[Nettime-nl] Video Vortex Conference Amsterdam, January 18-19

[Shirley Niemans <shirley@networkcultures.org>]

Last call for registration!

Video Vortex: Responses to YouTube
International Conference

Date: January 18-19 2008
Location: PostCS11, Amsterdam http://www.ilove11.nl
Registration: http://www.networkcultures.org/videovortex

Video Defunct, vlogging workshop
Date: Thursday January 17 2008, 13.00 – 17.00
Location: Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam http:// 
www.montevideo.nl


Video Slamming, evening program
Date: Saturday, January 19 2008, 20.00 - 23.00
Location: PostCS11, Amsterdam http://www.ilove11.nl
Free entrance with a conference day pass or passe partout


Video Vortex is an initiative by the Institute of Network Cultures,  
in collaboration with Argos Brussels and the Netherlands Media Arts  
Institute.

In response to the increasing potential for video to become a  
significant form of personal media on the Internet, this conference  
examines the key issues that are emerging around the independent  
production and distribution of online video content. What are artists  
and activists responses to the popularity of ‘user-generated content’  
websites? Is corporate backlash imminent?
After years of talk about digital conversions and crossmedia  
platforms we are now witnessing the merger of the Internet and  
television at a pace that no one predicted. For the baby boom  
generation, that currently forms the film and television  
establishment, the media organisations and conglomerates, this  
unfolds as a complete nightmare. Not only because of copyright issues  
but increasingly due to the shift of audience to vlogging and video- 
sharing websites as part of the development of a broader  
participatory culture.
The Video Vortex conference aims to contextualize these latest  
developments through presenting continuities and discontinuities in  
the artistic, activist and mainstream perspective of the last few  
decades. Unlike the way online video presents itself as the latest  
and greatest, there are long threads to be woven into the history of  
visual art, cinema and documentary production. The rise of the  
database as the dominant form of storing and accessing cultural  
artifacts has a rich tradition that still needs to be explored.

Presentations by:

Tom Sherman, Geoffrey Bowker, Andreas Treske, Tal Sterngast, Stefaan  
Decostere, Helen Kambouri, Tilman Baumgärtel, Ana Peraica, Dominick  
Chen, Thomas Elsaesser, Dan Oki, Jan Simons, Rosemary Comella, Thomas  
Thiel, Sarah Cook, Patrick Lichty, Emma Quinn, Matthew Mitchem,  
Valentin Spirik, Florian Schneider, Philine von Guretzky, Tatiana de  
la O, Jay Dedman

Themes:

Online Video Aesthetics
Looking at the videos on YouTube, what aesthetics do we find? Is  
there a homogeneous style, and can we define how artistic practices  
influence the look of online footage?

Participatory Culture
Web 2.0 promises new levels of participatory culture. The user has  
the potential to overcome centralized top-down media and create  
dialogue. Is the increased user participation a sign of a new socio- 
political culture or is it a mere special effect of technological  
change?

Cinema and Narrativity
Do fragmented video databases lead to new narratives and genres? Does  
a database like YouTube evoke new media skills? The bricolage is  
assembled by the end-user, not the producer. Does this add up to a  
new cinematic experience?

Curating Online Video
From 16mm film and video to the Internet and back, artists have  
always used the moving image to produce critical and innovative work.  
This session will investigate how artists and curators have responded  
to the YouTube challenge.

Alternative Platforms and Software
This session will trace developments in the field of open source  
software,  P2P alternatives and open licenses. Both users and  
programmers aim to create a truly distributed network, in which  
content can freely float around without having to use centralized  
servers and sign strings of user agreements.

Evening programme: Video Slamming
Much like poetry slamming the use of short video fragments has become  
a dominant mode in visual culture. This evening session is all about  
the new ways of watching, using, and playing with moving images, such  
as scratching, sampling, mixing, (meta)tagging and recommending.  
Performances by Emile Zile, Tatiana de la O and Rosa Menkman,  
presented by Michael Stevenson and Sabine Niederer.

Video Defunct vlogging workshop
by Seth Keen and the Video Defunct Collective. Can blogs and/or  
blogging be tools for creating a new type of net based art? Video  
Defunct is an experimental work that focuses on producing a hybrid  
form of video blog. Currently as a work-in-progress, a number of  
prototypes are being developed in the open source blog publishing  
system WordPress. A key objective of the project is to explore the  
way video is presented within the structure of a blog from a ‘poetic’  
perspective. The workshop focus is on artistic approaches towards  
vlogging and explores the questions raised in the Video Vortex.2  
exhibition. Thursday Jan 17 from 13.00 – 17.00, Netherlands Media Art  
Institute, Amsterdam. Please note: Register for the workshop at:  
http://www.montevideo.nl.


Register for the conference at: http://www.networkcultures.org/ 
videovortex
Register for the vlogging workshop at: http://www.montevideo.nl
For more information, please contact Shirley Niemans,   
shirley@networkcultures.org.

++
Institute of Network Cultures
HvA Interactive Media, room 05A20
Rhijnspoorplein 1
NL-1091 GC Amsterdam
t: +31-20-5951866
f: +31-20-5951840
info@networkcultures.org
www.networkcultures.org


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