creativity/machine

So Flickr finally ended the years of rumour-mongering and actually rolled out video. I was interested to see the way the official announcement carefully positioned the purposes of video on Flickr within the company’s (tasteful, cosmopolitan, playfully grown-up) brand identity, and its focus on self-created content:

we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse. If you’ve memorized the Community Guidelines, you know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of “long photos,” of capturing slices of life to share. [emphasis added, which possibly comes across as me being a bit pedantic]

They even give a carefully diverse range of quotidian examples–covering cats, places, events and people, of course.

There’s some really interesting protest going on within the sections of the Flickr community who are really invested in capital-P Photography, including this well-populated anti-video group, with some surprisingly hostile comments about the company. A lot of people seem to be worried that somehow the introduction of video will directly cause a ‘flood’ of banal, crass, and unlovely content, and will turn a photography-oriented community into ‘just another YouTube’. The controversy is tremendously interesting to me in its own right, of course–there’s technological determinism combined with symbolic boundary work and a fair amount of amnesia about Flickr’s mundane origins–at least as far as I remember there was a lot more emphasis on lifelogging using the (then) newly available camera phone than there was on digital camera arms races, fine art techniques, and so on.

So, controversy aside, how is it turning out? What do you really get when you start with a mature online social network with social and cultural norms increasingly organised around ‘quality’ content, introduce the ability to upload very short video clips (but only to Pro members), presented within the often carefully cultivated ‘photo streams’ of individual users, combined with a way of accounting for value that takes into account far more than the number of people who been tempted (or tricked) into viewing a particular piece of content?

I’m sure there will be some silliness, and unlike the Fotografrs who are protesting the move, I also really hope there will be some very cute cat videos.

But there will also be lovely slideshows designed to curate and exhibit small sets of photographic images, like this beautiful video–which is much more than a slideshow–by Timo Arnall [thanks anne, again]

And, I will bet, increasingly elegant innovations on observational and personal photography like what Photojojo is calling the ‘long portrait’:

The thing about the best portraits is how they capture the essence of a person.

Maybe the wrinkles on their hands, or the expression in their eyes, tell you about the life they’ve had.

So what if you had 30 seconds to capture that person, instead of a nanosecond shutter-click? And what if the person could talk? Whoa. Crazy, we know. We call it a long portrait.

Which sounds a lot like a micro digital story: a focus on the personal and first-person, within elegant aesthetic constraints, done with attention to detail and respect for the co-creator. Photojojo even links to the interviewing guide on the StoryCorps website to assist newbie micro-documentarists in learning the art of capturing these snapshots of individual human lives.

I really think the idea of the ‘long portrait’ is quite brilliant.

Aside from that, the collective shaping of the meanings and uses of video within Flickr’s existing community of practice is going to be extremely interesting to watch.

I haven’t been blogging regularly, so this is a news dump. I’ll preface it with a bit of commentary, though…

As a research fellow in an ARC-funded research centre I have had certain things drummed into me–not least by virtue of hanging out with actual ARC heavyweights from time to time. Especially in the lead-up to the now defunct Research Quality Framework, one of the things I had drummed into me was the difference between research outputs and research outcomes. Outputs, I have learned, are (merely) the things you make out of your research–products, publications, patents and processes. We all scramble to produce enough ‘outputs’, to the point that I am often at a loss to figure out where the time to process ‘inputs’ (like, reading books) is meant to come from.

But the productivity agenda is only half the story. Outcomes, apparently, only occur when the outputs get taken up and used for something in the ‘real world’–this is what the RQF framed as research ‘impact’. Despite the limits of ‘impact’ as a metaphor, which doesn’t really capture very well the slow and difficult to trace dynamics of diffusion that actually characterise the influence of humanities-based research, the pragmatist in me likes the idea that I might have some kind of direct usefulness, one day. Clearly, I have travelled a long way from the Oxbridge-esque imagined future in which I would be musing over great books by a cosy fire in Hobbiton, absorbing and transmitting knowledge via osmosis.

Anyway, in the last 6 months I’ve produced some ‘outputs’ that have now seen the light of day. Most exciting: some digital stories about biodiversity in Queensland backyards, and some more about the experiences of refugees who have settled in Queensland, both projects undertaken with the Queensland Museum, produced with a team run by my long-term collaborator Helen Klaebe, from QUT. I’m not sure if they’re outputs or outcomes, since they are clearly evidence that the digital storytelling idea is being taken up with a fair bit of enthusiasm around the place. There’s also some more digital stories about the history of the gold coast (during the course of which project i discovered the wonder of margarine sculptures, among other things), and some about the gay history of Brisbane, both of which I think will be launched in a few weeks.

Last: Joshua Green and I have sent the manuscript of our YouTube book off to the publisher, where it has now gone to readers. I hope to make a more celebratory announcement in the very near future. And we’ll be presenting on the major content survey that underpinned parts of the book at the ICA conference in Montreal next month–hope to catch up with some of you there!

Wow, really nice combination of original animation with edited audio from oral history-style anecdotal interviews in this sweet short film by Julia Pott. It’s one of a few YouTube videos that won selection at the SXSW film festival.

Oh, and while I’m embedding YouTube videos, I also found The Great Trafalgar Square Freeze sort of beautiful:

Technorati Tags: youtube, animation, film, storytelling, trafalgar square, freeze

I’ve just returned to my office, full of scones and lamingtons and date loaf, after the very well-attended launch of the second Kelvin Grove Urban Village Sharing Stories exhibition at the Creative Industries Precinct at QUT. As part of the launch we screened the digital stories from the 2006 workshop, which I co-ordinated with project leader Helen Klaebe. These stories (and the 2004 batch) are now available for you to view online.

It was great to catch up with the participants (many of whom brought along family, friends and neighbours), to have a laugh (or to be teased about why I haven’t finished my PhD yet) and to share their sense of occasion, pride and achievement. Some of the participants bumped into and reconnected with people from their pasts as a result of the connections made during the project - very cool that this can be a spin-off effect of a project like this, but it gives me a buzz every time it happens. And it amazes me how the audience laughs and cries in the ‘right’ places in every story, every time.

JumpCut is another new player in the “creative online community” business - the idea is to not only upload, share, and discuss, but also edit, collaborate and remix images and video online.

You can automatically import sets of images from flickr, too.

After having a quick play around with the editing interface, it seems pretty powerful and elegant. It’s set up to make quite sophisticated slideshows, with control over individual image duration (by manually entering values, though) and transitions, so it would also be relatively straightforward to use JumpCut to make and publish a very simple digital story using stills and an uploaded voiceover track.

I’ve just finished work (with Helen Klaebe and an absolutely crack pair of research/production assistants) on the second series of digital stories for the Kelvin Grove Urban Village Sharing Stories project.

This time, we were working mostly with older current and past residents of the Kelvin Grove area, and we’d discovered early on (with the help of past participants) that the motivation to make digital stories as part of this project was not primarily ‘creative’, but rather to do with the preservation of memory, social interaction and the sharing of knowledge. Additionally, several participants had health issues that made it difficult to do everything the ‘traditional’ way.

So we tried some experiments, including taking over a lot of the final assembly of the images and sound, while focussing on getting everybody together to share their stories, talk about their memories of the site, and ensuring that they all participated in the storyboarding and made decisions around the final editing process. We also tried something I’ve been wanting to play with for a while, which was to make some unscripted stories. This meant that the outcome of the storycircle process for some participants was something like an interview schedule - a roadmap for a chat - rather than a script that they read out. I then had the task of editing down long audio files (in some cases, 20 minutes worth) to 2 minute voiceovers, which was interesting. Not least because of the additional ethical and emotional burden on the team to get the substance and spirit of the story right. It’s also brought into sharp relief my ongoing questions about just how much the mastery of technologies is essential to cultural participation in new media contexts.

Yesterday was the screening of the next-to-final versions, and it went well so look out for the launch in May/June sometime.

I’m going to be presenting at this - should be an interesting collision of practitioners and researchers (and people who are both):

First Person: International Digital Storytelling Conference
Friday 3 February - Sunday 5 February 2006
The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Australia

First Person will showcase Digital Storytelling as a new cinema of personal portrait, engage with story as an interactive practice and investigate the use of technology to share meaningful stories as a global community.

One of many interesting discussions about the affordances, limitations and possible uses of the video iPod is happening at Adrian Miles’s blog. As I say in the comments, I’m quite positive about the implications of the iPod for small-format, visually humble and sonically rich cinema - like what my team had in mind with the prototype digital story we produced in the masterclass last week, or this kind of videoblog post. Once I get clearances sorted, I hope to post a version of our “story” (which is not so much a story as an impression, since it didn’t have a script and instead used remixed location sound and stills) soon.

A frequently overlooked, but incredibly important innovation from that point of view is that the new iPod records audio at 44.1 khz, which is CD quality, instead of the lame 8 khz the previous models limited you to. Not only that, but it records in stereo, which makes an enormous difference for recording anything other than lecture notes.

I want one.

Who wants to buy me one for Christmas? Sigh. I’ve been blessed with gadgets from heaven…

[edit]: Nice article on the new iPod in relation to audio recording at iLounge, and another lengthy discussion at music thing.

Daniel Meadows is a world leader in the Digital Storytelling movement and is here at QUT to offer a master-class workshop on new directions for digital storytelling.

Come and join us…

Public Lecture: Digital Storytelling: the journey from ‘doing media to people’ to ‘enabling people to do media’.

When: Tuesday 1st November (THIS COMING TUESDAY) from 4.30pm -6.00pm

Where: QUT Creative Industries Precinct, The Hall (Z2-226), Kelvin Grove.

J.D. Lasica has posted the video of an interview he did with Daniel Meadows at the Digital Storytelling Festival at KQED in San Francisco. In the interview, Daniel - who started it all here at QUT with a “train the trainers” workshop back in April 2004 - talks with characteristic passion about the social power of digital storytelling - where “empowerment” and aesthetic elegance meet the public sphere - as well as his own practice as a digital storyteller and trainer (see Daniel’s website http://www.photobus.co.uk and BBC’s Capture Wales for examples).