Adrian's posted a new vog, Edinburgh from the Airport Bus. Its simple enough: a movie of Edinburgh seen from a bus window plays in three panes, while travel notes from a visit to the city scrolls automatically to the right. The video panes also serve as controls: by rolling over, you can manipulate the playback.
Writing about the project Adrian states:
A major issue for me in my exploration of this work, particularly in relation to possible new forms for academic practice, is to move away from the humanities relegation of the image, particularly the moving image, to illustration for the text. This particularly happens in cinema studies where no matter what the work thinks it does the images are always reduced to secondary in relation to the written word.
What Adrian describes here is what I in my thesis called containment. When two sign systems are combined in a text, one is always surrounded by the other, as when video illustrations are contained within an academic essay. Adrian aptly demonstrates how writing may be contained within a movie. In Edinburgh, it is the movie stream that controls and dictates the playback of the writing. The trouble is that both the video and the writing requires the attention from our eyes. I have to either look or read. Short text inside the movie frame would have solved this, but I doubt whether long paragraphs of writing can be played back at the same time as moving images, without one of them losing out. We only have one set of eyes, and reading and image-looking use two different capacities of the brain, as Focault noted in This is not a Pipe.
Adrian could have put his essay or travelogue as a voice-over sound track, however. Think of DVD movies with commentaries. They work very well, and there is no doubt that the movie is the primary, the comments the secondary text.
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