- AUDIOVISUAL PRACTICES -
an introduction to the Audiovisual Bazar in Romania - Timisoara
Eclectic Tech Carnival 2006
brought to you by xname!

-machines and media
-language and communication
-audiovisual language (receiving and producing it)
-still images: working with layers and old-style animations (gimp)
-image sequence as animation and video manipulation
-movement and illusion
-interaction between audio and video: the audiovisual affection
-layer as a digital/practical concept and the semiotic parallel guideline
-audio editing basics (audacity)
-layers and non-liner editing in video
-definitions and methods of editing: linear, non-linear, procedural
-real-time video
-open publishing / input-output / upload-download
-streaming
-the net ubiquity
-a coin in the hat
-links

Computers are machines.
Machines can be creative. Creativity is not only a matter of art and galleries.
Creating is a possibility to express ourselves and produce content, culture.
When we work with machines we interpolate our creativity with the medium's possibilities. Every tool we use is a medium. Our hands are media. We are media.
Social media, human media, trans-local media, multidimensional media.
Creation goes through us and our prosthesis, and we work as tools, collectors. Communication starts when there is a language. A language provide transport of produced sense from a medium to the other, between persons, between machines, between disciplines. Communication describes and modifies society.
It gives voice to the critical anima facing the transformation of reality.
Our way of filtering, interpreting and projecting what we perceive is influenced by the languages we invent and use.
The level of consciousness of the power of languages we can achieve makes us aware citizens and active elements of a social change (i do not mean, here, a specific social change connected to a project or a revolution or a reform. Change here means the normality flux of things, that are never static but always progressing a continuous metamorphosis).
Nowadays, everything that exists is real, and the distinction between 'virtual entity' and 'real entity' does not refers any more to an ontologic value.
So, beside a technical description as virtual or real (digital or material), the distinction is out of date.

The audiovisual language is widely spoken in the contemporary world.
Understanding the way it works and the mechanisms of our reception is a re-appropriation of context and a mutation of position.
From the target status we upgrade to a critical conversing stadium.
That implies the possibility to interact and produce original sense.

The audiovisual is complex language. It develops in time. It overlays different layers: the visual and the acoustic layers, two different experiences forming a third one.
The result is not the sum of the two. There is an affection effect of the sound on the image, and a transformative deformation of the image on the sound. That is illusion. Think of all the cinema: the movement we normally see projected on the big screens, does not exist.
There is a sequence of still images, in case of the 24 mm cinema it is a 24 frames per second, in video it is 25 in Europe and 29 in Usa.
So the movement is happening in our eyes, it is not real but perceived.
Another illusion is coming from the interaction between audio and video.
A simple trick to face this is this: change the audio track of a fragment of a film!
The sentimental tone of the story, the sense of the images will change.

Movement is an illusory thing that is happening in time.
But there is more. The iconographic tradition, and the history of art and painting thought that there is movement, and narration, also inside a single still image.

It is important to consider all of these phenomena and layers when we analyze and produce and audiovisual product.

Simple digital audio trackers, image manipulation softwares and video editing programs have a basic concept in common: they use layers and juxtaposition as a transformative creative method of production. The digitalization of the existence has this great value: it permits the parallel of disciplines and practices that were considered very different and divided in the past.
For example, the idea of producing images from sound and sound from images was a big struggle dream since the XVIII century, and earlier. That became a quite banal digital practice today.

There are three main known ways of making video-editing, that are, in chronological order: linear, non liner and procedural video editing.
Linear editing is the analogic way of doing it: you have, for example, 3 tapes that recorded the same scene from different angles. You want to cut up the different perspectives and drop out the boring parts. With an analogue mixer and 3 players, you play them contemporarily and record what you want with a third recorder attached to the output of the mixer. As well you can do that live, having a mixer and 3 cameras filming a situation. This is online live editing.

Non linear editing is the method used at the moment by all of the video editing softwares that are around. You capture from a tape the clips you need from different tapes, and store them in a library with different bins collecting the scenes. You put them on the timeline, using different layers, and start cutting and manipulating.

Procedural video editing is video scripting. You write a code that defines a sequence of effects, in and out points, interpolations and chains of commands. The code, not your eyes and your audiovisual perception is determining the final output.
After some time and practice, i guess, the code can become predictable as a physical experience.

Digital practices are 'time based arts'.
The 'timeline' is a fundamental concept that structures most of the multimedia softwares we use in this mediated contemporary world.
It applies to audio, graphics and video. It is also a basic concept of the modern semiotic philosophy .
The idea of progression and street journey in the production, reception and modification of sense is the base of the actual speculation.

An audiovisual can be done in many ways. Hight fidelity is a commercial false dogma.
You can do a lot without tools. The best way you have to output your content is to use what you have.
You can use text, any software, the very evocative pencil, a scanner, the best video-camera on the market, your hands, a recording of your voice, a reversed audio track, the sound of a washing machine, a scream, a noise from the television when you move the antenna, a collage, a piece of toilette paper, a newspaper, images found online, your blood.
Everything can be source material of your work, better if you know already what you want to say (but do not stop yourself from pointless, non-sense experiment!).
The first step, once you have your ingredients, is to input them in a machine. That process is the digitalization.
Once you collected all of your ingredients, and they have now a new existential state, the digital substance, you are ready to enjoy!

It is very important, in any creative process, to be able to identify the moment when a work is ready. It is not so different from cooking a special dish, or a plate of pasta. A work should be refined in details, and details have a big role in an audiovisual product. But is also important not to cook it too much, or all of the flavors would be smashed and chopped together.

When a work is done, it is still prisoner inside a machine: it is the moment to output.
There are different ways and reasons for outputting a work: you can do it for publishing and for back-up.
A video work can be back-upped on a tape, on a cd-rom, on a cd, on a dvd, on an external disc ...
A very interesting method of publishing, or open publishing, is the upload.
Uploading and sharing your productions is a way to learn more from what you did, face the feed-back you get and become part of a community. The possibility of auto-publishing is a very new, contemporary practice that can describe the reality we live as a very different environment compared to the past. That possibility was not there before. Distribution and fruition contexts changed significantly during the last twenty years.

Another very contemporary audiovisual practice that can describe the modification of real is 'streaming'.
Streaming is (in very, very simple words) sending out a continuous flux of data through the net. This flow is received and decoded locally by a player on a receiving machine an physically outputted as audio or audio-visual show.
This is a new form of radio and television. Streaming is a child that is not exactly the copy of the ancestor, but preserves some characteristics and presents new properties. These different forms are not necessarily one the substitution of the other, they can coexist and cooperate.
A video or audiovisual signal is compressed (passed by an algorithm that describes it in 'less words': the amount of data becomes smaller and can travel faster and slimmer on the net), sent (on a server or directly to a user) , received and decompressed somewhere else (it is like cryptic poetry, less words, more sense, more CPU/BRAIN energy to understand it, interpret the meaning that is collapsed inside and make sense out of it). The synthetic has a symbolic value.

Links:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Video
http://archive.org/
http://ngvision.org/
http://www.youtube.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_media
hhttp://montevideo.dyne.org/releases/video-streaming-on-wan.pdf

Eleonora Maria Irene Oreggia (c) 2006

Appendix and Thoughts:

story telling:
_do you have something to say??? MESSAGE
_choose a language MEDIUM

movement=
something is moving into the frame =actor
the camera is moving
or zooming

it is very important to take a look at it because editing is playing with this space made alive by time

the movement is created by the difference between frames.
it is a magical illusion
every video is a sequence of still images

all video in this sense is animation

a beautiful language, you can say what you want

you can start to imagine a still frame

edit on a rhythm
this doesn't mean on music
visual language has his own rhythmic
even a single frame

i usually prefer to define this tempo with a silent listening of my eyes
but you can also build a vision on sound, music, noises...

each method is functioning for both films and animations

but the sound has deforming power on images

the audiovisual form of communication is spread and massive nowadays
understanding it is a way for reflecting on society
because reality is existing in a fictitious way.
the show is strong, sometimes stronger than what is authentic
the reflex can modify the reference
to take possession of a language to express
trying to be conscious and not only consumer

technology is fantastic because you can be free
to create your imagination

working with video today is easy,
few time ago the technical equipment was very expansive

video was analog
now it is digital
also at the cinemas

analog is impression, there is a kind of touch between video and world
a digital image is a logical description
the world is captured and rebuilt, simulated

the output= cinema television internet

today internet is an easy way to publish yourself on a worldwide context
the old style cinema is a kind of hierarchic bureaucracy
a slow and expansive pyramidal machine, a giant

the net is an organism without head or heart
his growth is not controllable because it is anti-centric, spontaneous

audiovisuals exercises:

-change the audio of a clip and see the difference
-try to create movement from still images (download)
-describe a body showing his own movement or moving the camera around it.
-describe your body without showing it, only with your movement.
-describe your body as a collection of parts
-choose a simple action and describe it in two different ways: with a single shot, or with a sequence
maintain the same duration and check the impression of velocity

space and time

they can be continuous or fragmented