This is the panorama I shot last class:

It's available as a full-size jpeg image or
a quicktime VR interactive panorama.

For me the most interesting part of Kohn's work is this type of "distributed documenting" proposed by him. I wonder how is it working so far, and what are the positive points he sees about it. cost reducing? faster? far-reaching? how is the footage quality in his opinion? if he had the budget to hire professional film makers would that be a better option?

And, speaking about our option of making a "do-it-yourself documentary kit" from our class footage, what does he think of a similar idea for his project? Would it be interesting to have a "distributed editing" process as well? Will the collected raw footage be available to the project participants somehow? Is he planning to release in the website footage that was not edited into the final piece?

I know Manovich is the main focus for today's class, but I couldn't help noticing Steve Mann's article in the syllabus as well, and I just think the guy's stuff is amazing. Especially his ideas about surveillance and privacy. Maybe we can see some excerpts from his "shooting back" documentary in class?

I find his definition of privacy very interesting. He quotes from Webster's Dictionary:

Privacy
The quality or state of being apart from company or observation.

And he then expands on the theme: "Suppose we combined 'the quality or state of being apart from company' together with 'the quality or state of being apart from observation'. In other words, suppose we constructed a world in which people could not be observed when they were alone -- a world in which observation required company. People should know when they are being watched. It used to be that we would assume that when we were alone we were not being watched. So there was a clear boundary between public and private. The only cameras were people." His radical proposal is that cameras should be illegal unless wearable.

Since I've made my avatar and spread the stor.co.uk URL around these things have been arriving by e-mail:

Gallery of friends' avatars

Re: 5pixels

I scavanged my shoebox of backup disks until I found this pearl from the past. Here's the picture I took of my friend via the USC webcam in 1995:



He's the one leaning on the statue's pedestal.

The visit to the Jewish Heritage Museum was very interesting despite the fact that the repository is not working yet. Instead you get to see a bunch of TV monitors spread around the museum running looped segments of testimonies grouped by themes like "before the war", "children" and "helpers". Disturbingly, small LCD screens mounted on the wall display historic footage but have no credits whatsoever. While the backdrop photographs where they're inserted have lengthy credits including date, place and author, the people in charge of the exhibition seem to think that a moving image is worth a good credit. Or maybe they're just not used yet to including video as part of an exhibition.

The CD-ROM is filled with videos, pictures and texts. I liked the fact that many words inside the texts have links to different levels (brief or extented) of further information. And there's a lot of information on it! I got frustrated by the small size of the photographs, though - I wish there was a zoom button somewhere.

But the two experiences - walking the museum and browsing the CD-ROM - felt very different to me. I'll post later more thoughts about it.

And here's my full CameraPlanet review with screenshots.

My review for today's class is CameraPlanet. Differently than JenniCam or AnaCam, it is not run by an individual, but by a team of producers that try to somehow mix the TV and web paradigm. I don't know if they're doing it well though. In their press section there's a review from Netsurfer Digest with which I agree quite a lot.

When you enter the site you notice it requires a lot of bandwidth and the latest Flash plug-in. Not a very democratic interface! Then you can choose between different channels like "meat market" or "planet pets". The stories and videos are suggested by people and the public gets to vote on stories descriptions to help the site producers choose the featured stories.

The idea seems very interesting, of a channel for independent web video productions, but I'm not sure about the way it's being edited right now. I think in the end this mix looses the naivity and unedited, free characteristic of personal cams, and yet doesn't reach the quality of editorial TV. Maybe a huge user-searchable database would be better. Something like a IHMDB (Internet Home Movie Database :) So I would fire the producers and hire some programmers and interface designers instead.

I think Naz is right to the point saying that most personal sites and weblogs are works in process rather that finished products. And while one may argue that they're "rough" and don't have an "ending" I think it's one of the reasons why they are so popular. And I don't think it necessarily has anything to do with interactivity. Soap operas are works of fiction, but they are also a form of "neverending" story. And they're not very interactive. What makes blogs a bit more interactive are the links to other sites commenting upon them. From quizes about hair color to intrincate love affairs there are different degrees of influence the "public" can have in this people's real life stories. And I'm sure the soap opera marketers also conduct quizes to see if the public would like the story to develop in certain ways or even if the main actress should dye her hair!

So I'll try this table of comparison between blogs, traditional documentaries and soap operas:

DOCUMENTARIES             SOAP OPERAS              BLOGS

mostly "real"             mostly "fiction"         mostly "real"

finished products         works in progress        works in progress

low interactivity         low interactivity        higher interactivity (?)

low to high budget        high budget              very low budget

What other characteristics we can add? And what kinds of other traditional media can be useful comparisons in this case?

Ok, I've made my little stortrooper icon, it's in the links section to the left.

After watching Doug's documentary I thought about the movie "Dangerous Liaisons". They both portrait a series of journals and correspondence dealing with intimate facts and thougths that are made public. Only for the Baroque France aristocracy that meant personal ruin, and for the generation Y it's a completely banal thing. From then to now the line between private and public changed a lot. So I ask my classmates: if you were to post a personal web site (I'm sure some of you already done that) what would you never want to end up online? what would you reveal and what would you hide? What kind of consequences could result today from revealing personal things online? Would that depend on the person's lifestyle? Did it matter for the people portrayed in Home Page?

I created this blog some time ago, but never posted anything other than "hello world"... Now I'm required to write assignments for my Interactive Documentary class in the form of a weblog, so here I am again!

hello world....