Full video report of Video Vortex V

We were very happy with the large amount of people attending the latest Video Vortex conference in Brussels. However, for those of you who could not make it, there is a full video report of all presented lectures to be found here.

Cimatics festival was hosting the 5th Video Vortex conference. Two years after its first edition, Video Vortex returned to Brussels, this time hosted in one of the great icons of mid 20th century modern architecture: the Atomium.

The past two years, the conference series - which focuses on the status and potential of the moving image on the Internet - has visited Amsterdam, Ankara and Split, growing out into an organized network of organizations and individuals. Time for an interim report, perhaps. We asked some participants of the first Video Vortex editions and publication, as well as new ones, to reflect on recent developments in online video culture.

Over the past years the place of the moving image on the Internet has become increasingly prominent. With a wide range of technologies and web applications within anyone’s reach, the potential of video as a personal means of expression has reached a totally new dimension. How is this potential being used? How do artists and other political and social actors react to the popularity of YouTube and other ‘user-generated-content’ websites? What does YouTube tell us about the state of contemporary visual culture? And how can the participation culture of video-sharing and vlogging reach some degree of autonomy and diversity, escaping the laws of the mass media and the strong grip of media conglomerates?

Credits:
Video Vortex V is organized in cooperation with the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam and supported by KASK (Faculty of Fine Arts, University College Ghent) and the Center Leo Apostel (CLEA).

Introduction by Geert Lovink

Session 1: System Flaws and tactics

Video channels, platforms and formats impose strict structures on how you can interact with them. This session is inspired by the inherent errors, disabilities and restrictions, often conducting our behavior but in this case inspiring and exposing new insights.

'Play that video, All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy' by Liesbeth Huybrechts/Rudi Knoops (BE)

'Blindness: the inability of YouTube to read itself' by Brian Willems (CR)

'Glitch - From Artifacts to filter. The Tipping point of failure' by Rosa Menkman (NL)

'It's a poor story if it only works backward' by Johan Grimonprez (BE)

Session 2: Online Cinema

Similar to his essay 'BMW Films and the Star Wars Kid: 'Early Web Cinema' and Technology' in the recently published 'Cinema and Technology', Andrew Clay provides an in-depth approach of online cinema. What will happen to web cinema as we shift from learning to see and how to feel to learning how to participate in this new electronic space of modernity?

'Web cinema: Mind the Gap!' by Andrew Clay (GB)

Session 3: Categories of enactment / Strategies of resistance

The two speakers have been contributing to the previous Video Vortex Reader. They are both artists and theoreticians and share a common attitude of resistance. In this session they will update and further expand their previous contributions to Video Vortex.

'beyond YouTube.world' by Keith Sanborn

''Impact, complicity, fascination' by Stefaan Decostere (BE)

Session 4: Artist practices: (Sub)Versioning

(Sub)versioning - the contraction of the Situationist 'subversion' and the common IT practice of 'versioning' - might best describe the practice of the artists in this session. They approach online video as a means for a subtle restructuring of existing popular media and a basis for investigating new modes of constructing and relating meaning brought about by the Internet. Note that Oliver Laric and Aleksandra Domanovic couldn't make it to the session (which is a real pity), but we found an excellent replacement in the session by Albert Figurt.

Artist presentation: Constant Dullaart I - Curated work

'Notrecam de Paris' by Albert Figurt

Artist presentation: Constant Dullaart II - Own work

Session 5: Politics of Online Video

In a dispersed society with a seemingly vanishing mass culture, online video is challenging traditional channels of public communication, oppositional media. A session providing us with some remarkable case-studies and research-projects about participatory communication, the White House and citizen journalism.

'Citizen Journalism vs Oppositional Media' by Simon Yuill (GB)

'The White House's use of YouTube and the reactions of privacy advocates' by Elizabeth Losh (US)

'Filmmaking and the politics of remoteness' by Stephen Crocker (CA)