Open Video, Open Knowledge

in Education, Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Science | October 18th, 2010

Read­ers of Open Cul­ture will appre­ci­ate how video has become, in many ways, our newest vernacular—growing in pop­u­lar­i­ty every day, and esti­mat­ed to reach 90 per­cent of world­wide web traf­fic by 2013. Yet so lit­tle of our mov­ing image her­itage is actu­al­ly online. As of Octo­ber 2010, just sin­gle per­cent­age points of the great col­lec­tions at the BBC Archive, ITN Source, Library of Con­gress, Nation­al Archives, etc., are actu­al­ly dig­i­tized and avail­able over the Inter­net! A new short film out this week from the UK’s JISC Film & Sound Think Tank makes the point with clar­i­ty. (Watch here or above.)

What if it were pos­si­ble to enjoy the world’s largest and most pop­u­lar infor­ma­tion com­mons and enable it with down­load­able video–video of great qual­i­ty, whose orig­i­na­tors, own­ers, and righthold­ers opened to reuse and remix by any­one for free?

Intel­li­gent Tele­vi­sion and iCom­mons have pro­duced a report–just out now–to help cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions under­stand and appre­ci­ate the pos­si­bil­i­ties pre­sent­ed by open­ly licensed assets for Wikipedia and the open web. Video for Wikipedia: A Guide to Best Prac­tices for Cul­tur­al and Edu­ca­tion­al Insti­tu­tions describes how Wikipedia is now open­ing its doors to video, and how lead­ing insti­tu­tions can par­tic­i­pate in what is, in effect, the newest knowl­edge rev­o­lu­tion.

The issues are sit­u­at­ed, of course, with­in the larg­er con­text of build­ing a free and informed soci­ety. For uni­ver­si­ties, muse­ums, archives, and oth­ers, bring­ing video online from our cul­tur­al her­itage (and equip­ping stu­dents to use it) has become a new cul­tur­al imper­a­tive. Open video on Wikipedia is not sim­ply a call for free media frag­ments to be stored online. It augurs a new vision of teach­ing and learn­ing, and a new cre­ative and polit­i­cal dis­course. Every­one is invit­ed to par­tic­i­pate in this con­ver­sa­tion just get­ting under­way…

This post was con­tributed by Peter Kauf­man, the CEO and pres­i­dent ofIntel­li­gent Tele­vi­sion, who shares our pas­sion for thought­ful media.

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Dark Side of the Lens: A Poetic Short Film by Surf Photographer Mickey Smith

in Art, Life, Video - Arts & Culture | October 12th, 2010

Dark Side of the Lens presents the art and inner voice of Irish surf pho­tog­ra­ph­er Mick­ey Smith. The six minute film lets you expe­ri­ence Smith’s aes­thet­ics trans­lat­ed into beau­ti­ful prac­tice. (“I wan­na see waverid­ing doc­u­ment­ed the way I see it in my head, and the way I feel it in the sea.”) But then it rather poet­i­cal­ly cracks open the per­son­al phi­los­o­phy of the artist:

I nev­er set out to become any­thing in par­tic­u­lar, only to live cre­ative­ly and push the scope of my expe­ri­ence for adven­ture and for pas­sion… The raw bru­tal cold coast­lands for the right waverid­ers to chal­lenge – this is where my heart beats hard­est…

Most folk don’t even know who we are, and what we do or how we do it, let alone what they pay us for it. I nev­er want to take this for grant­ed so I try to keep moti­va­tion sim­ple, real, and pos­i­tive… If I only scrape a liv­ing, at least it’s a liv­ing where I’m scrap­ing.… If there’s no future in it, this is a present worth remem­ber­ing.

The aes­thet­ic choic­es. The per­son­al deci­sions. It’s all what’s hap­pen­ing behind the cam­era, the place no audi­ence sees, the “dark side of the lens.” You can find the full tran­script of Smith’s com­men­tary after the jump…

A final note: Dark Side of the Lens was born out of a project called “Short Sto­ries.” Estab­lished by Relent­less Ener­gy Drink, the UK-based project chal­lenged film­mak­ers to cre­ate their own mini opus, to explore and cel­e­brate “no half mea­sures” in film. Find oth­er shorts here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

 

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The Mother of All Funk Chords

in Media, Music, Video - Arts & Culture | September 30th, 2010

Who said there’s not an art to remix­ing? The Israeli artist Ophir Kutiel, oth­er­wise known as Kuti­man, cre­at­ed this video by weav­ing togeth­er scenes and tracks from 22 sep­a­rate music videos, all found ran­dom­ly on YouTube. (Find the full list below the jump.) First he lay­ered in the drums, then the bass and the gui­tar. And it’s hard to argue that the total isn’t greater than the sum of the parts. The video fig­ures into Kuti­man’s larg­er remix project called ThruY­OU, which TIME called one of the 50 best inven­tions of last year. Vis­it the ThruY­OU site to watch more remix videos in Kuti­man’s trade­mark style.

Thanks Evan for flag­ging this for us…

(more…)

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Words

in Video - Arts & Culture | August 12th, 2010

This con­cep­tu­al lit­tle video keeps you think­ing about words and their uses. Will Hoff­man and Daniel Mer­cadante pro­duced it to accom­pa­ny a new Radi­o­lab episode called quite sim­ply “Words.” (Lis­ten via MP3 — iTunes — Web Site) If this is your first intro­duc­tion to Radi­o­lab, you’ll even­tu­al­ly thank us. Hands down, it’s one of the best cul­tur­al pro­duc­tions on radio/the web.

This video comes to us via Bill, who dis­cov­ered it on Devour, a new web site that hopes to intel­li­gent­ly curate YouTube’s mil­lions of videos.

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Fora.TV Goes Mobile

in Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Politics/Society | October 2nd, 2009

Yes­ter­day, YouTube EDU went inter­na­tion­al, and FORA.TV went mobile. FORA is an excel­lent resource for smart video (you’ll find it in our col­lec­tion of Top Intel­li­gent Video Sites), and now it has launched its new mobile web site. Just point your mobile brows­er to m.fora.tv, and you can start watch­ing smart video on the move. The mobile site works well on the iPhone, and hope­ful­ly that holds true for oth­er smart phones. For more intel­li­gent mobile con­tent, please check out our Free iPhone app, and send it along to a friend. To access the app, you can always use the short­ened link: https://bit.ly/opencultureapp

Fol­low us on Face­book and also Twit­ter, where we tweet and re-tweet extra cul­tur­al good­ies that nev­er make it to the blog.

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Every TED Talk Under the Sun

in TED Talks, Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Science | September 7th, 2009

If you reg­u­lar­ly vis­it Open Cul­ture, then you’re prob­a­bly famil­iar with TED Talks — the series of 15 minute “riv­et­ing talks by remark­able peo­ple” that TED pro­duces and makes free to the world. We’ve includ­ed TED in our col­lec­tion, Intel­li­gent Video: The Top Cul­tur­al & Edu­ca­tion­al Video Sites, and it’s one of the best sources of intel­li­gent video out there. Hav­ing said that, I was pleased to find this Google spread­sheet of every TED Talk ever post­ed online. Although TED hosts many videos on its web site (and on its iTunes and YouTube chan­nels), these plat­forms don’t give you clean access to the entire TED cat­a­logue. Mean­while, this sim­ple and sortable spread­sheet does. So enjoy, and use it well.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

TED to Chi­na: An Inside View

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Big Ideas

in Video - Arts & Culture | August 2nd, 2009

A new addi­tion to our pop­u­lar and still grow­ing col­lec­tion: Intel­li­gent Video: The Top Cul­tur­al & Edu­ca­tion­al Video Sites … (The list now has close to 50 intel­li­gent video sites.)

Big Ideas, a pro­gram that comes out of Cana­da, fea­tures a “vari­ety of thought-pro­vok­ing top­ics which range across pol­i­tics, cul­ture, eco­nom­ics, art his­to­ry, sci­ence…. The pro­gram has intro­duced Ontario view­ers to the impres­sive brain­pow­er of peo­ple like Niall Fer­gu­son on Amer­i­can empire, Daniel Libe­skind on archi­tec­ture, George Stein­er on the demise of lit­er­a­cy, Camille Paglia on aes­thet­ic edu­ca­tion, and Noam Chom­sky on U.S. pol­i­tics.” You will also find talks here by Umber­to Eco, Mar­garet Atwood, Richard Flori­da, Steven Pinker, Lewis Lapham. See the full list of videos here.

via Metafil­ter

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Streaming Movies Online: The Future is Almost Now

in Video - Arts & Culture | June 27th, 2009

Accord­ing to Net­flix’s CEO, the DVD is done, and the future is all about stream­ing movies online. (Read the Wall Street Jour­nal piece on that.) This segues nice­ly to a list that we have com­piled that con­tains 1) over 100 high qual­i­ty films that you can watch online for free, and 2) 35 web sites where you can watch free movies online. The col­lec­tion is called Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Film Noir, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.