April CommQuote

I love this bleary mixing of media morphing into other media forms/formats. That's what artist Jim Campbell is all about as reported in Benjamin Sutton's Why Is Jim Campbell’s Low-Res Video Art So Compelling, Even Captivating? for artnet news.

"In Topography Reconstruction Wave (2014) [pictured below], the footage of a crashing wave plays behind a thick layer of resin sculpted to represent a photograph of a wave. This work, part of a new series employing more sculptural elements than much of Campbell’s preceding works, culminates when the blurred video of the wave seems to line up perfectly with the sculpted resin wave encasing it....In addition to the process of stripping away visual information in his low-resolution videos, he is increasingly interested in the conversion of one type of media into another—in the case of the resin works, transforming black-and-white images into three-dimensional sculptures. The effect is deeply unsettling because of the way in which the video’s flickering lights interact with the translucent resin.

'As the lights change it distorts based on how thick the resin is, and what that does is that as the light passes through the face it feels like the face is moving, which goes back to this theory about some of the very earliest cave paintings that we have found; some people have suggested that with fire in there that they were actually animated,' Campbell explained."

You can take in the full article here.

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Scholarly Research in Communication

The International Communication Association's Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Scholarly Research in Communication, which is posted at the American University's Center for Social Media site (as well as it's own), identifies four situations that represent the current consensus within the community of communication scholars about acceptable practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials." The Center for Social Media is the place to go for fair use issues in education and media production. You can view videos on codes for best fair use practice in user-generated video, documentary film making, media literacy, and remix culture.

On the same front, just yesterday the Librarian of Congress announced the latest ruling on exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, expanding fair use practice to include encrypted copyrighted works. Teachers, students and filmmakers can now break encryption to quote limited portions of copyrighted works into their own work or teaching.

C-SPAN Video Library

Last week C-SPAN announced the completion of its the C-SPAN Video Library, a freely available Internet resource featuring every C-SPAN program aired since 1987, totaling over 160,000 hours. The Archives records all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Programs are extensively indexed making the database of C-SPAN programming an unparalleled chronological resource. Programs are indexed by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and location. The congressional sessions and committee hearings are indexed by person with full-text. The video collection can be searched through the online Video Library.

These archives cover 23 years of history and five presidential administrations. Though C-Span was established in 1979, recordings from the early years are spotty. But according to a recent New York Times article, C-SPAN has about 10,000 hours of tapes from before 1987 and plans to reformat them for the Web are already in motion.

Needless to say, this is an awesome historical resource and on top of that, the site is advertisement free.

ONandOnScreen

Just discovered an interesting site called ONandOnScreen.

"Here poems and videos meet their match: poems are written for videos, and videos are made and paired with poems. The poems may enhance the videos and the videos may glamorize the poems.

ONandOnScreen is a conversation between moving words and moving images, on and on."

The site does not feature video of poets reading poetry, but rather poems and videos "talking" to each other.

Edited by Thomas Devane (check out his Burning the Bear Suit with accompanying video), and published quarterly, ONandOnScreen is currently accepting submissions.

July CommQuote

Virginia Heffernan wrote on the Susan Boyle phenomenon in a the New York Times Sunday Magazine column, The Medium:

"What was the Susan Boyle spectacle, that chunk of culture that held us, for days at least, so firmly rapt?

The answers still lie in the video, a small, insidious masterpiece that really should be watched several times for its accidental commentary on popular misery, the concept of ''expectation'' and how cultures congratulate themselves. First off, the Susan Boyle phenomenon truly belongs to the world of online video, whose prime directive is to be amazing. The great subjects of online video are stunts, pranks, violence, gotchas, virtuosity, upsets and transformations. Where television is supposed to satisfy expectations with its genres and formulas, online video confounds them." --Virginia Heffernan (The Medium, The New York Times Magazine, June 28, 2009)

American Black Journal

Detroit Public Television (DPTV) together with Michigan State University (MSU) have collaborated to catalog, preserve, and provide internet public access to the entire corpus of shows from the DPT television series, American Black Journal, that aired from 1968-2002.

Both DPTV and MSU shared in the two main goals of this project--digital preservation of the ABJ tapes and using the shows to create a significant, accessible multimedia archive of African-American history. The programs cover a broad spectrum of African American history:

1. Education and Families: Building Opportunity and Community
2. Leadership: Politics, Politicians, and Reform
3. Musical Roots: Jazz, Motown, Gospel, Hip Hop, & Techno
4. Literature and Language: The Richness and Diversity of Black Voices
5. Religion and Spiritual Life
6. Sports and Entertainment: Actors, Athletes and the Black Community
7. Africa and African-Americans
8. Urban Challenges: Development, Re-development, CommunityLife
9. Poverty, Progress, Rise of BlackBusinesses and Professionals
10. Motor City & Motown: Detroit in Regional and National Context

You can search the site by these themes as well as chronologically by decade; the programs themselves are a mere click or two away as you navigate this simple, handsomely designed site.

January CommQuote

"Perpetual Art Machine (PAM) is an on-line video database begun in 2005 that provides community for artists, curators, scholars, and students....In addition to the Web site, PAM sponsors an interactive, traveling video installation that allows viewers to function as curators, choosing video programs by selecting various keywords...

Colette Copeland: How does PAM differ from other on-line media databases, such as Rhizome or Eyebeam?

Lee Wells: The biggest difference is probably funding. In operation for over ten years, both Rhizome and Eyebearm are bankrolled by institutions and key patrons... Most of our funds come out of pocket and a lot of free labor on the part of the founders and volunteer PAM artists at large. Although PAM engages multiple forms of new media, our primary focus is on the growing international video art community. Rhizome and Eyebeam broadly cover the entire spectrum of new media.

CC: ...what are some of the concerns that collectors have regarding archiving and preserving video long term?

LW: In my opinion, it's all about the digital archive files. It's just a matter of time before everyone is up to speed. The days of Gigi-beta and DVDs will come to pass as we rapidly move into the era of HD video on-demand relayed through high-speed, fiber-optic networks and secured in on-line (bank-like) storage databases. The problem is that most people who buy art still want an object to hold. At this point it still takes an enlightened and progressive collector to invsest in video and new media art."

--from "Predicate, Participate & Perpetuate: An Interview with Perpetual Art Machine" by Colette Copeland, afterimage, Volume 36, Number 3, pp. 18-19

December CommQuote

There were many good scenes in the 1999 Oscar winning film, American Beauty, directed by Sam Mendes. This was one of them. Excerpted from the screenplay by Alan Fall.


INT. FITTS HOUSE - RICKY'S BEDROOM

On VIDEO: we're IN an empty parking lot on a cold, gray day. Something is floating across from us... it's an empty, wrinkled, white PLASTIC BAG. We follow it as the wind carries it in a circle around us, sometimes whipping it about violently, or, without warning, sending it soaring skyward, then letting it float gracefully down to the ground...

Jane sits on the bed. She watches Ricky's WIDE-SCREEN TV, her brow furrowed, trying to figure out why this is beautiful.

From a chair across the ROOM, RICKY watches, smiling.

RICKY: It was one of those days when it's a minute away from snowing and there's this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it, right? And this bag was like, dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. And that's the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and ... this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid. Ever.

A beat.

RICKY: (cont'd) Video's a poor excuse. But it helps me remember... and I need to remember...

--Alan Ball, American Beauty screenplay