I was up last night at some ungodly hour and managed to catch Nabil Elderkin’s video for the Kanye West song “Welcome to Heartbreak”:
Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, but I was absolutely stunned. The effect used is called “data moshing,” and generally you see it in video that has been compressed in some weird way.
I’ve never seen it done intentionally before, but apparently it’s quite common. The video was actually released early because the “Evident Utensil” video by Chairlift uses the same effect (though I think Elderkin’s video seems a lot more deliberate and less random).
After doing some digging around on the web, I found some other videos using the same effect, but none quite as good as this one by David O’Reilly:
It’s subtle and short, but works so beautifully with the music. Quite possibly the best music video I’ve ever seen.
O’Reilly has apparently been using the effect since 2005, but has since declared the fad to be over (probably for the same reasons that T-Pain has killed robot vocal effects). Whether it is or not, however, I find the technique to be beautiful in that it plays with the “glitches” in digital media.
Glitches in certain types of analog media (like the hiss and crackle of a record player) actually do a lot to add to the character of a work. With digital, the perception is that everything should be perfect, crystal clear all the time.
(As an aside, print-based Graphic Designers must deal with this misperception all the time, and it has probably given rise to our favorite pastime: complaining about clients who want to take bad digital art taken from a website and place it into print media).
Sure, I want to watch the game in super high 24060pxqur megapixel definition, but does everything else have to be so clear? I’m not perfect, how can I relate to art that’s perfect? In a roundabout way, glitches inject a measure of humanity back into digital media.
I’ve been doing a bit of pondering on the value of traditional media, particularly with the recent shutdown of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the release of Amazon’s Kindle 2. I feel bad for the folks who have lost jobs because of the decline, but I’ll be perfectly honest: I haven’t read a newspaper since 2005 (unless you count the tbt, which I don’t).
In my mind, crying for the end of newspapers is kind of like crying for the end of music on CDs: it’s not like there’s anything about the medium that makes them inherently superior to what is replacing them. The music and newspaper industries were simply happy raking in the dough and were unwilling to consider the possibility that their dominance was impermanent.
Inevitably, the critics of new media trot out the “nostalgia” argument: traditional media cannot die because there is something about them that gets us closer to our humanity or some other lofty ideal. Sven Birkerts argues against the Kindle by telling us that by touching books, we touch a system that stands for the “labor and taxonomy of human understanding.”
Great. But are we so devoted to “touching” this “system” that we are still willing to put up with the inconveniences of paper? Are we willing to throw our cash to those who want so desperately for us to prop up their fading industry on the basis of some crazy idea that has nothing to do with how we interact with the medium?
Okay. Rant over.
Traditional media, however, does have a place – maybe their respective industries won’t go on making the same big bucks they have been, but that doesn’t mean they have to go extinct. The one criteria, however, is the medium has to be inherently superior in some respect. Beautifully worded justifications about what the medium represents are just not enough.
Case in point: vinyl records. 8-track and cassette tapes have been relegated to the dustbin of bad sitcom jokes, but vinyl records live on. In fact, in 2007, vinyl sales revenue jumped 46%. For what it lacks in portability, its quality makes vinyl to the music industry what microbrews are to the beer industry: a niche product for connoisseurs.
When I heard a story on NPR last week about the use of “clickers” to engage students in college classrooms, my opinion of the technology swung wildly: when they teased the story, I thought it was idiotic. “Clickers?” Isn’t that what they use to train pets?
When I heard how they were used in the class, I thought it was brilliant. Students, instead of just passively absorbing content, are forced to interact – primarily through answering multiple choice questions. Answers are then graphed out so the instructor can see what percentage of students is understanding the material. At the end of the story, they go into some detail about the more “advanced” clicker that allows for open-ended responses.
Wha? I’m sorry, that last sentence seems kind of odd to me, seeing as I was able to type it on a laptop, which if you enter a college classroom, everyone seems to have. Which makes me wonder why on earth these developers are trying to reinvent the wheel. Cole Camplese had a post on his blog recently about using Twitter in the classroom. Wouldn’t that be so much simpler (and cheaper) to implement? And wouldn’t it allow you to do more than just pick from a predefined set of answers?
Ah yes, I forgot. The point of higher education is to get students to think, but not too hard. They are, after all, preparing us to enter a challenging world where how far we go in life is determined by how well we answer multiple choice questions.
