This reply was puzzling me for a while - why wouldn’t “Interactivity” and “Computability” apply to online video? As someone who was involved in the practice and early discussions of video on the net in the end of the 1990’s, it’s funny to see how the YouTube phenomenon totally usurped early hopes for interactivity, personal video, generative or real-time manipulations etc. Is it now impossible to think online video outside the context of linear Web 2.0 video? What about early online video curating sites such as The Bit Screen that did not make a difference between straight video art pieces and works consisting of hyperlinked video structures? Perhaps ZKM’s Future Cinema show and its History of Web Video from 2003 could be a point of reference for tracing this lost(?) heritage. As I recall there was also simultaneously a lot of debate about the nature of online documentary, which again did not restrict itself to simply presenting content that could just as well be shown on TV or in the cinema. (www.docs-online.nl was one such portal, now defunct, as for more artistic experiments Hidekazu Minami’s remediation of Chris Marker’s La Jetee, http://www.thejetty.org was a memorable experiment - requires shockwave...)
Even the Videoblogging movement that got started in 2004 seemed for a while to establish its own concepts of online video, based in a kind of diary- and small-media filmmaking that strongly recalled the personal cinema of the 1960’s with its Gallion-figures such as Jonas Mekas. (videoblogs were even shown regularly as part of a series of screenings at the Mekas founded Anthology Film Archives in NY)
Some notable artists working with the computability of online video would be Barbara Lattanzi (http://www.wildernesspuppets.net). She and other early online artists were associated with Turbulence. Their New Media New Narrative project featured the interesting 24hour online video Ground Zero by John Cabral in 2001. Responding to the question “What are the unique characteristics of narrative on the Web? “ He responded:
“Live action, short narratives, real-time data, and distribution. “
I’m not sure about taxonomies, but there’s definitely an era of experimental practice, on different platforms and formats that seems to be lost in the “creative video”=flash video on social media platforms era. Sure, many of these are enmeshed in the now rather unhip Utopian discourses of interactivity, immersion, hypernarratives etc. But in reality they were part of a much more messy architecture of the early net, with lots of issues in terms of compabilities, bandwidth, compression etc - making them interesting beyond their now passed “hype cycle”. Not that this is so different today - video is no less computable than anything else on the net - and the recent outburst of Glitch art (great thread that was going on here recently, btw) is if anything a testimony to this.
/Kristoffer
http://www.youtubereader.com
|