51 HAPPENING Video Vortex
Words by Neal Romanek
VORTEX IN THE MEDITERRANEAN This year’s Video Vortex conference in Malta was a chance to think deeply about our (really quite bizarre) video-centric world
hile the sun blazed over Malta’s capital Valetta, inside the cool vaults of Spazju Kreattiv arts complex, Video
angle lens of most phones creates an illusion of greater distance). She noted that more people die in selfie photography than in war photography, and for some reason Croatia is a hotspot for these bizarre fatal accidents. Ultimately, it is impossible to reproduce in an image the fullness of the human visual field, or the ongoing assemblage of details that ultimately makes up our visual frame of reference – something much more like an endless series of rapid close- ups than a single, wide VR-like field. Dino Zhang, in his presentation ‘A Theory of Livestreaming Video’, looked for international unities in streaming culture, studying streamers from both West and East Asia. In his research, Zhang looked particularly at live streamers on Chinese streaming platform Douyu, over months, watching how their audiences ebbed and flowed. And while streaming is big, he concluded that live streaming was a fully mature industry – “[It’s] very industrialised; there are companies now who train live streamers”. The truth is that streaming viewership is restricted to a very small number of people. Most streamers have little or no audience at all, while a few command most of the numbers. Zhang also noted the preponderance of what he called ‘hydrographic’ language in talking about online video: ‘streams’, work ‘flows’, data ‘lakes’, and YouTube’s
Vortex XII convened academics, artists and technologists from all over the globe to discuss the online video world, over four days in September. Video Vortex began as an offshoot of the Institute for Network Cultures, founded 15 years ago by Dutch media activist and writer Geert Lovink. The Institute for Network Cultures created Video Vortex as a way to examine the rapidly changing digital media landscape, and also holds frequent conferences on the future of alternative currency models as part of a programme called MoneyLab. The purpose of Video Vortex is to look deeply into issues around streaming media and to explore what they might mean for the future, socially, technologically and economically. Many participants are academics, from a variety of disciplines, presenting papers on their specialities. Topics include the deeply esoteric, such as the presentation by Ana Peraica, art historian and author of Culture of the Selfie , who explored the implications of the mental and physical distortions of space that happen in a self-obsessed world. She points to the literal confusion about space and distance that happens when excited selfie-takers unexpectedly walk off a cliff or ledge behind them (the wide-
MORE PEOPLE DIE IN SELFIE PHOTOGRAPHY THAN IN WAR PHOTOGRAPHY
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