Public Lecture: “Video Spheres and Bubbles” @ VideoVortex#7 Yogyakarta

VideoVortex#7 Yogyakarta opens  with Andreas Treske (Yasar University, Turkey) giving a  public lecture at Sanata Dharma University, in the morning of July 18th, 2011. Treske began his lecture on “Video Spheres and Bubbles” by embarking video networks as a form of sphere, an architecture imbued by today’s proliferation of telecommunication and other audiovisual technologies. By touching on the different accounts weaving through tensions between video images and  technological transformations  (cinematic, television, computer to mobile devices) from visual and digital theorists like Lev Manovich, Peter Greenaway etc. Treske arrived at the questions on how to build a theory of video, and its potential extension to  theorizing online video.

Extending Tom Sherman criticism to Nam June Paik’s statement on video’s linear nature (in Geert Lovink and Sabine Nederer,2008)  saying that video has gone from total opacity to complete transparency in the last 40 years,Treske underlined  how the tendency of changes to content and forms of videos is increasingly dramatic in relation to the shrinking of the screen and personalizing features such as tapping as the celebrated form of human-technology interactivity. The new media-viewing experience  is further complicated  by the ability to network, share and map video to question not only about the forms of content but also of “where”.

Here Treske returns to Peter Sloterdijk’s notion of spheres or bubbles, to rethink video as an “artificial sphere of existence” – this sphere and its inner and outer views, its visible and invisible relations. By the delivery of viewer not just closer to, but inside of the media, and vice versa (namely immersive media)  Treske offered potential escapes for artists in their tactical engagement with homogenizing tendencies of capitalist media. Meanwhile, the implements of Sloterdijk’s notion of sphere to the fields of video remain a challenge the latter’s  potential as a mode of practice, or in Treske’s words while  closing his lecture: “When does video become a practice? How is the digital video image created?”

The second part of the lecture,- the Q & A Session, is held outdoor, under the Soekarno Banyan Tree located  at the center of IRB Campus,  Sanata Dharma University. In this session, questions popping out from the audience to test out Treske’s philosophical  provocations in local and regional contexts where the (re-)turn of classical (Western) cinema techniques as well as usage of evidential media within these settings are still prominent. The discussion expanded to the forms of appropriation in video forms crisscrossing different trajectories of cultural, historical and technological directions, in Indonesia, Turkey and Europe, akin to  Deleuze and Guatarri’s outline of ‘smooth-space’, which was also cited by Treske in the closing of his public lecture in proposing another ‘escape’ through the necessary distinction of  ‘optical and haptic’ visuality.

The VideoVortex#7 is currently happening until 22 July 2011. For daily programs and reports:

Check http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/videovortex/7-yogyakarta-2

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