Video Theory II - Shiny things so bright (Overture & Manifest)
Here is already a first draft of my upcoming talk @ Video Vortex XI in Kochi, Kerala
“Sul cominciare e sul finire” (On the beginning and the ending)
1st Movement - The Window
The history of film theory starts with the reflection of the window. The screen appears as an opening to another world constructed by the projected moving image. From early cinema and early film theory to video, the computer and software have come a long way, with various approaches and methodologies applied to describe and understand what happens with the moving images we are creating and us.
By visualising all videos of now together lined up, the resulting image might resemble an image we are already familiar with. As data is expanding exponentially and becoming such an incredible amount that a single human being never be able to make meaningful associations of even nano-scale amounts, automatic and algorithmic visualisation tools (like the ones Manovich is researching and applying) create a compression or extraction of an understandable or meaningful chunk, resembling of course another common standardised or stereotyped image.
In 2007, the south transept glass window of the Cologne Cathedral was inaugurated. The window was designed by the German artist Gerhard Richter and had an enthusiastic reception. Richter had used small squares to create what appears to be a kind of modern pixelated image of colours and light shining through.
Richter used an aleatoric (incorporation of chance into the process of creation) computer program to design the windows, meaning some elements were left to chance.
Richter’s work rejects an obvious meaning or message. He seems to neutralise the sacralised representative space of the church and provides an experience of lights and colours not transformed by the dominating narrative of the medieval space. Through the change of light Richter’s work gains a state of permanent uninfluenced change.
Such a state of permanent uninfluenced change of light might be created by all the billions of cameras from us and around us, constantly uploading, sharing, linking, and relating. It appears that a blue ocean is covering our planet, an ocean of video. Of course, if the assumption of the totality of video is blue is correct.
What might look as bluish noise and dust from the far outside, might embed beautiful and fascinating living scape of moving images, objects and light impulses constantly changing, re-arranging, assembling, evolving, collapsing, but never disappearing, something like a pulsar or like a real cinema (if cinema is basically the change of light through movement).
In “Video Theory - Online Video Aesthetics or the afterlife of video” I tried to describe and theorise these you might wish to call phenomena, objects or call it things formerly named video, their forms, behaviours and properties. I ended looking at Gerhard Richter’s window and its marvellous colours, the light shining through.
2nd Movement - Online Video
Online video has not only become the driving force on the web. From a static line the web itself evolved to a dynamic audiovisual network, constantly creating and operating temporal objects. Video enabled devices are more or less responsible for the net blackout in huge parts of the US in 2016.
As personal media on the web the moving image is the most significantly spreading form.
The recording, editing, distributing and mixing of personal means of expressions pushes a wide range of technologies and applications for the web and devices.
Web space is developing as video space with distinct aesthetics. Snapchat and Instagram stories as apparently ephemeral mobile applications are setting new temporal standards and push forward to animated, looping, moving contents, removing still image representations and doubles. Profile images can integrate cinematographic looping elements, images on timelines will be looking back and follow our gaze. Stills are paused images of intersecting timelines of temporary events or event formations, a point on a multi-dimensional map in a non-cartesian space.
A multitude of actors, a world of possibilities, an evolving industry pushes towards a personal cinema and the personal gesture, creating and rendering constantly data of self as its product.
The web space embeds these personal gestures and creates through video a sphere or living cell, expanding our physical space endlessly. The Web through video advances to an actor in our environment, an ecological system and a live-like being that not just relates to us, but exists with us in various forms, and shapes - shifting. Around us and with us.
Video itself as this ubiquitous something (Tom Sherman) absorbs every other medium. As a transformative technology online video collapses walls of classifications, systematisations, specificities, “barriers erected by broadcast corporations and the art-world machine” (Miller Hocking 2013) including academia. There is a definite need for models, methodology and theory as the established including late born “Digital Humanities” are not adequate anymore. The paradigm change has to be done and will be automatically, overturning the established conceptualisations, already redefining culture.
But as Adorno mentioned: “Whoever speaks of culture speaks of administration, whether this is his intention or not.” While defining a status quo academic institutions of the moving image are becoming more and more suspicious. Speaking about the moving image appears like looking through the ghost of an invisible object, an object, which is not there, the meta of the meta in language on something historical defined by some post temporal power.
For a new theory we need to storm the academia, the shopping malls of knowledge, their classified shops, and turnover their shelves to describe things, objects and sensitivities, to catch the moving image on the run.
But we don’t see. We have learned that we don’t see, that we can’t see if we don’t have the right tool. We rely on patterns, sequences, blocks and chains, the frame as a basic category for chunks of information of a status from a specific time, a status or recording of difference, a non-existence.
John Cage already defined in “The future of music” from 1937 the frame as a basic unit for temporal events, a basic measurement of time. Sounds for Cage can be organised in a simple frame, which would be the actual score. Structure is based on the length of time.
Influenced by Luigi Russello and the Futurists Cage claims that sounds are just sounds, and are all equally valid. Therefore a composer discovers new possibilities through the technological experiment. Cage emphasises time as the basis for musical structure.
Video is much more close to sound as it is to the photographic image. Even the cinematographic apparatus is a transport vehicle of stillness. Video does not know such stillness. Therefore precisely its forming structural element is movement and time.
The photographic image as a time component of a frame is just a single mark in a linear landscape, a single perspective, one point, one POV. It does not relate exactly to the world. It is not even a cut or a slice. The photographic image can be anything. This is it what makes images so weak, easy to violate and misuse, fragile construction of a possible death frozen, always in need of an explanatory vectorial layer to point to something, semiotical signifying.
Video is a part of an always evolving system. Video has no beginning and no end. Video is by definition in constant flow. The time based unit frame creates an imprisonment for readability and speak-ability, confirming a set of data, a massive expanding data. The time based unit frame might be to small for a human life as well as to big for a single human life, to small for a moment and to big for a moment of a human life. The time based unit of the frame like in a blockchain of data delivers an original individual never changing and private address for a block of data, high density information packages, thick and spherical.
3rd Movement - Shiny Things Substantial
What is the essence? The substance of video? If I tried to look from the outside, then now I should move back inside. …
Like with Google Earth zooming back into the bluish video ocean and deeper, inside shiny things, crystals and diamonds of temporality appear. While I first tried to describe the inside as assemblages, building blocks, lego-like objects, paradoxically chains appear fluid. I am wishing to dive with Dorothee and Alice, Humpty Dumpty at the side as my companion to wonder through shiny things so bright. I am a flaneur strolling through the crystalline vision of structures similar to the ones of Bruno Taut, Paul Scheerbart and the architects and artist of German Expressionism after World War I, moving chains of glas pearls along my finger tips.
Paul Scheerbart’s influential treatise, Glass Architecture (Glasarchitektur, 1914) “foretold of a sublime, technocratic civilization whose peaceful world-order was borne from the proliferation of crystal cities and floating continents of chromatic glass, a vision summed up in his aphorism: “Colored glass destroys all hatred at last.”
Only more than a decade after its birth in 1991 the web was able to embed video in containers, plug-in’s for web browsers to allow viewing of video. “Dancing Baby” (1996) was a strange thing, an object needed to be somewhere in a specific location to be pointed to. The technical development following then goes hand in hand with the digital video revolution in film making of the early 2000s and culminates in the 2005 birth of YouTube.
With HTML 5 coding the web is not only understanding “video”, it actually is about to become like video itself. Its basic numerical code, its logic and structure will be or is already video-like. Therefore I argue that video absorbs the web.
Online video touches and merges with every other object space in a variety of forms and practices, leaving webobjects as skeletons for video wraps or liquid chains. Like hypertext interactive video stacks build parent and child relations, creating inner and outer worlds living with us, in us, around us, or as granular and molecules forming tissues clothing us, and building new transparent skins temporarily shifting.
Video becomes an easy packaging tool for an enormous amount of data, and a fast method of transport - big data simplified. The frame as a temporal unit of video is a block of data in a chain, a ring of pearls, similar to the Turkish or Arabic Tesbih used for prayers, and meditation, may be similar to the Christian “Rosenkranz”. The chain of temporal audiovisual data organises in a repetition of spherical elements, containing themselves a similar substance. The frames like the pearls are a mode of counting and coding time, stamping each and other to keep countability and structure.
Chains anytime and anywhere create and define new patterns of meaning for us, melodies of life for humans. Machine seeing is superior as non-human seeing results in translation and action, but how, and on what, for what, when and why. We are experiencing an alienation of difference, and otherness towards the seeing as we are trying to see the chains we are creating in and with.
The sneezing of a baby is a movement best translated as a signal through impulses or frames. Frame and signal are close to particle and wave. The basic signal is the information of a change. The signal has changed, translated into light, or movement. Position change of an known object means again change of light, change of sensor information. Frame and signal are a way of reading and writing. Through this video overcame darkness.
The recording of a repairman by the neighbour on a mobile device, as well as streaming the conversation live to others far away, is in principal a similar normal gesture like streaming a live audiovisual signal of a protest against a government or the industrial military complex, etc. The signal emphasises and underlines the gesture, the act.
The photographic image is by definition the constitutional basic of cinema forming movement through loading and reloading into projection. It is an mechanical information surface slice of a chunk of data.
A website is another as time stamped postal addressed slice of data, browsing appears as cinematic movement and creates cinematic sequences and emotional cues.
A score in music translates in an orchestral experience. The form of coding of the web as video creates a dynamic temporal cinematic form.
The conventional cinema apparatus, the dispositiv cinema itself turns out to be to slow and to heavy. We need to confirm that the audiovisual is not mechanic anymore. Cinema has moved.
Already long time ago Jean-Luc Godard stated: “There are no more simple images. The whole world is too much for an image, you need several of them; a chain of images.”
Godard’s ‘chains of images’ still seem to be a very linear approach. It is a single layer of images. Cinema suggests that images are organised in a linear chain, one image juxtaposed to the other and so on. We might call this cinematic chain a horizontal chain oriented or directed on an x-axis in the graphical representation system. Movement in cinema means moving along this chain horizontally, to advance forward in time on one horizontal level. At the same time as we are moving we would experience a vertical extraction or extension at every point of the chain as well as a depth extension. Multilayering of chains over, below, and in each other creates at every point in time a multitude of crossing shiny things.
We are linear but acting on a point with multiple references.
Early analog video artists and thinkers like Paul Ryan and the writers of Radical Software in the 1970s seemed to have had already a sense of what is videos capability when they were more interested in the signal character of video and saw video much more like a ecological system.
4th Movement - Heaven on Earth
Gene Youngblood’s last sentences of “Expanded Cinema” (1970):
“The limits of our language mean the limits of our world. A new meaning is equivalent to a new word. A new word is the beginning of a new language. A new language is the seed of a new world. We are making a new world by making new language. We make new language to express our inarticulate conscious. Our intuitions have flown beyond the limits of our language. The poet purifies the language in order to merge sense and symbol. We are a generation of poets. We've abandoned the official world for the real world. Technology has liberated us from the need of officialdom. Unlike our fathers we trust our senses as a standard for knowing how to act. There is only one real world: that of the individual. There are as many different worlds as there are men. Only through technology is the individual free enough to know himself and thus to know his own reality. The process of art is the process of learning how to think. When man is free from the needs of marginal survival, he will remember what he was thinking before he had to prove his right to live. Ramakrishna said that given a choice between going to heaven or hearing a lecture on heaven, people would choose the lecture. That is no longer true. Through the art and technology of expanded cinema we shall create heaven right here on earth.” [ 419]
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