The Beached Whale

I decided to type this up in a word processor so I could keep track of the length, funny how it feels totally wrong to write in my ‘blogging voice’ when the page is MLA formatted. I never thought of my essays for coursework as being written in a stilted, unnatural style, but they’re certainly not how I write my blog, or emails, or posts on BricksInMotion, which tends to have more personality, and use contractions like a real person.

I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do for my final project for quite some time, though it didn’t really solidify into a clear, concise concept until we began discussing our projects in class. When I heard there was going to be a final project, I knew I would want to do something with video. I also thought the elemental, foretelling themes of Engelbart’s work would make for interesting subject matter.

Some time before this class I saw “I Met the Walrus” via a link on BricksInMotion and really liked the style of it, so when it came time to brainstorm for this project I wondered if a visual commentary of some kind of voiceover might be effective. I didn’t make the connection that I could use the audio from the Demo until later, however. From the standpoint of publishing it online, it was something I wanted to do but didn’t see much value in. My outlook on YouTube before this class was pretty skeptical; I use it a lot myself but primarily as a means of promoting my work to a larger audience, I didn’t think anything of serious, intellectual merit would be popular there unless for a reason other than this merit. For example, one of the most popular videos on my account is my short film “Unrenewable,” but most of the positive comments are about the visuals, it’s clear that a large portion of my mostly young audience (due to the use of LEGO) doesn’t understand the story. For every 10-15 comment asking about the technical process behind it, there is some kind of comment regarding the story or message behind the film, and there are a slim minority of well thought out, insightful comments. By contrast, messageboards where I’ve posted the film tend to have a more thoughtful group of people, who analyze it critically and discuss the themes (mostly stuff like capitalism and conservation) in it. I think part of this is due to the messageboard format being more conducive to real discussion, whereas on YouTube people are just looking for a bit of entertainment. Looking at the most popular videos on YouTube didn’t help my assessment of the site’s community.

I was a little surprised, then, that a video like ‘The Machine is Using Us’ had caught on, it’s certainly not pure entertainment and it’s not all that short either. It doesn’t enjoy the popularity of Fred or Charlie the Unicorn but the online video community clearly took some interest in it. I thought ‘The Machine is Using Us‘ was pretty inspiring and has an interesting concept and visual approach to it, it was certainly an influence on my own video project. I also thought Dr. Wesch’s Anthropological Introduction to YouTube was quite interesting, it did help me understand the YouTube community better, I had not thought of YouTube as much of a community website before. After all, many of the most popular videos became popular not through YouTube but by viral publishing on other websites –- the most influential being the smoke-filled back room that is 4chan, an online community of less than respectable reputation. (On a side note, Moot, the founder of 4chan, was recently voted the most influential person of 2009 in a TIME Magazine online poll. Guess they should have seen that coming. They didn’t honor the vote though, they ‘cheated’ him out of it instead.)

The in-class readings also helped formulate ideas for this project. Of course Engelbart’s work was important, but I tended to be more interested in the (briefly expressed) goals behind his work than the long technical explanations. As I mentioned in a previous blog, the Mother of All Demos itself would almost certainly not have any broad appeal, it’s 100 minutes of a computer scientist demonstrating highly technical processes and even though it is groundbreaking and impressive, the manner in which it’s presented is for the most part pretty dry unless you’re very interested in computer technology. I didn’t fully appreciate this until I watched the entire thing, at which point I became unsure of how I could condense it into 4-5 minutes. My solution was to try for a little bit of technical introduction to demonstrate how Engelbart’s system was similar to what we have today, but focus on the goals behind his work, something that’s important to emphasize because our use of computers has yet to reach the potential Engelbart had in mind.

Since early in the course I knew I would want my video to be based around some kind of animation; as the course progressed I realized it might be more meaningful with a modern, technological look – I wanted the video to look and sound like it was made on a computer, at least as it progresses. There is an emphasis on synthesized instruments in the music. The opening titles are modeled after the sloppy typewriter titles at the beginning of the original recording of the demonstration, followed by a Commodore 64 for the introductory question, the question that Engelbart asks very early in the demonstration and then answers for the rest of it: how much value could you derive from an augmentation system like what the HIRC was developing? Originally I had hoped to move the visualizations forward in time as the video progressed, but in the end I didn’t do this much beyond the intro and Commodore 64, going from there to a modern Windows look for the rest of the video. I didn’t want to rely purely on screencap footage, so I created animated transitions and some supplementary animated text (visually inspired by Worldle’s word clouds.) and of course the 3D at the end.

The decision to try to make the video look very computer-generated (normally the opposite of what I’m going for in my animated films!) ties into another important point of discussion in this class: it’s recursive! I wanted the whole video to be very tied to what it’s talking about, both in the visual / audio presentation and in the publication of the video to YouTube. Why?

The medium is the message. McLuhan’s words, but the idea in Engelbart’s demonstration is similar: he wants to show, rather than tell, what the HIRC has been working on. The whole demonstration uses an elaborate overlay system so that the viewers can see his computer system and him simultaneously on-camera. Having the video resemble what it is talking about isn’t just a neat gimmick it really does add another layer of meaning, or that’s the hope.

At the time of writing this post, the video has gathered 450 views and 15 comments. I joked before uploading it that my subscribers would probably be confused by it and make comments like “where are the legos,” but maybe I underestimated them. Most of the comments so far have been like the comments on Arturo’s images in that they’re short and not terribly insightful, but I am still surprised to see that these people were interested in my video and enjoyed it. I have 1,722 subscribers right now so hopefully this video will catch on a little more over the next several days, ideally I would like for it to get to an audience closer to what it was intended for. (I did submit it to Dr. Wesch’s account as a video response to ‘The Machine is Using Us,’ he had accepted two other video responses previously. Request still pending.) Then again, what Engelbart talks about in his demonstration is relevant to anybody who uses the computers on a regular basis, even if the HIRC’s goals have not been fully realized. If my video gets anybody interested in learning more about what Engelbart was talking about, then the (external, non grade-based) purpose of the video has been achieved.

The Mother of All Demos

~ by philip on April 28, 2009.