<nettime> softvideo essay draft

[Adrian Miles <adrian.miles@rmit.edu.au>]

hi all

a second essay on softvideography is available as a draft at:
http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/essays/CybercultureSoftvideography.pdf

The essay is entitled "Softvideography: Digital Video as Postliterate 
Practice'

the first para runs:
I open the box to unveil my new home computer. It might be portable, it 
might not, but if I’m at all interested in making my new purchase the 
‘digital hub’ of my new ‘digital lifestyle’ then my computer probably 
has several USB ports, an IEEE 1394 (also known as FireWire or iLink) 
port, DVD burner, and if I went for all the options, 802.11b or 802.11g 
wi-fi and bluetooth. What this means, outside of the lifestyle 
advertising that accompanies such hardware, is that it is now 
technically trivial for me to connect my IEEE 1394 enabled domestic 
video camera to my computer, capture high quality full resolution 
video, edit this video, and then print this video back to tape or 
export it in a digital format for DVD authoring, email, or to put 
online. But, aside from digital home movies, what would I now do with 
all this audiovisual empowerment? In this chapter I’d like to suggest 
two answers to this question, one looks backwards to our existing 
paradigms of video production, distribution, and presentation, while 
the other looks, if not forwards, then at least sideways, to recognise 
that desktop networked technologies might offer novel alternatives for 
not only production and distribution, but for what constitutes video 
within networked digital domains. This possible practice treats video 
as a writerly space where content structures are malleable, variable, 
and more analogous to hypertext than to what we ordinarily understand 
digital video to be. I call this practice softvideography.

Comments and criticism welcomed.

cheers
Adrian Miles
.................................................................
hypertext.rmit || hypertext.rmit.edu.au/adrian
interactive networked video || hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog
research blog || hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/vlog/

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