The availability of ready to hand video technologies for recording, editing, and publishing 'everyday ephemera' has seen an explosion of content online, from the low brow populism of YouTube through to the sophisticated observational post produced work of Robert Croma. These technologies of recording, editing, and distribution provide documentary practice with an everyday, quotidian apparatus for the creation of informal, reflective, observational and autoethnographic work. This paper will examine the use of ready to hand video technologies in concert with the use of the Korsakow interactive video authoring software, to create small scale, 'ready to hand' or 'dirty media' documentaries. This provides a model to investigate and develop alternative modes of making nonfiction video online material that falls outside of the economy of spectacle that dominates YouTube or the 'personal broadcasting channels’ of Vimeo . The problem investigated is how to contextualise and author in these systems so that work created is outside of the unstructured banality of aggregative platforms and the serialised limitations of the blog. Emerging software models such as Korsakow require a creative practice of making that involves the critical curation of video ephemera into complex, emerging and multilinear constellations and clouds of associated material that let these works lie between the personal documentary, essay film, home movies and broader poetic traditions. More significantly the use of systems such as Korsakow allows for an autoethnographic methodology of personal, informal and everyday observation to produce a ‘soup’ of material that is then structured through the elucidation of emerging or unveiled patterns of relation amongst shots and sequences. These patterns create affective and poetic “lines of flight” for both maker and user and their value lies in the possibility of poesis amongst otherwise unremarkable moments.

1. affective assemblages
(documentary practices)
adrian.miles@rmit.edu.au
vogmae.net.au
@vogmae
2012

2. a stranger here
I wrote the Chris Marker WWW site (1993), one of the first hypertextual
academic cinema sites online.
I have a cinema studies background then literary/humanities hypertext.
I have made small scale interactive QuickTime sketches since 2000 as the basis
of a video blogging practice that is an observational poetic noticing since 2000.
I experience new media in a positive way as disruptive, and look for those
differences that makes a difference, and am not interested in using new
technologies and networks for a repetition of the same.
As an academic, educator, and theorist I am interested in small scale works that
emerge out of ongoing practices, things that get woven into the everyday (like
writing, blogging, photography).

3. abstracted abstract (1)
Through an examination of some current online services, and the Korsakow
system, we can see that there are digital nonfiction practices being invented that
are facilitated by ready access to means of making and distributing, and that
these systems leverage the qualities of the minor, curatorial, intimate, distributed
and emergent.
From this we can see the attributes that documentary tools need in digital
networked contexts. We can also see that such ‘tools’ can be thought of as
systems to allow for the creation of affective assemblages.

4. abstracted abstract
Through an examination of some current online services, and the Korsakow
system, we can see that there are digital nonfiction practices being invented that
are facilitated by ready access to means of making and distributing, and that
these systems leverage the qualities of the minor, curatorial, intimate, distributed
and emergent.
From this we can see the attributes that documentary tools need in digital
networked contexts. We can also see that such ‘tools’ can be thought of as
systems to allow for the creation of affective assemblages.
The work is grounded in a sophisticated theory driven critical practice of
networked making.

5. ready access: making
It is now a commonplace observation that the means of filming, editing, and
distributing video is the inverse of what it was. Specialised, expensive,
technically sophisticated skills and equipment coupled with scarcity of
distribution has been flipped. My iPhone 4S shoots better video than the $30,000
video camera I used as a student in 1986. iMovie on my phone is a better editor
than the U-Matic suite too.
YouTube, blip.tv, and Vimeo have solved the former complexity of compression
algorithms, presentation formats, storage and bandwidth.

6. accidental good work
There is some good work made and can now be shared. There are exceptional
moments, Deleuze’s “privileged instants”, that emerge simply because of how
much material is being filmed, all the time, and able to be published and then
aggregated.
These are however accidental moments. What is of interest for me is not that I
can film and share, to professional or other standards or I just want to see the
baby bite his brother’s finger, but what and how should I film, and then how does
that become part of a larger work, to leave behind the show and channel
mentality of YouTube. In other words making and distribution is not the problem.
So what is?

7. ready access: distribution
A TV channel has scarcity because it can only broadcast one thing at a time
(even with new technologies it is still constrained to a model of programmed
scheduling, like a railway). So value here is realised by maximising audience at
any particular moment by narrowing supply (shown at this time, this often, if you
want to see it, be there or bad luck).
YouTube reverses this by maximising audience by erasing supply as a
constraint. If TV is a trickle then YouTube is the Yangtze.
In either case maximising audience remains the rationale.

8. colonising aggregators
A TV channel has scarcity because it can only broadcast one thing at a time
(even with new technologies it is still constrained to a model of programmed
scheduling, like a railway). So value here is realised as maximising audience at
any particular moment by narrowing supply (shown at this time, this often, if you
want to see it, be there or bad luck).
YouTube reverses this by maximising audience by erasing supply as a
constraint. Here TV is a trickle this is the Mississippi.
In either case maximising audience remains the rationale.
YouTube and their ilk are therefore aggregative (and colonising) systems that
are the inverse mirror of networked television.

9. it is good for
So YouTube and co are not a model for new documentary practice, and certainly
not a network specific one. It is an interesting site for all sorts of sociological and
ethnographic research. A site of research into, rather than a site of practice in
emerging networked nonfiction. So the question that I’m interested in is how we
can use the network as more than a distribution channel in concert with these
ready to hand tools to make new work, differently, and step beyond merely
treating distribution (and then monetisation) as the key problem.

10. on the other hand
Documentary is disruptive. It is a disruptive practice in relation to film making,
our experience and understanding of the world and ourselves, and to what could
(and should) be the economics and politics of film making. Documentary desires
to change, something, which is the agency it gains from being nonfiction
Documentary has the potential to play such a role in relation to online video
nonfiction making, distributing, and using (viewing/reading).

11. disruption
I’m using ‘disruptive’ here as something that questions, is outside and its
outsider status lets it say and do things that the inside can’t. Documentary isn’t
just usually cheap to make in relation to drama, but it also often has a politics of
engagement that is happy with the ready to hand and near enough having to be
good enough. Documentary can be thought of as a future orientated practice
because it wants to produce change. This might be social or political change, or
something as mundane as understanding butterflies better. But if one criteria of
art is its intrinsic refusal to be instrumental, documentary always engages with
the world, whether dogmatically or poetically, and so is an instrumentalised
practice. Because documentary is disruptive it is a key place to think seriously
and deeply about networked nonfiction practice.

12. Korsakow
Korsakow is a small scale authoring application for making interactive video. Its
key attributes are that it is premised on being able to make fuzzy connections
between clips so that relations between its constituent units (I’ll resist calling
them narrative units as the smallest unit here does not need to be narrative) and
this can be done incrementally. Structure emerges in the practice of making and
forming loose connections.
My own mode of working here is to record minor things that are ‘noticed’, and
once I have a few to see what they may have in common. This then informs
additional filming (it provides a filter and lens for more sophisticated ‘critical
noticing’ John Mason). What is noticed are ephemera and these form a ‘soup’
where a small set of tags are developed and used in Korsakow, beginning with
some clips, and some tags. It is reflective, autoethnographic, descriptive rather
than narrational.

13. To take the apparently simple notion of noticing to elaborate various features
of the kind of noticing which happens as part of carrying out professional
practice, and then to turn this into an intentional activity, a discipline and
practical approach to enquiry and research. (30.)
Mason, John. Researching Your Own Practice: The Discipline of Noticing. London:
Routledge, 2002.

14. Cowbird
Cowbird is an online platform that lets users contribute small stories. A story
usually consists of a photograph and a brief accompanying page, no more than
a few paragraphs (at most).
Each story can be tagged by its maker, and there is meta data auto generated
(associated with the story and its maker).

15. Cowbird
what is of interest is a) people are willing to submit quite personal stories and the
system supports and encourages this, b) that it then auto curates these into
more or less meaningful connections.
This can happen because they are small parts, and they are combined into new
sequences by what I am interested in following in conjunction with the system’s
building, this is what can be described as curatorial storytelling.

16. Cowbird
Cowbird is an online platform that
lets users contribute small stories. A
story usually consists of a
photograph and a brief
accompanying page, no more than a
few paragraphs (at most).
Each story can be tagged by its
maker, and there is meta data auto
generated (associated with the story
and its maker).
So stories are individual, but easily
aggregated into other collections
based on theme, location, date, age,
and so on.

17. We Feel Fine ‘scrapes’ content from
blogs, securing whatever metadata
is available (author, location, age)
within individual posts. More
significantly it applies text filters to
the content to match them against a
library of terms of emotional
descriptors. Search is available on
this metadata
We Feel Fine

18. differences
The difference between these three systems matters.
Korsakow is maker centred in terms of its rules composition. You make multiple
relations between parts, where you don’t control what joins to what, only
choreograph possibilities.
Cowbird is maker centred at the level of a single story, the system largely
determines the rest. Here you post as an individual, and Cowbird auto-curates
content from other individuals into thematic collections. (Curatorial storytelling.)
We Feel Fine retrieves what it finds and auto-curates this into clouds of
connected fragments. This is system centred and the maker is the designer of
the system.
These are related but different methodologies, each of which need to be
supported and further developed.

19. systems
These move from a personal, then a communal to a system level making. The
first does not scale beyond the personal, while Cowbird offers ways of thinking
about more open forms of collaborative and communal documentary. We Feel
Fine is a system level engine that offers a model for computational or generative
nonfiction.
I don’t think any of these are ‘it’ but each in its own way is an important example
of the modes of making that now apply and need to be theorised and engaged
with.

20. a thinkertoy
(This field is NOT about the digital, it is about the network. Thinking it is about
the digital is like thinking literature is about ink.) It is about the network as a
system.
What attributes do these systems have, or rely upon?

21. abstracted abstract (2)
Through an examination of some current online services, and the Korsakow
system, we can see that there are digital nonfiction practices being invented that
are facilitated by ready access to means of making and distributing, and that
these systems leverage the qualities of the minor, curatorial, intimate,
distributed and emergent.
From this we can see the attributes that documentary tools need in digital
networked contexts. We can also see that such ‘tools’ can be thought of as
systems to allow for the creation of affective assemblages.
The work is grounded in a sophisticated theory driven critical practice of
networked making.

22. qualities
Minor as they make a major language stutter by using that major language
differently, and they are minor as they are made up of small parts. (Deleuze)
Curatorial as they are media practices grounded in the life world of their authors
and these systems allow our media trails to be formed into collections.
Intimate in terms of their scale and their content. Scale because they are made
for the personal screen and the content is phenomenologically near.
Distributed as they are highly granular and this allows their contents to be
easily remixed in new ways using formal and informal metadata to make new
series (inside), and into other systems (outside).
Emergent as the relations that develop happen in situ, over time, and are not
predetermined. you storyboard an architecture of possibilities

23. uncertainty
Each of the systems deal with uncertainty in different ways.
In Korsakow it is the uncertainty of which clips will appear when (for maker and
audience). For Cowbird it is in what becomes related to what, how. In We Feel
Fine it is in what we find, how we find it, and what we take it to be.
This uncertainty is mitigated by the system and this is the role of the system (and
why it is a system). In Korsakow it is a form of pattern creation, in Cowbird that
patterns that can be formed are predefined by the rules of the system, while We
Feel Fine creates patterns by the provision of prior rules (a dictionary).
This uncertainty matters, and each has a different response to how to constrain
and enframe this uncertainty.

24. the two faces of the centre of indetermination
This uncertainty also means that each of these works and systems can be
experienced as a centre of indetermination. As they revolve around and are
grounded within an interface this becomes their centre, and what happens there
is indeterminate.
This indetermination faces two ways. One is inwards, towards its own material
and involves the poetics of networked making. This is about developing and
making a framework that allows patterns to be formed, without constraining what
actually appears (much like the sonnet defines a specific pattern without
declaring in advance specific content).
The second faces outwards, towards us, the users which is how we experience
the work and is the realm of experience and interaction design.
These two facets of indetermination are the basis of multilinearity.

25. the sensory motor schema
Being a centre of indetermination we can see, using Bergson and Deleuze, that
they participate in a sensory motor schema of perception, indecision/decision,
and action. (We notice, we must decide, and this decision must be realised or
expressed through an action we perform.)
I notice, I then need to decide, and this decision must be realised through action.
Such works are then closely aligned to Deleuze’s movement image.
From this we can see a strong affinity between multilinear interactive works and
the cinema of the movement image, suggesting they are not so very far apart
after all.

26. the affect image
In Deleuze’s tripartite schema the movement image consists of the perception,
action and affect image. The first is about noticing, the second the action that is
the result of noticing — I see the other character looking at the gun (perception),
we both decide to grab it (action).
Affect is what lies between, and for Deleuze works that are in the ‘register’ of the
affect image enlarge and slow down narrative’s drive towards closure, towards
responding to what has been noticed.
This suggests that multilinear nonfiction work is well suited (naturally orientated
towards) affect, which becomes the poetic, associative, and indeterminate.
This would seem to suggest that these works align themselves to the affect
image.

27. abstracted abstract (3)
Through an examination of some current online services, and the Korsakow
system, we can see that there are digital nonfiction practices being invented that
are facilitated by ready access to means of making and distributing, and that
these systems leverage the qualities of the minor, curatorial, intimate, distributed
and emergent.
From this we can see the attributes that documentary tools need in digital
networked contexts. We can also see that such ‘tools’ can be thought of as
systems to allow for the creation of affective assemblages.
The work is grounded in a sophisticated theory driven critical practice of
networked making.