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

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

> "CSPAN Karaoke" has enabled me to sit through more boring CSPAN
> television
> than I would have ever thought possible.

What is C-SPAN? What are those videos?

> 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!

It seems there are aspects of both, to me, anyway, in your C-SPAN X 4.

The karaoke and so on distracts focus from attention on the videos
themselves. The media rhetoric places focus not on the videos themselves but
on the interventions, and the delivery mechanism, the 'channel', the
interactivity, etc, ie, on the conceptual. I am not objecting to this. Just
saying that the active viewing mostly comprises activities that do not focus
on the videos or their content. Though the presence of the videos, and that
they are of the usa government talking, raises questions about how this
video operates in the different space/frame you've created, and raises
questions about what is possible in this regard.

> 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.

Would be interested to hear more about that.

One can make video or make it and work with it in apps such as you and
Nicolas and others are creating. It is then no longer solely video but video
crossed with the computer program. And you are also exploring how that opens
up not only the creation of 'channels' but all sorts of different processing
on and in parallel with the video. Just as, say, Final Cut Pro is sort of a
video processor--within or of videos themselves--the sort of work that your
C-SPAN x4 suggests is of the cross product of video and all other processes
available on the Net. Not solely a processing within video but within more
comprehensive processes. Be they interactive or otherwise. The way your work
suggests these wider possibilities is striking, I feel, Barbara.

ja