Videoblogging: Ten Years After
I’ve moved the videos over to their own weblog Direct Language, so in keeping with current trends I now have what is known as a videoblog! The 'videoblog' phenomenon is interesting, but of course using the web as video exhibition space is nothing new and many projects have also used a serial form. It is now more than ten years since Zoe Beloff made her Beyond online QuickTime video serial and Lev Manovich’s Little Movies project predates that:
The project was begun in 1994 when the World Wide Web was just beginning to gain mass exposure. From the beginning, my intention was to create cinema for the Web. I wanted to turn the network limitations into a new aesthetic. Is it possible to create films with the resolution of 1 pixel? Is it possible to have a meaningful and an emotional experience under 1 MB in size?
Of course there have been countless other online video projects since.
I have been involved with web-based video projects over the years, but in my own work have mostly used the web to host short extracts as previews of digital video works intended for exhibition as full screen, full motion video, usually in festivals and screenings in gallery or cinema spaces.
The videoblog moves away from the practice of serial presentation that we might be used to with artists’ work as it marks a move for online video into a different and wider milieu. Many of the factors determining conditions for online video have of course been technical: a lack of bandwidth and server space requirements among the most common. Manovich recognised the aesthetic implications of these limitation and Beloff’s movies were short and black & white, making for small file sizes, but in spite of this back in 1995 it was still a painfully slow process to actually see them over a 14kbps dial-up link.
The convergence of a number of factors now makes online video exhibition accessible to a larger number of people. These include a progressive increase in the availability of consumer level computers with video production software, processor and memory capabilities - standard now in the cheapest Macs - and the increase in cheaply available bandwidth through developments in ADSL broadband technology rolled out at a consumer level. Another crucial factor is the recent Internet Archive decision to open the archive up to anyone who wants to deposit digital media via Ourmedia, apparently without any limits placed on available storage space. So one no longer needs to worry about having access to enough server space (which in itself has been getting cheaper) through commercial hosting or having access to an education institution's server to store the video files.
The phenomenon that is the ‘blog’, which has given countless individuals the possibility of scattering their smallest thoughts, writ larger, across cyberspace, has created a new ‘socio-cultural’ space, which has evolved the photoblog and now the videoblog. The result is the potential for what might be tentatively characterised as a ‘democratisation’ of online video exhibition. (I’m not comfortable with this word ‘democratisation’, as it suggests that ‘democracy’ itself is some kind of naturalised ideal, so it is used here slightly ironically. Wider public access to the possibility of online video is more like the notion of free expression, which is problematic for other reasons mostly as it is so often used as a positive example of the ‘freedom’ associated with western democratic capitalism. Of course I am also taking advantage of these laissez-faire conditions!)
The extension of blogging into video gives birth to a video practice that inherits its processes and impetus from the personal diaristic/journalistic nature of the blog. Taken online this opens up the potential for a sort of freely exhibited wide ranging personal cinema: a form that has previously been the domain of the artist film or video maker. In committing to the interesting challenge of the potential for producing regular small videos for a video blog, this is a context that I am now also working in.
However it has taken years to reach the point where there is this level of potential accessibilty: at least ten years. In the world of ‘exponential’ increases in technological developments where we are borne along in the slipstream of ‘Wired’ digital optimism and cyber evangelism, rather than applaud how progressive and wonderful it is to be living in this egalitarian internet utopia, I am, rather, simply a little surprised that it’s taken so long to get here.
The project was begun in 1994 when the World Wide Web was just beginning to gain mass exposure. From the beginning, my intention was to create cinema for the Web. I wanted to turn the network limitations into a new aesthetic. Is it possible to create films with the resolution of 1 pixel? Is it possible to have a meaningful and an emotional experience under 1 MB in size?
Of course there have been countless other online video projects since.
I have been involved with web-based video projects over the years, but in my own work have mostly used the web to host short extracts as previews of digital video works intended for exhibition as full screen, full motion video, usually in festivals and screenings in gallery or cinema spaces.
The videoblog moves away from the practice of serial presentation that we might be used to with artists’ work as it marks a move for online video into a different and wider milieu. Many of the factors determining conditions for online video have of course been technical: a lack of bandwidth and server space requirements among the most common. Manovich recognised the aesthetic implications of these limitation and Beloff’s movies were short and black & white, making for small file sizes, but in spite of this back in 1995 it was still a painfully slow process to actually see them over a 14kbps dial-up link.
The convergence of a number of factors now makes online video exhibition accessible to a larger number of people. These include a progressive increase in the availability of consumer level computers with video production software, processor and memory capabilities - standard now in the cheapest Macs - and the increase in cheaply available bandwidth through developments in ADSL broadband technology rolled out at a consumer level. Another crucial factor is the recent Internet Archive decision to open the archive up to anyone who wants to deposit digital media via Ourmedia, apparently without any limits placed on available storage space. So one no longer needs to worry about having access to enough server space (which in itself has been getting cheaper) through commercial hosting or having access to an education institution's server to store the video files.
The phenomenon that is the ‘blog’, which has given countless individuals the possibility of scattering their smallest thoughts, writ larger, across cyberspace, has created a new ‘socio-cultural’ space, which has evolved the photoblog and now the videoblog. The result is the potential for what might be tentatively characterised as a ‘democratisation’ of online video exhibition. (I’m not comfortable with this word ‘democratisation’, as it suggests that ‘democracy’ itself is some kind of naturalised ideal, so it is used here slightly ironically. Wider public access to the possibility of online video is more like the notion of free expression, which is problematic for other reasons mostly as it is so often used as a positive example of the ‘freedom’ associated with western democratic capitalism. Of course I am also taking advantage of these laissez-faire conditions!)
The extension of blogging into video gives birth to a video practice that inherits its processes and impetus from the personal diaristic/journalistic nature of the blog. Taken online this opens up the potential for a sort of freely exhibited wide ranging personal cinema: a form that has previously been the domain of the artist film or video maker. In committing to the interesting challenge of the potential for producing regular small videos for a video blog, this is a context that I am now also working in.
However it has taken years to reach the point where there is this level of potential accessibilty: at least ten years. In the world of ‘exponential’ increases in technological developments where we are borne along in the slipstream of ‘Wired’ digital optimism and cyber evangelism, rather than applaud how progressive and wonderful it is to be living in this egalitarian internet utopia, I am, rather, simply a little surprised that it’s taken so long to get here.
posted by Steven Ball at 2:07 am
3 Comments:
I'm tempted to say "you wait ages for a Ball Blog and then two come along in quick succession", but that would be too much like the sort of facetious nonsense people post in the comments section of blogs...
oh well, whatever, it's nice to know that someone's paying attention.
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