Evil Media
Submitted by Pocketcine on November 27, 2006 - 4:43pm.
About a year ago, when I was asked to define what I meant by "mobile viral video," I offered what I thought was a commonly accepted definition. "An outrageous and contagious short funny video made for mobile playback."
I was quite surprised to hear almost the same words last week from somebody reviewing the emerging body of work the Pocketcine project has produced. Commenting on the three or four videos I presented, this person told the group she did not think any of the videos she had seen fitted that description. Plus she complained about the music.
My critic had ignored the fact I eschewed the term "viral video" at the start of my presentation, in favor of the broader description "social media." I am not sure anybody has coined the definition of that new term, but I see it as containing a distribution paradigm that is much closer to the way short videos with mobility travel. Inherent in the notion of viral video is that it is serially viewed, passed around like a bad flu bug from person to person until it has run its course. But social media implies a video that sparks debate and interaction within a social network. In this case, the medium is not the message. There is no message. There is a WIP, a "Work In Progress" that is meant to spark discussion and invite participation. I'll show you what I mean.
One of the videos I showed to the group was called "Evil Rainbow." I placed it on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqVKFACKYrE). YouTube has become a kind of public bulletin board for videos and other media. People use YouTube as point of distribution to other websites or forums. People are putting their portfolios up there, using YouTube as a media server on their own sites, as a way of sharing personal experiences with friends and family, as a point of distribution for propaganda that would not be accepted by corporate media, and so on.
At the time of this writing, Evil Rainbow has received ten comments and 7 ratings. But the most amazing response to Evil Rainbow has been from somebody called "Squidish." Squidish responded to the YouTube video by creating his own "talking head" video that reviewed the strengths and weaknesses of the piece. Squidish hails from another Internet artistic forum called "Deviant Art." The artist who did Evil Rainbow, Newel Anderson, had posted a still from the video on Deviant Art and re-directed people to YouTube. There were twelve comments on the Evil Rainbow on Deviant Art. Nineteen comments in all...
Another person commenting on Evil Rainbow said that they were going to tell friends about the video. This is the essence of social media: one friend or associate passing a reference to media to another.
So far the audience for Evil Rainbow is tiny, but I consider the quality and depth of the response to the video to be the most interesting part of the experiment that Pocketcine funded by commissioning Newel to create Evil Rainbow. I had told him to explore the medium on its own terms without preconceptions about what would work or not work. My own opinion is that the interactions between the evil female carnivore and blue male rabbit don't quite gel into a story, but the creepy atmosphere created by the original soundtrack and stark Flash vector art makes Evil Rainbow an entertaining work of art. It just may be the best experimental project so far. It is definitely not funny and perhaps not even contagious or outrageous. But it is a conversation piece among the group of artists who hang out at Deviant Art, creating dialog and perhaps...just maybe...helping to define what social media is.
A few days after I got the thumbs down from my critic at the meeting where I presented Evil Rainbow, I was contacted by a cable station in Washington DC, asking permission to air it. When I phoned Newel to tell him of this, he was excited. Not by the opportunity for its television debut. But rather, because of Evil Rainbow Newel had just landed him a contract to create a rapper video for MTV.
Okay, what the story I have just told illustrates is that medium is indeed viral, but not in the way my pundit suggested so authoritatively. Like a great many works of art on YouTube and on specialist art forums, Evil Rainbow was fully embraced as a WIP. Just like the Pocketcine project itself.
I had originally hired Newel to produce the 1-minute YouTube commercial for the "Worst Case Scenarios" contest now running in bookstores across Canada. Newel had been focussed on illustration at the time and had never heard of social media or mobile viral videos. He fell in love with the medium working on the commercial and then the Evil Rainbow experimental piece. And now he was a full time motion media artist. Chalk that up as a real fulfillment of our project mandate.
What I had set out to do with the Pocketcine project was to introduce the medium to artists and encourage their exploration of the medium. I was convinced that the innovations in the medium would come from the artists not the pundits or research analysts. Evil Rainbow validates that approach.
I recently saw an ad from the maker of Internet routers, Cisco, in which they presented their business as enabling "the social network." The social network is the means by which people engage in those activities that are both necessary and pleasurable to humans, whether experienced directly or through virtual means. So far my money is on the view that mobile video will play a role in the social network, encouraging dialog and social interaction rather than being a passive form of entertainment. On Deviant Art you can download the artwork to the mobile phone. Presumably this allows you to carry the work of art into other contexts, like restaurants or elevators, and other places where people congregate to engage in mutual stimulation. That's a dimension of social media I am very interested in persuing further. Stay tuned.
I was quite surprised to hear almost the same words last week from somebody reviewing the emerging body of work the Pocketcine project has produced. Commenting on the three or four videos I presented, this person told the group she did not think any of the videos she had seen fitted that description. Plus she complained about the music.
My critic had ignored the fact I eschewed the term "viral video" at the start of my presentation, in favor of the broader description "social media." I am not sure anybody has coined the definition of that new term, but I see it as containing a distribution paradigm that is much closer to the way short videos with mobility travel. Inherent in the notion of viral video is that it is serially viewed, passed around like a bad flu bug from person to person until it has run its course. But social media implies a video that sparks debate and interaction within a social network. In this case, the medium is not the message. There is no message. There is a WIP, a "Work In Progress" that is meant to spark discussion and invite participation. I'll show you what I mean.
One of the videos I showed to the group was called "Evil Rainbow." I placed it on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqVKFACKYrE). YouTube has become a kind of public bulletin board for videos and other media. People use YouTube as point of distribution to other websites or forums. People are putting their portfolios up there, using YouTube as a media server on their own sites, as a way of sharing personal experiences with friends and family, as a point of distribution for propaganda that would not be accepted by corporate media, and so on.
At the time of this writing, Evil Rainbow has received ten comments and 7 ratings. But the most amazing response to Evil Rainbow has been from somebody called "Squidish." Squidish responded to the YouTube video by creating his own "talking head" video that reviewed the strengths and weaknesses of the piece. Squidish hails from another Internet artistic forum called "Deviant Art." The artist who did Evil Rainbow, Newel Anderson, had posted a still from the video on Deviant Art and re-directed people to YouTube. There were twelve comments on the Evil Rainbow on Deviant Art. Nineteen comments in all...
Another person commenting on Evil Rainbow said that they were going to tell friends about the video. This is the essence of social media: one friend or associate passing a reference to media to another.
So far the audience for Evil Rainbow is tiny, but I consider the quality and depth of the response to the video to be the most interesting part of the experiment that Pocketcine funded by commissioning Newel to create Evil Rainbow. I had told him to explore the medium on its own terms without preconceptions about what would work or not work. My own opinion is that the interactions between the evil female carnivore and blue male rabbit don't quite gel into a story, but the creepy atmosphere created by the original soundtrack and stark Flash vector art makes Evil Rainbow an entertaining work of art. It just may be the best experimental project so far. It is definitely not funny and perhaps not even contagious or outrageous. But it is a conversation piece among the group of artists who hang out at Deviant Art, creating dialog and perhaps...just maybe...helping to define what social media is.
A few days after I got the thumbs down from my critic at the meeting where I presented Evil Rainbow, I was contacted by a cable station in Washington DC, asking permission to air it. When I phoned Newel to tell him of this, he was excited. Not by the opportunity for its television debut. But rather, because of Evil Rainbow Newel had just landed him a contract to create a rapper video for MTV.
Okay, what the story I have just told illustrates is that medium is indeed viral, but not in the way my pundit suggested so authoritatively. Like a great many works of art on YouTube and on specialist art forums, Evil Rainbow was fully embraced as a WIP. Just like the Pocketcine project itself.
I had originally hired Newel to produce the 1-minute YouTube commercial for the "Worst Case Scenarios" contest now running in bookstores across Canada. Newel had been focussed on illustration at the time and had never heard of social media or mobile viral videos. He fell in love with the medium working on the commercial and then the Evil Rainbow experimental piece. And now he was a full time motion media artist. Chalk that up as a real fulfillment of our project mandate.
What I had set out to do with the Pocketcine project was to introduce the medium to artists and encourage their exploration of the medium. I was convinced that the innovations in the medium would come from the artists not the pundits or research analysts. Evil Rainbow validates that approach.
I recently saw an ad from the maker of Internet routers, Cisco, in which they presented their business as enabling "the social network." The social network is the means by which people engage in those activities that are both necessary and pleasurable to humans, whether experienced directly or through virtual means. So far my money is on the view that mobile video will play a role in the social network, encouraging dialog and social interaction rather than being a passive form of entertainment. On Deviant Art you can download the artwork to the mobile phone. Presumably this allows you to carry the work of art into other contexts, like restaurants or elevators, and other places where people congregate to engage in mutual stimulation. That's a dimension of social media I am very interested in persuing further. Stay tuned.
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