The State of Video
The spectrum of contemporary video technologies, platforms, practices and communities is diverse but always in danger of normalizing and totalizing values that reinforce dominant ideologies and power structures. In this section I share some thoughts about the sate of video and some examples of the ways that new players in the industry portray their contributions and aspirations in an attempt to underline the similar claims of power through consistent visual approaches by which the world is rendered beneath an all seeing familiar gaze. Foregrounding the inherent diversity of video practices, I seek to find productive understanding in both the tensions and continuities threaded through the field from the most casual life-flow video making and sharing up through the most mature forms of industrial entertainment production. I am especially interested in shaping a clear picture of the middle of the spectrum; the boundary between amature and professional where we find enthusiastic and independent practices, spreading innovation up and down the video ecosystem. This middle space is the space from which I forged my own path and understanding of video practice, riding the wave of the digital transition in the early years of the 21st century, learning alongside other practitioners who embraced new tools and shared their progress in online communities such as dvxuser.com. The key tension within this space was an almost paradoxical process in which video makers went to great lengths to use their tools to replicate the material qualities of film, emphasizing frame rates and depths of field that sacrificed acuity in favor of mimicry, chasing some notion of aesthetic legitimacy. As I survey the state of the art, I hope to interrogate these divisive pulls and suggest ways in which vide practice can retain its innovative capacities without subsuming its distinct identity into the high-end hollywood practices that have slowly enveloped and adapted video into their own working flows.
Even the popular dialog around the most casual video practices is inflected with aesthetic expectations based on industrial standards of entertainment production. With the proliferation of smartphone devices equipped with video and still cameras of ever increasing resolution has come a proliferation of online video being shot and shared with a vertical aspect ratio. This prompted a tongue in cheek backlash video called “Vertical Video Syndrome: a PSA” that uses puppets and sarcasm to decry the use of vertical aspect ratios. Though clearly meant to be humorous, the video still articulates a deep seated sense of superiority and sophistication based on an understanding of ‘how video is supposed to look.’ The video received millions of views and spawned numerous blog posts and comments across the internet that reiterated the opinions expressed therein, and I can attest through recent personal experience that being dismissive of vertical video is still a culturally recognizable mantra of superior aesthetic knowledge of moving images.
What interests me in particular about the “Vertical Video Syndrome” piece is the way it invokes entertainment industry standards and history to portray its warnings of a dire future. The video explains that movies, movie theaters and televisions have always been horizontal and that if people continue to create vertical videos on their mobile devices, this infrastructure will have to be scrapped and new high rise vertical theaters will have to be created. Worse still, it will create an opportunity for George Lucas to go back and re-lease Star Wars in a vertical aspect ratio. The hypothesis is an absurd gesture of humor, yet the implication that popular image-making practices might threaten entrenched industrial technologies and practices is telling. There is a tension between the potentially exciting proliferation of video making opportunities for the masses, and a fear that those same masses will use the technology the wrong way. And though the ‘wrong way’ may be determined by entertainment industry practices, the opinion is often articulated and enforced not from the top, but from the middle, from the video bourgeois who want to distinguish themselves from the ignorant rabble and defend the fact that they are also using affordable cameras and means of distribution to tell their own stories and to legitimate their practices by mimicking the perceived Hollywood gold standards as closely as possible. The makers of “Vertical Video Syndrome” are prolific webseries video makers, clearly benefitting from innovations in affordable digital video acquisition and distribution, but have no trouble mocking the popular uptake of these tools when they exhibit formal characteristics that deviate from their aesthetic ideology. Of course, “Vertical Video Syndrome” is a comedy video, but later in the chapter I will return to this core tension and explore the ways in which it threatens to mire video practice in the material and aesthetic conventions of an antique medium.
Opinions on vertical video aside, popular use of mobile and smartphone technologies to make and share video offer some very interesting and novel materialities to consider. I would even argue that vertical video has some distinct merits as an aspect ratio; it fits the human form, placing an upright human body in the center of the screen; and it fits the screen of the device as we hold it in our hand. The smartphone screen is increasingly our window on the world, so why not create videos that fill that window and fit the orientation that suits us? Most videos recorded directly with a smartphone’s native recording application will end up on video sharing services like YouTube or on FaceBook. The process though is not perfect and in terms of social media flows, video has generally been subordinate to the still image. The most visible forms of video sharing were exceptional; viral videos that get passed around for some exceptional quality. Most social media sharing has focused on the still image. You can compose a visual moment of time that can be easily and carefully constructed and then consumed at a glance in the cascading flow of social media streams. Here, I am talking about the way we share media amongst networks of friends and family, not necessarily seeking a wider public audience, but not necessarily warding against such either. In this space, the Instagram app came to dominate still image making and sharing.
The qualities that made the Instagram app popular were also those that made me wary of it. I indulged my own snobbishness, though for slightly different reasons than those described above. The Instagram app limits the resolution and aspect ratio of an image, creating a standardized square image that is easy to display across a wide variety of contexts and that creates a uniform visual experience. The other signature feature of Instagram is its use of filters; along with the square aspect ratio, the app supplies built in processing options to create an image that is reminiscent of vintage looking instant photography. My reluctance to participate in this trend was due to what I saw as a mucking up of the intrinsic material qualities of the medium being employed; why would you want to throw away pixel information and inflect your image with a degraded aesthetic that arrives from no internal motivation of the subject?
It was not until Instagram added video that I took a second look at the app and realized that my previous reading was limited. I was judging the software as something that was getting in the way of the full capability of the tool and imagined that it was therefore limiting potential experimentation and innovation. This view had grown out of my experience of working with cameras where the software capabilities were limited. The smartphone is a different tool altogether, and the use of software based image processing built into the Instagram app is simply utilizing a different aspect of its materiality. I may not personally care for the choices, but they do represent a different kind of innovation. In assessing new forms of social video capture and platforms, I have tried to keep my mind more open and to consider them on their own terms and within a framework that considers materiality.
Instagram video came after Vine. Vine attempted to bring video into the social flow by placing strict and careful boundaries around what a video could be; Vine videos (Vines) are limited to approximately six second loops and square aspect ratios. Rather than limiting uptake and use, these constraints have actually spawned whole new genres of video making and micro storytelling. Separate from Vine content, I am interested in the way that the app creates a different kind of capture experience. To create a Vine recording, the user presses and holds on the smartphone screen and a status bar fills up showing how much allotted recording time is left. Lifting the finger pauses the recording so that multiple shots can be stitched together until the allotment is reached. Although the gesture is simple, it creates a powerful physical aspect to the process of digital capture; a feeling that the tangible act of pressing and holding on the screen is responsible for filling up the recording. The duration of the video is now linked sensorially to the duration of a physical act. And though the ‘press and hold’ is a simple act, it has a feeling of immediacy, almost urgency, that evokes a pleasant sense of focus when creating this new kind of video.
Other video apps aimed at the social space employ a similar ‘hold to record’ functionality, but with a variety of other affordances and constraints concerning the form of video produced. Instagram’s video recording allows for a length between 3 and 15 seconds. Instagram also allows users to include an existing video clip from their device’s internal storage. Earlier versions of the Instagram app included more extensive controls for integrating existing clips, allowing users to define the section of video to include and to determine how the video would be cropped to adapt a wide screen image to the square Instagram aspect ratio, but later iterations limited this functionality and nixed the ability to mix new recordings with saved content. This sort of progress that is marked by retraction of controls and features is indicative of the goals of an app like Instagram that aims to make an easy to use and easy to understand experience for as many people as possible. It also points to how quickly video can become unwieldy and complex. Authoring with time and space can quickly break the sheen of uniformity that is an inherent goal of an app like Instagram. Instagram is meant to make it easy to share video snapshots of life, to allow a user to carefully construct a shareable vision of their experience in and through the app, the device on which it resides, and the platforms on which the flow of images propagates and spreads. The touch screen is the portal by which pressing and holding to record transmits the real body into real virtuality based on the constraints of the tool being employed.
In contrast to the intentionally constrained capabilities of Instagram and Vine, Mixbit attempts to create a social video experience that is much more aligned with database identity and the flows of real virtuality and the infinitely recombinatorial nature of life expressed through media. The recording interface is similar and the press to record feature persists. But whereas the other apps have a finite allotment of recording time that fast fills up along the status bar, Mixbit does not limit recording time at all. Each new shot is represented with a different colored bar and the shots themselves are easy to reorder and trim in the editing phase, something that is less easily achieved in the other apps. But the real difference of Mixbit is that even after the video has been finished, saved and shared, the integrity of each constituent shot is preserved; by accessing their content through the web based Mixbit interface, a user can always go back to the source material and remix or remake their work. And other users can do the same. All users have the ability to remix other users’ work at the level of the shot. This preservation of the basic units of the source material is an important distinction. When video workflows bake-in editing choices and the original shots are lost, then the sense of life, identity and expression that crystallizes in a given work becomes an isolated cell, linked from one to the next through context potential recontextualization, but the potential to revisit and relearn from individual moments is hampered. When the raw material of a video work is preserved and made accessible, there is always the possibility of a deeper kind of continuity, where even a finished edited derivative work maintains a meaningful connection to the source flow, the branching system of roots remains intact from one outgrowth to the next.
The mobile devices we use to make and share images of our lives are also the conduits through which we enact a large proportion of our cultural rituals and social activities. Using them to converse with friends and family in text based conversations, and then switching to their camera functions creates a practice of mediation imbricated with all other aspects of our digital selves. The off- and on-screen worlds blur together seamlessly and the potential for projecting our identities in and through malleable media spaces is ever increased as new forms and affordances arise. The recently introduced Hyperlapse is made by the same entity as Instagram but stands alone. Meant exclusively for video, Hyperlapse offers a way of condensing long experiences into short videos. Instagram and Vine are suited to video snapshots; moving moments of time and micro narratives. But their affordances break at the prospect of a longer arc. In its simplest sense, Hyperlapse allows the user to make a long recording and then play process and preserve it at a high playback speed. In this way, a user could potentially keep their mobile device on and recording throughout the duration of a long form experience such as a music festival or wilderness hike. The practice is already there for many; people already have their devices in hand or close to hand, are already framing the experience through the screen of the device, whether they are taking a series of still images or various video clips. Hyperlapse enables a sensible step in the evolution of such practices, allowing for almost continuous recording that is still watchable in a condensed version. And the trace of the original is eradicated once a playback speed is baked in during the processing phase. So even as the user experiences an event in real time, they are projecting themselves into a potential future where time collapse is already accepted and understood, so that even in the moment of recording, their perception reaches out towards an altered state of understanding where sound is lost and motion is smoothed.
These two features of Hyperlapse are less visible but equally important. In its first iteration, at least, sound recording is totally elided in favor of a smooth visual experience. And smooth visuals are emphasized through an impressive image stabilization technique that uses the devices internal gyroscope to create a video product that seems almost to float. All signs of shaky hands, the percussion of footfalls, the flutter of heartbeats that would otherwise be accentuated through high speed playback of handheld video are all smoothed away in Hyperlapse. And though this might seem like a disconnect or an erasure of the body, subsuming the original perspective in the algorithmic vision of the machine, it actually more closely resembles the experience of the moment of recording; when you hold the screen in your own hand, your body moves in sync, your eyes and hand and screen are all moving together, so that shifts and jerks and bumps seem smooth until you see them played back on a fixed monitor. Watching a Hyperlapse feels more like your own conception of intentional movement through space. Even the collapse of time feels germane to the dynamic sense of time’s passing that each of us experiences at different speeds with different weights depending on our feelings, moods and intentions. Hyperlapse is gimmicky and meant to be fun. But that sense of experimentation and fun, anchored to a simple concept and tweak of time is an important form of video experimentation, offering new ways of experiencing the self in explicitly social spaces. Hyperlapse, Vine, Instagram, Mixbit; all are meant to be used to make and share immediately, to shorten the spaces between experience, recording and distribution to the point that the boundaries blur and all of life is a potential video, whether the camera is rolling or not, and choosing the tools and moments for actual recording is a pleasure, just another action of deciding who to be and how to live.
