#softvideography

This article is along the same lines as Kristen Daly's Cinema 3.0: The Interactive Image, or perhaps works as a nice accompaniment to that article, where whilst Daly discusses how digital technologies and online spectatorship have changed the form of cinema narrative Chuck Tryon discusses the implications of digital technological changes more generally in terms of processes of production, exhibition and distribution.

This article mainly focuses on how new production technologies have enabled amateur filmmakers, with accessible distribution possibilities such as Youtube, which has reshaped the boundaries between public/private and amateur/professional in terms of film production. He views these changes and implications in light of current scholarly work around the death of the cinema, and at the end of his article asks how these new technological advances can 're-invent' cinema rather than 'destroy' it. Therefore, in some respects Daly's article follows this in showing how new forms of cinema have erupted from these new technologies such as database films and puzzle films, etc.

However, another outcome from this article is not to look at the changing nature of cinema being adapted and changed according to digital technologies, but how new forms of video can be made that are formed according to the affordances of online digital environments. This is more or less where my project sits, where it uses Deleuze's concept of affect along with the affordances of online digital environments to construct a way of making video that is particularly suited to online environments, without losing the 'aura' associated with such forms of viewing. 

In fact, Tryon points to some of these changes in terms of experience of film, rather than an explicit focus on the content, where he quotes Catherine Russell noting '...that cinema be redefined less as "as an object but as an experience and mode of perception".' In conjunction with cinema should 'not simply be what we watch, but how we watch and under what conditions.' This is what I see as key to understanding how to make content for online environments and refers heavily to some of Adrian's points about softvideography, where similarly Tryon refers to duration and non-endings as well, however his examples are film based such as 'Behind the Scenes' documentary accompaniments to DVD film releases and director's cuts. Whereas Adrian points to the affordances of a strictly online video environment away from always referring back to the cinema. 

In terms of my project, whilst affect is prominent and should be emphasised the most the final component of my exegesis refers to how affect and the slow can be a general condition for interactive video work and this is more or less about seeing how affect adheres to the affordances of online interactive environments. Therefore, this and Kristen Daly's article will fit within this section.

Works cited:

Daly, Kristen. “Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image.” Cinema Journal 50.1 (2010) : 81–98. Print.

Miles, Adrian. “Softvideography.” Cybertext Yearbook 2002-2003. Ed. Markku Eskelinen et al. Jyvaskylan: Research Center for Contemporary Culture, 2003. 218–236. . <http://cybertext.hum.jyu.fi/articles/118.pdf>.

Yesterday in class we talked about the "horizon of understanding" and what your hypothesis is. Basically, you what this means is that you have two premises and the connection between those premises is your hypothesis. For instance, in my research I have affect and interactive video and the connections between those is my hypothesis ie. affective interactive video, and what that means. The "horizon of understanding" is the intersections between these bodies of knowledge and how it is not about using Deleuze's affection-image to provide a grid over which to think about interactive video, but to look at how interactive video and affect push towards each other and the affordances of each and how they work together.

This is something that I feel that I am more able to do now after reading some of Adrian's articles on softvideography, because they look at how softvideography is different from hardvideography, or in other words how interactive video is different from cinema. Therefore I can use this to think about affect, and the overlapping points between how Deleuze conceptualises affect and how softvideography is conceptualised.

'The recognition that each track within the work is in fact capable of being an independent entity is a major paradigmatic shift in terms of traditional cinematic practice' 

(Miles, "Softvideography")

This differs greatly from cinematic practice, where 'decisions are singular, as one shot is selected in lieu of another and then inserted into a fixed sequence' (Miles, "Softvideography"). In other words in the softvideographic possibility that each individual video can be connected with numerous other videos each video loses it's reliability on other shots to create sequential meaning. This defines a clear connective point with Deleuze's affection-image due to it's position as an entity, ie. 

'the close-up does not tear away its object from a set of which it would form part, of which it would be part, but on the contrary it abstracts it from all spatio-temporal co-ordinates, that is to say it raises it to the state of Entity' (98, Deleuze)

and

'The affect is entity, that is Power or Quality. It is something expressed: the affect does not exist independently of something which expresses it, although it is completely distinct from it.' (99, Deleuze) 

and

'The affect is independent of all determinate space-time; but it is none the less created in a history which produces it as the expressed and the expression of a space or a time, of an epoch or milieu (this is why the affect is 'new' and new affects are ceaselessly created, notably by the work of art).' (101, Deleuze)

The affect image exists, to some extent, independently of the spatial and temporal coordinates of canonical and sequential narration. For instance, in The Passion of Joan of Arc, her quality of sadness exists as an independent entity of expression, in Dreyer's framing of her face in a close-up, which presents her face against a white non-determined background. This shot presents her sadness in and for itself it presents sadness as separate from what caused that sadness. 

Therefore due to the position of Deleuze's affection-image as single entity, which does not refer explicitly to what determined it or what it will determine it holds a clear connective point to interactive video, which presents videos as single entities, the videos have to exist in and for themselves. In other words the hypothesis of my research because of this connection is that Deleuze's affection-image provides an image which is the most appropriate for interactive video because it expresses a power or quality in and for itself, and therefore due to one of the fundamentals of what constitutes softvideography as differential from cinema is that the video elements of the work remain as independent entities (Miles, "Softvideography")

Cited works:

Miles, Adrian. “Softvideography.” Cybertext Yearbook 2002-2003. Ed. Markku Eskelinen et al. Jyvaskylan: Research Center for Contemporary Culture, 2003. 218–236. . <http://cybertext.hum.jyu.fi/articles/118.pdf>.