Video as Jazz Performance
Traditionally, the production of video media for mass consumption is a very involved process. From the actual taping of the story/event/art piece to the editing and post production process, it takes a long time to get from concept to result. However, with the advent of cheap digital video cameras, video equipped mobile phones and easy to use digital editing tools, more and more people are creating video on the fly and publishing it on online forums in the form of video blogs or sharing them with family and friends with incredibly limited production concerns. As someone who came in to the video field as a photographer, my interest in creating video was never really about telling a story or imitating film but rather exploring the aspects of digital video production that are unique to the medium. I frequently used comparatively low-end tools and, especially when I began, had very limited knowledge of the editing process. What I found interesting about creating something in this atmosphere was that the process became more of an accidental trial and error improvisational experience rather then an exercise in filmmaking techniques. As a result, I am very interested in the idea of using the lowest common dominator of video tools to create something with a kind of immediacy that is traditionally more typical of musical performance, specifically jazz, rather then a video performance that uses media already created, edited and thus removed out of the context of the moment. I am also interested in what happens when you give people the opportunity to contribute to a performance rather then simply stand by and watch something that is already there. I have always felt that watching good live music has a kind of this participation because the audience reaction is very present as music quite often has the ability to illicit immediate emotional responses that are rarely found so quickly in other forms of media. By allowing the viewer to be both viewer and creator, I am hoping to experiment with how video can achieve a similar kind of participatory emotional feel.
In order to achieve this I plan to alert the audience prior to the performance that they if they have video enabled cell phones they should take video intermittingly before and during the performance of the space at tonic. I will then provide them with an email address of where to send the video. (I am going to have people planted to do this just in case). Once the emailed the video will automatically be dumped into a folder on my server and I will access the files through the folder object in jitter. Conceptually, I need to re-visit the space at Tonic (I haven't been there in four years or so) to get a better idea of exactly what it looks like physically, how the lighting is during a performance and what kind of emotional feel it gives off. I am expecting that after doing this I will have more of a concrete idea as to what kind of feel I want the performance to have. As I can't really control the content, my focus in the upcoming weeks will be what kind of changes I can make in the content that will be both interesting in the context of immediate video production performance and still contain a sense of organic filtering.
Here is the chain that the video will follow:
viewer cell phone---email----my server----folder on the server----folder object in jitter----as of yet undetermined changes---screen
Current things to think about;
Recent Developments:
I now have the mysql object working in Jitter. It accesses the database. I'm having trouble configuring things on dreamhost, however, but that should be fixed soon. I am also excited about collaborating with Vincent for the musical/sound aspect of the project. He is working on a very interesting device....we'll see what happens.