October 2011
19 posts
“…we want people to come out of it thinking, “Wow that was really cool. I’ve never seen that before. I’ve never done that before.”
—
Blake Whitman, Vimeo VP of Creative Development
10/18/2011, 11:30AM at the IAC Building in NYC
“…we know that we want it to be cool, funky and different.”
—
Blake Whitman, Vimeo VP of Creative Development
10/18/2011, 11:30AM at the IAC Building in NYC
The [updated] Narrative
With over 8 million registered users, Vimeo is the world’s largest network of amateur filmmakers. Over 10 million people in the U.S. alone visit the site each month and 70% of the user-base is located internationally. Many of its users are concentrated in dense urban areas, such as London, New York and Los Angeles.
Recent developments in communication technology and network theory have aroused a vast sum of creative capital, which Vimeo has harnessed to fundamentally reorganize film culture around the world. Vimeo is now in a position to actualize an offline, physical network to complement the existing web community for a new type of social experience around film.
We understand video both as a cultural production and as a medium of producing culture. The traditional model of this process is found in Hollywood. The film studio institution produces a feature-length film, which is distributed to the masses. The viewer is merely a vessel for the consumption of movie culture. Standing in stark contrast to that model, Vimeo is a highly democratic platform that empowers the user with the capacity to act as viewer, critic and filmmaker. This distinction reflects a conceptual shift in which the experience of film becomes an immersive, democratic process with potential social and political agency through social networking and crowd-sourcing.
Vimeo is a network, and when it goes offline it does not call for a building. Architecture, in the traditional sense, is undesirable because of its static nature and its actual weight and cost. A building, pavilion, or any other kind of physical structure is useless for Vimeo to own. On the other hand, we can consider Vimeo as an event, and liken its manifestation in an urban context to the action of embedding videos into different websites. We can then imagine that existing buildings or structures in a city become “sites” into which particular events are embedded. This concomitance has the capacity to generate more or less friction in order to create unique experiences. With multiple events occurring simultaneously throughout the urban fabric, a new network emerges where temporality is a catalyst for spatial transformation. This localized network provides a means to engage with user-generated, i.e. local, content. Its high permeability and inherent plasticity enables the user to navigate his or her own cinematic experience.
TYPOLOGY
Our point of departure for this project is that Vimeo has produced a radical shift in our experience of film. The passive viewer of the hollywood film has become an active user, who is at once viewer, filmmaker and critic. This means that a physical venue for the Vimeo experience calls for an entirely new spatial typology.
To discover the space of Vimeo, we started by an exhaustive and rigorous study of existing film-related typologies. Our concerns were based on the body’s relationship to film. We also compiled an exhaustive spreadsheet of quantitative information such as screen size, number of viewers, distance of viewers from film source, etc. which we will use to eventually help generate optimal forms.
Here are the existing typologies:
LAPTOP
iPHONE/iPAD
CAR
FAMILY VAN
COACH BUS
LIVING ROOM
GALLERY INSTALLATION
SPORTS BAR
VIDEO BILLBOARD
JUMBOTRON
ROCK CONCERT
FILM FESTIVAL
IN-FLIGHT MOVIE
DRIVE-IN THEATER
MOVIE-IN-THE-PARK
SHOP WINDOW
MOVIE THEATER
PLANETARIUM
