Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

David Wolf has made his MA Exegesis—Vidgets: The Development and Use of Interactive, Network Based Video Works—available online and it's worth a read. The paper deals with these questions:

• How can new audio-visual works (vidgets) be created to explore and utilise the capacity for real time interactivity and network awareness found in everyday computer technology?
• What can we learn by looking at the use of real time interactivity and network/environmental awareness in the histories of media and art practice and how can these this inform the development of new works?
• What happens when video media art works shift from being fixed and self contained ‘objects’ to dynamic, distributed systems inviting user interaction and performance?

David has been working with interactive works using QuickTime for years using both LiveStage Pro and Quartz Composer. This is an excellent overview, be sure not to miss the appendix containing a complete list of his works.

Adrian Miles' BlogTalk paper “Media Rich versus Rich Media (or why video in a blog is not the same as a video blog)” is online now. It's too late in the day to being reading it, but I will enjoy reading it over the course of this week. The paper is written in hypertext (though a long, single version is also available). Reading these hypertext papers is both very rewarding and very frustrating. As Adrian himself mentions during the introduction:

I recognise that this causes many anxieties for academic and casual readers, where a culture of exhaustive (that is complete) reading is the norm.

I kind of like the fact that I can take a paper like this, and start reading one day. When I'm done for the day I can just bookmark the last page I was at, and then continue the next. That way I can ‘swim” around the text for days, reading and re-reading. It's very fascinating, but at the same some I do have that anxiety that I am missing out on something. It's weird because I don't have the problem when I sit with today's newspaper — there I happily accept the fact that I won't be reading the whole thing.