CONCEPT

VHS (originally short for Vertical Helical Scan, later Video Home System) was invented in the 1980s and allowed viewers to watch movies in their own home. It also gave us the technology to record and store content from broadcast television in a relatively cheap and accessible format. In 2007 the last Hollywood film was released on the medium, now mostly superceded by DVD. It is envisaged that VCR players will no longer be manufactured in the next twelve months. An era has ended. What was the VHS era?

The work of Ross Harley and Elvis Richardson has intersected in a number of exhibitions and publications dealing with questions of archives, storage, access and remix culture. They began to develop this new project as a way to bring together and investigate their respective VHS collections. Ross selectively recorded classic cinema [broadcast primarily on late night TV during the 1980/90’s] while Elvis amassed her collection by way of rubbish tips, garage sales and donations from friends in Canberra.

During their 3 week residency at Artspace Sydney, they developed a flexible and scalable installation that uses the physical materials and content of VHS cassettes. The work — entitled LOOM-O-RAMA — poetically meditates on the nature of change and the spatial dimension of video-time, collective memory, and pre-internet networks of exchange and distribution.

[See post to watch Flash video]

WHAT IS LOOM-O-RAMA ?

LOOM-O-RAMA pulls apart the VHS black box to weave new patterns and forms. The humble  VCR and VHS cassette have been disected and reconstituted.  During the Artspace residency, the artists sketched out their first concept/prototype: a video-loom that displays 20 minutes of VHS tape woven through a series of rotating spools attached to the wall. It evokes the memory of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage [whose Jacquard loom inspired Analytical Engine is the Victorian precursor to contemporary computing] while it connects with the experimentation of early video pioneers of the 1960s and 70s..

There are a number of designs the loom-like wall pieces can take. Borrowed and adapted from pop/op culture string art patterns, they reference craft and a kind of pre-digital aesthetic that can be scaled to cover even the largest of walls.

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“VHS BOX“, Ross Harley and Elvis Richardson, colour video projection loop, 2008.

This ongoing series of video works reconstitutes the recorded material stored on their collections of VHS cassettes. The  content is then projected from the stripped-back wall-mounted VHS player onto another wall.  It can also be displayed on a monitor in the gallery space.

Harley and Richardson have recycled the redundant VHS cassette and playback machines. They have reinvested in the technological sublime promised by the system that first allowed the user control and feedback to the singular voice of broadcast television and cinema. This abondoned archive of memories and cultural manipulations, once stored with such pride in lounge rooms and TV cabinets across the world, now seems destined for dumpsters and landfill.

LOOM-O-RAMA reminds us of the ever-shrinking spiral of technological change and cultural obscelesence.

DERIVATIONS

LOOM: a frame or machine for interlacing at right angles two or more sets of threads or yarns to form a cloth; to appear in an impressively great or exaggerated form; to take shape as an impending occurrence.

LOOM is also a graphical adventure game originally released in 1990. It was both developed and published by Lucasfilm Games (now called LucasArts).

RAMA: from the Greek meaning ”that which is seen”

LUMA: the brightness portion of a video signal (”Y”); from the Latin word “lumen”, meaning radiance or light.

The VHS logo and technical description of the VCR tape transport system.

VHS spools and covers unpacked and in template form.

In the heyday of VHS, the logos seemed to suggest there was a stellar quality to the content and packaging alike. When VHS was new, barely 30 years ago, it represented the heights of domestic recording products: the Video Home System everybody longed to own.

Looking at all the distributor’s logos at the head of each tape today, it seems EVERYBODY wanted to put their company into outer space. Set against sparkling galaxies and stars, it’s as if this technology were so advanced, it could only have come from the heavens above.

Or maybe that’s just the result of the new video FX devices (another kind of black box) that were used to generate the video distributors’ identity.

These videos also relate directly to the kaleidoscopic “string art” video wall pieces made out of lengths of VHS tape and displayed on the opposite wall in the installation version of this piece.

[See post to watch Flash video]

“VHS BOX“, Ross Harley and Elvis Richardson, colour video projection loop, 2008.

[See post to watch Flash video]

“VHS Logo Heaven“, (Ross Harley and Elvis Richardson) 2.30, colour video, 2008.

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“Movie Break 01: On the Waterfront”, (Ross Harley and Elvis Richardson) 2.30, colour video, 2008.

“Movie Break” concept edit. Condensed broadcast movie, captured on VHS and then distilled to remove the movie’s content and retain only the ad breaks.

The commercial logic of broadcast television recorded and exposed by VHS manipulations.

Rough sketches for physical installation and video content types for the “Loom-O-Rama” exhibition.

The idea right now is to get the stripped back VHS machine to play the tape out into the spirograph configuration beside it. Nice idea. Now for the execution.

[See post to watch Flash video]

[See post to watch Flash video]

Each wall piece is a spatial representation of VHS tape time. This series of photos includes the work “20 minutes of VHS tape”.

Depending on tape playback speed (in stand or long play modes), about 1.5 metres of VHS tape equals one minute of video. The VHS wall spirographs help us do the math.

Here’s what we proposed, and here’s what we’re working on so far:

The Fall of the Wall: Beyond Walled Gardens in Higher Education

[This paper is based in part on a white paper co-authored with Mark Pesce entitled “Out of the Garden: UNSW and its Web Discontents”, written in November 2007.]

1. The explosive growth of knowledge in the 21st century has placed a unique set of pressures on many institutions, and in particular, on those institutions that have a specific charge to generate, analyze, sort and disseminate this ever-increasing wealth of information. While the public looks to universities as places where world’s-best practice in knowledge management is employed, these same universities are in danger of being overwhelmed — not only by the increase in knowledge, but by the just-as-rapid multiplication in techniques for capturing, exploring, and distributing this knowledge. Universities must have a strategic plan for knowledge management: this is a core justification for their existence. The problem is, the plan’s not really working.

2. In the ideal IT world envisaged by administrative, academic, and IT staff at many Australian universities, the university’s web presence and web services should be part of a centrally managed repository. These services should be strictly gated and limited in access. They should be controlled, secure and hierarchically organised. This particular conceptualization is the by-product of another time when computing and network resources were both limited and expensive. Now that both are cheap and broadly available, universities have lost their “natural monopoly” on the provision of web services for their academic communities.

3. This is a familiar story in the so-called digital age. We see all around us how the internet, peer-to-peer and other networked technologies are developing profound challenges to the organization of media, information and knowledge. In simple terms, the user-centric web services commonly associated with terms such as Web 2.0, the semantic web, and the Read-Write Web are at the forefront of this change. Even if we filter out much of the hype surrounding these terms, the web is becoming more user-focused, collaborative, more “participatory”, and more dynamic. This participatory logic of networked media is also having a profound effect on the way we might think about the position of universities in terms of their general contribution to what Benkler calls “the wealth of networks”.

4. Many new social network services have very quickly been positioned in the marketplace as brands. At the same time, we could also argue that these new entities could be easily aligned with pedagogical principles of “learner centred”, “blended” or “constructivist” learning approaches, which emphasise the ways students operate in a community of peers. When students are encouraged to explore at their own pace, reflecting on their own discoveries as part of that process, there is enormous potential for them to learn in new ways. Utilising the multiple feedback channels available via social networking software and other simliar tools, universities can engage with students by entering into a dialogue with them about what they want to learn (and what they need to learn) in this fast paced media-world.

5. While this might be the case, universities have been slow to embrace the full social and collaborative strengths of the web, and to align themselves to the emerging practices of the 21st century. For the most part, universities still prefer to work within their “walled gardens” purpose-built by the institution. These are typically “push” systems with strict protocols that disallow external access or control. Although disruptive, universities need to adopt the best practices of the social web in order to improve their internal processes, and to transform themselves into more outwards-facing teaching and research institutions.

6. As Chris Anderson puts it in The Long Tail, these developments contain the potential to free us from “the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare” and establish in its place “a world of infinite variety.” As the internet becomes more ubiquitous, it is reshaping the economics of media culture. It is reshaping the culture and economics of education in the same way. The flood of blogs, podcasts, video clips, and MP3s, most available for free, testifies to these changing economies. While universities struggle to keep their Vista and Blackboard and WebCT packages operational, the students and staff are climbing over the walls and becoming increasingly involved in the participatory media culture of the social web.

7. And so, higher education faces a challenge. It may not fully acknowledge it yet, but it does. And the challenge is this: when students have been accustomed to these very facilitative, usable, customisable, personalised and adaptive tools — both for learning and for socialising — why would they accept standardised, unintuitive, clumsy and out of date tools in the formal education they are paying for? This goes to the core of the cultural differences between the Web 2.0 environment and the traditional domain of higher education. Who needs a VLE or WebCT (or whatever proprietary software package the university demands that they use) when the open web and social software already provide that for you — only better and for free? The question universities have to ask themselves is whether they are prepared to acknowledge this shift, and to embrace new strategies of adaptation instead of the usual resistance to rapid social and technological change.

8. Parallels between the music, film and entertainment industries in the digital disaggregation of delivery and platforms should serve as an equally loud wake-up call for those of us working in higher ed. Will universities go the way of vinyl and CD? I don’t believe so. But the message remains clear: we ignore the everyday social media practices of our constituents at our peril.

9. I want to suggest that centralised VLEs are not the answer to the ‘web 2.0 problem’ for education. This is because its software protocols embody principles of hierarchy, control, and centralisation instead of bottom-up, networked interconnectivity. Making the traditional classroom virtual won’t help educators understand the new challenges and opportunities they are now facing. By allowing user-centric web services to flow back into the university web systems, we will be able to build upon the increasing participation of the university community in the broader production (and critique) of knowledge.

10. So, what are the characteristics of web-native learners, and what tools do they want or need? What new learning opportunities – and risks – are opened up by social networking and media sharing tools? And how might we reframe our ideas of learning, teaching and research in light of all this? In short, what would be the role of the university if many of its current services were disaggregated to specialist providers on the web?

11. These are difficult, complex questions to consider. Part of the answer is staring us in the face. If the university community is going outside for solutions, then we need to connect those practices and systems back to the institution. If we don’t, universities are in danger of cutting themselves off from the world-at-large. We are cutting ourselves off from potential students, research collaborators, and business partners. And we are missing out on the opportunity to widely promote ourselves outside of the walled gardens of educational institutions.

12. Although much of what I mention here can seem radical to some academics and administrators, the collaborative read-write web is already in broad daily use through the higher education community. Students scour Wikipedia when doing background research for an assignment. Wikipedia in fact, is still the outstanding example of a collaborative success story. Researchers maintain blogs and wikis, giving colleagues instant access to experimental results. Many people at universities spend much of their time online, trading links to media and information on every subject imaginable — via email, SMS, Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging and so on. We all know this. The social web is already a reality. It’s up to us, to make sure that we do everything we can to allow our constituents to redefine the university in the light of these new organizational structures and models.

Ross Harley, Brisbane, June 2008

New Video installation at Casula Powerhouse

Australian

Casula Powerhouse commissioned Australia’s hottest contemporary visual artists to transform the newly refurbished arts centre into a spectacle of colour, texture and movement. Combined, the artists have 40 biennales between them, and are among the most exciting practitioners today. The exhibition features 12 new works, in a variety of mediums including sculpture, painting, installation and textiles.

Like most Australians the artists have cultural and family ties in other places and it is this which informs their work. Australian celebrates the complexity that makes this country such an interesting place to live and presents some of the freshest and most dynamic work being created in this country today.

Curator
Nicholas Tsoutas

Assistant Curator
Brianna Munting

Artists
Maria Fernanda Cardoso collaborating with Ross Rudesch Harley, Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy, Shaun Gladwell, David Griggs, Gordon Hookey, Dani Marti, Raquel Ormella, Nike Savvas and Stephen Little, Sardar Sinjawi, Suzann Victor, Savanhdary Vongpoothorn collaborating with Richard Johnson and Guan Wei