Everyone who carries a mobile phone in their pockets can produce video. These days, the video camera is fully integrated into the mobile phone, and at the hand of them, this type of camera has become ubiquitous. Although camera phones have made more popular than ever,  the production of home movies, the history of amateur film equipment reaches far back and can be traced back to the early years in the film history. At the beginning of the 1920s a French company developed what was the first portable film camera intended for amateur production. Portability, the most remarkable feature of that camera, has since become the driving force behind the amateur production of moving images.

The history of the portable camera begins when the French firm Pathé developed and successfully commercialised the 9.5 mm format in 1922. The system composed of film stock, movie camera, and projector was purposely designed to attend to the amateur market. Other formats were previously developed but none enjoyed the popularity the Pathé had, basically because of its cost and size. The narrow 9.5 mm film stock was reversal-processed which means that it could be directly developed as positive, thus sparing the negative printing process. This feature lowered the costs of production and made possible for the amateur to afford the production of films on a home-based scale. The Pathé-baby format put in the hands of everyone, with no experience, the power to film short sequences on a non-professional scale.

The portability of the camera was the most salient characteristic of  Pathé’s system. The camera, known as Pathé-baby, was a simplification of the cumbersome 35 mm movie camera. The Pathé-baby kept the basic elements: a lens, a shutter, an internal sprocket to move the film along the film guides, and an external hand crank to operate the camera. The camera was 10 cm height, 10 cm wide, and 0.4 cm breadth; and it weighted slightly more than 0.6 kg. These dimensions and weight made easier for amateurs to carry the camera in a handbag and to shoot a Sunday picnic or a horse race. The Pathé-baby could be easily brought and used everywhere at any moment.

The Pathé-baby made portable, in a reduced scale,  the production of moving images. The firsts movie cameras were mobile but not portable. They could be moved to any location where the filming would occur. But the size and length of the industry standard 35 mm film stock made those cameras big, heavy, and expensive. Filming in 35 mm was not, and still isn’t , an easy matter. The Pathé-baby was, in contrast, light enough to be always ready to go and shoot; it didn’t even need a tripod. Its portability allowed it to be an spontaneous media. In that sense, the camera phone is similar. Both cameras are small and both represent different instances of the portable media; which is to say that the tools for media production live in our pockets.

Self-portrait (2012)

The individual portrait was a Renaissance invention and it has been popular in visual arts since.  Today, a portrait is still described by the stylistic rules of the Renaissance portraiture. In this kind of depiction we observe the subject either in profile or in frontal position; and his or her eyes, nose, and mouth are easily identified as such. We have an idea of how the governing elites of the courts of Florence and Venice looked because they had themselves portrayed. The purpose behind these depictions was always the same: to make the subject identifiable and recognisable as the ruler.

The advent of photography facilitated the production of portraits at an individual scale and made them portable. Nowadays, one of the primary devices for identification is the ID photograph that can be found in ID cards and passports. The style of these photographs is always the same: frontal position, lack of gestures and headdress, and neutral background. Contrary to the Renaissance, the portraitist, photographer, is not necessary as this style is embedded in the photo booth. This style allows to thoroughly measure the face of an individual. The distance between eyes, dimension and position of the nose, width of the mouth, height and breadth of the face, and all other sort of physical features are documented. The aim of this process is the certain identification of each particular person. The modern systems of control in public places like airports and government facilities largely depend upon the boring ID portrait.

‘Ah’ said the old lady, ‘painters always make ladies out prettier than they are, or they wouldn’t get any custom, child. The man that invented the machine for taking likenesses might have know that would never succeed; it’s a deal too honest, –a deal,’ said the old lady, laughing very heartily at her own acuteness. [1. p.90]

1. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. London, England: Penguin Books. (1837) 2009.

Culturally an artificial part played the role of an unwelcome aid; and it wasn’t considered necessarily beautiful, because the were simply visible alien. Nowadays beauty has to be augmented through implants and prosthesis. Beauty is defined by the prosthesis that are usually fully integrated into the body.

Just as beauty prosthesis, the technical media are blending with our skin. Their interfaces, we operate, are as sensible as if they were actual beings. Their hardware, body, is portable and is everywhere. We carry them with us as closer as possible. We feel naked or uncompleted when they happen to be absence. These are the final steps to be inside the body, to blend the media with the body, and to take over the body. Soon we’ll be all populated by prosthesis.

• Self-made practices and text. The production and sharing of attitudes and materials is independent of those traditionally imposed by the mass media, namely, by one’s own initiative, own rhythm and way, comprising broadcast-, publish-, design-, and make-it-yourself. The content includes machinimas, game mods, video clips, photo galleries, narratives, news, knowledge, and art.
• Persistently promotion and circulation across the open media. New tools are embraced to distribute media content. ‘Open media’ describes one single channel without contents. This empty channel is populated and fed by a multiplicity of collaborators. YouTube™, Wikipedia®, and Facebook® are examples of open media that oppose ‘closed media’ that are produced and distributed by one primary collaborator. The ideologies of ‘user empowerment’ and ‘democratization of media’ are permanently and simultaneously repeated by all collaborators of the media, and each member urges others to join, produce, and share.
• Everything is susceptible of appropriation and becomes source material. During the 1980s and 1990s, postmodernism proclaimed the appropriation of whichever mass media contents happen to be available, generating a frenzied media bricolage [1, p.211]. The nature of source material has changed because of the ubiquity of tools used to capture the world and the ease of production of media content, made possible by digital photo cameras, video cameras, and blogs. Consumers are the source material of the open media; their lives, work, and leisure time are all part of this new content. The media has adapted itself to the logic of the source material.
• There is no evident intervention of a specialist or a culture industry. Everyone is utterly amateur. There is a blind rejection of hierarchies as seen in professional/amateur relationships, ownership, and scholastic elitism. Although the open media certainly has owners and the tools are designed and produced by professionals, users are kept ignorantly indulged in the pleasure of self-production.

1. Manovich, Lev. “Generation Flash”. New Media Old Media. A History and Theory Reader. Ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan. 2006: Routledge, New York, NY. 209-18.

Three weeks ago I attended the 4th Pure Data (PD) convention.  This time it was organised in Weimar and Berlin. The convention lasted one week and included conferences, workshops, concerts, and installations. The frame for the convention was Weimar, which has a name in art history: Goethe, Schiller, Bach, and the Bauhaus were there.

The conferences were technical oriented. The topics included the implementations, the developing of tools for PD, extensions to PD, and sound projects using PD. The workshops happened in the afternoon and there were for beginners and for experienced users. I took part in the beginners workshop, especially in the visual ones as GEM for beginners, GLSL, and Understanding the PD Data Structures. The concerts were scheduled in the evening; they were amusing, exciting, and inspiring. Although I enjoyed most of them I got impressed by the works of Chikasi Miyama, Hsin-jen Wang, Jinyao Lin, Oscar Martin (Noish), Cyrille Henry and Nicolas Montgermont, Dan Wilcox, and Onyx Ashanti. From my point of view, these were the most aesthetically refined works. They depict too a wide range of expressions to be found in contemporary digital/electronic art. An impression of each concert could be got at the convention website. Finally, from the installations I would like to highlight Tafel by Alexandre Castonguay, Cymatic Imprints by Donna Legault, and Concerto para Lanhouse by Giuliano Obici. They all graciously combined machinic poetry and ingeniousness which made me wonder if I weren’t in a Gibsonian reality.

A small bite of what happened in Weimar could be listen to below.

Chikashi Miyama.Black Box. Record of a live performance in the 4th PD Convention 2011. Weimar, Germany. Duration: 7:17

‘Become mediocre’ is the only morality that makes sense. [qtd. 1, p.22]

Now:
Become spectacular is the only morality that makes sense
Become consumed is the only morality that makes sense
Become pictured is the only morality that makes sense
Become green is the only morality that makes sense
Become transparent is the only morality that makes sense

How could then be described the morality of our days?
It is said that a healthy and progressive modern society is that one with a large middle class to produce consumption. The middle class is a vast collection of people whose social relations are mediated by consumption. These mediations are materialized in different kind of objects like images, products, and trends. Today we have a mediation of second order. The digital media have first co-opted all other channels to be informed of new trends; second they have challenged the products as mediators of social status; finally in the digital media are produced all the images of the spectacle we live in. The morality of today is shaped in the digital media. But still, how could it be described?

1. Berman, Marshall. All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity. London, UK: Verso. 1983.

Topografías is a collection of 6 videos, of approx. 2 minutes length each, in DVD-video. This work explores the hybrid territories in the moving image through the manipulation and mix of live-footage with graphics of topographic representations and digital video defects (artifacts and glitches). The hybrid character in the outcome eliminates the spatio-temporal and narrative references of the source material to centre the attention upon its unreal and artificial aspect. For each sound, a machine composed of modulators and oscilloscopes was made. All sounds were recorded in real-time and improvisatory sessions.

This series of videos and the final piece in DVD-video was developed using exclusively free software, under GNU/GPL licenses. Codecs and containers for audio and video are free, too. The platform for production was openSUSE; video editing, mix, and composting was made in Kdenlive and Avidemux, and oscilloscope machines were built on Pure Data. All source files are available for downloading at Topografías.

This particular kind of exposure of poverty usually combines famished, dirty, and slavish aesthetics. This cunning combination produces in the spectator a saturation similar to the experience of watching a pornographic film. S/he is delighted to be confronted with the uncivilized poor for s/he gets the impression of a critical and denouncing insight. Nothing farther from reality because the artist has used the poor merely as a commodity. The image of poverty in such expert hands produces a piece to be consumed, enjoyed, and disposed as soon as possible, not to be understood.

The voracious artist has hunted the poor, captured his image, ripped out his dignity, and served it us in a neat frame. The naked prey stands in front of us to be scrutinized, commented, and dismissed. The purpose of the spectacle is to spot the compromise of either artist and spectator with social issues. The poor clean us out.

The Vampires of Poverty (Agarrando Pueblo), shot in 1978, in Cali and Bogotá, by Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo, is a false documentary that satirises this artistic practice.

[1515-25; < LL approopriātus, ptp of appropriāre to make one's own = L ap- ap-' + -propriāre, v. der. of  propious one's own].

ap-pro-pri-a-tion, n.

[1325-75; ME (< MF) >LL]

Abbreviation key LL: late Latin; ME: middle English; MF middle French.
Source: Random House Webster’s College Dictionary. McGRAW-HILL Edition, 1991.

Cedeño Montaña, Ricardo. <em>Topografía lenta tres</em>. 2010. Digital video and audio.

//Soon File to download (XXMB)

SIGRADI 2010 announcement here

Machinima Fictions: A DIY practice to produce animated movies from Videogames
Ricardo Cedeño Montaña

Building: Edificio W.
Room: Classroom 101
Date: 2010-11-18 04:20 PM – 04:40 PM
Last modified: 2010-11-03

Abstract

ABSTRACT
The mixture of playing videogames and producing movies has produced a new kind of moving image, a hybrid that, in the underground realm of videogames, has silently lured thousands to enter its territories. In the late 1990s, devoted players started to use videogame software for movie production. Their activity molded a narrative medium called ‘machinima’. Two recent productions are discussed to describe the various facets of this phenomenon in order to present the features that make up machinima and how it is relevant to popular culture.

KEYWORDS: machinima, videogames, hybrid, real-time, do-it-yourself (DIY).

Update (28.feb.2011)

Cedeño Montaña, Ricardo. Topografía lenta tres. 2010. Digital video and audio.

//Soon File to download (XXMB)

Cedeño Montaña, Ricardo. Topografía lenta dos. 2010. Digital video and audio.

//Soon File to download (XXMB)