tecznotes

Tim Jaeger is currently working on a project called VJ-BOOK.

VJ-BOOK is one of the first books that will be published on VJ culture, and potentially the first to theorize VJing in a way that breaks down the practice and reception of live visuals in a systematic, structured way.

The book is meant to be an academic work on VJ'ing, which is a lot more interesting than the glut of mid-1990's rave flyer books that functioned solely as collections with no commentary or reflection. The most fascinating aspect of this book for me is the beta reader concept:

Beta-Readers will serve an important function in VJ-BOOK. Contributing to its semi open-source format, PDFs of the different sections will be distrubuted to selected parties ahead of time (approx. Aug 2005) who will then add comments, additional photos, anecdotes, etc. These sections will be distibuted according to the readers unique areas of knowledge (software, a particular scene, etc.). This will serve to produce an authorship model that is similar to threaded online conversations rather than a single, stand-alone text.

Early printed books came with wide margins built-in, for use by readers when taking notes or adding glosses. These were necessarily personal, while Tim's are slightly more public without sacrificing the "official" feel of a printed book. Purple numbers in a printed work could serve as a bridge or peg to open the margins to the wide world. Incidentally, these same themes are explored in Narrating Bits, an interactive academic work that we helped develop with Erik Loyer earlier this year. This project was just mentioned on the excellent Information Aesthetics weblog.

Let's create a feedback loop and reblog blogs about the reblog ~tj

Hooray for recursion! (again)

I just got through posting this to an entry on Radar about the general incomprehensibility of XML/RSS icons on web pages:

The one thing all those buttons have in common is white text on an orange background, which is becoming something of an international symbol for a feed independent of format. RSS Equalizer and RSS Content Builder.com even use this convention in their product logos. It won't be long before this pattern enters the global consciousness, "the thing that decided decaf coffeepots should be orange."

Why not jump-start the process and ditch the letters altogether? A symbol such as this small image has a number of advantages over the RSS and XML buttons:

• Orange and contains three enclosed elements. This echoes the older buttons for those familiar with them.
• Visually distinctive, but still wordlike and usable within a text stream or verbal explanation.
• Designed to be small.
• Independent of language or character set.
• Three bullets look like an ellipsis and imply repetition and continuation.

Starting this week, Eyebeam's guest reblogger of the fortnight is VJ Tim Jaeger. Until I shifted my focus completely to net-based visuals and data graphics (and co-writing ReBlog ;), VJ'ing was my most serious side project. I produced a lot of free video loops, experimented with 3D rendering in Max/MSP, and participated in local video events.

It should be fun to see what constitutes the cutting edge of the genre since I last performed.