Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

And now we add radio sight to sound. It is with a feeling of humbleness that I come to this moment of announcing the birth in this country of a new art so important in its implications that it is bound to affect all society. It is an art which shines likes a torch of hope in a troubled world. It is a creative force which we must learn to utilize for the benefit of all mankind.

David Sarnoff, President of RCA at the New York World's Fair, April 30, 1939 (from Paul Schatzkin's “The Boy Who Invented Television”).

Tomorrow it will be 6 months since Richard clarified his view on photography and video. To mark the occasion I will post a quote by Roland Barthes from Rhetoric of the Image and pretend I have another 6 months to write a proper reply. Perhaps it's a red herring, a stalling technique. Hopefully it's food for thought.

[…] The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjuction between the here-now and the there-then. It is thus at the level of this denoted message or message without code that the real unreality of the photograph can be fully understood: its unreality is that of the here-now, for the photograph is never experienced as illusion, is in no way a presence (claims as to the magical character of the photographic image must be deflated); its reality that of the having-been-there, for in every photograph there is always the stupefying evidence of this is how it was, giving us, by a precious miracle, a reality from which we are sheltered. […]

Yes, I had to look up stupefying. Next week: Why French authors prefer semi-colon over period and avoid commas altogether.

A cable channel showed the brilliant movie One Hour Photo tonight, starring Robin Williams as the psychotic photo lab operator. I won't get into the tragedy of his character, but move on to a quote that stuck with me:

I'm sure my customers never think about it… but these snapshots are their little stands against the flow of time. The shutter is clicked… the flash goes off… and they've stopped time… if just for the blink of an eye. And if these pictures have anything important to say to future generations, it's this… I was here. I existed. I was young. I was happy… and someone cared enough about me in this world to take my picture. Most people don't take snapshots of the little things… the used Band-Aid… the guy at the gas station… the wasp on the Jell-O… but these are the things that make up the true picture of our lives. People don't take pictures of these things.

Peter Harms Larsen writes about this registrering aspect of the photograph and the video in “Faktion som udtryksmiddel” (in Danish only, sorry):

Fotografiets — og senere filmens specifikke mekanisk-kemiske produktionsteknik (i modsætning til tegningens og maleriets subjektivt håndværksmæssige), medfører at disse nye billedfremstillinger på én gang registrerer en del af den synlige virkelighed nærmest som et måleinstrument, samtidigt med at de afbilleder den med en særlig realistisk mimesis. Vi får altså billeder hvis betydning består i en kombination af den indexikalske og den ikoniske tegnfunktion i forhold til den gengivne virkelighed.

And Adrian Miles makes the more or less obvious connection to blogging in “Blogs: Distributed Documentaries of the Everyday”:

This 'everydayness' of blogging grounds practice in the lifeworld of the writer, and tends to assist in legitimating the blog in terms of its purchase upon the world. […] The notion of authenticity here is related to the indexical markers described, so that these texual markers operate much like the analog indexical relations evident in film. This is not to overstate the point, but it is to insist that when a blogger mentions a place, time, or person, such place, events and people do exist.

Richard BF somehow thinks that video has patented the registration of the everyday in videoblogging. He even says he doesn't like photography because it's posed (if that's not what he's saying I'm not understanding his dislike of photography). The difference between video and photography is not that one is somehow more real than the other — they are equally “posed” so to speak. The difference is simply that the photography freezes a blink of an eye in time, while the video records a series of blinks. I find this freezing in time very alluring, as it can show things the continuous recording cannot. They two are different, but to say that one is more real than the other would be a mistake.

Richard ended his post with a snapshot of real life. I suppose I should end with a photo snapshot from real life. Jenn took the photo, but I wish I had. The photo has frozen time at the right moment where Indie (the cute puppy) and the cow are looking at each other. That makes this blink of an eye much more powerful than a video of the event would have.

Woody Guthrie once said:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ours, cause we don't give a darn. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do.

When we were kids we could get excited about the smallest things. A walk at the beach would be interrupted every two seconds with a “Look what I found!” It's great to see that Jay hasn't lost his inner child:

Of course when you live in Manhattan you're finding things you wouldn't see at the beach. Watch the rest on Jay's blog.

I saw this cool little video from Road Node 101. In the quote above they are talking about breaking down the party lines based on cookie preference. I thought that was a pretty good idea. There's more in the full entry (duh).

I'm sort of testing out a way of doing video quotes. You can click on the little comment icon image to go to the original blog post. Also I added big, semi-transparent quote marks to the movie to signal that this is not the full video. Comments on the format are welcome.

I'm sitting in Peter's apartment with Peter and Bre, and we're playing around with the new quote feature in mefeedia. Bre made this hilarious quote: I think it's important to try to look in the dirty face of reality. After that you should go watch Bre looking in his own dirty face of reality.

As a response to my last post I recieved an e-mail from Doug Kaye. He pointed out that you can create your own audio quotes of any audio file at IT Conversations. Just click any “clip” link to start. It's a pretty sweet feature.

As I've shown it's pretty painless to quote video in video. It would also be straightforward to quote text in video by including the text in your video clip. But how do you quote a video in a text post? For text I do something like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.

I can of course just make a link to the video I'm quoting, but often a small snippet would be optimal to bring forward a point. Do I just cut out my quote, save it, upload to my own server and embed it like any other video? With a link inside the videoquote to the original video?

In his last video Peter mentioned quoting in video. I've been meaning to make a little test for a while, and so Peter became my victim. The video was made using only Quicktime Pro. I just marked the piece of Peter's video I wanted to use and chose “Copy” from the Edit menu. Then I simply pasted it in (“Paste” — also in the Edit menu) at the spot in my video where I wanted it to appear. Export, add a link using Quicktime Thingie, and I was done. I wanted to try out a video-in-video thing, but I've run out of time today.