wk 4 quicktime website: accessproject
The ACCESS project is almost scary. It was created to call attention to surveillance. It is an interactive, international social experiment created by a German art/media institute. it has the lighting effect we saw in the Third Man.
As one of the archive videos tells us, ACCESS is an robotic spotlight with tight beam accoustic instructional audio installed in a public place. Individuals are tracked without knowledge of who is the tracker or what is the reason. A voice tells them they are being watched online and gives them instructions, with mixed results.[see the project archives;ARS Electronica 2003. ] then watch:
Quick Time is the delivery method, the videos are archived in a very clean, minimalist style. They are of short duration, most load very quickly in a new window. The image quality was perfectly acceptable for me, I am watching on a 1680 x 1050 resolution, streaming over a wireless connection. The purpose of the archive is to capture the results of the project and make the experiment results available to the public. Interestingly enough, they credit Flash, not Quick Time. I am confused.
The end product belongs to Creative Capital Foundation, one of the project sponsors. Following the path backwards, I found the Creative Capital Channel, which uses streaming media to present their digital, social commentary, work of arts. This one, Book of Roofs is actually a Flash driven "E-art", with files within files of discovery to be had. It was located under webcasts. (ummm, E-Art? never heard of it til now). A delightful angle on this site is the free, art box, to which you can store your favorite E-Art, to view at anytime, by logging in with your new assigned password. Nice spin on Favorites, eh? The purpose is an art exhibit, some of the art has been withdrawn and so does not load. But it is interesting.
See the exhibit, Letters from Homeroom. For this one you need both Flash and Quicktime. The whole is run with Flash and the substories "notes" are done in quicktime, both video and audio. I think this format could be successfully used on other types of sites, for story telling. I think they used the thumbnail, quicktime shorts for the visual appeal and to support the randomness of the highschool experience. Now, if all personal websites were this well put together, we would delight in wading through them.
