RE: [-empyre-] Interactive Video for the Web - Have you thought of astory?

[Barbara Lattanzi <threads@wildernesspuppets.net>]

At 12:30 AM 3/3/2005, you wrote:
> The tech of your
> http://www.wildernesspuppets.net/yarns/annotate/cspanx4.html 'C-SPAN X 4' is
> interesting, and what it does and enables is kind of interesting, but it
> seems it's mostly the 'conceptual dimension' of the piece that is most
> interesting. I'm not motivated to sing along with the 'C-SPAN Karaoke', for
> instance--and I doubt you figured people would be--but somehow the concept
> of the piece is very intriguing.

Hello Jim and others.

The concept was irresistable.  But, you know, singing is irresistable 
too.  And those songs are hard-wired in my head anyway (as they are, I 
think, for others)... so it doesn't take much to trigger my singing reflex. 
In fact, the more I watch the CSPAN Karaoke, the more that I am interested 
in the actual singing, for its ability to enforce a certain distance from 
the content being watched.

"CSPAN Karaoke" has enabled me to sit through more boring CSPAN television 
than I would have ever thought possible.  And I have learned that CSPAN is 
not always boring and that sometimes there is information conveyed or there 
is sobering, unvarnished depiction of political lies.

The question is, after the cleverness-of-concept wears off,  one might come 
to realize that there needs to be ways invented for regular people to have 
the stamina and interest to watch boring political processes - since the 
banalities of those processes have everything to do with how and why the 
U.S. governement is now run by a bunch of mass-murdering gangsters.  i.e., 
I need to be able to see that with my own eyes in order to politically act 
on it.

C-SPAN Karaoke is a genuine tool for active viewing.  It transforms singing 
as a tactic for re-framing and dialoguing with media content.

The project may need a better selection of songs, but it is not conceptual 
- it is activist!


> I guess you get an XML feed or something, maybe just a .txt file, that lists
> urls to streamable videos and descriptions of the content. This content is
> meant to be 'syndicatable' by C-SPAN. And you've gone to a lot of trouble to
> build the tech in Director to get that info and then be able to stream those
> videos in Director. So then the question arises what to do with that
> information, and what is that information? Your 'answers' to these questions
> would, I presume, stop many a person dead in their tracks, because your
> approach is so non-standard. Which, for me, anyway, serves to increase the
> force with which the questions are raised. You 'make strange' strongly. And
> what is made strange is not only the video itself, but the delivery and
> processing and framing of the video.


I would like to make the awkwardness of my self-taught approach into an 
asset.  Who wouldn't?  There are many limitations in my approach.  I 
haven't gotten the hang of parsing XML, so I break my head over reinventing 
the wheel in other ways.

What is strange, I think, is the capacity of the web for breaking the 
authority of the frame itself.  We aren't used to it.

Barbara

------------------------------------
Barbara Lattanzi
www.wildernesspuppets.net






> And the status/nature of journalistic
> video in society.
>
> ja
>
>
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