[-empyre-] fwd:re:re:re: Download Finished & Deptford.TV

[#! /usr/bin/adnan]

thanks for jumping in!

to briefly add to the discussion i'll outline another project we're 
working on entitled Deptford.TV

Deptford.TV is mainly a research project on collaborative film - 
initiated by at deckspace media lab, in collaboration with bitnik media 
collective, boundless project, liquid Culture initiative, and goldsmiths 
college.

it is an online media database documenting the urban change of deptford, 
in sout east london. Deptford TV functions as an open, collaborative 
platform that allows artists, filmmakers and people living and working 
around deptford to store, share, re-edit and redistribute the 
documentation of deptford.

the open and collaborative aspect of the project is of particular 
importance as it manifests in two ways:
a) audiences can become producers by submitting their own footage,
b) the interface that is being used enables the contributors to discuss 
and interact with each other through the database.

Deptford TV is a form of "television", since audiences are able to 
choose edited "time lines" they would like to watch; at the same time 
they have the option to comment on or change the actual content. 
Deptford TV makes us of licenses such as the creative commons sa-by and 
gnu general public license to allow and enhance this politics of sharing.

In terms of policy recommendation i would argue for the importance openness.
a) through the use of open source software, which ensures the users 
continued control over the infrastructure for distribution and
b) through the capacity building of participants in the technical 
aspects of developing an on-line distribution infrastructure that they 
themselves can operate and control, empowering them to share and 
distribute production work both locally and internationally.

best,
adnan


#! /usr/bin/doma wrote:
> Dear Empyres
>
> We were a bit reluctant to barge into an ongoing and interesting 
> discussion by starting a new topic - it also took us a few posts to try 
> to understand what you have been discussing..
> Maybe it can nevertheless be interesting though, to try and add to your 
> ongoing discussion by tryig to discribe our approach to what networks / 
> internet can contribute to video / film making. It is easiest for us to 
> explain by describing some concrete works that came out of this approach.
>
> Gabriel asked us firstly to describe the work "Download Finished" 
> (http://www.download-finished.com), a project we started in 2006. 
> Download Finished is basically a website which transforms and 
> re-publishes films found in P2P networks and online archives. If we were 
> to describe Download Finished as an input-output-machine, the endless 
> abundance of video material found in online archives, P2P networks etc. 
> would be the data stream input; On the output-end of Download Finished 
> you receive 5-minute cut-up-clips with a transformed visual layer - "new 
> originals", as we called them. The transformation the raw data video 
> input receives through Download Finished brings the underlying data 
> structure of the input films to the surface.
>
> Let us go into this underlying data structure just quickly to explain 
> what we mean:
>
> Before a film, originating either from a camera take or a DVD, is 
> digitized and fed into a file sharing resource, it has undergone several 
> transformations. It has been digitized, encoded and compressed, aplying 
> complex mathematical transformations to the original data.
> A film found in a filesharing network is the sum of [>1] the original 
> film, [>2] the work of the mathematicians who laid the theoretical 
> foundations for [>3] the programmers who designed the encoding software 
> / the codec and [>4] the file sharer who finally uses all that software 
> to intentionally make the [>5] film widely available. The processes 
> behind [2] - [4] usually stay invisible, leading to the wrong assumption 
> that [1] = [5]. Download Finished transformes [5] such, that the 
> processes behind steps [2] - [4] become visibile and show that films 
> found in file sharing networks are actually collaborative works. The 
> transformation process in Download Finished shows the collaborative 
> effort behind the sharing of cultural contents and clearly shows that 
> [1] ? [5].
>
> Download Finished uses this characteristic of online video files to 
> transform the input files: The one Download Finished exploits, is the 
> compression technique of delta frames. Unlike the original film, an 
> encoded film does not consist of 25 full images per second: The amount 
> of full images is reduced to save space, and the parts in between full 
> images (key frames) are calculated on the fly. The frames generated from 
> the differences between key frames are called delta frames. By simply 
> deleting the key frames of a film the file data is transmogrified to 
> reveal the nature of the found footage files as a collaborative work 
> with a very complex data structure.
>
> What we also wanted to comment on with Download Finished is the question 
> of authorship. There is no way of knowing (from the data structure) the 
> copyright status of online footage. On machine level it is just a set of 
> data. People who use DF to transform a video input "own" what they 
> prduce and Download Finished also asks them to download their new film 
> in DVD quality in order to be able to insert it into other pieces of 
> film or even to send it off to film festivals, screen it etc.
> This actually worked quite well - we  know of some Download Finished 
> films being shown in screenings, some films entered in festivals and 
> there are probably some more of which we have no idea...
>
> cheers,
> -carmen & doma
>
> --
> !Mediengruppe Bitnik
> http://bitnik.org
>
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