Mat Dryhurst’s Saga – make your embeddable videos fluid and context-relevant

“Saga however encourages artists to challenge the way their work is being ‘exploited’ online.

[… a self-hosted] video embed much like YouTube or Vimeo that can be changed if you don’t like the context in which your work is displayed. For example, if someone posts your work next to something you don’t like, you can obscure it with a slogan or graphic. If someone is hosting advertising alongside you work, you can even charge them to keep hosting it.” FACT Magazine
(Hier auch ein deutschsprachiger Artikel im Groove dazu)

I also love the Saga idea for other aspects: it opens possibilities for keeping digital art fluid instead of a finished fixed object, and: For playing with contexts. I still think context awareness – on the level of how it produces meaning and of how it is socially relevant – is disappointingly neglected by critical thinking and art. In the for-high-profit tech bubble context is well explored, or another examplet. news media build formally and technically different content for different platform contexts, optimizing it for what users of that special platform prefer and depending on distintictive technical features of a platform). Today profit industry and state, marketing companies, social media platforms like Facebook etc., the NSA – are the most sensitively and aware fields if it comes to considering the emotional, social and political effects of context. Just think of how each of us has a totally different view of Facebook, each of us enclosed in the perspective of their own unique timeline. Facebook though has a god-like view on all of our personalized time lines and it can gamble with that knowledge. Something like Saga shows how embed functions create a similar power imbalance and how to shift this balance. Me, personally, I’m less interested in the profit aspect of this (though it’s all good to aim at making things more fair) but I’m fascinated even more by the possibilities it opens for making critically and creatively challenging everchanging content that is different in different contexts. That opens so many possibilities. It could raise more context awareness. It could be like an inverse mirror/metaphor for our personalized spaces on social media. Less archive, more moment, more ephemerality also could be an aspect. Now once more I wish I was more of a geek so I could try Saga myself.

Go find more info >>> HERE <<< while I’ll stay here and keep F5-ing and suspiciously eyeing the video below and the picture above for changes. ??