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DVblog

01/12/2005
Furtherfield

DVblog Quicktime Platform

When I first visited the DVblog on June 27th, earlier this year (2005). There were only about 5 entries, but if you go back now it is a completely different story. It is a thriving, busy platform with an abundance of work submitted from all over the world with new material added daily. It features many different types of short movies, uploaded by emerging talents and established movie-makers.

“DVblog.org is a Vlog and platform for artists and scholars for presenting or publishing stand-alone quicktime works.” The deal is simple, if you are currently creating work in Quicktime, upload them and let everyone see it. As well as the central column of recently uploaded works for all to view, on the left side of the blog sits a list of archived works, tagged with various genre titles such as Trailer Cinema & Ephemera. It also has other categories such as: realtime, net art, personal, quicktime tech, quicktime VR and many more…

The site is run by artists, Doron Golan, Tim Whidden, Lew Baldwin and Yoshi Sodeoka.

Doron Golan is living and working in New York, and works in dv, computer animation and media, primarily with Quicktime streaming and codec. You can also find some of his personal works here at the9th.com. He is also the founder of Computer Fine Arts a net art collection and archive.

Tim Whidden is also pretty well known in the net art world, usually for his works with Mark Rivers, as part of the dynamic duo called MTAA (M.River & T.Whid Art Associates) who are based in Brooklyn, New York, a conceptual and net art collaboration founded in 1996. You can catch some of their current online artwork at this address www.mteww.com/mtaaRR/on-line_art.

Lew Baldwin is an artist and musician currently working in New York. His work has been shown internationally and his piece milkmilklemonade.net, which was part of the Whitney Bistreams show, which was the first net-based installation to implement a live chat wall in a public space.

Yoshi Sodeoka who is also New York based artist, designer and musician, especially known by the net art world for recreating video works originally featuring works by musicians such as The Who, Motley Crue, Beck and a few others, recycling their music video footages and turning them into alphanumerics imagery, moving-ASCII films.

Net-based movies have been appearing on the Internet alongside Net Art for a few years now. With the rapid increase of broadband the limitations that we all once experienced when first exploring the Net is now a mere memory. The difference between Net Art and movies-online is that, unlike movies- Net Art is primarily, and more usually created for the Internet from the Internet. The movie as a format, is more accepted by fine art insitutions and of course, movies are respected by the creative industries and avdertising companies, due to it being an immediate and tele-visual medium.

In a recent report in The Wall Street Journal by Becky Bright it was mentioned that “The rapid spread of broadband connections is creating a growing audience for video and animation clips of roughly five minutes or less” and “Television broadcasters are among the leading providers of streaming video on the Internet, offering both news clips and excerpts from their other shows”. The implication here is that many more companies are going to be interested in investing in such a format, tapping into it as a money making resource. Already, Warner Brothers is preparing a major new Internet service that will allow its fans to watch full episodes from more than 100 old television series. The service is called In2TV and it will be free, supported by advertising, and will start early next year. More than 4,800 episodes will be made available online in the first year.

“The Surrealist liberation of desire, for all its aesthetic accomplishments, remains no more than a subset of production–hence the wholesaling of Surrealism to the Communist Party & its Work-ist ideology (not to mention attendant misogyny & homophobia). Modern leisure, in turn, is simply a subset of Work (hence its commodification)–so it is no accident that when Surrealism closed up shop, the only customers at the garage sale were ad execs.” Hakim Bey.*

DVblog currently still displays a strong independence from commercial mannerisms and promises to provide a crucial and valuable archive of Quicktime- based artworks of all forms and intentions, creatively. It will be interesting to see how it fares in the coming tidal wave of “entertainment”.

There are some excellent works to view on DVblog and here a just a few of them: Chris Oakley has communicated skilfully in his well crafted ‘video to Quicktime’ work The Catalogue. The equally sinister Beauty Kit by Pleix, is definately worth watching, and you can’t go far wrong with Pavu’s PINE-LING-PAN, and as usual Alan Sondheim’s movie work always offers something in between philosophical grunge, steeped in feralness. Don’t take my word for it, visit the DVblog yourself and enjoy…

*Hakim Bey RINGING DENUNCIATION OF SURREALISM Naropa, July 9, 1988.
http://www.t0.or.at/hakimbey/taz/taz2e.htm