creating flickering shadows in a cave

I find I have a block when it comes to thinking about the social-ness of creativity. I tend way more towards the “huddle in the dark and make things up and don’t show anyone until it’s ready” model of art making. Blogging and tweeting and the like doesn’t feel like it’s creation at all: it’s all just blather you do to keep from really working. (I blame reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast at a formative age.)

I realize I’m using terms like art to talk about 90-second library videos here, and that that’s kind of weird. I’m not going to apologize for it though.

So creating something like this little screencast about tagging in Koha using Jing feels more like my idea of creativity. I sat here on my bed in my room, downloaded the software, wrote a short script, pressed record and then uploaded it to the site. It felt like no one was involved and it was easy to pop up onto the web. It’s not encouraging you to tweet about it while you’re doing it, just the finished product. I like how it creates an unintelligible but relatively short URL to promote Tweeting and the like, but that’s as social as this process got.

Part of that is because Jing wants you to Go Pro so you can create mp4 files and presumably then you’d be able to upload your video to YouTube or something where people actually are, watching video. And it wasn’t the pure solitary artist experience either. For that I’d need the ability to actually edit the video, to sit here laboriously sweating over each frame (which I’ve used Camtasia for in the past and it lends itself well to that, but I wanted to try something new and simple for this little activity). This is social because it’s not prompting a lot of agonized self-reflection, just the “do something and get it out there” mentality.

I’m not sure that creates greatness but quantity has its own quality, I suppose.

2 Responses (Add Your Comment)

  1. You have a irreverent way of looking at things. The quality is one part world weariness combined with obvious practical technical knowledge (that’s what I surmise, anyway).

    I’m surprised you didn’t mention you couldn’t embed the screencast; that’s worth complaining about in some way, isn’t it? It would make the screencast more sociable, me thinks.

  2. I always forget about embedding options. I’ve run into so many instances when they just don’t work (because of the various wherevers my blog has been hosted not wanting to have funky javascript or whatevers running) I barely think of that as an issue.

    Also there’s a bit of an aesthetic issue. I like things on one site to be clean and fit together simply. It was always an issue with MySpace for me. Having videos and things on the blog always feels like it disrupts the words on a screen experience. I’m not a big fan of web video in general, because I’ve had enough shitty internet connections to know it’s not as reliable as reading the words. And yet I have no such problem with Tumblr-style blogs. Ah, foibles and idiosyncracies.

    But yes, there is a lack of embeddability there as well. (Somethign I notice Walwisher doesn’t lack.

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