Category: Paper

2005

Mike Leggett

This paper will outline some instances of ‘tekhne’, the Greek term for art, incorporating the tool and its expression in the hands of the protagonist regardless of the outcome of the purposeful creative act. With examples of work from various domains, it will argue that cross-disciplinary, practice-based work in studio and laboratory, in moving towards the dissolving of historical divisions in the generation of knowledge or experience, will be central to giving form to future work for and of, social engagement. (For the Vital Signs- Creative Practice and New Media Now conference; RMIT at ACMI, Melbourne)

2005

Mike Leggett

Based on Notes about the film, “Red+Green+Blue” (Leggett 1975), the project and its context, the generative system using 16mm film, an analogue-based medium, is evaluated in the light of recent discussion of digital/binary-based generative mediums. (Third Iteration, Generative Art Conference, Monash University, Melbourne.)

2006

Mike Leggett

2009

Mike Leggett

Paper for Re:live Media Art History, Science and Technology conference, University of Melbourne, Australia.

Abstract: The adoption of video by artists responded to the affordance of immediacy and portability for the making of a motion picture recording. In the early 1970s in England, the potential of this facility was as novel as it was without precedent in the photo-time-based arts and collaborative work between artists generated a range of approaches to working with the new media of the day.

This paper draws on two sets of detailed notes the author made in 1973, now held in the British Artists’ Film & Video Study
Collection in London and the Rewind archives in Dundee, that record his reflections on the creative
potential of the Portapak video recorder and Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) systems. The making
of The Heart Cycle during 1973 commenced as a series of experiments with a roll of 16mm film and a
CCTV system, recording a series of procedures and adjustments made to the system during experiments
and ërehearsalsí. With references to the work of Donald Schön (1983), contemporary VJ and digital
video culture, the paper reappraises the creative process for framing and making the artwork. The
conclusions reached at the time about synthesising the videotapeís final form as private performance are
explored in the context of contemporary motion pictures and the expanded public contexts for reception.
The Heart Cycle has been selected for the Rewind/LUX DVD boxed set, An Anthology of Early British
Video Art, 1972-82.
video art, performance, archiving

 

Introduction
This paper addresses an immediate concern of the Re:live conference by seeking to record a firsthand
account of working with electronic media at its early inception. As Simon Biggs has recently observed:
ìÖwhilst the subject of intensive historical study, [research] is nevertheless typified by incomplete
documentation and hazy recollections of events that were either not documented or which, in their
mediality, could not be documented appropriately with the tools of the day.î (Biggs 2009)
The paper draws on two sets of documents on paper, now held in the British Artistsí Film & Video Study
Collection in the University of the Arts, London and the Rewind archives at the Visual Research Centre
in the University of Dundee. They record my reflections on the creative potential of the Portapak video
recorder and a Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) system, shortly after the technologies became available in
the early 1970s to artists and other researchers. Together with case-study notes on the videotape The Heart
Cycle (1972), the material will form the basis of a critical reappraisal.
At this time many film and visual artists were averse to the ënon-materialityí of the electronic image and
the restricted range of acuity the bandwidth could support. The materiality of the film image was much
debated throughout the 1970s, less so the video image. The non-materiality of the video image arises from
a perceptual paradigm: light emitted from the video monitor is an asynchronous rendition of electronic
information stored on the surface of the videotape. This is in contradistinction to the image on the filmstrip
in the gate of the film projector, which is in synchronous relation to the image reflected from the screen.
The illusiveness of the material base for the video image became one of the themes of experimental work
produced from this point onwards.
A poster, ëVideo + Video/Film ñ Some Possibilities Suggested by Some Experience,í prepared during
1973 and exhibited at the Experimental and Avant-Garde Film Festival at the National Film Theatre in
June of that year, recorded the process and outcomes of six exploratory projects pursued during 1971 and
1972 (Leggett 1973). The projects included various CCTV configurations: in 1971 for Ian Breakwellís
ONE event at the Angela Flowers Gallery; the Moving Wallpaper in the Television Lounge project at the
Somerset College of Art (1972); the Whittingham Hospital performance, The Institution (1971) with Kevin
Coyne at Art Spectrum exhibition, Alexandra Palace (Fig 2); and the Artistsí Placement Group (APG)
exhibition (1971) at the Hayward Gallery (Leggett 1973/2005).
As performances, the events established their asynchronous materiality through the presence of cameras,
Re:live Media Art Histories 2009 conference proceedings 96
cables, monitors and the general paraphernalia of the CCTV video studio, where the formation of the image
and its reception happened in the same physical space. The series was an approach taken in the spirit of
what Duncan White identifies as ì..Expanded Cinemaís principle concern with context and the social spaces
of receptionî (White 2008).
Practice
Several of my completed films set out to make available to the audience the means, the forms and the
materials that constructed the filmic phenomena as experience. In an encounter with ëfilm as phenomenaí,
as film ëabstractedí, an opening-up of the spaces between its component parts is created. This is in
contradistinction to the narrative conventions of Cinema, intent on concealing the many joins that hold the
illusion in place. The problematics of cinema were addressed using this framework through a problemsetting
process of a conceptual, substantive (material) and procedural kind. This is in contrast to traditional
problem-solving approaches intent on delivering outcomes as product for a market place. My initial
approaches to experimenting with video were similar, with the additional aim of developing skills with the
new medium and understanding the aesthetic principles emergent from practice.
The outcome of this practise-base was a body of artworks in several media exhibited both nationally and
internationally during the 1970s. The focus here will be on one of the video works, The Heart Cycle, for
two reasons: firstly it has been curated into the Rewind/Lux DVD, An Anthology of Early British Video
Art 1972-1982 (to appear 2009); secondly, a detailed typescript account of the making of the video was
ërediscoveredí on the Rewind online database (Leggett 1973). The level of detail in the notes indicates they
must have been made soon after the events they record. Some [editing] has been applied to improve syntax,
as well as adding explanation and comment on the now obsolete technology and the affordance it provided
in the process of making art with Video.
My initial encounters as a filmmaker with the Portapak (Fig 3) were revelatory. I found: ì..on playback, after
each attempt, that additions and alterations become quickly apparent.î(Leggett 1973). In the contemporary
context this may seem mundane, but in the early 1970s the potential of this facility, as others have noted,
was as novel as it was without precedent (Frampton 1974, Marshall 1996, Donebauer 1996, Elwes 1996,
Critchley 2006).
The opening sentence of the notes made in July 1973 evoke the spontaneity the technology made possible:
ìDriving home with the Portapak in the back ñ stop at the bridge and walk to the stream and set-up tripod
in water ñ the idea, the location.î By beginning a process of recording the scene in front of the camera and
then determining where this decision would lead, brought the conceptual framework for commencing the
making of a motion picture recording into closer proximity than had previously been possible. While these
experiments were proceeding, forays into the studio occurred to explore the possibilities of working with
CCTV using three studio cameras connected through a vision mixer to the Portapak.
The Heart Cycle: selected annotated notes
ìSet-up the studio to look at some film ñ added another camera to relay off the monitor through mix box;
[vision mixer] Öî (Fig 4) The intention was clearly to explore the relationship between the film image and
the video image when the film image was used as a source to make a video image using a film projector and
video camera. ëTo relay offí the monitor meant that another camera was pointed at the monitor capturing
the image coming from the film projector, a ëfeedback loopí connected through the vision mixer.
My first time encounter with the vision mixer required me to understand the various effects selectable by
combining knobs, faders and buttons. ì.. became confused by mix box; the temptation being to ëuseí the
various effects [and thus] making even simple switching obscure after a while ñ went back to beginning
and tried again, forgetting the FX! [effects] î The pre-set effects for combining camera outputs with various
graphical shapes tended to ape the effects with which we had become familiar on television. These visual
devices ñ wipes, irises, boxes, etc – had evolved from silent cinema traditions; the adjustable matte (Key)
effect however, was worthy of further investigation.
Re:live Media Art Histories 2009 conference proceedings 97
“Came to ëfeelí the [vision mixer] box, the mix, superimpose and cutting ñ introduced third camera
through Key channel and got to know the box with this very seductive FX ñ finally found the Key image
which seemed to work the best, being simple in area and rhythmic in action – this was the film spool on the
projector, which after a while was lit with a small spot to improve the outline of the white to black areas.
This was controllable using a Key Control knob, such that the area affected by the white key could be
altered from zero ñ a blank screen – to maximum, which produced a distorted image of the spool.”
Experimenting with the relation between the object in front of the video camera ñ the film spool turning on
the projector ñ and the real-time control of the keyed white and black areas, produced a rhythmic device
upon which to build the composition. The feedback loop created with one of the cameras and a monitor, was
controlled through the use of the sliding faders on the mixer. The zoom lens (framing) and focus controls on
each of the cameras added further variables in the system. During my interaction with each of these control
surfaces, a shape and order began to emerge.
“Finally all the elements were combined on the final monitor. The combined images were of great interest,
the only problem being where – in terms of start and finish – the [duration of the] combined [images] might
exist. A series of takes [recordings] were made onto the P[ortapak] and again played back at the end of each
one.”
The facility of the system being developed to show immediate results was quite unlike the experience of
making a film, when there is the inevitable delay between exposing the image to film and being able to see
the result as a motion picture image. The feedback from the video system encouraged spontaneity similar to
making music, drawing, or writing: working with the system was something plastic and responsive.
“The [vision mixer] box proved difficult again but gradually on watching playbacks bits were noticed and
technically improved by rehearsing certain box manipulations. Work on [a] short piece [at a time] ñ record
then playback. Ö Finally something had sedimented out which needed final structuring – the backend of
the film seemed to provide the most sympathetic images. The [use of the] Key was to start the piece with a
white line on black; there would be a cut to feedback [from the camera facing the monitor] plus [the] key
image [of the rotating film spool, which was] also white on black; then the introduction of the [images from
the] film; then the reintroduction of the Key into the image.”
The process of investigating the convergence of these various elements gradually improved not only my
skills of interacting with the various control surfaces but also the outcomes delivered as a live composition.
The investigative activity shifted away from learning the system to understanding how the different
components were determining the shape of the composition and the images it contained. The appearance
of the film spool had been abstracted by use of the Key: the rounded shapes of the spool accentuated by the
Key giving the visual impression of an electronically generated image, the source of which is not ërevealedí
until the very end of the tape – a treated electronic image of a real object”.
The Heart Cycle therefore developed from the manipulation of primary elements contained by the video
system, with the images in the emulsion on the acetate of the film occupying a secondary position within
the structure. The next question was how to fit the elements of the composition so far constructed into an
overall time span.
“It was noticed during one of the final takes that the film spool would speed up imperceptibly as the film
came closer and closer to the centre [of the spool]. such that The rate was noticeable frenetic before the film
would actually run-off and suddenly stop the spool [rotating] dead. It was decided that this would complete
the cycle.”
Problem solved, the duration of the performed procedures with the video system would match the length of
the found footage on the projector. The experimental stages had consolidated the procedures to arrive at a
series of ërehearsalsí peaking as a final unedited performance, the extent recording of The Heart Cycle.
The recording ended with a coda, where the physical elements of the performance are revealed using a
zoom out and track: the spool and the projector, the cameras and monitors, the vision mixer and Portapak,
Re:live Media Art Histories 2009 conference proceedings 98
and then the artist entering left to sit at the mixer and move a fader to take the image to black and the end of
the recording.
“Three takes were needed to get the acceptable one Ö the obvious joy was the making of the tape as much
as the collision of its various elements. To ëperformí the tape each time was the obvious ideal ñ here
anyway was the recording of one of these performances.”
The observation that the ideal would be to ëperformí the procedure ëeach timeí to a live audience was a
realisation that the black and white ëlow-bandí video recording delivered with a large television monitor,
tended to undermine aesthetic value. Rather than expecting an audience to focus their attention on a
television set styled in the domestic taste of the day, what was envisaged was something more expansive.
This would share the spontaneity and ëlivenessí of the proceedings with an audience responsive to the
presence of the artist and the workís development, a response in part, to the audienceís material presence:
incorporation, feedback and looping becoming the key to performance of the workís elements.
Though the Notes presciently anticipate the live performances of contemporary VJs and the dynamic
architectures of digital video, analogue video had strict limitations when it came to the live performance
involving complex manipulations. Though video experimentation pursued during this greyscale era could
expand into gallery spaces as CCTV or prepared tape installations using multiple monitors, the restraints
were nonetheless severe compared to film: by the low resolution of the image, lack of colour, imprecise
editing options, random interference from poor quality recording tape, etc. When scale, colour and acuity of
the image was necessary for a project and if the considerable costs associated with the alternative could be
covered, film remained the medium of choice for single and multiple-screen presentation.
It is in the nature of experiments to be unclear about direction and the time needed to pursue them. The
approach described here for making art with video is echoed in the work of Donald Schön and his analysis
of professional practice, based not on problem solving but problem setting. The artist or researcher makes
and tests ì.. new models of the situation Ö to function as transforming moves and exploratory probes.î
(Schön 1983) In the case of The Heart Cycle a point was reached in the investigations where the identified
elements, emergent from the working procedures, were brought into states of proximity with one another ñ
as images, as durations ñ and gradually incorporated into the process of composition, sustained for a finite
period. As the series of procedures converge on the durational and physical end point of the film, abstraction
seeks to undermine the ëauthorityí of the instructional documentary, creating a durational space through
which the dialectic develops between the representation and its antithesis.
Liveness, Performance and Video
The making of The Heart Cycle was a series of live real-time performances, live in the sense of performed
iterations proceeding toward the workís final completed duration. The ëtransforming moves and exploratory
probesí employed in performing the medium is reflected in the heuristic production of evidence in viewing
the completed art work; light as abstract movement, with synchronous/asynchronous sound, as image of
place and surface, as image of presence and agency, interrogated within a continuous present. Kacunko
describes the performative state as of ì..a kind of highly unstable entity [where] liveness should be regarded
as an authenticity guaranteeÖî(Kacunko 2009). This is in the face of traditional archivists (or anyone
else for that matter), who regard the recording, (as a storage medium), as the authentic artefact. From
ëperforming the mediumí the tendency developed in the following years towards the medium framing
performance, and as the technology became more ëfilm-likeí in handling and image appearance, encouraged
the use of video for the hermeneutic ends of producing meaning from performance through interpretation.
As improvements and upgrades were made to the technology throughout the 1970s ñ colour and general
image quality, editing using dual-VCR controllers ñ the affect was to consolidate video being used as
ësubstitute televisioní and as others have observed (Spielmann 2008, Rees 1999), as a documentation
and documentary tool, using a language made increasingly familiar in the 1980s with the expansion of
ëindependentí television production in Britain and throughout the Western world.
The migration process from the analogue version of The Heart Cycle to the digital artefact in 2007,
introduced further interruptions and interferences to those already evident: horizontal white lines flick
Re:live Media Art Histories 2009 conference proceedings 99
across the screen, the sign of decay caused by the metallic oxide dropping off the tape mylar substrate
ñ ëdrop outí. Within the overall schema of the composition this ëvariableí becomes a manifestation of
the rendition of magnetic and electrical fluctuation into digital data, stored on a hard disc or DVD and
asynchronously reproduced on replay through microprocessor array onto the screen.
Duration and extreme duration were outcomes of artistsí work with the new media of analogue video, a
medium specific for delivering to artists for the first time, motion pictures that displayed in ëreal timeí, the
state of a system in synthesis. The Heart Cycle as a record of the synthesis of a performance event, retaining
the finite time span of the artistís film, a singular event when replayed on the screen of a video monitor.
However, in the act of viewing, it retains in the electronic genesis of the black and white DVD image, a
provisional gesture in private performance towards a contemporary present.
References
Biggs, Simon. 2009. Correspondence with author.
Critchley, David. 2006. Video Works 1973-1983. In Experimental Film and Video: an Anthology, edited
by J. Hatfield. Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey Publishing.
Donebauer, Peter. 1996. A Personal Journey Through a New Medium. In Diverse Practices – a critical
reader on British Video Art, edited by J. Knight. Luton, UK: John Libbey Media.
Elwes, Catherine. 1996. The Pursuit of the Personal in British Video Art. In Diverse Practices, edited by
J. Knight. Luton: John Libbey Media.
Frampton, Hollis. 1974. The Withering Away of the State of the Art. In On the Camera Arts and Consecutive
Matters: the Writings of Hollis Frampton, edited by B. Jenkins. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Original
edition, Open Circuits: the Future of Television, Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
Kacunko, Slavco. 2009. M.A.D.: Media Art Database(s) and the Challenge of Taste, Evaluation and Appraisal.
Leonardo 42 (3):245-250.
Leggett, M. 1973. Video + Video/Film – some possibilities suggested by some Experience. Exeter: Exeter
College of Art & Design.
óóó. 1973/2005. Video+Video/Film: time-based media, the New, and Practice-based Research. In CCS
Reports, edited by A. Johnston. Sydney: University of Technology Sydney.
Leggett, Mike. 1973. An account of working with video and the new Portapak. In Rewind Archive.
Dundee: Duncan of Jordonstone College of Art, University of Dundee.
Marshall, Stuart. 1996. Video: from art to Independence – a short history of a new technology (1983). In
Diverse Practices, edited by J. Knight. Luton: John Libby Media.
Rees, A.L. 1999. A History of Experimental Film and Video. London: British Film Institute.
Schön, Donald. 1983. The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books.
Spielmann, Yvonne. 2008. Video: the Reflexive Medium. Edited by S. Cubitt, Leonardo Books. Cambridge,
Mass. MIT Press.
White, Duncan. 2008. Expanded Cinema in the 1970s: Cinema, Television and the Gallery. In Expanded
Cinema: the Live Record. National Film Theatre, London.
Biographical Note Mike Leggett has been working across the institutions of art, education, cinema and
television with media since the late-60s. He has film and video work in archives and collections in Europe,
Australia, North and South America and practises professionally as an artist, researcher, curator, writer and
teacher. He has a MFA from the University of New South Wales and has recently submitted a PhD to the
University of Technology Sydney on hypervideo and mnemonics. He has curated exhibitions of interactive
multimedia for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, (Burning the Interface<International Artistsí
CD-ROM> also in Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne); the 1996 Brisbane International Film Festival;
the 5th International Documentary Conference; and Videotage Festival of Video Art, Hong Kong. He
contributes to journals (Leonardo

2004

Mike Leggett

This paper examines the concept of ‘data space’ and sentient ‘presence’ in relation to practice-based research being pursued by myself and others working in the institutional space that lies between the disciplines of art and science. It will consider the broader Western cultural context for the idea of presence and the contemporary literature produced by presence researchers. The artefacts of three contemporary artists working with presence in the physical spaces of public museums and galleries, will be described in the context of telepresence in the domain of cyberspace. (Interaction: Systems, Practice and Theory – A Creativity & Cognition Symposium hosted by the Dynamic Design Research Group, Faculty of Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney,

2002

Mike Leggett

The interactive multimedia prototype of PathScape has been developed with an interface and navigation system which gives access to knowledge through a connection with a specific place or location. It seeks to enable the navigator to associate digital documents with a (fragmented) representation of contiguous cinematic space and thereby offer a means of retrieval based on visual memory.
Re-establishing visual memory as a primary indexing system for access to personal and public narrative documents will be asserted, and directions
proposed in the pursuit of research resources.

(Presented at the 18th Computer & Art History Conference, ‘Digital Art History?’)

2004

Mike Leggett

Abstract

The tools with which the media artist works and the infrastructure within which the artwork is
made and exhibited are critical determinants of how work is received and considered. This paper
will build upon earlier investigations by myself and others into interactive art installation as models
for informing development of HCI. These areas of practice-based research and the resources
available online for the development of solutions based on modular electronics, suggest there
exists common ground for scientist and artist to explore for revising the interface as an
experience built from components – of presence, of devices and of code.

(Presented at the Biennale of Electronic Art Perth)

2007

Mike Leggett & Shigeki Amitani

Abstract: In this paper we propose the exploitation of high mobility portable battery operated Video Players (PVP) for the retrieval of video associated with the location in which it may be used. Reporting on an earlier interactive multimedia location-based prototype, we assess the possibilities for specific ontologies of a taxonomy of indexing procedure which avoids text-based retrieval methods, using instead the mnemonics of image association. We outline the proposed development of PVP firmware and a related user application enabling users to construct indexing procedures appropriate to their needs, using a metadesign approach,.

Keywords: hypermedia, video, video player, authoring

 

 

1   Introduction
The proposal emerges from current interdisciplinary research into machine memory as a context for understanding its relation to human memory and methods for storing and retrieving movie files. It proposes an approach to indexing audio-visual media utilising an ‘index-movie’ file as the taxonomy of the indexing procedure, to which is linked related movie files. An interactive experimental prototype, PathScape, has provided initial evaluation of the concept using a real-world time-space representation as the basis for indexing. Further practice-based research approaches to user-defined storage and retrieval systems for the video iPod and other PVPs as advanced portable video systems, will be described.
The proposal is for the PVP user to interactively navigate the linkages between movie files, either as an exploration of a creative maze, or as a means of recalling a particular series of operations, directions, sequences explained in pictures and sound, but under the direct and immediate control of the PVP user. This feature will enable complex data structures often represented visually – land surveys; mining topographies; design or biological sequences; architectural spaces; construction progress; cultural artifacts; etc – to be made accessible relationally rather than sequentially.
Whilst positioning of a pointer on a visible timeline provides instant access to a particular part of a movie in a conventional computer-based movie player, this is not an option in PVPs. However, the visibility of images during high speed spooling on a PVP, could assist locating entry points to a hyperlinked movies system utilising frame number metadata and mnemonics. An indexing approach of this kind implies special concerns in the design of such a system, for individual, specialised and public groupings and communities, for which metadesign approachs are being developed.
2. Navigation Principles
Interface design for multimedia databases has been the subject of investigation by earlier researchers for desk-based systems, though few have achieved avoiding the use of words or on-screen graphical devices to aid navigation. [1] [2] [3]. Experimental approaches by artists have included Twelve of My Favourite Things, effecting navigation using a touch screen over an image composite of three movies linked to other movies related by a colour selected on the screen.[4] In the late 1990s a website appeared documenting the Exeter Cathedral Vaulting: “There are two main routes into the material, Visual and Verbal. ….. The Visual route is for those who are more at ease with images than text.” The ceiling, built in the 14th Century, used the vaulting bosses as a mnemonic system related to the stories both sacred and profane, of an oral culture in the West Country of England of the time. The designers of the website echoed the memory system by using a plan of the vaulting and its bosses to access the database containing detailed photographs of each item together with several layers of metadata.[5] More recently the Digital Songlines project at the Australasian Centre for Interactive design in Queensland uses graphical representations familiar in game engines, to map the GIS data relevant to ‘country’ and cultural artefacts, related to an indigenous community.[5]
The principle of this taxonomy does not seek to index video libraries or collections, nor provide machine-based ‘importance sampling’. [7] The concept of detail-on-demand is a means of working with specific video material that avoids “…having to use a separate interface such as keyframes or a tree view”. [8] As a means of navigation it has been explored by others [3, 9, 10, 11] based on earlier experiments with video and hypermedia theory [12].
The central novelty of an approach to mnemonic movies indexing is to enable an accelerated usage of movie based data or information. The movie being watched will provide the link to the related movie(s), without the need to return to scroll a text-based index menu at the root. It will enable PVP users to engage interactively with videos using links to move from one movie to another according to relational rather than sequential connections.
These approaches overlap with the Greek oracists and rhetoricians, who before the alphabet had been handed down, developed an elaborate form of artificial memory, described so fully in Yates’ Art of Memory. Ars memoria, “…a series of loci or places. The commonest, though not the only type of mnemonic place system was the architectural type ….. We have to think of the ancient orator as moving in imagination through his memory building whilst he is making his speech, drawing from the memorised places the images he has placed on them.” [13] It could be claimed the first movies were a conceptual model made by the Greek rhetoricians, complete with wide shots, tracking shots, panning, tilts, close-ups and flashbacks. Played in the cinema of the mind’s eye, the first ‘classic film narrative’ guided his oratory from theme to theme, detail to detail, by associating each element of the speech with the loci and the objects placed there and visible only to him.
2.1   Pathscape
Our familiarity with cinema and the reading of Cartesian spatial representation is exploited in the PathScape prototype system. It explores through demonstration, a means for augmenting human memory for the purposes of storing and retrieving movie files. The detail-on-demand principle employed however, has no overarching narrative, but a series of interactive option prompts. These access movie files in the system using a taxonomy based on fragmentary images, sounds, colours and shapes. The ‘index-movie’ file (I-MF) produces apparent motion in a central image for forward direction along an X-Y axis, perceived as a movement ‘into’ the cinematic space recorded, a landscape.

Figure 1: Screen images
The movement is controlled by gesture, using a mouse in the prototype (Figure 1 & 2) to ‘move’ towards point X accessing file I-MFX; by gesturing to the central image, movement ceases; gesturing to the bottom of the screen instantly loads I-MFY movie file, swinging the image through 180˚ to return along the path previously followed towards point Y.
Figure 2: Screen area images and Cursor gesture outcomes
The taxonomy of the Path which the user traverses is ordered by three indexical devices. Two are located in the border area that surrounds a central image. The first level of indexing is within this border and seen at particular points as fragments of images, visible for short durations. These indicate a nodal junction which, when ‘captured’ by using gesture to halt movement in the central image, will enable with a click, the launch of a movie and associated sound from the database, replacing the central image movie of movement along the path.
Thus along the X-Y axis are the 1, 2, 3, …. 4, 5 etc interactive options, ‘narrative branch nodes’, which in effect are groups of movie keyframes representing a loci or location linked to an associated movie file. (Figure 3)
The second device uses changes in background colour in the border area and background sound to signify changes of zone. (In this prototype different colours represent different ecological zones). When a colour is visible in the border, gesturing to the left or right of the screen will launch the movie of a 360˚ panning movement of the landscape, (Figure 1 & 2) a movie representation of the zone through which the user is currently ‘passing’ –  gesturing to the right will pan right, to the left will pan left : AA, BB, CC … FF. (Figure 2 & 3) Within the pan will be ‘found’ further narrative branch nodes from where to launch movies set during the authoring process, associating each movie with the visible appearance of each locale.
Figure 3: Schematic for accessing database
At the completion of a narrative, the third indexical device appears as a series of circle shapes that appear over the final frame of the movie. Blue, yellow and brown and green circles function as ‘buttons’ to linked topics, colour coded to symbolically represent a narrowing of the index path from the broad to the specific. [14, 15]
The encounter in this prototype enables the user to orientate within a given topography in a way not dissimilar to a regular route followed in the country or the city. Similarly, interaction with the surroundings reveals hidden evidence, concealed information and comment, delivered as stories, as samples of discrete information enabling the interacting subject to put together knowledge of this place through information gathered. The interactive process is not through query structures addressed to a database, but as embodying gestures, using the relational terms, “more, same, less” within the interface of mnemonic cues to linked movie files. The experience is a procedure of constructing meaning through familiarity as part of a gathering process that adds to the individual’s knowledge base accumulated during this and subsequent visits.
2.2   Prototype Outcomes
The prototype explored the means and the cinematic syntax of creating a multi-layered representation of the landscape, through time as well as space. As a multi-voiced ‘interactive documentary’ over which the visitor has agency to ‘move’, to be able to order the stories and the depth of detail which could be retrieved in the prototype, revealed four main areas of response:
visitors who wholly embraced the visual and navigational experience together with the knowledge building process;
visitors who wholly embraced the experience without much concern for the documentary and informational aspects;
visitors for whom the knowledge acquired was unacceptable and without authority or specificity;
visitors who resisted the responsibilities of interactive engagement.
The prototype demonstrated a wide range of responses from users but most acknowledged the novelty and applicability of the approach to a field of their interest. This indicated to us the need to develop an authoring tool that would enable individuals and groups to design their own system for linking their movies.
2.3   Video Acquisition
The prototype was completed in 2000 and since that time the video data stream has become more ubiquitious. Whether generated by a digital video handycam, mobile-phone, a web-based stream or download, optical media and broadcast television and video-on-demand databases, an ever increasing amount of digital media images and sounds need to be managed, whether for professional or recreational purposes. The PVP is an affordance for making use of the video data stream in a variety of ways in a range of ontological contexts.
2.4   Navigating the PVP
Codecs for video files and devices to handle them in creatively useful ways have developed exponentially. The Apple video iPod for instance, can store up to 3 hours of video playback and delivers high quality video using several codecs, 320 x 240 pixels at 30 frames per second with stereo audio. Interacting with the device is through gesture related to the navigational principles used in the Pathscape prototype (Figure 2) mapped to the device front panel (Click Wheel, Figure 4):

Figure 4: Click Wheel navigation controller on PVP
A simplified mapping, based upon the ‘stories in a landscape’ approach, will achieve similar outcomes (Figure 5):

Figure 5: Click Wheel mapped functions
3   Metadesign and Authoring Principles
The use of consumer technology for productive as well as recreational purposes requires an adaptable design approach to the authoring process. Fischer and Giaccardi have shown that metadesign serves the interests primarily of the community of practice (CoP), the consumers, where the community of interest (CoI) are able to provide expert input to a complex design problem. Metadesign gathers potential from these convergences and becomes “…an emerging conceptual framework aimed at defining and creating social and technical infrastructures in which new forms of collaborative design can take place.” [16] The metadesigner as CoI, in working with the CoE could advise in establishing a consistent (or even ideosyncratic) relationality for a specific collection of video files by advising on syntax, ‘a connected order or system of things’, [17] within an image-based indexing system.
In the context of using a modified consumer device to interactively produce outcomes based on relational rather than sequential ordering, it is important that the authoring principle of syntax to be applied in each design and authoring process is determined. The authoring tool framework can then be applied to set the coordinates for the hyperlinking Node() governing the navigation options. Thus the design task can be seen to deal with mnemonic cues as much as the normally associated temporal aspects of ‘editing’ film or video, (though duration will be part of that decision-making process).
We propose two approaches to the design of the system. The first, On-Board Authoring is effected on the device itself and is capable of setting very basic relationships between the (suitably compressed) movie files uploaded to the PVP. The second, Off-Board Authoring, is more generic and involves an application external to the device on which the files and their relationships are established using drag and drop procedures before upload to the PVP.
As APIs for iPod are not publicised, we have developed a simulation to indicate how users of iPod or similar PVPs could author and navigate movies. The system was modelled with Java v.1.4.2 on Mac OS X.
3.1   On-Board Authoring
As the PVP has a limited interface, the authoring operations need to be simple and incorporated within the device’s firmware. The prototype model has the following basic functions: (1) selecting; and (2) marking the related movies. The authoring operation is:

1.Select a file to use as the “IndexMovie”. (Figure 6)

     
          
Figure 6: Choose movie. Figure 7: Play movie.
2. Play >|| (Figure 7)
3. Push >|| to Pause to stop the movie at the point a link is to be created.

4. Push “Menu” to see the movie list, and Select another file to link to;
5. Push ‘Enter’ to set the link, Node(), and return to Index movie.

6. Play >|| to continue
7. Repeat steps 3 – 6 to create additional movie links.
In this simulation the indexing information is stored as a simple text file recording movie file name and frame number from the IndexMovie for the PVP to reference during use. When IndexMovie is played a small arrowhead in the corner of the frame appears for two seconds to indicate where a linked movie can be played by pressing Enter. Otherwise the movie runs, (at fast speed if desired, in either direction, as is standard on PVPs), until the next required indicator is reached. The function of the indicator becomes redundant as the user becomes familiar with ‘incidents’, or specific images on the movie. Operating as mnemonics these enable the  user to recall and so launch, the hyperlinked movie connected to Node() in the IndexMovie.
3.2   Out-Board Authoring
An out-board approach to authoring provides greater flexibility for linking, even to the extent of ‘cascading’ related movies without using one file as the key indexing file such as the Hyper-Hitchcock project have demonstrated. [8] The more recently demonstrated HyVal system uses authoring visualisation of video objects, metadata and the overall hypermedia document as parts of an Editor tool. Shot detection algorithms effect a semi-automatic function, giving it great potential for working quickly with large video file collections or through using search engine routines. [18]
The out-board authoring we propose for the PVP would employ a timeline similar to existing video editing applications, such as iMovie, as the receptor for linking the metadata associated with the linking options – a sprite dragged to position provides a pop-up window into which the linked movie thumbnail is dragged and dropped from the movie clip viewer. Following playback in the editing tool, adjustments and changes can be more easily effected than within the PVP itself.
4   Applications
Video acquired from many sources can be indexed using visual, non text-based protocols, determined by the individual, group or corporation, at a level of complexity appropriate to the ontological context or immediate application. Practical applications would be characterised through a need for dynamic non-linear navigation of movies, represent pedagogical issues for instance, or research data, media production study or methods, visualisation of spatial or temporal dimension etc. For example:
as a user-centred product design / protocol analysis / software architecture analysis aid, the PVP becomes a mobile research tool;
explaining the life-cycle of the frog, at various points in the tadpoles development, the PVP as personal teacher is able to show the detail of a specific moment in that development;
the PVP as personal electronic tour guide enables the visitor to a place to determine, as with museum audio guides, at what point in a tour more detail is required;
for the redevelopment of a city area the PVP becomes a planning tool, capable of integrating video-based data with the location in which the data was gathered, at which it is later referred;
as the recreational device for which it was intended, the Singer Not the Song option will have the user command the iPod view behind the scenes of the recording session and concert footage.
In the creative space of a classroom, the PVP as a teaching tool in the context of its well promoted use as an entertainment and recreational device will be promoted, in conjunction with an authoring tool, as a valuable learning system, engaging critical and creative assets amongst the student body.
5   Discussion
PVPs are ‘hard-wired’ devices with no facility at present for dynamic linking of the indexing movie(s) to external databases. Navigable media spaces of the kind described in which individual files can be accessed and / or updated from more centralised media resources and databases, become a ‘soft-wired’ installation possibility, using the appropriate protocols.
The user of the ‘mnemonic movie’ option on the PVP is also the designer. Design principles in each case will be approached according to the domain in which it will be employed. As a commercially marketable entity such as a music-based package, the design of the ‘bundle of files’ will reflect the ‘culture of connections’ of the target group. For a town planner, collecting data and compiling on-the-fly for examination by other stakeholders, the design approach will be different again. For the artist, hyperlinking will reflect a different set of issues to be explored by the interacting audience, as the mobility of the device enables the city or country environs to be used as the exhibition gallery.
6   Conclusion
PathScape, an experimental interactive prototype, provided initial opportunity to evaluate the concept of indexing audio-visual media utilising a real-world time-space representation as the taxonomy of the indexing procedure. We propose a system for the PVP user to interactively navigate the linkages between movie files as a means of recalling a particular series of operations, directions, sequences explained in pictures and sound, but under the direct and immediate control of the video iPod or other PVP. The feature will enable complex data structures often represented visually – land surveys; mining topographies; design or biological sequences; architectural spaces; construction progress; cultural artifacts; etc – to be made accessible relationally rather than sequentially.
The contemporary burgeoning usage of the video data stream, whether generated by a digital video handycam, mobile-phone, a web-based stream or download, optical media and broadcast television and video-on-demand databases, determines an ever increasing amount of digital media images and sounds to be managed, whether for professional or recreational purposes.
We have proposed two practice-based research approaches to authoring suitably prepared digital video files, either on-board the PVP or off-board such that the hyperlinked prepared files are uploaded to the device for use ‘in the field’ of management and development professionals, or in the more familiar recreational ways for which the PVP is enjoyed.
References
[1]  Bolt, R. ‘Put That There’ Voice and Gesture at the Graphics Interface, (1980) Computer Graphics 4 (3) 262-270
[2]  Davenport, G. and e. al, Jerome B. Wiesner, 1915-1994: A Random Walk through the 20th Century. 1994. Accessed: 1.2.04 http://ic.media.mit.edu/projects/JBW/
[3]  Naimark, M. Place Runs Deep: Virtuality, Place and Indigenousness. in Virtual Museums Symposium. 1998. Salzburg, Austria: ARCH Foundation.
[4]  Hales, C., Portfolio Accessed 1.2.2006 from http://www.smartlabcentre.com/4people/coreres/chales.htm.
[5]  Henry, A. and A. Hulbert, Exeter Cathedral Keystones and Carvings. 1998. Accessed 1.9.04 from http://hds.essex.ac.uk/exetercath/
[6]  Leavy, B., Digital Songlines, Jones, J. Editor. 2004, Australasian Centre for Interaction Design, QUT: Brisbane.
[7]  Gatica-Perez, D. and M.-T. Sun. Linking Objects in Videos by Importance Sampling. in ICME’02 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo. 2002: IEEE.
[8]  Shipman, F., A. Girgensohn, and L. Wilcox. Hyper-Hitchcock: towards the Easy Authoring of interactive Video. in Interact 2003.
[9]  Tua, R. From Hyper-film to Hyper-web. in Electronic Imaging and the Visual Arts: EVA 2002. Florence.
[10]  Girgensohn, A., F. Shipman, and L. Wilcox. Hyper-Hitchcock: Authoring Interactive Videos and Generating Interactive Summaries. in MM’03. 2003. Berkeley, Ca.: ACM.
[11]  Girgensohn, A., et al. Designing Affordances for the Navigation of Detail-on-Demand Hypervideo. in ACM Advanced Visual Interfaces. 2004.
[12]  Tolva, J., MediaLoom: an Interactive Authoring Tool for Hypervideo. 1998, Georgia Tech: Atlanta. http://www.mindspring.com/~jntolva/medialoom/. Accessed 1.3.2006
[13]  Yates, F.A., The Art of Memory. (1992 ed) 1966: Pimlico, London.
[14]  Leggett, M. Losers and Finders: Indexing Audio-visual Digital Media. in Creativity & Cognition Conference 2005. Goldsmiths College London: ACM.
[15]  Leggett, M., Indexing Audio-visual Digital Media: the PathScape prototype, in Scan. 2005, Macquarie University: Macquarie University, Sydney. http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/index.php. Accessed 1.11.04
[16]  Fischer, G. and E. Giaccardi, Meta-Design: a Framework for the Future of End-user development, in End User Development, H. Lieberman, F. Paterno, and V. Wulf, Editors. 2004, Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dortrecht.
[17]  OED, Oxford English Dictionery. 2004.
[18]  Zhou, T. A Structured Document Model for Authoring Video-based Hypermedia. in Proceedings of the 11th International Multimedia Modelling Conference (MMM’05). 2005. Deakin University, Melbourne: IEEE Computer Society

2005

Mike Leggett

ABSTRACT : The contemporary burgeoning usage of digital movies, photos, audio and text, their distribution through networks both electronic and physical will be considered in the context of a convergence of these media with a popular interest in personal and community history and identity.
The paper introduces interdisciplinary research into human memory as a context for understanding its relation to machine memory and methods of storing and retrieval. It proposes an approach to indexing audio-visual media utilising a time-space representational system, drawing upon a real-world time-space representation as the taxonomy of the indexing procedure.
An interactive experimental prototype, PathScape, will be described and evaluated and further practice-based research approaches to author-defined storage and retrieval systems will be outlined.
Author Keywords
Interactive, digital media, taxonomy, index.
ACM Classification Keywords
H5.2 User interfaces: user-centred design.

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION
Storage of artefacts is far easier than finding them again, as any dog will tell you. (Anon)
This paper outlines some research that seeks to develop tools for storing and retrieving audio-visual digital media. The design of the system will need to accommodate the needs of the ‘memory worker’, whether as an individual, or part of a closed or open working group.
The contemporary burgeoning usage of digital movies, photos, audio and text, their distribution through networks both electronic and physical will be considered in the context of a convergence of these media with a popular engagement with personal and community history and identity.
Interdisciplinary research into mind and memory, perception and cognition, presence and embodiment, media representation, creativeness and meaning, will provide a context for understanding this approach to investigating machine memory. A short survey of methods of storage and retrieval of audio-visual digital media will provide the background for the further development of an existing experimental prototype.
DESPERATELY SEEKING….
“Memory is a label for a diverse set of cognitive capacities by which humans and perhaps other animals retain information and reconstruct past experiences, usually for present purposes.”(30)
Lansdale and Edmonds in a 1992 study investigated the design of document filing systems by developing a prototype, MEMOIRS, that treated “…documents as a particular form of event memory”, referring to it as episodic memory. (20) Sutton describes episodic memory as “personal memory for past events and experiences accompanied …by a feeling of familiarity and a reflective awareness of having had the experiences in the personal past.” (30) Semantic memory delivers to us facts derived of the world – Freud died in London – knowledge by association. As the MEMOIRS project observed: “It is enough that the distinction between episodic and semantic memory throws into perspective an approach to the design of filing systems based upon event memory as opposed to the associative relations between items.” (21)
With interest in and the relevance of the field increasing, interdisciplinary memory research is becoming increasingly recognised and valued (17). As Sutton points out, “It’s no accident that memory is at the heart of recent work on dynamical cognition and the embodied, embedded and extended mind…” and that the “…brain and world are often engaged in an ongoing interactive dance through which adaptive action results.” (30)
Interacting with external memory machines such as collections and libraries of knowledge located on computer servers around the globe are central to academic pursuit and increasingly, the education and edutainment of the population. The machine-based memory industries that specialise in servicing this demand by storing data and knowing how to retrieve it again, are moving away from notions of information retrieval and database management towards information gathering, seeking, filtering and visualisation. (29)
DIGITAL SHOEBOXES
Another computer-based industry, growing annually, is digital video. (Notes 1). Disseminated by cable, broadcast, the internet and more recently the mobile phone into the home and the workplace, audio-visual media is ubiquitous (Notes 2) and will increasingly become the format of document that will need an advanced design of filing system. Digital media can be used simply to document an object or the appearances of an occasion, but it is also expressive. In the hands of a trusted author, (or authors), visual media can inform us and reflect us in ways of which we are often unaware. Many of us have the option to gather these images, as photos, as video, as sound. In making images as records of the passing moment, we are able to display our appearance, our presence, often instantaneously, in a place, of a time. But having made the record and following its initial consumption, what then happens to the artefact? “..there has been very little research attention given to how people organize and browse their photo collections, whether digital or non-digital.” (Notes 3) (28)
As collective or personal memory decays, whether a corporate memory or a family memory, the connectedness of events to the media artefact fade and the narrative thread is disrupted. The significance of the memory, the meaning of the image even, can be lost.
‘Episodic memory’ or personal memory is discussed by philosophers at length. Like semantic memory, episodic memory is declarative memory which sets out to represent the world, usually with the aim of truthfulness (30). Epistemologies of representational systems are debated between interdisciplinary researchers working in the fields of philosophy, cognition, perception, cultural theory and semiotics:
“Signs represent the present in its absence; they take the place of the present … when the present does not present itself, then we signify, we go through the detour of signs.“(11)
The notion of ‘memory traces’ and representations for and of recall, while remaining contested ground, form the basis of memory storage and retrieval devices, from the dictionary to the encyclopedia, from the diary to the snapshot. Autobiographical and personal memory can be prompted by what Tulving terms “synergistic ecphory” (32) whereby the emotion or the memory is evoked or revived by means of a stimulus (27). Often aided by the context of the recall, a writer for instance, through placement of artefacts or words in spatial relationship can create the circumstances which connect with the narrative (of a memory trace, event, object etc). We are not unfamiliar with the use of postcards and palm cards or scraps of paper placed around the room as a way of organising complex sources in the process of synthesising thoughts and events into fresh formulations. (Notes 4)  
Within the repositories of collected memory, in large public collections for instance, the stimulus relies on a common rather than private language of signs, most often expressed in a word index form.
INDEXING OPTIONS
“Indexing is a way to increase retrieval precision and accuracy by consistent application of subject terms in their preferred forms. … A taxonomy is a controlled vocabulary presented in an outline view, also called a classified view or hierarchy. Terms are organized in categories reflecting general concepts (Top Terms), major groups (Broader Terms), and more specific concepts (Narrower Terms). The final terms at the end of a branch, often called nodes, can represent any specific instance of a Broader Term, including terms from an authority file of people, organizations, places, or things.” (7)
A taxonomy of indexing enables an overview of the topography of the system, by reducing scale and quantity to proportions that can be comprehended, particularly by new or inexperienced users. In many ways ideal for text-based data such as large ICT parallel database systems (31), such to approach audio-visual data based upon word interpretation is constraining, useful only when words in documents need to be illustrated. On-line picture libraries use keywords associated with location, subject, artist, colour, date, owner etc. – the AHDS Data Service Visual Art (2) image resources site is an example of this tradition as are many photographic archives and stock-shot libraries. Whilst a word index is admirable for locating traces within written language sources, “..keyword searching is a crude and unsatisfactory method for sampling the information content of complex sources….” such as media collections. (8) Likewise, seeking images on the web with a search engine is similarly hit and miss, having to double guess a file name or location descriptor or other aspects of the meta-data, if present.
Glorianna Davenport is one of a group of researchers who have developed approaches to storing and retrieving the complex nuances of the audio-visual artefact within machine-memory database systems. One of these was developed by a research team in the Media Lab at MIT during the mid-90s, ‘Jerome B. Wiesner, 1915-1994: A Random Walk through the 20th Century’ (9) By monitoring the users initial selection subsequent options are reorganised to cluster related topics, using a combination of image and words and re-shuffling their relative positioning on the screen. Each thumbnail image is able to operate as an iconographic link to play the archival media material.
At about the same time, a British artist, Chris Hales made ‘Twelve of My Favourite Things’, an interactive diaristic installation, accessed using a touch screen. A composite of three Quicktime movies, through interaction with ‘hot spots’ based on visible colour zones, movies narrating the world of some young children recorded talking about their favourite colours, places and people, replace one another within the composite on the screen. Contained in scope and size by the technology of the time, the work was an early model of how it could be possible to navigate a series of recollections using wholly visual means. (15) Hale’s overall project to develop an interactive cinema based on these indexing principles has currently reached fourteen iterations of the touch screen-based model.
Research projects seeking industrial objectives, visual indexing systems for the television and cable industries, have included the IBM CueVideo research project. The project measured the productiveness of automated indexing, browsing and retrieval based on different means of summarising digital video using keyframe storage, and accelerated sound reproduction employing audio processing TSM technology. (1) Whilst the taxonomy is text-based, the final indexing stage which locates sequence or shot, is a audio and/or visual abbreviation of content, of relevance to our current concerns. (Notes 5)
Well established software tools, such as ArcView, are related to topography, recorded time and place, and are widely used in industries related to environmental planning, water and land management, urban layout, national parks, mining and agriculture, etc. These are specialised tool sets based on data derived from various methods of measurement. GIS satellite data and a range of plug-ins to the system enable digital images, sound and text files to be attached to specific coordinates. This provides extensive profiles to be constructed and navigated in real-time from numerical data using graphical and map visualisations. Such tools have been adapted by archaeologists and social scientists. In the west of Sydney, the NSW Migrant Heritage Centre has commissioned a website [13] using a application called TimeMap that links a combination of text and map metaphors with personal oral histories and localities around the City of Fairfield in western Sydney.
These tools offer a plethora of styles and codes that incorporate maps, diagrams, graphical and typographic devices, each inflected with current tools and fashions in interface design. The Fairfield project takes an approach closely related to the archaeologist’s inventory, making it possible to store and retrieve data about the past, but making the oral and written evidence useful for archaeologists and educationalists but uninvolving and distant as an experience for individuals in the community.
LOCI SYSTEMS
The Greeks oracists and rhetoricians, who before the alphabet had been handed down, developed an elaborate form of artificial memory, described so fully in Yates’ Art of Memory. Ars memoria, “…a series of loci or places. The commonest, though not the only type of mnemonic place system was the architectural type ….. We have to think of the ancient orator as moving in imagination through his memory building whilst he is making his speech, drawing from the memorised places the images he has placed on them.” (34) It could be claimed the first movies were a conceptual model made by the Greek rhetoricians, complete with wide shots, tracking shots, panning, tilts, close-ups and flashbacks, all played in the cinema of the mind’s eye, the first ‘classic film narrative’.
In a 2002 edition of Nature Neuroscience, a study included a range of tests carried out on people who were highly ranked in the World Memory Championships. Whilst their brain capacity and structure was determined to be average it, it was found with functional magnetic resonance scanning (fMRI) that the regions associated with navigation and memory were more active than in a control group attempting the same memory tasks. The contestants confirmed that they used a strategy called the ‘method of loci’ in which the objects to be remembered were placed along an imaginary pathway that could be retraced when recalling the items in order. “The longevity and success of the method of loci in particular may point to a natural human proclivity to use spatial context – and its instantiation in the right hippocampus – as one of the most effective means to learn and recall information” (23)
In this, the age of the rhizome (10), linearity need not structure thought within the confines of logic and rhetoric. In the same way as the walk from home to the station may allow interventions of the everyday to structure the day itself, even enhanced by the imprecision of the visual cues that guide us during the walk, then too the invention or re-invention of a visual literacy based on digital video and ‘machine memory’ technologies, would enable us (with the happenstance of chance encounter), to employ indexing and classification appropriate to the task in hand.
An experiment in the late 1970s by the Architectural Machine group at MIT, ‘Aspen Walk’, linked two video disc players with a computer system. By interacting with a touch screen display, the viewer could navigate the image of a drive around the town of Aspen, determining as each crossroad approached on the video screen whether to turn left or right or to proceed forward. With an appropriate touch, the video would be cued to change the image correspondingly. (25) Our familiarity with the visual cues of the urban landscape and of the principles of physical movement through linking streets, enable us in the machine version to navigate, cognitively, the visual system representing the physical layout of the town.
Criss-crossing the virtual town would enable us to gradually install in memory at first the main features of place and their relation to other features and the grid of the streets. Later as our familiarity increases, then the ‘bird’s eye view’ could be constructed in the mind at the moment it becomes necessary to reckon the most direct route between two points in the town. Such a process of conceptualizing would be similar whether in front of the representational system or within the town itself.
This begins to illustrate the complex way in which physiology, mind, agency and artefacts can interact to inform action, the outcomes of which can cause physical passage through a space as well as further updates from the system of representation.
“Clark (5,6) and Hutchins (18)… and others, have argued that just as basic forms of real-world success turn on the interplay between neural, bodily and environmental factors, so advanced cognition turns – in crucial respects – upon the complex interplay between individual reason, artifact and culture. …The external environment, actively structured by us, becomes a source of  cognition-enhancing ‘wideware’: external items (devices, media, notations) that scaffold and complement (but typically do not replicate) biological modes of computation and processing, creating extended cognitive systems whose computational profiles are quite different from those of the naked brain. Hutchins for example, gives a wonderful  and detailed account of the way multiple biological brains, tools (such as sextants and  alidades), and media (such as maps and charts) combine to make possible the act of ship navigation.” (5)
A final example of memory systems based on loci is the Exeter Cathedral ceiling website. Here the narrative of a learnéd treatise, the index of a catalogue and a graphical map of the ceiling are each linked to pictorial details of the magnificently restored ceiling of the structure. However, the authors are quite upfront: “There are two main routes into the material, Visual and Verbal. ….. The Verbal route is for those who are more at ease with text than images.” There is an elegance and appropriateness in the visual component of the site in associating a contemporary on-line database design with a medieval equivalent – the vaulting and keystones in a 700 year old cathedral. These are pathways and nodes that actual store 15th Century arcane and local knowledge using, like their modern counterpart, visual coding and systematic method. (16)
PATHSCAPE
An interactive multimedia prototype of PathScape was developed in 1999/2000 with a small team of which I was project leader, in association with the Australian Film Commission. The prototype has an interface and navigation system giving access to ‘narratives’ by their association with a specific place or location or series of locations.
The taxonomy is represented with images of contiguous cinematic space – individual photo images are pixilated to produce apparent motion in a forward direction, perceived as a movement ‘into’ the space recorded, a landscape. The movement is achieved by gesture, using a mouse in the prototype. (Figure 1)

Figure 1: Screen Cursor Areas and Gesture Outcomes
The taxonomy of the Path is ordered sequentially by three indexical devices. These are located in the border area that surrounds the central image of movement along the Path. Within this border are seen at various points, fragments of images, visible for short durations. These indicate a nodal junction which, when ‘captured’ by halting all apparent forward movement, enable with a click the launch of a movie to replace the image and sound of the Path. Thus along an X-Y axis are the 1, 2, 3, …. 8, 9 etc options, or loci ‘in’ which are stored the ‘narratives’. (Figure 2)

Figure 2: Schematic for accessing image/sound database
The second device is changes in background colour to the border and background sound, signifying changes of zones. (Differences in ecology along the Path in this prototype). In Figure 2, along the X-Y axis are the AA, BB, CC …. FF etc axes. By gesturing to the left of the screen (or to the right) will launch a 360˚ panning movement, a movie representation of the zone through which the user is currently ‘passing’ – to the right will pan right, to the left will pan left. Within the pan will be ‘found’ further nodes to launch movies storing more narratives.
At the completion of a narrative, the third indexical device appears as a series of circle shapes that appear over the final frame of the movie. (Figure 3) Blue, yellow and brown and green circles function as ‘buttons’ to linked topics colour coded to symbolically represent a broad sort (in this prototype) under the descriptors: Anecdotes, Historical Context, Commentary and Analysis. Each option extends and develops the background of what has gone before, in effect narrowing the index path to the specific, reducing from the broad.
FURTHER DEVELOPMENT
Following demonstrations to several groups of the initial prototype and receiving anecdotal responses and with the limited resources left to the development project at that stage, it was decided to implement a text-based component to PathScape. This would not compromise the initial intention of devising a visually-based indexing system as the choice to use text would be clearly indicated and separated from the visual path.

Figure 3: Screen grab within a narrative branch, with colour-coded circles.
The grey/black circles on the screen that sit behind each of the coloured circles are the route through to the traditional text-based index – the text information sits in the shadow, as it appeared, of its iteration as a movie. The text is organised sequentially as a series of ‘browser pages’ gathered, utilising XML protocols, from the Sources database of content, specifying:
For each narrative: Sound; Picture; Transcript; Keywords; Web Search;
For the whole prototype: More Stories (as a Table of Contents – the narratives – with the frame numbers of the Path movie listed against each item, from which the narratives could be launched); Keyword Index
The user in the prototype therefore has a choice – to navigate the index by using images and sounds, or by using words, or a mixture of both. The probable usefulness of the feature in an educational context was also noted.
FURTHER RESEARCH
PathScape is a project progressing through several stages and adopting several iterative forms. It could be delivered on disc (CD or DVD) or via the internet or broadband cable or conceivably, as it uses XML protocols, via a PDA or mobile phone. The software framework is dynamic, rebuilding the database interface at each launch. With the further research into the development of appropriate interfaces that help the author(s) define the ontology and epistemology of personal and collective memory, the PathScape paradigm will examine models for placing and retrieving audio-visual digital media artefacts.
At a later stage it may be appropriate to consider meta-design as an approach to developing the tool further. Fischer describes “…a fundamental objective of meta-design is to create socio-technical environment that empower users to engage in informed participation rather than being restricted to the use of existing systems.”(14) In such an event, this representational system will be open to invention by its author(s) through the placement of appropriate media into the chosen taxonomic indexing system. Different modes of taxonomic representation could be suggested in such a scenario to provide ways of thinking about the representation of memory.
RESEARCH BACKGROUND
Lansdale, Scrivener and Woodcock have shown that “useful theories of spatial memory can be developed of general utility in the design of pictorial databases” but that “…the specificity of task domain and visual material is more likely to dictate issues of design than is any generic theory of visual cognition.”(21) The prototype of PathScape is a specific model using the familiar figure of a landscape into which we walk and from which we can return as a paradigm with which to address this conclusion. Like many of the aspects of contemporary interface design, the various devices and indexing systems could become options at application launch, easily switched on or off by the user, helping the user to define for themselves, the interface with which they felt most comfortable and productive.
Though setting out to be a storage system for movies and narratives rather than just pictures, the direction indicated by Lansdale, Scrivener and Woodcock’s research into designing a system is in the same area as more recent thoughts by Clark about “…the challenge of tractable search and recall given an extremely large database.” (4) Though an interactive system may ameliorate the apparent size of a digital media database, at some point the ‘visitor’ to such a system will want tools to enable a meaningful encounter with it.
In addressing the problems associated with other ‘unknowable’ database resources like the web, Clark describes Kleinberg’s procedure, “..which exploits information implicit in the links between pages so as to identify patterns of connectivity indicative of ‘authoritative sources.’” Recent work on this approach to “…information-about-information (or second-order information) implicit in the link structures…” may be of value in creating “…a useful, low dimensional reflection of the high dimensional knowledge-space.”(4) A taxonomy based on making visible connections between locations of knowledge or evidence, whether on the unordered space of the internet or the more ordered (but possibly idiosyncratic) space of an artificial topography, provides the visitor to the system with some shapes, some vectors to move within at the outset.
The appeal is to the users knowledge and experience of moving through three-dimensional space, in the urban or rural setting and its remediation as an artificial topography. Encountering a range of spaces in representational form (loci) that engender in the user a sense of a favoured space raises the issue of motivation, particularly for the visitor to the system, or one who is not familiar with it. A ‘low dimensional reflection’ of this kind will at very least be a means by which the scale of the database and its contents can be comprehended. But the registering of presence of the user both in the space of the system and the images and sounds it can retrieve, and within the physical space the system stands, together will provide reassurance and encouragement to interact, to explore and to respond to and move through what is retrieved.
Mantovani and Riva, building on the work of Zahoric and Jenison (1998) through Heidegger and J. Gibson, proposed an ‘ecological approach’ to establishing a relational presence. Like Kleinberg’s ‘second-order information’, this is based on resources not being the ‘properties of either object or subject, but of their relation’(23). Gibson’s image of a tree in the middle of a field on a summer’s day being only an ‘affordance’ to those who seek its cool shade being an illustration of ‘resources, which are only revealed to those who seek them’. Mantovani & Riva go on to amplify this distinction with the argument that presence is a social construction “mediated by both physical and conceptual tools which belong to a given culture” in which there is “the emphasis of ecological approach on the primacy of action on mere perception” and that “action is not undertaken by isolated individuals but by members of a community. …. Ultimately, there are only two elements which guarantee presence: a cultural framework and the possibility of negotiation of both actions and their meaning”. (23)
This tends to support work developed a decade previously by R.S.Lazarus under the heading Cognitive-Relational Emotion Theory which set out to propose
“..that emotions work through a set of interdependent systems including processes for cognitive appraisal, physical interaction between person and environment, coping, and emotional response itself.” (19).
Discourse around the term embodiment has ventilated many of these concerns about presence. Dourish giving central place to Merleau-Ponty captures “…a sense of ‘phenomenological presence’, the way that a variety of interactive phenomena arise from a direct and engaged participation in the world [which] includes both physically realized and socially situated phenomena…”  Meaning and meaningfulness “…is to be found in the way in which it reveals itself to us as being available for our actions. It is only through those actions, and the possibility for actions that the world affords us, that we can come to find the world, in both its physical and social manifestations, meaningful.” (12) (Author’s emphasis)
CONCLUSION
“One of the most basic principles of plot construction is that the remembered ‘I’ traces a continuous spatio-temporal route through all the narratives of memory, a route continuous with the present and future location of the remembering subject. … This principle imposes a kind of unity on all the narratives; …” (3).
The narrative that I conclude here has briefly discussed, if not imposed unity upon, the interdisciplinary nature of the Pathscape project. Thinking about ways in which a system may be further developed has unavoidably caused me to consider the often separated disciplines that are the study of mind and memory, perception and cognition, presence and embodiment, media representation, creativeness and meaning. I am not forgetting the Machine and the interdisciplinarity of connecting with another or others through computational complexity and its magnetic appeal.
Increasingly in the contemporary context of tools like the Macintosh lifestyle suite iLife, we can anticipate if not fewer words, then a lot more images to be digitally authored and then consigned to data media, before being finally consigned to the bottoms of drawers for a want of a means of retrieving their autobiographical or historical significance. PathScape and similar projects set out to extend the potential of these cultural resources and the authors who will provide a signifying unity for the benefit of others to make meaningful enjoyment. Enjoyment should be the key because, after all is done, and as Andy Clark has recently commented, “Memory is but constrained confabulation”.
NOTES
1. Communication of digital video signals has many aspects: content; creation; formatting; encoding for data compression and channel error control; modulation; satellite, terrestrial, cable, and networked transmission; and reception – demodulation, decoding and digital signal processing. Accompanying every signal operation is a piece of hardware to perform the task. Cameras, displays, switching arrays, servers, mass storage devices, and computers are examples of the kinds of hardware required for the generation and distribution of digital video and which will be affected by technological advances in the state of the art. (17)
2. Broadband services enable, if not video quality, access to audio-visual digital media. Broadband subscribers have increased six fold from a base of 6.6 mil in 2000 to 35.8 mil in 2004. Source: US Bancorp Piper Jaffery. ‘Streaming Media Guide’ Viewcast (32)
3. Rodden and Wood’s research came up with several interesting proposals for further research. In the conclusion they went on to cast doubt on the usefulness of text-based indexing and retrieval providing the subject group with “enough extra motivation to invest the effort in annotating their photographs.” (27)
4. The author witnessed two professional script-writers working method, which involved them laying out palm cards and images around a studio, whilst working with a computer in the centre of the room to synthesis their content. Russell Crowe portrayal of the schitzophrenic John Nash in the movie ‘A Beautiful Mind’ provides an image of this process in its pathological state. (19)
5. “The on-line video server is composed of our speech-based search and retrieval system, a multimedia streaming server (Real Networks, IBM’s VideoCharger and/or Apple’s Quicktime), and query processing and a process that compose and deliver the retrieved results back to the user. The search and browse system includes an Internet-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) that can be run by any browser, on different platforms, using standard plug-ins. The GUI includes a text query box and associated advanced searching options, and allows easy navigation between the different views which blend together into an advanced video browser. … The results further show that there is no difference between speed assessment of video, MSB and audio only. This means that in many cases of remote education we can replace the video with a moving storyboard, which is much smaller in size and can be streamed across low bandwidth networks. … The results also vary between people. Among the 24 subjects we have some prefer to watch the full video, some prefer to watch the MSB, and others prefer audio only. The main lesson from this diversity in preferences is not to “optimize” the system for an “average” user, but to leave him/her to decide which media and what speed to use for a given task.” (1)
6. Pixilation is defined as “A technique used in theatrical and cinematographic productions, whereby human characters move or appear to move as if artificially animated. (26) This should not be confused with the pixel, a compression of the term, ‘picture element’ being “The smallest resolvable rectangular area of an image” (18)
REFERENCES
1. Amir, A. Ponceleon, D. Blanchard, B. Petkovic, D. Srinivasan, S. Cohen G.  Using Audio Time Scale Modification for Video Browsing, Proceedings of the 33rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences  2000.
2. AHDS Arts and Humanities Data Service Visual Arts. http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/about/index.html. Accessed 1.9.04.
3. Campbell, J. The Structure of Time in Autobiographical Memory, European Journal of Philosophy 5:2, Blackwall Publishers, Oxford 1997.
4. Clark, A Global Abductive Inference and Authoritative Sources, or How Search Engines can Save Cognitive Science. Cognitive Science Quarterly 115-140 2:2:2002
5. Clark, A.  Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again, MIT  Press, 1997.
6. Clark, A. Where Brain, Body and World Collide Daedalus 127, 257-80, 1998.
7. Data Harmony Inc http://www.dataharmony.com/ faq.htm#b1 Accessed 1.9.04.
8. Davenport, G.Indexes Are Out Visions & Views, MIT Media Lab Fall 1996.
9. Davenport, G. et al  ‘Jerome B. Wiesner, 1915-1994: A Random Walk through the 20th Century’ (1994) http://ic.media.mit.edu/projects/JBW/ Accessed 1.9.04.
10. Deleuze, G & F Guattari ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia'(1994), trans B Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
11. Derrida, J. Difference. Speech and Phenomena, NW University Press 1973.
12. Dourish, P  Where the Action Is – the foundations of embodied interaction, MIT Press. 2001
13. Fairfield, City of ‘Peopling Fairfield’ website http://acl.arts.usyd.edu.au/projects/consulting/fairfield/index.html Accessed 1.9.2004.
14. Fischer, G Meta-Design: Beyond User-Centered and Participatory Design, Proceedings  of HCI International 2003, Julie Jacko and Constantine Stephanidis  (eds.), Crete, Greece, June 2003, pp. 88-92.,
15. Hales, Christopher. http://www.smartlabcentre.com/ 4people/coreres/chales.htm Accessed 1.9.04.
16. Henry, A. and Hulbert, A. Exeter Cathedral Keystones and Carvings. http://hds.essex.ac.uk/exetercath/ Accessed 1.9.04.
17. Hoerl, C. and McCormack, T. (eds) Time and Memory: philosophical and psychological perspectives. OUP 2001.
18. Hutchins, E.  Cognition in the Wild, MIT Press,1995
19. Huang, M  Presence as an Emotional Experience, Medicine Meets Virtual Reality ed Westwood et al, IOS Press, Amsterdam. 1999
20. IMDB, International Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268978/ Accessed 1.9.04.
21. Lansdale, M Edmonds, E  Using Memory for events in the design of personal filing systems, International Journal Man-Machine Studies, 36 97-126. 1992
22. Lansdale, M Scrivener, S Woodcock, A Developing Practice with Theory in HCI: applying models of spatial cognition for the design of pictorial databases, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 44, 777-799, 1996.
23. Maguire, Dr Eleanor, et al  ‘Routes to Remembering: the brains behind superior memory’ in Nature Neuroscience V6 N1. 2002
24. Mantovani, G Riva, G  “Real” presence: how different ontologies generate different criteria for presence, telepresence and virtual presence’, Presence: Journal Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 8 (5) 538-548. 1999
25. Naimark, M. Place Runs Deep: Virtuality, Place and Indigenousness. Virtual Museums Symposium, ARCH Foundation, Salzburg, Austria 1998.
26. NSF Industry/University Co-Operative, Research Center for Digital Video at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, New York.  http://www.ecse.rpi.edu/CNGV/proposal.html#intro. Accessed 1.9.04.
27. OED, Oxford English Dictionary http://dictionary.oed.com/ Accessed 1.9.04.
28. Rodden, K Wood, K How Do People Manage Their Digital Photographs? Proceedings of CHI 2003, Ft Lauderdale, Texas, 2003.
29. Schneiderman, B. Designing for User Interface, Addison-Wesley, 3rd edition 1998 pp 510-511.
30. Sutton, J. Memory, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta  (ed.),http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2004/ entries/ memory/.2004
31. Taniar, D Rahayu, W. A Taxonomy of Indexing Schemes for Parallel Database Systems, Distributed and Parallel Databases, 12, 73–106, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 2002.
32. Tulving, E. Elements of Episodic memory, OUP 1983
33. US Bancorp Piper Jaffery. ‘Streaming Media Guide’ Viewcast http://www.viewcast.com/whitepaperdownload.asp# Accessed 1.9.04.
34. Yates, F A. ‘The Art of Memory’, Pimlico, London 1966 (1992 ed)
 

2007

Mike Leggett

ABSTRACT
A series of Models were built to explore and test the precept of navigating movies using gesture to control both forward and backward movement, and to launch movie files linked using visual elements associatively and semantically related to the knowledge domain represented within a movie collection.

Author Keywords
Video, indexing, hypermedia, mnemonics, meta-design
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.4 Information interfaces and presentation: hypermedia.

 

 

INTRODUCTION
The browse searching of digital video files using proprietary software and commercial applications relies on alphanumeric indexing and keyword selection. This is appropriate for ontologies with established taxonomies and structures for maintaining Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) including information contained in movie files. But as movie files become ubiquitous in our everyday lives as a means of conveying information for a range of purposes, the design of computer systems for storage and retrieval employing other forms of visual mnemonics could add efficiencies of speed with ease of accurate access.
The research approach taken utilises the mnemonics contained in the motion-picture images of a movie collection and offers possibilities for non text-based interaction with a KMS. A series of Models were built to explore and test the behaviours of subjects navigating movie files, encountered as full screen motion-picture images, using either arrow keys on the keyboard, or mouse, to effect 4-way control: the playback of the movie – up for forward, down for backward; and launch movie files linked to mnemonics in the movie being viewed – left and right to link.
Linking to left and right is according to a schema, (from the Greek skhema, meaning shape), designed for each Model, that aids in the retrieval of movies in the collection.

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Using visual elements associatively and semantically related to the knowledge domain represented within the movie collection, evaluation will compare Models operated by novice and expert groups.

METHODS
The software tool, Mnemovie, was developed by the researcher, in collaboration with a professional multimedia developer. The approach to this initial task has been described by Fischer, Giaccardi et al, using the seeding, evolutionary growth, and reseeding (SER) process model [1] p 492. The practice of building the software tool by Leggett and Hinshaw was guided by the fourth model described by Fischer et al for collaboration paths in software development, where both the domain practitioner and the software professional has some knowledge of the others practice (p 487).
Building on related hypermedia research by Girgensohn et al [2] the Mnemovie tool facilitated the rapid building of Models to create linkages between movie files as a means of realising proof of concept. Following analysis and reflection on the semantic domain of each of six movie collections, navigational schemas were designed before links were created between movie items. The tool enabled the researcher to define parameters within the code to link movie files and iteratively develop and refine the schema for each Model.
Retrieval Schemas
Four of the six schemas were advanced further in preparation for evaluation using a specific movie collection of people talking about their research activity.
1. The segmented Loop schema, where each segment is a compression of each movie item in the collection. Linking thereby has a direct indexical relationship between a Loop segment and the item, and vice versa to return to the Loop. (Figure 1)
2. The Pathway line schema, from A to B, linking to the researcher collection has an indirect connection, where a particular location along the path is the mnemonic for a particular movie item.
3. A development of the Pathway line to the horizontal Grid is applied to a collection of movies shot and linked by the system through the intersecting streets of an inner city block. Linking to the collection of movies about the work of the researchers has an indirect connection with the schema, a particular location in the grid of streets being the mnemonic for a particular movie item.
4. The Clock face schema, dividing by convention the passing of time and indexically, direct links to the proportional durations of a movie; or indirectly to different movies in the researcher collection.

Fig 1. Sample movie collection using Loop schema.
Mnemovie Tool
Arising from an earlier prototype that used Macromedia Director to construct the system framework, conceptual and technical elements used for the PathScape project were extended into the requirements for the current investigation. Specifically this moved away from hard-coded ‘content’ to a modular and externalised framework, (.mov, .swf, .dcr files), subject to an “external importation routine” incorporating an XML file, “..more extensible to handle growth of later versions.” This approach has more recently adopted by other developers whereby a:
“…presentation engine allows content authors to describe … content through associated XML files. Interpretation of those files, content layout, and all … communication is automatically handled by the presentation engine. The content is described external to the application, creating a natural separation from the … interface.” [3]
In Table 1, the conceptual data model for building the Mnemovie tools includes the software framework, the presentation engine and the media directory.
Root Directory of Model
Presentation Engine
Media
Mnemovie b3
MNEMOVIE (application) •Mnemovie.dcr •movie_data.xml
MOVIES (video files directory)
Table 1: Mnemovie data model
Media files are prepared using a digital video editing application and saved with consistent resolution and frame size into the directory. The .dcr file compresses
specification data for the Director application and is prepared by the software professional. The file movie_data.xml contains a description of the tags and the layout of the program source code specific to the manipulation of the movie files contained in the adjacent Movies directory. The modular construction of the source code enables the researcher to expand the scale of the instruction set according to the requirements of the interactive Model.
The XML-file structure throughout was based on each <track> having a <movie id> for the forward motion movie and a different <move id> for a reverse motion movie. From each <track> links to other movies could be created. The Beta 1.0 used the following structure (sample):
<track id=”PD”
 <movie id=”PZF” file=”movies/PulledZfore.mov” dir=”F” ><!–F–>
<link side=”L” start_time=”00:00:13″ end_time=”00:00:14″
movie_id=”11″ link_start_time=”00:00:00″ />
    </movie>
<movie id=”PZB” file=”movies/PulledZback.mov” dir=”B” ><!– B –>
    <link side=”R” start_time=”00:00:12″ end_time=”00:00:13″
movie_id=”R11″ link_start_time=”00:00:00″ />
    </movie>
</track>
As experimentation progressed iteratively, the <link_> group of tags operating within the system were increased and thus offered additional linking possibilities for schema design.
Evaluation
Each Model is in the process of predictive and operator evaluation with a movie collection to assess interaction efficiencies between Models, the quality of the experience and the interacting subject’s ability to:
navigate a movie collection using the schema approach;
retrieve information contained within movie files;
retain memory traces from the navigational process, such that subsequent interactions with the Models can demonstrate accumulated learning behaviour.
REFERENCES
1.    Fischer, G., Giaccardi, E., Eden, H., Sugimoto, M. and Yunwen, Y. Beyond binary choices: Integrating individual and social creativity. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 63. 482-512. 2005
2.    Girgensohn, A., et al. Designing Affordances for the Navigation of Detail-on-Demand Hypervideo. in ACM Advanced Visual Interfaces. 2004.
3.    Mentor, K. Director and SCORM 1.3 SCORM SCO Presentation Engine (S2PE) Director Developer Center, Adobe Inc, 2006.