18.01.

13 Program | VIDEO VORTEX #9

FEBRUARY 2013
FE B
Arrival and registration
28 09:30 – 10:15
Thu
Please register for the conference and workshops here: http://bit.ly/SGtT86

* Welcome *
10:15 – 10:30

Götz Bachmann, Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University and Timon Beyes, Copenhagen
Business School/Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University
Oliver Lerone Schultz, Vera Tollmann, program curators Video Vortex #9

 CATEGORIES: LECTURE

Tweeting the Revolution: Activism, Risk, and Mediated Copresence

10:30 – 11:15

Beth Coleman will re-engage local affairs with visions of networked activism. She will address
visions of
networked subjects, video tools, avatar images in the contemporary play of politics, mediation,
and activisms.
resp: Oliver Lerone Schultz

 CATEGORIES: LECTURE  TAGS:  Beth Coleman

The Future is Back: New Visions for Film on the Web

11:30 – 12:45

Seth Keen: Poetic Taxonomies and Spatial Fluctuations

This research examines the redefinition of documentary on new digital platforms, with a specific
focus on the ‘network’, which includes computers, the Internet and the World Wide Web. In
response to the affordances of the network, I work with the potential to use databases and
metadata to annotate, index, store and retrieve video content. In this type of ‘web interactive
documentary’, a taxonomic schema is used to create associations between separate shots as part
of a unified collection on a topic.
I argue that database and narrative structures in combination with the spatial affordances of the
network can be utilised to explore a form of poetics. In the prototypes that are produced, I play
with creative relationships between text and moving-imagery, using ‘informal taxonomies’. In
collaboration with interaction designers, we experiment with the design of combinatory engines
and multi-window video interfaces, as part of creating fluctuations between multiple shots
displayed simultaneously.
Edwin and Thomas Østbye: “17.000 Islands”
17000 Islands Interactive is a multi-platform documentary exploring the act of creating an image of
a nation. The project looks at the relationship between models of reality and reality itself. 17000
Islands Interactive is also a website where users can rip apart an original film and make new films
out of its material.
The Taman Mini Indonesia Indah or “Beautiful Indonesia Miniature Park” is a theme park built in
1972 to represent the 17.000 Islands that make up the archipelago of Indonesia. It is a manicured
synopsis of Indonesian culture and geography – offering national and international tourists an

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opportunity to experience the richness of Indonesian culture in a one-stop-shop recreational site.

Fascinated by this concept of idealized representation of culture, filmmakers Edwin (Indonesia) and
Thomas Østbye (Norway) embarked on a documentary project that set out to capture some life
within this controlled setting. Their documentary project explores the act of creating an image of a
nation, of looking at the relationship between models of reality and reality itself.

resp: Andreas Treske

 CATEGORIES: LECTURE SCREENING  TAGS:  Andreas Treske  Edwin  interactive film

 Seth Keen  Thomas Østbye  web documentary

Developing and Funding Transmedia

14:00 – 18:00
Mobile apps, TV to go, game consoles and social networks all offer, in addition to traditional TV
broadcasts, a vast variety of gateways to media offerings, integration of communities and, of
course, dissemination of content. To make viewers and users aware of this content, providers
must develop integrated digital strategies. Both producers and writers face the challenge of
developing innovative, multiplatform-ready narrative forms and integrating them into market-
compatible worlds, always with an eye on the new opportunities promised by cross-media
financing models.
With the groundwork thus becoming more complex, production and marketing strategy have
become increasingly intertwined: More and more, project development, platform selection, target
group appeal, community-building, financing, marketing and sales go hand in hand. At the same
time, the financing options available for development – economically the most critical phase of any
media production, entailing a high degree of self-investment – are few and remain mostly meager.
The distinct shift of the risks faced by producers onto the early stage of project development is
one aspect; that these risks are passed on by producers to the writers and creative staff involved
is a further consequence. And with constantly shrinking budgets, fewer and fewer television time
slots are available. A change in the value chain can be discerned, with mixed-finance and
micropayment components playing a more significant role as the financing of film, television and
video projects moves toward assemblage. Motion-picture projects genuinely designed for the
internet and elaborate interactive concepts that go beyond pure AV formats lack access to
conventional financing methods and often remain starved of funds in the contest between
development and budgeting.
What proportion of subsidy is required for a minimum financial foundation on which to build flexible
and strongly process-oriented stepping-stones toward a complete and functional budget? How
might potential partners in financing and distribution position themselves in future collaborations,
and how would they define their interests and points of influence? To what extent may
participatory processes be conceived and presented as crucial to the intended purpose of public
funds? What might an economic ecosystem based on user participation and interaction look like,
in which both producers and writers can work effectively, profitably and with predictable
development risk?
These questions will be addressed at Video Vortex #9 by a panel on the development and
financing of transmedia projects. The starting point will be the presentation of three web formats
emerging from the Moving Image Lab, a unique experimental environment free from pressure for
immediate capitalization, which provides time and space to test projects’ conceptual and
commercial qualities. This incubator model represents a process accompanied by constant
dialogue with partner companies as well as attention to marketability and criteria for public
funding.
Through a comparison with three other international projects representing different financing
models, and through current media funding administrators’ accounts of their experiences and
prospects, the panel will seek to illuminate the relationship between and interdependence of
specific media formats, chosen financing strategies and the notorious question of target group
appeal.

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Case Studies Moving Image Lab Incubation as a Model: Challenge and Prospect for future
Media Funding I
Arndt Potdevin: PLAY WITH FOOD
Alexander v. Lukowitz: Satans Boardroom
n.n.: Turning Point
Case Studies ext. Transmedia Strategies: User Participation, Community Building and Hybrid
Funding II
Edwin & Thomas Østbye: 17.000 Islands
Martin Katić & Theresa Steffens: Dystopia
Max Valentin: Crowdculture, tbc
Dialogue: Economic Risk and Cultural Responsibility: Counterbalance by Media Funding?
Andreas Ebert, Arndt Potdevin, Alexander v. Lukowitz / Edwin & Thomas Østbye / Martin Katić &
Theresa Steffens / Max Valentin, tbc, Jan Oehlmann (nordmedia Mediengesellschaft
Niedersachsen I Bremen mbH), tbc / Rangeen Horami (Medienboard Berlin-​‐Brandenburg GmbH)

 CATEGORIES: LECTURE  TAGS:  Alexander von Lukowitz  Andreas Ebert  Arndt Potdevin  Edwin
 interactive film  Martin Katić  Theresa Steffens  Thomas Østbye  transmedia  web documentary

Editing Session
14:00 – 15:00
Collaborative editing of the Video Vortex sourcebook , hosted by Gary Hall, Open Humanities
Press (tbc)

 CATEGORIES: WORKSHOP  TAGS:  liquid book  publishing

Mass Lip Sync

14:00 – 14:30

by artist Stephanie Hough and the Lueneburg public

The Mass lip-synch will be a response to the typical lip-synch videos found on Youtube. Being a
live enactment and repositioning of online culture, by restaging a mass version of this online
cultural activity from an online location to an offsite location. This is a simple action that people can
easily relate to; the idea of singing or miming alone to your hairbrush in this escapist moment,
mimicking the actions of pop stars. Allowing this private act from a intimate domestic space to be
brought into the public realm. Humor is key expressed through the irony of a large group of people
convening together to do what would normally be a solitary private act. The selection of songs will
make this irony more apparent, possible choices may include songs about being alone such as:
‘All by Myself’ by Eric Carmen ‘I Think Were Alone now’ covered by Tiffany. These songs being
subverted by this context their placed within, ironically pointing to a return to community
engagement. The key relatable message for observers and participants being: though you think
your alone you’re not. Private space is no longer sacred as the internet infiltrates out daily life, and
with the threat of the abuses to personal online information.
Follow the blog: www.masslipsync.wordpress.com

 CATEGORIES: PERFORMANCE  TAGS:  lip sync  Stephanie Hough

Inside the Video Vortex

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15:00 – 18:00

An intensive workshop for teenagers passionate about video, journalism, or programming. The
workshop will be split into three parts:
1.) How has the history of the moving image been shaped by the constraints of dissemination? A
rapid and dizzying survey of distribution platforms (current and historical).
2.) What is a “medium” and how do decisions about infrastructure shape the creation and
reception of video? Can designing tools be as much an art as using them? Discussion about
“affordances” provided by and absent from the likes of YouTube, Vimeo, HTML5, Popcorn,
Zeega, InterLace, Apps, Flash, Hulu, WWW, Xanadu, Wikipedia, Everything2, &c
3.) And what can you do with all this? In groups or individually, decide upon both a project and a
distribution technique simultaneously; discussion and execution. Support will be provided
for using YouTube video annotations, Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker and Popcorn.js, and the facilitator’s
InterLace software.
Participants should have a strong interest in at least one of: film-making, (documentary) story-
telling, or web development, though no particular skillset is assumed. Bring a laptop and camera if
you have it, but supplies will be provided.
Limited to 20 participants. The workshop will be held in English.
Statement Robert M Ochshorn:
“My teenage years were concurrent with the first consumer-grade digital camcorders, and I spent a
good chunk of my spare time making videos with my friends. YouTube wasn’t launched until I
finished high school, and my parents’ dial-up Internet generally wasn’t up to the demands of video
anyway, so we released all of our creations on DVDs with elaborate menus, hidden features, etc. It
was a decision made without much thought, a sort of “default.” YouTube or Vimeo might have
taken this place of a “default” for a while, but I believe for a variety of reasons that we’re moving
beyond that phase, and that the limitations of these generic web video distributors are being
sharply felt.”
About the facilitator:
Robert M Ochshorn (*1987), nomadic computer practitioner and researcher focusing on
intersections throughout: media and journalism; electrical and computer engineering; sonic and
visual art. Has worked with Krzysztof Wodiczko in the Interrogative Design Group at MIT and
Harvard, with Eyal Sivan on Montage Interdit and the Common Archive, and in
other art/software/music collectives including Numm, Camel, and Truro. Just completed research
fellowship on “compressions” at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, NL.

 CATEGORIES: WORKSHOP  TAGS:  free video  Robert M. Ochshorn

Pro-Am
15:00 – 16:30

Representation of Difference and Mainstream Seriality: A Utopian Television Series on the

African Community of Castel Volturno
Despite the growing number of immigrants regularly working and living in Italy, issues related to
racial and cultural difference in Italian mainstream television still appear to be mostly confined to
the crime section of the news bulletins. Starting from this premise, the Cultural Video Foundation
(CVF), an association of Italian filmmakers born in Kenya, began in 2011 to work on the idea of a
television series on daily life in Castel Volturno, 50 kilometers north of Naples, the biggest
settlement of African immigrant workers in the country.
CVF’s focus on mainstream television channels is a product of the peculiarities of the Italian media
context. In fact, given the country’s history of media concentration and relative lack of pluralism,
and considering that, according to recent statistics, the mainstream television audience still
constitutes the majority of media consumers, a wider distribution of media products dealing with
sensitive issues such as racial and cultural difference could be fundamental in a process of social

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transition.
CVF’s project on Castel Volturno can be seen, then, as a provocation, a denunciation of the
persistent obstacles in representing alterity in Italian mainstream media. Series such as Cidade
dos homens in Brazil and Makutano Junction in Kenya have demonstrated that it is possible to
bring sensitive issues to a large audience, using the codes of mass-media entertainment. Could it
be possible to bring the debate on new citizenship and migrants’ rights in Italy to a wider public?
Could the TV series be an effective, expressive means to this end?

Boris Traue and Achim Kredelbach a.k.a. Jo Cognito: Economies of Contribution and 7 ways
to corrupt them
It has been widely discussed how web video is a hybrid of different media genealogies: cinema,
radio and, most importantly, television – all, of course, under the umbrella of the internet. But its
history as a medium sui generis is presently unravelling. The contemporary terms of its ongoing
commercialization are narrowing its pathways of individuation (Gilbert Simondon), bending it toward
a television-type institution. The demand-based medium that is the internet (Dominique Wolton),
with its powerful audiences, is increasingly supplemented by supply-based media structures,
creating a psychopower (Bernard Stiegler) over producers and audiences without resurrecting
control of content. These developments also provoke counterindividuations; producers and users
are in the process of developing economies of contribution. These, however, are deeply involved in
the gaming industry (let’s plays), in the entrenchment of a “channel” infrastructure and in promoting
individual careers, so that the distinction between “good” amateurs and “bad” commercial
interests has become far too simple to describe the new situation.
In the German context, on which we will concentrate our empirical focus, the web video world has
been agitated by YouTube’s recent forays into TV terrain and its delegation of organizing power to
commercial “networks” and media agencies that seem successful in harnessing the public’s
attention. These developments have garnered critical scrutiny and strategies for creating
committed audiences, which we would like to consider in depth and in relation to theory. We will
engage in a dialogue between activism and academia, combining theoretical work with a critical
evaluation of the German situation from an activist’s perspective.

From Steamed Bun to Counterattack: The Practice of E’Gao Video in China

This study examines e’gao videos and their implications for the practice of digital assemblage in
China through the exemplary case of Hu Ge, the most influential amateur e’gao video creator in
China.
E’gao, originating from Japanese kuso, has become a special genre of digital assemblage for
satirical purposes in China. Among the many e’gao videos and their creators, Hu Ge and his works
stand out. His first piece, A Bloody Case over a Steamed Bun (2005), was a parody of the film The
Promise by the world-famous Chinese director Chen Kaige. Hu appropriated elements from that
film, a CCTV legal program and other visual assemblages to make critical reference to Chen’s film
and to various social and political issues in contemporary China. The satirical, deconstructive spirit
of laughing at authenticity and authority lends e’gao video special significance in China’s
contemporary political and social context.
Yet ironically, while e’gao videos still seek to mock political, social and cultural authorities and
elites, they have also proved unable to resist the overarching system of capitalism and the elite
culture industry. In Hu’s case, his comeback piece The President of Counterattack (2009) was a
deliberately commercial advertisement of e’gao style for the world’s biggest B2B website,
Alibaba.com. More recently, the e’gao genre has been subsumed into “microfilm,” an emerging
form of digital assemblage that shares many of e’gao video’s technical features but largely lacks
its parodic tone. While microfilms are heavily promoted by the state, by film professionals and by
social media platforms like Tudou and Youku, e’gao videos are deliberately suppressed in the
name of purifying internet space and cultivating high-quality digital-media work.
The ambivalent practice of e’gao video in China reflects the rhizomatic complexity of digital
assemblage on the Chinese internet, which not only highlights intermediality but is heavily
influenced by the interplay of political, social, cultural and commercial factors.
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resp: Kristoffer Gansing

 CATEGORIES: LECTURE  TAGS:  Achim Kredelbach  amateurs  Boris Traue  Jo Cognito

 Nan Haifen  professionnels  Videoamt  Viola Sarnelli

Digital Natives
16:30 – 18:00

Renée Ridgway: Digital Natives

During the past three years the Hivos/CIS knowledge workshops gathered together participants
(digital natives) from Asia, Africa and Latin America: Bangalore, Taipei, Santiago and Johannesburg,
culminating in last year’s publication, DIGITAL ALTERNATIVES with a cause?
For the videos DNI-IV, visual artist Renée Ridgway and filmmaker Rick van Amersfoort interviewed
the participants from these workshops around four issues, juxtapositioning images with spoken
content. The first video, DNI addresses the construction of the digital native (DN) with comments,
critiques and opinions from the interviewees, visualising a shift in how digital natives are imaged
and perceived. The second video DNII focuses on the real vs. the digital whereby the division
between physical reality and virtual reality is dismissed to build more comprehensive accounts of
digital native practices. The third clip DNIII explores the processes that produce possibilities and
potentials for social change through political participation and the role that technologies play in
defining civic action and social movements. What are the relationships that these technology-
based identities and practices have with existing political legacies? The last video DNIV combines
connectivity, collaboration, inspiration and transformation but also reflects upon the limits of
cyberspace, its borders and the eventual co-optation of technology by users.
The videos therefore can be seen as a knowledge inquiry that incites new discussions, invoking
cross-sectorial and disciplinary debates whilst consolidating knowledge about digital(alter)natives
and how they work in the present to change our futures.
DNI, DNII, DNIII, DNIV were commissioned by Hivos, Amsterdam and the Centre for Internet and
Society, Bangalore.

resp: Dalida Maria Benfield

 CATEGORIES: LECTURE SCREENING  TAGS:  Dalida Maria Benfield  Renée Ridgway

Re:assemblies of Video
18:30 – 19:30

Nishant Shah: Video at the digital turn as an object, as a process, and as a symptom of the
transnational flow of ideology, ideas and infrastructure
Nishant Shah, Director Research at the Centre for Internet and Society Bangalore, shall unpack the
video at the digital turn as an object, as a process, and as a symptom of the transnational flow of
ideology, ideas and infrastructure, especially in emerging information societies in the uneven
landscape of globalisation.
resp: Yuk Hui

 CATEGORIES: LECTURE  TAGS:  Nishant Shah

Reception, tapes and videos

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20:00 – 22:00

Gabriel S Moses: The Missing Tape

The line between static and moving image is just as tangible today as the actual videotape onto
which video was once recorded. Gabriel S. Moses will suggest why today’s media objects are
powerless without sequence, and why the connecting transitions between and within media units
are the true “content” of social media portals and not the other way around.
Andreas Treske: The inner life of video spheres
Video is everywhere. We are swimming in an ocean of video. But video itself is no longer the video
we knew. The video performance Swimming and Floating is conceived as an introduction to the
essay “The Inner Life of Video Spheres: Theory for the YouTube Generation,” to be published as
part of the Network Notebook series from the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam.

 CATEGORIES: PERFORMANCE SCREENING  TAGS:  Andreas Treske  Gabriel S Moses

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