a looking-glass book

marc davis @ ucla

his talk brought up a lot of interesting points for me.

at first, i was excited by the idea of a better and easier toolset to use to create videos. this soon soured as i realized he was looking to mass produce video for the masses.

i will agree that everyone has the right to create video, just as everyone has the right to create poems or paintings or writings.

does this mean that everyone has the right to have said work published and available for comsumption? does the idea of having 500,000 channels or millions of videos created a day worry anoyone else? i cant keep up with the world now. what happens when we have too much data? when every single person thinks their life story is all important?

i am not trying to sound elitest. i am concerned of oversaturation of media. too much and not enough of it being quality. kurt and i spoke at length in the parking lot. how do we ensure quality work? (example: virtually no high school english class covers material post-1970. im sure there are a variety of reasons for this, but i fail to believe that one of them isnt that there is a huge glut of work out there since 1970. how do we determine what is good when even the most popular books are outsold on a regular basis by a single issue of a magazine?)

on top of this, how do we create a great set of tools which will allow videos to be made easier and more quickly without creating pre-packed mass appeal crap? is it possible?

video hasnt skyrocketed yet because of the equipment and complications involved to make a high quality piece. it take a lot of people, a lot of time and a decent chunk of change still. what is the incentive to allowing it to evolve into a solitary artform that can be done for virtually no budget?

when you have that much media being create, who will watch it? how can we approach video (or any time based media) so that it can be absorbed in fragments. looking a photo might only take me 30 seconds, but to watch a video, odds are it will take much longer. the closest solution to this puzzle piece i have seen is viola's pieces at the getty. you could look, leave and come back and see the difference. in 'reinventing' how we view video do we need to throw away narrative to be able to get a similar enjoyment out of it (similar to traditional studio art)?

many many thoughts (including a statement i find slightly absurd: 'we should teach video/video editing to everyone in school' [there are so many other things i consider more important; it seems egotistical to assume video as one of the most important things a person could learn...i think logic skills and storytelling on a more generic level would be much more useful than straight filmic communication.])