In the summer term 09 I offer a seminar on Visual Sampling as a cultural practice at the media science course at University of Siegen, Germany.
“Digital Media offer the discrete description of cultural products, every composition of images, sounds and words can be deconstructed into zeros and ones. The recontextulization of the small entities of meaning (sample/loop) to a new remix is mostly known from music, especially DJing. In this course the perspective on sampling will be expanded and focussed onto the visual aspects of the matter.
The medium Internet hasd changed the circumstances for remix works. Archives like YouTube provide an unlimted memory of forms, from which the remixer draws both his inspiration and his material. Besides this changes in production and distribution we will also discover the social processes of the web, because the dynamics of the remix culture are influenced by referencing onto each others works.”
Get more info about my work at the University on www.multimediale-systeme.de
Together with Mirko Kubein I produced a Popkomm webvideo special for Electronic Beats. Electronic Beats is a platform for electronic music and lifestyle which is run by T-Mobile. We did the whole package from concept and editorial supervision to production and post.
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I posted my most favourite clip featuring the extraordinary Zeigeist from Sweden here. Check the other clips at Electronic Beats.
Starting this semester I hold a seminar at University of Siegen on the subject “The Moving Web - New Forms of visual Net Aesthetics” together with my colleague and good friend Sascha Simons.
We’ll start the course with a formal analysis of principles of construction, visual language and cultural effects of a new audiovisual net aethetics (e.g. nonlinear, interactive logics of narration or the convergence with established form languages). Later on, the students will write concepts for new web video formats and realize them.
Some of the subjects will be:
Web Video: Case-Analysis – Forms, formats & genres.
From the Movies to Graphical User Interface and back.
Anne Friedberg „The virtual Window - From Alberti to Microsoft“.
How becomes video visible on the net? Platforms and logocs of presentation.
New forms of storytelling and aesthetics in editorial formats
Genuine Aesthetics? Non-Linearity and Self-Reflexivity
To learn more about my work at the chair for “Theorie und Praxis multimedialer Systeme” at the University of Siegen check www.multimediale-systeme.de.
Sonic Acts XII - the Cinematic Experience is a festival/conference, taking place in Amsterdam from 21-24 of february 2008. Besides a conference, screenings, performances and an exhibition they’ll have a publication which has an interview with me in it! It discusses how the Internet changes the cinematic experience both in terms of distribtion and artist’s production experiences. You can order the publication here.
On the occasion of the twelfth Sonic Acts festival, Boris Debackere and Arie Altena edited a multi-faceted book with nine essays and ten interviews dealing with various aspects of the cinematic experience. The book focuses as much on theories of the cinematic experience, as it does on the practice of artists working in the fields of cinema, contemporary media art and sound. It shows how artists develop their work and theories on the cinematic experience, using different technologies and materials, and offers a many-sided theoretical journey into the history, present and future of the magic we call cinema.
A new article for the german print magazine PAGE (issue 01/08).
I presented some projects which remix user generated content as a data resource for creative projects and by this create new web aethetics.
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SimonSchwarz.org is my new playground for experimental projects.
Expect some progressive experiments soon!
The Website is not finished yet, but you can check out the brand new showreel!
Exclusive soundtrack by jsaal.
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I edited the new Showreel for the Berlin based actress Daniela Schulz.
Among others she was appearing in Tatort and Soko Wismar lately.
Brussels based ARGOS centre for Media and Art organized a conference on VIDEO VORTEX: Responses to YouTube. I was invited and held a talk on “The Artist Moving through the Web - new forms of Artists’ production and distribution on the Internet.”
It was a very inspiring conference!
Thanks to Stoffel, Maria, Adre, Bram and the whole team at ARGOS for the wonderful weekend!
“Over the past years the moving image has claimed an increasingly prominent place on the internet. Thanks to a wide range of technologies and web applications it has become possible, not only to record and distribute video, but to edit and remix it on-line as well. With this world of possibilities within reach of a multitude of social actors, the potential of video as a personal means of expression has arrived at a totally new dimension. How is this potential being used? How do artists and activists react to the popularity of YouTube and other ‘user-generated-content’ websites? What is the impact of the availability of massive on-line images and sound databases on aesthetics and narrativity? How is Cinema, as an art form and experience, influenced by the development of widely spreading internet practices? What does YouTube tell us about the state of art in visual culture? And how does the participation culture of video-sharing and vlogging reach some degree of autonomy and diversity, escaping the laws of the mass media and the strong grip of media conglomerates?”
Speakers are JOHAN GRIMONPREZ, PETER HORVATH, LEV MANOVICH, ANA KRONSCHNABL & TOMAS RAWLINGS, ADRIAN MILES, SIMON RUSCHMEYER, KEITH SANBORN, PETER WESTENBERG.
I wrote an article for the german print magazine PAGE (issue 10/07) on the influence of the web on movie distribution and marketing.
The article orginates from Four Eyed Monsters, the first full feature film on YouTube and, and broades the perspective to a general discussion om internet marketing and distribution for former cinema releases.
Moving Web is a blog I started accompanying my diploma thesis on the covergence of movin media and the Internet. It has grown into a lively discussion platform for progressive trends and developments, where I continue my research in the field of web video.
Moving web is a place to share thoughts about all forms of moving content on the web. As bandwidth keeps growing, the internet will converge with the moving media: film, tv & video.
Therefore the Internet as a textbased information medium seems to be the past - moving web explores the future possibilities of the internet as a more immersive entertainment medium. We choose a rather broadly based perspective on the theme of motion on the web: Flash Video, Mobile Web, WebTV, Viral Video, Interactive Narration - all these phenomena are discussed with the emphasis on how moving content will change the web.