Excerpt
What a thrill to see the videos that Latin-American U2 fans have uploaded on the web. They show the same concerts of the U2 Vertigo tour as in the concert film ‘U23D’ I saw the evening before in the IMAX cinema in Brussels. It is said to be the first 3D multi-camera recording of a live event ever. This 85 minute immersive experience of tangible high definition, spectacular spidercam shots and graphic overlays contrasts highly with the ephemeral qualities of the short, handheld mobile phone ‘flix’ of Argentinian and Mexican teenagers. They both are signs of our times.
In one of these amateur videos we find our 15-year old cameraman laughing at the lens in extreme close-up, meanwhile joking to his friends. They’re all waiting for the kick-off of the long expected Vertigo tour concert of U2. Night has fallen, and he sweeps his phone 360 grades around: a generic camera movement to express exposition. We vaguely get an idea of the enormous mass of people gathered in the football stadium, an average of 100 000 people according to the ‘U23D’ website. We seem miles away from the stage. Now the blaring lights of this sports arena are turned off, and for a long time the Quicktime player shows nothing more but a black screen, if not for the dispersed glowing mobile screens, like dirty pixels. The start of the concert is pure ecstasy, and abstract: a distant light explosion and video walls popping up in the dark. The phone returns to his pocket, while much closer to the action the ‘U23D’ crew gets its multi-camera set rolling. To achieve the 3-D stereoscopical effect the concert is filmed simultaneously by a double camera apparatus, an apt metaphor for the multiple video practices I want to discuss here . . .
Unsteadicams
Distraction leaves room for cracks, something an immersive experience tries to avoid by any means. There’s room for ‘mental images’, another way of thinking about these hypersubjective vernacular videos. But on the web, these holes are filled with commercial noise. Maybe amateur videos will be hard to find in the future. You discover a lot more television reports, promotional footage and trailers when you search webplatforms on video footage of the Vertigo tour. Which is the real trash? Found footage filmmakers also integrate commercials and corporate movies in their art works. Video networks do contain spoofs and parodies too. But when web video will evolve into smaller, more mobile and interactive units, this will surely increase as well the amount of commercial junk inserted into networks. Maybe it’s the impossibility of inserting commercials in songs, which makes pop music that subversive. Pop and rock iconography goes along with the turbulent character of the Internet. When Tiziana Terranova writes about the instability of the web, she goes against the neo-liberal imagination of the Internet as a place of smooth, friction-free and undisturbed transit. Spam, worms and other viruses cause unpredictable events of destruction and entropy. And the blogosphere of ‘pending friends’ and ‘empty inboxes’ shows up to be a sinister brakeland of nihilism, narcotism and loneliness.
The shaky images from handheld cameras fit well here. They scan the space, uncertain where to focus, like unstable steadicams. According to Wikipedia, a steadicam is a ‘stabilizing mount for a motion-picture camera, which mechanically isolates the operator’s movement from the camera, allowing a very smooth shot even when the operator is moving quickly over an uneven surface’. Mobile phone cams share these prosthetic qualities, but are today still lacking lens-stabilizing systems. The hi-tech of aerial or spider cameras owes a lot to these. Gyrostabilizers consist of compensating for the unfirm movements your body makes, by moving the lens in the other direction. ‘You shake one way, it shakes the other way’, briefly said. Maybe the network can be like an anti-shake apparatus. A movement in an opposite direction, which compensates for the commodification of manufactured music imagery. Networks leave traces on web videos, in a gesture that makes them vivid and free. I’ve lately added a video to my YouTube favorites of such a pure beauty. Amy Winehouse, sitting in a room singing, accompanied by an off-screen acoustic guitar. It’s an image that needs nothing more than a network.
Kesenne, Sarah.
On Gig Flix: A Stereoscopic View on the Multi-Camera Filming of Live Music in ‘U23D’ (2008) and its Fan Movie Counterparts on the Internet.
In Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer, eds. Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.
Related posts:
- Music Analysis Down the (You) Tube? Exploring the Potential of Cross-media Listening for the Music Classroom. body {background-repeat: no-repeat;}Abstract School students’ immersion in a rich entertainment...
- Media Consumption and Multi-tasking Continue to Increase Across TV, Internet, and Mobile. body {background-repeat: no-repeat;}From Nielsen’s Three Screen Report: Americans are increasing...
- Making Friends with Jarvis Cocker: Music Culture in the Context of Web 2.0. body {background-repeat: no-repeat;}Abstract The movement toward what has been described...
- The New Shape of Online Community: The Example of Swedish Independent Music Fandom. body {background-repeat: no-repeat;}Abstract Online groups are taking new forms as...
- The Internet and the 2008 Election. body {background-repeat: no-repeat;}Excerpt The 2008 election campaign has sparked unprecedented...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
