My last video post of this year. A quickie loop. Videobloggers were ambitious in 2007 and the results are mixed. For me, the highlight of online video was Navlopomo. As Aaron Valdez put it so clearly: In this show-saturated, promote-yourself-to-death state of videoblogging it was great to see the videos from all over the world with no other intention than sharing. It’s just great to see people doing for the love of doing. I feel like it’s lost more and more every day, that idea that somehow this form will change things. There are a lot of people involved in some amazing projects, but somehow the magic is getting lost, those little moments. -Aaron Valdez My own inkling, and what keeps me going in online video for the next year, is the sense that we are building real value around something immaterial and ephemeral. What is permanent in this overwhelming flood of video? To me it is the distinctive voice. The tactic. The insurgent attack on the everyday. A culture is growing around the desire to look thru another s eyes. This might be the real dream of cinema and not the vaudeville entrepeneur s hope of making a buck. We all want to make a living at doing what we love, but this is just the beginning of a new kind of discourse and new space for cognitive exploration. The practice needs nurturing before the harvesting. And so, following the advice of a favorite and recently revived vlogger, I am giving this video post of an animal pile to a voodler. Sam Renseiw s spacetwo : patalab, for me, is a model of this new practice: 1. take small camera everywhere 2. move through space letting the body/camera record its traces 3. post-produce the pieces into psychogeographic maps 4. repeat All the best in the New Year.
