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Metropath(ologies): ecstasy of communication or ambivalence of information?Written by David Tames on May 23, 2009
Filed Under Art, Featured, New Media, Reviews
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Judith Donath recently spoke at MassArt. In anticipation of her talk I went to see the Connections exhibition of works by Donath and her Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. I was particularly taken by Metropath(ologies), an immersive installation that is at once beguiling and enchanting.... Continue Reading...
Making Media Now 2009: the premiere New England independent film conferenceWritten by David Tames on April 21, 2009
Filed Under Business, Events & Screenings, Filmmaking, New Media
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Making Media Now 2009 is a full-day conference that will take place on Friday, June 5, 2009 at Bentley University. The event will bring together filmmakers from all over New England with national industry experts for lectures, workshops, and panels confronting the most daunting challenges facing... Continue Reading...
A postmodern remake of a futurist classic: Perry Bard’s Man With a Movie Camera: The Global RemakeWritten by David Tames on March 29, 2009
Filed Under Art, Documentary, Featured, Filmmaking, New Media, Web
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Video artist Perry Bard’s Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is a participatory project made with contributions from people around the world who upload video clips interpreting Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera (1929), a film that is still fresh today in surprising... Continue Reading...
Bard’s work is the kind of machine-assisted participatory filmmaking that brings Vertov’s vision into the new millennium and enabled by computers and the net. I’m sure Vertov would have loved it. Man With A Movie Camera was Vertov’s mechanical vision of a new socialist society with Vertov as auteur, Mikhail Kaufman as the cameraman, and Yelizaveta Svilova as editor, and with Soviet society and the machinery of the industrial age as the protagonists. Bard’s project presents a global social reality in the new millennium. Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake, or as I like to think of it, “People with Video Cameras” brings the machine and ordinary people into the process of movie production and delivery, providing a collective vision consistent with Vertov’s futurist masterpiece of the modern era but remade in a postmodern setting with the media and tools of our generation: participation, camcorders, the internet, and computation. The perspectives of multiple contributors is consistent with Vertov’s philosophy, Joseph Schaub wrote in his essay, “Presenting the Cyborg’s Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye“, “Kino-eye, then, is a cyborg construction that contains multiple positions for the production of film meaning.” OK, I’m stretching a little, but ideas are fun to play with, I see them as guides to possible worlds.
Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake provides a crisp example of the first, second, and fourth characteristics that Janet Murray suggests in her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck, make new media a powerful vehicle for literary creation: 1. Procedural, 2. Participatory, 3. Spatial, and 4. Encyclopedic. The site does not make use of the spatial dimension (except for some aspects of the interface, which traditional cinema lacks completely), however, It’s pretty easy to see how the project could become more spatial in an interesting manner by adding geographical information related to the video when it is uploaded to the site, underscoring the truly global nature of the effort. Regardless of being light in the spatial dimension, Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is one of the most interesting participatory video projects I’ve had the pleasure to experience and points the way to the future of cinema. While theater owners worry over sagging ticket sales and studio moguls fear the audience’s move to net, as creators and participants we can move beyond the industrial practices of the past and look forward to a re-invented, participatory, global, postmodern, Kino-Eye.
This post is based in part on a post written for my Design Seminar II class at MassArt in response to Scott Kirsner’s Media Tech Tonic presentation, “Inventing the Movies.”
--> Four books covering Internet and WebWritten by David Tames on October 14, 2008
Filed Under Business, Featured, MassArtDMI, New Media, The Media, Web
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If I had to pick four relatively current books that will help readers develop a better understanding of the World Wide Web, I would suggest the following books. It was hard to narrow down the list to four, but sometimes less is more. This particular list stems from a recent conversation with... Continue Reading...
DIY DAYS coming to Boston October 4, 2008Written by David Tames on September 13, 2008
Filed Under Art, Business, Distribution, Events & Screenings, Filmmaking, New Media, Web
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The DIY DAYS conference will be held in Boston on Saturday, October 4th at MassArt, along with screening of From Here to Awesome films the night before, also at MassArt. This traveling conference, recently held in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, explores how independent filmmakers... Continue Reading...
Boston Media Makers, Meeting Notes, September 7, 2008Written by David Tames on September 7, 2008
Filed Under Events & Screenings, Filmmaking, New Media, Video on the Web
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Pierre-Loic Assayag, who I know from the old Viant days (at one point we both worked for this digital business consulting firms that rose and fell during the era of irrational exuberance) is now working on Traackr, a fascinating start-up which tracks and compiles social media data and produces... Continue Reading...
New Media Expo 2008 DiscussionWritten by David Tames on August 18, 2008
Filed Under Interviews, New Media, Podcasting, The Media, Video
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To wrap up New Media Expo 2008, I sat down with Steve Woolf (Epic Fu), Zadi Diaz (Epic Fu), Steve Garfield (SteveGarfield.com), and Walt Ribeiro (Ustream.TV), here’s the unedited conversation. Recorded on Saturday, August 16, 2008. We discussed topics such as what was best about the show,... Continue Reading...
Slava Rubin of IndieGoGo at New Media ExpoWritten by David Tames on August 17, 2008
Filed Under Distribution, Filmmaking, Interviews, New Media, Video
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I met Slava Rubin, co-founder, chief of strategy and marketing of IndieGoGo back at Making Media Now 2008 and was pleased to catch up with him again at New Media Expo in Las Vegas. IndieGoGo is an online social marketplace connecting filmmakers and fans to make independent film happen. Here’s... Continue Reading...
Philip Hodgetts of Open Television Network at New Media ExpoWritten by David Tames on August 15, 2008
Filed Under Distribution, Interviews, New Media, Podcasting, Television, The Media, Video, Video on the Web
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I spoke with Philip Hodgetts at the New Media Expo in Las Vegas and asked him about his new venture, the Open Television Network which I blogged about several weeks ago. Play Video Music by Colin Owens. Read More →
Best Practices in Fair Use for Online VideoWritten by David Tames on July 21, 2008
Filed Under Copyright, Law, New Media, Podcasting, Video on the Web
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The Center for Social Media of the School of Communication at American University recently published The American Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video, an important guide for producers of online video who make use of copyrighted materials without specific permission. Online... Continue Reading...
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