Ratchet Up

Re-Photographing Atget

Photographers working the objectivist tradition associated with Walker Evans typically trace their roots back to the Parisian photographer Eugene Atget.

Christopher Rauschenberg has undertaken a “re-photography” project with Atget's work. That is, he has carefully re-photographed the original Atget frames, but now in the present day. Re-photo projects like these—and there are several others—are provocative indices of physical transformation and cultural change.

Check Rauschenberg's work out online.

Collaborative Screenwriting with WikiScripts

I have an edge-'O-Hollywood screenwriter friend who regularly riffs along these lines: “A writer should always carry his script on a clipboard...makes it more convenient for everyone else to pen in their changes.”

So here's WikiScripts:

“Wikiscripts is a collaborative script writing site, which decentralizes the movie and television script writing process. Anyone can edit a script and add their own creative skill and talent. This is how the site works: Click on a movie or television genre below. You can edit any script listed or add your own script for others to edit. Here, at Wikiscripts, we believe in collaborative media. Together, as a community, we will revolutionize television, Hollywood, and Bollywood by organically producing consistent high quality and entertaining scripts. [...]

Here at Wikiscripts, we believe that all humans want to create. However, we also understand that the process of creation is inherently risky, time-consuming, and opens the creator up to uncomfortable possibilities of rejection. Wikiscripts eliminates all of these concerns. There is no risk. You can edit on breaks during work, at home, or even in your favorite cafe. The script writing process is no longer time consuming. You can contribute as much or as little of your time, as you want. You're in control. [...] Wikiscripts is decentralized media. There is no editorial oversight or quality control. Media is created by the crowd not by a self-selected group of professional screenwriters. This site believes that a million people can get together and collaboratively produce great works. The collective creativity of humanity far surpasses the unique talents of a few individuals, and together, will lead to higher quality, more entertaining scripts.”

I especially like the optimism about how the writing process no longer needs to be time consuming. Anyway, this may be a better idea than the pitch they have ginned up for it. Truly a place of miracles, this Internet.

Current TV Backgrounder

As you may know, Current TV is a cable channel that's all about presenting short video pieces submitted by viewers. It has major support and involvement from Al Gore, whose name—in our celebrity-driven culture—is drizzled like chocolate topping over every story written about the new channel. Current TV one strategic intervention in the notion of Open Source Media. Many critics have applauded it as a good idea, but think Current really ought to exist as a streaming media portal on the net rather than as broadcast TV, which brings with it a host of [perhaps insurmountable] legal and generic constraints. For most of us, Current TV is an interesting new idea that we have never actually been able to watch since many cable franchises don't put the station in their lineup. If you have been curious about Current TV here are the good bits from a backgrounder article in the New York Sun:

“Current TV [...] now faces daunting competition from some of the biggest players on the Internet [...] Mr. Gore sees the venture as an effort to ”democratize television.“ [...] Like other start-up networks, Current faced the challenge of convincing cable and satellite operators to carry the product sight unseen. A legal services entrepreneur who is Mr. Gore's lead partner in the venture, Joel Hyatt, devised a way to short-cut that process by buying a little-watched network from Canada, Newsworld International. The acquisition, which reportedly cost $70 million, got the new network into about 17 million homes through Time Warner and Comcast digital cable and a popular satellite carrier, DirecTV. That number has risen to about 20 million through the growth of those services, but so far the channel has failed to make any major deals to add new outlets. Mr. Hyatt, who serves as Current TV's CEO, told the San Francisco Chronicle the network will ultimately need 50 million subscribers to be viable. [...] The limited ”carriage,“ as it's called in the industry, makes it difficult to assess how the channel is doing. Just 18% of households with television are able to see the network. Firms like A.C. Nielsen do not provide ratings for Current TV. [...]

So far, he said, about 1,000 videos have come in and about 140 have made it to air. [...] Current TV programming jumps abruptly from topic to topic, with a hip looking presenter in Los Angeles introducing each video. Most ”pods,“ as the network calls them, last between two and eight minutes, which makes them substantially longer than most stories on network or cable news. One afternoon last week, a segment about British soldiers beating prisoners in Iraq was butted up against a look at new video games. That might be jarring to some, but it doesn't seem to faze the Web-savvy audience.

”It's the closest thing to the Internet that's on TV, and vice versa,“eeeThe concept behind the network, harnessing user-provided content, is also at the core of some of the hottest new Internet ventures, such as the youth-oriented social site MySpace and the photo-sharing site Flickr. [...] One way Current TV could gain access to more viewers quickly is by streaming the network via broadband. At the moment, contracts with cable and satellite providers preclude that [...]

While there's no question the number of people who can edit videos at home has skyrocketed, Current TV has discovered that the number who can make interesting or watchable ”pods“ is substantially smaller. To separate the wheat from the chaff, the network uses a Web based ”green-lighting“ process through which viewers rate each others' submissions. Videos that rise to the top are put on air and the contributors are paid a fee that starts at $500. That process yields only about 30% of what the network needs to fill its days. The channel fills the rest with commercially-produced or ”commissioned“ segments about social issues, fashion, and music.

Current TV also has an in-house, six-person news staff that covers stories of interest to young people. ”With our small, scrappy team, we're sort of tackling a lot of things that I think are important and newsworthy but aren't so much being covered by everyone else,“ the network's news director, Laura Ling [...] The network's staff is clearly wary about the channel being perceived as political. Mr. Gore is not an on-air presence. According to a question-and-answer posting on the channel's Web site, it is ”absolutely not“ a requirement that videos present a Democratic Party viewpoint. Despite the caveats, on balance the on-air segments do tilt left. [...] Ms. Ling said submissions are vetted for accuracy, but that the network doesn't try to obscure a contributor's viewpoint. ”Sometimes that voice is not the unbiased voice and we will set it up that way,“ she said, adding that opposing views are always solicited on controversial topics.

Asked about the company's finances, the network spokesman, Mr. Dolan, said, ”We're very happy with our performance.“ He declined to say how long the company can go without making a profit. [...] The bulk of Current TV's potential audience comes from DirecTV, which makes the network available to all 15.1 million American subscribers.”Current TV

Democracy: Video Player and Feed Reader

I've downloaded the new video player and RSS reader from the Participatory Culture Foundation and can recommend it highly.

Corey Doctorow writes:

“A new suite of free and open tools let you watch TV, make TV, and recommend TV in a way that's easier, cheaper and more accessible than ever before. Democracy is a new Internet TV viewer that combines RSS (so you can pull a ”channel“ of programming), BitTorrent (so you can download TV from indie producers without gonking their site by sucking down all their bandwidth) and VLC, a multi-format player (so you can watch video no matter how it's encoded). Combine that with Broadcast Machine, a simple tool for publishing channels of video, and Videobomb, a social video service a little like Digg or delicious, and you've got a tremendously exciting development in democratic access to media.
Democracy has been available in beta for the Mac for months, but as of today, Windows users can play along too (the Linux player is just a little ways behind).

The experience of Democracy is great. Fire it up, pick some channels, and leave it running. Flip to it whenever you want to watch your video -- it's as easy as turning on a TV, but you can recommend the videos you like to your friends, make channels of them and save them.

What's more, you can hack the player, the publisher, all of it -- it's all free, open source software that's ready for your code contributions.”

I Am A Camera: The New Digital Self-Portraiture

“...people who did not consider themselves photography buffs as recently as five years ago are filling ever-larger hard drives with thousands of images from their lives. And one particular kind of image has especially soared in popularity, particularly among the young: the self-portrait, which has become a kind of folk art for the digital age. Framing themselves at arm's length, teenagers snap their own pictures and pass the cameras to friends at school or e-mail the images or upload them to the Internet. For a generation raised on a mantra of self-esteem, striking a heroic, sultry or brooding pose and sharing it with the world comes naturally. [...] ”I think it is probably a new genre of photography,“ said Guy Stricherz [...]

To a certain extent new technology is driving the new self-portraiture. Cellphone cameras and other digital cameras are sold with wide-angle lenses that allow a picture taken at arm's length to remain in focus. Computers are essentially $1,000 darkrooms that permit sophisticated manipulation of images. But technology alone can't explain the trend. Even in previous generations when cameras were cheap, they were generally reserved for special occasions. ”In 1960 a person just wouldn't take a Kodak Brownie picture of themselves,“ Mr. Stricherz said. ”It would have been considered too self-aggrandizing.“

Psychologists and others who study teenagers say the digital self-portraiture is an extension of behavior typical of the young, like trying on different identities, which earlier generations might have expressed through clothing and hairstyles. ”Most of what I've been seeing is taking place in the bedroom,“ said Kathryn C. Montgomery, a professor of communication at American University, referring to teenage self-portraits. Dr. Montgomery studies the relation of teenagers to the digital media. ”It's a locus of teen life where they are forming their identities, and now it's also a private studio where they can develop who they are. “What better tool could they have than one that allows them to take pictures of themselves and manipulate them like never before?” [...]

“When I was a kid I didn't want my picture taken,” said Jim Taylor, a trend consultant at the Harrison Group in Waterbury, Conn. “But these kids are fabulous self-marketers.” He added: “They see celebrities expressing their self-worth and want to join the party. This is a free forum to do so.” “Self-branding is a big deal for kids, and self-produced entertainment is a big deal,” Mr. Taylor said. In their pictures, ordinary young women metamorphose into glamour queens or pinup girls, thanks to a few well-rehearsed come-hither poses and mood lighting reminiscent of an old Hollywood studio portrait. Average boys turn themselves into brooding antiheroes by gazing intently into their camera lens in a darkened room, face half buried in shadow. [...]

Amber Davidson, 19, a freshman at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., refreshes her self-portrait on MySpace every couple of weeks and puts a lot of thought into it. “There's been a big increase in creativity over the past couple of years,” she said, referring to the self-portraits on the site. “A lot of people get inspired by what they see in other people's pictures.” [...]

“In a funny way I don't see this as photography anymore,” said Fred Ritchin, an associate professor in the photography and imaging department at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. “It's communication. It's all an extension of cellphones, texting and e-mailing.” [NY Times]

Master Glass Eye Maker at Four Docs

Channel Four in England has put up a new site featuring online documentaries. It's a great place to check out regularly.

I've always been fascinated by glass eyes, so I was pleased to find a short portrait of a master glass eye maker on the site.

Screens Of The Future...

...are appearing all around us. Some on the emerging new eBooks that seem finally to have found their form. Others—like these at NYU—promise to put us into the picture...or the picture into us.

“While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.

Since refining the FTIR (frustrated total internal reflection) sensing technique, we've been experimenting with a wide variety of application scenarios and interaction modalities that utilize multi-touch input information. These go far beyond the ”poking“ actions you get with a typical touchscreen, or the gross gesturing found in video-based interactive interfaces. It is a rich area for research, and we are extremely excited by its potential for advances in efficiency, usability, and intuitiveness. It's also just so much fun!

Our technique is force-sensitive, and provides unprecedented resolution and scalability, allowing us to create sophisticated multi-point widgets for applications large enough to accomodate both hands and multiple users.” [More] [Via Paul Hager]

Reopen 9/11

Confronting the Evidence reflects to an interesting emerging practice in personal media—trying to influence public opinion by issuing a free DVD that pulls together individual citizen journalism, investigations, and speculation on a specific topic.

In this case it's multiple alternative theories about the World Trade Center. I have not seen the material, but what I find interesting is the way that personal media looking to find its form. Here individual reports—otherwise essentially invisible as they are spread across scores of personal blogs—are combined on a convenient DVD package and distributed for free.

It's sort of like Netflix for social activists.

Expect your mailbox to fill to brimming in the next few years with shiny plastic discs packed with multimedia appeals an every imaginable topic.

Remember those print mailers with pictures of dead seals meant to tug your heart-strings on behalf of ecology causes? Now they'll be writing in full-motion agony and braying in stereo. Get ready.

>> And speaking of getting ready, are you ready for the real War on Terror. [Via Eyebeam]

Visual Aid

[Unattributed]

How It's Going To Work: Projection

How are we going to transcend the tiny screen images of current cellphones and VidPods?

By projecting their images onto any convenient surface. Imagine that your cellphone or laptop can actually project its image onto a wall, and clean up the keystone problem as well.

Light Blue Optics and Digislide are about to introduce products which do just that. You'll be able to view mobile TV and images right from your mobile devices.