User:Emily/Self-Evaluation trimester II

reassembling and re-networking

accidentally mix, cut-up

The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr by E. T. A. Hoffmann (aka, The life and opinions of Tomcat Murr together with a fragmentary Biography of Kappelmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper): It is a fiction novel that the author Hoffmann brilliantly mixed the story of cat Murr with the story of a composer, two wildly different characters emerge from the confusion.

cut-up technique by Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara: Take a a newspaper, cut it into words, and randomly pick them up, assemble them in order to make a poem.

William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin fold-in technique and later affect on video making.

an accident driven by intuition become a system, a research method

The game of Exquisite Corpse: Basically, at that time it requires several people involved to compose a sentence without knowing what words have been written down. It contains suggestive power that can surprise the creators by juxtaposing words. Later on, this game involved a question-and-answer variation, which produced resonate discourse. "What is André Breton? An amalgam of humour and a sense of disaster; something like a top hat"

The History of Oulipo A good example: A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems by Raymond Queneau

-->physical photobook

The right to make meaning out of the world

"The simple act of moving information from one place to another today constitutes a significant cultural act in and of itself" -- Kenneth Goldsmith

text to comments: VIRTUAL GRAFFITi(group work) woking method The solid text (society of control) as original data is distributed through network (here Youtube). The new interface (comments) of the text provides its performability

The Battle of Algiers by Marc Lafia: the work breaks down cinema's linear structure, proposing an open ended narrative in which the viewer's intervention catalysts a set of events prescribed by predefined rules, which are based on the artists' interpretation of the original work in combination with the inherent nature of its subject.

Mimic structure: self-organized cells(in the film) to cell-based structure(in Marc Lafia's work)

Attentive and affective qualities of watching

consumer+producer = prosumer —> prosumer+publisher+commentator+distributor —> multitasking-self

Marshal McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt suggested in their 1972 book Take Today, (p. 4) that with electric technology, the consumer would become a producer. In the 1980 book, The Third Wave, futurologist Alvin Toffler coined the term "prosumer" when he predicted that the role of producers and consumers would begin to blur and merge. Nowadays, we are assembling even more roles in ourselves. Provided with all kinds of online platform, “prosumer” masters the role of publisher and the phenomenon of “15 minutes of fame” has already been superfluous. Further more, social networks empower us to comment, retweet, like, forward at meanwhile. We are so multitasking, but are we really that multitasking?

database retrieval, algorithm generation —> mass customisztion

Here I aim to draw attention to online video watching. Does the transformation to multitasking-self change our way of watching videos? I come to embrace Geert Lovink's statement, “We no longer watch films or TV; we watch databases.” . Database watching seems to be the most customised way for nowadays watching habit. We search online, get a watching list followed by another watching list, we can skip, we can jump to another, we have been provided with “an endless branching database”. From collaborative engineering perspective, mass customization can be viewed as collaborative efforts between customers and manufacturers, who have different sets of priorities and need to jointly search for solutions that best match customers’ individual specific needs with manufacturers’ customization capabilities(Chen, Wang & Tseng (2009)). It indicates that the outcome after collaborative efforts based on the common area that we share. What about watching videos in web2.0 environment, Geert Lovink argues, online video sites assume that we have an incestuous desire to be just like our friends. The essential fact of postmodernity - namely that we seek difference, not similarity - has not (yet) persuaded the Web 2.0 entrepreneurial class.

the loss of attentive and affective watching

We constantly watch online, each time lasts from a few seconds, to a few minutes. It seems the longer the video is, the hard we can stay ease. The moment we are in front of our computers or smartphones, we are unable to pay attention, we easily get distracted even in a short while. We start to judge in the middle of the watching; if the duration lasts a bit longer, we start to scan around; those seamlessly recommendations and links drive us to the next. We seems always be on the way to the next. Crystallised time become a sign to make us dive in and be on the move. We all have known that YouTube system serves videos based on the number of clicks they receive. As they are knowledgable that "sometimes thumbnails don’t paint the whole picture, or a video title isn’t descriptive." They have been "experimenting with the way they offer Related and Recommended videos, focusing on video engagement to get people to the videos they like more quickly. In particular, we’ve discovered that time watched is one of the best indicators of a viewer's engagement." I find it is a really intriguing statement with the phrase "more quickly". What shall we adapt to that? The answer from YouTube is "create great videos that keep people engaged. It doesn’t matter whether your videos are one minute or one hour. What matters is that your audience stops clicking away and starts watching more of your videos." Are the audience really stops clicking away? What do we really lose here is “attentive watching and listening give way to diffused multitasking”. What will really engage with our eyes and then our emotions?

what does it mean that our attention is guided by database systems —> what is the alternative way of watching?

So how shall we behave ourselves in front of those incredible amount of video content. Why we are constantly on the move to the next and seems never get satisfied. We have been encouraged to give away our personal information in order to generate the best respond for each searching and recommendation. We send out “likes” which start linking. We are guided by all those database systems. What are the elements that algorithm takes in account for sorting contents? Are we really in dialogue with the machine? There are multiple reasons out there obviously, but as Geert Lovink argues that "to study online video is to study this intimate aspect of affect, not the theories of commercial repackaging that underline common rhetoric about remediation…the social is the core constitutive element of contemporary video practice and not some leftover redundant noise surrounding audiovisual content.” (to be continue)

What will be the work made to engage the eyes, the body, and even the emotion and mind of the viewer

About my work

• Rework with video, image and text
• repurposing and performability
• subjectivity after database processing
• pursuing a attentive and affective way of watching

How database-watching can be affective (Should I magnify subjectivity while opting/sorting the database)

How to present my way of seeing (are we in dialogue with machine, or with the "editor" behind it)

My prototype:

Photobook

Videogrep the repetition

Reversed shots

In this two channel video, I take the most dramatic part of Roman Polanski's film The Tenant, along with reversed each single shots. The beginning and the end of each shots can be viewed at the same time and then go on playing to the end and beginning.

Movie Dialogue_cross films

In this practice, I use different films, make them talk to each other by formulating questions and answers.

kickstarter

Iterative movies

In this interactive video, two participants(or one participant with two hands) can collaboratively control the video play and the duration within this video. The differentials of the power that participants give will determine the looping duration and playing speed of the video.