Monthly Archive for August, 2004
I found this on Flickr. Just testing the ‘post to blog’ feature.
With all the re-vogging going on I’ve finally got around to setting up a Creative Commons licence for this site and of my works included on it (unless otherwise noted).
It is basically a formal way of saying that you can use the content however you like as long as:
1. You credit me
2. Its not for commercial purposes
3. Anything you create based on my works must be licensed identically
Go to CreativeCommons.org for more info.
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I bumped into my auntie the other day in the city and we had a look at Allan Mitelman: works on paper 1967 - 2004 at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia. As we were wandering around the gallery I noticed that all of the works were titled Untitled and the year. We had a chat about how the works were abstract and how giving them names would impose a fixed meaning on something that you could otherwise find your own meaning for.
Conceptually and artistically this made sense but it was then that I realised there were often more than one works from the same year. How does the gallery keep track of them and how do you refer to one particular work, “the medium sized blueish one with the fine scratches?” The blogger part of my brain said: “Why aren’t they date-stamped?” December 17 1976 at 4pm. They could be referenced with a permalink in the artist’s journal. What were they thinking at the time? Not necessarily a statement of intention for the work but an extra insight into what what was going on at the time. “I’m really into rubber stamps at the moment but I don’t like the black ink, this purple is much better”, for example. That’s kinda what I’m trying to do with this blog. |
The full text of Gene Youngblood’s classic 1970 book on experimental film and video Expanded Cinema has been made available online. It has some really great information on the Whitney brothers’ films.
Youngblood, Gene. 1970. Expanded cinema. Toronto and Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited.
I see that Adrian has found some useful info on embedding QuickTime movies in web pages. It is very cool how you can set up a series of individual movies to play in sequence using the embed tag alone. I think this is particularly useful in the context of moblogging/videoblogging.
One of the characteristics of video taken with a camera phone or digital still camera is that it tends to feature one continuous shot. While Quicktime Pro allows for fairly easy basic editing of shots, by using the embed tag to string the shots together the user can create separate annotated permalinks for each shot (say videos from a holiday) and string a selection of shots together for a ‘hilights reel’ at no extra storage cost and with very little difficulty. Tools like QT HTML help too.
Some more snooping around the Apple developer site reveals some of the other network friendly abilities Quicktime has. QuickTime XML Importers describes how a basic xml text file with the ‘.mov’ extension can be used to do a number of handy things. For example, if you are using a new codec or component in your movies which are not yet common, such a file can be used test for its presence and ask the user if they want to download it.
The ability to read xml files also means that you can set up a ‘Quicktime Link File’ (.qtl) to do things like: open a movie in the Quicktime Player application, play at full screen, and then quit when the movie has finished. ‘.qtl’ files can be written by hand in any text editor, generated by script, or created using Quicktime Player’s XML Exporter.
Another flavour of XML is SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) which provides a standard cross platform way to create playlists and presentations combining discrete content (interestingly, the MMS standard for mobile multimedia messaging is based on SMIL). For example a SMIL file can source a slide show of JPEG photos from one server and display text annotations for each photo, while playing an accompanying MP3 from another. SMIL also allows multiple visual sources to be arranged on screen and played independently. Quicktime and SMIL provides a detailed run through of the functions available and how to apply them, while Embedding SMIL Documents in a Web Page describes that process.
This video was recorded during a lunch break at work. Michael (one of my work mates) is showing me the new automated self-checkout at Chadstone Coles. While there are still human checkout operators there too, and It does seem to take longer to go through the self-checkout than it would be to go through an actual person, I don’t think I’d like to be one of checkout operators who has to watch as they are slowly replaced.
Click to view video (1.5Mb).
This is a homage to Michel Gondry’s awesome music video for Chemical Brothers: Star Guitar with all of the coolness surgically removed. Also I am travelling in the wrong direction. Enjoy. I definitely recommend the original 
P.S: the Quicktime plugin didn’t seem to like it when I used the .3gp extension so I saved the movie as as .mov and all seems well. Weird.
Click to view video.
Ok, I’ve been inspired by the Videoblogging crew to start posting some video blog entries and now that I have a new phone which can record video and send it to my computer via bluetooth there’s no excuse! I think these posts will be mostly everyday snapshot type content which I can remix and manipulate in my interactive works.
This was recorded on Swan Street in Richmond with my shiny new phone (a Sony Ericsson K700). Over the last couple of weeks the speed limits on inner suburban shopping streets seem to have all dropped from 60kmh to 40 and these flashing signs have popped up all over the place. I think they look cool, but with cars going slower pedestrians seem to cross the road whenever they want to (creating some near-misses).