Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2001 12:38:47 +0100
From: Honor Harger
Subject: bandwidth aesthetics
Hi all,
Just wanted to add my two cents worth to the streaming media thread ....
>I second Simon’s idea about an online interface to streaming media
>(de)construction. Bits of this are cropping up in artist projects as
>well as high bandwidth, virtual editing suites, and it would be an
>interesting effort for AFI.
I think this is a really interesting point. The notion of interface obviously came up a lot during net.congestion , the festival I helped to organise (alongside Adam Hyde, Eric Kluitenberg, David Garcia and others) in Amsterdam last year. In order to best try and present a range of streaming media projects - artists works, documentaries, films and sound works - we created a database / interface called ‘the media bank’. ‘the media bank’ was built on top of code which r a d i o q u a l i a have used to construct the ‘frequency clock’ system , but was developed to optimise the viewing of projects for this festival situation.
One issue which will inevitably arise if you are planning on building an interface to present streaming media works is the problem of conflicting codecs. Codec literally stands for Compress-Decompress, and is the term used to describe the method of compression necessary for creating streaming media files. As many of you will know there are three key proprietry streaming architectures available (Real Networks, WindowsMedia, Quicktime), all of whom use a dizzying array of codecs (Real have a whole family of audio and video codecs, WindowsMedia use their ASF codec, and Quicktime use a whole variety of codecs, presently favouring the Sorenson codec for video). Added to this is the various MPEG based architectures, which also have their own players and encoders.
There is no Player available which can support all of the main codecs. Players developed by Real, Apple or Microsft are obviously optimised to play their own codecs. Custom-designed players, such as the ones r a d i o q u a l i a have developed, or the elegant ‘FreeB92 Player’ (developed for Belgrade based radio station, B92), generally have to favour one family of codecs, eg Real, rather than being able to support several codecs.
This creates an interesting challenge for the ‘streaming media curator’. Having to deal with many different files formats, and no single play-back mechanism can be a tricky proposition. Presenting a great range of streaming media material, which uses many codecs, via a single interface is very difficult. The computer playing back streaming media files needs to have the Players from all three architectures installed in order to ensure that works created in each format are able to be played. This makes the proposition of creating an attractive, well designed cohesive interface a very diffuicult task (as we discovered at net.congestion). Though some streaming media files can be embedded into web pages (Real files for instance), and played back via a webpage, using the Players as plugins, this is not possible with all streaming files.
So best of luck to the AFI in coming up with an intelligent solution to this issue ;-)
Also, I wanted to pick up from where Simon and Julie left off in the discussion of:
>
>Looking at the so-called “high and low aesthetic” issues
> from independent
> >artists to industry makers could be in the mix. Thoughts?
I think that there is work being developed within the streaming media art community which creates some interesting food for thought on these issues. Perhaps this is an obvious point for most people, but I feel its important to note that streaming media is not merely being used in an artistic context to create online versions of existing ‘offline’ sound or film work. In much the same way as we saw the architecture and language of the internet being reconfigured in the ‘site-specific’ works of jodi, Alexei Shulgin, Vuk Cosic and co. between 95 - 97, I think now streaming is likewise producing works which are entirely specific to the medium.
Artists creating video and audio work to be streamed online have to bear the limitations of the media (bandwidth, codecs, buffering etc) very much in mind during the creation of their work. They have to work with, rather than against, the characteristics of the media. This creates all sorts of interesting challenges, and the resulting works can tell us more about streaming media as a creative medium. In the work ‘RGB’ by Heiko Daxl for instance, we see an artist working with the jerky movement and limited colour handling of the media, to create a piece which seems perfectly adapted to low-band delivery. Similiarly, in Lev Manovich’s ‘Little Movies Vol.1: microcinema: cinema for the early Net’, circa 1994 , we see the artist (perhaps ironically) configuring a type of cinema specifically for viewing at low-bandwidths. His ‘new’ project ‘Anna and Andy: a Streaming Novel | Emotional Movie Engine’ is an different kind of exploration into the aesthetics and structure of streaming media. ‘Anna and Andy’ uses a basic mathematical algorithm called ‘pattern matching’ to create connections between the novel ‘Anna Karenina’, and Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests.
Through these projects, and many others, I think its possible to see something emerging that we at net.congestion referred to as ‘bandband aesthetics’. We saw these kinds of explorations as being fundamentally linked to a trajectory of investigation dating back to the work of video artists from the 1960s and early 70s. As we all know, many artists during this period exploited the technical limitations of video technology in creative ways - for example Joan Jonas in the iconic ‘Vertical Roll’ - leading to the development of aesthetic trends within video art. We posited the question in our panel ‘Bandwidth Aesthetics’: can a critical investigation of the formal and aesthetic qualities of streaming media reveal similar idiosyncrasies? Do the current characteristics of narrow-band streaming constitute a particular streaming media aesthetic?
I think when considering the curatorial challenges of working with streaming media, its worth bringing raising questions like this.
Best wishes
Honor Harger
Webcasting Curator, Education & Interpretation Tate Modern
honor.harger@tate.org.uk