Producing video or media art today outside of the museum or the white cube has become standard practice. With production tools at our fingertips, an invisible campaign of media literacy has begun, and we now adapt to new media with the speed of light. The Hollywood mode of production is certainly still around and will continue to exist, but dominant emphasis is now on reproduction, economies of attention and participation. This will lead to new styles of appropriation and an optimized aesthetic response in the videos to come.83 In other words, as we develop new forms, video as we experience it now will change yet again. Sean Cubbit has already argued that the purpose of video art is to attack mediocracy! Art can become the force that resists mediocrity and conformity. Artist-activist groups like Ruangrupa in Jakarta base their video works on urbanity and inhabited space; their video not only records and documents the world around them but becomes a living space. That way it defines a place and is embedded in daily life; it acts as a force connecting us to social movements as we advocate for change. For this reason we should acknowledge those urban regions less well-lit on the global map but that are still aware of the impact of the video sphere. Video not only creates the need for functional literacy, it also becomes a form of social training for our society. Just as we learned to write, we now must learn to look through and act with moving images. The video activist is exemplary for exploring and defining a trace or a path of narrative action in this navigable space. Video literacy training still involves a degree of cinema imitation, only this time with digital video tools and online distribution and appropriation. Short films and documentaries in hi-def resolution are relatively easy to produce and have created a wide range of new and talented filmmakers around the world. A few of them are even able to leave more than just a little splash on the web. Festivals come and go, pointing out the social relevance of these products. The cinema was never able to exist commercially and still meet the necessity and demand for more diverse moving images. Television also lost its bid for depicting alternative ways of life. In the video sphere, all these practices leave traces of smaller or bigger dots, flashes, waves, tsunamis, even supernovas. They are part of the subjective experience of the user. In the ‘video foam’ they come together to be shared, and we can dive in and out at any time. With video as a daily practice in a shared network environment, knowing the source of any single video will not be as relevant as it has been up to now. Such information has become redundant, because we no longer think to reference any index or about the ability to index. Lawmakers should become aware of this situation and act with foresight.84 YouTube or any video website has shifted attention away from the production process to a video’s pure real-time existence, to the flow of images. The flow is not archival or even watchable in its totality. Images are just one of several conditions and relations. Forms and shapes are exchangeable on demand, within the process of us coming together to talk, laugh, cry or love.
83 | See Stefan Heidenreich, ‘Vision Possible: A Methodological Quest for Online Video’, Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images Beyond YouTube, p. 13. 84 | Law has never had much foresight, and lawmakers never understand something in flux and in process. In these matters law might be reluctant for years to come and will be used by commercial interests to the extreme to stop what is already unstoppable.
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