I had fun working on the Vlogging entry yesterday, kept going back and editing it, also looking at more of the vlog entries I found online. I think they call an entry a “bite.” Many of them are true art.
Searching wider, I found that some people actually video themselves talking about the news like anchormen (it seems to be mostly men that do this)! Help!
When, like, Charlene Rule (link to a MOV) can do so much more just by waving her hands over the camera. Or Mica (link to a MOV) can capture the true pathos of being alive in a quick grab of a few minutes of an unappy friend's face in a bar.
Wonderfully skewed reflections of the world. Mind puddles. (In this photo below that I took yesterday, the water's on top, I have a mirroring theme in todays 3 pictures.)
You’d think that on a day when I blog so much, I wouldn’t get much “real” writing done. But somehow I did. I ran out to the Great Bear coffeeshop with my laptop (which, thank God, isn’t wirelessly connected) and sketched a scene of Bela spending a night in jail with Thuggee and Naz for the Washer Drop incident. And later Sylvia and I went for a walk.
I often think of the painting metaphor when writing. I mean first there’s the architectural thing of figuring out the arc of the novel. And then, faced with each chapter, figuring out the sequence of scenes. And when it’s time to write a scene, I tend to write something pretty rapidly, like a sketch or underpainting. Fast is good, since one is always anxious, faced with the blank page. And then I go over it, adding things, intensifying, fractalizing.
Trees have a ramifying structure underground just like they do above ground, I took a picture of the roots of this one big oak on a cliff near my house yesterday.
I imagine good videos are built up slow like paintings or stories, using the editing software. Most of the more interesting vlog bites are indeed edited. But now and then there’s a simple unedited reality take that’s perfect. The world does give us things for the taking.
Here’s where the other approach kicks in, the photographer’s eye thing of just seeing the artistic event and having the craft to capture it intact. Maybe here, it’s the seeing that’s the hard part. Seeing, and going back again and again to try and get the picture. The successive photos as drafts.
But even in photography, you do PhotoShop to make it look better. You can’t quite do the spontaneous grab with text, although, yeah, you can just natter on without editing. Oh, yeah, and you can collage in passages that you find in the world.
Still thinking about the autovideo thing that my character’s “vlog ring” does. There’s some smart software that breaks it into bites, aims the viewpoint at the loudest noise (like a dog hearing something), and speech-recognizes some words for the title.
But any automatic art pales, at least so far. Art is a class four fractal computation informed by emotion. We can always recognize it at a glance.
February 3rd, 2005 at 9:55 am
Posthuman Blues
This vlogging thing seems to be leading up to scenarios like the one in Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition.” I like his concept of the “garage Kubrick”…
February 3rd, 2005 at 10:00 am
Posthuman Blues
I totally forgot the film “Until the End of the World” — it anticipates vlogging and, for lack of a better term, “neuroblogging.” It’s beautifully filmed, too.
–Mac
February 3rd, 2005 at 1:55 pm
I think about artistic creation a lot. I guess art could be seen as a way of communicating. You are sharing something and when other people view it, it triggers thoughts and emotions when they see it. I find it interesting that many artist or poets do not like to explain their works. They want their viewers to think and come up with their own conclusions. A good art piece will cause people to think and by telling them what you thought it ment might limit their own experience.
Adding rules to the art making process is also interesting. For instance, a Haiku poem introduces the rule of 5,7,5 syllables for each line. I read an interesting article that said we need rules to be creative. By being limited it forces you to try to push your creation to the limits.
Its a problem we face in the video game industry. It is often very difficult for us to be creative since the hardware and software are constantly changing. Once we start mastering what we have to work with and start pushing creativity, it all changes the next year. So we spend a lot of time scrambling to learn the new ways to create instead of pushing the current limits. It may be the reason why basic things like a guitar or a paint brush have not changed much for years and years. The people that mastered the old guitar would have to throw it out and learn the new one and it would hurt their creativity.