The second installment of the Video Vortex conference took place in Amsterdam and was hosted by the Institute of Network Cultures and the project instigator, Geert Lovink. The programme was quite varied, and there were a few very interesting perspectives on the internetvideo movement. I particularly liked the ideas of Stefaan Decostere and Thomas Elsaesser. Decostere refered to Keith Sanborn’s presentation in Brussels and introduced the concept of ‘impactology’, as a way to grasp the grasp the dynamics of the YouTube Culture, a dynamics of user driven impact, not ‘content’. Impact, not only as an object, but as a tool for analysis. He refered to ideas of Octavia PAz (“Life in the impact is a futurism”), Paul Virilio (esthetics of disasters), Flusser (information is the expression of what the user does with the image) as well as Klimov’s war movie ‘Come and Se’. Decostere propagated a distantiation form impact, creating contexts for reflection and intervention, something he want to do with his installation Warum 2.0 (a sort of ‘update’ of his ‘Warum wir Männer die Technik so Lieben’ from 1985, in which he explored the ways technology organises reality, based on interviews with Paul Virilio, Klaus vom Bruch, Jack Goldstein and Chris Dercon). In that tape Virilio analyses the close relation between war & technology. The artists – Klaus vom Bruch in video, and Jack Goldstein in paint & sound – propose their personal artistic versions of it. “Since then”, Decostere writes “no radical change occurred in the relation between war and technology. It just became more intensified, excessive that is. Technology brings the logic and reality of war ever closer into our daily lives and habitats. If a difference WARUM makes, it is 2.0, as today, not only artists, but most of us have access to parts. We all are very actively involved with media nowadays, adding value all the time. Digitization, virtualization and automation are the major massively enacted actions with technology. They guideline the basic moves possible in the playing field here.”
Warum 2.0 will be premiered at the ARTEFACT festival in Leuven in February. “The changed attitude towards documentary images is the main theme of WARUM 2.0. A 360° panorama amidst transparent screens and multiple interactive access points turn the installation into an arena where visitors can interfere with and add value to the images.Late 2007 a new conversation was recorded with Paul Virilio. Both at the installation and online, new tools by Christian Decker, Edwin Uytenbroek, Chris Devriese, Jonas Hielscher and Sander Korebrits are available. The footage used is shot in Haiti, Iraq, Gaza, Darfur, Kosovo and Afghanistan by freelance cameraman Daniel Demoustier.”
More info.
Another talk I liked a lot was Thomas Elsaesser’s “Constructive Instability’, or The Life of Things as the Cinema’s Afterlife?”. He drew on the potential relationship between cinema and biopolitics (something that was explored during a research project at Van Eyck, instigated, I think, by Stefan Geene of BBookks) and borrowed the notion of “constructive instability” (the neocons in the States use it to describe their strategy in the Middle East, especially after the Israeli bombings in Lebanon, backed by the US of course. The Bush administration also uses the expression “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”, or in Rumsfeld’s words “Hey, Shit Happens”) to describe the dynamics of serendipity and volatility at work in networkcultures. It’s all about the potential, productive performativity of faillure. To make his point he started a trail through YouTube content, starting with the idea of collapse as bipolar : from the Honda log ad and remixes, to Fischli & Weiss ‘Der Lauf der Dinge’, to various Rube Goldberg machines and domino Toppling videos. As in a picaresque novel, the YouTube user is always trapped between the joy of epiphanies and a constant threat of entropy – a bit like cellgrowth: cells die, repenish and rework themselves constantly.
Also picked up: Florian Schneider’s idea of “imaginary property”, as something to chew on, and Dominick’s Chen‘s idea of ‘Prochronism’ – Bateson’s concept applied to “digital content or to any agent, entity or organisation to evaluate and share the embryological processes as creatively valuable information”, with reference to the Japanese videosharing site Nico Nico douga where comments are “becoming constituents of the original work, affecting both authorship and spectatorship. On Nico Nico Douga, a movement has emerged that uses original material and builds upon it by using, for example, the VOCALOID sound plugin.
I also liked Sarah Cook’s projects: the Broadcast Yourself exhbition @ the AV festival, in which she researches the different ways artists have related to televison in the past (Ant Farm, Bill Viola, etc.) and how the internet has opened up this potential in exciting ways. She also mentioned Star and Shadow Cinema , a grassroots and community project that deserves following (also here in Brussels, athough we already have Cinema Nova).
I also remember a quote of Godard (of course) mentioned by Geert, that has a lot of truth to it: “Die Ziet: Do you concern yourself with new media and technology? Godard: I try to keep up. But people make films on the Internet in order to show that they exist, not in order to look at things.”
More reports on the site of Masters of Media
Images on Flickr