Patterning video data with ConTour

Posted: January 14th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , |

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.


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