Online viewing tips.

For a few months before launching GC Daily, we were running a sort of mini-blog at the site proper. Entries would often sign off with an "online viewing tip," an odd tick you'll see here now and then as well. A little something to watch, usually, though at times, just pretty pictures or a labyrinthine puzzle worth exploring.

As a little experiment, I thought I'd round them up and post them here, but I ran into a few surprises. The first was simply how many there were, so right off, I settled on dealing with a little less than half of them, saving the rest for another day if this whole idea plays halfway decently. The second was the realization that this would be no quick cut-n-paste-n-run sort of link dump. About half of that half are no longer out there.

Gone. 404. Or, as John Cleese might say, "This is an ex-online viewing tip."

We're not dealing here with ancient runes chiselled into stone tablets that have since turned to dust. Or the fading pigments of centuries-old paintings. Just little files that no more than a year ago, definitely, and in most cases, just a few months ago, were still there. But aren't now. Many of them might actually still be out there, only they've moved and there's no redirect from the original URL, so they'll have to be rediscovered all over again some day. But some are truly gone. Some may be sitting on a private hard disk somewhere, but have disappeared from public view after a server blew or a domain name lapsed or what have you.

You want a jolting reminder of how ephemeral this medium is, poke around. You don't have to stray far from the well-beaten paths.

Is it a problem? If all you've got in mind is the disappearance of some cute little Flash animation, no, not really. Pull back a bit, though, and you begin to see all sorts of problems, and they more or less fall into two basic categories: the organization of information and the preservation of information. (Or media, or art, or stuff, whatever you want to call it.)

The first is the lesser of the two problems. Move that cute little Flash animation and Google won't know about it until enough people discover its new location and adjust their own references to it accordingly. But if it still exists at all, there are enough curious minds scurrying around that eventually, it'll turn up again, like the love letters of a famous poet or politician, stashed in the secret compartment of an antique desk, now discovered and sending a new generation of biographers off on a new tangent of their careers, or the previously unknown screen tests of a long gone Hollywood icon. The global library shudders and shifts a bit, but its foundations don't budge.

But at least those papers and that can of film are still around to be found. The impermanence of the digital media we're racing to load all our culture onto is not a new worry, of course. But just as an update, a reminder: It hasn't been taken care of yet.

Digitalization has done wonders for film culture, no doubt. The DVD brought pristinely restored film classics to places they'd never been before, i.e., just about anywhere but a select few arthouses in major cities, and whatever form film's equivalent of the "celestial jukebox" eventually takes, may it carry on the trend, and hopefully, affordably, too. But the speed at which this transformation is taking place - just as an example, Kodak is announcing today a major shift of focus away from film; Kodak! - has me wondering whether there really might be something after all to the title of an article that Wired News ran in 1998: "No Way to Run a Culture." You see this sentence?

"While most consider digital data to be the ultimate repository of information, participants at last weekend's "Time and Bits: Managing Digital Continuity" gathering at the Getty Center, warned that in reality, society is courting disaster."

Try clicking that link. "The specified server could not be found."

Well. On to the fun stuff, the stuff that's still there. Arranged in no order whatsoever, not chronological, not alphabetical, not thematic, a few online viewing tips.

Kubrick2001: the space odyssey explained. Flash. 20 min.

RE: THE_OPERATION.

Andrea Flamini via ArtKrush.

[Sadly, this one's been edited down considerably:] "A vog is the video equivalent of a blog... an informal, personal, desktop authored, low bandwidth, interactive digital movie." In an essay, manifesto and tutorial all in one, Adrian Miles, who teaches and researches this sort of thing at RMIT in Melbourne, introduces the world to what he's been up to for the last couple of years. He runs one of the first vogs we came across a while back and, via another, Solublefish.tv, we've come across online viewing tips galore: Uda Atsuko's site has gone all Japanese and seems to be rarely updated. But audiovisceral.net is jam-packed and hopping even now [it was; now, it's slowed down again]; are-f stands for Ryan Francesconi and, for the first-time viewer, is loaded with fresh QT and Flash...

God Save the Sex Pistols. By Red via NTK.

Go to the site for Richard Elfman, Danny's big bro. Find "Movies" and watch the clip from Forbidden Zone. Then start exploring for more.

Jeff Krulik is probably most widely known for Heavy Metal Parking Lot, but at Planet Krulik, you can watch about 40 more plus a dozen or so films made by others he happens to like.

Mind as Master, a pen-n-ink kung fu short.

Toei Yakuza movie posters, via Coudal Partners.

Take a break from the video stream. Today's Front Pages. 216 [now 261] of them from 27 [35] countries on weekdays, [fewer] on weekends.

David Crawford's Stop Motion Studies, updated.

Mise-en-scène, schmise-en-scène. Get your quick cut kick in the gut from this showreel by one of the hottest effects houses, the Mill. Via Newstoday.

do it tv features short video work by the likes of Gilbert & George, Jonas Mekas, Yoko Ono and more.

A sloshed Orson Welles is featured in one of ten outsider videos that'll restore your faith in humanity. Via Boing Boing.

Jellylova.

Instant Films.

A treasure trove of Japanese movie posters. It's going to look frustrating at first, but trust me. Just start clicking around.

Mumbleboy. Via Weblogsky.

Clips from three docs by Albert Maysles. Also: an interview. Via Signal vs Noise.

The short films and videos of Ruben Fleischer.

"I work mostly alone in producing my short documentaries and I have an average budget of under $100 per film. Using the Internet, it costs me next to nothing to distribute one of my films to thousands of people, and they show in a venue that never closes and requires almost no maintenance." That's Nathan Bramble, talking to the Hartford Courant. His docs. His blog.

[Once, there was Sharpeworld. And there, it was written:] "phew... i'm finally done with the new coyle & sharpe website, an archive of mp3s, video clips, photos, and so much more, i can't even begin to tell you how much work it was to put it all together. if nothing else, it's a window into the sharpeworld ancestry, which originated on the ancient streets of san francisco in the early 1960s."

Posted by dwhudson at September 25, 2003 6:31 AM