Video Analysing Tool
A study by Woody Vasulka and Jürgen Enge
Idea: Woody Vasulka
Technical concept and realisation: Jürgen Enge
Woody Vasulka is one of the few media artists who has actively concerned himself with the contents and functionalities of video as analogue and later digital image medium since the inception of video. In addition to his artistic interest as a film maker and his notable technological abilities as engineer, here we want to direct special attention to his technological knowledge and his research into video as a signal-based artistic medium.
Hardly any other artists are as deeply involved in the signal structure and the technical essence of video as Steina and Woody Vasulka. They belong to that generation of video artists and designers, who were exhibited in a decentralised overview exhibition on the artistic application of video synthesisers held under the title "Die Eigenwelt der Apparatewelt" at the Ars Electronica in 1992 - an collective exhibition, which was conceived by Steina and Woody Vasulka together with David Dunn and curated by Peter Weibel.
Research into the nature of video is still one of the main interests of Woody Vasulka, despite the relational context and the manner of examination having changed immensely by the advent of digital media.
Since the late 60ies Woody Vasulka and Steina were witness to nearly all technological changes in an artistic context and in some cases have provided crucial impulses and enrichment to the medium.
One concern which Woody Vasulka has pursued for some time is the question of frame-accurate analysis of video images. At a time when video is still being referenced in publications via screenshots, these screenshots play an important role.
Woody Vasulkas idea was to develop a tool in which the screenshots are lined up in a row. The researcher chooses the slot or the time interval from which he wants to see different pictures in a sequence and may zoom directly into the respective frames.
Moreover, it was to be possible to add comments to these screenshots to enable a discourse among researchers. The OASIS Project seemed the ideal platform: in a kind of curatorial network videos in sequences with varying length were to be analysed and afterwards discussed. Woody himself once commented on it like this:
”To analyse pictorial and structural features suggested, observed or not yet found in the works of the moving image makers in films (on DVD) and video (both in the computer) and perhaps of their other strategies expressed in their other pictorial works (scores, templates, set of rules build on paradoxes etc, etc…) we are attempting to organise a specific environments in which to study these phenomena.” (Unpublished excerpt of an exhibition)
This approach has been discussed by Woody Vasulka, Steina and Juergen Enge over the past year and he has come up with very simple, engaging and useful program sketches which could definitely lead to a common framework for a line of analytic devices.
Technical description of the tool for analysing video material and its functionalities
Initially screenshots from the chosen video tape are automatically generated, with the amount of frames per second being selectable depending on the available storage capacity.
The frames/videos are then presented in a browser window by another PHP-based script in a manner that through their sequence an idea about the content of the video images can be gained.
The user may hereby chose the tape, the cut-out and the interval with which the screenshots are outputted: for example from Tape No 25 the image sequence starting at Minute 2 with an interval of one frame per second (refer to the illustration):
For the available pilot version two different layouts were developed:
While the horizontal arrangement represents the medium video, the image sequences may also be arranged vertically portrayed like film stills. This is comparable to the handling in editing: While film is running through the cutter horizontally, the frames on magnetic tape are arranged vertically.
To create a visual log and to enable other researchers to comment on the selected sequences a second script was developed, which...
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