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

[Barbara Lattanzi <threads@pce.net>]

Hi Jim and others.

In the Thomas Edison film from 1902, "Uncle Josh at the Motion Picture 
Show", we get a glimpse of the ideal audience for CSPAN x 4, including 
CSPAN Karaoke.

In this early film, Uncle Josh is performing TO the screen that is 
streaming new experiences about which he is clueless.  As I recall, his 
modes of interaction as he watches a variety of filmed vignettes include:

-- dancing in front of the screen
-- running and hiding from the screen
-- gesturing angrily to the screen
-- body-slamming the screen (an early predecessor of mouse-clicking)

In the process of his (inter)activity, he arrives at a shocking moment of 
clarity in regard to the cinematic illusion.   His "poor" attention to the 
diegetic world reveals the projection/projectionist system behind the 
screen.  (The film ends with the projectionist and Uncle Josh wrestling 
each other to the ground.)

Ultimately, his "bad example" serves to educate and to connect Uncle Josh's 
"superior" audience, who are watching his antics, into a "proper" attention 
to the authority of the frame, accepting it in a kind of bargain with 
something in return (emotional projection).

So, when you say, in your previous post...

"active viewing mostly comprises activities that do not focus on the videos 
or their content"

... I disagree.  Uncle Josh and I are responding to what we see on the 
screen.  We have our motivations, as all good characters.

C-SPAN Karaoke is for building bad viewing habits and breaking the bargain 
(of emotional projection in return for submission to the authority of the 
frame).

C-SPAN Karaoke is one tactic among others for seeing better through bad 
viewing habits.  It is the Web that makes this other form of viewing 
possible, because it is characteristic of the Web to re-frame and 
re-contextualize.  I would like to think that this "politics and poetics" 
is shared, and articulated in a growing variety of forms of Interactive 
Video on the Net by many artists.

I think that you are suggesting such a thing when you write:

"the sort of work that your C-SPAN x 4 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."

My only issue with this description  is that it might be placing too much 
emphasis on a supposedly neutral totality of processes and what can be done 
with them, i.e., one apparatus of illusion (the cinematic apparatus) simply 
being substituted by another (Net processes)... with the same result: 
imposition of a new norm of behavior and attention.

Barbara

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

C-SPAN x 4
http://www.wildernesspuppets.net/yarns/annotate/cspanx4.html




At 04:43 AM 3/4/2005, you wrote:

> > "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
>
>
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