Semantic, RDF and Linked data.

Just writing a description of the final phase of the Landscape-Portrait Bournemouth project. In reading about the history of RDF as a subset of XML it seems to me, materially and maybe structurally, that there is a connection between the schema of RDF and the materiality of video. 

For example the portrait videos in Landscape-Portrait do not work in a statistical fashion, rather each video text is a temporal descriptor, rather than an abstract fixed piece of data. In order to access it a coherent taxonomy, such as that outlined by RDF needs to be employed. 

In essence the video functions as a container, much in the same way as XML/RDF is a  language for describing content in a uniform manner, video is used as a temporal container of descriptive information, which might be accessed by RDF protocols and made sense of at a machinic level by using a semantic approach. 

That said the video is also a signifier of a great deal of other information not quantifiable using a descriptive language such as RDF such as might be understood by Jameson's description of video as ‘a total flow’ of imagery, words, context. Overiding the hegemony of the linguistic medium' and perhaps this quote form Jameson points towards this machinic understanding: 

'“Yet the involvement of the machine in all this allows us now perhaps to escape phenomenology and the rhetoric of consciousness and experience, and to confront the seemingly subjective temporality in a new and materialist way, a way which constitutes a new kind of materialism as well, one not of matter but of machinery.' (Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism, 1991).

Forma - LP -Updates

Had a really good meeting with David Metcalfe and Caroline Smith from Forma yesterday. Landscape-Portrait has been engaged in a form of touring for the last seven years and we all agreed it was now time to move it to phase 3. Phase 3 involves making the data usable in other formats. This is closely linked to initiatives around Open Data. It is also perhaps concerned less with the liberal idea of 'openness' which dominated the talks at the recent conference in Berlin, but rather a concern to the methodologies used to create the data, the notion of a public art work as an engine which animates this process and a concept of the outcome of such as project as a component in a larger network; which neatly creates a tension between artwork and resource. There is also a wider issue of the semantic web, and how the video data recorded by LP might be made 'intelligible' via a robust mark up, how do you mark up video for use in Open Data projects. We talked about funding to create this next phase of the project, looking at academic, commercial and civic funds. Be interesting how this develops in the current funding crisis.