Penticton Peaches

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Clip Specs:
Location: Penticton, BC
File Size: ~5MB
Length: 1 min. 4 sec.

Bitter Poutine

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It seems that taking pictures and/or videos in public spaces is getting harder and harder to do...and not just in America!

I was too shocked by this incident to challenge Jeffers, the chip wagon guy, but next time, I'll be ready for a fight. Maybe we should organize a flashmob in Penticton...?

Oh yes. We figured out after taking this footage why our videos have been washed out recently. Someone (and I'm not blaming Devlon...I'm just saying...) inadvertently pushed the backlighting button on the side of the camcorder. Doh!

Clip Specs:
Location: Penticton, BC
File Size: ~24MB
Length: 3 min, 58 sec.

Grand Prix GT

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Clip Specs:
Location: Penticton, BC
File Size: ~14MB
Length: 00:02:20

Adult Living

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Clip Specs:
Location: Penticton, BC
File Size: ~8MB
Length: 00:03:09.28

Sorting and organizing...

I am re-posting some of my clips over to my other site strange days in an effort to organize a bit. The clips that will be there are just the way I see something when I see it. I want to sample what I see, and push it and shape it into something else.

I am not sure if these types of clips are vlogs, I think they are more just videos online and we'd like to try to adhere to the stricter form of 'vlog' here.

And yes, this post was nothing more than a plug for the other site :)

Her Walk

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Clip Specs:
Location: Penticton, BC
File Size: ~27MB
Length: 00:03:05.17

white guy eats foreign food

Inspired by a desire to try one week where I eat nothing but foods from other countries and the more exotic the better, I have started another vlog: 'white guy eats foreign foods'

check it out, now.

Seduced

Clip Specs:
Location: Penticton, BC
File Size: 4MB
Length: 00:02:30.00

Time flies when you are having lunch

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Clip Specs:
Location: Penticton, BC
File Size: ~9MB
Length: 00:02:04.19

Sunday Ride

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Clip Specs:
Location: Penticton, BC
File Size: ~23MB
Length: 00:02:27.04

bastards

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Clip Specs:
Location: Penticton, BC
File Size: ~6MB
Length: 00:01:37.07

Send off

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Clip Specs:
Location: Penticton, BC
File Size: ~15MB
Length: 00:03:50.28

Finally, camcorder goodness

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Just me babbling on while I make coffee. I was so jazzed to be able to get footage from the camcorder that I had to post something!

Clip Specs:
Camera: Sony Handycam
Location: Penticton, BC
File Size: ~19MB
Length: 00:02:52.12

Building Better Vlogs

Clip Specs:
Camera: cheap webcam
Location: Penticton, BC
File Size: ~12.9MB
Length: 00:03:22

Pause

Staff photos Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Office

I've been looking into the work of Wynne Greenwood, sole band member in the three person band, Tracy and The Plastics. I am interested in the idea of participatory video and in performance that moves between real and recorded space. Through the use of multiple personas, Greenwood's performances attempt to blur boundaries between the maker and the made and invite her audience to make the performance as well by encouraging interjected commentary.

Part basement punk show, part video installation, and part one-woman play, Tracy and the Plastics are comprised of Greenwood and her virtual alter egos, Nikki and Cola, who exist solely on a four by five foot screen via video projections. Through lo-fi electronic music and bold but simple video art, Greenwood and the Plastics explore - and dismantle - the layers of interaction among performer, spectator, and screen. Midway through her performance Greenwood addressed this altered dynamic; stopping the VHS tape she explained: "When I pause the video, it's an acknowledgment that I made the video." Harvard Gazette

Greenwood will stop her act and engage her audience in conversation. In Can You Pause That For A Second...and let yourself groove, Greenwood writes about her concentration on the ability to pause a video and what this means to her:

It seems like when you pause (a video) you stop participating with it. You disengage, you stop paying attention, you answer the phone, spill(ed) your drink. But I think the opposite. I think the space of a paused video is one of total participation and self-care...

CAN YOU PAUSE THAT FOR A SECOND? Why do I keep doing this? Why do we keep doing this (this band, this video work, this singing job)? I make this happen because there's a space I'm moving around in. And it's a hot space, it's breathing and imagining and producing revolution, culture, passion. It's the same space as a video paused. It's the same space as the spoon suction in the separated peanut butter/oil mix. These spaces ask us to bring things together for a second.

I think that the vlog is a paused video. When you visit a vlog website, video merges with text , still image, and audio and there is space for the viewer to become maker through the inclusion of commentary which can be in the form of text, image and video. Many vloggers make themselves freely available for real time conversations via chat, PoIP, and video conferencing, merging the "then" with the "now".

There is a high degree of intertextuality between vlogs as makers comment on each other's videos, respond to them with their own videos, make guest appearances in the videos of other vloggers and make new videos utilizing clips from other makers. The idea that each of us is a potential vlogger, invited to contribute to the conversation, heightens the participatory nature of the medium.

Paused video is good for the soul. It's physical. It's a participation...Your turn. Wynne Greenwood

My Car

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An ode to my '77 Benz.

Clip Specs:
Camera: FujiFilm A200 Digital Camera
Location: Penticton, BC
File Size: ~11MB
Length: 00:01:47.20
Music: Kruder & Dorfmeister - Cafe Del Mar - Lamb - Transfatty Acid

Saturday

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Clip Specs:
Camera: FujiFilm A200 Digital Camera + Webcam
Location: Penticton, BC
File Size: 19.6MB
Length: 00:02:53.15
music:
Menuett G flat major & Valse bluette
Performed by: Kathleen Parlow - violin ; George Falkenstein - piano
September 1912

Stupid Human Tricks

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This one is reminiscent of 'Stupid Human Tricks' on Late Night with David Letterman way back in the day....

Clip Specs:
Camera: Cheap Walmart Webcam
Location: Penticton, BC
File Size: ~9.5MB
Length: 00:01:52.14
Edited with Adobe Premiere and produced with Avid

Signs

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We're still ironing out technical wrinkles with hardware and software...

But now that I've been informed about 3ivx compression, finally we can get decent video. This one was a lot of fun to make.

Clip Specs:
Camera: Cheap Walmart Web Cam
Location: Penticton, BC
File Size: ~4.5MB
Length: 00:01:17.02
Music: Anne Hell, "The Stars Inside Piano"
Editted and Produced on a PC with Adobe Premiere

Feed me, Seymour

Unfortunately this is a text post not the video post that we battled with last night (yes, again...Premiere keeps munging the audio that comes from my webcam) Going lo-tech is cheaper but man, oh man are we paying in sweat and frustration. They say what doesn't kill ya, makes you stronger...we'll see about that.

Hardware/software troubles aside we are steadily progressing towards being fully immersed and available in vlogs.

With some great help from Josh over at FireAnt and tutorial #7 (which I should've viewed first...) at freevlog.org we now have a feedburner feed that works in FireAnt. (feedlink)

Woo-hoo!

Some of the clips look a bit nasty in FireAnt if the viewer windows is large but that will be resolved once we improve the quality of or clips.

...another step forward.

Communication Art

Posted on No Practice

I've borrowed D.'s laptop while I try to figure out what is wrong with my Mac. What an awful thing for a cyborg - the breakdown of a virtual body.

I found an interesting article about Communication Art. While it specifically addresses telephones with an emphasis on the mobile phone, the definition of the genre covers technology based participatory works of many kinds:

Telecommunications-based art is primarily concerned with connecting distant and contiguous spaces. According to Frank Popper [7], communication art has six main characteristics: (1) it stages physical presence at distance, (2) it telescopes the immediate and the delayed, (3) it focuses on the playfulness of interactivity, (4) it combines memory and real time, (5) it promotes planetary communication and (6) it encourages a detailed study of human social groupings. In a broader sense, it can be said that telecommunication art not only foresees new developments for existing technologies, but also changes our perception of space. It focuses on the relationships between participants, rather than on the creation of material objects, in a situation where the author is the context provider, not the content creator.

I was thinking about how vlogs are participatory in a way that video art is not. Vlogs allow for direct communication with the image creators and are often intertextual. Like a conversation on a bulletin board, the videos are posted, viewed by many who respond with written, audio and video comments. Sometimes, the videos are taken and remixed or expounded upon. The viewer is also a potential creator.

D. and I have joined a vlogging community and are finding out just how much the various vlogs are interwoven. We only wish that we had the money to attend the various real time/space meetings between this worldwide group.

On a related note, Eric Deis sent me an email pointing me to his drawing board project. This is also a form of communication art. Deis has provided a forum for others to collaborate and converse via drawing. While this is not a new concept (my youngest daughter has been participating in this activity for years on the many draw chat sites), the drawings done on Deis' site will be printed out and displayed as art. Who is the author?

Eek!

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We threw this up while the screen flickered and shrunk...no time for edits or credits or finesse of any kind. Exciting!

Oh, and it's formatted in mp4.

Learning curve

Since the purpose of this site is to explore and report on the new technology and it's effect on our communications, etc. I should share my experiences through this vlogging learning curve.

After fighting with one particular video last night for hours and then more time this morning I have come to the conclusion that I can't completely 'dummy' my way through this.

I have been lucky with the last few vlogs, but since we are starting lo-tech and capturing video and audio from several different sources...and I am stuck with a PC for now, there are times when producing a nice clean product is very frustrating.

I guess it is time to roll up my sleeves, open the hood and put my software-engineer hat back on. Time to figure how all this mess works. I want more control.

I was determined to get a small file, but now I see that with the progressive downloading, that isn't a big deal. Once I get a TV Tuner card in my PC and we can use a camcorder to capture and that will reduce the capturing issues, but I'd still like to be able to grab clips from anything since they all have a certain 'feel' to them. (webcam, digital cam clips, etc.)

We have Anne's Mac to fall back on, but I am determined to be able to produce from my PC....I am sure by the time I get it figured out I will have saved enough to buy a Mac....ah, c'est la vie.

Very frustrated, but undaunted. (sometimes tenacity isn't a good thing)

Post-performance performance post

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We extracted the audio from Anne's post-performance vlog of her ...performance to use as the audio track. She was filming herself and I was filming her.

After several runs through Premiere to get a nice small file with decent quality I forgot to set it up for streaming...so you'll have to wait until the clip loads.

Clip Specs:
Camera: Cheap Walmart webcam
Location: Penticton, BC
File Size: 2.6MB
Length: 00:01:06.16
Edited and produced in Adobe Premiere

Chevlolet Six

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It was a lovely evening for a drive, the sunset was setting painting the sky with color. The audio track is compliments of Archive.org. It suited the mood of the drive. Apparently it is a song that was record in 1929 in New York. He is singing about the Chevrolet Six, favored by moonshiners since it was faster than the law.

Clip Specs:
Camera: FujiFilm A200 Digital Camera
Location: Penticton, BC
File Size: ~2MB
Length: 00:00:52.12
Edited and Produced on an iMac with iMovie and Audacity