Zoekresultaten

Inside the YouTube decade

What’s online video today, fifteen years into its exponential growth? In the age of the smart phone, video accompanies, informs, moves, and distracts us. What started off with amateur prosumers on YouTube has spread to virtually all communication apps: say it with moving images. Are you addicted yet? Look into that tiny camera, talk and move the phone, show us around, and prove the others out there that you exist!With this third reader the Video Vortex community — initiated in 2007 by the Instituteof Network Cultures — proves that it is still alive and kicking. No matter its changes, the network is still driven by its original mission to develop a critical vocabulary for this rapidly spreading visual culture: what are the specific characteristics of online video in terms of aesthetics and political economy of image production and distribution, and how do they compare to film and television? Who is the Andre Bazin of the YouTube age? Honestly, why can’t we name a single online video critic? Can we face the fact that hardly anyone is using the internet? What are you going to do with that 4K camera in your smartphone? Have we updated Marshall McLuhan’s hot and cold media for our digital era yet? Who dares? We see the Woman with a Smartphone Camera in action, but who will be our Vertov and lead the avant-garde? Who stops us? Let us radically confront the technological presence as it is and forget the pathetic regression to past formats: radical acceptance of the beautiful mess called the net.

MoneyLab reader

Is contemporary art history?

Transcript of a lecture during the conference 'Is contemporary art history', Institute of Fine Arts, New York, 28th february 2014.

Not the usual travel video to the Philippines.

Exploration of the Video Essay format about the impact of political and cultural factors in the Philippines.

From Opinions to Images

Ulus Baker (1960 – 2007) was a Turkish-Cypriot sociologist, philosopher, and public intellectual. He was born in Ankara, Turkey in 1960. He studied Sociology at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, where he taught as a lecturer until 2004. Baker wrote prolifically in influential Turkish journals and made some of the first Turkish translations of various works of Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, and other contemporary political philosophers. His profuse and accessible work and the novelty of the issues he enthusiastically introduced to Turkish-speaking intellectual circles, earned him a widely spread positive reputation in early age. He died in 2007 in Istanbul.The text in this edition is edited from essays and notes Ulus Baker wrote between 1995 and 2002. In these essays, Baker criticizes the sociological research turning into an analysis of people’s opinions. He explores with an exciting clarity the notion of ‘opinion’ as a specific form of apprehension between knowledge and point of view, then looks into ‘social types’ as an analytical device deployed by early sociologists. He associates the form of ‘comprehension’ the ‘social types’ postulate with Spinoza’s notion of ‘affections’ (as a dynamic, non-linguistic form of the relation between entities). He finally discusses the possibilities of reintroducing this device for understanding our contemporary world through cinema and documentary filmmaking, by reinstating images in general as ‘affective thought processes’.Baker’s first extensive translation to English provides us with a much-needed intervention for re-imagining social thought and visual media, at a time when sociology tends to be reduced to an analysis of ‘big data’, and the pedagogical powers of the image are reduced to data visualization and infographics.

Listening into others

The essays collected here are based on two decades of engagement with the residents of the slums of Govindpuri in India’s capital, Delhi. The book presents stories of many kinds, from speculative treatises, via the recollection of a thousand everyday conversations, to an account of the making of a radio documentary.Zig-zagging through the lanes of Govindpuri, Listening into Others explores the vibrant sounds emanating from slum culture. Redefining ethnography as listening in passing, Chandola excels at narrating the stories of the everyday. The ubiquity of smartphones, sonic selfies, wailing, the ethics of wearing jeans, the crossroad rituals of elections, the political agency of slum-dwellers, the war of the sexes through bodily gestures, and conflicts over ownership of both property and sound generated in the slums — these are among the many encounters Chandola opens up to the reader.Slums are anxious spaces in the materiality, experience, and imagination of a city. They are the by-products of the violent and exploitative mechanisms of urbanization. What becomes of the slum-dwellers, who universally, across centuries, cities and continents, befall similar fates of being discriminated, reckoned to be the scum of the earth, and a burden on society? By listening to identified others and amplifying their voices in their own vocabularies and grammar, Tripta Chandola’s praxis creates a methodological, political, and poetic rupture. Slums, she finds, are not anathema to the city’s past, present, or future. They are an integral component of urbanization and a foundational part of the city.With Listening into Others, Tripta Chandola poses the question: ‘Who owns the slum, and who determines which voices are heard? From where you are, listen with me.’