April 4th, 2008
The LiVE show at the Beall Center for Art and Technology at the University of California, Irvine features metavid in the shows collection. The pieces explored the meaning of “live” in the context of heavy mediation of day-to-day interactions. Karen Finley piece, titled “business as usual” highlighted a constant stream of deaths as a consequence of US aggression in the Iraqi region via unattended computers constantly printing out large stacks of the names of people killed in the conflict. MTAA & RSG’s Want consists of 900 video clips in which individuals declare something that they desire, which are then triggered by search requests from a peer-to-peer network. More information about all the pieces is on the site.
dale
July 10th, 2006
A new feature is now available that facilitates the remote embedding of metavid or other ogg theora /annodex content within webpages. featured in this article post is a clip from metavid:
check out the external embed page in the wiki for implementation details. Will be interesting to see how this new feature gets used 
Either leave comments here or in the wiki page to request new features, complain, or let us know how it’s being used.
dale
April 21st, 2006
Here are some relatively short answers to what metavid is about.
Metaivd addresses the problem of undemocratic systems of engagement with political proceedings. We argue that in commercial content production there is an inherently undemocratic assumption in which there are “producers†of information and “consumers†of information.
In commercial television for example political proceedings are mediated by the selection of news segments, the editorializing of the content, the news tickers, the choice of subject matter, the advertisements etc. These mediations predominately reflect the point of view of the concentrated power which produces them and is therefore undemocratic. The production is packaged in compiled form as an authoritative product which is made un-questionable by the culture of consumption and Intellectual Property laws which forbids the reuse or re-contextualization of this content.
Metavid in contrast makes the assumption that everyone is a participant. In Metavid all the mediations built with or in the system are open source. You can change the in and out points on the segments your presented with, you can view source on the ticker and change the sources of information from which it draws its titles. You can re-mediate or re-negotiate anything before you including the metavid system itself which is also open source, built on top of other open source applications. This operates within a culture of participation, and rather then focusing on the first creator leverages the potential for creation in everyone.
We feel this begins to addresses the problem of undemocratic systems of engagement by providing liberalized alternative context for engagement. Building off of the work of innovative participatory cultural systems such as wikipeidia, metavid makes the full archive of participation, meta data, and public domain content freely available for re-appropriation as long as you do not restrict the freedom of others to do the same.
And finally some relevant quotes:
“What matters therefore is the exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce others to produce, and second, to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers, that is readers or spectators into collaborators†Benjamin, Author as Producer
“If its correct as I believe it is that a fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work or creative inquiry for free-creation without the arbitrary limiting effects of coercive institutions then of course it will fallow that a decent society should maximize the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realized.†Noam Chomsky
dale
January 13th, 2006
This is a test post to make sure this works. Watch this space and we’ll have some project updates in no time.
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