Patterning video data with ConTour

A trip down memory lane. I thought I’d post up some of the documentation of some method experiments I did while I was visiting researcher at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. (I was connected to the  very impressive Master in Media Design and Communication program)in 2006.  During that time i was researching queues as form of mobile architecture. Part of the project entailed taking 20 second video of diverse queue structures from various cities around the world. At that time i has a dataset of about 80+ videos and i was looking for a way to tag and sort them. I was discussing my issue with PZI Lecturer, Michael Murtaugh  who suggested i try out a video wiki app  ( ConTour) he’d developed for his Masters a few years back and he was now using it for social history projects.  ( http://www.automatist.org/contour/).

Unfortunately, I can’t show it to you, as I can’t run system 9 anymore to even run it and capture it as a movie. Here are screen grabs: I wasn’t really using ConTour as a ‘wiki’ in the traditional sense, I was more interested in its power to generate patterns based on semantic tags and the freedom that it offered in terms of layout. It enabled a reflexivity to thinking about interactions of layout and tagging in terms of data visualisation methodologies  back in the day.

I used  tagging videos as mode of thought- as a way of trying to think about what terms would produce the most illuminating variables to show comparative relations between embodied and informational architecture that i was particularly interested in. Being able to spatially organise the videos more or less in any way on the screen, enabled a  lot of play and lateral thinking. AND it was lot more fun that the sorting and filtering I generally do with tags in Iphoto.

Therapeutic Aesthetics- the example of aircam.

“There is no fundamental difference between perception, hallucination and cognition” ( Brian Massumi, Parables )

aircam on Emirates (ICE) System

So this is what I wrote in my journal just after I took the first video of a landing at Bangkok Airport at night as mediated through an in-flight entertainment system that transmits live feed from a CCTV housed in the nose of an airplane. It is a little overblown as unedited me tends to be, but i present it as documentation of a series of sensations rather than poetic analysis (although I suspect that is what I was trying to do).

“I am flying. The darkness unfolds before in a jerky motion steadied by the symmetrical glow of the airport and its runway lights below. Thick drops of rain dash against my surface as I descend  toward earth. The array of glowing lines rise like a blob and blur before me, then everything begins to shake  and slide as I, cocooned and dry, meet the hard wet surface of another non-place night.

bangkoklanding Movie

My live stream remains until the aluminium tube of the plane rests close to the glass tube of the airport terminal which extends another tube in the form of an air bridge which locks onto the open orifice of the plane. A continuous pipe across vision to matter has been secured, as I am entubulated in multiple dimensions. Folded and looped into a tunnelled perspective of layering perception, this experience is inherently synaesthetic, involving the cross referencing of perception and sensation across hard and soft, dynamic and inert, material and informational. Moving from the tube of the plane to the tube of the airport while staring at the tubular vision on the screen before me, forwardness is both ineluctable (the must move forward or drop from the sky) and elicited (by all the cultural tropes in which ‘forwardness’ is loaded with values of social and personal success). ”

So my first thoughts about this seemingly obscure phenomenon of avionic culture were about tubular dynamics and how despite the fact that everyone laughed when Senator Ted Stevens describes the internet as a series of pipes, he was actually ‘kind of’ right. There is a distinctly tubular ‘look and feel’ to the ’space of flows’ ( of which both airports and the internet are both base parts). In many ways it is hardly surprising that the space of flows would look like a tube. Tubes are of course very ancient technologies to facilitate flow. And yet the literalness with which tubular aesthetics articulate is , to me at least, curious. What are the perceptual, political and corporeal ramifications of entubulated dynamics?

Before we forget and get all cynical again

Its only four days after the Obama Victory  and I’m surprised with how quickly I am over it all. Maybe I couldn’t sustain the intensity. Maybe Sarah Palin is more fascinating that Rahm Emmanuel.  All through September and October I had been gripped. My laptop, youtube, pollster.com, huffingtonpost and associated feeders had been one. Part of a collectively formed neural map that jumped from here to here to here and then here etc… A swarm of clicks, comments and embedded data. Now meh..

So before I forget I thought I’d post up a little email exchange that Mat Wall Smith and I had about our top five US Election 08 campaign moments from a ‘new media’ perspective. Mat as always responds to a concept in the most insightful way and I ‘ll try and catch Mat on Oovoo today and have a little diavlog with him about  what he means when he says ” seed the network like unthought”

but here  are our top fives!

Gillian
Here is my top 5 media moments

1. Google hacks and Obama website. How US Election 08 showed the clear relations between network participation and community organisation. How this raises questions about publics, audiences and participatory media
2. Obama campaigns ‘Flusher’ Program. ( links campaign office to electoral roles in real time! see Newsweek article here)
3.CNNNBC customised viral videos take pointcasting into a new affective realm,
4. Huffington Post and Viral contagion.
5. NYTimes electoral day ‘emotional cities’ application which they call a ‘word train’.. Newpspapers as affectual communities.
6.. ( ok one extra) the fact the the papers of record sold out. newspapers literally as memorials.

Mat replied to my shorthand list in the following way:

Well - I’m nowhere near as engaged as you on this.
But I spose

no 1: Being moved by people being moved by Obama - or rather an
intense empathy evoked by his achievement/which is to a degree ‘our’
achievement coupled with the the pain of all costs.

no 2: It was all about pure unadulterated affect. That is why the JFK
comparison pops up with little actual corelation - Except that the
mass didn’t NOT elect a Catholic/Non-Anglo far more important that
they were good looking eloquent and efused a positive energy. The
lesson nothing: seeds network like the unthought…

no 3:  the martialling of the moveon, getup, avaaz model to mainstream
politics with all of the problems and possibilities it entails. - this
is a democracy Jim, but not as we know it.

no 4: Martialling Ubiquitous media and understanding that ubiquitous
facedness is more important than a coherent/controlled top down
message (particularly if you are good looking and eloquent)

no 5: The strange shift in politics and media that sees the US
president-elect acknowledge that the world is listening and with that
comes the responsibilty of dialogue.

Transit Semiotics- a manifesto in process

Transit Semiotics. Yes it seems obscure and so I better defend my ‘brand’ or my intellectual credo or whatever label correctly describes the domain name that one ultimately settles on.

A transit semiotic deals with meaning that moves. A transit semiotics looks at meaning from the viewpoint of mobile information society where informational flows constantly overwrite the seeming certainties of code.

Transit semiotics is interested in the a-signifying systems of a techno-social semiotic system. Another waying of saying this might be to say:  transit semiotics, for me at this point in time,  needs to concern itself with how the message operates through transmodal modulations rather than what it means. This is not to say that ‘meaning’ is no longer important, it  is.  But perhaps meaning doesn’t mean what it used to.

Transit semiotics operates through the body, affect and aesthetics and politics. These foci are borne out of empirical necessity as media systems increasing migrate onto a body that is always in motion and always wired up.

more to come…

Flow control structure- Kansai Airport Metro Station. Images taken by Ross Harley for Fuller + Harley