Blogs

short summary:
PUBlicIMAGenING project deals with re-factoring of surveillance video systems from its current surveillance and anti/counter critique to an observation and commons oriented setup. Research is set out to articulate and investigate processes of (hegemonic) image acquisition done through video surveillance (through it's technical design, aesthetics and economic/power relations). It is set to do so in order to meet the urgent need for setup of systemic observation installations in public spaces (with openly accessible images), benefiting general public (empowering activists, academics, urbanists, researchers, designers, artists, performers and all sorts of enthusiasts of urban living discoveries...)

Managing Openness

On november 28, I joined the symposium, Add Comment: Designing Critique in Public Forums organized by Casco, co-organized with ArtEZ The Arnhem Academy of Art and Design and Vinca Kruk on the (im)possibility of critique within the structures of current web-applications.

During the first talk by Mia Jankowicz (a curator and art critic based in London/Amsterdam), it occurred to me how the perspective of “openness” has shifted because of 2.0 environments, how it is being managed as a scarcity. Mia presented several (art) projects that deal with different ways of opening up information to the public. In these cases it is decided when, how and to whom openness to information is offered. In this case openness is an act of control, openness is managed as an exclusivity.
Instead of making information available as in creating openness, how could one go about producing openness, not designing it preemptively into the software and its associated gestures? Also another question is whether openness is actually a scarce good on the web?

Every second Wednesday of the month, at Goldsmiths college in New Cross, London, some people are meeting to discuss, around a table, different projects and researches concerning media art and related fields of inspection. On November 12th Gabriel Menotti presented a very interesting text entitled 'Computation as dynamic topography', part of his research at University of Sao Paulo. His approach is presenting computation as a specif process that cannot be described as simple text, because, in short, computation is a dynamic event happening inside a machine, thus it is not text in itself, and probably software should not be defined as text at all. On November 26th the project Virtual Entity will be presented and discussed. The door is open and any interested person is welcome to come in and participate, we are gathering at 18:00 at Whitehead Building, room 117.

Collage and Code, was the subject of the morning session. In it Michael Murtaugh spoke about his ideas dealing with what he calls "collage" editing as his preferred technique in manipulating video. As the title of the session clearly states, he was referring to collage achieved mainly by software and coding. In the first part of his presentation he explained that he had found in .srt files (the conventional file extension used for subtitles) a very powerful and simple resource for experimenting with the time line and the time code.

In session 04 Bitnik.org gave a brilliant presentation about their general philosophy summarized in the slogan "A hack a day." As an example, they showed images and gave a detailed description of their Opera Calling (Arias for All) presented in 2007, at Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich. In this project, they placed "bugs" made with old cellphones inside the Zürich Opera House. This phones were connected to an application fed with the whole city's white pages.

During the presentation at Haip festival Virtual Entity's digital world division into four substances was put under question. Basically the whole lecture was divided in two segments: from a general presentation of the project and its current state, the focus went on substances as relevant categories, including relative problems and possible solutions to those. These four substances are, in the specific, Text, Audio, Video, and Image. These are somewhat echoing Aristotle's four elements constituting earth, and the celestial globe.
An interesting discussion started, here is a recording of the stream in mp3 or ogg.

WALLED GARDEN
communities & networks post web2.0 - conference...transformed from usual VirtualPlatform.nl conference formats into a series of Workshops and Presentations...
With my late application, I was directed to workshop flwr pwr: Tending the Walled Garden, mentored by Matt Ratto (Scandinavian in Canada) - without knowing what it is about.

oups...me running late... seems that morning is/will be dedicated to Pad.ma which was partialy presented last night (video should be available soon) at the public event at OKNO...this time presentation is more of a discussion on exames from practice/life/media...pad.ma licence (free-software-licence with tech spin on Low-Res)...

...continuing a bit slower (practical work brings tech issues) in using utilities like ffmpeg2theora, ffmpeg, dvgrab... using HD source material, linux pipes...also discussing different container options (ogg for web video and matroska for Blue-Ray and DVD ripping due to a number of features it became popular in Anime community). Somewhat less dynamic ;)

Host institution is wonderfull flamish cultural center PianoFabrique...

With (very) short delay and (very) few participants missing workshop started off with quite serious and detailed overview of licensing policies, economic relations, technological limitations and much more from the digital video world (from perspective of open source developer/producer/user)... as (somewhat) expected Jan Gerber of (0xdb and pad.ma fame) is showing some of the amazing examples of what future version of web browsers (primarily Firefox and Opera) with support natively video+svg+JavaScript ...this will enable us to do/see - AMAZING NEW WEB of VIDEOS and not just web pages ...while avoiding embedded propertary technologies/content (flash & other plugins)!
Presentation of http://MetaVid.org/ was also impressive demo of what can be done using semantic wiki data JavaScript applets and SMILE (the fact that SMILE is back in big style - brings SMILE back to my face ;-)