Dear List,

Taking some ecouragement from being one of this month's 'invited
respondents' and taking advantage of the lull Beryl senses, I would
like to offer some comments. I was pleased to be invited to the list,
because I'd be more likely to puzzle over the meaning of 'new media
curating' than sign up for it myself. My project 'Video as Urban
Condition' (to some, video is old media already) does not aim to
establish an ontology of video, still less one based on technology. It
explores how video shapes urban experience and suggests an analysis
and critique of what i call 'relations of representation'. More on
that later.

The discussion at the beginning of the month on computing and the
difference between programming and using failed to engage me for
several reasons. I couldn't help perceiving the language and tone
debate as a kind of entrance exam or initiation designed to sort
newcomers into those who shall and shall not be new media curators. Of
course, the discussion was not incomprehensible but it was tiresome
because it is hardly a surprise that in the end no clear distinction
can be drawn between programmers and users. On the one hand, I know
that software programmers use other people's software to make the
tools which I use and I'm happy if they also give me the means of
customising my work environment and creating scripts to make the
computer work for me. On the other hand, I don't need to know much
about computing to predict that categories like 'computers'
'programmers' and 'users' would be hard to defend against a thorough
semiotic analysis and that linguistically the terms get their meaning
from the social relations which they transact. The hint of connivance
(the analogy sometimes emerging in the hybrid 'software-artist')
between the claims of programmers and the claims of artists within
their respective hierarchies (not, it should be underlined, given or
essential hierarchies but ones which programmers and artists establish
in their linguistic practice), however, prompted me to speculate on
another analogy.

What happens when we think about 'programmers' and 'users' in the
field of video? Firstly, instead of forcing it into line with the
assumptions made for computing, I would allow the slip which gives
meaning to: TV 'programmes' (i.e. content segments) and 'programmers'
(i.e. broadcast controllers), video 'programmes' (e.g. as presented in
art exhibitions and film festivals) and 'programmers' (i.e. the
supposed experts who decide which videos go in the programmes in what
order), or 'programming' a VCR/PVR (i.e. when users instruct machines
to record programmes for future viewing).

Being a video user can mean a lot more than being the couch-potato
conusmer of (possibly timeshifted) broadcast TV and 'brown goods'.
Users are highly skilled and discriminating interpreters of images and
messages, decoding the signals as quickly as the remote control can
zap the channels. Users are selectors and organisers of their own
programmes for a range of viewing contexts (TV, PC, home theatre,
iPod, Xbox, PSP, mobile phone); users are collectors and critics
(curators, even) of expanding media archives; users are owners and
controllers of increasingly sophisticated means of recording and
disseminating audio-visual material; users are content-providers and
reflexive subjects of broadcast and privately circulated programmes;
users are the subjects and objects of paranoid and narcissistic closed
circuits.

In short, video users and programmers become harder to separate in
parallel with the consolidation of corporate interests across the
fields of content (software), technology (hardware) and distribution
(networks). Clearly, it is not users alone who are about to overturn
the traditional economic model -- and hence the traditional power
relations -- of TV in which the programme is the vehicle by which the
broadcaster sells the audience to the advertiser. (Even a public
service broadcaster has to produce and deliver a public.) A new
settlement of the relations and contradictions within the field of
video would appear to set the investments made by individuals in new
equipment against the range of its permissible uses, on one hand
empowering the user and on the other hand extending the
commodification of the user's desires and behaviours into new
territories. The commodifiction of intimacy, feelings, shared moments
with others etc. as mediatied by must-have personal video-recording
and communication devices is a case in point.

If new media curating can be about contemporary 'relations of
representation', then the tendency of new media curators to privilege
the 'programmer' (as traditional curators privilege the artist) begins
to look like mystification: a alliance between artist and curator, as
magician and priest of new media, to defend a hierarchy which the
proliferation of technology has already helped undermine. However, if
emphasis falls on the technology and not the relations it mediates,
the tendency to celebrate new media revolutions begins to look like a
utopian affirmation of the marketing hype.

Key aspects of 'Video as Urban Condition' reflect my concern to
develop strategic methods of research and presentation for a role
which begins to look like new media curating.

If this resonates with any list members, I'd be happy do talk more,
but this post is doubtless too long already.

With best wishes,
Anthony Auerbach
http://www.video-as.org