International Experimental Media Congress, 21 April,2010. http://rhizome.org/editorial/3478.

218 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches219ReferencesAnderson, Chris. ‘The Long Tail’, Wired, October 2004, http://www.mediamaxscript.com/Video-Hosting-Script.boyd, danah. ‘Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace’, Apophenia BlogEssay, 24 June, 2007, http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html.Cubitt, Sean. ‘Codecs and Capability’ in Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds) Video Vortex Reader:Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.Depocas, Alain, Jon Ippolito and Caitlin Jones (eds) Permanence Through Change: The VariableMedia Approach, The Guggenheim Museum and The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science& Technology, 2003.Ito, Mizuko. ‘The rewards of non-commercial production: Distinctions and status in the anime musicvideo scene’, First Monday 15.5 (2010), http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2968/2528.Jenkins, Henry. ‘Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube’, Henry Jenkins Weblog, 28May, 2007, http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/05/9_propositions_towards_a_cultu.html.McGarry, Kevin. Medium Quality: The 2010 International Experimental Media Congress, 21 April,2010. http://rhizome.org/editorial/3478.Pettinato, Isabel. ‘Viral Candy’, in Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied (eds) Digital Folklore Reader,Stuttgart: Merz & Solitude, 2009.Shirky, Clay. ‘Private, Public, and the Collapse of the Personal’, in Lauren Cornell, Massimiliano Gioni.Laura Hoptman (eds) Younger Than Jesus: The Reader. New York: Steidl & Partners, 2009.–––––. Here Comes Everybody:The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, New York: PenguinPress, 2008.Blocking, Tracking, and Monetizing:YouTube Copyright Control and theDownfall ParodiesAndrew ClayAs a media corporation, YouTube has a legal obligation to reassure other media corporationsthat it is doing everything it can to uphold copyright law, in the face of the infringement ofYouTube users. When users remix commercial media content they are potentially contraveningthe company’s terms and conditions and blackening YouTube’s reputation as a securesite to do business. YouTube’s Content ID system attempts to ‘keep everybody happy’ byfacilitating the blocking, tracking, and monetizing of commercial assets uploaded by userswho do not own the rights to them. For instance, Sony monetized the unauthorized use ofa song by Chris Brown on the very popular user-generated ‘JK Wedding Entrance Dance’video. In this case, Sony was a spectacular winner, but the system as a whole favours therights-holder and dismisses the commercial rights of the remixer who has added value to theproduct through their creativity. Other examples of online video remix culture, such as theDownfall parodies, demonstrate how YouTube’s system can break down. YouTube is part ofa culture in which mediation is intensified, and in which people are encouraged to transformthemselves into media. Not only can the culture of sharing be at odds with the culture of commercialismwith which it attempts to engage, it can illustrate some of the important limitationsof our ability to experience the world authentically and to pay sufficient attention to the forcesof consumerism.YouTube Content ID and the ‘JK Wedding Entrance Dance’ VideoIn March 2007, Viacom filed a one billion dollar lawsuit against YouTube, alleging direct andindirect infringement of copyright. The latest ruling, in June 2010, went in YouTube’s favour,with the judgement suggesting that the burden of responsibility for policing and monitoringcopyright lies with the copyright holder. YouTube was judged to be immune from claims ofcopyright infringement by corporations such as Viacom under the ‘safe harbor’ provision ofthe 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), by virtue of its implementation of compliant‘notice and takedown’ procedures. YouTube has been able to demonstrate that it operateslegally, by responding promptly to official claims of infringement by removing or disablingthe audio on videos. However, this does not mean that YouTube is passive or neutral concerningcopyright infringement, or that its actions are without controversy. Whereas YouTubesees itself operating ‘a creative ecosystem where everybody wins’, 1 ‘free culture’ advocateLawrence Lessig terms this a ‘perverse system’. 21. Mary Gould Stewart, ‘How YouTube Thinks About Copyright’, http://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_stewart_how_youtube_thinks_about_copyright.html.2. Lawrence Lessig, ‘Re-examining the Remix’, at http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/lessig_nyed.html.

220 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches221Viacom’s litigation is the most public expression of conflict between the corporations andYouTube users who want, and are able, to upload copyright infringing material belongingto media industries such as television, music, and cinema. YouTube is caught between thecompeting demands of these entities: corporations feel uneasy about the lack of control, andusers dislike corporations interfering. 3 Corporations take the position that their products arecreating value for YouTube through traffic-driven advertising revenue, revenue to which theytherefore claim some entitlement. Some corporations believe that they should be benefitingmore substantially from YouTube, hence the size of the Viacom lawsuit, and the refusal ofWarner Music Group (WMG) to re-negotiate its 2006 partnership deal with YouTube at theend of 2008, because WMG regards it as an under-valued revenue-sharing arrangement.However, corporations may also have wider cultural concerns regarding how copyright infringementon YouTube challenges the way that corporations have traditionally been ableto determine the reproduction and distribution of their own products. They might feel thatthe ability of YouTube users to copy, re-edit, and share audio and video creates a worryingcultural situation in which new contexts of use are afforded to consumers, enabling them tobecome producers of cultural objects outside of the monetizing traditions of corporate intellectualproperty. It is unlikely that corporations such as WMG would see YouTube as a ‘vitalcultural archive’, or user video uploads of copyrighted works as ‘fair use’ within new forms ofparticipatory and networked society. 4On the issue of copyright infringing videos, YouTube seems to prefer concord over conflict.It has attempted to create a stable business, increasing potential advertising revenue by developingtighter controls of uploads and extending its partnership arrangements with rightsholders.YouTube provides a manual DMCA takedown notice system using a ‘Copyright ComplaintForm’ that anyone can use to request the removal of an uploaded video. It also runs an‘Audioswap’ facility that offers the uploader an opportunity to automatically replace the audiotrack of a video with one approved by YouTube’s content partners. The ‘Partner Program’ isused by YouTube to recruit content partners into revenue-generating opportunities that mightcircumnavigate infringement problems. YouTube partnerships allow the sharing of revenuebetween YouTube and the content partner by using tools such as ‘InVideo’ adverts overlaidover videos, banner ads, and other forms of marketing and branding.More advanced tools are available for professional content producers to protect their intellectualproperty. The ‘Content Verification Program’ allows content to be verified and ifnecessary to use the information supplied to make bulk submission copyright complaints.The major tool used by YouTube against copyright infringement is ‘Content ID’, including‘Audio ID’ and ‘Video ID’, which allows the swift removal of unapproved videos, and at thesame time provides the opportunity to monetize infringing videos without removal. This facil-ity marks a significant new development in the cooperative relationship between YouTubeand media conglomerates. The Content ID system lets rights-holders decide whether to blockthe upload altogether, monetize the video, or track the video to gain information about howit is being used. The tracking is achieved by ‘YouTube Insight’, a reporting tool that identifies‘user sentiment’ by recording views over time, analysing the most viewed parts of the video(‘Hotspots’) or the least interesting (the parts where people lose interest and close the clipdown); provides demographic and regional viewing statistics; compares the ‘claimed video’(such as an unofficial visual interpretation of a piece of music) with the official versions; andidentifies which external websites the video is being embedded in, and the keywords used tofind the video in search engines.YouTube employs several mechanisms to identify the 24 hours of video material uploadedevery minute, using reference files supplied by the participating rights-holders. Algorithmsare used to convert complete video files into shorter, fixed-size datum files, or ‘MD5 Hashes’.The hashes generated from new uploaded files can be compared to the database of referencehashes, allowing identical video files to be noted. Newer methods work in a similar way,providing ‘fingerprint’ files that match reference files to audio and video uploads that haveminor degradations or discrepancies (such as moving image reversal). The fingerprint filesare spectrograms: visual representations of the separated audio and video signals generatedfrom algorithmic frequency variations over time. 5 If the system finds a match, it followswhatever rules are attached in the database. The database can be updated on a rolling basisaccording to the decisions made by the rights-holder, or to cope with different instructions inrelation to different regions.Mary Gould Stewart, a User Experience Manager at YouTube, has given an illuminating videopresentation on this topic. In ‘How YouTube Thinks About Copyright’, 6 Stewart suggests that‘rights management is no longer simply a question of ownership’, but is a ‘complex web ofrelationships and a critical part of our cultural landscape’. Stewart maintains that YouTube isempowering content owners by providing a ‘culture of opportunity’, where ‘progressive rightsmanagement and new technology’ offer an alternative to simply blocking all re-use of intellectualproperty. YouTube’s approach, she argues, sustains new audiences, art forms, andrevenue streams that would otherwise be circumscribed.In her presentation, Stewart refers to an example of which YouTube appears particularly proud,the ‘JK Wedding Entrance Dance’ video. 7 This video consists of a five minute real- time recordingof the beginning of the wedding ceremony of Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz, who weremarried in St Paul, Minnesota on 20 June 2009. The first upload by ‘TheKheinz’ was posted amonth after the wedding, when the bride’s father requested that the video be shared with relativesunable to attend the wedding. The video begins conventionally enough, with the closing3. Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, Cambridge:Polity, 2009, p.5.4. Paul McDonald, ‘Digital Discords in the Online Media Economy: Advertising versus Contentversus Copyright’, in Pelle Snickers and Patrick Vonderau (eds) The YouTube Reader,Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009, p. 402.5. Eliot Van Buskirk, ‘YouTube Search-and-Delete Code Makes Money for Rights-Holders’, 21August, 2009, http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/how-copyright-holders-profit-frominfringement-on-youtube.6. See: http://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_stewart_how_youtube_thinks_about_copyright.html.7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0&feature=related.

222 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches223of the church’s entrance doors. However, its departure from the norm of homemade weddingvideos quickly becomes apparent, as R&B singer Chris Brown’s track ‘Forever’ begins to playover the building’s public address system, and the groom and best man throw their servicesheets into the air and begin to dance down the aisle toward the camera.Those familiar with ‘surprise first wedding dance’ videos taken at a reception will recognizethis as a variation upon the tradition of a bride and groom secretly rehearsing choreographyto entertain their guests and produce a memorable ‘surprise’ experience. 8 However, asthe ‘JK Wedding Entrance Dance’ video continues, the scale of the choreographic preparationis revealed, as more and more of the wedding party become involved in the elaborateentrance dance, and the congregation catch the mood by laughing and clapping along. Atfirst the entrants appear singly and in pairs, sometimes performing ambitious moves such ashandstands and forward rolls, but eventually the whole entrance party can be seen swayingand swaggering in exaggerated imitation of dancers from R&B music videos as they maketheir way to the front of the church, with choreography responding to the changing pace ofthe rhythms in the song. Most of the dancers are wearing ‘cool’ sunglasses, and althoughthe dancers and congregation that can be seen in the video are almost entirely white, thereis clearly a lovable reference to this black music style, and the sentiments of the song arematched to the feelings of Jill and Kevin on their ‘big day’. The overall effect of the videois joyful. The preparation and execution of the choreographed entrance is delightfully wellexecuted, and the dancers’ enthusiastic abandonment of the conventions of the weddingprocession reaches a tearful highpoint with the entrance of the jigging bride.The YouTube Content ID system identified the audio to the wedding video as belonging toSony, and the instruction was to track and monetize the video as it stood, rather than blockthe audio track. Within the first two days the video was viewed 3.5 million times, by the endof the first week this had reached 10 million. In 2009, the video was the third most watchedon YouTube, and was publicized by the appearance of Jill and Kevin, and a live recreation oftheir dance, on American television. In January 2010, the video had been viewed 41 milliontimes. YouTube Insight created new marketing information for Sony, and identified a differentdemographic for the song. Click-to-Buy (CTB) links were run over the video and the opportunityto buy the track through Amazon and iTunes led the track to return to the top ten ofthe download charts 15 months after its original release. Sony also received a share of therevenue from Google text ads on the video’s page itself. The CTB rate was double the averagefor the YouTube site as a whole and a 2.5 times increase on the Clickthrough rate (CTR) ofthe official ‘Forever’ music video (which is currently blocked in the UK). 9The ‘JK Wedding Entrance Dance Video’ demonstrates how online rights management is a‘complex web of relationships’, as Stewart states. Chris Brown’s ‘Forever’ began its life asa jingle for a Doublemint chewing gum commercial, and the gum can also be seen in the8. See for example ‘best first dance brubaker’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeoi16lScf4.9. Chris LaRosa and Ali Sandler, ‘I now pronounce you monetized: a YouTube video case study’,YouTube Biz Blog, 30 July 2009, http://ytbizblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/i-now-pronounce-youmonetized-youtube_30.html.official music video as a product placement arrangement, a consequence of Doublemintfunding the recording costs to develop the music into a full song. In March 2009, and priorto the upload of the JK Wedding Entrance Dance video, Brown was charged with assaultagainst fellow R&B singer and then girlfriend, Rihanna. Just two days after the Heinz’s wedding,Brown pleaded guilty to the charges. Part of his sentence included having to attenddomestic violence counselling. Brown’s behaviour clearly did not affect the Heinz’s choice ofmusic for their occasion, but it has affected how they have reacted to the popularity of theirvideo. In line with the normal system, the Heinzs were not included in the revenue generationarrangements made between YouTube and Sony. While they cannot benefit directly fromSony’s music, they have ‘monetized’ their fame by creating a charitable website that channelsdonations to an institute that addresses the problem of domestic violence. 10 They have alsocreated a piece of popular culture that has been referenced by mainstream television – aparody of the wedding entrance dance was incorporated into the ‘Niagara’ episode of theU.S. television comedy The Office in October 2009.However, it is possible to challenge the cosy commercial relationships championed by YouTube.Lawrence Lessig’s video presentation ‘Re-examining the Remix’ challenges YouTube’s prideabout its rights management procedures. 11 Lessig views the act of adding video imagery tomusic protected by copyright as a form of social creativity, a collective expression in whichpeople communicate with others through symbolic performance and inter-video dialogue andimitation. Lessig conceptualizes two major cultures of creativity – commercial and sharing –and argues that the latter should not suffer from the former’s strict copyright controls. Lessigsuggests that we need well protected spaces of ‘fair use’, so as to respect the rights of the creatorof remix. Lessig sees YouTube’s Content ID system as a ‘perversion of freedom’ because itcan perform a DMCA takedown that might well be challenged and overturned on grounds offair use, which the system cannot recognize. YouTube’s system effectively places the powerof judgement mainly on automatic recognition of infringement and disregards the context ofsocial and cultural sharing in which the copyrighted material might exist.By erring on the side of the rights-holders by default, even when the remix may be legalunder fair use provisions, YouTube’s rights management systems are heavily weighted insupport of commercial culture. In the case of the ‘JK Wedding Entrance Dance’ video, Sonywaived their right to block the audio track and decided to wait for monetizing opportunities.Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz’s planning and rehearsal transformed a sober ritual intogood-natured revelry, and a unique and special event with the help of a piece of commercialmusic. Once uploaded to YouTube, however, the Heinz’s video became an object that couldbe commercially exploited by the-rights holder, while denying the couple any right to directcommercial benefit from their own creativity. A piece of music that began as a musical ‘hook’for a chewing gum commercial became the soundtrack to a mediated DIY musical weddingceremony, which itself became a ‘music video’ working for the profit of a media corporation.Around the grey, largely untested legal area of fair use, practice is actually unfair and iniq-10. See: http://www.jkweddingdance.com/.11. Lawrence Lessig, ‘Re-examining the Remix’.

224 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches225uitous in terms of the power relationship it institutes, whereby commercial culture exploitssharing culture using prohibitive copyright law – a practice that YouTube supports and implementswith enthusiasm.Constantin Film and the Downfall ParodyIf Sony’s video of a lively wedding entrance allows YouTube to claim a dubiously harmonious‘spreading of joy’ for its rights management systems, there can be no doubt about thedifficulty and conflict over YouTube’s rights management for the Downfall parody videos.Downfall (Der Untergang), 12 a film about Hitler’s final days, is an internationally co-producedfeature film directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel for the German production company ConstantinFilm. For the last four years or so, hundreds of user-remixed clips from the film have been uploadedregularly to websites such as YouTube. The remix has most commonly taken the formof alterations to the English subtitles, which are re-written to replace the originals, leaving therest of the clip unaltered. The scene that has been used repeatedly is set in the war room ofthe Führerbunker in Berlin, as Hitler discovers that he has lost the war, and excoriates hisofficers, calling them cowards and traitors. 13 Subjects of these parodies include Americanpolitical figures such as Obama, Palin, and Clinton; issues in sports such as relegations andtransfers in football; the latest technological gadgets such as the iPad; and events in popularmusic such as the death of Michael Jackson, or the split-up of Oasis. However, more local orpersonal subjects such as problems with car parking or council politics can also feature. InApril 2010, Constantin Film requested a more systematic takedown of the Downfall parodies,which is possible using YouTube’s Content ID technology. Even though it is likely that theremixes would be considered legal under fair use copyright legislation, YouTube acceded tothe request. As we now know, YouTube just wants to keep everyone happy:Content ID has helped create an entirely new economic model for rights holders. Weare committed to supporting new forms of original creativity, protecting fair use, andproviding a seamless user experience – all while we help rights owners easily managetheir content on YouTube. 14In public, Constantin Film are asserting their rights and discouraging unauthorized use ofcopyright. They say they feel ambivalent about the attention, as it publicizes the film, but hasa negligible effect on sales. Having to monitor the uploads and respond to complaints andcontroversial uses of the clip has proven tiresome and, one suspects, damaging. 15Since the first remixes appeared on YouTube, Constantin Film have been issuing ‘cease-anddesistorders’ and have used selective manual DMCA takedowns. They have also had to respondto complaints from companies whose products have been ridiculed in the video. Onesuch product was Microsoft’s Xbox Live, the parody of which was the most popular Downfallvideo with over four million views at the time of its takedown in 2007. The video in question‘Hitler Gets Banned From Xbox Live’ 16 was made by UK computing student Chris Bowleywhen he was 19. Bowley claims the idea came to him late one night as he was trying to sleep.He got up, and uploaded his video an hour later. Here was a spontaneous thought turnedinto action, as Bowley drew upon the experience of friends who had had their Xbox consolesturned off due to copyright infringement issues. The video is a bit of fun; instead of depictingHitler as a Microsoft figurehead, he is transformed into an Xbox-using gamer victim, angryat Microsoft’s drastic action against its consumers. The satire is quite gentle, yet Bowley wasthreatened with legal action by Constantin Film, presumably via a Microsoft complaint.Unlike Sony, Constantin Film has shown no interest in monetizing its property. The companymerely wants to block the use of its content. The company’s more recent blanket approach toassert copyright control of Downfall can be viewed as an attempt to reassert control over theirproperty in the face of embarrassing appropriation and time-consuming management of infringement.Above all, it may appear that the company is not in control of its imagery – which isironic, given that the power of the clip is its depiction of a person who has so dramatically ‘lostit’. Individuals who have worked on the film, such as director Hirschbiegel, have stated thatthey have no problem with the parodies. Hirschbiegel sees the parodies as an amusing adaptationof history for participation in contemporary culture, although he regrets that he doesnot receive any royalties from the parodies. 17 The reaction of online cultural interest groupsto the systematic takedown of the videos has been largely negative. The company’s decisionhas been characterized as misguided, heavy-handed, and a possibly illegal violation of fair uselegislation. For instance, Nicholas Lovell of the games business blog ‘Gamesbrief’ has made anumber of suggestions of the ways that Constantin Film could have monetized the parodies,such as building a YouTube channel, claiming revenue for them, using a Facebook fan page,and creating a website to host remix competitions. 18 However, this vision of friction-free ‘convergenceculture’, which castigates Constantin Film for missing out on commercial opportunities,fails to acknowledge the larger issues that the company has had to deal with, and thatcould be exacerbated if the company were to be seen as directly profiting from the remixes.12. Downfall (dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004).13. These remixes, known as ‘Downfall parodies’ are also referred to as the ‘Hitler Finds Out Meme’,the ‘Hitler Gets Angry Meme’, or simply ‘The Hitler Meme’. See, ‘Downfall / Hitler Meme’, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/downfall-hitler-meme.14. Shenaz Zack, ‘Content ID and Fair use, Broadcasting Ourselves blog, 22 April 2010, http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/04/content-id-and-fair-use.html.15. Martin Moszkowicz (head of film and television at Constantin Film), AP press release, widelyreported online, for example, http://mediaissues.org/2010/04/21/popular-internet-memeremoved-from-youtube.16. ‘Hitler banned from Xbox live’, http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x27sh3_hitler-banned-fromxbox-live_videogames.17. Oliver Hirschbiegel, telephone interview with New York magazine, widely reported online, forexample, http://www.switched.com/2010/01/18/downfall-director-loves-the-hitler-mashups.18. Nicholas Lovell, ‘Are Constantin Film the stupidest company in the entire world?’, Gamesbriefblog, 21 April, 2010, http://www.gamesbrief.com/2010/04/are-constantin-film-the-stupidestcompany-in-the-entire-world/.

226 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches227Fair Use and Fair DealingLeaving aside the perceived economic benefits of a more permissive ‘free culture’ allowingfor creatively building on what has gone before, as advocated by Lawrence Lessig, themajor concern of the supporters of online user-participation has been that Constantin Film’ssystematic takedown could be illegal according to the fair use provision in U.S. copyright legislationthat may allow for remix-type activity. In this respect, Brad Templeton, a former chairand current board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been particularlyprominent. The EFF is a U.S.-based non-profit organization that campaigns for civil libertiesin relation to computing and telecommunications. In relation to user-generated video content,the EFF states:Online video hosting services like YouTube are ushering in a new era of free expressiononline. By providing a home for “user-generated content” (UGC) on the Internet, theseservices enable creators to reach a global audience without having to depend on traditionalintermediaries like television networks and movie studios. The result has beenan explosion of creativity by ordinary people, who have enthusiastically embraced theopportunities created by these new technologies to express themselves in a remarkablevariety of ways.Furthermore, the organization claims:The life blood of much of this new creativity is fair use, the copyright doctrine that permitsunauthorized uses of copyrighted material for transformative purposes. Creatorsnaturally quote from and build upon the media that makes up our culture, yielding newworks that comment on, parody, satirize, criticize, and pay tribute to the expressiveworks that have come before. These forms of free expression are among those protectedby the fair use doctrine. 19Fair use remains a grey area in American copyright legislation, but it is more permissive thanthe U.K.’s ‘fair dealing’ equivalent, which allows for criticism but not for parody. When assessingfair use of copyrighted material, one factor under consideration is whether the newwork is transformative, as opposed to derivative, of the existing work. Cases of fair use haveestablished parody as acceptable, where parody is defined as using a work in order to pokefun or comment on the work itself. Satire, however, is defined as using one work to poke funor comment on something beyond the original work.In fact, Templeton made his own exemplary fair use Downfall parody, ‘Hitler, As “Downfall” Producer,Orders A DMCA Takedown’. 20 His declared purpose was to make fun both of the memeand of the actions of Constantin Film, in a video which re-imagines the bunker as the ConstantinFilm offices, Hitler as a company producer, and Hitler’s generals as lawyers. The videoattempts to enlighten the viewer about DMCA and satirizes the actions of the company using19. Electronic Frontier Foundation, ‘Fair Use Principles for user Generated Video Content’, http://www.eff.org/issues/ip-and-free-speech/fair-use-principles-usergen.20. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzUoWkbNLe8.the very clip they are trying to block. Templeton went out of his way to produce a clean videoby buying a copy of the DVD, and copying it without circumventing the encryption. And yet,he nevertheless ended up predicting the ‘downfall’ of his own clip. His video was taken downby YouTube in April 2010. It was, however, reinstated when Templeton filed a dispute claim.The fair use defence of parody seems to have worked in favour of those uploading Hitlermeme videos, as many such videos are still available on YouTube. Constantin Film’s publicblocking response may well have sent the message that the downfall of the Downfall parodyhad begun, and the news may have discouraged further infringement, yet Constantin Filmhave not made any detectable progress in their attempts to end the use of their film. Thedownfall, in fact, was a temporary downturn, as many of the videos that were removedhave returned. Furthermore, new parodies have been uploaded: there are clusters of videosabout events that have occurred since April 2010, such as the World Cup in South Africaand the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill.Spoof, Parody, and SatireRegarding parodic practices in online video, Rebekah Willett has claimed that parodies areplayful transformations of the text, placed on the continuum between homage and satire.Satire, she states, creates distance from the original work, whereas homage imitates the textmore closely. 21 Speaking literally, the Downfall parodies transform nothing but the subtitles,yet this itself is transformative: it creates substantial transformative distance from the hosttext, like a cuckoo in the nest. The original work functions as a pretext, a medium for speakingabout other issues. The transformation in the Downfall videos is achieved by making adramatic scene comedic. At the same time, as Virginia Heffernan observes in the New YorkTimes, the parodies reveal Downfall as a ‘closeted Hitler comedy’. Hitler, Heffernan writes, isplayed as ‘flat-out melodrama’ by Bruno Ganz’s ‘goofy, trembling, hopeless rage’. Throughrepetitive, contentious, and allusive iteration by the remix videos, Downfall’s realist humanizationof Hitler is revealed as excessive melodrama. 22In relation to the question of whether or not the Downfall videos are parodies that commenton the work itself, or employ that work to satirize another issue, Templeton suggests that thetransformative defence applies to all Downfall parodies:While my video obviously does qualify as criticism, even the videos about unrelatedtopics like X-box live are sending up the over the top nature of the scene, at least to asmall degree, and illuminate the character of the scene in a new way, though that maynot be their primary goal. 2321. Rebekah Willett, ‘Parodic Practices: Amateur Spoofs on Videovideomaker Sites’, in DavidBuckingham and Rebekah Willett (eds) Video Cultures: Media Technology and EverydayCreativity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 115-132.22. Virginia Heffernan, ‘The Hitler Meme’, The New York Times, 24 October, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/magazine/26wwln-medium-t.html?_r=2.23. Brad Templeton, ‘YouTube makes statement on Content-ID takedowns’, Brad Ideas, 24 April,2010, http://ideas.4brad.com/youtube-makes-statement-content-id-takedowns.

228 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches229Thus, Templeton is implying that even though most of the Downfall videos are satirical andtherefore might not qualify as fair use, they are in fact fair use because they build on andtherefore transform the resonant exaggeration of the character’s anger which is integral tothe original work, and thus these parodies are not just a comment on another topic. Thisdistinction is clearly debatable. And yet, as long as such debates remain untested in court,participatory video practice continues to challenge the YouTube ecosystem and vex thoseaffected by speculative DMCA takedowns. Interestingly, as ‘The Hitler Meme’ has matured,it has become more overtly parodic. The self-named ‘Der Untergangers’ or ‘The Downfallers’use an online ‘Downfall Parodies Forum’, subscribe to each other’s channels on YouTube,and have expanded the remixes beyond the most commonly used clip to other scenes fromthe film. 24 Other videos use or reference historical films containing contemporaneous figuressuch as Stalin, or actual footage of Hitler speeches. In this way, attention is turned towardsthe film itself, and the story world surrounding it.However, the Downfall parodies should ultimately be regarded as the product of satiricalpractice, as well as a long-running, faithful and prolific meme. The practice has enduredbecause of the ease with which the original subtitles can be replaced, and the adaptabilityof the scene’s narrative to the mapping of unrelated current events. It is like a mini-film,constituted of three acts: the delivery of bad news; the lengthy rant in reaction to this news;and then quiet resignation to the new situation. For a long while – for nearly the entire historyof YouTube, in fact – the scene has managed to bear repetition thanks to the wit of theremixers, and the novelty added by new referents. The popularity of the parodies depends ona number of factors, including the timelines of the video, and the size of the groups to whichthe videos might appeal. The videos are particularly popular if they address topics likely toappeal to the groups most likely to view them. Thus, one of the most widely viewed Downfallvideos, Chris Bowley’s ‘Hitler Gets Banned From Xbox Live’, simultaneously taps into gamingand geek technology culture, and to the issue of Microsoft’s response to the users of piratedsoftware. The video includes plenty of references to authentic console and online gamingculture, such as the PlayStation3 console, and the need to have spent months ‘finding theagility orbs on Crackdown’. These ‘in-jokes’ make the video appealing to insiders, withoutalienating wider audiences.The removal of this video in 2007 is evidence that it caused irritation to Microsoft and ConstantinFilm at the time. However, these video practices are not a model for engaged andeffective civic engagement and dialogue between citizens, governments and corporations.Consider the handful of Downfall videos that take the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as their subject.The disaster began on 20 April 2010, the day before Constantin Film initiated its blankettakedown. And yet, despite the global interest in this environmental catastrophe, the videosmade by young, American ‘Untergangers’ have failed to capture significant audiences. Theyare unfunny, and inevitably treat a complex issue simplistically. The videos do not recognizethat BP is a global corporation – all-too-conveniently blaming the ‘Fucking Brits’ – and do not24. The Downfall Parodies Forum is available at http://s1.zetaboards.com/downfallparodies/index/.See YouTube user channels such as ‘Sine! Cosine! Tangent!!!’, http://www.youtube.com/user/Edudn01 and ‘Downfall Parodies’, http://www.youtube.com/user/hitlerrantsparodies.engage with the wider issues of deep water oil production and the forces that drive it. In themost popular video of the collection, ‘Hitler rants about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill’, Hitleris written as a concerned environmentalist who gets angry with incompetent officials aboutthe death of his pet duck Sammy. 25 In other versions, Hitler’s beach house is ruined, hisplanned holiday cruise is jeopardized, and he cannot help the cleanup operation because heis trapped in a YouTube video (this at least is witty). 26 Even if the videos were to be politicallysmarter, funnier, and more widely viewed, this would not make Downfall remixes politicallyefficacious.Mediatized Creative Play for SociabilityIn relation to the activities of the ‘Untergangers’, Willett studied a similar group of online videocontent generators. These are largely groups of young men making spoof videos of films andtelevision programs and, as Willett shows, are displaying their cultural capital and showingoff their production skills for the purpose of male bonding and identity construction. In effect,they had shifted some of their socialization through media from talking about a mediaproduct, as members of an audience, to making and sharing their own imitative media. AsWillett rightly concludes, this is not the same as Henry Jenkins’ ‘convergence culture’, fortraditional media consumption is still important, and is consumed in parallel with the productionof user-generated content. What Willett is describing is mediatized creative play forsociability facilitated by our changing relationship to technologies of media production, for thedevelopment of ‘sharing culture’. The Downfall remixes, then, are not an example of Jenkins’convergence culture: amateur media practice converging with traditional media. Rather, theypossess a supplementary, mediatized sociability: people drawing upon their own personalinterests and experiences, and mediatising them. As social, sharing objects, the mutually opposedconcepts of amateur and professional are not helpful when describing these videos. Incontrast to the vast majority of people who continue to participate in both traditional and newmedia as non-producing users, these are people creating meaningful objects as aestheticexperiences about events and subjects they find worthwhile.It is difficult to think of a film clip that has invited participation to the same extent as theDownfall clip. However, we might recall the major meme of pre-YouTube web video, the‘Star Wars Kid’ (SWK), which showed 15-year-old Ghyslain Raza, whose private momentof imitating a Jedi warrior from Star Wars became very publicly remixed into other media.On this newer occasion, the offended party is not the private individual, but the productioncompany Constantin Film. Both examples are sustained by a largely young, male subcultureseeking the admiration of their peers, and wider fame. However, unlike the SWK culture, theDownfall or ‘Hitler Gets Angry’ (HGA) meme is not mere postmodern parody, but often cleverand engaging satire. It is also a more conflicted example of remix culture because it beganand continues within the corporate space of YouTube. HGA is not SWK, but it continues to25. Benad361, ‘Downfall Parodies’ channel. As of October 2010, the video had 51,000 views. See:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LICAosO79nA.26. ‘Hitler find out about the BP oil spill’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC5paVe1Fjw, ‘Hitlerfinds out about the BP oil spill’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mDIUZy7omw, and ‘Hitler isinformed about the oil spill’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-y7Ri3EmMo.

232 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches233I would add that media has always been social and participatory, only mediatized in differentways. In Stiegler’s terms, we have always been technology, because he sees our very humanityas defined by the prosthetic use of technical objects to make a different life than that which isdetermined by our biology alone: ‘in this sense we have always been media(ated)’, and mediaare becoming increasingly closer to ‘us’. 36 Downfall remixes allow people to turn their interestsand experience, and indeed themselves, into media, as many of us do as part of our everydayuse of online social media such as Facebook and Twitter. In Stiegler’s terms, this experiencemight just be ‘too fast’, too individualized, and too easily exploited by, or incorporated within,corporate media. In this respect, it might be more appropriate to refer to ‘content-generatedusers’ (CGU) than to ‘user-generated content’ (UGC). This term acknowledges the extent towhich we are either made by, or make ourselves in, the processes of mediation, and sometimeswithin remixes of commercial culture. As engaged couples plan their wedding ceremoniesas if they were music videos, and people use Downfall as a proxy for their own views ofan issue, it is clear that we are made by the content, and adopt new technologies at the sametime as we are transformed by them. We have always been CGU, and our mediation will alwaysappear novel - although not always as joyfully and harmoniously as YouTube would have usbelieve.36. Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, ‘Creative Media: Performance, Invention, Critique’, in JanisJefferies, Maria Chatzichristodoulou, and Rachel Zerihan (eds) Interfaces of Performance,Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, pp. 4-5.References‘Anamnesis and Hypomnesis’, Ars Industrialis, http://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis.Burgess, Jean and Joshua Green. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, Cambridge: Polity,2009.Clay, Andrew. ‘BMW Films and the Star Wars Kid: “Early Web Cinema” and Technology’, in BruceBennett, Marc Furstenau and Adrian Mackenzie (eds) Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories,Practices, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 37-52.Cox, Geoff. ‘On Premediation: Interview with Richard Grusin’, http://www.anti-thesis.net/contents/texts/premediation.pdf.Crogan, Patrick. ‘Essential Viewing’, Film Philosphy 10 (2006), http://www.film-philosophy.com/2006v10n2/crogan.pdf.de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1984.Electronic Frontier Foundation. ‘Fair Use Principles for user Generated Video Content’, http://www.eff.org/issues/ip-and-free-speech/fair-use-principles-usergen.Heffernan, Virginia. ‘The Hitler Meme’, The New York Times, 24 October, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/magazine/26wwln-medium-t.html?_r=2.Jenkins, Henry. ‘Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and ParticipatoryCulture’, Henry Jenkins Publications, http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/starwars.html.Kember, Sarah and Joanna Zylinska. ‘Creative Media: Performance, Invention, Critique’, in Janis Jefferies,Maria Chatzichristodoulou and Rachel Zerihan (eds) Interfaces of Performance, Farnham:Ashgate, 2009, pp. 7-26.LaRosa, Chris and Ali Sandler. ‘I now pronounce you monetized: a YouTube video case study’,YouTube Biz blog, 30 July, 2009, http://ytbizblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/i-now-pronounce-youmonetized-youtube_30.html.Lovell, Nicholas. ‘Are Constantin Film the stupidest company in the entire world?’, Gamesbrief blog,21 April, 2010, http://www.gamesbrief.com/2010/04/are-constantin-film-the-stupidest-company-inthe-entire-world/.McDonald, Paul. ‘Digital Discords in the Online Media Economy: Advertising versus Content versusCopyright’, in Pelle Snickers and Patrick Vonderau (eds) The YouTube Reader, Stockholm: NationalLibrary of Sweden, 2009, pp. 387-405.Ross, Daniel. ‘The Cinematic Condition of the Politico-Philosophical Future’, Scan, http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=99.Sinnerbrink, Robert. ‘Culture Industry Redux: Stiegler and Derrida on Technics and Cultural Politcs’,Transformations 17 (2009), http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_17/article_05.shtml.Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth andGeorge Collins, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.Templeton, Brad. ‘YouTube makes statement on Content-ID takedowns’, Brad Ideas, 24 April, 2010,http://ideas.4brad.com/youtube-makes-statement-content-id-takedowns.Van Buskirk, Eliot. ‘YouTube Search-and-Delete Code Makes Money for Rights-Holders’, Wired, 21August, 2009, http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/how-copyright-holders-profit-from-infringement-on-youtube.Willett, Rebekah. ‘Parodic Practices: Amateur Spoofs on Video sharing Sites’, in David Buckinghamand Rebekah Willett (eds) Video Cultures: Media Technology and Everyday Creativity, Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 115-132.Zack, Shenaz. ‘Content ID and Fair use’, Broadcasting Ourselves blog, 22 April, 2010, http://youtubeglobal.blogspot.com/2010/04/content-id-and-fair-use.html.

234 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches235Cultural Analytics at Work: The 2008U.S. Presidential Online Video AdsTara ZepelNote: hi-res color versions of the visualizations in this article, as well as a number of additionalvisualizations related to this study are available at: lab.softwarestudies.com/2010/12/2008-uspresidential-campaign-ads.htmlCulture comes in the form of data.Data, data, data. We have lots of it. Today’s techno-cultural landscape is characterized bya steep increase in the amounts of data captured, processed, archived and generated. Notonly have the cultural storehouses of old gone digital, thereby creating a vast global databaseof existing cultural artifacts, we are constantly generating new cultural artifacts – culturalartifacts born digitally, in the form of data. Our global cultural database is exploding, and onecatalyst for this explosion is the evolving medium of online video. This subset of the culturaldatabase, which has been growing rapidly since 2005, has become a field of increasing criticalcuriosity alongside its expanding significance for artistic, social and political use. 1 In whatfollows, I will be proposing a research methodology appropriate to the scale and potential impactof online video. Over the past two years, the Software Studies Initiative at the Universityof California, San Diego (UCSD) has been developing Cultural Analytics, 2 a new methodologyfor researching and teaching visual and interactive media. As a member of this initiative, Iexplore how this methodology might apply to the analysis of online video. To illustrate onepotential application, I turn to a specific set of video clips used as advertisements during the2008 U.S. presidential campaign.During their campaigns, both Barack Obama and John McCain hosted their own YouTubechannels, and used the online video portals to showcase speeches, interviews, commercialsand debates. The adoption of this new medium as a political communication tool provides aunique and timely opportunity for exploring the cultural implications of online video: for example,for the way we understand form and visual design, and for the way visual rhetoric workson the socio-political scale of the internet. The preliminary analysis that follows looks at therole online video had to play in the campaigns by way of revealing differences and patternsin visual form, through two comparisons: 1) between advertisements originally designed fortelevision and for web broadcast and 2) between advertisements for Obama and for McCain.1. Examples of this increasing critical curiosity include numerous web and blog commentaries,academic and industry organized conferences and a growing list of recent publications: VideoVortex Reader (2008), YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (2009), The YouTubeReader (2010) and Watching YouTube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People (2010).2. http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/09/cultural-analytics.html.The Data-ImageThe millions of users creating, sharing, viewing, tagging and commenting on video through amultitude of online video sharing and social networking sites results in what can justifiably betermed a territory of online video data. Like much of the data in our digital cultural database,this data comes encoded in a form defined by the cycle of cultural production and consumptionthat characterizes contemporary social and technological infrastructure. We can think ofthis visual manifestation of data form as the data-image. The encoding process for the dataimageis collective and dynamic. If offline moving-image content, both analogue and digital,engenders culture through the viewer’s reception of the medium, then online moving-imagecontent propagates culture through the user’s direct interaction with the image and, becausethe image is in the form of data, through the user’s direct interaction with data.The story of the data-image doesn’t end there. Based on this interaction, the web’s participatoryarchitecture builds metadata into the content of the image. As techno-doubters andtechno-utopists alike have pointed out, the ability of viewer reception to affect the trajectory ofcultural content is, in and of itself, nothing new. It is not that an ancestral version of the dataimagewas not possible in the age of offline media. What is unique to the cultural experienceof online video production and consumption is the frequency of transformation. Becauseonline media interaction and dissemination is literally written into the media content and canbe quantitatively measured, the form that online media takes can assume infinitely moreiterations, and this form is selected for and transformed at the pace of fibre-optic cables. Thisrevs up both the speed and scale at which media interaction and form can lead to culturalideas, flows and stylistic preferences.Online Video: The Challenge of ‘Watching’ the NetworkThe availability of this amount of data, and of data that feeds upon itself, generates a repositoryof image-based cultural material unparalleled in size, and potential relations. This bodyof material proves challenging for our standard 19th and 20th century ways of representingand understanding culture, which typically involve the methods of close reading and/or comparativequalitative analysis of a relatively small sample set. Using these methods, how couldwe even begin to explore the type of cultural innovation associated with online video, whichinvolves hundreds of billions – and soon trillions – of objects and histories, linked together ona global scale? Take the following statistic: as of May 2010, 24 hours of video are uploaded toYouTube every minute and, taken as a whole, the global community of users watch over twobillion videos per day. 3 Any individual scholar, group of scholars, or even entire universitiesor think tanks, cannot possibly view all this material, parse it, or draw insightful conclusionsabout the relationships constituted by it based on anything but sheer intuition. Computers can.Currently, many realms of scientific and social inquiry have embraced this solution. Thesciences, business and government all rely on computer-based processing and analysis toexplore similarly large datasets. The developing fields of information visualization, scientificvisualization, and visual analytics are the outgrowths of computerized methods of analysis.3. http://www.youtube.com/t/fact_sheet, accessed September 25, 2010.

236 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches237The commonality between these methods resides in the technique of visualization. Becauseof the breadth of its application and use, the term visualization eludes exact definition independentof context; in general, however, the visualization of large datasets involves mappingdata onto a visual display for the purposes of discovering and/or communicating data structure.Thus, visualization holds tremendous aesthetic and cognitive possibilities for uncoveringpatterns and understanding relationships.The arts and humanities have, however, begun to catch on. In the interdisciplinary field ofdigital humanities, people are using computer power to mine, process and represent largequantities of data. However, the cultural content selected for analysis is usually canonicaltexts: those deemed influential enough to be worthy of further investigating the rules andquestions driven by ex post facto historical assessment. History is not objective. Moreover,very rarely does this cultural data excavation involve images, let alone video, and very rarelydoes it delve into the wealth of contemporary cultural material.Companies such as Amazon, Google and Neilsen do capture and visualize a subset of theexploding cultural database – data based on use. Amazon showcases this data in preferencelists and recommendations, Google in the graphs and links found on Google Trends,and Neilsen in information available through BlogPulse. YouTube also has its version in thepull-down menu that is placed next to the view count. While these efforts are important andnecessary for understanding the cultural content on the web, they stop short of pairing thisreception-based data with data inherent to the characteristics and form of the content itself.If online video constitutes a new visual medium, might it not make sense to include the visualform of this medium within the analysis of data?One reason for the absence of a broad scale cultural or stylistic analysis of new media contentmight be our assumptions about what it means to reflect upon the present. Currently availablemethodologies for arriving at cultural or aesthetic theory make it difficult to know whether itis feasible to cultivate a critical theory of cultural developments as they occur in real time. 4The negative response centres on the argument that we need perspective to be critical, andthat perspective necessitates temporal distance. I would call this argument opinion. Culture ischanging, and the mechanisms of perception and analysis are changing with it. Why wait untila particular cultural form has played out, and then attempt retrospectively to fit cultural changeinto tidy and often arbitrary forms of classification? Why not embrace the variety and continuityof the present? And why, when cultural content and dynamics are so intimately tied to theresidues of our interaction, should we wait to achieve a ‘situational awareness’ of our present,and by extension our future? How do we begin to explore, conceptualize, and reflect upon, inreal-time, the artifacts and interactions that comprise today’s techno-cultural datascape?Welcome to Cultural Analytics.4. Geert Lovink, ‘The Art of Watching Databases – Introduction to the Video Vortex Reader’, in GeertLovink and Sabine Niederer (eds) Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam:Institute of Network Cultures, 2008, p. 9.Cultural Analytics as Cultural ExplorationAs a methodology, Cultural Analytics offers a new paradigm for cultural analysis and informationvisualization. This paradigm matches the data-explosion of networked and ubiquitouscultural creation with the processing power of computers. This paradigm brings the culturalexploration of comparably large datasets in line with the techniques and methods of the mostdata-intensive scientific and business inquiries. This paradigm focuses on real-time visualizationsof data that dare to ask challenging theoretical questions about the form and trajectoryof current cultural artifacts, dynamics and flows.Elements: Defining the Cultural Analytics MethodologyCultural Analytics feeds off today’s techno-cultural landscape. It borrows from methods for thequantification and analysis of data: statistical data analysis, information graphics, informationvisualization, scientific visualization and computer simulation. However, the following characteristicsdistinguish the cultural analytics paradigm from these related methodologies: 51) Exploring and visualizing the global dynamics and flow of cultural form, ideas and changeacross multiple scales and on all possible dimensions. Such an approach is particularlyrelevant, if not necessary, in an era when cultural change, on global and local scales,occurs rapidly and through a complex network of technological and social mechanisms.2) The use of very large datasets currently available on the web and/or in digital form.3) A focus on visual and interactive media data including, but not limited to, film, animation,video games, comic, publication layout and design and websites.4) A focus on contemporary cultural data and understanding the present with an eye towardsthe future. In other words, developing a real-time ‘situational awareness’ for ‘culturalanalysts’.5) The use of all of the above to expand the boundaries of current cultural analysis, andinvestigate challenging theoretical questions with aesthetic, social and political implicationsfor today and the future.A Productive Pairing: Cultural Analytics and Online VideoWe can map each of the above traits of Cultural Analytics onto the territory of online videoin the following way.1) Online video proliferates. It is a cultural form based on the flow and sharing of ideasacross a global network. Henry Jenkins grounds this capacity of online media in theease of ‘spreadibility’. 6 Jenkins writes that ‘It is through this process of spreading that5. For a more detailed explanation of these traits as well as other characteristics of CulturalAnalytics see Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, ‘Cultural Analytics: white paper’, (May2007, latest update November 2008), http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/09/cultural-analytics.html.6. The term ‘spreadibility’, which refers to Jenkins’ concept of ‘spreadible media’ is borrowedfrom Jean Burgess, ‘“All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong to Us?” Viral Video, YouTube and theDynamics of Participatory Culture’, in Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds) Video VortexReader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008, p. 102.

238 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches239the content gains greater resonance in the culture, taking on new meanings, finding newaudiences, attracting new markets, and generating new values’. 7 ‘Spreadibility’ may alsodrive changes to cultural form. Cultural Analytics can map this and give us the visuallanguage to open discussions about contemporary cultural change.2) The staggering amount of data available on leading online video sharing websites providesthe very large dataset. Yet, these large datasets are not always freely or easilyaccessible. YouTube Insight, a self-service analytics tool, does provide detailed viewingstatistics, but this data is only available to YouTube users for the videos they have uploaded.Obtaining video shared by others is equally difficult. YouTube, Vimeo, Tudou andYouku all prevent the direct download of files. To obtain content data, third-party toolsare necessary. Keepvid and Savevid, which allow you to download and save videos fromvideo sharing and streaming sites, are two of the most popular. However, video sharingsites often block this software, along with any customized scraping scripts.Copyright and licensing issues also pose difficulties. What content can be shared andby whom? How long is this content allowed to remain on video sharing sites? Who canaccess the associated data? An additional question is whether obtaining and distributingcontent as a form of data analysis falls within the realm of fair use. These are bugsfor Cultural Analytics to work out. Fortunately, Cultural Analytics is philosophically opensource and doesn’t resign itself to using easily available data. It looks for interesting data.3) Online video is visual data, making it particularly appropriate material for measurementby computer automated image analysis that then visualizes cultural patterns and change.4) Online video is today’s real-time cultural data. Online video sharing sites are updatedin real-time, on a potentially global scale. Exploring this growth is a key first step to anycomprehension or analysis of the continuously unfolding present.5) What might be the challenging theoretical questions posed by new cultural medium ofonline video? Well, these are what Cultural Analytics provides the opportunity to explore.Techniques: How to do Cultural AnalyticsObtain a large body of cultural data. Clean data is important. Now, you can begin the processof ‘analytic browsing’ and, I would add, analytic insight – that is, the kind of explorationand awareness that leads to understanding. The techniques for doing Cultural Analytics canbe divided into two categories: 8 direct visualization and digital image analysis alongside visualizationof content.The dataset can be directly visualized, without additional computational analysis, by samplingor re-mapping existing visual data and its accompanying metadata – creation date,length of clip, keywords, category and so on. For example, if we apply this method to onlinevideo, we might take all the clips posted to YouTube on a given day and graphically organizethem according to length, location, channel, and so on. Or, we might take a representationof the actual media content in the form of sampled frame, and re-order them to visualizecontent in a new or distilled form (a montage of all frames, a series of frame slices, or asingle frame summary of regularly sampled frames). 9 Figure 1 shows diagrams of two directvisualization techniques that are useful for analyzing video. Although these techniques mayappear very simple, their ability to consolidate potentially hours of video content into a singleimage often leads to fruitful and original discoveries that may have remained hidden if videoclips are only viewed one frame at a time, in sequential form.FIGURE 1. Direct Visualization Techniques for Video.Figure 1a. Montage Technique.This technique involves sampling framesfrom a video clip and arranging these framesin a rectangular grid according to their originalsequence. In this diagram, each numberedsquare represents a hypothetical framesampled from a video. (The video on the lefthas 20 sampled frames; the video on the righthas 17). Such re-mapping allows you to seethe patterns in form and content acrossa video’s entire duration in a single glance.This technique is particularly useful forcomparing multiple videos at once.Figure 1b. ‘Summary Image’ Technique.This technique involves sampling framesfrom a video clip and then superimposingthese frames on top of each other tocreate a single ‘summary image’. If visualelements remain clearly discernible withinthe summary image, this means that theystayed in the same position for a significantportion of the clip. If the summary imageappears uniformly blurred in color andtexture, this is a likely indication thatthe visual elements in the original videoconstantly moved or changed.Alternatively, we can add the step of digital image analysis and visualize the results alongsidethe media content. This allows us to explore the patterns in videos along potentially hundredsof visual dimensions: brightness, saturation, color and pixel difference between frames arejust a few variables that are relevant to a study of online video. Imagine a visualization thatreveals whether any of these measures change over the duration of a clip, or the duration ofsuccessive video responses to a video clip, or between content posted by professionals andby amateurs? The list of what such visualizations hold the potential to reveal is as endless asthe possible combination of visual characteristics.7. Henry Jenkins, ‘Slash Me, Mash Me, Spread Me...’, Confessions of an Aca/Fan, Henry JenkinsWeblog, 24 April, 2007, http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/04/slash_me_mash_me_but_please_sp.html.8. Lev Manovich, ‘Visualization Methods for Media Studies’, in Oxford Handbook of Sound andImage in Digital Media, (ed.) Carol Vernallis (forthcoming).9. Brendan Dawes’ Cinema Redux (2004) is an example of the montage method of directvisualization whereby an entire film is distilled down to a single image. See: http://processing.org/exhibition/works/redux/index.html.

240 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches241A Sample Set: Using Culture Analytics to Re-present 2008 U.S. PresidentialCampaign AdsThe pilot study chosen to test a Cultural Analytic approach to online video explores a smallsample set, composed of advertisements produced by the Barack Obama and John McCaincampaigns during the 2008 U.S. presidential race (see Table 1). 10TABLE 1. Sample Set of 2008 U.S. Presidential Campaign Ads.analyse vast amounts of data, it makes sense to play small, and scale up should the explorationof data prove interesting. It does.The Context of the 2008 U.S. Presidential CampaignsTo say that the 2008 presidential campaign was an historic one is an understatement. Notonly did the end result of electing the nation’s first African American president change thegame of American presidential politics, the build-up was equally revolutionary: the 2008election cycle marked the first time both candidates were sitting U.S. senators; the longestcampaign with the greatest gap between nominations and primaries; a record number ofvotes cast (131.2 million); 12 and the most expensive campaign in U.S. presidential history,with $745.7 million spent by Obama and $350.1 million spent by McCain. 13Equally notable was the candidates’ use of the internet and Web 2.0 technologies. Althoughboth Obama and McCain relied on today’s wired and networked landscape to organize, advertiseand communicate with their constituents, the Obama campaign is seen as the overallwinner, with impressive results. At the 2008 Web 2.0 Summit shortly following the Novemberelections, Arianna Huffington went as far as to assert that, ‘Were it not for the Internet, BarackObama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not havebeen the nominee’. 14Title and URLs for each of the 12 campaign ads analysed. Eight ads (four Obama and four McCain) were aired ontelevision and distributed on the web. Four ads (two Obama and two McCain) were aired exclusively online. All adsin the sample were officially produced and made available by the campaigns with the exception of D6, which wasproduced by the Democratic National Committee.The videos in the set include eight advertisements produced for television and also disseminatedon the web, and four advertisements produced solely to be aired on the web.As a group, the clips run for a total of 413 seconds, and sampled at 12 fps, provided 4,960frames for analysis. Since the goal of the study was to test the Cultural Analytics methodswhen applied to online video, the dataset is preliminary in size and in exploration, and thusnot yet scaled to the magnitude of the larger datasets that characterize more developed CulturalAnalytics projects 11 or the full potential of what the approach has to offer an analysis ofthe 2008 U.S. presidential campaign ads. However, before beginning to gather, process and10. Video clips of all advertisements in the sample are available on YouTube at the specified URLs.Further information including credits, original airdate and transcripts is available from The LivingRoom Candidate, http://www.livingroomcandidate.org, an online archive of presidential campaigncommercials 1952-2008 organized by the Museum of the Moving Image.11. See the Software Studies website, softwarestudies.com and Flickr stream, http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis, for examples of projects with significantly larger datasets (up to one millionindividual images) and more in-depth statistical analysis.The implications for the way that presidential campaigns are run are profound. In 2008, theweb became the complementary medium to broadcast television for political advertising.Since the middle of the 20th century, broadcast media had been the major factor at playin the media campaigns of the respective parties. 15 Until 2008, broadcast political advertisementshad no significant online presence in any prior U.S. presidential campaigns forobvious reasons: YouTube and other online video sharing sites simply weren’t around yet.The introduction of online video to the political campaign advertising repertoire in the 2008presidential elections opened up a vast arena for communicating and receiving political messages.For one, using online video for advertising is cost-effective. Advertisements designedfor broadcast on television can also be posted to the web and thus aired to a potentiallylarger portion of the population for a greater length of time. Advertisements can also bedesigned purely for web distribution, which cuts expenses significantly. The official materialcreated for the Obama campaign that was posted on YouTube was viewed for a total of 14.512. Federal Election Commission, ‘2008 Official Presidential General Election Results’, 4 November,2008, http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2008/federalelections2008.shtml.13. Federal Election Commission, ‘Overview of Presidential Financial Activity 1996 - 2008’, 2008Presidential Campaign Financial Activity Summarized, Press Release, 8 June, 2009, http://www.fec.gov/press/press2009/20090608PresStat.shtml.14. Claire Miller, ‘How Obama’s Internet Campaign Changed Politics’, NY Times Bits blog, 7November, 2008, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/how-obamas-internet-campaignchanged-politics.15. Lynda Lee Kaid, ‘Videostyle in the 2008 Presidential Advertising’, in Robert Denton and RobertE. Denton Jr. (eds) The 2008 Presidential Campaign: A Communication Perspective, Plymouth,United Kingdom: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009, p. 209.

242 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches243million hours. To buy this much time for broadcast on television would cost $47 million. 16On YouTube, this expense is reduced to production costs, plus any costs for storage andstreaming, which are currently minimal in comparison. It is worth noting that the use of onlinevideo also enables mass distribution of unofficial campaign material or negative advertisingproduced by the public. For the purposes of this sample study, however, we will be interestedonly in the official content created for the campaigns.FIGURE 2. Comparison of Visual Change in Obama and McCain Video Ads.Given the historical importance of broadcast advertising as a communication tool in presidentialcampaigns, and the noted innovation of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaigns inembracing the web as a medium of communication, what are the aesthetic, cultural andpolitical affects/effects of the use of online video for political advertising? How is culturalchange manifest in online video – for example, does the use of online video for political advertisementresult in changes to video style? Does it alter visual and/or political rhetoric? Whatabout practices of reception? We can put forward hypothetical responses to these questions.Sometimes we can even ‘sense’ them. Cultural Analytics lets us trace and comprehend them.Sample Set VisualizationsWhen we watch a political advertisement, we watch a series of moving image frames thatchange over the course of the video’s duration. Each frame has a set of unique visual characteristicsthat we parse in succession, but always one frame at a time. Political remix videosallow us to see this succession in an alternate, or subverted, order. Yet, even if we change theorder of succession, we still have no way to see the precise patterns in visual characteristicsas they extend temporally over the duration of the clip. Perhaps we can mentally constructthis representation for one 30 second commercial, but what if we want to compare suchpatterns across multiple commercials? The line graphs in Figure 2 offer one possible wayof achieving this by visualizing simple but effective representations of a dimension of videothat we can call ‘visual change’. This includes the types of change commonly discussed infilm and video production and theory, such as camera movement, shot types, and other cinematictechniques, as well as the graphical changes that became commonplace in the 1990swith the adoption of motion graphics and compositing software such as Adobe After Effects.Frame difference line graphs for each of the 12 ads in the sample set.x-axis: frame numberx-axis: pixel difference between consecutive framesUsing digital image analysis and simple software, we can measure the pixel differencebetween two consecutive frames, where pixel difference is a function of how many pixelschange from one frame to another. The measurement can then be plotted in the form of aline that, like a seismograph printout, graphically displays the rhythm of visual change overtime. A large spike marks a greater magnitude of difference between two frames and is alikely indicator of pronounced movement across a frame. This difference might correspondto a cut, a movement of the camera, characters, animated text, or graphics, or any othervariety of visual change. Viewing these frame difference line graphs as a group allows us tosee interesting broader patterns, namely:1) Web commercials are more static than commercials made for television. As the linegraphs immediately reveal, the web commercials have a lower frequency and magnitudeof visual change. 172) McCain’s television ads are more visually dynamic. The line graphs for McCain’s televisionads spike more often and with greater intensity than those produced by the Obamacampaign.16. Miller, ‘How Obama’s Internet Campaign Changed Politics’.17. ‘Summary images’ are not included here but can be accessed through the Flickr set referencedin note 11 of this article.

244 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches245These two levels of visual difference discovered in the data appear in other dimensions ofvideo style that, unlike movement, may be a bit more difficult to intuitively perceive whenwatching a moving image. Since images can be measured by a computer on hundreds ofdifferent visual characteristics, we can combine any two of these dimensions to create a kindof ‘image map’ – a 2D visualization that incorporates a combination of these measurementsto diagrammatically represent the visual form of the image(s) analysed. Figures 3 and 4 showimage maps that take regularly sampled frames (at 12 fps) from all of the ads and representthem together on two dimensions.In Figure 3, the mean (average) grayscale values of all video frames are mapped against thestandard deviation of these values. In other words, the x-axis represents the average brightnessof an image, while the y-axis represents the range of all grey tones in an image, so thateach point on the graph marks the intersection of these two measurements. Again, we canuse simple digital image analysis to measure these visual characteristics, but what can acomparison of the numbers reveal?The range of a binary grayscale is 0-255 where 0 is pure black, 255 is pure white and all valuesin-between are different intensities, or shades of grey. The further to the right of the graphFIGURE 3. ‘Image Map’ Comparison of Web and TV Video ads.Figure 3a.2008 U.S. PresidentialTV Ads.x-axis: A mean for all pixels’grayscale values in singleframe.y-axis: A mean of standarddeviation of pixels’grayscale values in singleframe.FIGURE 4. ‘Image Map’ Comparison of Obama and McCain TV Ads.Figure 4a.2008 Obama TV Ads.x-axis: A mean for all pixels’grayscale values in singleframe.y-axis: A mean of standarddeviation of pixels’grayscale values in singleframe.Figure 3b.2008 U.S. PresidentialWeb Ads.x-axis: A mean for all pixels’grayscale values in singleframe.y-axis: A mean of standarddeviation of pixels’grayscale values in singleframe.Figure 4b.2008 McCain TV Ads.x-axis: A mean for all pixels’grayscale values in singleframe.y-axis: A mean of standarddeviation of pixels’grayscale values in singleframe.

246 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches247a frame falls, the lighter the average value of the pixels comprising the image. Standard deviation– the value that dictates where a point falls on the vertical dimension in these graphs– is simply a measure of variability that shows how different a value is from the average. So,those data points towards the bottom of the graph could be said to refer to frames that havefairly typical (or expected) grayscale values whereas those data points at the top of the graphrefer to frames where the intensity is further removed from the norm. Immediately, we noticea difference between Obama and McCain, and between web and television, as to where theframes fall along both the horizontal and vertical dimension. The distribution of frames drawnfrom television advertisements falls close to a clear trend line. There seems to be some normativecombination of mean grayscale value and standard deviation that characterizes theads designed for television broadcast. The web advertisements, however, are scattered, withno apparent core. Perhaps this is an indication that political campaign web ads do not yethave a normative visual language? This is not a hypothesis that can be tested with the smallsample set gathered for the purposes of this pilot project, but it is certainly worth looking into.Analysis using the techniques of Cultural Analytics can lead us to ask questions that aresometimes old, sometimes new, and sometimes reveal the old in a new light. The distributionof frames drawn from the television advertisements – that is, advertisements with a history ofvisual development – have a distinct core. There seems to be a pattern to the numbers. Tomake the visual characteristics behind these numbers a little easier to see, we can add theframes being analysed directly into the graph.Figure 4 takes the image analysis data used in Fig. 3a to graph a comparison between Mc-Cain and Obama TV ads, breaks the dataset into two visualizations, and maps the imagecontent with the analysis. The variance in visual style becomes almost immediately perceptible.The frame cluster in the top right corner of the graphs depicting McCain’s television advertisementscorresponds to uncharacteristically white frames that deviate significantly fromthe representative mean value characteristic of the majority of all frames (both Obama andMcCain) that comprise the dataset. Here again, Cultural Analytics leads us to further avenuesfor exploration. What other visual dimensions, besides mean grayscale value and standarddeviation, might contribute to the strong core we observe in the television-based campaignadvertisements? Brightness? Color? Saturation? And what exactly is unique about this outlyingsubset of frames that fall at the extreme edges of this core?What Cultural Analytics Tells Us About the 2008 U.S. Presidential Campaign AdsNotice that the patterns that continue to emerge from the visualizations are related. If wecompare patterns across a larger number of visual characteristics and condense our imageanalysis to sample-wide averages (Fig. 5 – 6), keeping in mind the comparatively detailedexplorations discussed thus far, we can observe general trends in the visual form of the campaignadvertisements across multiple dimensions of measurement:1) While all campaign ads in the sample set were posted and distributed on the web, thoseads designed for television broadcast are visually different than ads designed for webbroadcast across a number of visual dimensions.If the internet was indeed a revolutionary force in the 2008 U.S. presidential elections, thenwe might expect to see this reflected in the visual design of campaign advertising and communication.As the numbers reveal, we do. For all but one of the six visual characteristicsrepresented in Figure 5, there is a measurable difference between television and web advertisements.However, the implications and parameters of the patterns that emerge from thedata may deviate from our expectations about how the developing medium of online videoshould look and function. The pattern revealed – that web-based advertisements possessa quieter and more conservative visual language that those designed for television – is nota trend we would expect from the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign’s innovative use of anonline moving-image medium.2) Comparing the television advertisements for both candidates leads to a similarly counterintuitiveobservation: McCain’s TV ads are more visually aggressive and radical in visuallanguage than Obama’s.FIGURE 5. Visual Dimension Averages for 2008 U.S. Presidential Campaign Ads(TV vs. Web).FIGURE 6. Visual Dimension Averages for 2008 U.S. Presidential Campaign TV Ads(Obama vs. McCain).

248 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches249Here again, the results of digital image analysis challenge our prior assumptions. Based onthe political rhetoric, public opinion and party lines surrounding the candidates, we mightexpect that the media team for Obama, the younger and ostensibly more ‘dynamic’ candidate,might design commercial advertisements that showcase this dynamism. Yet, the visualizationsI have presented indicate otherwise. At least for the small-scale sample set of thisstudy, John McCain’s television advertisements are comparatively more visually radical thanObama’s. Could McCain be putting forward a ‘maverick’ political message in response toObama’s message of ‘change?’ Why is this pattern visible in advertisements produced fortelevision and not those produced for the web? If we’re interested in a real-time critical theoryof online video, these questions are worth pursuing.These observations are based on visualizations that explore just a few of many possible dimensionsof the visual language available for political video advertisements. Analysing differentcharacteristics, and combinations of these characteristics, may reveal different degreesof disparity. Furthermore, a more in-depth analysis of a larger dataset across a longer era oftime may offer further insight into the changing form of the broadcast campaign advertisement.Fortunately, Cultural Analytics scales up to the macro-level. Imagine visualizing all U.S.presidential campaign advertisements, from their birth during the 1952 Eisenhower vs. Trumanpresidential race up until the present, and watching the unfolding of a media form overdecades. Imagine extending this analysis beyond a single election cycle, so as to compareand observe how the introduction of an online video medium might have changed the visuallanguage of political campaign advertisements. Imagine incorporating the unofficial onlineadvertisements and video responses into the dataset. Imagine leaving the U.S. and analysingpolitical campaign ads as they venture into the new web medium on a global scale.ReferencesBurgess, Jean. ‘“All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong to Us?” Viral Video, YouTube and the Dynamicsof Participatory Culture’, in Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds) Video Vortex Reader:Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008, pp. 101-110,Federal Election Commission. ‘2008 Official Presidential General Election Results’, 4 November,2008, http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2008/federalelections2008.shtml.Federal Election Commission. ‘Overview of Presidential Financial Activity 1996 - 2008’, 2008 PresidentialCampaign Financial Activity Summarized, Press Release, 8 June, 2009, http://www.fec.gov/press/press2009/20090608PresStat.shtml.Jenkins, Henry. ‘Slash Me, Mash Me, Spread Me...’, Confessions of an Aca/Fan, Henry Jenkins blog,24 April, 2007, http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/04/slash_me_mash_me_but_please_sp.html.Kaid, Lynda Lee. ‘Videostyle in the 2008 Presidential Advertising’, in Robert Denton and Robert E.Denton Jr. (eds) The 2008 Presidential Campaign: A Communication Perspective, Plymouth,United Kingdom: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009, pp. 209-227.Lovink, Geert. ‘The Art of Watching Databases – Introduction to the Video Vortex Reader’, in GeertLovink and Sabine Niederer (eds) Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Instituteof Network Cultures, 2008, pp. 9-12.Manovich, Lev and Noah Wardrip-Fuin. ‘Cultural Analytics: white paper’, (May 2007, latest updateNovember 2008), http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/09/cultural-analytics.html.Manovich, Lev. ‘Visualization Methods for Media Studies’ in Carol Vernallis (ed.) Oxford Handbook ofSound and Image in Digital Media (forthcoming).Miller, Claire. ‘How Obama’s Internet Campaign Changed Politics’, NY Times Bits blog, 7 November,2008, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/how-obamas-internet-campaign-changed-politics.Such visualizations would allow us to explore cultural dynamics as it happens, in real-time.Cultural Analytics lets us observe, with the support of quantitative analysis, what characterizestoday’s campaign advertisements in relation to those of the past. With observation, we canthen ask: Does the visual style of web and television advertisements differ more significantlythan the style of campaign advertisements broadcast in different election years? Is the visualrhetoric of a campaign correlated to a candidate’s political leaning or to a given culture’svisual ideals? Does the visual language of political campaigns translate globally and if so,does it flow with shifts in global politics? Most importantly, Cultural Analytics has the potentialto help us ask these questions and even uncover new questions, which we may never haveotherwise thought to ask.All images, figures and tables appearing in this text are copyright of Software Studies Initiativeat University of California, San Diego, 2010.

252 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches253Jaromil: I think it’s because of the CPU power (central processing power) of the availabletechnology – computers were not so powerful and the majority of the GNU/LINUX communitywas still busy on the development of networking protocols and other less visible things. In2000, computers were enough to process network packets - and therefore operate broadcastingreflectors - but processing audio was way more expensive, without even mentioningvideo. Only institutions or companies could afford something like a Silicon Graphics and itsC compiler - those weren’t tools that an independent developer could have on his or her owndesk, just the support of a community of enthusiasts.So for me the reason is obviously that while technology became more advanced, processingpower also became more affordable, and it took time for it to happen. The moment a technologybecomes shared, democratized and made available to more people, a community candevelop. Since free software is about community development, without this democratizationof technology the work to develop software and the work to develop the community cannothappen. To me it’s a very clear pattern: as technology is more available for grassroots agency,community development follows.RSM: How do you see the role of the free and open source software community in the developmentof online video?Jaromil: I think something very interesting has been happening in the last years. Ten yearsago online video was a waste of bandwidth and wasn’t really available to everyone, so it wasless interesting - not many people wanted to experiment with it, just some could. One of themain reasons it is interesting today is that it finally has the potential to change the way weconsume and produce television. Free and open source in video is unlocking a lot of creativity,not just in making tools available, but also in making them customizable, breaking fixedschemes and, as we see it happening more often, enhancing possibilities for participation.What happens very often with modern technology is that we first have commercial implementationsrealized by those that actually see a business possibility there, that are capableof investing and expect an advantage from that. These investors will develop it faster andprovide a solution that will stay established for at least five to ten years.The difficulty comes when the long-term interest of such investments is effectively closing thepossibility for people to appropriate technology, to customize it for their own community, andto grow their own economy around it. This is how multinational monopolies actually lead toeconomic conglomerates that establish political control on standards. They tend to enclosetechnological progress while spreading its use among large masses, for instance, the case ofinternational corporations such as Adobe.The so-called ‘mega-corporations’ are often lobbying to close access to technology development,even on a governance level. For instance, stakeholders in codec 18 products try to18. Encoding and decoding algorithms for audio and video compression for instance, whose use isoften encumbered by software patents.influence the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) 19 to favour their closed technologies overopen options when deciding upon standards. The fact is that this attitude of ‘buying peoplein’, rather than coexisting with variety, doesn’t foster economic growth or quality in results.Often old and inappropriate, yet economically well-established monopolies, become tyrantsthat clog up innovation to perpetuate their own advantage, rather than playing in the interestof progress, and of the millions of consumers who could otherwise become producersthemselves.Within this context, online video has changed a lot in recent times because independentefforts nevertheless have come to exist and proliferate. The most significant one from 2000-2005 was lead by Chris Montgomery at Xiph.org a foundation based in Texas that developedthe Ogg/Vorbis 20 standard for audio, and Theora 21 for video, distributing it under a BSD(Berkeley Software Distribution) 22 license, which is basically free software. They providedthe possibility for small and medium hardware manufacturers to use free codecs inside theirproducts without paying royalties on patents to multinationals. They also unlocked the possibilityfor software artisans to develop independently and sell their work along licensingschemes like the GNU General Public License (GPL), 23 which encourages people to distributeand even sell software without having to pay for royalties or patents.Still, the video application panorama has space for more players, in particular those developingnew schemes of interaction when processing video. We saw some early lone cowboyefforts such as Heroine Warrior 24 who developed Cinerella, and then more software efforts:LiVes 25 developed by Salsaman; Open Movie Editor 26 by Richard Spindler; KDN Live andthe MLT multimedia framework (Media Lovin’ Toolkit) developed by Dan Dennedy and hiscrew. 27 I’m also personally involved in FreeJ, 28 which we’ve been developing since 2000 toprovide our community with a javascript environment to manipulate and stream video in realtime,and Frei0r, 29 a plugin framework for video effects that is already adopted by severalapplications on all major operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Apple/OS X and Windows.19. http://www.w3.org/.20. http://www.xiph.org/ogg/; http://www.vorbis.com/..21. http://www.theora.org/.22. http://www.freebsd.org/.23. GPL stands for ‘General Public License’ and is a free copyleft license for software and otherkinds of work created by the GNU Operating system. As stated on the GNU website, thefoundations of a GPL license are: ‘the freedom to use the software for any purpose; the freedomto change the software to suit your needs; the freedom to share the software with your friendsand neighbors; and the freedom to share the changes you make’. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html.24. http://heroinewarrior.com/.25. http://lives.sourceforge.net/.26. http://www.openmovieeditor.org/.27. http://www.piksel.org/frei0r.28. http://freej.org/.29. http://frei0r.dyne.org.

256 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches257and appropriated by communities of enthusiasts. Unfortunately most industry manufacturerscurrently see their own gain through limiting the possibilities of enthusiast communities toadapt their devices, and this I believe is a big mistake that will cost them the market in thelong term.As of today we can already find some positive trends in the direction of opening hardware.Many people buy certain devices because ‘they can be hacked’ and thus, can have moredone with them. Speaking for one, I wouldn’t have been able to develop the SyncStarter 32while working at NIMk without having a device on the market based on GNU/Linux that couldbe reprogrammed. The ability to do this made everyone happy: me, because I was able to deploymy skills and adapt the device for the particular needs of my employer; and the companythat produced it, because they included a GNU/Linux operating system on the device for free,instead of having to pay for years of development tailored to a single product.RSM: In your understanding, experience and practice as an active member of the free andopen source software community, can you describe what you feel are the over-all main contributionsthe community has offered, and continues to offer, to online video?Jaromil: Here, I consider the contributions as a set of characteristics that are fundamental tothe politics and philosophy of the free and open source software:InteroperabilityThis is an approach to problem solving that the free and open source movement, as we knowit today, has inherited from the so-called UNIX philosophy: to solve a big problem don’t builda big solution, but break it down into pieces, and try to formulate a pattern language that suitsboth the description of the problem and that of the solution. By realizing a diverse set of toolsthat will inter-operate to reach the final goal it will be possible, later in time, to reuse this effortand recombine it to reach more analogous goals. Such an approach produces tools that canbe specialized to solve simple tasks, but that are also generic enough to be combined in aset of diverse tools to reach more articulated solutions, without generating the need for newsoftware or hardware.Avoid wasteThanks to its free and open source nature, new software can easily adapt and reuse what hasalready been created and perfected. For instance, video software like LiVES 33 uses imagemanipulation tools from the ‘ancient’ ImageMagick 34 framework on single video frames, as ifthey were single images to be edited. This approach has enabled a non-linear video-editingprogram to use algorithms that were previously made and perfected over decades for photography,for their own purpose. In this way, LiVES has made hundreds of high quality effectsfrom the tradition of digital photographic manipulation available to the users of a video-editingprogram.Human resourcesMore than expensive hardware and support contracts with foreign helpdesks, free and opensource licenses on software allow competence to be valued over infrastructure. This leadsto the employment of local people able to adapt technology to local needs, rather than lettingthe global market adapt local needs to its offer. This is something I can relate to with myown position at NIMk, as can many other researchers and developers working inside similarorganizations that are on the edge of innovation: we are constantly in need of being able toadapt our output to new ideas.TransparencyEspecially in the field of protocol design, free and open source research and developmentis leading to increased transparency in the field of codecs and transport video formats. Freesoftware projects provide a reference for transports and video codecs that are free to reuse,while an increasing amount of hardware devices are supporting these formats, because theyare convenient and efficient. The result is that encoding and playback of media doesn’t dependon a specific manufacturer or software, finally making it possible to seamlessly movefiles around without the need for reconversion.Peer reviewThis is a common situation for free and open source projects, and is also found in otherfields particularly where precision and specialization is necessary like in scientific research.Through fostering this kind of review practice, the free and open source community providesspace to peer review the inner mechanisms (which in the case of video would be a compressionor filtering algorithm for example), and if necessary, modify and adapt them to specificneeds or more advanced hardware.32. Syncstarter is a free and open source software used to sync the playback of video installationsthat require multiple videos on multiple screens. http://www.nimk.nl/syncstarter.33. http://lives.sourceforge.net/.34. http://www.imagemagick.org.

260 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches261In 1997, a net.radio workshop lead by E-Lab, nowadays RIXC, 14 took place during a meetingcalled Polar Circuit (Tornio/Finland). The workshop introduced a commercial software calledReal Producer, for which no Free/Libre alternative was available at the time. Anyhow, at thevery least, the software allowed audio to be sent across the network. It was simple to operate,requiring only 56kbps of bandwidth to activate an ‘on air’ signal, and share a sound eventover the internet in real-time, between one or two listeners. You might call it intimate media,but this approach proved that the positions of sender and receiver were interchangeable,breaking apart all established communication or media production models. The software wasused by people from Riga to trace transcultural and artistic links with colleagues in Austria,the U.K, and New Zealand, among others.At the end of 2004 and during 2005, the usual hackitectura suspects co-organized madiaq 22and fadaiat. Following both events from a remote location was easy, as it was with a fewhack-meetings that took place in Italy and Spain. All this led us to take steps towards buildinga similar infrastructure enabling the development of hacklabs, social centres, independentnetworks and open source software. This was to be done for, and from, the hemisphericalsouth from the hand of the already present LUG (Linux User Groups) across the continent.In 1999, Orang, or the Open Radio Network Group, hosted live streaming from Paradiso(Amsterdam/NL) during the N5M3, 15 (Next Five Minutes 3), a conference on the TacticalUse of Media. This was not just a spontaneous action, it was the beginning of an ambitiouseffort to build a worldwide archive of Sound Art and other related files. The database grewexponentially, but later disappeared – the server was reported to have been ‘hacked’, and itsinformation rendered unrecoverable. Among the many tactical media oriented people thattook part in the above-mentioned meeting was Raul Marroquin, a key operator who still workson the project DeHoeksteen.live 16 through Salto, a digital television station in Amsterdam.Elsewhere on the internet, he is cutting across a variety of protocols, from http, SecondLifeand Skype to Twitter, quik and IRC. His feverish rush for making live programs has dwelt incables and improvised studios for decades.In 2003, Okupa Futura (Asturias/Spain) received first-hand exposure to open source codefor streaming media. An event organized by Hackitectura 17 used a ‘squatted’ architecture, aswe were hosted by the multiple potentialities of a distributed T.A.Z, 18 crossing networks, andheading from immediatism 19 to immediacy. 20 The Placard 21 festival operates in a similar veinand spirit. Back in 2004 (Mulhouse/France) sound streams met video flows. This was the firsttime we had a stable feed using a GNU/Linux laptop running Gentoo, plus the well-knownunstable software Pd (a.k.a PureData), which had just recently integrated video modules toencode video/audio packets. It took a good while to compile and install such objects, but wesucceeded on both the tech and party fronts. The core infrastructure was ready.14. http://rixc.lv/; http://rixc.lv/net.art.lv/index.php?obj_id=1029&kat_id=215 =.15. http://www.n5m.org/n5m3/.16. http://dehoeksteen.live.nu/.17. http://mcs.hackitectura.net/tiki-index.php.18. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone.19. ‘Immediatism is a political philosophy embracing the virtues of immediate social interactions withpeople as a means of countering the antisocial consequences of consumerist capitalism’. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immediatism.20. ‘Immediacy is a philosophical concept related to time and temporal perspectives, both visual,cognitive. Considerations of immediacy reflect on how we experience the world and what realityis’. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immediacy_(philosophy).21. http://leplacard.org/.Screenshot of FLISOL.tv freej stream test.In 2006, we organized a variant of the Festival Internacional de Installacion de Software Libre.This effort was named FLISOL.tv, 23 and was documented via wikis. We also provided IRC(Internet Relay Chat) support to encourage everyone involved with the Latin American InstallFest to adopt and use software called freej. 24 This was provided by the hackers at dyne.org,who were always ready to implement new features. One such feature allowed the selectionof frame-rate so as to economize on bandwidth, which is crucial when one is behind a verylimited data transfer link. 25 Thanks to another netizen known as Chaser we were able to run22. http://mcs.hackitectura.net/tiki-index.php?page=MAPA:+cartografiando+el+territorio+madiaq.23. http://www.flisol.info/FlisolTv.24. http://freej.org/, this was the one line command to stream:freej /dev/video0 -s 320x240 -T 6 -V -1 -i.25. IRC chat with one of freej’s developers:[00:16] try latest svn for fps[00:16] freej -f ...[00:16] jaja! perfect![00:16] :)[00:16] but it doesn’t work with video[00:17] test it because I havn’t tested it yet :)[00:17] wait I have to commit[00:17] ahh its fine, we need just streams no video :)[00:17] no rush[00:17] im here helping a kid in colombia with his freej install[00:18] great :)[00:18] yeap, you will see, it will be a mad event..march 24

262 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches263embrace more participants and grow larger. Even today, in the days of Ubuntu, 28 we are notyet ready to be running and operating a Linux based system. A few years back, anyone usinga Macintosh was banned and bullied by the typical Linux evangelist. In the last few yearswe have seen Adobe Flash take over through a few not- worth-mentioning commercial platforms.In any case, this state of things is temporary, as HTML5 now allows embedding tagsfor and . Open source formats such as ogg/vorbis and ogg/theora, the samethat wikimedia or archive.org use, can now be easily integrated into any web page.Poster for Festival Internacional de Installacion de Software Libre, 2006.an Icecast server within the G.I.S.S 26 network, the first project ever to share bandwidth usinga feature that can put each server on a relay.This allowed the hosting of multiple streams or channels (from Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina,and Bolivia) while offering us enough bandwidth to permit connections to dozens of clients.The G.I.S.S project was inspired by independent media networks such as indymedia.org. InBrazil, we have had estudiolivre, 27 a state supported initiative that aims to ensure that selfmademedia will extend beyond a techno-ghetto. Today, they continue to provide a streamingserver to the members of the community, while documenting all the required know-how.Streaming video began as a way to reclaim media, not just artistically, but politically. Forsome time, there was something we might call a streaming movement, yet the evangelisticand orthodox pose of a few ‘radical’ developers destroyed the chance for the movement toWe were also given the opportunity to stream the transmediale.08 and transmediale.09 (Berlin/Germany)conferences using FLOSS 29 codecs. 30 The stats 31 and the working group doubled,and the local television station merged with us to provide web-based real-time contentalong with their usual coverage. As before, we integrated an IRC chat window to the streamfeed, facilitating the set-up to enable people in parallel rooms in places such as Colombia,Chile, Canada and several African nations to take part. The participation enabled by this openstructure was at all times projected into the conference space. Rather than the usual situationof talking heads in front of a local audience, the interaction of people from across theglobe gave rise to a third level of participation. For some in Berlin, such interventions wereconsidered noise, interference or simply distraction. They were indeed a rupture. A good one.In any case, conclusions were drawn veryquickly, and perhaps because of a very traditionalapproach to web-based content, theonline streams were jailed – not just insidethe formal web page, but under a heavyand awkwardly designed festival homepage.It might take some years until we finally seethe integration of streams within the flows ofa shared discourse, both on the network andelsewhere. Telephones will surely play a partLive stream during Transmediale 2009.with their expanded ‘2-way’ far-reaching electricspeech. Multiple and replicating channels for sound and video feeds might be justaround the corner; YouTube will develop a mixer; some stuff will be live, other stuff will bearchived. We will see a media loop hooking up different platforms.26. ‘a multitude of individuals with different histories, background and nationalities (italian, french,spanish and spanish colonized, argentinian, chilean, mexican, colombian, brasilian, norvegian,slovenian, ...) joined together over the last three years to create a human-scale media and anempathic network of human experiences in different locations of the globe ( mainly europeand south america ), this informal structure took the name of G.I.S.S. ( Global IndependentStreaming Support ). It is mainly run by free software activists, that lend some resourcesand servers to make it growing in terms of connections, but, keeping in mind that the mediaproduction unit must remain accessible to everyone (so, yes, a simple internet connection and abasic computer equipped with a microphone and eventually a camera is enough to become oneof the broadcasting agents)’, http://giss.tv.27. http://estudiolivre.org/.28. http://www.ubuntu.com/.29. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open_source_software.30. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec.31. transmediale.09 streamed live to 1,029 individual clients (for a length of 15 minutes or more)during the festival. 527 clients tuned in to 15 minutes or more of the Auditorium (Conference)stream. 439 clients tuned in to 15 minutes or more of the Salon (K1) stream. transmediale.09streamed to 52 different countries. 542 clients tuned in from Germany, 129 clients from the US,51 from the UK, 40 from The Netherlands, 27 from Austria, 25 from Spain, 21 from Colombia,18 from France, 15 from Switzerland, 3 from Kenya and 158 other clients from 42 othercountries. transmediale.09 streamed approximately 23 events and 50 hours of footage live.

264 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches265The shift from the basic infrastructures to the design of a RealTime-Interface to representsuch communities continued to gain relevance. Such questions remain significant as noneof the popular websites that commercially offer stream support can deal with more than onestream at a time in a clean and uncluttered front. Furthermore, there’s no social integrationoffered by such .com platforms. They can call it ‘social software’ and trumpet ‘sharing andopenness’, but this is as a way to cache their intentions to outsource and create revenue,while enslaving us through the use of their ‘services’.Today, we can all stream video using proprietary software, but our feeds will be overlaid by foreignclickable advertisements, our videos will belong to a corporation obeying easy to decipherprinciples: making profit from content generated by its audience. The procedures for settingup a free/libre streaming server with Icecast 32 are well documented online, and the bandwidthavailable today has no problem carrying a user’s own radio and video program. The Xiph 33video codec and transport layer known as .ogv/theora has finally been integrated into the coreof many web browsers, rendering obsolete the need to install third-party plug-ins to view videoonline. For example, Google chrome, Firefox and Opera have this built-in capability.An awareness of the ways that online video is commercialized might lead us to more fullyembrace live streams, and reject the fever for archiving. 34 We need to stream against thedatabase. Streams give real-time impressions and leave no traces at all; they are an undocumentableand ephemeral art practice. After all, streaming is far less complicated than traditionalvideo-making. Live video is a performative and liberatory practice, free of the traditionalforms of tyranny related to video:– Rehearse.Record– digitize.remaster.edit– re.compress– upload/host– distribute/syndicate– tag, index and archiveWe need to stream counter-currents while fully distrusting the conditions under which ourvideos will be embedded elsewhere, and with a clear resolution to reject and make impossibleany sort of recuperation, that will lock our senses again. Not as a fight against the system,but through it. Becoming-imperceptible: 35– turn [webcam/mic] ON– stream (icecast FLOSS)– re.act (look at the IRC feedback)– turn [webcam/mic] OFF / go outerspace!32. http://www.icecast.org/.33. http://xiph.org/.34. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_Fever.35. The term comes from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism andSchizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, London: Athlone Press, 1988.All that is left from this latter, raw approach could very well be the chat logs. One could easilysave the streamed media content and offer an à-la-podcast repertoire for later viewing, yetthis destroys the thrill of setting up a stream, as any technical problems are solved via textbasedor other messaging systems. This rush is part of the fun, even of setting up a camerathat records the movements of a passerby in a remote street. It’s all about keeping it live: beit silent vision, or sharing news and views, or as-yet vague ideas for an art project to come. 36Like the radio program broadcast at two a.m., it exercises freedom to communicate – no matterthat the missive resembles a message like the one contained on the Arrecibo 37 string, orthe one encapsulated and drifting inside a bottle.It is the fact that we are incorporating real-time technology into participatory media thatmakes these projects so unique. From so-called net.radio and web.tv, to the over-hyped networkedperformance, streaming is about resonating spaces, allowing places to crossbreed,exchange, trigger and subvert order. To reject the repetition of the database is to fight againstthe tone and style of the industry of mass entertainment. Yes, this can indeed be classified asresistance – yet this time, the resistance doesn’t expect to be located within the movementsof protest and contestation, but simply left aside and forgotten in its own void. We Await SilentTristero’s Empire.For such reasons, it is crucial that both software and hardware become part of the creativeequation, and that our efforts don’t fall prey to the make believe notions of net-neutrality andthe ‘social web’, or end up being considered inoffensive or instrumentalized components onejust needs to operate. At the end of the day, those commercial platforms will co-opt both ourcontent and intentions. In 2007 a LiveCD 38 under the name of PlanktumII was produced toallow more people to participate during the FLISOL.tv streams. This simple, easily distributed‘dispositif’ is just 400 megas, and includes the basic applications to set-up a stream. In 2010a new version was developed with the intention of setting up a radio station for the Free Partyfestival Bogotrax. 39 It offered four different ways to set-up streams, with the internal video deviceas a webcam, the external video as in a miniDV firewire camera, with sound, or througha net.radio station supported by a playlist of free party tracks. A forthcoming version will takeshape as a LiveUSB key for booting both Macintosh computers and PC-Compatibles alongwith the plethora of netbooks. There have been many LiveCD’s before, with dynebolic 40 acertain precursor.On the hardware side, there are a few devices that engage into plug-&-play ‘streamability’,such as the Locus Sonus Streambox, 41 which serves to maintain a soundmap 42 of open36. http://neoscenes.net/aud-vid/streams/index.php.37. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message.38. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_CD.39. http://planktum.wikidot.com/.40. http://dynebolic.org/.41. http://soup.znerol.ch/en/node/73.42. http://locusonus.org/soundmap/.

266 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetechnological approaches267microphones streaming 24/7 from different countries and continents. The Streambox is abox into which one merely has to plug in a microphone, internet and electricity in order tobe ‘on-air’.Long-awaited mobile streaming is around the corner using open codecs, and the Androidplatform is a step ahead of this process. Current mobile devices offer enough computingpower, and accessing enough bandwidth on such networks has become the main objectiveof those who profit big time from the internet (Google and telephone operators). We will soonsee higher data transfer rates capable of supporting video on a consumer scale type of contractwith the telecom operator.Meanwhile, from our silent and underdeveloped world we play with IRC bots hooked to micro-controllers,43 a remote control achieved by way of chat messages, and a webcam locatedat the other side of the planet. This game takes place under the name of halfBro and half-Bro4500, and was deployed and tested during the transmediale festivals in 2008 and 2009.For the ‘Utube’, the ‘twitler’,and the ‘fakebook’, the ‘social’means opportunisticcrowdsourcing. Alternatives?There are many, from transmission.ccto miro, indymedia,archive.org, current.tv,politube, and enagemedia.The question is: Why do wehave to work for free for theImages of halfBro and halfoBro4500.corporations that gain profitsusing our content? Pirate Media, Protest Media, Reclaim Media. This is not about a politicallycorrect attitude, nor is it about designers from Brooklyn uniting for another revolution. This isa simple ethical turn, since we are made out of what we read, see, eat and use.We have the option to operate and remain in a grey zone, to leave untrackable traces or, whatis certainly more fun, misleading ones. Do avoid reading this as an attempt to completelyinsulate oneself from all networks; to some degree it is perhaps a voluntary exclusion, withthe spirit and intention of sheltering online video so that it may grow deeper roots into oursocial layers.Last day of streams for Transmediale 2009, closing the counter with my brother in arms Adam Thomas.ReferencesDeleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. BrianMassumi, London: Athlone Press, 1988.Foucault, Michel. ‘The Confession of the Flesh’ [1977] interview with Michel Foucault, in Colin Gordon(ed. and trans.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, Brighton, Sussex:Harvester Press, 1980.Kluitenberg, Eric. ‘Distance versus Desire: Clearing the Electrosmog’, http://turbulence.org/blog/2010/11/29/distance-versus-desire-by-eric-kluitenberg/.All images are courtesy of Alejandro Duque, and are available as public domain.Respeto y admiración a todos los desarrolladores que hacen posible el uso libre de sonidoy video en la red.43. arduino comparible: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino.

268 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubepolitics & human rights269Cameras Everywhere: UbiquitousVideo Documentation of Human Rights,New Forms of Video Advocacy, andConsideR ations of Safety, Security,Dignity and Consent 1Sam GregoryIn shaky footage, police officers strike a man lying on the ground with their batons– and then begin kicking him.With minor variations, this footage could have been (and indeed, has been) filmed in multipleplaces around the world in the past year. As I write this, a clip has come to light of policemenin East Timor punching and kicking a suspect they are arresting in broad daylight on a beachon the island of Atauro, near Dili. However, the case I am describing above is the ‘RodneyKing incident’ - filmed in March 1991 on a street in Lake View Terrace, Los Angeles, by acitizen observer, George Holliday.WITNESS was created just under 20 years ago, arising out of that moment. Captured by Mr.Holliday from his apartment window, the footage of Rodney King - an African-American man- being beaten by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department following a traffic violation isfamiliar across the world. To our founders – Peter Gabriel and the Lawyers Committee for HumanRights - it confirmed the power of video cameras in the hands of a bystander/witness. Atthe time, they asked the question: ‘What if every human rights worker had a camcorder in theirhand? What untold stories, what visual evidence, would be captured and shared?’ Our assumptionswere that you could enable a new way of mobilizing action for genuine change if you couldplace the capacity to film in the hands of the people who chose to be “in the wrong place at theright time” and were not just accidental observers – that is, human rights advocates and activistsaround the world living and working with communities affected by violations.Lessons Learned from the Past – and Meeting Present ChallengesOur work since 1992 has focused on how to best to enable human rights defenders to usevideo in their advocacy and activism, and has integrated training and intensive support to1. This article was first published as Sam Gregory, ‘Cameras Everywhere: Ubiquitous VideoDocumentation of Human Rights, New Forms of Video Advocacy, and Considerations of Safety,Security, Dignity and Consent’ in the Journal of Human Rights Practice, 2.2 (2010): 191-207and is re-published by permission of Oxford University Press.The author thanks the Journal for permission to republish this article and also acknowledgesall the colleagues at WITNESS and partners in the human rights community worldwide whoselearning, experience and expertise informs this article.local groups on their campaigns, as well as developing multimedia platforms for informeddissemination of human rights media. Along the way we have learnt that the technology initself is insufficient in the absence of the capacity to film capably – or to tell stories effectivelywith the resulting material. Without technical training you can shoot raw video, but you cannotcreate the finished narratives that are of value in most advocacy contexts - outside ofproviding direct eyewitness material to the news media or circulating it to existing communitiesof interest. We have also had initial assumptions challenged that television would beas amenable and open to most human rights footage as it was to the Rodney King material- and that evidentiary usages of video would predominate. As a consequence, we have hadto think about different audiences for advocacy video. We have seen that ‘seeing is believing’does not necessarily apply in all instances, and that nuanced storytelling and incorporationof video into other advocacy strategies often produces the most effective results. Training onthe strategic structuring, distribution and use of video documentation is as important – if notmore important - than technical skill sets.As a consequence of the difficulties of using video in the media and in judicial processes,WITNESS and its human rights partner groups have looked for new advocacy audiencesfor visual evidence and testimony. The majority of our work has focused on incorporatingvideo into a range of human rights advocacy and organizing venues that have hitherto seenlittle use of video. We have done this in partnership with a range of locally-based humanrights groups, which we support through the process of developing camera and productionskills, and in developing and implementing plans for effective audience targeting, messaging,storytelling and advocacy distribution. WITNESS’ work has always blurred the line betweenamateurs and professionals in terms of using video – training human rights workers, and now,increasingly, concerned citizens, to use video as an everyday facet of their work, a vernacularfor effective communication, rather than attempting to turn them into high-end documentaryfilm-makers.Frequently our approach has focused on ‘smart narrowcasting’ 2 - speaking to a particularaudience at a particular time, and seeking a distinct change in policy, behavior or practice.We work with partners to craft videos for sequenced and targeted distribution, and always aspart of a continuum of action - and within a strategy rather than as a stand-alone product orevent. Primarily the work has been in the middle ground between the extremes of undifferentiatedmass media attention and direct evidence in the courts. These potential audiencesmight include:1) Evidentiary settings such as a courtroom or international war crimes tribunal, where videocould function as direct, contextualizing, or circumstantial evidence;2) Quasi-judicial settings, including many of the bodies that monitor compliance with internationalhuman rights law but have limited enforcement power, including the UN HumanRights Committee, or other UN charter and treaty bodies, as well as institutions at a2. A term suggested by Meg McLagan, ‘Making Human Rights Claims Public’, AmericanAnthropologist 108.1 (2006).

270 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubepolitics & human rights271regional level. For example, WITNESS recently worked with a group in Kenya, CEMIRIDE,to produce the first-ever video submission to the African Commission on Human andPeoples’ Rights on a land rights case affecting the Endorois people of Kenya;3) Direct-to-decision-maker contexts, meaning that in some cases video needs to be showndirectly to a key decision maker or decision-making body so that they can ‘witness’ humanrights violations or ‘meet’ the victims. For example, our partners have done screeningswith senior officials of the International Criminal Court to convince them of the needto prioritize the recruitment of child soldiers in the eastern Congo in their investigations;4) Community mobilizing campaigns in which video is shown within a community to mobilizeit to take action on a specific issue, or to demonstrate the capacity of individuals andcommunities to challenge abuses and alter the context in which these abuses happen.An example here would be showing a video on voluntary recruitment of child soldiersin villages across eastern Congo to stimulate community dialogue around the circumstancesin which this occurs, and the consequences for the children recruited;5) Activist and participatory organizing within a community or virtual community of solidarity,increasingly via the internet, and integrating participant creation of video content.Videos always provide a ‘space for action’ by the audience, encouraging them to participatein solving the problem.Fundamental to all this campaign partnership work – as well as our extensive training workwith broader human rights networks - has been a focus on three elements of video usagein human rights contexts: a) that it be ethical in its creation, storytelling and distribution; b)that it be effective in its advocacy usage, and c) that it does not recklessly endanger thosewho participate in creating it or who are filmed.These concerns – which could also be expressed in terms of questions of authenticity,efficacy for action and safety – have only been magnified in an environment of radicallyincreased participation in visual documentation and testimony of human rights violations.It is this final element of safety, security and consent that this paper primarily explores – ina new environment of radically increasing numbers of creators of human rights content.A Billion Potential Observers to the ‘Rodney King’ or ‘Tiananmen Tank-man’ of 2010In 2010 we can reconsider the Rodney King moment, and WITNESS’ genesis, in a new light.The growing reality of this decade is the possibility of not only every human rights defenderhaving a camera in their hand, but that a significant and growing minority of all people haveon their person the capacity to document or record human rights violations.If we think back to March 3rd, 1991, multiple elements came together fortuitously to createwhat we now know as the ‘Rodney King’ incident. There was George Holliday, the accidentalwitness, with a camera to-hand. When he came to distribute the material, it’s graphic nature,and its media saliency was of interest to the gatekeepers of distribution at that time - thenetwork and cable television stations.If 20 years ago a camera was a luxury item, now many mobile phones come with a videocamerabuilt-in - and the most recent statistics show that there is now one cell phone ac-count for every one and a half people on earth. 3 As a consequence, in many industrializedcountries and in much of the Global South a growing number of individual citizens nowpossess the technological capacity to film using a cell phone or mobile device – which theycarry with them at all times. Many other activists worldwide -- even in less cell phone friendlyenvironments -- could be empowered with a device such as a Flip Video camera that recordsreasonably high-quality video images for less than $100. 4 We’re in a world of a billion potentialobservers to the Rodney King incidents of 2010, or to the contemporary equivalent ofthe brave man confronting the tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989.As a consequence, technological capacity and the ‘ready witness’ are now commonplace.Simultaneously, the ability to share material without as many gatekeepers (at least aroundchoice of issue - gatekeepers still exist around graphic nature or controversial political content)has increased with the advent of both online video sharing networks like YouTube andDailyMotion, and social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, Twitter and others, as well asthe ‘i-witness’ appeals of networks from CNN to the BBC. Not to be underestimated, thereis also growing media literacy among certain sectors of a younger generation about how tocreate and share moving images.This potential presence of a camera in every concerned citizen’s hand creates powerfulopportunities for the future of human rights video and human rights advocacy. At the sametime, it raises significant questions of agency, action and audience. As we anticipate a continuinggrowth of cameras in the hands of potential witnesses and observers, it is time forthe human rights community to work out how to grapple with, harness and engage with thepotential of these tools to contribute to effective documentation and advocacy.WITNESS’ founder Peter Gabriel has repeatedly talked of his vision of Big Brother in reverse.This is a situation where, rather than Big Brother watching, there are a million Little Sistersand Little Brothers – each with the capacity to have their voice heard, to let no human rightsabuse go undocumented, and to hold their oppressors accountable.So what is out there now in terms of human rights material? I’m going to draw many examplesfrom a recent WITNESS project– the Hub 5 , a pioneering participatory media website for humanrights launched as a subsection of the Global Voices blogging site in September 2006,and operated by WITNESS from late 2007 to early 2010. The Hub was conceived as anonline human rights community focused around safety, context and action, as well as knowledge-sharingon what worked in using video and related tools for human rights advocacy.A selection of some of the online videos which surfaced in both the pilot and the subsequenttwo years of the project gives a flavor of the human rights video documentation that is startingto be created as a result of technological ubiquity and electronic peer-to-peer and onlinedistribution opportunities.3. International Telecommunication Union (ITU) figures, November 2009, http://www.itu.int/net/itunews/issues/2009/09/04.aspx.4. For example, the Pure Digital Flip cameras that WITNESS currently provides to some trainees.5. WITNESS Hub, http://hub.witness.org.

272 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubepolitics & human rights273In Malaysia, in what has been called ‘Squatgate’, police filmed the humiliation of a seminakedyoung woman of Chinese-Malaysian origin and emailed it to each other. 6 In Egypt,police sodomized and slapped detainees on cell phone cameras and shared it. 7 In China,anonymous watchers documented the scale of protest in small towns - challenging statecontrol of public knowledge about dissent. 8 In Canada, First Nations protestors filmed theirstand-off with government officials - while in repressive Guinea-Conakry in West Africa, footageshowed the army firing on student protestors. 9In the United States, passersby on a subway platform used cell phones to capture the shootingof an unarmed African-American man by police. 10 In Guatemala and Cambodia, communitiesfacing displacement from their land by mining and commercial development videoedtheir moments of resistance. 11 Activists attending key UN meetings took advantage of adigital camera to provide daily updates from the field to campaigners back home who wereunable to be present - demystifying the process. 12 Leaders of the monks’ protest in Burmaspoke directly to the camera to share mobilizing messages one year on from the SaffronRevolution 13 - and a survivor of a still unpunished prison massacre in Brazil made an impassionedcall for accountability 16 years on. 14 Sex worker advocates from Southeast Asiaremixed and reworked popular songs and images from anti-trafficking campaigns into theirown mobilizing films, 15 and labor advocates from Philippines incorporated video into theirorganizing in a hospital where nurses were forced to work excessive hours 16 .One of the most viewed and most notorious videos on the Hub is a redacted version of thefootage shot by Egyptian police in which they humiliate a Cairo bus driver by slapping him6. Ethan Kiczek, ‘Malaysia: Cellphone Video Captures Police Excess’, WITNESS Hub, April 9, 2007,http://hub.witness.org/en/node/18.7. See for example Sameer Padania, ‘Egypt: Bloggers Open the Door to Police Brutality Debate’,WITNESS Hub, December 9, 2006, http://hub.witness.org/en/node/33.8. Sameer Padania, ‘China: Government’s Video-Censorship Foiled’, WITNESS Hub, April 9, 2007.http://hub.witness.org/en/node/32.9. Sameer Padania, ‘Massacre in Guinea Conakry, 2007’, WITNESS Hub, September 17, 2007.http://hub.witness.org/en/node/619.10. Priscila Neri, ‘Mobile Phone Footage Shows Police Shoot and Kill Unarmed Man in California’,WITNESS Hub, January 9, 2009. http://hub.witness.org/en/node/11825.11. Sameer Padania, ‘Violent Evictions at El Estor, Guatemala’, WITNESS Hub, September 16, 2007,http://hub.witness.org/en/node/620, and Licadho, ‘7NG Company and Phnom Penh AuthoritiesIntent on Inciting Disorder in Cambodia’s Capital’, WITNESS Hub, January 9, 2008, http://hub.witness.org/en/LICADHO1.12. HR2Housing, Eric Tars of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, ‘CERD Day 2 -Feb 18 2008’, WITNESS Hub, February 18, 2008, http://hub.witness.org/en/node/4064.13. US Campaign for Burma, ‘Burma: Leader of Monks’ Alliance on the Saffron Revolution - Pt 1’,WITNESS Hub, September 26, 2008, http://hub.witness.org/en/node/8864.14. Priscila Neri, ‘Brazil: Survivor of the Carandiru Massacre on 16 years of Impunity’, WITNESSHub, October 1, 2008, http://hub.witness.org/en/node/8884.15. ‘One Whore- APNSW STAR WHORES Karaoke’, http://www.blip.tv/file/199048/.16. Kodao Productions, ‘STOP! 12, 16, 24, 32 hours Duty of Nursing Staff ! – TMCEA-AHW’,WITNESS Hub, January 20, 2010, http://hub.witness.org/en/upload/stop-12-16-24-32-hoursduty-nursing-staff-%E2%80%93-tmcea-ahw.repeatedly. These images, as well as other more graphic videos that include the sodomizingof another driver, were filmed by the police themselves. Subsequently they were used to humiliatethe victims (for example, by sending the images to other drivers 17 ) and to intimidateother people by demonstrating what would happen if they didn’t follow police orders. Theyshare many similarities with the psychology of what have been called happy-slapping videos(in which someone is caught by surprise and assaulted on camera): the triple humiliationof the assault, the act of documentation, and the subsequent preservation and distribution.Similar cases have galvanized debate in Greece 18 - where two Albanian immigrants wereforced to slap each other on camera (a case extensively discussed by Nelli Kambouri andPavlos Hatzopoulos in the last Video Vortex Reader 19 ) as well as in Malaysia (the infamousSquatgate case mentioned above) and a number of other countries (including, most recently,East Timor). And of course, footage is also shot increasingly by governments to documentand apprehend protestors and dissidents. In the United States, there has been a contentioussuit related to arrest of protestors at the Republican National Convention in New Yorkin 2004, highlighting the contradictory accounts of these arrests that videos shot by both theNew York Police Departments and activist provide- while more recently we can see officialcameramen in the footage of protests from Burma, Iran and Tibet.As can be seen from the examples cited above, in the growing world of human rights videoonline, it is both the abuser and the abused, the implicated and the observer who are documenting.The outputs are both produced and raw. There is a mix of ‘witness journalism’- theraw footage from the sites of tragedy, whose variants news organizations are currently pursuingthrough their user-generated media programs. There are produced citizen or NGO advocacyvideos that are constructed and edited together with a narrative or rhetorical framework.There is activist and human rights defender witnessing in less structured formats - but withadvocacy and/or documentation intention. And there is also perpetrator-shot footage. It is aworld of commentators and re-mixers, of virtual witnesses and viral witnesses - as much asit is a world of direct observers.And the circulation of these visual images is pervasive. Last year I was sitting in a sharedtaxi in an authoritarian country in the Middle East, half-way down a long rural road. A manleaned back and offered his cell phone to me, asking: ‘Change?’ It seemed odd since my oldNokia was far less impressive than his latest Spiderman-themed phone. Then he started toshow me the clips he had filmed or had received from others – including a series of ‘happyslapping’sequences. I realized he wanted to swap what I would term abuse videos.17. Maggie Michael, ‘Video Shows Egypt Prisoner’s Humiliation’, Associated Press, WashingtonPost, January 21, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/21/AR2007012100468.html.18. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCc7xc8hxDQ.19. Nelli Kambouri and Pavlos Hatzopoulos, ‘Making Violent Practices Public’, in Geert Lovink andSabine Niederer (eds) Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute ofNetwork Cultures, 2008.

274 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubepolitics & human rights275These videos also circulate to ultimate positive effect – in some cases, when they are assignednew meanings and new contexts and framings. In Egypt, bloggers and journalistslead by Wael Abbas 20 and Hossam el-Hamalawy 21 distributed the leaked cell phone videos tochallenge repeated denials by the government of responsibility for police brutality and torture.By circulating the videos, and connecting online to both a local and international audience,they were able to generate media attention, and to force an official response. Although thegovernment initially tried to discredit the activists, it was very hard to deny the truth of the imagesor the public exposure, and for the first time, there was an investigation into the conductof police officers in two of the leaked videos - leading to a prosecution. 22Increasingly, one of the skill sets demanded of a human rights group conducting advocacyis the ability to mobilize, foment, aggregate, shape and/or curate this content created byothers. So, in relation to WITNESS’ new campaign models we are increasingly looking tothis approach. For example, with our ‘100 Voices’ 23 component of a campaign for the rightsof the elderly in the United States - where participants in a campaign in multiple states areencouraged to create their own individualized video messages to specific legislators on keyCongressional Committees relevant to legislation.The circulation and re-appropriation of images shot by others is a key aspect of contemporaryonline culture – namely, its participatory nature which allows consumers to ‘archive,annotate, appropriate and re-circulate media content in powerful new ways’. 24 Some of themost powerful political commentary in the US over the past decade has featured remixes ofnews, archival and user-generated footage, especially during the Bush Administration andits actions in Iraq. 25 Similarly, groups WITNESS has worked with at a local and regional levelaround the world have used karaoke remix formats to communicate effectively around humanrights issues. One example of the karaoke remix style I’ve seen in Southeast Asia is avideo by one of our Video Advocacy Institute alumni from the Asia-Pacific Network of SexWorkers that remixes U2 songs for sex worker advocacy. 26WITNESS itself has recently started to experiment with providing video for remix and re-useand looking at how collaborative creation can be used for advocacy. In one very open-endedexperiment we provided footage for a video contest organized by Enough (an NGO that worksto end genocide and crimes against humanity) in collaboration with YouTube’s ‘Video for20. For the video work of Wael Abbas see, http://www.youtube.com/user/waelabbas.21. For the blogging and video work of Hossam el-Hamalawy see, http://www.arabawy.org.22. For more detail see Al-Jazeera, ‘Egyptian Policemen Jailed on Torture Charges’, November 5,2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU6SY6VrwY0&feature=player_embedded.23. Elder Justice Now, http://elderjusticenow.org.24. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New YorkUniversity Press; 2006, p. 18.25. For examples of this genre see Political Remix Video, http://www.politicalremixvideo.com,including examples focused on the Bush Administration at http://www.politicalremixvideo.com/tag/bush.26. Asia-Pacific Sex Worker Network on Blip.Tv, http://sexworkerspresent.blip.tv/ and ‘One Whore-APNSW STAR WHORES Karaoke’, http://www.blip.tv/file/199048/.Change’ initiative. The contest, entitled ‘Come Clean 4 Congo’, encouraged people to createvideos highlighting the link between “conflict minerals” used in cell phones and the war inDemocratic Republic of Congo (DRC). We provided a compilation of short footage clips shotby one of our partners in the DRC, depicting amongst other elements, conditions in militiacamps, as well as in rural and urban areas. Where the footage was used it was often as emotivebackground or ‘wallpaper’ footage – for example, transposed onto a computer screenthat is seen intercut with a young woman answering her phone to receive a text about thecampaign in a video uploaded by YouTube user CheFoo10. 27We have also been working with the student anti-genocide coalition STAND on a morebounded remix experiment within their Pledge2Protect project. Here we provided a templatere-editable video-making the call for effective legislation to prevent genocide - as well selectedand carefully reviewed short clips from inside potentially genocidal situations worldwide.We then supported student chapters from around the US to create customized videos thatspoke to the particular interests of their Senator, and that incorporated additional footage andlocal voices from their State. My colleague Chris Michael has written more about this projecton the WITNESS blog. 28 In his words, ‘We wanted to see how video could not only be madefor a group of key decision makers – but individualized for each decision maker. We wantedto integrate video into this campaign to see how a decentralized, motivated network couldquickly create, share and edit multimedia content targeted to key decision makers – in thiscase U.S. Senators’. 29 So, for example, students from, Florida, gathered not only their ownvoices to introduce the video, and made personal appeals to their and his Christian faith, butalso identified Lost Boys from Sudan living in Jacksonville, Florida who could speak fromtheir own personal experience in the video - making a direct request to their Senator. Videosfrom California and Wisconsin expressed personal thanks to their respective Senators fortheir actions to date through montages of high school and college student voices; highlightedprominent community figures who the Senators would know and respect (for example, arespected academic, and an award-winning humanitarian); and urged them on to do more.Other videos ranged from fully remixed videos to direct-to-camera video introductions andcalls to action from student and influential community leaders in the Senators’ states. 30Remix uses – like these, and like many others that are occurring - particularly challenge usto question how to balance creativity and effectiveness in a participatory environment withhuman rights concerns. From a human rights advocacy point-of-view, the positive dimensionsof this are clear - as participation is at the heart of any mobilizing activity. For particularcommunities - for example, the so-called ‘digital native’ youth of today’s connected Northern27. CheFoo10, ‘Come Clean for the Congo’, May 28, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JasbiUATEaE.28. Chris Michael, ‘WITNESS & STAND Partnership Spotlight: Pledge on Camera’, WITNESS Hub,December 3, 2009, http://hub.witness.org/STAND-SPOTLIGHT.29. Chris Michael, ‘Pledge On Camera: How Anti-Genocide Student Activists are Ushering-In a NewEra of Video Advocacy’, WITNESS Hub, November 4, 2009, http://hub.witness.org/STAND.30. To see a sample of the videos: Chris Michael, ‘WITNESS & STAND Partnership Spotlight: Pledgeon Camera’, WITNESS Hub, December 3, 2009, http://hub.witness.org/en/STAND-SPOTLIGHT.

276 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubepolitics & human rights277societies - the most active forms of participation are taking place in these online spaces andon these online terms. Additionally, there is a possibility to benefit from the creativity andcapacity of a distributed network of peer production that can rework the ‘raw’ audiovisualmaterial to appeal to diverse communities of interest, and within which the opportunity to bea (co)-producer rather than just a viewer may promote sustained engagement. The challengelies in how this remix ethos relates to a human rights culture concerned for the dignity andintegrity of victims and survivors and about the role of ethical witnessing – a culture that alsohas a strong sense of control over its material. Many may have enjoyed seeing George W.Bush remixed, but where would we draw the line?A New Ethics of Ubiquitous VideoSo how does and how could this evolving culture of online and ubiquitous video relate to humanrights values and to human rights practice? What would it mean if the principles of theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) were written into the ‘terms of service’ anduser interfaces of online video platforms and other Web 2.0 initiatives (as suggested by theblogger Dan McQuillan 31 )? How could we place key human rights values at the forefront ofpeople’s minds as they turned their cell phones on each other to film and capture evidence?Many of the values of online communities already fit closely with the values of human rightsaround freedom of expression (UDHR Article 19: ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of expression…’)and access to science and culture (UDHR Article 27: i) ‘Everyone has the rightfreely to participate in the cultural life of the community’). However, instead of focusing onthese already shared values, in this paper I want to focus on one idea that is the heart of humanrights - namely respect for the dignity, agency, worth and integrity of every person, andparticularly for rights-holders in the midst of crisis.In this context, from a human rights perspective there are two sets of directly parallel concernsabout an increased creation and circulation of visual imagery in a participatory culture of everydaywitnesses - as well as in a world where image-making is not controlled by the governmentor ‘professionals’. The first of these concerns relates to the potential increase in the absenceof consent, or failure to secure fully informed consent, and of retaliation and repercussions tovictims and human rights defenders whose words and actions can be circulated with greaterand greater ease. A second, related concern is around psychological re-victimization and thepreservation of human dignity. I will not reflect so much in this paper on an additional set ofconcerns which relate to how we protect the increasing number of people who take a stand forhuman rights (as human rights defenders) by creating visual media and circulating materialvia the internet as their primary advocacy tools. This is a subject of vital concern to WITNESSand others who uphold, support and protect freedom of expression, the right to communicateand human rights defenders’ rights. However, this paper and its concerns are more focusedon the people ‘on film’ rather than on those who capture images and events on video.Human rights values emphasize the importance of the integrity and dignity of the individualsurvivor of abuse in line with the primary principle that every human being is possessed of‘inherent dignity’ 32 - a concept that runs through every right included in the UDHR.A particular concern in the victim/survivor-centred human rights model is the avoidanceof re-victimization either directly or indirectly (as can happen when an image is distributedand exploited inappropriately). The most graphic violations - violent attacks, or even sexualassault – are seen as the material that most easily translates into a loss of dignity, privacy,and agency, and which carries with it the potential for real re-victimization. Individuals whoare featured in videos who are not victims or survivors, but bystanders or witnesses, are alsounderstood to be in positions of vulnerability and risk. Video distribution in and of itself canalso contribute to creating further layers of victimization: The individuals in the torture videosshot by authorities are already being doubly humiliated - in the first instance by what happensto them in custody, and in the second, by the act of filming. They are then further exposed asthe footage achieves widespread circulation.Contemporary thinking on testimony, witnessing and trauma also places a heavy emphasison the responsibility of the witness to abuse to represent it responsibly and with ethical integrity- to be, so to speak, the ‘ethical witness’. As Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas note in theintroduction to their recent book The Image and the Witness 33 , ‘images which appropriateand expropriate existing visual representations of public trauma respond to the immenseethical responsibility which burdens the image… Ethical responsibility to the integrity of thevictim is one of the defining criteria of authentic witnessing to trauma. This is especially urgentwhen the sufferer is no longer able to speak. Thus, the one who carries the continuedmemory of suffering also carries the responsibility to do so in a manner that empathizes with,rather than violates, the silent victim’. It is incumbent on us to promote a culture of empathyand ethical sharing rather than perpetuating any violation of the ‘silent victim’.Both of the principles mentioned above – that of the integrity of the victim/survivor’s experience,and that of the role of the ethical witness - are made problematic by the possibilitiesfor remixing, re-appropriation and recirculation. These possibilities pull the material fartherand farther from its source testifier and/or witness and from its original context - even as thatprocess of translation may increase the chances that the footage will find an audience (evenan unexpected one) that may be willing and able to respond.WITNESS has wrestled for years with how to ensure that people filmed in human rightscontexts understand how the video will be used, and the implications both positive andnegative, devoting a whole chapter to the subject in the recent book, Video for Change. Ourmodel focuses on supporting individuals to make informed choices about if, how, where andwhen their image is used. When that is impossible we support an assessment based eitheron objective, established principles (termed ‘a professional practice’) - or carried out by a31. Internet.artizans, http://www.internetartizans.co.uk/.32. Preamble to the UDHR, http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html.33. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas (eds) The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and VisualCulture, London: Wallflower Press, 2007.

278 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubepolitics & human rights279well-informed individual who seeks to determine what a person who has not given explicitconsent might be expected to grant (‘a reasonable person’ guideline). We also consider relevantinternational human rights and humanitarian law (for example, the Third Geneva Conventionforbidding the exhibition of prisoners of war). It is an extremely thorough approach toinformed consent that harks back to social science and medical protocols. WITNESS’ policies– based on an ideal paradigm of consent -- encourage groups it works with (in an approachcommon to most human rights organizations 34 ) to take into account principles of disclosure(where the individual is informed why they have been filmed and for what purpose); voluntariness(where the individual agrees to be filmed without pressure or coercion); comprehension(where the person filmed understands the implications of being filmed, how the video willbe used, and particularly, the worst case scenario); and competence (where the person iscapable of making these judgments).Within these frameworks of consent, WITNESS always emphasizes that in a digital era itshould be assumed that a piece of media will circulate if it is shown - even if only once. If itcan be circulated, then it should be assumed that it will be seen by your oppressor or opponent.As a consequence our model relies upon presenting worst-case scenarios for impact,assuming that media will circulate, and seeking to enable genuinely informed consent to begiven. The risks associated with shooting and circulating video have been clearly reinforcedin recent events. In Burma, for example during and after the Saffron Revolution, when thousandstook courageously to the streets, intelligence agents scrutinized photographs and videofootage to identify demonstrators and bystanders. In Iran, the government took to crowdsourcingidentification of protestors via facial pictures grabbed from YouTube and placed ona website with a request to the public to identify them. 35The same circulatory risks apply (and will continue to grow over the next few years) in lessprominent incidents of human rights documentation that do not make the banner headlineson CNN. So in rural eastern Burma, far from the urban protests seen on television, theordinary civilian speaking out against government attacks on ethnic minority villages - forexample, in the videos shot by WITNESS partner Burma Issues 36 - should assume that shecould be seen and heard by the local military commander. And although one tendency ofadvocacy videos may be to make of the witness an iconic, emblematic figure, separatedfrom an individual identity and standing in for a class of victims, Naw Paw Paw (not herreal name), who speaks in two of the videos Burma Issues has produced, is not just a representative‘Burmese villager’. She is a school teacher from a specific community of peopleon the run in eastern Burma, speaking at risk of execution, displacement or imprisonmentin a region where the military junta is currently conducting a devastating offensive. In adigital era, we should assume that once a clip re-circulates, and indeed even more so if itsuccessfully re-circulates on any scale (and Naw Paw Paw’s videos have been seen closeto a million times on YouTube), then there is a good chance that the video will be seen bythose in power - such as the military junta in Burma. This is why it is incumbent on theperson filming to tell someone the worse case scenario, not the best case scenario, andenable them to make decisions on whether to speak, and what to include or exclude, andwhat measures to take to conceal their own identity. That is the only way for someone togive truly informed consent.However, this ‘worst-case scenario’ model of consent is difficult enough to promote in the‘professional’ documentary world (and also heavily contested 37 ), as well as in the humanrights community, and impossible to sustain in the online participatory culture context ofuser-generated media. Within our own practice, WITNESS can emphasize consent throughfront-and-centre prompts as people upload, via training materials that provide relevantguidance, and via a system of review on the Hub site that looks for obvious egregiousexamples of absent consent and danger to an individual filmed. But consent can neverbe assured in a world of uploaded content from relatively anonymous sources. So whatcomes next?A Forward-looking Perspective from WITNESS: Which Ethical Frameworks and TechnologySolutions Can Contribute to a Ubiquitous Video Culture of Dignity and Justice?The use of video will continue to expand across the range of human rights documentationand advocacy activities, both professional and citizen, over the coming years. From WIT-NESS’ vantage point at the intersection of human rights, media and technology, with alliesand stakeholders from the worlds of local and global human rights organizations, socialmedia, academia, technology, archive and documentary film, we see a pressing need forcollective engagement between these disparate sectors to create a more conducive environmentfor impact-generating video – supporting changes in norms, policies and practices, andpromoting effective solutions across disparate sectors.As an initial starting point in our own work, we are focusing on how to ensure that the evolvingonline, mobile and ubiquitous video environment becomes safer for human rights defendersand for those who experience or witness human rights abuses. At the heart of this challengeis the question of how we establish online and participatory cultures that create and share socialjustice and human rights material in a manner that balances the right to privacy (and theintegrity of the person) with the right to freedom of expression – balancing the urge to exposehuman rights violations with a consideration of the very real dangers to human rights defendersand victims or survivors. By its very nature, this will always be a dynamic and evolvingprocess. But we have taken some initial steps to reach out to the human rights, technology,34. See for example, internal documentation produced by organizations like Amnesty International.35. For more information see Hamid Tehrani, ‘Iranian Officials “Crowd-Source” Protestor Identities’,Global Voices, June 27, 2009, http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/06/27/iranian-officials-crowdsource-protester-identities-online/and Gerdab website, http://gerdab.ir/fa/pages/?cid=422.36. For example Burma Issues in association with WITNESS, ‘Video from Burma: Shoot on Sight’,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPSsKcpxJMk, April 18, 2007.37. Cf. Patricia Aufderheide, Peter Jaszi and Mridu Chandra, Honest Truths: DocumentaryFilmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work, Washington D.C.: Center for Social Media,School of Communication, American University, 2009, http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/publications/honest_truths_ documentary_filmmakers_on_ethical_challenges_in_their_work, and the documentary scholarship of Brian Winston, Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries,London: BFI Publishing; 2000.

280 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubepolitics & human rights281privacy law, and media literacy communities - as well as, most importantly, the online communitieswhere video is being shared - in order to identify common ground in terms of ethicaland normative frameworks, to see where there is scope for test projects, and to identify howwe can all best communicate around these concerns.With our respective expertise, experiences and vantage points, we hope to identify the optimalcombination of norms and code/architecture, as well as potentially law and marketapproaches (to borrow from Lawrence Lessig’s outline of potential regulatory approaches 38 )to promote a safer, more effective world of ubiquitous human rights video. Key to that combinationwill be finding a way to discuss how the ethical frameworks and learning aroundconsent, safety and human dignity from established human rights practice – including thosediscussed in this paper – are accessible and relevant to broader online culture and the digitalmedia literacy of a new generation of ‘digital natives’ worldwide. How does the ‘professional’learning and experience of human rights organizations on an issue like informed consenttranslate into guidelines that will work in a space like YouTube, or into 30-second pieces ofspreadable media that will circulate online? What role can human rights organizations play interms of supporting focused curation of human rights material to promote understanding, literacyand debate around key issues of human rights protection in a Web 2.0 era, and in supportingtest-case projects within their own practice that demonstrate what can be achieved- balancing participation, openness and safety? How do we develop broadly-agreed codes ofconduct and ethics on online video and human rights that speak to the needs, constituenciesand understandings of different sectors?Much of this needs to be informed by collaboration and dialogue with the technology providers,both of hardware and software, online and in the mobile arena. These actors play acritical role in the growing ubiquity of video. In addition, it requires participation in the Web2.0 spaces these providers facilitate. There are potential technology approaches and innovationswithin these spaces that can help address challenges around consent, representationand safety - balancing openness and transparency with a proactive response to real risks.These approaches include adjustments to site governance and review policies in video sharingsites and social networks to allow better handling of sensitive human rights footage. Theyalso include the development, promotion and dissemination of learning materials, spreadableguides to security approaches, and tools that can better enable safe documentation. Togive two examples, tools that enable concealment identity with blurring could be developedfor devices that shoot video (for example, smartphone applications) as well as the platformswhere video is shared. Likewise, user experiences in relevant human rights contexts couldprovide prompts on consent as a person films or uploads.All this needs to be done while retaining a very concrete understanding of danger as experiencedon the ground in real-life spaces (and not in our safer online environments), and anunderstanding of what constitutes truly informed consent. For although there may be a generalizingassumption that privacy is being de-emphasized in favor of openness and transparency(see, for example, recent debates prompted by the founder of Facebook observing thatsocial norms are evolving towards more information sharing), the realities of human rightsrisk have not necessarily changed in tandem.And doing this cross-sectoral work soon is critical - because soon we will have to translatethese concerns and challenges into an environment of simultaneous live-cast rather thanasynchronous, after-the-fact distribution. Already ‘eventstreaming’ 39 or ‘live-casting’, facilitatedby technologies like Qik 40 and Flixwagon 41 , permits live user-generated streaming 42of media (including documentation of human rights abuses) directly from a cell phone orother mobile device to an online public. In this case, those human-based review processesthat are currently used in some human rights spaces (for example, the process we used onthe Hub) to sift through footage to assess potential risk to those featured will be impossible tomaintain. These live-casting technologies will have powerful positive implications for sharingfootage and engaging constituencies immediately, but at the same time consent and securitynorms will become even more critical once more video is streamed immediately rather thanedited/uploaded after the fact.At this stage in the movement towards ubiquitous video, it is vitally important to supportemerging norms in online culture that promote respect, tolerance and an understanding ofrisks, as well as to think about how we take proactive educational steps to provide the nextgeneration of digital natives with experience and understanding on these issues. This is akey need, only brought home more and more as we increasingly experience both globallycirculatedhuman rights crises – Burma, Tibet, Iran – as well as a multitude of less prominentsituations of human rights violations, via imagery and testimony circulated online.To watch the video version of this article and to contribute to the conversation visithttp://blog.witness.org/cameraseverywhere; we welcome your feedback and ideas.38. Lawrence Lessig, Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0, New York: Basic Books,2006.39. A term apparently coined by Duncan Riley, http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/30/eventstreaming-the-seed-of-a-revolution, Techcrunch, June 30, 2007.40. Qik, http://www.qik.com.41. Flixwagon, http://www.flixwagon.com.42. See also such current options as Stickam, Justin.tv, and Bambuser.

282 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubepolitics & human rights283ReferencesAufderheide, Patricia, Peter Jaszi and Mridu Chandra. Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers onEthical Challenges in Their Work, Washington D.C.: Center for Social Media, School of Communication,American University, http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/publications/honest_truths_documentary_filmmakers_on_ethical_challenges_in_their_work.Gregory, Sam, Gillian Caldwell, Avni Ronit and Thomas Harding. Video for Change: A Guide forAdvocacy and Activism, London: Pluto Press, 2005. Also available at http://www.witness.org/videoforchange.Guerin, Frances and Roger Hallas (eds) The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and VisualCulture, London: Wallflower Press; 2007.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York UniversityPress; 2006.Kambouri, Nelli and Paolo Hatzopoulos. ‘Making Violent Practices Public’, in Geert Lovink and SabineNiederer (eds) Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of NetworkCultures, 2008.Lessig, Lawrence. Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0, New York: Basic Books, 2006.McLagan, Meg. ‘Making Human Rights Claims Public’, American Anthropologist, 108.1 (2006).Winston, Brian. Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries, London: BFI Publishing, 2000.Shooting for the Public: YouTube,Flickr, and the Mavi Marmara ShootingsElizabeth LoshIn contemporary English, to ‘shoot’ has two distinct meanings: to use a camera and to fire aweapon. Of course, this supposed similarity between media practices and military might hasa long rhetorical history, which is epitomized by lines such as ‘the pen is mightier than thesword’ or the phrase ‘this machine kills fascists’, once famously emblazoned upon the guitarof Woody Guthrie. It could be argued that the very term ‘tactical media’ carries similar connotations,suggesting an analogy between armed conflict and media gamesmanship fought,in the latter case, with cheap recording technologies, appropriated platforms, and viral onlinedistribution. These are weapons to be deployed in situations of asymmetrical warfare againstcorporatized anti-democratic entities, although theorists of tactical media are careful to distinguishtheir unstable, temporary, polymorphous allegiances from the bi-lateral conflicts associatedwith nationalism or the zeal of the global religions of the codex.The media deployed by different sides in these conflicts may have fundamentally differentorientations toward testimony and evidence. Competing campaigns by pro-Palestinianactivists and Israeli public relations specialists in the wake of the Mavi Marmara shootingsattempted to use video and photo-sharing sites as platforms from which to persuade a transnationalpublic. In the Turkish case, the rhetorical claims focused on testimony, in which aparticular political subject can bear witness as an individual agent. In the Israeli case, claimsemphasized the presentation of evidence in a seemingly neutral, technocratic display ofdisembodied objects, traces, and signs.In an essay on ‘Official Channels’ in the first Video Vortex Reader, I argued that the statesanctioneduse of YouTube in e-government in the United States and Britain tended to reinforcethe one-to-many structures by which liberal representative democracies functioned inthe mass media era and government norms of bureaucracy, surveillance, and legalism. 1Rather than celebrate the victory of YouTube’s DIY culture over corporatized neoliberal agendasof command and control, I asserted that the Staatswissenschaft of contemporary Achenwallscould just as easily borrow the trappings of vernacular video to co-opt the political willof citizens and further the data-mining of information on these citizens’ computers by thirdparties.Since then, modern states around the world have borrowed Anglo-American YouTube techniquesto buttress their authority. For example, a New York Times article from November1. Elizabeth Losh, ‘Government Youtube: Bureaucracy, Surveillance, and Legalism in State-Sanctioned Online Video Channels’, in Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds) Video VortexReader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008, pp. 111-124.

284 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubepolitics & human rights2852008 describes how, after the election of Barack Obama, the campaign of conservative Israelipolitician Benjamin Netanyahu borrowed ‘colors, the fonts, the icons for donating andvolunteering, the use of videos, and the social networking Facebook-type options — includingTwitter’, a service that very few Israelis would be likely to use, in ‘a conscious effort bythe Netanyahu campaign to learn from the Obama success’. 2 Thanks to a successful race,Netanyahu’s Likud party rose to power, and the former head of state returned to the positionof Israeli Prime Minister.Netanyahu was already installed in office by the time Turkish nationals were organizing theso-called ‘Freedom Flotilla’, which was intended to break the three-year-old blockade of Gazathat had been maintained by the Israeli Navy on international waters while Egyptian officialshad also agreed to keep the border closed on land. From the Israeli perspective, the blockadewas intended to prevent the importation of weapons that might compromise their securityand to economically punish anti-Israeli Hamas supporters, who had controlled the territorysince winning a majority of parliamentary seats in Gaza in a 2006 election. Organizers of theflotilla hoped to shame the Israelis and to bring humanitarian aid to Palestinians cut off fromMiddle Eastern trade and desperate for medical, construction, and school supplies.In preparation for an eventual confrontation between the six ships loaded with provisionsand the Israeli military forbidding the transport, the Insani Yardim Vakfi IHH (a Turkish HumanitarianRelief Foundation) established a channel on the livestream.com service. 3 TheIHH was soon publicizing this online venue on multinational news broadcasts and invitinginternational observers to watch online. The IHH hoped that viewers would see this not justas an act of military oppression by the Israelis but also as an act of piracy on internationalwaters, and they consciously set the stage to draw analogies with recent clashes with piratesoff the coast of Somalia.In the wake of the bloody consequences of boarding the Mavi Marmara on May 31, 2010, inwhich nine pro-Palestinian activists died (eight citizens of Turkey and one Turkish-American),the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were soon disseminating online videos of their own to counterpossible outrage. One of the most popular videos was on the IDF YouTube channel, ‘Close-upFootage of the Mavi Mamara’, 4 which to date has received over two million views. Unlikethe widely watched raucous video recording 5 of anti-Israeli student demonstrations by theso-called ‘Irvine 11’ on February 8, 2010, who had repeatedly disrupted the speech of Israeliambassador Michael Oren a few months earlier and fueled debate about the free speech2. Ethan Bronner and Noam Cohen, ‘Israeli Candidate Borrows a (Web) Page From Obama’, TheNew York Times, November 15 2008, sec. International / Middle East, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/world/middleeast/15bibi.html?_r=1.3. IHH Insani Yardim Vakfi - live streaming video powered by Livestream, http://www.livestream.com/insaniyardim.4. ‘Close-Up Footage of Mavi Marmara Passengers Attacking IDF Soldiers’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYjkLUcbJWo&feature=youtube_gdata_player.5. ‘Uncivilized Tactics at UC Irvine (Rough Cut)’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w96UR79TBw&feature=youtube_gdata_player.rights of Muslim students on American campuses, many of the most-watched video accountsof the Mavi Marmara shootings are eerily silent.As Israeli military personnel swift-rope down to the deck of the ship from helicopters, viewersof ‘Close-up Footage of the Mavi Mamara’ can see projectiles being thrown at the soldiersand a swarm of swirling bodies in the chaos shot by the rocking camera. At second 22 on theIDF YouTube video, yellow lettering appears that says ‘Soldiers being hit with metal poles andchairs’; a yellow circle and then a yellow ellipse appear to show where these events can beobserved. By second 34 another yellow circle has appeared with yellow text reading ‘Demonstratorsthrowing soldier off of boat’. About one minute in, another yellow ellipse pops ontothe grainy black-and-white footage with the phrase ‘Soldiers being hit with metal rods’ nearby.Providing clear indices to aid in the interpretation of potentially ambiguous visual evidencehas become a common strategy in defending violence by agents of the state. Most famously,the footage in the criminal trial of the California police officers who were filmed beating dociledrunk driving suspect Rodney King was subsequently remediated to justify the exercise offorce. As Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and Gary Peller point out in their analysis of the case,defense attorneys were successful in presenting a particular version of events to the jurorsby slicing up the 81 second videotape into single discrete frames mounted on a white posterboard. By combining still images with a neutral backdrop, the officers’ lawyers both physicallymediated the footage and in ‘the same moment of disaggregation ... symbolically mediated’the videotaped evidence with ‘the technical discourse of institutional security’. 6 What hadseemed at first to show a shocking exposé of corrupt behavior was ultimately reduced to adidactic show of information graphics about proper state-sanctioned techniques of appropriaterestraint.The ability to remix and remediate digital content has been celebrated as a sign of the vigor ofparticipatory culture and civic deliberation by American critics Henry Jenkins, Lawrence Lessig,and Jay David Bolter. Of course, remixing and remediating content that might originallybe captured in a continuous shot raises questions about the transparency of representation,particularly when the full video record combines the incriminating with the exculpatory, justas it often combines the shocking with the banal. Less obviously, these activities of repurposingand re-contextualization recognize the extent to which our current situation within a politicsof what I have called ‘mediated transparency and transparent mediation’ draw attentionto the contingency of all contemporary truth claims.Even leaders in human rights non-government organizations (NGOs) have come to recognizethe complications of what WITNESS head Sam Gregory has called ‘witness journalism’ ratherthan the more optimistic ‘citizen journalism’. In a recent article entitled ‘Cameras Everywhere:Ubiquitous Video Documentation of Human Rights’ in the Journal of Human Rights Practice,Gregory explains his dilemma:6. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and Gary Peller, ‘Reel Time/Real Justice’, in Robert Gooding-Williams (ed.) Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, New York: Routledge, 1993,p. 59.

286 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubepolitics & human rights287Our work since 1992 has focused on how best to enable human rights defenders touse video in their advocacy and activism, and has integrated training and intensivesupport to local groups on their campaigns, as well as developing multimedia platformsfor informed dissemination of human rights media. Along the way we have learned thatthe technology in itself is insufficient in the absence of the capacity to film capably – orto tell stories effectively with the resulting material. Without technical training you canshoot raw video, but you cannot create the finished narratives that are of value in mostadvocacy contexts ... We have seen that “seeing is believing” does not necessarily applyin all instances, and that nuanced storytelling and incorporation of video into otheradvocacy strategies often produces the most effective results. 7As Gregory writes, the ‘potential presence of a camera in every concerned citizen’s hand createspowerful opportunities for the future of human rights video and human rights advocacy.At the same time, it raises significant questions of agency, action and audience’. 8 In fact,it could be argued that what Gregory really presents is ‘evidence journalism’ rather than ‘witnessjournalism’. After all, the apparatus of the digital video camera witnesses an event onlyto the extent that it can as a mechanical recording device. It cannot bear witness in the publicspace of forensic argument. As Derrida once claimed, judges, tribunals, and other arbiters ofjustice need those who attest to their own self-interested and singular presence at an eventin order to participate in deliberation.In the series of videos that were released on May 31, 2010, the IDF seems to be methodicallypresenting a legal case composed of a sequence of evidentiary moments. ‘Israeli NavyAddresses a Ship in the Flotilla and Offers it to Dock in the Ashdod Port’ 9 shows a militaryofficer advising passengers of their legal rights and obligations. He speaks in English, andsubtitles are appended to the video to make the official statement clear:Mavi Marmara, you are approaching an area of hostility which is under a naval blockade.The Gaza area, coastal region and Gaza harbor are closed to all maritime traffic.The Israeli government supports delivery of humanitarian supplies to the civilian populationin the Gaza Strip and invites you to enter the Ashdod Port. Delivery of the suppliesin accordance with the authority’s regulations will be through the formal land crossingsand under your observation, after which, you can return to your home ports aboard thevessels on which you arrived.To this hyper-rational legalistic discourse, the Mavi Marmara responds, ‘Negative, negative.Our destination is Gaza’. The video ends with this brief, contradictory reply.7. Sam Gregory, ‘Cameras Everywhere: Ubiquitous Video Documentation of Human Rights, NewForms of Video Advocacy, and Considerations of Safety, Security, Dignity and Consent’, Journal ofHuman Rights Practice 2.2 (2010). Sam Gregory’s text is also published in this reader.8. Gregory, ‘Cameras Everywhere’, p. 5.9. ‘Israeli Navy Addresses a Ship in the Flotilla and Offers it to Dock in the Ashdod Port’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKOmLP4yHb4&feature=youtube_gdata_player.Later in the sequence of the May 31 st YouTube videos, the IDF released a video entitled‘Weapons Found on the Flotilla Ship Mavi Marmara Used by Activists Against IDF Soldiers’. 10The explanatory caption claims that the video will show a ‘cache of weapons including manyknives, slingshots, rocks, smoke bombs, metal rods, improvised sharp metal objects, sticksand clubs, 5KG hammers, firebombs and gas masks’, but the first piece of evidence shown inthe video is a large pile of keffiyeh, traditional Arab headdresses that have become associatedwith the Intifada in the visual rhetoric of the Israeli government and its Western military allies.In the next shot, a crate of smoke torches is shown, but in the background the viewer canclearly see packages of water. This is followed by a confusing mass of slingshots and then twoplastic bottles filled with stones. Toward the end of the video there are the types of weaponsdisplays that a television viewer might associate with the successful ‘bust’ of a criminal enterprise:arrays of pipes, bats, and knives that are neatly lined up atop a green Hamas flag. In theYouTube video ‘Footage from the Mavi Marmara Including Injured Soldiers and Items FoundOn Board’, 11 the jumble of detritus includes bags of marbles, which are part of the rhetoricalcase presented. The faces of the injured Israeli soldiers are not visible; their wounds appearas more evidence to support the case presented by the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit on YouTube.The final video in the May 31 st series seems to provide testimony rather than evidence tobolster the IDF case. However the face of the witness in ‘Israeli Navy Soldier Describes theViolent Mob Aboard Mavi Marmara’ 12 is obscured by digital blurring, and thus the viewersattention might naturally go to his broken arm in a sling, which provides evidence of his injury.It is worth noting that although other videos dispassionately describe the ship’s passengers as‘demonstrators’ or ‘activists’, this video characterizes them as a ‘violent mob’. In an article inThe New York Times, ‘Videos Carry On the Fight Over Sea Raid’, the newspaper observes thatthe rhetorical retaliation escalated in succeeding days. 13 In this ‘fight’, the Israelis quickly lostpolitical capital: the mere fact of having so apparently edited the footage called its authenticityinto doubt, and the Israeli commandos who stormed the Mavi Marmara seized digital photosand videos created by witnesses from the other side.What is also striking is that many of the videos either use moving images alone, or only featuresound, which draws attention to the lack of sound synchronization in many of the IDF MaviMarmara videos. By June 4 th the IDF was actually posting a still photograph of the Israeli militaryperson previously shown notifying passengers that they could peacefully deliver the suppliesby land if they complied with his nautical orders. In the new version the still is mashedup with inflammatory dialogue supposedly from the Mavi Marmara. An unlikely assortment10. ‘Weapons Found on the Flotilla Ship Mavi Marmara Used by Activists Against IDF Soldiers’,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvS9PXZ3RWM&.11. ‘Footage from the Mavi Marmara Including Injured Soldiers and Items Found On Board’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN3vIT2uh_U.12. ‘Israeli Navy Soldier Describes the Violent Mob Aboard Mavi Marmara’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9p5QT91QYs.13. Brian Stelter, ‘Videos Carry On the Fight Over Sea Raid’, The New York Times, June 1 2010, sec.World / Middle East, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/world/middleeast/02media.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1284832821-QIx62AT77LxfPB2eYFomEw.

288 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubepolitics & human rights289of accented voices, badly edited together, declare ‘Shut up, go back to Auschwitz’, ‘We havepermission from the Gaza Port Authority to enter’, and ‘We’re helping Arabs go against theU.S., don’t forget 9/11 guys’. 14 The nasty insults emphasize a form of verbal violence thatimplicitly justifies Israeli retaliation. Shortly afterward, the IDF posted a blacked-out ‘uneditedversion’ that included five and a half additional minutes of audio from the exchanges betweenthe ships, including a female voice arguing that the Freedom Flotilla was an all-civilian humanitarianenterprise. This less incendiary version received far fewer views.In her work on jailcams and death row websites, law professor Mona Lynch has asserted thatdigital video disseminated to online audiences often takes on a third valence: one of nihilistichumor. 15 This jocular attitude about vernacular media creation differs fundamentally fromthe reinforced positions of either the Israeli’s authority or the pro-Palestinian sympathizer’sresistance. Such light-hearted commentary and cavalier digital manipulation often mocksthat which anthropologist Meg McLagan, making use of a term put forward by Richard Rorty,has termed the ‘sad, sentimental stories’ considered central to enabling ‘technologies of witnessing’to be an effective part of the ‘visual culture of human rights’. 16The Israel Defense Forces maintain a parallel Flickr site, which also documented the boardingof the Mavi Marmara. It has a noticeably different tone from the more deferential YouTubesite, and some of the titles of photographs actually indicate outright mockery of the Mavi Marmarapassengers. For example, one photograph of a bearded man in a black t-shirt, whichappears to be a still of video footage, shows him speaking into a microphone on which thewhite subtitle reads: ‘Third time lucky, with the help of God, I will be a Shahid (Martyr)’. Thephotograph is sarcastically titled ‘“Peace activist” hopes to become a Shahid (Martyr)’. 17Unlike the IDF YouTube site on which comments are disabled, the IDF Flickr site allows viewersto post responses to the jumble of evidence shown in the frame. Thus skeptical visitors tothe IDF Flickr site can respond to Israeli cynicism in kind with comments like ‘It’s some Englishtext written on top of a static photograph, so it must be a completely truthful representation ofwhat he was saying’, and ‘Sorry, can’t hear what he says, so I can’t judge the subtitles either’. 18The Flickr set of ‘Weapons found on Mavi Marmara’ 19 was obviously intended to quiet theinternational outcry that resulted from the death of the pro-Palestinian activists and presentthe Israeli military’s case that they had to kill passenger-protestors because 1) they had14. ‘Flotilla Ship to Israeli Navy: ‘We’re Helping Arabs Go Against the US, Don’t Forget 9/11 Guys’,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxY7Q7CvQPQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player.15. Mona Lynch, ‘Punishing Images’, Punishment & Society 6.3 (2004): 255 -270.16. Meg McLagan, ‘Introduction: Making Human Rights Claims Public’, American Anthropologist108. 1 (2006): 193.17. Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘“Peace activist” hopes to become a Shahid (Martyr)’, http://www.flickr.com/photos/israel-mfa/4666114392/.18. Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘“Peace activist” hopes to become a Shahid (Martyr)’, http://www.flickr.com/photos/israel-mfa/4666114392/.19. Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Weapons Found on Mavi Mari’ photograph set, http://www.flickr.com/photos/israel-mfa/sets/72157624179998488/with/4666114392/.weapons that they could have used against the commandos or 2) they had weapons that theycould have shipped to Gaza to support Intifada-related activities. But often the presentation ofevidence on sites like YouTube and Flickr only invites spoilers who question the truth claimsof digital content-creators. Much as YouTube sensations lonelygirl15 and other fictional bloggerswere unmasked by those skeptics who scoured backgrounds in search of clues of authenticorigin that might be left in the simulacrum presented, visitors to the IDF Flickr sitewere able to contest IDF claims and insist that some of the evidence presented was staged.For example, a shot of night vision equipment and what the authorities claim is a rifle scopelabeled ‘Weapons found aboard the Mavi Marmara’ 20 is largely a discussion among dozensof netizens about the photograph’s metadata on Flickr and the fact that the timestamp onthe image indicates a much earlier date in 2006. Although most ridicule the IDF with commentssuch as ‘every moron, knows, that nowadays, every pic you make, has EXIF’, somedefend the IDF’s record-keeping by arguing that the camera had probably been reset to its2005 default date more recently in a simple oversight that many make in the era of mediatedtransparency and transparent mediation.Digital historian Dan Cohen has argued that ‘pickling’ information about the original digitaldevice on which a file was created could be important in preserving a more complete versionof the historical record, whether it be the Blackberry of an important political figure or thecomputer on which a great work of literature was written. 21 In the commentary on the MaviMarmara photographs, one participant copied out the entire digital signature of the photographand traced the migration of the file from the Nikon that shot the image without flash tothe computer with the Adobe Photoshop software that prepared the file for its Flickr debut.The trail was as follows:Camera: Nikon D2XsExposure: 0.003 sec (1/320)Aperture: f/4.5Focal Length: 38 mmISO Speed: 200Exposure Bias: 0 EVFlash: No FlashFile Size: 264 kBFile Type: JPEGMIME Type: image/jpegImage Width: 1196Image Height: 1800Encoding Process: Baseline DCT, Huffman codingBits Per Sample: 8Color Components: 320. Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Weapons found aboard the Mavi Marmara’, http://www.flickr.com/photos/israel-mfa/4662343805/.21. Dan Cohen, interview, Washington D.C. May 27, 2010.

290 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubepolitics & human rights291X-Resolution: 300 dpiY-Resolution: 300 dpiOrientation: Horizontal (normal)Software: Adobe Photoshop CS4 MacintoshDate and Time (Modified): 2010:06:02 11:23:04YCbCr Positioning: Co-sitedExposure Program: Aperture-priority AEDate and Time (Original): 2006:02:07 05:20:56Date and Time (Digitized): 2006:02:07 05:20:56In contrast to the Israelis’ evidentiary protocols, the Flickr account from the IHH emphasizedhumanizing headshots in which the chief engineer of the ship was shown with a pacifiersuckingbaby and an obviously secular passenger in a ‘reliable goods’ t-shirt and a colorfulnecklace. On the IHH Flickr photostream traditionally garbed men in skullcaps were shownpraying, but others were shown leisurely chatting and relaxing in deckchairs, without any obviousreligious mission, and with flags from several countries flickering in the breeze nearby.After the ship was boarded by Israeli soldiers, a number of pictures of the wounded beingtreated were placed on the IHH Flickr site, which included a dramatic photograph of anIsraeli soldier being treated by doctors who were among the Palestinian sympathizers onthe ship. There were two other immediately striking aspects of the IHH Flickr set. First, thequality of the photographs was often aesthetically more compelling than the less artfullycomposed evidentiary IDF photos, as though well-composed shots would run counter to theIsraeli government’s claims for credibility. Second, the IHH used the copyright symbol prominentlyon their Flickr pages, which would seem to discourage fair use of the images, whilethe IDF chose to use a Creative Commons license that was more generous with its claims tointellectual property (in the months that followed, the CC license was subsequently removedfrom the IDF Mavi Marmara images).Eventually the IDF posted new footage on YouTube, which was actually taken from the demonstrators’own cameras. For example, on June 2 nd , the IDF posted a video called ‘Flotilla RiotersPrepare Rods, Slingshots, Broken Bottles and Metal Objects to Attack IDF Soldiers’. 22The ‘demonstrators’ in earlier videos have now become ‘rioters’. Perhaps the most noticeablecut in the ‘rioters’ video is between 21:36 and 22:04, where it seems that the activists mayhave been gathered for prayer. By June 5 th the IDF YouTube channel was emphasizing thesad ironies of lost possibilities and the wish for a different conclusion to the conflict on thehigh seas, one that imagines an alternative history for those from the Mavi Marmara who werenow dead, wounded, or in custody. In the video of ‘Passengers from Seventh Flotilla ShipDisembark at Ashdod Port’ 23 we see obedient flotilla members disembarking non-violentlyfrom the Rachel Corrie ship. Unlike the people in the ‘mob’ or ‘the rioters’ depicted in otherIDF videos that show the Mavi Marmara, the Rachel Corrie video includes old women, pregnantwomen, frail men, and others who do not fit the image of jihadist radicalism that the IDFhas associated with other participants in the flotilla attempting to cross the Gaza blockade.Actually, the YouTube message is really in the crowd’s applause at the end, which reinforcesthe idea that the soldiers leading the passengers off the boat are behaving chivalrously andcourteously in their interactions.When those who survived the shootings were repatriated, the IHH Livestream site showedfirst-person accounts of victimization by recording testimony of survivors in their hospitalbeds intercut with footage of Israeli commandos with faces obscured by helmets and automaticrifles pointed. The survivors described loss of consciousness, drops in blood pressure,the pain of being handcuffed, and other aspects of their embodied experience as witnesses.In the immediate aftermath of the vessel’s boarding however, this Livestream channel waslargely devoted to news coverage rather than original content from the IHH, because theirrecording devices had been confiscated by Israeli authorities.Even for activists, the evidentiary approach of using digital content can backfire. Although thefamed ‘Collateral Murder’ video on YouTube from WikiLeaks 24 used similar subtitling, labeling,and visual targeting techniques as those deployed by the IDF, it was perceived as a credibledepiction of the murder of two Iraqi journalists by U.S. soldiers and the wounding of children ina van driven by Iraqi civilians attempting to aid other civilians. Yet the ultimate remoteness andanonymity of the producers behind the WikiLeaks site and allegations about the moral characterof its chief backer have since raised doubts about its ability to continue to bear witness.Ironically, the internet may be a site in which testimony is less likely to be challenged than evidence.Online presentations of evidence often inspire nitpicking and the search for contradictoryclues, while the mere words of an autistic person or a schizophrenic inspire admiration.Yet since the Mavi Marmara, the IDF continues to use editing techniques in other YouTubevideos that are devoted to building a case by presenting overwhelming quantities of materialevidence and providing obvious pointers to guide the viewing experience. For example, coveragethat promised ‘extended footage’ titled ‘Hezbollah Removes Weapons from ExplosionSite in Al-Shahabiya’ 25 uses a silent subtitled format with time code and circled sectionsto indicate where the viewer’s eyes should be. With their onslaught of YouTube videos, theIsraeli Defense Forces had hoped to bolster their case about the boarding of the Mavi Marmara.But the Israeli government made a fundamental mistake by assuming that picturesspeak for themselves…or more specifically, that governments can speak for pictures.22. ‘Flotilla Rioters Prepare Rods, Slingshots, Broken Bottles and Metal Objects to Attack IDFSoldiers’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZlSSaPT_OU&feature=youtube_gdata_player.23. ‘Passengers from Seventh Flotilla Ship Disembark at Ashdod Port’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtjWyweOFyM&feature=youtube_gdata_player.24. ‘Collateral Murder - Wikileaks – Iraq’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0&feature=youtube_gdata_player.25. ‘Extended Footage (English): Hezbollah Removes Weapons from Explosion Site in Al-Shahabiya’,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAUzs-4GM8k&feature=youtube_gdata_player.

292 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art293ReferencesBronner, Ethan and Noam Cohen. ‘Israeli Candidate Borrows a (Web) Page From Obama’, TheNew York Times, November 15, 2008, sec. International / Middle East, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/world/middleeast/15bibi.html?_r=1.Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams and Gary Peller. ‘Reel Time/Real Justice’, in Robert Gooding-Williams(ed.) Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, New York: Routledge, 1993.Gregory, Sam. ‘Cameras Everywhere: Ubiquitous Video Documentation of Human Rights, New Formsof Video Advocacy, and Considerations of Safety, Security, Dignity and Consent’, Journal of HumanRights Practice 2.2 (2010): 191-207.Losh, Elizabeth. ‘Government YouTube: Bureaucracy, Surveillance, and Legalism in State-SanctionedOnline Video Channels’, in Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds) Video Vortex Reader: Responsesto YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.Lynch, Mona. ‘Punishing Images’, Punishment & Society 6.3 (2004): 255 -270.McLagan, Meg. ‘Introduction: Making Human Rights Claims Public’, American Anthropologist 108.1(2006): 191-195.Stelter, Brian. Videos Carry On the Fight Over Sea Raid. The New York Times, June 1, 2010, sec.World / Middle East, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/world/middleeast/02media.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1284832821-QIx62AT77LxfPB2eYFomEw.Increasing the Visibility of Blindness:Natalie Bookchin’s Mass OrnamentBrian WillemsOn Facebook, others can post pictures of you, tag your presence, and comment as theywish. These photos are added to your personal profile, thereby foregrounding the limitsone (always) has to self-representation. This can cause problems. Friends from one milieu(work) are privy to tagged activities from another (play). On the one hand this is terrible;whatever control that was held over the different domains of life is decreased even further.On the other hand, however, this chaotic presentation of self comes closer to who we actuallyare, precisely because people other than ourselves have control. Social media can workto reveal aspects of ourselves that we would rather keep hidden, to which we would ratherkeep our ‘friends’, and ourselves, blind. It forces us, and others, to see a fuller picture ofwho we are. In this sense a site like Facebook, or the meta-information contained in theblogosphere, works towards a critical convergence, or what David Bordwell calls an ‘intensifiedcontinuity’, in which our blindness to who we are becomes more and more visible, forbetter or for worse.I argue that social media like Facebook and YouTube have the ability to make that whichPaul de Man would call the ‘blindness of reading’ visible. This qualitative difference is manifestthrough the ability to track, and hence see through tags and other meta-information, anumber of connections between bodies that would otherwise remain hidden. What is importantis to understand the manner in which these connections are made visible. I use two examplesin order to discuss the visibility of blindness as it relates to YouTube in particular: first,Avital Ronell’s argument from the early 1990s that video’s inability to be read paradoxicallyvisualizes the unreadable trauma of television; and second, the more contemporary exampleof Natalie Bookchin’s Mass Ornament (2009), a piece of video art utilizing YouTube as anexample of structuring a visualization of the unseen.Reading, Trauma, TelevisionOne way to approach the relationship between visibility and blindness is through the conceptof reading. Reading is an activity that is both ubiquitous and challenging to pin down. Theco-existence of ubiquity and ambiguity is paramount to the events of both reading and beingread.For Paul de Man, reading is never ‘just’ reading; it always refers to something beyond itsdirect referent. In the following, de Man discusses Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu:The allegory of reading narrates the impossibility of reading. But this impossibility necessarilyextends to the word ‘reading’ which is thus deprived of any referential meaningwhatsoever. ... Everything in this novel signifies something other than what it represents,be it love, consciousness, politics, art, sodomy, or gastronomy: it is always somethingelse than is intended. It can be shown that the most adequate term to designate

294 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art295this “something else” is Reading. But one must at the same time “understand” thatthis word bars access, once and forever, to a meaning that yet can never cease to callout for its understanding. 1The doubled meaning of reading becomes apparent: it is both active (it does something,it refers to something else) and substantive (static, describing a state, like the verb tobe). These two meanings cannot be reconciled; rather, their coexistence functions asan engine for the process of becoming visible. We must proceed very carefully here, forby discussing reading’s existence as something else, and its being a call for a ceaselessincompletion of understanding, we are coming very close to saying nothing at all, of becomingtrapped in a self-assured understanding of a certain kind of dialectics. Thereforean example is in order.In March of 1991, in an early case of what Steve Mann has termed ‘sousveillance’, 2 GeorgeHolliday videotaped the beating of Rodney King by a number of Los Angeles police officers,four of whom were later brought to trial. The role of the video in this trial was paramount,and it forms the crux of Avital Ronell’s essay ‘TraumaTV: Twelve Steps beyond the PleasurePrinciple’. 3 Here, Ronell focuses on the way in which the video of King occupies the positionboth of being something else, and of referring to that something else, just as reading does forDe Man. In other words, what the Rodney King video actually shows is how hard the videoitself is to see.First, the video foregrounds the question of whether King’s getting up from the ground wasan aggressive gesture or not. Even though the gesture was recorded and the video was examinedframe by frame in court, the ‘truth’ of King’s gesture is still impossible to ‘see’ (althoughit was perhaps made difficult to see for reasons other than the truth). Second, by showing theimpossibility of reading, the video assumes the active function of referring to something otherthan itself, to something more than the contents of the video. The video shows how King’sgesture slips beyond the tag of ‘aggression’. This is reflected in the way King himself occupiesa similar double-position, for he needed to be something other than himself in order to bebeaten: to justify the beating, King needed to have been on PCP (for which he tested negative)and ‘buffed out’ as one of the officers claimed he appeared. As Ronell argues:What does it mean to say that the police force is hallucinating drugs, or, in this case,to allow the suggestion that it was already in the projection booth as concerns RodneyKing? In the first place, before the first place, they were watching the phantom of racistfootage. According to black-and-white TV, Rodney King could not be merely by1. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust,New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1979, p. 77.2. Steve Mann, ‘Sousveillance’, Wearcam.org, 2002, http://wearcam.org/sousveillance.htm. Thisexample is actually an illustration of the second subtype of sousveillance Mann describes, ‘outof-bandsousveillance’.3. Avital Ronell, ‘TraumaTV: Twelve Steps beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in Finitude’s Score:Essays for the End of the Millennium, Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.himself or who he was that night. In order to break Rodney King, or break the story,the phantasm of the supplemented Other – on junk, beside himself, not himself, morethan himself, a technozombie of supernatural capabilities – had to be agreed upon bythe police force. 4For Ronell, one of the reasons that King was allowed to appear as a figure of displacementand projection in the early 1990s was because the video of the beating was located withinthe medium of television. Television, according to Ronell, ‘exists in trauma, or rather, traumais what preoccupies television: it is always on television’. 5 Trauma, too, is also unreadable intwo ways: ‘as a memory that one cannot integrate into one’s own experience, and as a catastrophicknowledge that one cannot communicate to others’. 6 The video of King, projectedonto and out of television, is what made the trauma of communication visible. This is becausethe video was assumed to record the reality of the event, as is evident in its use as a perfectlyobjective eyewitness in court. However, what the video actually revealed was that it could beshown, but not read. King had been recorded but he was not communicating, at least not inthe expected manner. His gesture of getting up off the ground could not be determined bythe court to be aggressive, or otherwise. And then, repetition of the recorded and replayablevideo on transient television only foregrounded the unreadability of television itself. As Ronellpoints out: ‘I am not saying that video is the truth of television, nor its essence. Rather, it iswhat is watching television; it is the place of the testimonial that cannot speak with referentialassurance but does assert the truth of what it says’. 7As a medium, television is always something other than itself, ‘when it mimes police work orwhen, during the [first] Gulf War, blanking out in a phobic response to the call of reference,it becomes a radio’. 8 However, Ronell argues, the central question regarding video on televisionis the doubled active/substantive role of the medium of television. Ronell describes thisdual role using the language of blindness: television ‘showed itself not showing, and becamethe closed, knotted eye of blindness’. 9 For Ronell, television is both something else and refersto something else, and this position is foregrounded, or made visible, by the call of video. Thereading of King shows that the question of the ability to see relates to the medium of video.What the reading of King shows is that the question of the ability to see relates to the mediumof video, a question addressed by artist Natalie Bookchin’s in her work that uses YouTubevideos as material.4. Ronell, ‘TraumaTV’, p. 307. This projection can also be seen as an example of what FrantzFanon terms ‘collective catharsis’ in Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox, New York:Grove Press, 2008, p. 124.5. Ronell, ‘TraumaTV’, p. 313.6. Ronell, ‘TraumaTV’, p. 314. Slavoj Žižek calls trauma an ‘unknown unknown’ in counterdistinction to the ‘unknown known’ of the Unconscious. Trauma is ‘the violent intrusion ofsomething radically unexpected, something the subject was absolutely not ready for, and which itcannot integrate in any way’, Living in the End Times, London; New York: Verso, 2010, p. 292.7. Ronell, ‘TraumaTV’, p. 316.8. Ronell, ‘TraumaTV’, p. 316.9. Ronell, ‘TraumaTV’, p. 316.

296 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art297Visibility, Video, Girl-KulturIn her 2008 work Trip, her 2009 work Mass Ornament, and her latest piece at the time of writing,Testament (exhibited October 2009-January 2010 at the Los Angeles Country Museumof Art), Natalie Bookchin has based her work on online video collocated around a number ofrelated meta-tags. Her methodology is to choose and then explore these videos through thesimilarities and differences she finds that extend between people separated by time, spaceand culture. In Trip, Bookchin collates videos found on YouTube that feature road trips; fromtraveling with friends, to video of an improvised explosive device explosion in Iraq. What firstseems to hold these disparate videos together is that they were shot from cars and othermeans of transportation. However, what emerges from the mixture of languages, cultures andsituations, is that what has actually been recorded is an attempt – both failed and successful– to traverse borders, the inherent promise of every trip.The focus here, however, will be Bookchin’s Mass Ornament, a piece of video art whichcompiles YouTube videos featuring people dancing alone in a room. Bookchin reinforces thecommonalities between the clips through the music she occasionally uses to accompanythe images, including the song ‘Lullaby of Broadway’ from Busby Berkeley’s 1935 film GoldDiggers of 1935, and pieces, mainly those of Wagner, from another film released in thesame year, Leni Riefenstahl’s work of Nazi propaganda, The Triumph of the Will. 10 In orderto understand this work, and its relevance to reading and blindness, it is necessary to brieflydiscuss the text from which Bookchin has taken the title of Mass Ornament.Siegfried Kracauer’s essay ‘The Mass Ornament’ first appeared as a feuilleton in the FrankfurterZeitung in 1927, and was later reprinted in 1963 in a collection which was titled afterthe essay. In ‘The Mass Ornament’, Kracauer states that it is the unconscious production ofan era, rather than its conscious critical output, that can provide access to ‘the fundamentalsubstance of the state of things’. 11 Kracauer’s example of unconscious production is thechorus girl or line dancer. ‘These products of American distraction factories’, Kracauer states,‘are no longer individual girls, but indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrationsof mathematics’. 12 The group of line dancers Kracauer refers to, the Tiller Girls,were themselves English, the precision products of Manchurian ex-textile manufacturer JohnTiller. 13 For Kracauer, they signify the way in which people (Volk) become the mass (Masse).People, for Kracauer, are burdened with burdening others with meaning, while the mass ‘aremere building blocks and nothing more’. 14 The mass is ornament, and ‘The ornament is anend in itself’. 15 The Tiller Girls are de-eroticized, their movements ‘take place in a vacuum’;‘they are a linear system that no longer has any erotic meaning but at best points to the locusof the erotic’. 16 These ‘girl-units’, Kracauer states,drill in order to produce an immense number of parallel lines, the goal being to trainthe broadest mass of people in order to create a pattern of undreamed-of dimensions.The end result is the ornament, whose closure is brought about by emptying all thesubstantial constructs of their contents. 17They become ‘purely’ referential, taking on the double position of referring to the shape of astar, square or circle, and being that referent themselves. In this sense, following Kracauer’sargument, they are vehicles of the unconscious, a medium allowing the un-thought elementsof capitalism to seep through to consciousness.For Kracauer, the solution to the ornament is not a return to nature or to ‘the human’, but amore extreme calculability, a stricter rationality. At the close of his essay, Kracauer uses rhythmicgymnastics as a failed example of such potentially extreme rationality, for it ‘goes furtherand expropriates the higher mythological levels, thereby strengthening nature’s dominanceall the more’. Therefore, Kracaeur writes, ‘It is just one example among many other equallyhopeless attempts to reach a higher life from out of mass existence’. 18 Rhythmic gymnasticsdoes not fit the bill because it is too romantic, it lacks ‘more’ rationality. We can only moveforward ‘when thinking circumscribes nature and produces man as he is constituted by reason.Then society will change’. 19In part, Kracauer’s description of the Mass Ornament recalls Elizabeth Losh’s account of theprotagonists of YouTube videos:There may be real human beings populating the audience constellations of YouTube,but they satisfy stock roles, such as griefer, self-promoter, parodist, pundit, and seconderof motions. In other words, YouTube is often a culture engine of popularity insteadof populism, in which the power laws by which it functions largely protect thestatus quo rather than challenge it. 2010. The Triumph of the Will, (dir. Leni Riefenstahl, 1935).11. Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Levin, Cambridge;London: Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 75.12. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, pp. 75-6.13. Peter Jelavich, ‘“Girls and Crisis”: The Political Aesthetics of the Kickline in Weimar Berlin’,in John Roth (ed.) Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics and the Psyche, Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1994, p. 226.14. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, p. 76.15. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, p. 76. Adolf Loos’ Ornament and Crime, from 1908, should alsobe indicated here, although Loos adds a lack of moral evolution to those that are immersed inornamentation. See Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, trans. Michael Mitchell,Riverside: Ariadne Press, 1998.16. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, p. 77.17. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, p. 77.18. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, p. 86.19. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, p. 86.20. Elizabeth Losh, ‘Government YouTube: Bureaucracy, Surveillance, and Legalism in State-Sanctioned Online Video Channels’, in Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds.) Video VortexReader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008, pp. 111-112.

298 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art299On the surface, Bookchin’s video piece seems to agree with Losh’s assessment, and to callattention to the dehumanizing aspect that Kracauer identified. Indeed, as Bookchin herselfstates in relation to her own work: ‘The Mass Ornament reflects the abstraction involved incapitalist profit formation. Workers in a factory, like dancers in a stadium, laboured to producesurplus value that existed for its own sake’. 21 However, I believe that what is in fact evidentis the more extreme rationality that Kracauer calls. In the hyper-structure of Bookchin’svideo collection of single figures dancing alone in their rooms, it is this more extreme rationalitythat allows the ‘unconscious’ aspects of contemporary culture to shine through. As in theexample of social networking sites discussed in the opening of this essay suggested, extremerationality can actually take the form of an extreme sociability. In order to understand the roleof this kind of rationality, the structure of Mass Ornament will be described in some detail.Bookchin’s video may be broken down into the following four ‘autonomous segments’: 22A) Amidst a black background there appear first one, then two, then more, then fewer bedroomsin a horizontal row. As Bookchin says of the piece, the blocks appear across thescreen as ‘a chorus line but [they] also [reflect] the viewing conditions of YouTube, wherevideos are shown with an accompanying row of thumbnail images linking seeminglysimilar videos’. 23 There are no people in these rooms, although sometimes, when a videofirst appears, a hand can be seen quickly moving out of the frame, probably having justturned the camera on. Each of these pictures has the number of views put underneathit, recalling the function on YouTube. Some of them even report ‘Removed by user’. Theyshow a number of empty rooms, until a hooded figure enters.These frames abruptly disappear, in a cut to the title of the piece. The initiatory stanceof this sequence is reinforced by the diegetic sound and music, which features an operasinger, television news and conversation, and the song ‘Lullaby of Broadway’, which willform a central motif for the whole video. The levity of this song, which was written in themidst of the Great Depression in 1935, at once hearkens back to the Roaring Twenties,which was perhaps the last time one could flaunt one’s self without shame, and a mourningfor the loss of those times – a send-off, or lullaby. A different era is now approaching,one in which a self-critical stance is paramount, as one is surrounded by so much suffering.This introduction to Bookchin’s piece ends with its title, although the song beginsagain before we cut away from the title, signifying a new section is about to begin.B) Next, one of only two optical devices that separate the images is used. As the music playson, the title fades out and a new segment with a new format fades in: one image whichis larger and in the centre of the screen. The content of this piece is a scene from anold movie showing a couple dancing. This single shot, which provides an autonomoussegment in itself, then fades into a shot of a young woman walking up to her mirror, andadjusting her gold lamé belt. Reflected in the mirror is a computer, to which the youngwoman turns. This image is followed by a jump cut to five other women, in five otherbedrooms, who all walk up to their computers and bend over to turn them on, supposedlycompleting the action that the first woman was about to begin. The next cut is to threeslightly larger screens with close-ups of computer monitors and single arms waving upand down, as if disconnected from the body of a belly dancer.What follows is a number of arrangements of people who are ‘just about to dance’: siximages of mirrors, with women stepping in front of them, facing the camera. The musicat the beginning of the piece is light, musical-like. There are then six images of womenbending down into the camera, having just turned it on, their faces at times out of focusfrom coming so close to it. Then, three women, and two men, are shown in their fivescreens preparing to begin a dance. They are not dancing, but are braced for the beginningof their routine. In the next shot, we see five empty rooms, into which a person walksand turns to face the camera, then three girls who have their midriffs exposed; then ninescreens show people backing away from the camera so their whole body can fit in theframe. Then twelve do. Then eighteen.Mass Ornament (2009) - the setup. All images are courtesy of the artist.Eighteen Dancers.21. Carolyn Kane, ‘Dancing Machines: An Interview with Natalie Bookchin’, Rhizome.org, 2009,http://www.rhizome.org/editorial/2653.22. Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor, Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 24-28.23. Kane, ‘Dancing Machines’.C) A change occurs at about the 2’45” mark, signaled in a number of ways. The diegeticroom noise takes over the lighter musical piece, and Mass Ornament takes on a more serious,and even sinister, tone. As the extra-diegetic music fades out, there is once again asingle shot to focus on. As with the black and white image of the dancing shadows, there

300 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art301is now a single shot in the centre of the frame. ‘Lullaby’ has finished and there are at firstonly diegetic sounds, and then a more sinister single synthesized note. What is seen is animage of a midriff in front of a television.Two disembodied bodies.companies a single screen, with similar framing to the shot showing only a midriff andtelevision; here, however, the dancer has her back to the camera, and her head ishanging down, supposedly to dramatically whip her hair up over her shoulders. However,as a punctum to this subjectum, a portrait hangs on the wall, as if to compensatefor the body’s facelessness. This pencil drawing shows the soft, innocent face of a girlwith long hair. Whether this is the girl in the video is not really important. Rather, wesee that the portrait has taken the place occupied by the television in the previous shot.If nothing else, the memes of the culture industry have been completely absorbed bythe subject, and then by the two girls who subsequently appear on the screens next tothis one, along with their own portraits. As these three become six, the ‘tag’ for portraitwidens to include any kind of painting or reproduction, which changes the meaningfrom self-image, to the image in general. Then, some other ‘tags’: dancing in front ofironing boards, Christmas trees, and then computers themselves (in one of which it ispossible to see that the person is watching a YouTube video).D) At this point, at 4’03”, and just past the half-way mark, the final segment is about tobegin. Once again, the change is signaled by a single, larger frame in the centre of thescreen. This shot shows a lone computer playing an unidentifiable YouTube video.This is a shot of a reflection of culture reflected in a midriff reflecting onto the videoscreen. On the one hand, this makes a rather trite statement about the role of the cultureindustry; on the other it returns us to Ronell’s reading of the relationship between televisionand video. Ronell, recall, did not claim that video posed an ethical call to television,but that video helped to make the unreadable trauma of television visible. To put it briefly,in Bookchin’s work, video makes ‘YouTubed’ connections between videos visible. Theseconnections, mapped out in different ‘semantic fields’ 24 or tags, such as midriff, mirrorand turning on computer, are made visible by the availability, replayability and connectivityof videos presented together on a video sharing platform such as YouTube or Vimeo.The ubiquity of these connections is partially assumed in this scene: people have ‘always’been dancing in their rooms with the same gestures, influenced by television or anothermedium, but they were always hidden. It is only now that we can see them doing so, thatthe new, meaningful patterns of the culture industry may be understood.Following this image, the ‘Lullaby’ music returns a few seconds before cut to threescreens of scantily glad girls who are posing, then dancing for the gaze of the camera.Then we see three more doing the same - although now there are men included - andthen three more. Then four, then three, then six, then nine. The memes of televisionare spreading, dehumanizing, ‘ornamentizing’. The chorus music fades out. A singleshot, with what sounds like an ‘Arabic’ piece of music, begins. 25 This new music ac-24. David Bordwell, Making Meaning, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 105-128.25. Bookchin used to have this video piece up on YouTube but it had to be removed, not becauseof copyright issues with the images, but because of the music. At the time of writing, the videoappears only on Vimeo.YouTube, alone?As has been continuously signaled by the varying ‘view counts’ and ‘removed by user’titles under all of the videos, the viewer is at this point seemingly being asked to reflecton the specific nature of the electronic medium through which these images are beingtransmitted. This is a scene of blame. The view count is 411,823, which is relatively highfor these videos. The music also underscores the change, with an operatic voice accompanyingthe images of bodies and hands sliding along walls. The extra-diegetic soundfades out, so the sound of flesh against object can come forth. Rubbery hand againstplastic-y cupboard. Then we return to mirrors, with the music turned low, and the soundof ungraceful feet pounding against cheap floors. Then we see images of stretching andwaving, spinning and more sliding, pushing against walls and dancing against walls in

302 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art303small rooms and tight, cramped corridors not conducive to dancing. Now, the ‘Lullaby’is back. People are now jumping together and raising their hands in the air. For the firsttime, more than one row of screens appear, which then snake and twirl their way up thescreen. Then, handstands and other attempts at gymnastics, as music from The Triumphof the Will plays over images of arched backs, indicating the complacency these acts offreedom have in a structure beyond (or behind) their movements. 26 Cartwheels and backflips, rather than dancing, symbolize the inclusion of rhythmic gymnastics into the fold ofthe ornament, which Kracauer warned against. The extra-diegetic sounds of tap dancingfrom an unseen performance accompany images of people doing the ‘Macarena’. As theimages begin to shrink, it is no longer really important what they are doing. There are noreal clear tags tying these dancers together. They are just people alone in their roomsshaking their hips back and forth.The following cuts once again feature dancers and the ‘Lullaby’ theme. Eventually,there is such an abundance of connections being made between videos, and so manyvideos with these connections, that the specific tags grouping these figures togetherbecome irrelevant to images too small to make out such details. This is an increasedlevel of connectivity, of ‘rationality’ that, in Kracauerian fashion, reveals the larger issuesthat cause these images to appear together, rather than just their individual marks ormotifs. The individual videos are becoming too small to see, and they disappear withthe ending of the song.Structure, Tags, BlindnessWhat is interesting about the structure of Bookchin’s Mass Ornament is how clearly it ismarked out, both through music and image, according to the classic three-act formula ofHollywood cinema: Induction/Setup, Conflict, and Closure (or Climax). Bordwell describesthis structure in the following manner. 1) The Setup ‘establishes the characters’ world, definesthe main characters’ purposes, and culminates in a turning point near the half-hourmark’. 27 2) The traditional second act is comprised of a ‘Complicating Action’ and ‘focusesor recasts the film’s central goals. Either the protagonist changes tactics for achieving hergoal, or she faces an entirely new situation – a sort of “counter-setup”’. 28 3) The Final actis the Climax. ‘Often following the ‘darkest moment’, the scene in which a crisis forces theprotagonist to take action, this section revolves around the question of whether or not thegoals can be achieved’. 29In Mass Ornament, Part A functions as a kind of induction scene, whereas Part B functionsas a setup: the real action of dancing has not begun, but we are introduced to the differentplayers. Part C is introduced with a conflict: the body before the television being shown onvideo. This could even be described as a ‘counter-setup’, in that we need to revise some ofthe preceding images in a more critical light. Part D offers a closure to the piece: a singlevideo featuring a computer, alone, playing a YouTube video. The images eventually becometoo small to read individually, thereby becoming so intense that they foreground the processof viewing (reading) itself.What is more interesting, however, is the relationship of Mass Ornament to Bordwell’s mainthesis, which is that modern cinema does not deviate from the classical structure per se asmuch as it exhibits an ‘intensified continuity’. 30 Modern films, taken as roughly post-1960,are not less structured but rather hyper-structured; they do not eschew the three-act structurebut rather follow it even more closely, providing an over-abundance of motifs and connectionsbetween acts. In a similar manner, Bookchin’s video has an overabundant numberof semantic fields linking one video to the other, so that the videos eventually become too numerousto pick out individually. This foregrounding is achieved not by making the tags morestable, but by exploding their referentiality through combination and selection. If Bookchin’svideo is able to make unseen connections visible, this is through intensification and combination,rather than paring down and separating. It is maximalism, not minimalism.In Mass Ornament, the relation of visibility to meta-information is realized through greaterstructure, rather than less. In order to understand this relation Jan Simons’ theory of tagsand tagging will be discussed. According to Simons, the ‘problem’ with finding content usingtags does not only lie in the system’s inherent polysemy, homonymy and synonymy 31 –such as tagging a computer with ‘apple’ and then retrieving a piece of fruit – but rather witha lack of understanding of the intuitive way in which users tag their products. 32 The problemwith tags is that they occupy the place of a double-bind: on the one hand they incorporatesome of the ambiguity inherent within language; on the other they are one-word, limitedutterances and are therefore seemingly devoid of grammar. 33 At the core of both this ambiguityand non-grammaticism is: a) the way that tags refer to things other than themselves;and b) the way that tags are themselves always something other than themselves. This dualstructure is, recall, also emblematic of reading, and the strength of Simons’ argument isthe recognition that this ambiguity needs to be incorporated into the actual structures oftagging. 34 Because tags are usually created by non-expert, but fluent, users of language,tags themselves will incorporate some of the same ambiguities of language. It would seemlogical, therefore, that tags will also incorporate and reproduce some of the same structuresof reading. In order to illustrate this point, Simons ends his article with a paragraph highlightingthe visibility of blindness:26. And remember that the National Party Congress held in Nuremberg in 1934 was mainly stagedto be filmed. See Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. PatrickCamiller, London; New York: Verso, 1989, p. 69.27. David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies, Berkeley:University of California Press, 2006, p. 36.28. Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It, p. 36.29. Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It, p. 38.30. Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It, pp. 121-89.31. Jan Simons, ‘Another Take on Tags? What Tags Tell’, in Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds)Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008, p.240.32. Simons, ‘Another Take on Tags?’, p. 243.33. Simons, ‘Another Take on Tags?, p. 244.34. Simons, ‘Another Take on Tags?, p. 245.

304 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art305Since taggers tap into the same cognitive and linguistic resources that allow for the impressiveflexibility and adaptability of language, it is very unlikely that tagging practiceswill eventually converge in something like a controlled vocabulary. Tag-elese is not a“language without a grammar”, but its grammar is largely concealed – or “repressed”as a Freudian would say – by the very design of tagging systems and – it should beadmitted – by the very purposes proponents of folksonomies had in mind for taggingpractices. Nevertheless, as the “purloined letter” in Poe’s famous story, the grammarof tag-elese has been staring us in the face all the time while we were looking for it atthe wrong place. 35While Simons’ conclusion brings together a number of threads developed here, I believe hisfinal use of Freud, and then of the example of ‘The Purloined Letter’ famously used by Lacan,misses the point in a slight but profound way. Simons states that we were looking for thegrammar of tag-elese (the ‘language’ of tagging) in ‘the wrong place’, implying that if we wereto look in the correct spot, we would be able to locate this allusive grammar. This spot is rightin front of our noses, i.e. in the way tags themselves work. However, Poe’s story, along withLacan’s use of it, is not about looking in the right place, as much as it is about how we cancome to see that we are actually looking in the wrong place. This is what Poe’s story seemsto indicate: the best place to hide a letter is out in the open. The question that this raises isnot how we see the letter, but how it is that the letter is ever missed. Or, put in the languageof this essay, how is it that blindness becomes visible? Tags seem to be part of this equationbecause they reflect the ambiguity of language: yet, how is such reflection able to takeplace? Bookchin’s Mass Ornament offers one answer to this question. The work’s intensifiedcontinuity does not clarify anything at all; rather, it makes the blindness and ambiguity of theconnections between videos visible. 36 Bookchin’s piece points towards a new level of blindnessparticular to the internet; a quantitative increase that becomes qualitative, as it allowsfor a stricter and more ‘rational’ set of coordinates between these instantiations of blindnessto come forth.We can still ask, however, how it is that an ability to see the unseen can ‘come forth’? In closing,I will briefly make use of a concept developed in the third section of Giorgio Agamben’sessay ‘What is the Contemporary?’. Here, Agamben defines the contemporary as a personwho ‘firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness’.37 For Agamben, the activity of seeing darkness defines the contemporary: ‘those whodo not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century, and so manage to get aglimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity’. 38 The role of the contemporaryis, then, to turn towards this darkness: ‘The contemporary is the one whose eyes arestruck by the beam of darkness that comes from his own time’. 39Much like the ‘purloined letter’, darkness is that which is already there, but remains difficultto see. Bookchin’s work demonstrates how YouTube may be used to bring this darknessforward, to position the spectator in front of its black rays: through hyper-structuring andcombination, it becomes possible to turn towards this darkness, and to make it visible.ReferencesAgamben, Giorgio. ‘What is the Contemporary?’, in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans.David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.Bordwell, David. Making Meaning, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989._____. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies, Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2006.Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox, New York: Grove Press, 2008.Jelavich, Peter. ‘“Girls and Crisis”: The Political Aesthetics of the Kickline in Weimar Berlin’, in JohnRoth (ed.) Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics and the Psyche, Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 1994.Kane, Carolyn. ‘Dancing Machines: An Interview with Natalie Bookchin’, Rhizome.org, 2009, http://www.rhizome.org/editorial/2653.Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Levin, Cambridge; London:Harvard University Press, 1995.Loos, Adolf. Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, trans. Michael Mitchell, Riverside: Ariadne Press,1998.Losh, Elizabeth. ‘Government YouTube: Bureaucracy, Surveillance, and Legalism in State-SanctionedOnline Video Channels’, in Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds) Video Vortex Reader: Responsesto YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust,New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1979.Mann, Steve. ‘Sousveillance’, Wearcam.org, 2002, http://wearcam.org/sousveillance.htm.Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor, Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1991.Ronell, Avital. ‘TraumaTV: Twelve Steps beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in Finitude’s Score: Essays forthe End of the Millennium, Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.Simons, Jan. ‘Another Take on Tags? What Tags Tell’, in Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds) VideoVortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller, London; New York:Verso, 1989.Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times, London; New York: Verso, 2010.35. Simons, ‘Another Take on Tags?, p. 252.36. This is what Bordwell’s ‘recalcitrant data’ wants to do, Making Meaning, p. 30.37. Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays,trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 44.38. Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, p. 45.39. Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, p. 45.

306 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art307out in public: Natalie Bookchin inConversation with Blake StimsonNatalie Bookchin and Blake StimsonNatalie Bookchin and Blake Stimson first met in New York in the early 1990s when they wereboth affiliated with the Whitney Independent Study Program. This exchange took place overemail, for the most part between their respective homes in Southern and Northern Californiaduring the summer of 2010.Although she has a rich and varied artistic background, one theme that has regularly cometo the fore in Natalie Bookchin’s work is a concern with documentary. In some of her earlywork, this concern seemed to emphasize the inhumanity of recording machines in the waythat Andy Warhol’s, or perhaps Gerhard Richter’s, work did. In a different way, the entire‘found object’ tradition associated with Duchampian indifference, and still so manifest inmuch contemporary art, also seemed to feature in Bookchin’s work. Here, we might recall anearly piece for which Bookchin photographed everything she owned, object by object, downto the last paperclip; or perhaps, in a different sense, the Universal Page she created withAlexei Shulgin in 2000, which promised an algorithmically derived objective average of allweb content. In one sense, her recent work of gathering videos from the internet might besaid to continue in this vein—at least insofar as she is functioning as an aggregator of existingcontent drawn largely from YouTube, in a way similar to a service like Digg or any of themany interest or attention measuring functions of the web (not the least being Google andother search engines).On the other hand, Bookchin’s work possesses a strong, even impassioned, activist elementof the sort consistent with the reportage tradition extending back to John Heartfieldand Sergei Tretiakov, or Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine before them. For example, in the interviewBookchin and Shulgin published in conjunction with the exhibition of Universal Page,Bookchin spoke of that time as one that demanded ‘superactivity’ because ‘there are vitallyimportant things that need to be done’ to ‘resist total corporate, technological, and institutionaltakeovers’. In addition, her multiplayer game agoraXchange was created in collaborationwith the political theorist Jackie Stevens, and called for ‘an end to the system of nationstates,the demise of rules rendering us passive objects tied to identities and locations givenat birth’, and the elimination of ‘those laws requiring us to live and be seen largely as vesselsfor ancestral identities’. And finally, there was her very funny announcement, in 1999, of herintention for a journal titled BAD (standing for Burn the Artworld Down) that was ‘committedto the documentation of acts of terrorism and agitation against the institutional art world’. Allof these works have performative dimensions to them, and as such call up a sense of tonguein-cheekdetachment from the subjects they purport to represent. Yet, to varying degrees,they also seem earnest and forceful political statements.Blake Stimson: With all the political history that lies behind it, is ‘documentary’ a useful labelto describe your work?Natalie Bookchin: There’s always been a strong documentary thread running through mywork, and this has only increased in recent years. My work aims to make visible social facts,as well as my role in shaping and skewing those facts. In my newest projects I’ve been drawingfrom the archive of online videos – the stuff that at first glance might be dismissed asthrowaway junk consisting of banal chatter and trivial displays of mass media mimicry. YetI see it instead as a vast, largely untapped stream of constantly updated source materialout of which I can document the present seen through the eyes of many others, and buildnew composite documents, rich with descriptive accounts and reflections of both currentattitudes and social conditions. I’d say that the work is part of the Readymade tradition onlyinsofar as the source material is found. But rather than presenting the footage as is, most ofmy work is in reshaping and reworking it into something new.trip, from 2008, was the first piece I made from YouTube videos. It’s a 63 minute video inwhich I edited and assembled dozens of traveling shots to create a road movie that followedthe route of technology around the world, in other words, traveling only where otherswith their cameras and cell phones have already gone. Viewers move through a physicallyimpossible geography connected by an always-present road, like disparate sites linked onthe internet, across dozens of countries and borders, through war zones, tent cities, andtourist centres. Viewers see a world framed by the car window from continuously shiftingperspectives of missionaries, truckers, soldiers, locals, tour guides, human rights workers,and tourists. The road acts as a kind of stand-in for the internet – a conduit for the circulationof images, attitudes, and goods around the world, occasionally stalled by conflict, butultimately, like the rows of trucks plodding across borders that appear throughout the video,relentless and without an end.BS: Terrific—‘making visible social facts’ strikes me as a great short definition for documentarygenerally, particularly insofar as ‘social facts’ can be distinguished from the social isolation offacts as such. It also seems spot on with my experience of pieces like I am Not or Laid Off oryour work in progress on race, Now he’s out in public, and everyone can see. What thrills methe most about these pieces has little or nothing to do directly with the found videos themselvesas isolated facts unto themselves, but instead with the sociality you draw out of them.The videos are what they are: typically heart-wrenching signs of human suffering of a disturbinglycommon sort. Your authorial voice, on the other hand, comes through loud and clear asa form of mediation between the videos and in so doing, it seems to me, gives rise to both the‘making visible’ you refer to and to a living, human form of sociality for the facts in question.My sense is that there is a lot that can be said about that function and so I would like youto elaborate further about what it means for you and your sense of what it means for others,but before I pass this screen back to you I’ll share one impression of mine. What seems sorefreshing about your use of woman-on-the-street commentary is that it seems diametricallyopposed to the sort used routinely by politicians, news media, and marketing departmentsin advertisements, anecdotes passing as news, individual exemplars of the effects of good or

308 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art309NB: That’s exactly right. The work borrows from a Greek model of tragic theatre where thechorus speaks collectively, set apart from and reflecting on, the action of the drama. I likeSchlegel’s description of the Greek chorus as an ideal spectator who watches over and combadpolicies, editorial contributors, focus groups, social media product updates, consumerfeedback loops, crowdsourcing, etc. It seems nothing like a Tea Party event or an Amazonconsumer review or a reader response to a piece on Fox News or The New York Times, forexample, which any one of your source videos on its own might. Put more simply, it seemsnothing like the vlogosphere from which you have drawn the videos. Can you say a bit moreabout your role as compiler and how it transforms the videos you take from YouTube andelsewhere?NB: The videos come from online social networks, which offer exalted promises of creatingsocial relationships and making the world more open and connected, but instead, producea cacophony of millions of isolated individual voices shouting at and past each other. What Iam trying to do through my editing and compilation is reimagine these separate speakers ascollectives taking form as a public body in physical space.Installation of Mass Ornament, 2009.In Mass Ornament, a video installation from 2009, I edited videos of people dancing alonein their rooms, to create a mass dance reminiscent of historical representations of synchronizedmasses of bodies in formation, from Busby Berkeley to Leni Riefenstahl. I wanted thework to continually shift between depictions of masses and that of individuals. The dancers,alone in their rooms, seem to perform the same movements over and over as if scripted. Butat the same time their bodies don’t conform to mass ideals, and their sometimes awkwardinterpretations undermine the ‘mass ornament’ produced by synchronizing their movements.I added sounds of bodies moving about in space, thumbing, banging and shuffling, as well asambient sound emphasizing geographical differences, from crowded urban dwellings to thesuburbs. Dancers push against walls and slide down doorways, as if attempting to break outof or beyond, the constraints of the rooms in which they seem to be encased.In Testament, a series I began shortly after I completed Mass Ornament, I started with anidea that I wanted to represent waves of language and ideas as they flow across the internet,like the shared movements flowing across the net in Mass Ornament. Once I choose a topicI want to explore, I look for patterns in the way people talk about it: the words they choose,their tone, their attitudes, the narrative arcs they follow. Sometimes I just look at single wordsor phrases. Other times I want extrapolations. While I am sometimes surprised, moved, ordisturbed by what people have to say, just as often I’m not. They mimic the media – some-times word-for-word, they vent, they advocate, they confess. They talk to the camera as if itwere a friend, an adversary, or a mirror. For the most part people appear to be at home, givingunprompted monologues to an unmanned camera on their computers. Maybe they haveno other platform. Maybe they are enticed by the opportunity to broadcast their thoughts tountold numbers of strangers. Though what they say may not always surprise, the fact thatthey are saying it in this environment and platform is pretty strange and compelling. We haveentered another level of alienation when our equivalent of a public forum is a person alone inhis or her room speaking to a computer screen. But, my work suggests, we are not alone inour need for public conversation and debate about the circumstances of our lives.The source material is transformed pretty radically through my editing. I attempt to foregroundinstances where performances of identity and individual expression appear as socialand collective enterprises, sometimes performed as a series of apparent scripts that peopleinternalize, interpret, or enact for the camera. I edit for repetitions and patterns, and create akind of mass choir out of seemingly individual expression.In the newest chapter of Testament, titled Now he’s out in public, and everyone can see,currently in progress, I am constructing a narrative out of found vlogs in which speakersdescribe and evaluate four very prominent African American public figures, as they recounta number of highly charged, racialized media scandals. I construct a narrative out of the assortedclips, interweaving multiple stories and descriptions as they intersect around themesof racial and class identity. Out of these clips, I create a collective performance that explorescurrent popular attitudes, anxieties, and conflicts about race. In a time of instantaneous24-hour news cycles, emotionally charged media stories spread virally across the internetand are filtered through social media sites where commentators make videos respondingto, reenacting, remixing, and retelling the stories. The project seeks to examine these oftenpolarizing responses, which dominate our media-driven conversations about race and class,driven and inflamed by fears over demographic changes, by tough economic times, and byreactions to the our first African American president. My aim is to create an installation thatoffers greater depth and a broader critical context to otherwise scatter-shot individual onlinevoices by drawing links and making connections and locating tropes and commonalitiesbetween different individual rants, responses, and interpretations.BS: You have used a number of metaphors to describe what you have generated throughyour selection and editing for repetitions and patterns—mass choir and Greek chorus, amongthem. The latter characterization is particularly appealing insofar as it suggests a separationof chorus from actors and harmonic parts from spoken parts. As I understand it, the chorusin the original Greek model often took on a separate theatrical role or voice as a kind of figureof the social as such— ‘the “vox humana” amid the storm and thunder of the gods’, in thewords of one interpreter. If this analogy is correct, could you say a bit more about the separatemeaning and significance of that choral voice that you have drawn together?

310 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art311BS: One of the most appealing aspects of all these recent works for me is the way in whichthey are at one in the same time scripted (and thus conceptually and rhetorically polished inthe manner of Fox/RNC talking points cum mass-mediated commonsense) and emotionallyraw and authentic. It seems to me that there are two ways this combination might be undermentson the action. Aristotle also suggests that the chorus embodies the reactions of audiencesand the people against the kings and their misdeeds.In the various chapters of Testament, I’ve created choruses of vloggers who comment onactions that have taken place off screen. This is especially apparent in Laid Off, where I’vecompiled and edited together videos in which people discuss losing their jobs into a kind oftalking choir. The actors, that is, those that have produced the tragedy – heads of companies,Wall Street, Alan Greenspan, our political system – are not heard from directly. Instead, wehear from a choir of ‘the people’ or ‘the masses’, united in their language, as well as in theiranger, frustration, and their despair over the economic crisis and its impact on their lives.I should add that though they often speak in unison, the vloggers are still depicted as distinctindividuals speaking in their separate and unique private spaces.Installation of Testament, showing I Am Not, 2009.Installation of Testament showing a detail from Laid Off, 2009.Although their experiences are shown to be collective – even the language they choose todescribe their situation is similar – they aren’t reduced to an abstraction in the way the Godsor the key actors are. They are not perfect machines, reciting in absolute unison, but insteadunique individuals who interpret the choral script to fit their own story.In Now he’s out in public, and everyone can see, I represent greater discord among differentchoral groups. Although the various choruses still reiterate and respond to the primary actors- in this case the mass media - as well as to the secondary actors - the media celebrities - theydon’t speak in harmony. And some of what they have to say is pretty repellant as they reciteand reenact themes they pick up from conservative actors like Fox News.BS: When it is repellent, is the choral ‘vox humana’ still morally distinguishable from Fox’s‘storm and thunder’ and thus also sympathetic? In other words, is it a symptom speaking oris it the disease itself? What is the political role of your voice insofar as you are responsible forthe choral unity of otherwise disparate repellent voices and the resulting gain of social andpolitical emphasis or force?NB: The choral voices work somewhat differently in the various projects – sometimes it’s unified,and people appear to speak in unison without conflict. There the analogy of the collectiveas a choir performing against the backdrop of dominant forces is most vivid. Other times,the choirs aren’t unified: in I Am Not, and in Now he’s out in public, and everyone can see,individuals perform struggles over identity and self-identification, and there is no consensus.Someone once described I Am Not as a punk rock song – fast, intense, and compact – a2-minute ensemble that creates a map with different points of identification around the word‘gay’ and its associative identities.In Now he’s out in public, and everyone can see, a longer and more elaborate chapter, I amlooking at the way vloggers discuss a series of media stories involving four celebrated – andvilified – African American men. Each has been accused of occupying his powerful positionunder false pretenses and of holding a false identity, whether because of mixed ethnicity,apparent racial identification, relationships, appearance, public persona, or social class.The piece explores the ways that media propagated stories are embodied, articulated, andinterpreted by vloggers. I highlight instances where it appears as if the men in question arebeing judged for having crossed a racial boundary, and look for moments vloggers attemptto define and articulate the limits and the boundaries of an authentic or acceptable blackidentity. Often the vloggers appear unaware of the racial aspects of their positions. I have acluster of speakers recite the too familiar phrase ‘I am not a racist, but…’ followed by ‘someof my best friends are…’. I form clusters of choirs around types of articulations, some of themfamiliar racist or anti-racist tropes, reading between the lines of vloggers’ monologues, lookingat subtexts that mask themselves as something else – as racialized – in a time some hadimagined would be ‘post-racial’, making connections between seemingly disparate mediastories and gossip. I think that by showing these articulations to be collective, rather thannecessarily giving them political force for the cause, of say Birthers, or segregationists, it distillsvarious positions and reveals them as scripted. I also depict a large dissonant choir, filledwith disharmonious voices and discord. That still doesn’t necessarily make some of the racistscripts or those that recite them sympathetic, but it reminds us that they are malleable formations– open to change and just one mode of expression in a large complex musical number.

312 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art313stood: first, as the nexus of any effective propaganda (such as, at one end of the spectrum,the historic response to blood and soil imagery in Nazi Germany, for example, or, at the otherend, the likely response to the recent television advertisements for the iPhone video-callingfeature that have their emotional engineering down to a T); and, second, as the nexus of anyand all effective emotional expression. We all need rhetorical and conceptual conventions tounderstand and communicate how we feel. This comes through strongly for me in I am Not,for example, where the rhetorical form of denial seems at once so conventional, so disturbing,and so human, and in Laid Off, which plays out the stages of grief in a manner that is bothimmediately predictable and profoundly heart-wrenching. Something related might be saidabout the work in Now he’s out in public, and everyone can see. In each case, because yourediting brings out choral expression around emotional keys, the humanity of the convention isforegrounded in such a way that it makes it hard for me to see them as strictly mass-mediatedaffect.I take this accomplishment of yours to be very valuable because it escapes both the undueobjectivism of sociological or statistical understanding and the undue subjectivism of theisolated individual exemplar. In this way it enables the beholder (at least this beholder!) toexperience and respond to that emotion more substantively than otherwise. In other words,my own experience is one of coming away from your work with the sense of having a richerunderstanding of the human dimension of the various constituencies represented, and thereforea better sense of how I might respond as a critic or friend or otherwise. In this way itstrikes me as a distinctive form of documentary. I’ll try to elaborate on this last point in a questionto follow, but for now could you say a bit more about the emotional complexity of theseworks? Particularly, could you say something further about the emotional valence of yourvoice? For example, if we were to say that you are performing the role of choir conductor, howwould your performance compare to this or that bravura conductor’s performance in whichher emotion, energy, timing, expressive hand-waving, etc. are understood to successfullycarry or direct or enlarge the performance of the group?NB: I’m not really sure how much I can add to your very precise analysis. I’ve thought aboutmy approach as very different from some other art works that also orchestrate archives ofchatter and personal blogs online such as The Listening Post by Mark Hansen and BenRubin, and We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. Both works use the toolsof the statistician, algorithmically processing large quantities of online material to producedata visualizations and audio streams. While compelling in their depictions of the flow andmagnitude of voices chattering across the internet, individual voices are all treated the same,subsumed in an undifferentiated whole. In my work, single speakers may be placed in a collectiveunit at different moments, but they aren’t standardized or abstracted. The pathos andvulnerability – and the specificity – of their original expressions with their unpolished, clumsy,yet urgent intimacy, remains intact.Through my edits, there is a movement between individual speakers and collective units, andviewers can linger over the details, the shared characteristics, and the differences amongthe environmental self-portraits the vloggers have produced. My edits build up to key movementswith shared pregnant pauses, snide asides and interjections, emotional outbursts, andpersonal insights or revelations. The movement between the isolated individual (isolated intheir room, and in the video frame) and the much larger collective units may invite what youdescribe as your sympathy for (or identification with) the speakers regardless of the correctnessor originality of their perspectives.BS: Yes, I think you are right about the movement between the individual and the collectiveinviting (I would say ‘enabling’) my sympathy, and it does so in a way that the algorithmicworks you cite don’t even touch on. In the end, the distinction that concerns me may comedown to a rudimentary modern/postmodern divide over the definition of the public or publicness.For example, we might take a Bergsonian like Brian Massumi to stand for the latterwhen he writes ‘From the network’s point of view, the human will is an interrupter’, an ‘irruptionof transductive indeterminacy’, an unformed ‘raw material or natural resource’, and KarlMarx to stand for the former when he writes, ‘It is not the fact that the human being objectifieshimself inhumanly, in opposition to himself, but the fact that he objectifies himself in distinctionfrom and in opposition to abstract thinking, that constitutes the posited essence of theestrangement and the thing to be superseded’. That is, where Massumi casts the problemas one of the relation between individual nodes of human will and the collectivized abstractionof the network, Marx casts it as a matter of good and bad – or better, subjectivized andobjectivized – abstraction.In a nutshell, the experience I take your work to offer is something akin to the point of tensionthat Marx describes, and to be further afield from that taken up by Massumi. In other words,the experience offered by a piece like Laid Off seems to be one where the tension betweenthe storm and thunder of the gods and the ‘vox humana’ is palpable, whereas in the algorithmicworks you cite, human will registers only as a natural material expended in the freemarketeconomy of the network. The critical difference between the two models to my mindis the difference between having you or the algorithm in the conductor’s seat, or, put differently,it is the difference between the ‘vox humana’ and the ‘vox mechanica’. Either way, it isan abstraction, but in one instance that abstraction is reaching towards class-consciousnessand thus towards humanity, and in the other towards the false, machine-modeled naturalismof network or market time.NB: Another way to put it is that I am trying to orchestrate a variety of quests to define anddescribe the self as a part of (and agent in) a larger social body. The tension is between thisdepiction of active attempts at self-identification and political subjectivity, and that of isolatedindividuals in an alienated space.BS: Yes, terrific! It seems to me that the presence of your desire to orchestrate those quests,to give form and expression to their collective life, is what is so exciting and resonant andcompelling about your recent work. In sum, I’d say that desire is the living embodiment ofwhat I have been calling the ‘vox humana’ even when the chorus fails to achieve its humanityby merely mechanically parroting the storm and thunder of the gods.This brings me to the promised further question about documentary. Documentary hasalways been socially minded and often that has manifested itself in forms that are meant to

314 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art315realize that sociality themselves. We might think of the redistribution of the authority of representationfrom management to labour by the worker-photography movement in the 1920sand the public funding of various documentary projects in the 1930s, for example, or thegrand efforts in the 1950s to use serial photography to represent social form in the Family ofMan exhibition, Robert Frank’s The Americans, and the first formulation of Bernd and HillaBecher’s life project, or the efforts to bring out multiple intersecting layers of psychosocialexperience in the photographic essays of Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler, Mary Kelly, and othersbeginning in the 1970s. In each of these cases, the distributed, multipart form of thework itself served as both the bearer and the enactor of sociality or social being by makingthe relations between the parts, and of the parts to the whole, a central formal concern. Ineach of these examples it might be said that the form of distribution represented both passivelyreflects the social world it documents and actively reconstitutes, and thus transforms,that world. One of the features of your recent work that seems so appealing is the way inwhich it takes up the question of documentary as a question of distribution or socializationof form and reinvents it once again. You said before that your work ‘aims to make visiblesocial facts’. If you agree with my premise about documentary and its application to yourwork, could you speak further to how the multipart form itself achieves not only a revelationof social fact but also an enactment or realization of sociality itself? If you agree with mygenealogy, how does it do so differently?NB: Yes I see my project in part as an attempt to develop and invent new documentaryforms. One obvious difference between my work and some of my precursors is that insteadof hitting the streets to collect my footage, I go online and cull from what I’d describe as acontinuous stream of video instant replays with analysis or commentary about everyday life.I’m documenting life mediated through other people’s descriptions, creating both a documentand an interpretation of current rhetoric, including how people speak in online space.My relationship to my subjects is further mediated by the camera and by the computerscreen. While in some ways I have a greater reach – more mobility and easier access to theinside of people’s homes across the country and the world – in other ways my distance isgreater. This of course is a condition of our times, and it’s one that is pointed to in my use ofmultiple screens of single people framed within their individual cells.The serial form the work takes – that there are many speaking in unison about a particularset of conditions and circumstances – also suggests its sociality. I take many original ‘I’sand make them into ‘we’s. In this respect, my project is both documentary and aspirational,taking material already out there, and aspiring to make it more of a social experience thanit currently is. The collective ‘we’ cuts through even aspects of life we often think of as mostprivate, such as our psychic states and their treatment. In My Meds, clusters of speakersrecited a long, rhythmic list of psycho-pharmaceuticals they were prescribed. On the onehand the piece reflects our heavily medicated society, but on the other, it shows how peoplenow speak about what once was considered extremely private in new public forums, attemptingto transform personal experience and trauma into something social and public.This is true as well in Laid Off, where people’s private, personal experiences of the impact ofthe economy on their lives are made social and public.The installation of Testament may also speak to your question of sociality. Unlike with viewingthe source material, the installation tries to create both a physical and a social experience.Sound comes from different speakers at different moments, and the images, muchlarger than they are on a computer screen, appear in different parts of a room, on differentwalls or screens, requiring a viewer to move around the work and the room. Whereas thestandard viewer of the source material is a single person at her computer, the installationsenable a viewing experience that is active rather than passive, public rather than private,and social rather than isolated.BS: Consistent with the best part of the documentary tradition, it seems like your position asan artist hovers somewhere between those of the anthropologist, the labour organizer, andthe composer or dramatist. With that middle term in mind – organization – could you saysomething about how your upbringing has influenced your current work, focusing particularly,perhaps, on your uncle Murray Bookchin? He had an unusually long career that shiftedin various ways over the course of the 20th century, but I’m thinking of a piece he wrote in1995 taking on Hakim Bey and the later work of Michel Foucault, among others, in a mannerthat might be said to be characteristic of his thought as a whole. His main critical concernwas with what he refered to there as ‘lifestyle anarchism’ or an anarchism that mistakenly and‘arrogantly derides structure, organization, and public involvement’. This tendency is onlyone small and relatively insignificant branch of what he referred to as ‘ideological individualism’,of course, but it would be easy to see how it overlaps with various tendencies in the artworld such as those sometimes associated with the term ‘relational aesthetics’. So, I guess Iam asking you two things: to say something about how your family history formed your socialthinking and how that social thinking sits in relationship to existing efforts made by artists toproduce socially relevant or resonant art.NB: The article you mention ‘Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism’ reflects Murray’s frustrationwith the way he saw the term anarchism being emptied of value as it had come torepresent a fierce individualism, more a fashion statement than a term grounded in the transformativesocial movements he held so dear. He began to distance himself from anarchism– didn’t like to be referred to as an anarchist, as he had been for years.I have always had great admiration for and attachment to Murray, his ideas, his incrediblecommitment, and his mind. He’s part of a family history that I feel very close to, and includesmy grandparents and great aunts, all very active in union organizing in New York City. Mygreat aunts were smart, tough, and witty Russian women, living in Brooklyn, communists andmembers of The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. My parents, New Deal liberals,met and fell in love at a red-diaper summer camp in upstate New York, where they wereboth counselors. We grew up singing union songs and protest songs that my Dad played onthe guitar (though as a teenager my interests switched from folk songs to Punk rock, equallyfilled with protest and anger, but maybe less directed!) During the summers we went to aQuaker camp in Vermont, where my Father worked as the camp Doctor in exchange for ourtuition. The camp’s emphasis was on cooperative work and living. I remember hanging outwith – and being dazzled by – the Shabazz girls (Malcolm X’ daughters), who were a littleolder than me and who also attended the camp.

316 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art317As for where all this fits into existing art world efforts: it’s pretty daunting to try to step backand place my work – especially current work – into a tread. Anyway, isn’t that your job asart historian? I guess I’d like to believe that I work in the gaps, in the areas that are missingfrom current conversations. But here’s an attempt: I have for a long time felt an affinity withmost of the artists you’ve mentioned in your genealogy. As we talked about before, I am veryinterested in documentary and in interrogating and reworking of its forms, and so I am drawnto works like Nine Scripts for a Nation at War, by Ashley Hunt et al, Harun Farocki, SharonHayes, some work of Pierre Huyghe, Omer Fast, Eyal Sivan, Chantal Akerman, Zhang Ke Jia,Ken Jacobs, among many others. Chantal Mouffe’s writing on agonistic spaces, and RosalynDeutsche’s discussions of political philosopher Claude Lefort’s ideas about radical democracyand public space have also been important to me.BS: Well, truth be told, I’d rather my job not be artworld trend-tracking! Could you say a bitmore about your role as a teacher? For example, what place if any does your role educatingyoung people in an art school environment play in the social imagining that you develop so effectivelyin your recent work – in Laid Off, for example, or My Meds, or I am Not, or Now he’sout in public, and everyone can see? For purposes of comparison I am thinking of JosephBeuys and the role his notion of ‘social sculpture’ played in the context of his teaching, andlater, his organizational work on behalf of the Green Party. Or we might think of others closerto home like Hans Haacke’s career as a teacher at Cooper Union or Ron Clark’s WhitneyProgram and the tremendous legacy they have had through their students. Or we might thinkof the plethora of recent DIY educational initiatives, like 16 Beaver in New York or the PublicSchool in Los Angeles and elsewhere, or even the student protests, teach-ins, etc. that haveemerged in response to the privatizing of the University of California and other institutionsaround the world. Is the social work of teaching connected to the social work developed inyour recent art? What about the fact that, on some basic material, sociological, anthropological,and economic level, you are teaching art to artists? What role, if any, does that play inyour work about race or employment or sexuality?NB: I think of art making and teaching as fundamentally creative social practices. I teachfrom the position that most art making is collaborative, that in the current parlance, artistsedit, remix and sample ideas, attitudes, and images, working from within culture rather thanoutside of it. I think some of the best work comes out of dialogue, critical awareness, andactive engagement in the world.It is really disturbing that art education – that all higher education in this country – has becomeprohibitively expensive, and that students are being shut out or are leaving school withenormous debt. We’re witnessing a crisis in higher education that I think is going to reach abreaking point soon, although it’s unclear how it will end. So, while I don’t think the DIY initiativesreplace college or universities, it is great to see them out there.as it avoids many of the pitfalls of counter-identification, scientism, primitivism, and the likethat anthropology came to be wary of during its self-critical phase, for example, or that HalFoster detailed for contemporary art in his study ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’. Could you saysomething about your status as a participant-observer? That is, insofar as, on the one handyour participation is registered in the view count below the video postings of others and inyour own postings in return, and on the other hand, your work is about reflexive observation:to what extent is back-and-forth, insider-outsider, intersubjectivity a constitutive meaning foryour work? In other words, to what extent is the meaning and significance of your work abouta way of relating to, and participating in, the attitudes, beliefs, and values of others as well asdepicting those attitudes, beliefs, and values?NB: I’ll go back to a discussion of the function of the chorus in Greek theatre to answer yourquestion. One of the roles of the chorus in Greek theatre was to act as a bridge between theaudience and the actors, mediating the action between the two and interacting with both. Inthe choruses I create and the commentary I assemble, I variously present different positions,and speak through the assembled voices. In other words, at varying points in the differentworks, the chorus’s commentary becomes my own.Online documentation of Mass Ornament:http://vimeo.com/5403546Online documentation of Laid Off:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoWzWrsugdYhttp://vimeo.com/19364123Online documentation of My Meds:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzFhEdht5bohttp://vimeo.com/19588547Online documentation of I Am Not:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G78sFBPU_4http://vimeo.com/19588631BS: Perhaps we should end with a general question about your role as a manner of anthropologistor ethnographer. I find this to be one of the most exciting aspects of your recent workbecause it seems to realize much of the promise of Malinowski’s old ‘ethnographer’s magic’(or an accurate narrative expression of how the experience and affective orientation of asocial group can be realized through the subjective impressions of the writer or artist) even

318 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art319non-western and garlandLinda WallaceAs an artist and curator I greeted the eruption of the internet with enthusiasm, seeing it as amedium with specific qualities and materialities. By 1994 I was using email-address-like titlesfor an exhibition in Singapore, and the CeBit, Germany in 1995 heralded a trajectory whereinternet artworks formed an integral part of all my new media curated projects to come. Myinterest in the material possibilities of different media began with photography, 16mm filmand super 8, to analogue Hi8 video, moving into digital photography, video and internet.Two videos I made exemplify a moving towards this digital/online worldview. lovehotel: formulationfor the emergence of the new (2000) combined Hi8 and digital video footage witha variety of texts written from 1994 to 1997 by frontier cyberfeminist Francesca Da Riminifocusing on her online experiences at LambdaMOO (founded in the early 90s, it is the oldesttext-based virtual reality system to which multiple users are connected simultaneously); andeurovision (2001) which I saw as template for the possibilities of online video in terms of theintersections of narrative, composition and non/linearity.My 1995 MFA looked at pre-internet art and technology in southeast Asia. I was curious asto what kind of spaces different technologies and mediums invited, particularly those relatingto identity and geopolitics. These spatial and aesthetic qualities, opening up new waysof seeing-through the medium, formed the basis of my 2003 PhD dissertation and were alsoexplored in curated projects such as PROBE, the first new media arts exhibition in China in1999. Such questions continue today in my work. non-western was part of the exhibition ofthe Video Vortex event in Split in 2009, and what follows here is the gist of the presentationabout that work and another project, garland.I finished non-western in December 2008. It is a video for three-screen installation and isalso on the internet where the five parts or ‘chapters’ can be accessed in any order, via fivedifferent websites.The genesis for non-western goes back to March 2005 with LivingTomorrow. Produced asartist-in-residence at the Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk) it was a three-screen videodatabase work with a random-access overlay. The idea was that one could access it directlyfrom the server in gallery space but also bring it to an (urban) screen near you via the internet.LivingTomorrow pivoted centrally around the murder of Dutch film-maker Theo van Goghby Mohammed Bouyeri in Amsterdam in 2004. I cut-up scenes from the American soapopera The Bold and the Beautiful and added my own subtitles to create a narrative that couldbe seen in any order. There were also images of the Dutch urban and rural landscape andthose which spoke to the migrant culture I was surrounded by, and indeed part of – focusingon the swirling glorious colour and pattern in Muslim women’s headscarves.In 2006 in Berlin I made a short video TOR, looking into the largely immigrant faces of peoplein the home-crowd gathered to celebrate their win over Argentina in the semi-final of theWorld Cup. TOR begged the question: ‘who, now are the Germans?’non-western built on this interest in national identity and migration. In late 2006 I was invitedinto a project set in the ‘Green Heart’, an area bounded by Utrecht, Amsterdam, DenHague and Rotterdam and stretching south to Gouda. Containing the remnants of whatwas once a strong farming community the Green Heart still feels a bit wild but is rapidlyfilling up with highways, train lines, electricity poles and new housing developments. Whatwas striking was the almost total absence of migrants living there. non-western began asa response to this.Early in 2007 I’d registered a number of URLs without knowing exactly why, with names likeundergrowth.eu, the-shadowlands.eu, allochtoonen.eu. mysafehouse.eu and off-the-radar.com. These later became the ‘chapter headings’ of the five sections of non-western. At thetime I was unsure of the spelling of allochtonen. Allochtoon, in Dutch, signifies ‘foreigner’,and allochtonen.nl was taken, however the mistakenly spelt ‘allochtoonen’ was available.Checking on the internet I found hundreds of cases of the same mistake, mainly made byother allochtonen. I registered the mispelling.I started gathering fragments for the work, video footage from the train to Gouda fromAmsterdam and also vast amounts of photographs that I’d taken in the area. I had theidea to rinse this material through the internet, give it a wash out there and then bring itback in to dry. The photographs were strung together into QT H262 movie files at variouscompression rates (ie high, medium and low), uploaded to YouTube - going through theirproprietary compression - then downloaded and inserted into the work’s video fabric.In the first part of non-western these stills are accompanied by a voice, my voice, recitingthe Nicene Creed, written in AD 325. I had my reasons. Mainly they were to do with thepower of the voice, and how, in this religious context it can invoke embodiment of thosepast, and of communities past. It was to do with the relation of the voice to the embodiedimagination. This incantation of the ancient Christian creed is set against images of whatcould be thought of as classic Dutch landscapes. The fact that the creed was adopted bythe first ecumenical council in Nicaea, Turkey is a curious irony given that Turkish (andall) migrants in The Netherlands (NL) were being increasingly ‘othered’ in Dutch society– 2008 was the time of the rise and rise of Geert Wilders.Fragments from the Dutch soap Goede Tijd Slechte Tijd were combined with facts foundonline to do with the attitude of the Dutch towards migrants. A few scenes from Floris, aDutch series from the sixties directed by Paul Verhoeven, and starring Rutger Hauer asmedieval knight, was added to the mix. A theme began emerging around the entity ofRutger Hauer, performing the quintessence of Dutchness. This was then enhanced byincluding a scene from another Verhoeven film, Soldier of Orange, where Hauer has toprove to the German occupiers he is genuinely Dutch by saying various difficult Dutchwords.

320 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art321And then there was Blade Runner. I would say that the whole work pivots on these includedfragments. In the film from Philip K. Dick’s book, Rutger Hauer plays replicant leader RoyBatty. Instrumentalising Hauer-as-replicant in this way in non-western calls into questionwhat is Dutch and what is not, a debate which was then and is still raging in NL.The image meltdown of the Blade Runner fragments occurred when the film changed formats/codecsand seemed to get jagged on the code signaling movement within the frame. Ienhanced this accidental effect by running it backwards and forwards again in After Effectsin high resolution. non-western plays with various codecs throughout the piece, plays withtheir translation from one to another and with the aesthetics of their misinterpretation. Youcould also say that this mistranslation serves to make the images strange, to ‘other’ them, torender them allochtoon(en).non-western seemed to fall neatly into five sections. The URLs became chapter headings,and each was uploaded onto one of the five sites, able to then be viewed in any order. Therewas also the linear three-screen installation version.The second project I will discuss is one curated by Marina Fokidis for the Pulse Art Fair NY in2009. Participant artists had to devise a playlist up to 30 minutes of YouTube clips, blurringthe roles of curator and artist.Upon receipt of the playlists from the artists, curator Marina Fokidis immediately downloadedthe clips and strung them together in video files for playing in the Pulse exhibition. Quitequickly clips were taken offline by users, not because they were on the playlists (at least Idon’t think so) but just because this is how it is with YouTube. Gaps and jumps began to appearin the ‘live’ playlists of all the artists. What would it mean to have re-uploaded the absentclips? Where and what was the real work? Was the video version played in the exhibition adocumentation of an ephemeral moment in YouTube time, or was it the work itself? Or are theplaylists themselves as they are now the real works, full of omissions and gaps, continuallybreaking down further over time? Perhaps in fact there are numerous versions of the playlistsand of the entire exhibition, with exponentially infinite variations over time.non-western by Linda Wallace, Dec 2008:www.lindawallace.eugarland playlist:http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=randomrules09#p/pHow to approach YouTube? I had in mind a whole lot of different ways to go. I sat down in frontof YouTube to begin, and absent-mindedly played a ‘favourite’ from my own YouTube site, theLaughing Clowns song Eternally Yours. YouTube, as it does, spat up a few suggestions basedon my selection. I clicked through their suggestions, listening and looking at clips of bandsfrom the eighties in Australia while still working on my paper list of where I thought I wantedto go. Soon I stopped writing ideas on the paper list and followed links. Selecting the song ITouch Myself by the Divinyls I was startled to find hundreds of versions of people covering thesong, with attitudes ranging from hilarity to poignancy. Intrigued, I knew I’d found my playlist.Then it was just a process of sorting and selection, settling finally on clips where peopleactually sing, not just mime. This song, with lyrics ‘I touch myself, thinking about you’ wasseemingly a private fantasy rendered public. One after another people were seen in theirrooms singing to an unknown you. There were also choirs singing the song, bands, tipsysingers in bars and at weddings, but mainly it was the solitary singer at home that interestedme. Reaching out, sliding across windows and doors, seeking with their voice transformationthrough embodiment. The selection seemed to say a lot about YouTube, about the banalityand ordinariness of most of the uploads but...the humanity!I called the playlist garland, like a garland of flowers strung together on the same rope, echoingthe internet’s world of self-similarity, the same yet with variation, where being is pursuedby automated software shadows.

322 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art323When Film and Database CollidePerry BardUpload to Shot 1166 by Greg Gallagher, USA.‘Cinema continues to interest us for that which it is not’. 1At the premiere of Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake, 2 a stranger in the parkasked me what I thought the piece was about. Instead of responding I asked for his impressionto which he replied ‘There’s an old film on the left, and on the right people are mashingit up’. I was relieved that in public space there was a reading for people who may never haveseen Vertov’s masterpiece. At the same time I found the inevitable comparison between leftand right problematic.Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is inspired by and a tribute to Russian filmmakerand theorist Dziga Vertov. It is a participatory video shot by people around the worldwho are interpreting the original script of his 1929 experimental documentary. Curious toknow how the idea of a remake could be interpreted, I invited a range of possibilities onthe intro page of the website. Contributors upload images to dziga.perrybard.net where thefilm is logged shot by shot. A scene index and tags allow users to select their shots whilesoftware developed for this project by John Weir 3 archives, sequences and streams theirsubmissions as a film. There can be multiple uploads for each shot, making infinite versionsof the film possible. The software selects the shots on a daily basis.I first began questioning what a remake might be after Bulgarian artist Boyan Dobrev and Ireplicated six minutes of Man With A Movie Camera for VideoArchaeology, a videoart festivalheld in the town of Sofia, Bulgaria. 4 While the contemporary version did produce a portrait ofSofia in the Vertovian tradition, the results seemed predictable. Simultaneously, I was collaboratingwith a community group to create a portrait of their community for the Staten IslandFerry Terminal Building. 5 When we were testing the public installation, people who were notin the video wanted to know how they could have a voice. To do that I needed a database. InThe Language of New Media, 6 Lev Manovich proclaims Vertov the originator of the database.I stole his analysis.In cinema most crimes are solved because life and Hollywood need alignment for television tobe real. Vertov must have known that: his manifesto, which I consider to be contained withinthe titles at the beginning of Man With A Movie Camera, declares the film to be ‘an experimentin the cinematic communication of visible events without the aid of intertitles, withoutthe aid of a scenario without the aid of theatre’. This sounds like the definition of documentary.The film is subtitled ‘an excerpt from the diary of a cameraman’. The first image sequencein the film is a superimposition: the upper third of the frame shows the man with a moviecamera ascending a mound and placing his camera on a tripod, while the bottom two-thirdsis a still image of the camera. Vertov’s cameraman is filmed in the middle of traffic, in themiddle of train tracks about to be run over by an oncoming train, climbing a smokestack toget an aerial view, suspended in a bucket over a dam, getting close-ups of a woman sleeping.His film is a performative ode to speed and to the industrial revolution, driven by footage thatis sped up, slowed down, superimposed and pixelated in sequences of 2-frame shots. Andhow did he get that close-up?‘Freed from the rule of sixteen-seventeen frames per second, free of the limits of time andspace, I put together any given points in the universe, no matter where I’ve recorded them’. 7This interpretive ‘real’ is fueled by Vertov’s vision of a future in which an army of ‘kinoks’(cameramen) will update world news every four hours. Today we have that army of kinoks,and YouTube is the world stage.This ‘real’ as it is updated by participants on the website of Man With A Movie Camera:The Global Remake is also subjective. There are contemporary versions of the original: forexample mobile phones, flip cams, webcams, and HD cams replace the 1920’s film cam-1. Benjamin Fondane, quoted in Annette Michelson, ‘Film and The Radical Aspiration’, in GregoryBattcock (ed.) The New American Cinema, New York: Dutton, 1967, p. 84.2. The remake was first screened on a large public LED display as part of the Urban ScreensConference at All Saint’s Garden, Manchester UK. 11-12 October 2007.3. www.smokinggun.com.4. VideoArchaeology: International VideoArt Festival, Sofia, Bulgaria, 1-22 October, 1999.5. The Terminal Salon, 2000, under ‘Public Art’ at www.perrybard.net.6. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.7. Dziga Vertov, in Annette Michelson (ed.) Kino-Eye The Writings of Dziga Vertov, Berkeley and LosAngeles: University of California Press, 1984, p.18.

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.

326 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art327Scene 39, Shot 909.Upload to Scene 2, Shot 19. Nelson Ricardo. Brazil.A few years later there are uploads I would choose to eliminate. Here are my criteria: Theuploads are either blurred or too dark to see (quality in the filmic tradition) or have a hazyor no discernible reference to the Vertov shot (quality in the conceptual tradition). In 2010, Icreated a new category allowing all uploads to remain part of the database. Those shots thatdon’t meet my criteria remain visible in the scene index and tags, but are eliminated fromthe stream.A new film streams daily on the website with Vertov’s original on the left, the remake on theright. When there are no uploads for a shot, the right side of the screen remains blank. Thisspace reconfigures the viewing pattern, shifting attention from a two window montage to thesingle window on the left, the right remaining an active absence in recognition of the missingupload. There are other significant absences or spaces in the project: one is the spacearound and between the original and the remake, which mutates according to the format ofthe upload; the other is the absence of representation from places in the world where thereare no uploads. Almost three years later it is these absences that I find most telling. Theseare the spaces of engagement that determine the aesthetics of the piece, spaces I considercentral to the remake.While the uploads on the right are a developing database reflecting participation in theproject, the spaces between and around both windows vary constituting physical evidenceof the devices from which the uploads are made. Aspect ratios of 16:9 versus 4:3 alter theshape of the space, some participants crop their images. The dual-screen structure createsan uneasy alliance between past and future, the right window is a collision course of onenight stands.One of my favourite comments about this piece was from a critic, who said ‘wiki doesn’twork’. I’ve thought about it long and often. There seems to be a lot at stake here: the questionof authorship, another model, a shift in perspective? The juxtaposition of film with databasebegs these questions. At the same time database cinema, social cinema, and participatorycinema pose other questions: What if Beirut bumping up against Bangkok doesn’t make forcontinuity? What if the upload of seven consecutive shots by seven people from different citiesand countries doesn’t make for a uniform aesthetic? What if the software accepts uploadsin all aspect ratios making no attempt to standardize them? What if a film is being authoredcollectively? What are the rules?Upload to Scene 29, Shot 706. Soyun Bang. Korea.In ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’, Sol Lewitt writes: ‘If the artist changes his mind midwaythrough the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results’. 9Questions concerning quality, aesthetics, the problem of democracy (curating a project thatinvites participation) – but especially Lewitt’s words regarding the problem of repeating pastresults – were on my mind when I attended Transmediale in 2010. At a critical debate entitled‘Innovative Artistic and Economic Practices’, seven of the eight panelists presented a varietyof collaborative participatory projects. The event felt like an early 1970s love fest – withoutthe benefits of an LSD capsule. As my mind wandered, I recalled Claire Bishop’s article ‘Antagonismand Relational Aesthetics’. 10 Acknowledging a ‘long tradition of viewer participationand active spectatorship’, Bishop questions the nature of the endeavors of 1990s galleryartists whose works involve creating social or participatory situations, and the praise given tothem by Nicolas Bourriaud In his book Relational Aesthetics. 11 Describing these as ‘feel-goodpositions’, Bishop concludes that.The tasks facing us today are to analyse how contemporary art addresses the viewer and toassess the quality of the audience relations it produces: the subject position that any workpresupposes and the democratic notions it upholds, and how these are manifested in ourexperience of the work. 129. Sol Lewitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (eds) Theories andDocuments of Contemporary Art, Berkeley and Los Angeles California: University of CaliforniaPress, 1996, p. 826.10. Claire Bishop. ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October 110 (Fall 2004): 51-80.11. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, France:Les presses du réel, 2002.12. Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, p. 78.

328 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art329I like to consider the aesthetics in Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake as thatwhich is not articulated visually. It exists in the open spaces on the right, in the space betweenthe original and the remake. It exists in the absence of uploads from parts of the worldthat are unrepresented and in the reasons for those absences. It exists in imagining a future,in spaces that trigger the imagination of the user and the spectator. Those spaces remainnegotiable. They are the battleground of economics and of the imagination, they make visiblethe cultural context within which the work is being created - a public space open to all whohave access.The remake is the whole: it includes the left and right windows, the absence of an imageon the right, the shifting configurations of those windows caused by uploads and the lack ofthem. Even the framing device - the black around the windows - is in a constant state of flux.The stream is unstable, changing on a daily basis. Continuity is replaced by conflict, meaningis constructed through the simultaneity of the two windows on the screen. It’s a messy affair.Thus the aesthetics escape evaluation through authorship, through stylistic vocabulariesnormally associated with a specific discipline be it film, video or the database. What is heretoday will be different tomorrow. To appreciate the work must mean to appreciate change,instability. Maybe the aesthetics can be defined as what’s left to be learned.ReferencesBishop, Claire. ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October 110 (Fall 2004): 51-80.Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, France: Lespresses du réel, 2002.Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.Lewitt, Sol. ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (eds) Theories and Documentsof Contemporary Art, Berkeley and Los Angeles California: University of California Press,1996, pp. 822-827.Michelson, Annette (ed.) Kino-Eye The Writings of Dziga Vertov, Berkeley and Los Angeles: Universityof California Press, 1984._____. ‘Film and The Radical Aspiration’, in Gregory Battcock (ed.) The New American Cinema: ACritical Anthology, New York: Dutton, 1967, pp. 83-102.New York City is the ultimate experiment in international living - I’m reminded of it every timeI ride the subway. The car is a container carrying people of every rank and ethnicity jostlingagainst each other as the car moves along at a clip. Teens talking in their idioms across theaisle to friends they can’t see, people singing alta voce to the tunes on their devices. It’s anuncomfortable but synchronized experience similar to the stream of Man With A Movie Camera:The Global Remake - a temporal coexistence of images and styles from daily life. Or asVertov would say ‘the decoding of life as it is’.

330 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art331YouTube as a Subject: Interview withConstant DullaartCecilia Guidaneers in these investigations. Among them, Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik used techniquessuch as détournement, manipulation, repetition, slowing down and speeding up images, etc.in order to explore the technical limits and possibilities of the medium. In particular, Paikincorporated the ideas of Marshall McLuhan in his work, specifically exploring video as aform of social experiment to bring people closer together and a suitable medium for audienceConstant Dullaart (the Netherlands, 1979) is a visual artist who explores the contemporarylanguage of images through the ironic re-contextualization of material found onthe web. For Dullaart, whose works are widely discussed online and have been showninternationally, the web is a space, a landscape, and a world to investigate in all itsvariety, from a platform’s ‘default’ style, to its content, its popularity, and its use. In2009, Dullaart presented at Video Vortex #5 in Brussels, discussing his use of onlinevideo within his artistic practice. This interview, which took place by email in July 2010,takes up some of the ideas presented at that event, focusing particularly on Dullaart’sseries ‘YouTube as a Subject’. Taking his work on the image of the YouTube play buttonas a point of departure, the conversation reflects on the theories of Marshall McLuhan,the perceptions of artwork on the YouTube platform, the contemporary position of theartist, the relationship between online and physical spaces, and the interaction of theaudience in the era of ‘participatory culture’.Cecilia Guida: In your series of short videos titled ‘YouTube as a Subject’ (2008) no peopleare visible in the work. On a black background the familiar image of the YouTube play buttonfalls off the screen, bounces as a ball, grows out of focus or changes colour with the soundof techno music. The button is at the same time the starting point and subject of the work.Through a simple and smart gesture you reflect upon the digitalization of our contemporaryvisual culture, and call the spectators’ attention to meditate upon the relationship betweenthe user interface and the moving image in logical and semiotic terms. For you, where did theidea for ‘YouTube as a Subject’ emerge?Series of videos ‘YouTube as a Subject’, 2008, from the Constant Dullaart’s YouTube Channel.Constant Dullaart: First of all I have to say that I disliked the YouTube design and videoquality in 2005 when it started to come out—the chaotic site structure, the badly designedlayout, and the obnoxious play button. After a few years it was clear that YouTube had wonthe battle of online video hosting companies, and it started to function as an archive (practicalcontemporary rights issues that avoid it from functioning in this way, and the 10 minute timelimit aside), not only as a medium that was breaking with the authority of the expensive craftof the moving image professional. This caused me to wonder why the obnoxious play buttonhad not been used as a subject since it was the first image people would see before watchingall these important reference videos, art, wedding, news, etc. The play button is the startingpoint regardless of whether it’s a meme video, a Joseph Beuys performance, a Warhol screentest, or an instructional video. Every single one starts with the same image.CG: In the 1960s early video art united negative and positive criticism about the technology,and offered alternatives for a traditional approach to the medium. Fluxus artists were pio-‘YouTube Collage’, courtesy of the Constant Dullaart.

332 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art333participation. Do you relate to these strategies of technical investigation, and to video as aform of social practice, in your work?CD: Comparisons between media are often made around a whole range of issues, from theanxieties and fears during their establishment in society (such as the predominantly negativeinfluence on children of video games, television, graphic novels or even books), to the celebrationof a medium’s influence on a better future, to the announcements of their so calleddeaths or exits from daily use in society.To apply this comparison to an artist’s research of a medium is a simple step.For this artist’s research, first, the technical possibilities of the medium are often explored,and art is made to exhibit these capabilities. These works tend to catch the attention of thegeneral public more often in the beginning establishment of a medium. Why this works in thisway exactly I have never understood. It seems like the medium is still suffering from a lack oforiginal medium specific content, and needs to attract attention by showcasing its capabilities.These conclusions are difficult to draw between the internet as a medium and older mediasuch as painting. But the comparisons can be made between the birth of the film camera, theinfluence of photography on contemporary western image language, and very recently, videoart. But then the internet contains several developing social media, like mail and text drivenmedia, so it is hard to compare it to a single older medium, especially since it is so dynamic.The second step would be to find the boundaries of the technical capabilities, whether it’shuman/user-related or medium-related.The third step of this medium research would be to view the young medium on a metaphysicallevel: not only what is the use of the medium, but also how is it being used, and whatis the meaning of this usage? After this, the medium’s content could escape the process asdescribed above and it should be able to be used with more authentic or medium specificcontent. An example to understand it would be the film-maker Andrej Tarkowski. As the formaland technical possibilities of the cinema movie had been researched in the 1920’s, hefound an ‘adult’ medium to work with knowing a lot of the medium implications and playingwith it in more detail. He used the medium specific qualities to enhance the content and tellan authentic story disconnected from the medium itself. Let’s say that for now in relation tointernet: the medium is more interesting than most of its content.My ‘YouTube as a Subject’ work can be seen as a reference to Marshall McLuhan’s ‘the mediumis the message’, although I thought of the work more as purely formal in the sense thatthe form was the content. You could say that if the form is the medium, then form becamethe message. But, I think this series of my work was not about the implications of the socialweb or of mass social online video hosting, it was not dealing with the hotness or the coldnessof the medium as McLuhan would describe it. It was more about the specificity of onecorporation existing within the medium. YouTube itself is not a medium. To have the workexist outside of YouTube was important to me. To collect my videos and contextualize themoutside of YouTube (on an html page with embedded videos) meant it was about the player,Ben Coonley’s responses to ‘YouTube as a Subject’,courtesy of the artist.and not so much about the social part ofthe website, to separate it more from ‘theMedium is the Message’ idea.CG: When you posted ‘YouTube Disco’(from the series ‘YouTube as a Subject’)on YouTube, Ilovetoeatmicedotcom aliasBen Coonley responded with the video‘Free Spin’ which shows another elementof the YouTube interface: the revolvingdots that appear while a video is loading,with the voice of the host from the gameshow Wheel of Fortune and the clappingaudience playing as audio. This videocreates a dialogue with yours, and it isonly one of seven video responses to yourmeta YouTube works. On your YouTubechannel one can find these works togetherwith enthusiastic, curious and doubtfulcomments. Making new videos as responses and commenting are ways in which usersinteract with the video content. How do you understand the meaning of ‘to participate’ in thecontext of the YouTube platform?CD: How would it have been for Duchamp if his comment on the Mona Lisa would have beenhanging directly next to the original painting in the Louvre? Would he have made a bettercomment? Would people have beaten him to it? Could you have made a better version?Could the works have functioned separated from each other?The authenticity and authorship of the original seems to be less clear when a response orother version of the original starts to coexist, but the general impact of the shared idea becomeslarger. The online tradition of linking back to the origin of the idea (the original postor video) is of course an important one, but sometimes the response is more valuable thanthe original. I am happy that because of this, what I see as the distorted value of singularauthenticity is changing. On the YouTube platform, how people understand video responsesand whether videos are seen as part of the general idea or the ripples on a pond created byan idea, actually depends on the site’s structure. At the moment, mid-2010 after the latestYouTube re-design, it seems harder to find the specific video responses people have postedto another video, which is sad, but it is still possible, and I think the possibility to openlyparticipate is very valuable.CG: Deleuze and Guattari say that ‘production is at once desiring-production and socialproduction’. 1 This social-desiring-production is part of the user-generated content of the 21st1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Continuum:London, 2004, p.325.

334 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art335from its content yet still medium specific. I wanted to solve the question ‘how to show contemporaryonline art in a physical exhibition space’ in an ironic, crude and simple manner,really physically showing an icon that would make people film the sculpture. I did not quotethe contemporary online or software semantics in the physical realm, but I only quoted thevisual appearance of one of the most influential gateways on the World Wide Web, YouTube.Visitors saw the sculpture and immediately thought of the YouTube loading balls, pulled outtheir video camera devices and then also uploaded their documentation back onto YouTube,contextualizing the documentation of the representation of an online experience all overagain. I also partially curated the exhibition, and the theme was to see the comment as amedium, and how to view a change in commenting practice after having become part ofpopular culture and then translated in this physical space of art presentation.CG: You are at the same time an artist, curator and lecturer, easily switching between onlineand gallery environments, and translating digital things into physical objects. Can one stillspeak of rules, divisions and categories in contemporary society where much is interconnectedand mingled?‘YouTube as a Sculpture’, 2009, in the group show Versions, at Netherlands Media Art Institute,courtesy of the artist.century media world. In particular, YouTube is a ‘space’ for experimenting with new formsof cooperation between artists, and between artists and independent and amateur creators.In ‘YouTube as a Subject’, do you consider the collection of videos as art objects in and ofthemselves, or do you consider the responses/feedback that people make about the workson the YouTube channel as part of the work?CD: I consider them part of the work. I feel honoured to have initiated a discussion thathopefully leads to the possibility to view YouTube for what it is, just a very large video hostingplatform, like so many others, even a badly designed one. I consider the original work as astone thrown into the social pond so to say, and am happy that I see the ripples continue (thesocial visual impact), it makes the original stone look bigger, and heavier.CG: As a response to the reactions of your ‘YouTube as a Subject’ series you made the installation‘YouTube as a Sculpture’ (2009). In this work, which was exhibited at the NetherlandsMedia Art Institute in Amsterdam for the group show ‘Versions’, a black fabric-covered roomis presented in which a series of 20cm styrofoam balls hang in a circle that are illuminated bya rotating light moving from one ball to the next. Why did you decide to make a work similarto that of your online work, in the physical space of the museum? Physical and online spacesare different worlds requiring distinct languages to speak to a diverse audience. Do you feelthat these two spaces are distinctly separate, and how do you see your work as connectingthe online with the offline (museum/gallery)?CD: The rules are there, I just think these limits exist to be broken. Basically, these sociallyimplicated limitations prohibit and limit discussion. There is an end to specialization, andthis end is where people will only operate in a tiny field and not learn from trying somethingoutside of that field. This tends to make people lazy and dependent. Next to that I do notfeel my work only functions best in one form, let alone the form of a commoditized productbasedpresentation.CG: Would you consider YouTube a free territory when it comes to artistic practice?Is there another space now, another platform, that offers more creative freedom for artisticintervention and practice than strictly YouTube?CD: No, I do not consider YouTube a free territory, it is very censured (copyright issues,nudity, etc.), there is a time limit, it is badly designed, it is not open and accessible from allover the world. I actually think Ustream or just using a search engine for privately hostedvideos is unbeatable. This is just not as easy, and lacks the wonderful comment and searchoption. YouTube solved the issues of finding an easy way of uploading videos and convertingthem to appropriate and playable formats and was accessible through its crudeness. Butthis work was never meant to celebrate YouTube. YouTube is temporary, and its importanceis made by its users, not by the form. The celebration is ironic. I hope YouTube will changefor the better, or people will find their way out of this constricting, although wonderfully easy,medium again.http://constantdullaart.com/www.youtube.com/constantdullaartCD: Media iconographic images, like television test images for example, are always interestingto juggle between media. So many of these images are printed on clocks, t-shirts, mugs,etc. People seem to identify with them, the basic common icon that is shown, disconnected

336 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art337Glitch Studies ManifestoRosa Menkman‘Collapse of PAL’, an A/V performance by Rosa Menkman (2010).

338 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art339PAL (Phase Alternate Line) 1963-2006.Dear PAL,In Copenhagen, Denmark, in a humble studio that was completely empty, besides the manyscreens and technologies that were apparently needed for the creation of DVB (Digital VideoBroadcasting) television, I had the honour of performing your obsequies; your funeral rites.I was asked to reflect on your fragmented histories, your inherent characteristics and finally,your silent, yet somehow violent termination. 1I believe that I can only grasp your story as a consequence of media innovations, driven bya growing impatience to get faster and to progress towards perfection. However, the more Istudy your complex history, the more I learn about me; my preconceptions and expectationsabout you but also about your successors. How your scanning lines and other artifacts havebecome a beacon and how they resonate in my understanding and thinking of other, newermedia. What your history teaches me is that your discontinuation is continued in my experienceof new technologies; your history teaches me about my future.Dearest PAL, I hope that while I performed your story, with all its unbearable tones and images,I captured at least some part of that indescribable history of which only you could tellthe beginning and on end.As evolution is paralleled by the multiplication of machines, I think I can only start to beginto understand the flow of this progress, by studying the history of breaks, like yours - in anart of artifacts. 2Warmly yours,The Angel of History1. The Collapse of PAL is a real-time nationwide television performance that I presented at TV-TVon the 25th of May 2010, in Copenhagen, DK. In The Collapse of PAL, the Angel of History (asdescribed by Walter Benjamin) reflects on the PAL television signal and its termination. Thisdeath sentence, although executed in silence, was a brutally violent act that left PAL disregardedand obsolete. However, the Angel of History has to conclude that while the PAL signal might beargued to be dead, it still exists as a trace left upon the new, ‘better’ digital technologies. PALcan, even though the technology is terminated, be found here, as a historical form that newertechnologies build upon, inherit or have appropriated. Besides this, the Angel also realizesthat the new DVB signal that has been chosen over PAL, is different but at the same time alsoinherently flawed. The impending question is if this progress also means improvement. SinceMay 2010, The Collapse of PAL has been performed and screened a couple of times in venuesin Europe, the US and South America. A render of the first part of The Collapse of PAL can befound here: http://vimeo.com/12199201 .2. Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, trans. Barclay Brown, New York: Pendragon Press, 1986.The Art of ArtifactsTechnological Progress is an Ill-Fated DogmaIn the beginning it was calm... Then humans built technologies and the first forms of mechanicalnoise were born. Since that time, artists migrated from the grain, the scratching andburning of celluloid (A Colour Box by Len Lye, 1937) to the magnetic distortion and scanninglines of the cathode ray tube (as explored by Nam June Paik in MagnetTV in 1965).Subsequently digital noise materialized and artists wandered the planes of phosphor burnin,as Cory Arcangel did so wittily in Panasonic TH-42PWD8UK Plasma Screen Burn, in2007. With the arrival of LCD (liquid crystal display) technologies, dead pixels were rubbed,bugs were trapped between liquid crystals or plastic displays and violent screen crack LCDperformancestook place (of which my favorite is %SCR2, by Jodi / webcrash2800 in 2009).Today artists even surf eBay to buy readymade LCDs with T-con board failure or photocameras with loose CCD (charged coupled device) chips (the latter I too exploited in TheCollapse of PAL, 2010).While most of these artworks do not have a lot in common, all of them do show that this is theproduct of an elitist discourse and dogma widely pursued by the naive victims of a persistentupgrade culture. The consumer only has to dial #1-800 to stay on top of the technologicalcurve; to ride the waves of both euphoria and disappointment. It is now normal that in thefuture the consumer will pay less for a device that can do more, but at the same time willreach a state of obsolescence faster. This quest for complete transparency (the perfect, invisibleinterface) has changed the computer system into a highly complex assemblage that ishard to penetrate, and sometimes even completely closed off. The system consists of layersof obfuscated protocols that find their origin in ideologies, economies, political hierarchiesand social conventions. The user has to realize that improvement is nothing more than aproprietary protocol, a deluded consumer myth of progression towards a holy grail of perfection.Every (future) technology possesses its own fingerprints of imperfection, which I referto as ‘noise artifacts’.The Art of Noise ArtifactsIn information theory, noise possesses a very specific set of connotations, or even rules. Inthis theory, noise has been isolated to the different occasions in which the static, linear notionof transmitting information is interrupted. 3 In the digital, these interruptions can be subdividedinto glitch, encoding / decoding (of which in digital compression is the most ordinaryform) and feedback artifacts. Artists exploit these artifacts to make (reflexive) media specific3. Claude E. Shannon and W. Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Urbana,Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1949. I realize that Shannon’s and Weaver’s model isnot a correct blueprint for communication. But because it is basic and doesn’t focus on thetransmission of meaning, the model makes it possible to leave semiotics or textual analysis outof the picture, at least for now. In this way the model can be used to research communicationstrictly from a formalistic point of view, which is in my opinion one part (the ‘beginning’) of themany different stratifications of glitch art.

340 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art341art works; as is for instance done by Gijs Gieskes in his Sega Mega Drive 2 (2007), Paul Davisin Codec (2009) and botborg’s Live at Ars Electronica Festival video (2007). 4As might be clear from these artworks, the meaning of noise is more complex than canbe explained by information theory; the ‘meaning’ of noise differs according to perspective.Etymologically, the term noise refers to states of aggression, alarm and powerful sound phenomenain nature (‘rauschen’), such as storm, thunder and the roaring sea. Moreover, whennoise is explored within a social context or in art, the term is often used as a figure of speech,and possesses many more meanings. Sometimes, noise stands for unaccepted sounds; forthat which is not music, not valid information, or is not a message. Noise can also stand foran (often undesirable, unwanted, other and unordered) disturbance, or a break or additionwithin the linear transmission of useful data. However noise is defined, its negative definitionalso has a positive consequence: it helps to (re)define its opposite, which is the world ofmeaning, the norm, regulation, goodness, beauty and so on. 5Some artists intentionally elucidate and deconstruct the hierarchies of digital technologies.They do not work in (binary) opposition to what is inside the flows (the normal uses of thecomputer) but practice on the border of these flows. Sometimes, artists use the computers’inherent maxims as a façade, to trick the audience into a flow of certain expectation that theartwork subsequently rapidly breaks out of. As a result, the spectator is forced to acknowledgethat the computer is a closed assemblage based on a genealogy of conventions, while atthe same time the computer is actually a machine that can be bent or used in many differentways. Digital noise artifacts thus exist as a paradox; while they are often negatively defined,they also have a positive, generative or redefining quality. The break of a flow within technology(the noise artifact) generates a void which is not only a lack of meaning. It also forcesthe audience to move away from the traditional discourse around a particular technology andto ask questions about its meaning. Through this void, artists can critique digital media andspectators can be forced to recognize the inherent politics behind the codes of digital media.So, while most people experience noise artifacts as something negative (or as an accident),I am of the opinion that the positive consequences of these imperfections and the new opportunitiesthey facilitate should be emphasized. Noise artifacts can be a source for newpatterns, anti-patterns and new possibilities that often exist on a border or membrane (of, forinstance, language). With the creation of breaks with the political, social, and economic conventionsof the technological machine, the audience may become aware of its inherent preprogramdpatterns. Then, a distributed awareness of a new interaction gestalt can take form.Glitches vs. Glitch ArtI experience the glitch as a wonderful interruption that shifts an object away from its ordinaryform and discourse, towards the ruins of destroyed meaning. My first encounter comes hand-4. Gijs Gieskes, Sega Mega Drive 2, 2007, glitch/circuitbend Sega, http://gieskes.nl/circuitbending/?file=segamegadrive2; Paul Davis, Codec, 2009, compression algorithm, http://www.beigerecords.com/paul/defineyourterms/codec.html; botborg, Live at Ars Electronica Festival, 2007, livefeedback, http://botborg.com/index.php?go=videoslive.5. Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History, London and New York: Continuum, 2007, p. 5.in-hand with a feeling of shock, or being lost and in awe. But once I find myself within theseruins I also experience a feeling of hope; a triumphal sensation that there is something morethan just devastation. A negative feeling makes place for an intimate, personal experienceof a machine (or program), a system exhibiting its formations, inner workings and flaws. Asa holistic celebration rather than a particular perfection these ruins reveal a new opportunityto me, a spark of creative energy that indicates that something new is about to be created.Questions emerge: What is this utterance, and how was it created? Is it perhaps...a glitch?But once the glitch is named, the momentum – the glitch – is gone...and in front of my eyessuddenly a new form has emerged.The glitch has no solid form or state through time; it is often perceived as an unexpected andabnormal modus operandi, a break from (one of) the many flows (of expectations) within atechnological system. But as the understanding of a glitch changes when it is being named,so does the equilibrium of the (former) glitch itself: the original experience of a rupture movedbeyond its momentum and vanished into a realm of new conditions. The glitch has becomea new mode, and its previous encounter has become an ephemeral, personal experience.Just as with noise, the word glitch in glitch art is used metaphorically and thus slightly differentthan the stand-alone technical term ‘glitch’. The genre of glitch art moves like theweather: sometimes it evolves very slowly, while at other times it can strike like lightning. Theart works within this realm can be disturbing, provoking and horrifying. Beautifully dangerous,they can at once take all the tensions of other possible compositions away. These worksstretch boundaries and generate novel modes; they break open previously sealed politics andforce a catharsis of conventions, norms and beliefs.Glitch art is often about relaying the membrane of the normal, to create a new protocolafter shattering an earlier one. The perfect glitch shows how destruction can change intothe creation of something original. Once the glitch is understood as an alternative mode ofrepresentation or a new language, its tipping point has passed and the essence of its glitchbeingis vanished. The glitch is no longer an art of rejection, but a shape or appearance that isrecognized as a novel form (of art). Artists that work with glitch processes are therefore oftenhunting for a fragile equilibrium; they search for the point when a new form is born from theblazed ashes of its precursor.Hot and Cool Glitches 6The procedural essence of glitch art is opposed to conservation; the shocking experience,perception and understanding of what a glitch is at one point in time cannot be preservedfor a future time. The beautiful creation of a ‘cool’ glitch is uncanny and sublime; as an artistI try to catch something that is the result of an uncertain balance, a shifting, ungraspable,unrealized utopia connected to randomness and idyllic disintegrations. The essence of glitchart is therefore best understood as a history of movement and as an attitude of destructivegenerativity; it is the procedural art of non con-formative, ambiguous reformations.6. Marshall McLuhan outlines a theory of ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ forms of media in Marshall Mcluhan,Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw Hill, 1964, p. 22.

342 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art343However, I have also noticed that over time some of my own glitches have developed intopersonal archetypes; I feel that they have become ideal examples or models of my work.Moreover, I see that some artists do not focus on the procedural entity of the glitch at all.They skip the process of creation-by-destruction and focus directly on the creation of a newformal design, either by creating a final product or by developing a new way to recreate thelatest glitch archetype. This can result in a plug-in, a filter or a whole new ‘glitching software’that automatically simulates or recreates a particular glitching method, which then becomessomething close to an ‘effect’. Some forms of glitch art can thus become ideal examples ormodels that have gained a particular meaning and follow a certain discourse. 7This ‘new’ form of ‘conservative glitch art’ or ‘hot glitch art’ focuses more on design and endproducts than on the procedural and political breaking of flows. There is an obvious critique:to design a glitch means to domesticate it. When the glitch becomes domesticated, controlledby a tool, or technology (a human craft), it has lost its enchantment and has become predictable.It is no longer a break from a flow within a technology, or a method to open up thepolitical discourse, but instead a form of cultivation. For many actors it is no longer a glitch,but a filter that consists of a preset and/or a default: what was once understood as a glitchhas become a new commodity.Glitch art is thus not always an art of the momentum; many works have already passed theirtipping point, or never pass one at all. Glitch art exists within different systems; for instancethe system of production and the system of reception. It is not only the artist who creates thework of glitch art who is responsible for the glitch. The ‘foreign’ input (wrongly encoded syntaxesthat lead to forbidden leakages and data promiscuity), the hardware and the software(the ‘channel’ that shows functional[?] collisions), and the audience (who are in charge ofthe reception, the decoding) can also be responsible. All these actors and their perspectivesare positioned within different but sometimes overlapping flows in which the final productcan be described or recognized as glitch art. This is why an intended error can still rightfullybe called glitch art from another perspective, and why glitch art is not always just a personalexperience of shock, but also, as a genre, a metaphorical way of expression, that depends onmultiple actors. Works from the genre ‘glitch art’ thus consist as an assemblage of perceptionsand the understanding of multiple actors. Therefore, the products of these new filtersthat come to existence after or indeed without the momentum of a glitch cannot be excludedfrom the realm of glitch art.The popularization and cultivation of an avant-garde of mishaps has become predestinedand unavoidable. Even so, the utopian fantasy of ‘technological democracy’ or ‘freedom’,which glitch art is often connected to, has little to do with the ‘colonialism’ of these hot glitchart designs and glitch filters. If there is such a thing as technological freedom, it can onlybe found within the procedural momentum of cool glitch art – when a glitch is just about torelay a protocol.7. Rosa Menkman, ‘A Vernacular of File Formats‘, August 2010, http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com/2010/08/vernacular-of-file-formats-2-workshop.html.Acousmatic Videoscapes 8Whenever I use a ‘normal’, transparent technology, I see only one aspect of the actual machine.I have learned to ignore the interface and all structural components in order to understanda message or use a technology as quickly as possible. The glitches I trigger turn thetechnology back into the obfuscated box that it already was. They shroud its inner workingsand the source of the output under a sublime black veil. I perceive glitches without knowingtheir origin. This gives me and the audience an opportunity to concentrate better on theirform – to interpret their structures and to learn more from what can actually be seen. Anexample of such a work is my video Radio Dada (2008). 9 I prefer to show this work and givethe explanation of what technically happened only after a discussion of what the audiencehas seen and heard.The glitches in Radio Dada create an acousmatic videoscape in which I can finally perceivean output outside of my goggles of speed, transparency and usability. The new structures thatunfold themselves can be interpreted as a portal to a utopia, a paradise-like dimension, butalso as a black hole that threatens to destroy the technology as I knew it. In the acousmaticvideoscapes I make, I use critical trans-media aesthetics to theorize human thinking abouttechnology, creating an opportunity for self-reflexivity, self-critique and self-expression. 10 Iuse synaesthesia not just as a metaphor for transcoding one medium upon another (with anew algorithm), but a conceptually driven meeting of the visual and the sonic within the newlyuncovered quadrants of technology.Critical Trans-media AestheticsWithin software art, the glitch is often used to deconstruct the myth of linear progress and toend the search for the holy grail of the perfect technology. In these works, the glitch emphasizeswhat is normally rejected as a flaw and subsequently shows that accidents and errorscan also be welcomed as new forms of usability. The glitch does not only invoke the deathof the author, but also the death of the apparatus, medium or tool – at least from the per-8. Acousmatics is a concept originally described by Pierre Schaeffer, in Traité des objets musicaux,Le Seuil, Paris, 1966.9. Radio Dada can be watched on vimeo: http://vimeo.com/2321833. The video-images of RadioDada are constructed out of nothing but the image created by feedback (I turned a high-endcamera on a screen that was showing, in real time, what I was filming, creating a feedback loop).Then I glitched the video by changing its format to .avi (the cinepak codec) and subsequentlyexported it into animated gifs, which resulted in the loss of certain pixels and a very specialvideo-texture. I (minimalistically) edited the video in Quicktime. Then I sent the file to Extraboy,who composed music for the video. The composing process started with a handheld world radio.Extraboy scanned through frequencies and experimented with holding the radio in differentparts of the room while touching different objects. Eventually he got the radio to oscillate noisein the tempo that he perceived in the video. The added synthesizer sounds were played live tofurther build on the non-digital sound and rhythm. This was later contrasted with drums whichwere digitally synthesized and processed through effects with a very digital sound to them. Justlike with the video, the digital and analogue media and aesthetics of sound are mixed into onecoherent whole.10. My Acousmatic Videoscape portfolio can be found at, http://videoscapes.blogspot.com/.

344 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art345spective of the technologically determinist spectator – and is often used as an anti ‘softwaredeterministic’form.This fatal manner of glitch art presents a problem for media and art historians, who try todescribe old and new culture upon a continuum, composed of different niches. To deal withthese breaks, historians have repeatedly coined new genres and new media forms, in orderto give these splinter practices a place within this continuum. As a result, an abundance ofdesignations such as databending, datamoshing and circuitbending have come into existence,which in fact all refer to similar practices of breaking flows within different technologiesor platforms.Theorists have been confronted with the same problem. For them, terms like post-digital orpost-media aesthetics frequently offer a solution. Unfortunately, these kinds of terms seemto be misleading, because in glitch art ‘post’ actually often means a reaction to a prior form.And yet, to act against something does not mean to move away from it completely – in fact, areaction also prolongs a certain way or mode, at least as a point of reference. 11 An answer tothe problems of both historians and theorists might be to describe glitch art as a proceduralactivity demonstrating against and within multiple technologies, which I call critical transmediaaesthetics. The role of glitch artifacts as critical trans-media aesthetics is twofold. Onthe one hand, these aesthetics show a medium in a critical state: a ruined, unwanted, unrecognized,accidental and horrendous state. These aesthetics transform the way the consumerperceives the normal (every accident transforms the normal) and describe the passing of atipping point, after which the medium might become something new. On the other hand,these aesthetics critique the medium’s genre, interface and expectations. They challenge itsinherent politics and the established template of creative practice, while producing a theoryof reflection.Some people see glitches as technological, while others perceive them as a social construction.I think it is useless to place one perspective above the other. Glitch studies needs totake place in-between, both, neither and beyond. 13 Glitches do not exist outside of humanperception. What was a glitch 10 years ago is, most often, not a glitch anymore - it might howeverhave become a fetishized retro-commodity. This ambiguous contingency of the glitchdepends on its constantly mutating materiality. The glitch exists as an unstable assemblagein which materiality is influenced by the medium’s construction, operation and content of theapparatus on the one hand; and the work, the writer, and the interpretation by the readerand/or user – the meaning – on the other. Thus, the materiality of glitch art is not (just) themachine on which the work appears, but a constantly changing construct that depends onthe interactions between the text and its social, aesthetic and economic dynamics – and, ofcourse, the point of view from which different actors are able to make meaning.Glitch studies attempts to balance nonsense and knowledge. It can be pursued throughGlitchspeak, a vocabulary of new expressions, and an always growing language of digital culture.These expressions teach the speaker something about the inherent norms, presumptionsand expectations of a language: what is not being said, what is left out. Glitch studiessearches for the unfamiliar while at the same time it tries to de-familiarize the familiar. Thisstudy can show what is acceptable behavior and what is unacceptable, or outside the norm.To capture and explain a glitch is a necessary evil, which enables the generation of newmodes of thought and action. When these modes become normalized, glitch studies shiftsits focus or topic of study to find the current outsider in relation to a new technology or discourse.Glitch studies is a misplaced truth; it is a vision that destroys itself by its own choiceof and for oblivion. The best ideas are dangerous because they generate awareness. Glitchstudies is what you can just get away with.Glitchspeak and Glitch StudiesJust as Foucault stated that there can be no reason without madness, Gombrich wrote thatorder does not exist without chaos, and Virilio stated that technological progression cannotexist without its inherent accident. I am of the opinion that flow cannot be understood withoutinterruption, or functioning without ‘glitching’. 12 This is why we need glitch studies.11. Lev Manovich, ‘Post-media aesthetics’, disLOCATIONS, Karlsruhe: ZKM, Centre for Art andMedia/Centre for Interactive Cinema Research, University of New South Wales, 2001.Kim Cascone, ‘The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary ComputerMusic’, Computer Music Journal 24.4 (2000): 12-18.12. Michel Foucault, ‘First Preface to Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique’ (1961). trans. A.Toscano, Pli, 13, (2002): p. xii; Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in thePsychology of Decorative Art, London: Phaidon Press, 1984, pp. 124-125; Sylvere Lotringer andPaul Virilio, The Accident of Art, Semiotext(e): New York, 2005, p. 8813. Lievnath Faber, Tim van der Heijden and Rosa Menkman, In Between Manifesto. May 2008,http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2008/05/30/in-between-manifesto/.

346 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art347Glitch Studies Manifesto1) The dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel has been — and will always be— no more than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma.Acknowledge that although the constant search for complete transparency brings newer,‘better’ media, every one of these improved techniques will always possess their own inherentfingerprints of imperfection.2) Dispute the operating templates of creative practice; fight genres, interfaces and expectations!Refuse to stay locked into one medium or between contradictions like real vs. virtual,obsolete vs. up-to-date, open vs. proprietary or digital vs. analogue. Surf the vortex oftechnology, the in-between, the art of artifacts!3) Get away from the established action scripts and join the avant-garde of the unknown.Become a nomad of noise artifacts!The static, linear notion of information-transmission can be interrupted on three occasions:during encoding-decoding (compression); feedback; or when a glitch (an unexpectedbreak within the flow of technology) occurs. Noise artists must exploit these noiseartifacts and explore the new opportunities they provide.ReferencesCascone, Kim. ‘The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary ComputerMusic’, Computer Music Journal 24.4 (2000): 12-18.Faber, Lievnath, Tim van der Heijden and Rosa Menkman. In Between Manifesto, May 2008, http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2008/05/30/in-between-manifesto/.Foucault, Michel. ‘First Preface to Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique’ (1961), trans. A. Toscano, Pli13, (2002): 1-10.Gombrich, Ernst Hans Josef. The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, London:Phaidon Press, 1984.Hegarty, Paul. Noise/Music: A History, New York: Continuum, 2007.Lotringer, Sylvere and Paul Virilio. The Accident of Art, Semiotext(e): New York, 2005.Manovich, Lev. ‘Post-media aesthetics’, disLOCATIONS, Karlsruhe: ZKM, Centre for Art and Media/Centre for Interactive Cinema Research, University of New South Wales, 2001.McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill, 1964.Menkman, Rosa. ‘A Vernacular of File Formats’, August 2010, http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com/2010/08/vernacular-of-file-formats-2-workshop.html.Russolo, Luigi. The Art of Noises, trans. Barclay Brown, New York: Pendragon Press, 1986.Schaeffer, Pierre. Traité des objets musicaux, Paris: Le Seuil, 1966.Shannon, Claude E. and W. Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Urbana, Illinois:University of Illinois Press, 1949.4) Employ bends and breaks as a metaphor for différance. Use the glitch as an exoskeletonfor progress.Find catharsis in disintegration, ruptures and cracks; manipulate, bend and break anymedium towards the point where it becomes something new; create glitch art.5) Realize that the gospel of glitch art also reveals new standards implemented by corruption.Not all glitch art is progressive or something new. The popularization and cultivation ofthe avant-garde of mishaps has become predestined and unavoidable. Be aware of easilyreproducible glitch effects, automated by softwares and plug-ins. What is now a glitch willbecome a fashion.6) Force the audience to voyage the acousmatic videoscape.Create conceptually synaesthetic artworks, that exploit both visual and aural glitch (orother noise) artifacts at the same time. Employ these noise artifacts as a nebula thatshrouds the technology and its inner workings and that will compel an audience to listenand watch more exhaustively.7) Rejoice in the critical trans-media aesthetics of glitch artifacts.Utilize glitches to bring any medium in a critical state of hypertrophy, to (subsequently)criticize its inherent politics.8) Employ Glitchspeak (as opposed to Newspeak) and study what is outside of knowledge.Glitch theory is what you can just get away with!Flow cannot be understood without interruption or function without glitching. This is whyglitch studies is necessary.

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?

350 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art351Still from “Quixotic”, an improvis(ualiz)ed short by @lbert figurt.Cinema Solubile: celebrating 100 years of futurism with a 24-hour film marathon, Groningen 2009.The eye is both a camera and a mirror; digital eyes are cameras, but in videochats they alsobecome mirrors. Emerging online applications like Chatroulette, allowing the user to casuallyleaf through his peers, finally clarify that by using a webbie we turn into channels. Transmitting(from) our highly accessorized telerooms, flying over the internet by manoeuvringbuttons in our lounge cockpit & spreading our post-chronobiological coordinates all around,we’re dramatically exposed to the possibility of being ‘nexted’ or ‘zapped’. My [third] eye ismounted on your laptop; when you call (or accidentally find) me, your [third] eye awakes inmy laptop. Videochatting means opening tridimensional chasms in interlocutors’ screens;our actual position rapidly packed and sent to the other, we scrutinize him via an extrusivelyrented pupil. Browsing potential videopartners is a very intriguing and terrifying re(a)lationalsport - I stare at you looking at me while peeping at myself glancing at us two from the flippeddesktopreview.In just a few years, the fascinating wilderness of accidental framing is quickly vanishing.Re[cursive]flexi(a)bility is virtually assured; from a haphazardly expanded visual privacy we’llhopefully move to a more refined self-exposure (both in terms of light/frame composition andof visibility). Or maybe in the near future everything will be arranged webcamwise, allowingus to take care of only what is visible – the rest of our rooms, or life, abandoned and drownedin chaos. Videochat as voluntary, self-inflicted bigb(r)othering, ephemeral online data foranyone - or nobody; passing the days leaning out of public livecams (as ultimate windowson our screened existence), broadcasting our own lives. When the gadget is on, we’re alsoon[line]; a form of subtle s(kype)talking - archiving others without directly pointing a cameraIntrospective drosteffect from “Skype is the limit”,a multimedia project by @lbert figurt, Amsterdam 2010.– can be the outcome, as well as plenty of astonishing videocadavrexquis or freaky youtopianhikikomori formats. The computer display as the paramount wonderland theatre: a madreality-shake where everything can happen (better, be instantly reported & captured), givingrise to s[creenshot]ituationist docufictions.Proletarian CubismParallel - or maybe just complementary - to the eclectic stardom[estic] odyssey (occurringacross extemporaneous arenas of connected laptops) is the proliferation of LCD surfacesof many kinds and dimensions in public spaces, especially relevant when these dynamicsources are embedded in private mobile devices. Already quite accustomed to human-madeurban landscapes whose aftertaste is uncannily shaped by commercial stereotypes, we’reindeed not too surprised or ravished if some big video projection or huge display adds an(audio)visual complement to the artificial playground. If cinema and TV rhetoric progressivelyadvanced from drawing on the real to suggesting photogenic steps for its staging, anen-plein-air overlayed screening is just a coherent step forward in this blurring boundariesscenario. But when clusters of personalized miniscreens suddenly enter our lives, or whenwe enter one or more of them without knowing (or without caring too much), it’s perhapswort[ime]h to reflect on this molecular splintering of viewpoints.At the end of a concert the musician announces his latest hit; everybody used to raise alighter to warmly appreciate the long-awaited song, while in these days the flames’ swarm isreplaced by a videophone’s, and the singer’s image instantaneously explodes into kaleido-

352 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art353Offading OutJust like many unintentional neuroticelebrities, at length we may find ourselves overwhelmedby a constant spectacularization of the contingent – the distinction between a narcissisticimage-bulimic ecstasy and a paparazzi nightmare being not so clear. In the past we cameout of our houses to breathe some fresh air, leaving technology behind and happily facing theprobabilistic opportunities of the street; today we’re surrounded by sensors and bugs (bothexternal and wearable), at the point that the seemingly offline outside is in fact a dissimulated– not necessarily glorious – red carpet. Photocam-free parties are blooming here and there,as archaeological rem[emorial]edies to celebrate good ole’ pre-recording-euphoria-times,when losing control went along with losing the memory of it the very next day. Metropolitanlegends about remotely activated webcams leads to paranoiac sticky-tape-based habits, oreven drastic hardware removals. The up-skirt shots phenomena (nonchalantly hunting forimages below the lines of etiquette, midway between soft pornography and underwear mapping)is catalyzing unexpected audiences on the net.Public webcam turned into a rudimental communication platform from “Skype is the limit”,a multimedia project by @lbert figurt, Amsterdam 2010.scope fragments. Like many post-modern votive candles, digital eyes are launched above theregular view, fighting for a clear perspective, surrounding and optically hugging the target.Tridimensional vlogging syn[chronicity]ergy winds among the excited crowd, a new kind ofspectacle is added to and superimposed on the first one. Video-bootlegging material that willsoon be transferred online (usually without further sound or image adjustment), is in the momentnarrowcasted at a small distance for indiscreet, shortsighted or lazy fans. Philosophicallyspeaking, the LCD reveals itself as the m[ethonymical]atrix, or mother, of this inside-outand swapping gaze-o-rama; a small liquid crystal display (regularly attached and recentlybuilt into video/photographic equipment) that liberates the eye from a binding prox[emics]imitywith the viewfinder, encouraging experimental and aleatory framing while simultaneouslyacting like a preview monitor. It seems like we’re looking at a carved out portion of life, butwhat’s really running over the display is an already digitized sequence of visual stimuli (i.e.liable to real-time zooming procedures in absence of an actual lens); a bunch of liquidatawhose destiny - to be endlessly poured and sipped through com[putational]municating vessels– is figuratively inscribed in its original spouting form. Reality is not grasped by or representedin the miniscreen; it is filtered-processed-reproduced on it. Waiting for the upload,we’re transmitting (while recording); reality is there, and we’re centripetally or centrifugallydoublechecking it (whilst immersed).Curtains are vanishing, or maybe it’s just that we love to indulge in sm[ediated]ooth voyeuristicbehaviour without accepting the (symmetrical) counterpart. A miniaturized camera mountedon a mobile phone is not just a powerful enhancement, but probably a hidden metaphor:we’re expected to discuss video, to walk with the idea of video in mind and the possibility toeffortlessy realize it in the pocket, to look at the video universe with more attention, but toalso grasp the microcosm of our own daily events with an augmented lucidity – and possiblywithout the device. In the end, the unlimited productive & storing capacities guaranteed bydigital reprovisual apparatuses, along with the web as the main platform for creative potlatchesand scattered cooperation, could be a way to reposition ourselves both as producersand consumers within the AV mediascape; the way we look at the world (is it video’s referentor viceversa?) will change accordingly. The online videoframework has not acquired a specifictrajectory yet – it totally depends on us; suspended between a mere replica of today andrecombinant meditations about yesterdays, it’s heading a pluralized tomo(u)rrow.Let’s see.

354 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeappendices355APPENDICES

356 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeappendices357Video Vortex IIIAnkaraOctober 10-11, 2008Location: Conference Hall, Faculty of Art, Designand Architecture, Bilkent University, AnkaraOn October 10-11 2008, Bilkent University Department of Communication and Design, incooperation with the Institute of Network Cultures, organized the 3rd Video Vortex event inAnkara, Turkey. Video Vortex 3 Ankara Edition featured a two-day international conference,an evening program, live performances and a new media art exhibition. More information isavailable at http://std.comd.bilkent.edu.tr/videovortex/.Video Vortex 3 Ankara Edition is an extension of the Video Vortex project by the Institute ofNetwork Cultures in Amsterdam and is a follow-up to the Amsterdam conference, held inJanuary 2008, and the Brussels conference, held in October 2007. It continued and deepenedthe debates, while bringing together a wide range of scholars, artists and curators aswell as lawyers, producers and engineers.Themes of Video Vortex 3 Ankara Edition included: Navigating the database, p2p, art online,visual art, innovative art, participatory culture, social networking, political economy, collaborationand new production models, censorship, YouTube, collective memory, cinematic andonline aesthetics.> Thursday October 9, 200810.00 – 12.00Workshop: Open Collaborative Mapping/OLPC Project (Markus Schaal)14.00 – 16.00Video Art Screenings> Friday October 10, 20089.30 – 12.00Workshop: Video Blogging by Michael Verdi13.30Doors open, coffee and tea14.00Welcome by Andreas Treske, Head of Department of Communication and Design14.15 – 16.30Opening Session: Political EconomyModerator: Sabine NiedererAras Özgün, Dominic Pettman, Kylie Jarret16.30Coffee, tea16.45Video Vortex Reader Launch by Sabine Niederer17.00Video Screening by Vera Tollmann, ‘Always on your minds’18.30Exhibition and Reception21.00COMD 10th Anniversary Party> Saturday October 11, 200810.00 – 12.00Participatory CultureMichael Liegl, Martin Koplin, Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen12.00 – 13.00Lunch13.00 – 15.00Online Video and BloggingMichael Verdi, Sarah Késenne, Basak Senova15.00 – 15.15Coffee, tea15.15 – 17.15Art OnlineModerator: Mehmet SırayBrittany Shoot, Gülsen Bal, Dan Oki17.15 – 17.30Coffee, tea17.30 – 18.15YouTube and Censorship: Turkish CaseMehmet Ali Köksal

358 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeappendices359Video Vortex IVSplitOctober 22-23, 2009Location: Multimedia Cultural Center, splitThe Department of Film and Video at the Academy of Arts University of Split and Platforma9.81 will organized the fourth Video Vortex event, in collaboration with the Institute of NetworkCultures in Amsterdam. After previous events about online video and responses to YouTubein Brussels, Amsterdam and Ankara, this event focused on the moving image on the Web.The themes of the international symposium include:Telepresence and Web AestheticsVideo meets Web aesthetics: how is the phenomenon of ‘telepresence’ incorporated in variousart forms, such as music, theatre, visual arts, literature and cinema? What are underlyingaesthetics and what are the specific interface contexts?Social CinemaHas cinema found its way onto the Web? Did it change the essential features of cinema? Whatare the new possibilities of collaborative production? Does the future of film museums andcinematheques lie in online cinematic databases?Architecture and Moving ImageOnline video offers an immense database of moving images, which could be displayed inurban public space. What are the existing cinematographic visions of the future of the movingimage in public space? (In films such as Blade Runner, Minority Report, Children of Men,etc.) Which visions can be directly implemented, and which will remain film scenography?Video SharingWhat are the standards and alternatives for sharing, licensing and hosting moving images onthe Web? This theme explores issues around the distribution, licensing, collaborative production,and video hosting.Technology and politics of the moving imageWhat is the future of visual browsers? How does moving image production relate to cultural,technological and political dominance? Open standards and codex politics. Surveillance issues.Literature and video online narrativeNarrative strategies on the Web. From screenplay writing with hypertext, the broadcasted selfand narrative avatars to collective narrative processes leading to Web literature, tag basedvideo narrativity, public journalism and performative real-time literature.During the Video Vortex in Split five cinema events were presented:1) upload cinema 2) mobile phone cinema 3) social cinema 4) cinematic data base 5) performativecinema> Day zero: Thursday, May, 21, 200917.00Screenings 1Location: Kinoteka Zlatna VrataTrip – Natalie Bookchin (63 min.)Q&A – Natalie Bookchin (Los Angeles), (20 min.)19.00Opening eveningLocation: Multimedia Cultural Center19.00 – Word of Welcome by Geert Lovink, Miranda Veljacic and Dan Oki19.10 – Introduction speech by Lev Manovich (San Diego)20.00 – Exhibition opening with food/buffet21.00 – Emile Zile – Post-It Kino Performance21.45 – Nenad Vukušic Sebastijan – VJ Performance> Day One: Friday, May, 22, 2009Video Vortex ConferenceLocation: Multimedia Cultural Center9.45 – 11.30Tele-Image Research StrategiesModerator: Sabine NiedererAndreas Treske (Ankara), Nathalie Bookchin (Los Angeles), Dalibor Martinis (Zagreb)11.45 – 13.45The DatabaseModerator: Tomislav MedakMaarten Brinkerink (Amsterdam), Kuros Yalpani (Munich), Albert Figurt (Rome),Alejandro Duque (Zurich)14.30 – 16.30Video Art meets Web AestheticsModerator Leila TopicVera Tollmann (Berlin), Vito Campanelli (Napoli), Sarah Késsene (Gent),Linda Wallace (Sydney/Amsterdam)17.30 – 18.45Screenings 2Location: Kinoteka Zlatna VrataShelly Silver – In complete world (53 min.)Q&A – Shelly Silver (New York), (20 min.)

360 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeappendices36121.00 – 22.30Screenings 3Presented by: Dagan CohenLocation: Kinoteka Zlatna VrataUpload Cinema, March 2009 Edition ‘Engineering the Body’ (90 min.)> Day Two: Saturday, May, 23, 2009Video Vortex ConferenceLocation: Multimedia Cultural Center09.45 – 11.45Online Video TheoriesModerator: Geert LovinkJan Simons (Amsterdam), Gabriel Menotti (London), Amir Soltani (Manchester),Stefan Heidenreich (Berlin)12.00 – 14.00Online Video NarrativesModerator: Brian WillemsJasmina Kallay (Dublin), David Clark (Halifax), Valentina Rao (Pisa),Paul Wiersbinski (Frankfurt)14.45 – 16.45Politics of the Moving ImageModerator: Petar MilatSaša Vojkovic (Zagreb), David Teh (Bangkok), Ana Peraica (Split),Antanas Stancius (Vilnius)17.00 – 18.30Social CinemaModerator: Dan OkiPerry Bard (New York), Evelin Stermitz (Villach/Ljubljana), Dagan Cohen (Amsterdam)19.00PerformanceLocation: Multimedia Cultural Center‘Cym and the Aethernauts’ (Walkersdorf / All over the world) (performance 30 min.)22.00Conference PartyLocation: KOCKA CLUBVideo Vortex VBrusselsNovember 20-21, 2009Location: Atomium, BrusselsIn collaboration with the Cimatics Festival, KASK HogeschoolGent and CLEAProgram by Bram Crevits and Stoffel Debuysere.Two years after its first edition, Video Vortex returned to Brussels, this time hosted in one ofthe great icons of mid 20th century modern architecture, the Atomium. It could be read as are-baptism of this symbol of the atomic age into a symbol of network culture.Over the preceding two years Video Vortex – focusing on the status and potential of the movingimage on the Internet – had visited Amsterdam, Ankara and Split, growing out into anorganised network of organisations and individuals. The second Brussels edition headed foran interim report and asked some participants of the first Video Vortex editions and publication,as well as new ones, to reflect on recent developments in online video culture.Over the past years the place of the moving image on the Internet has become increasinglyprominent. With a wide range of technologies and web applications within anyone’s reach,the potential of video as a personal means of expression has reached a totally new dimension.How is this potential being used? How do artists and other political and social actors react tothe popularity of YouTube and other ‘user-generated-content’ websites? What does YouTubetell us about the state of contemporary visual culture? And how can the participation cultureof video sharing and vlogging reach some degree of autonomy and diversity, escaping thelaws of the mass media and the strong grip of media conglomerates?About Cimatics:This 7th edition of the Cimatics festival again went at full throttle with contemporary imageand network culture. As a festival for digital culture it puts the focus both on art, media, designand music in a mix of concerts, film-screenings, exhibitions, workshops, conferences,public interventions and parties. Cimatics 2009 was spread out all over the city of Brussels.For 10 days and nights it was be hosted by numerous venues, both underground and above.It intends to be a citywide international festival for advanced creativity, a node where grassroots,underground and pop or art become mixed in an exciting cultural mash-up.> November 20, 2009: Day I13.30Introductionby Geert Lovink14.00System Flaws and TacticsModerator: Andreas TreskeLiesbeth Huybrechts/Rudi Knoops,Brian Willems,Rosa Menkman,Johan GrimonprezVideo channels, platforms and formats impose strict structures on how you can interact with

362 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeappendices363them. This session is inspired by the inherent errors, disabilities and restrictions, often conductingour behavior but in this case inspiring and exposing new insights.17.30Q&A20.30Video Vortex Evening Program at Les Brigittines> November 21, 2009: Day II10.00Online Cinema Moderator: Andreas TreskeAndrew ClaySimilar to his essay ‘BMW Films and the Star Wars Kid: ‘Early Web Cinema’ and Technology’in the recently published ‘Cinema and Technology’, Andrew Clay provides an in-depth approachof online cinema.10.45Categories of Enactment / Strategies of ResistanceKeith Sanborn,Stefaan DecostereBoth lecturers have been contributing to the previous Video Vortex Reader. They are bothartists and theoreticians and share a common attitude of resistance. In this session they willupdate and further expand their previous contributions to Video Vortex.13.30Artist Practices: (Sub)Versioning Moderator: Vera TollmannOliver Laric & Aleksandra Domanovic,Constant Dullaart(Sub)Versioning – the contraction of the Situationist ’subversion’ and the common IT practiceof ‘versioning’ might best describe the practice of the artists in this session. They approachonline video as a means for a subtle restructuring of existing popular media and a basis forinvestigating new modes of constructing and relating meaning brought about by the Internet.15.00Politics of Online Video Moderator: Sabine NiedererSimon Yuill,Elizabeth Losh,Stephen CrockerIn a dispersed society, with a seemingly vanishing of mass culture, online video is challengingtraditional channels of public communication, oppositional media. A session providing uswith some remarkable case-studies and research-projects about participatory communication,the White House and citizen journalism.17.00Closing Q&AEvening invitation to opening night of Cimatics festival 2009 at Beursschouwburg with audiovisualconcerts by AGF (DE) and TVestroy (CA).

364 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeappendices365Video Vortex VIAmsterdamMarch 11-12, 2011Location: TrouwAmsterdamSince its birth in 2005 YouTube has grown into an unstoppable force. In response to theoverwhelming presence of this web giant, 2007 saw the first Video Vortex conference, withfour more over the next three years. While influenced by the legacy of YouTube, online videohas become omnipresent as part of the landscape of our digital culture, finding a homeacross diverse platforms and sites, and developing particular and peculiar aesthetics acrossthe internet ecosystem. Two years later, the Video Vortex events come back to Amsterdam.Organized by the Institute of Network Cultures, and in a top cultural venue, Video Vortex #6offers artist presentations (performances, screenings and talks), hands-on workshops, thelaunch of the upcoming Video Vortex Reader II, and a 2-day symposium.> Thursday, March 10, (NIMk)Time: 10:00 – 16:00 hrsLocation: Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk), Amsterdam.Workshop 1 – Remixing and Re-Use of Open Video CollectionsIn the context of the Open Images project (www.openimages.eu), participants of the Remixingand Re-use of Open Video Collections workshop will get creative with material from theNetherlands’ public broadcasting archive, to make their own short videos. Led by MaartenBrinkerink of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, and facilitated by artists EmileZile and José Miguel Biscaya, creative students, media producers and video amateurs areinvited to start reusing and remixing the growing wealth of open video collections that aremade available online for use in inspired and inspiring video creations. During the workshop,participants will first become familiar with the Open Images collection, seeing what is availablefor re-use, and are then, through the guidance of workshop facilitators, offered a creativetoolkit of possible styles and techniques they can use with the material to create and tell theirown story using this found footage. The workshop takes place in collaboration with MediaLABAmsterdam.Workshop 2 – Animated Gif Mashup StudioLed by artist Evan Roth, Animated Gif Mashup Studio invites participants to work collaborativelyto create a single music video composed of their favorite animated gifs. During theworkshop, Roth will teach participants about the open source animated gif mash-up softwarehe built, how to search for animated gifs and how to put together their own animated gifcompilations.Friday, March 11, (TrouwAmsterdam)10.00 – 10.15Welcome and introduction by Geert Lovink10.15 – 12.30Online Video AestheticsModerartor: Geert LovinkAndrew Clay, Florian Cramer, Florian Schneider, Michael StrangeloveIn response to the ubiquitous presence of video on an array of websites and platforms, thissession seeks to explore the development of the diverse and distinctive aesthetics of onlinevideo. Tackling the tenuous relationship between amateur and professional video production,particularly with respect to the question of ‘quality’, have amateur and professionalvideo grown closer further erasing the ability to distinguish between distinct visual tropesand operating within similar economic arenas, or are they still in competition? Further -more, how do mechanisms of monetization on many video platforms effect the collisionbetween professional and amateur content and its creation? What techniques aesthetics,genres, structures and practices exist in the realms of amateur and professional onlinevideo creation, and where through the maze of the internet are unique forms and practicesemerging?13.30 – 15.15Platforms, Standards and the Trouble with Translation Civil RightsModerartor: Maarten BinkerinkBen Moskowitz, Matthew Williamson, Holmes WilsonProliferating platforms and standards for video on the web offer the picture of a vast, andsometimes turbulent, sea for online video. The problem of translation across platformsand browsers that arise to due to conflicts in standards, and diminished access to contentthrough language barriers, often restrict the possibilities for diverse and open video sharing.With this in mind, this session digs into the ins and outs of some of the main video sharingplatforms analysing their distinct and competing characteristics; exploring standards for webvideo particularly in light of the advent of HTML5 and discussions of the Open Web; and anew tool for collaborative translation as videos bound across language borders. It is in theseplatforms, new standards and language translation tools that the current state of politics andpossibilities for the growing ecology and culture of online video come to light.15.30 – 17.00Online Video ArtModerartor: Josephine BosmaDagan Cohen, Ashiq Jahan Khondker and Eugene Kotlyarenko, Evan Rothand Roel WoutersCinema screenings of online material, live video capture and Skype as a medium, animatedGIF mashups, and collaborative networked video-making, arts practices all made possiblewith the changing technological landscape of video on the internet. Asking what is currentlyon the minds of artists who engage with online video, this session explores how moving imageson the internet are being used in creative and innovative ways. What sorts of issues

366 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeappendices367are artists dealing with, what kinds of mediums and production methods are being usedand developed, and what kind of work is being made? Through artist talks, this sessionseeks to illustrate the diverse practices and perspectives of artists working in the realm ofonline video.17.00 – 17.15Book launchWeb Aesthetics: How Digital Media Affect Culture and Society, by Vito Campanelli> Saturday, March 12, (TrouwAmsterdam)10.00 – 12.00It’s Not a Dead Collection, it’s a Dynamic DatabaseModerartor: Rachel Somers MilesArjon Dunnewind, Sandra Fauconnier, Mél Hogan, Teague Schneiter, Catrien Schreuderand Annelies TermeerNow that museums, distributors and TV channels have put their collections online, what isthe next phase for these digitalized archives? How can ‘the audience’ be involved in order toavoid a dead online collection with zero comments? Moreover, what forms of social dynamismcan be critically forged in the default rush towards greater participation? How to jump throughthe hoops of copyright legislation, format compatibility and the spatial culture of consumptionand production? Who controls the database, and what are the different ethics involved inputting up content from artist collections to indigenous material? Once collaboration comesinto play, what impact do conflicting skill sets, different modes of knowledge production andvarying social desires have?15:15 – 17:15Online Video as a Political ToolModerartor: Merijn OudenampsenPatricía Dias da Silva, Sam Gregory, And Lowenthal and Joanne RichardsonVideo on the internet has opened up a powerful and important place for the widespreaddistribution of moving images for multifarious political purposes, from grassroots activism,citizen protest and human rights violation witnessing to government “outreach” (authoritativeand otherwise) and corporate PR. With these multiple competing interests, this session askswhat are the political strategies of online video? Furthermore, are there powerful platformsavailable for videos in the realm of activism? How do activists deal with and reflect on thenature of online video, with its guerrilla, amateur, viral, remix and lo-fi characteristics? Howis online video being used as a grassroots political tool, and conversely what are the ways inwhich large institutional actors understand and use video as a tool to their own ends, oftentimes against activist intentions? What are the ethics involved in making, sharing and usingvideo on the net as a political tool, and what are the new ways of launching political contenteffectively when everything aims to be viral?17.15 – 17.30Book launchVideo Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube20.30 – 23.00VeniVidiVortex: Closing Party13.30 – 14.45The World of Online Video: Country ReportsModerartor: Andreas TreskeKoen Leurs, Ferdiansyah Thajib & Nuraini Juliastuti and Ebru BaranseliWhat are some of the key current issues being faced by different countries in their use ofonline video? Moving beyond the oft-focused European and North American context, thissession seeks to offer a detailed exploration of some of the hot topics, initiatives, and pressingneeds of various countries in their development and use of video on the internet by centringon specific projects and case studies.14.45 – 15.00In Conversation with artist Natalie BookchinNatalie Bookchin’s video installations explore new forms of documentary, addressing conditionsof mass connectivity and isolation and exploring the stories we are telling about ourselvesand the world. Using webcam footage and YouTube videos throughout her oeuvre,Bookchin poignantly uses video on the net and its revolving cultural, social and political terrainas material and inspiration for her work. In an onstage interview format, this presentationwill offer a conversation between Natalie Bookchin and Geert Lovink about online video andher artistic practice.

368 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeMoving Images Beyond Youtube369Studies in Network CulturesStudies in Network Cultures is a book series that investigates conceptsand practices special to network cultures. Network culturescan be understood as social-technical formations under construction.They rapidly assemble, and can just as quickly disappear,creating a sense of spontaneity, transience and even uncertainty.How to conduct research within such a shifting environment is akey interest to this series. Studies in Network Cultures are editedby Geert Lovink, and published by NAi Publishers, Rotterdam andthe Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam.Eric KluitenbergDelusive Spaces: Essays on Culture, Media and TechnologyThe once open terrain of new media is closing fast. Market concentration,legal consolidation and tightening governmental control have effectivelyended the myth of the free and open networks. In Delusive Spaces, EricKluitenberg takes a critical position that retains a utopian potential foremerging media cultures. The book investigates the archaeology of mediaand machine, mapping the different methods and metaphors used tospeak about technology. Returning to the present, Kluitenberg discussesthe cultural use of new media in an age of post-governmental politics.Delusive Spaces concludes with the impossibility of representation. Goingbeyond the obvious delusions of the ‘new’ and the ‘free’, Kluitenbergtheorizes artistic practices and European cultural policies, demonstratinga provocative engagement with the utopian dimension of technology.For more information please visit:www.networkcultures.org/publications/studies-in-network-culturesEric Kluitenberg is a Dutch media theorist, writer and organizer. Since the late 1980s, he has beeninvolved in numerous international projects in the fields of electronic art, media culture, and informationpolitics. Kluitenberg heads the media program at De Balie, Centre for Culture and Politics inAmsterdam. He is the editor of the Book of Imaginary Media (NAi Publishers, 2006) and the themeissue ‘Hybrid Space’ of Open, journal on art and the public domain (2007).Rotterdam/Amsterdam, 2007ISBN 978-90-5662-617-4 / 250 pagesNed RossiterOrganized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour,New InstitutionsThe celebration of network cultures as open, decentralized, and horizontalall too easily forgets the political dimensions of labour and life in informationaltimes. Organized Networks sets out to destroy these myths bytracking the antagonisms that lurk within Internet governance debates,the exploitation of labour in the creative industries, and the aesthetics ofglobal finance capital. Cutting across the fields of media theory, politicalphilosophy, and cultural critique, Ned Rossiter diagnoses some of thekey problematics facing network cultures today. Why have radical socialtechnicalnetworks so often collapsed after the party? What are the keyresources common to critical network cultures? And how might thesecreate conditions for the invention of new platforms of organization andsustainability? These questions are central to the survival of networks in a post-dotcom era. Derivedfrom research and experiences participating in network cultures, Rossiter unleashes a rangeof strategic concepts in order to explain and facilitate the current transformation of networks intoautonomous political and cultural ‘networks of networks’.Australian media theorist Ned Rossiter works as a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies (Digital Media),Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland and an Adjunct Research Fellow,Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, Australia.Rotterdam/Amsterdam, 2006ISBN 90-5662-526-8 / 252 pagesMatteo PasquinelliAnimal Spirits: A Bestiary of the CommonsAfter a decade of digital fetishism, the spectres of the financial and energycrisis have also affected new media culture and brought into questionthe autonomy of networks. Yet activism and the art world still celebrateCreative Commons and the ‘creative cities’ as the new ideals for the Internetgeneration. Unmasking the animal spirits of the commons, MatteoPasquinelli identifies the key social conflicts and business models at workbehind the rhetoric of Free Culture. The corporate parasite infiltratingfile-sharing networks, the hydra of gentrification in ‘creative cities’ suchas Berlin and the bicephalous nature of the Internet with its pornographicunderworld are three untold dimensions of contemporary ‘politics of thecommon’. Against the latent puritanism of authors like Baudrillard andŽižek, constantly quoted by both artists and activists, Animal Spirits draws a conceptual ‘book ofbeasts’. In a world system shaped by a turbulent stock market, Pasquinelli unleashes a politicallyincorrect grammar for the coming generation of the new commons.Matteo Pasquinelli is an Amsterdam-based writer and researcher at the Queen Mary University ofLondon and has an activist background in Italy. He edited the collection Media Activism: Strategiesand Practices of Independent Communication (2002) and co-edited C’Lick Me: A NetpornStudies Reader (2007). Since 2000, he has been editor of the mailing list Rekombinant (www.rekombinant.org).Rotterdam/Amsterdam, 2008ISBN 978-90-5662-663-1 / 240 pages

370 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeMoving Images Beyond Youtube 371Vito CampanelliWeb Aesthetics: How Digital Media Affect Culture and SocietyOnline video, Web interfaces, file sharing, mailing lists and social networksare transforming our experience of the world. While the social dimensionof these Web-related forms dominates public discourse, their aestheticimpact is largely ignored. In response, Web Aesthetics intervenes in thefield of new media studies and art theory, proposing an organic theoryof digital media aesthetics. Italian media theorist Vito Campanelli tracksthe proliferation of Web technologies, platforms and software and offersa catalogue of aesthetic strategies to address their profound cultural impact.As Campanelli argues, when the Web is located inside socioculturalpractices, processes and expressions, it becomes a powerful agent ofaestheticization of life on a global scale.THEORYON DEMANDFOR MOREINFORMATION SEEhttp://networkcultures.org/publications/theory-on-demand/Theory on Demand is a series published by the Institute of Network Cultures thatdraws from an archive of content production. The series takes its name from Printon Demand, a process in which new copies of a book are not printed until an orderhas been received. Every publication in Theory on Demand can be downloadedfreely as a pdf, or can be ordered in print from Lulu or OpenMute.Vito Campanelli lectures on the theory and technology of mass communication at the Universityof Naples–L’Orientale. He is a freelance curator of digital culture events and co-founder of MAO– Media & Arts Office. His essays on media art are regularly published in international journals.Rotterdam/Amsterdam, 2010ISBN 978-90-5662-770-6 / 276 pagesJosephine BosmaNettitudes: On a Journey through Net ArtDuring the nineties net art burst onto the scene as a radical reflectionon the role of technology in contemporary art. In Nettitudes Dutch artcritic Josephine Bosma catalogues this tumultuous history as art becamesituated in the material dimensions of the internet, from the spectacularinterventions of the first decade to today’s dispersed practices, includingonline acoustics, poetry and archiving. Never the darling of the mediaart institutions and ignored by many curators and critics since itsemergence, net art still persists as a ‘non-movement’ in the cracks ofcontemporary media culture. This book provides an analytical foundationand insider’s view on net art’s many expressions as it grapples with theaesthetic, conceptual and social issues of our times.Issue no.01: Dynamics of CriticalInternet Culture (1994-2001),by Geert Lovink.ISBN: 978-90-78146-07-0.Issue no.02: Jahre der JugendNetzkritik: Essays zu Web 1.0,by Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz.Forthcoming.Issue no.03: Victims’ Symptom(PTSD and Culture),by Ana Peraica.ISBN: 978-90-78146-11-7.Josephine Bosma is an Amsterdam-based journalist and critic commenting onthe fields of art and new media since 1993. One of the first to probe intoand engage with the domain of net art, her pioneering work is publishedinternationally in books, periodicals and catalogues.Rotterdam/Amsterdam, forthcoming April 2011ISBN 978-90-5662-800-0 / 272 pagesIssue no.04: Imagine ThereIs No Copyright and CulturalConglomerates Too / An Essay, byJoost Smiers & Marieke van Schijndel.ISBN: 978-90-78146-09-4.Issue no.05: Spatial Aesthetics:Art, Place, and the Everyday,by Nikos Papastergladis.ISBN: 978-90-816021-3-6.Issue no.06: Gaming Rhythms: Playand Counterplay from the Situated tothe Global, by Tom Apperley.ISBN: 978-90-816021-1-2.

372 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeauthor biographies373AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIESPerry Bard is an artist living in New York. She works individually and collaboratively on interdisciplinaryprojects for public space. She has exhibited video and installations internationally,in New York at the Museum of Modern Art PS1 Museum, Sao Paolo Biennial, MontrealBiennial, and Reina Sofia Museum Madrid. Her project Man With A Movie Camera: TheGlobal Remake won Honorary Mention in the Digital Communities category at Ars Electronica2008 , was presented at Transmediale 2009, File 2009, Media Forum at Moscow InternationalFilm Festival 2009, Doclab at IDFA 2009, and has been installed in museums andgalleries and on public screens worldwide. http://www.perrybard.net.Natalie Bookchin is an artist whose video installations explore new forms of documentary,addressing conditions of mass connectivity and isolation, and explore the stories we are tellingabout ourselves and the world. Her work is exhibited widely, including at LACMA, PS1,MASS MoCA, the Generali Foundation, the Walker Art Center, the Pompidou Centre, MOCALA, the Whitney Museum, the Tate, and Creative Time. She has received numerous grants,including those from Creative Capital, California Arts Council, the Guggenheim, the Durfee,the Rockefeller, California Community Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, DanielLanglois, a COLA Artist Fellowship and most recently from the Center for Cultural Innovation.In 1999-2000 Bookchin organized , an eight month series of lecturesand workshops on art, activism and the internet at CalArts, MOCA in LA, and LaboratorioCinematek in Tijuana . She lives in Los Angeles where she is co-Director of the Photography& Media Program in the Art School at CalArts. http://bookchin.net/.Vito Campanelli is an Italian new media theorist who lectures at the Università degli Studi diNapoli ‘L’Orientale’. His essays on media art are regularly published in international journals.He is a freelance curator and promoter of events in the field of digital culture and co-founderof the non-profit association MAO - Media & Arts Office ONLUS (http://www.mediartsoffice.eu). His most recent publication is the book Web Aesthetics: How Digital Media Affect Cultureand Society as part of the book series Studies in Network Cultures (Institute of NetworkCultures, Amsterdam/NAi Publishers Rotterdam, 2010).Andrew Clay is Principal Lecturer in Critical Technical Practices in the Department of MediaTechnology at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, and has published articles on crime andmasculinity in British cinema. He is currently researching and publishing on the theory andpractice of online film with particular reference to YouTube social media sharing practicesand new media developments such as open source cinema and post-television web video.He has adopted a number of social media tools in teaching and explores the pedagogicalpotential for hands-on experience of digital technologies in the study of media technology.Alexandra Crosby researches Indonesian culture. She also writes, curates exhibitions andthinks up exciting collaborative projects. She recently coordinated Camp Sambel for Engage-Media. She is based on NSW’s Central Coast, Australia, with her partner and son where sheis finishing a PhD on cultural participation in Indonesian activist spaces.Constant Dullaart born in 1979 in the Netherlands, is a Berlin-based artist/curator whoworks primarily on and with the world wide web. During his residency at the Rijksakademiein Amsterdam he curated several events in the surrounding city, such as the periodically heldLost and Found evenings (with his final event in the New Museum, NYC), ContemporarySemantics Beta in Arti et Amicitiae, and Versions in NIMk (Netherlands Media Art Institute).His work is shown internationally in places such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Art in Generaland MWNM galleries in New York, the ICA in London, and NIMk, de Appel, W139, theStedelijk Museum, Ellen de Bruijne projects, and Gallery West in the Netherlands. Dullaartlives/works in Berlin and Amsterdam. http://www.constantdullaart.com/.Alejandro Duque spreading his time between Columbia and Switzerland, is an artist and currentPhD candidate at The European Graduate School in Switzerland with research entitled:‘Gifted Malice, Kinship Through the Wires and the Waves’. Alejo dedicates his free/libre timeto experiencing all possible ways for collaborative/participatory arts that celebrate culturalagitation across all possible networks and mostly in a South to East axis. His current interestsdeal with HAM radio, streaming media and satellite spotting. He is also an active member ofnetworks such as Bricolabs and dorkbot, labSurlab and [k.0_lab] and is easy to spot on theIRC freenode network @ dspstv.Sandra Fauconnier is an art historian specialized in (new) media art. She holds an MA in arthistory from Ghent University, Belgium, graduating with a thesis about internet art in 1997.She first worked as an educational technologist at Ghent University. Since 2000, she hasbeen involved in several media art archives and collections. She was archivist for V2_ Institutefor the Unstable Media until 2007, responsible for the development of metadata modelsand terminology resources for V2_’s media art documentation. Sandra currently works forthe collection and mediatheque of the Netherlands Media Art Institute, where she describesNIMk’s distribution collection and works on terminology and dissemination. She also regularlywrites and lectures about media art.@lbert figurt is an Italian video-maker, musician and medialchemist. He holds a BA in cinemaand has worked as a director and screenwriter both for TV programs and independentproductions. Constantly undecided between doing and thinking, he recently developed (andhe’s busy testing) a “creativitheory escamo[n]tage” where performative lectures mingle withaudiovisual essays. http://vimeo.com/albertfigurt.Sam Gregory is the Program Director at WITNESS (http://www.witness.org) leading globalorganization training and supporting people to use video in human rights advocacy, where hesupervises campaigning, training and policy leadership initiatives. He has worked extensivelywith human rights activists, particularly in Latin America and Asia, integrating video intocampaigns on civil, political, social, economic and cultural human rights issues. In 2005,he was lead editor on ‘Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism’ (Pluto Press),and in 2007, developed WITNESS’ Video Advocacy Institute, an intensive two-week trainingprogram. Currently he is leading WITNESS’ ‘Cameras Everywhere’ initiative on ubiquitousvideo. He is an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, from wherehe graduated with a Master’s in Public Policy. He was formerly on the Advisory Board of theTactical Technology Collective, and is on the Advisory Board of Games for Change.

374 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeauthor biographies375Cecilia Guida is an independent curator and PhD candidate at IULM, University of Milan,Italy. Currently, she is working on a research thesis on the topic of: the new public space ofthe Net as a political and social space, which connects to participative art practices. Ceciliawas also an intern at the INC in 2010, focusing on the Video Vortex project.Stefan Heidenreich born in 1965 in Biberach/Riss, Germany, lives in Berlin and works aswriter, journalist and theoretician, and teaches at the Architecture Department of the ETHZürich. His books include Was verspricht die Kunst? (The Promises of Art, 1998/2009),Flipflop. Digitale Kultur (Flipflop. On Digital Culture, 2004) and Mehr Geld (More Money,2008). He is currently working on the book Über Universität (On University, 2011). http://www.stefanheidenreich.de.Larissa Hjorth is an artist, digital ethnographer and senior lecturer in the Games Program atRMIT University, Australia. Since 2000, she has been researching gendered customizing ofmobile communication, gaming and virtual communities in the Asia–Pacific — with studiesoutlined in her book, Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific (London/ NY: Routledge). She haspublished widely on the topic nationally and internationally, in journals such as Games andCulture, Convergence, Journal of Intercultural Studies, and Fibreculture to name a few. Sheco-edited two Routledge anthologies, Gaming Cultures and Place in the Asia–Pacific Region(with Dean Chan), and Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunication to Media (with GerardGoggin). In 2010 she released Games & Gaming textbook (London: Berg). Since 2009 Hjorthhas been doing an ARC discovery fellowship with Michael Arnold exploring the role of thelocal and social media in the Asia-Pacific region, focusing cross-culturally on Tokyo, Seoul,Shanghai, Singapore, Manila, and Melbourne.Mél Hogan is currently completing her research creation doctorate in Communication Studiesat Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. Her research documents defunct, stalled,and crashed online video art repositories within a Canadian cultural context. (See onlineresearch curation: http://wayward.ca). She is also the Art Director of online and print ondemand journal Nomorepotlucks.org and part two of two of the BRUCE video art duo. http://www.melhogan.com.Nuraini Juliastuti is a co-founder and director of KUNCI Cultural Studies Center in Yogyakarta,Indonesia, an organization concerned with experimental approaches to cultural issuesand advancing them into a wider critical movement through popular education practices. Shelives and works in Yogyakarta.Sarah Késenne holds a Master’s in Art History and Film Studies at the Universities of Ghentand Antwerp in Belgium, and Bologna, Italy. She‘s currently working at Sint-Lucas Visual ArtsGhent (www.sintlucas.wenk.org), part of the Faculty of Arts and Architecture of KU LeuvenAssociation, as a researcher and research coordinator. She has been involved in a few artsprojects, teaching art theory courses at MAD Hasselt & TU Delft. She has written articles onAfrican cinema, short films, video and music and is currently developing ideas for a PhDproject. She lives in Brussels.Elizabeth Losh is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes, and is theDirector of the Culture, Art, and Technology Program at Sixth College in U.C. San Diego. Shewrites about institutions as digital content-creators, the discourses of the ‘virtual state’, themedia literacy of policy makers and authority figures, and the rhetoric surrounding regulatoryattempts to limit everyday digital practices. She has published articles about videogames forthe military and emergency first-responders, government websites and YouTube channels,state-funded distance learning efforts, national digital libraries, political blogging, and congressionalhearings on the internet.Geert Lovink is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and critic. He is Professor at The EuropeanGraduate School, Research Professor (‘lector’) at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam wherehe is founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, and Associate Professor in MediaStudies (new media program), University of Amsterdam. Lovink is author of Dark Fiber(2002), My First Recession (2003), and Zero Comments (2007). A fourth book in this serieswill be published 2011 by Polity Press. He recently co-organized events and publications onWikipedia research (Critical Point of View), online video (Video Vortex), organized networks(Winter Camp) and the culture of search (Society of the Query).Andrew Lowenthal has been a media and technology activist since 1998. He has workedwith a range of online activist media projects - he was a long time coordinator and editor atMelbourne Indymedia, participatory media project lead at Tactical Technology Collective, andis co-founder and General Manager of EngageMedia.Rosa Menkman is a Dutch visualist who focuses on visual artifacts created by accidentsin digital media. With the idea that every technology possesses its own inherent accidents,the visuals she makes are the result of glitches, compressions, feedback and other formsof noise. Although many people perceive these accidents as negative experiences, Rosaemphasizes their positive consequences. By combining both her practical as well as her academicbackground, she merges her abstract pieces within a grand theory of artifacts (a glitchstudies) that compromises both static works, texts and video performances. She has shownwork at festivals such as Cimatics (Brussels 2008 and 2009), Blip (Europe and U.S. in 2009),Video Vortex (Amsterdam 2008 and Brussels 2009), ISEA (Dublin 2009), and File (Sao Paolo2010). Menkman was also one of the organizers/curators of the successful GLI.TC/H festivalthat took place in Chicago in 2010. http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com, http://GLI.TC/H.Gabriel Menotti is an independent curator and producer engaged with emerging mediacircuits. He has been involved with pirate movie screenings, remix film festivals, videogamechampionships, porn screenplay workshops, installations with super8 film projectorsand generative art exhibitions. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths (UniversityLondon) and the Catholic University of São Paulo. He also does 2D animation. http://bogotissimo.com/b2kn/.Rachel Somers Miles works on projects and publications for the Institute of Network Cultures.She moved from Toronto to Amsterdam in 2008 to attend the Preservation and Presentationof the Moving Image Master’s program at the University of Amsterdam, solidifyingher interest in the theory and politics of archiving, and continuing to stoke her interest andinvolvement in (new) media arts/digital culture. She also obtained a Master’s degree in MediaStudies from Concordia University, Montréal. Exploring the different media arts and digitalculture hubs of the Amsterdam-area, Rachel has worked at the Netherlands Media Art

376 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeauthor biographies377Institute (NIMk) in the preservation and collections department, and also as a researcherfor Virtueel Platform’s series ‘Project Observatory’. While at the INC she has worked on boththe Studies in Network Cultures and Network Notebooks series, and is currently focusingher attention on the Video Vortex project.Andrew Gryf Paterson is a Scottish artist-organizer, cultural producer and independentresearcher, currently based in Helsinki, Finland. His work involves variable roles as initiator,participant, author and curator. Andrew works across the fields of media/network/ environmentalactivism, pursuing a participatory arts practice through workshops, performativeevents, and storytelling. Selected curatorial/organizational projects include: ‘Herbologies/Foraging Networks’ program of Pixelache Festival (2010); ‘Alternative Economy Cultures’program of Pixelache Helsinki Festival (2009); ‘Add+PF+?’ in the Pedagogical Factory programat Hyde Park Art Centre, Chicago (2007); ‘Locative Media: On and Off the BeatenTrack’ for Leonardo Electronic Almanac, MIT Press (2006); ‘Locative Media Workshop:Rautatieasema’ for Pixelache Helsinki Festival (2004/2006). He is currently a doctoral candidateat Aalto University School of Art and Design, with the working thesis title of ‘ArtisticPractice as Fieldwork’, and coordinator of Pixelversity education program (Pixelache Helsinki)in 2011. http://agryfp.info/.Denis Roio aka Jaromil is an Amsterdam-based artist, theorist and programmer. Inspiredby Richard Stallman’s ‘Free Software’ liberatory ethics, he seeks to cross borders betweenart and code, social activism, and research and development, focusing on the recycling oftechnology and its accessibility. In the past years his publications have focused on computerviruses, piracy and privacy issues, freedom of speech and independent media practices. Asauthor of the dyne:bolic operating system and several other software projects he has madeimportant contributions to the development of the GNU / Linux platform. For a number ofyears Jaromil has been active in R&D for the Netherlands Media Art Institute and in 2009 wasawarded the Vilém Flusser Theory Award at Transmediale Berlin.Teague Schneiter is a media archivist and researcher whose work bridges online video, humanrights, and moving image archiving. She is currently working as an Outreach/ArchivesConsultant for IsumaTV, an online interactive network for Inuit and Indigenous multimedia.Teague completed her Professional MA in Preservation & Presentation of the Moving Imageat the University of Amsterdam in February 2010, graduating cum laude with a minor thesisexamining the ethics and politics of the presentation of indigenous media online. Before IsumaTV,she worked within the Media Archive and participatory media website (The Hub) forWITNESS, an international human rights video-advocacy organization.Jan Simons is associate professor in New Media at the University of Amsterdam. He haspublished on new media and film culture. He is the author of Playing The Waves: Lars vonTrier’s Cinema Games (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007). Currently, he ispreparing a book on computer games and researching new interfaces.Evelin Stermitz graduated with a Master of Arts degree in Media and New Media Art from theAcademy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and also holds a Master’sin Philosophy from Media Studies. Her works are in the field of media and new media artwith the main emphasis on post-structuralist feminist art practices. Besides her artistic work,Stermitz’s research focuses on women artists in media and new media art. She founded Art-Fem.TV – Art and Feminism ITV (http://www.artfem.tv) – in 2008, receiving a special mentionfor ArtFem.TV at the IX Festival Internacional de la Imagen, University of Caldas, Manizales,Colombia, in 2010. http://www.evelinstermitz.net.Blake Stimson teaches art history and critical theory at the University of California, Davis.His research focuses on the social life of archaic modernist values such as beauty and commitmentfor the world we find ourselves in today. Recent publications include The Pivot ofthe World: Photography and Its Nation (MIT 2006), Collectivism after Modernism: The Art ofSocial Imagination after 1945 (co-edited with Gregory Sholette, Minnesota 2007), The Meaningof Photography (co-edited with Robin Kelsey, Clark/Yale, 2008), and Institutional Critique:An Anthology of Artist’s Writings (co-edited with Alexander Alberro, MIT 2009).David Teh works in the Department of English Language and Literature, National Universityof Singapore. He studied critical theory at the Power Institute, University of Sydney, receivinghis PhD in 2005. Before moving to Singapore, David was an independent critic and curatorbased in Bangkok (2005-2009). His projects there included ‘Platform’, a showcase of Thaiinstallation artists (Queen’s Gallery and The Art Center, Chulalongkorn University, 2006); ‘TheMore Things Change’, The 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (2008); and ‘Unreal Asia’,a thematic program for the 55th International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany(2009). David has contributed to numerous publications including Art Asia Pacific, Art &Australia and The Bangkok Post. His current research concerns contemporary art, film andnew media in Southeast Asia. David was co-founder of the Fibreculture forum for internetculture. He is a member of Bangkok art collective, As Yet Unnamed, and a director of FuturePerfect, a contemporary art platform based in Singapore.Ferdiansyah Thajib is a researcher at KUNCI Cultural Studies Center in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.His subject interests cover media-technology convergence, anthropology of emotion,and critical sexuality studies. In the recent past he co-organized the local holding of Q! FilmFestival in Yogyakarta, and has also collaborated in various projects such as working withEngageMedia as one of the field researchers for the Videochronic publication.Andreas Treske is an editor, film-maker, and media artist living in Turkey. He graduated fromthe Munich Film Academy, Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film. From 1992 to 1998 he wascreative art staff at HFF Munich, with extensive research on applied aesthetics for cinemaand TV. From 1998 to 2010 he taught at the Department of Communication and Design atBilkent University, Ankara, in film and video production and new media theory, acting asdepartment chair from 2005 to 2010. Since the summer of 2010 he is Assistant Professorat Yasar University in Izmir, Turkey. He’s shown his interactive media works and films at variousinternational exhibitions and festivals, and co-directed the feature length documentaryTakim boyle tutulur (Autumn 2005), shown in more than 50 Turkish cinemas. In 2008 hewas picture editor of the feature length documentary “Mustafa”, directed by Can Dündar, andorganizer of the 3 rd Video Vortex conference, in Ankara.Robrecht Vanderbeeken obtained his PhD in Philosophy in 2003 at Ghent University with adissertation that brought forward an analysis of the explanation of action from a philosophy ofscience’s perspective. He has published widely in magazines, academic journals and books

378Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeon subjects ranging from metaphysics to aesthetics. He was a researcher at the TheoryDepartment of the Jan van Eyck Academie in The Netherlands (2004-2006) and is/was avisiting lecturer at the postgraduate institute Transmedia in Brussels, the Higher Institute ofFine Arts (HISK) in Ghent, Sint-Lucas Academy in Ghent, and Brunel University in London.Since 2007 he has been a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Fine Arts (KASK) at UniversityCollege Ghent. He is currently doing research on video and media art, and the culturalphilosophicalimplications of technological-scientific evolutions.Linda Wallace has worked in many different media, including radio and sound, visual media,text and writing, art and curating. In 1995 she formed the company machinehunger. Sheholds an MFA (1995) from the University of NSW, Sydney, and a PhD (2003), from AustralianNational University, Canberra. Linda Wallace lives in Amsterdam, makes art, writes, andteaches Iyengar Yoga. She is currently working on a book. http://machinehunger.com.au.Brian Willems teaches literature and film theory at the University of Split, Croatia. He is theauthor of Hopkins and Heidegger and Facticity, Poverty and Clones: On Kazuo Ishiguro’sNever Let Me Go. His essays on the cross-sections of literature, philosophy and media haveappeared or are forthcoming in From A to : Keywords in Markup, Battlestar Galacticaand Philosophy, artUS, electronic book review, Poiesis, Symposium and elsewhere. Willemspoetry and prose has appeared, for example, in The Antioch Review, Salzburg Poetry Review,Things Magazine, Identity Theory, Eyeshot.Matthew Williamson is an artist, once described as ‘frustratingly engaging’, who examines thecohesion between the internet and so-called ‘real life’. While working in a broad range of formatsfrom print to video, websites to electronics, his work is focused on the humorous relationshipswe forge with our machines. A graduate of the Ontario College of Art & Design and MFAcandidate at Syracuse University, Matthew has shown work in Italy, the U.S.A, and Canada.Tara Zepel is a researcher, theorist, intermittent artist, and a PhD student in the Art History,Theory & Criticism program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where herwork explores the intersection(s) between aesthetics, community and technology. Her currentfocus is on the networked aesthetics of ubiquitous computing and Augmented Reality.She is particularly interested in relations between art and technology that push conceptionsof what is possible and the cultural/aesthetic implications that ensue. Prior to UCSD, Tarareceived a Bachelor’s degree in Literature from Duke University (2002). She has also actedas a project manager in the art world and worked in production and post-production forindependent films, but has always retained close ties to her passion for learning and sharingknowledge. http://artfuturenow.com.

Video Vortex Reader IImoving images beyond youtubeEdited byGeert Lovink and rachel somers milesINC READER #6Video Vortex Reader II is the Institute of Network Cultures’ second collectionof texts that critically explore the rapidly changing landscape of online videoand its use. With the success of YouTube (‘2 billion views per day’) and therise of other online video sharing platforms, the moving image has becomeexpansively more popular on the Web, significantly contributing to the cultureand ecology of the internet and our every day lives. In response, the VideoVortex project continues to examine critical issues that are emerging aroundthe production and distribution of online video content.Following the success of the mailing list, the website and first Video VortexReader in 2008, recent Video Vortex conferences in Ankara (October 2008),Split (May 2009) and Brussels (November 2009) have sparked a numberof new insights, debates and conversations regarding the politics, aesthetics,and artistic possibilities of online video. Through contributions from scholars,artists, activists and many more, Video Vortex Reader II asks what is occurringwithin and beyond the bounds of Google’s YouTube? How are the possibilitiesof online video, from the accessibility of reusable content to the internet asa distribution channel, being distinctly shaped by the increasing diversity ofusers taking part in creating and sharing moving images over the web?Contributors: Perry Bard, Natalie Bookchin, Vito Campanelli, Andrew Clay,Alexandra Crosby, Alejandro Duque, Sandra Fauconnier, Albert Figurt, SamGregory, Cecilia Guida, Stefan Heidenreich, Larissa Hjorth, Mél Hogan,Nuraini Juliastuti, Sarah Késenne, Elizabeth Losh, Geert Lovink, AndrewLowenthal, Rosa Menkman, Gabriel Menotti, Rachel Somers Miles, AndrewGryf Paterson, Teague Schneiter, Jan Simons, Evelin Stermitz, Blake Stimson,David Teh, Ferdiansyah Thajib, Andreas Treske, Robrecht Vanderbeeken,Linda Wallace, Brian Willems, Matthew Williamson, Tara Zepel.Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2011ISBN 978-90-78146-12-4

Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube

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