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New feature on the Walker Channel.

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We have some new material on the Walker Channel. Video Jukebox, videos from the Spencer Nakasako installation in the OPEN-ENDED exhibition. Nakasako and a group of students at the Vietnamese Youth Development Center in San Francisco, the Bronx Museum Teen Council, and the Walker Art Center Teen Arts Council hit the streets, gathering and recording [...]

We have some new material on the Walker Channel. Video Jukebox, videos from the Spencer Nakasako installation in the OPEN-ENDED exhibition.

Nakasako and a group of students at the Vietnamese Youth Development Center in San Francisco, the Bronx Museum Teen Council, and the Walker Art Center Teen Arts Council hit the streets, gathering and recording spontaneous responses. Gallery visitors can also respond on tape to the same questions. These preproduced videos and the video-booth recordings are fed into the jukebox and played in random order.

Nakasako’s project will be available from the Channel homepage unless there is an event being streamed live, like tonight when Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne discuss curating the Whitney Biennial.

This is a minor tweak to the Walker Channel’s format, we are hoping this sort of continuously featured stream (as opposed to specifically requested archives) will make more material easier for casual surfers to hit.

Update:

I know a few people have been linking to the lecture by Philippe Vergne and Chrissie Iles already waiting for the archive to go online. It’s up now so download away.

  • Jonathan says:
    April 15, 2006 at 5:23 am

    First of all, I just want to say what a fantastic idea these streams are. Such a good idea, and such a great resource.

    I have been trying to follow a number of the lectures, but I’m sorry to report that it hasn’t been working well at all.. My realplayer is set up well, I listen to alot of radio streams and have watched other video streams. When I try to connect to the Walker Channel it keeps disconnecting me with the message that the connection to the server has timed out. I get to watch a couple of minutes at a time, but have to keep restarting the stream..

    I have had this problem on multiple locations / machines, so I’m guessing it’s either your pipe to Holland that’s a bit congested or that the streams are so popular that the streaming machine isn’t able to keep up..

    Have you given any thought to offering these lectures as video podcasts? Or just making them downloadable instead of streamed?

    And if bandwidth for downloading is to expensive, what about bittorrent?

  • Nate says:
    April 17, 2006 at 12:55 pm

    Thanks for the comments, and sorry to hear that you’re having trouble with the streaming video. It’s come up several times here that we should offer these as downloadable files, and I think it’s being looked into but there are some issues with converting from RealMedia to another format…

    Let us know if things improve for you, and we’ll post here if/when we get alternative formats available.

  • Robin says:
    April 17, 2006 at 5:50 pm

    Jonathan,

    Are you having problems with the archive files posted after the event or just the live streams? I’ve never had a problem with the archives but sad to say I have experienced the dropped connections during the live streams.

  • Jonathan says:
    April 18, 2006 at 10:14 am

    The archived streams were the ones giving me problems (I haven’t tried watching a live stream yet)

    I just gave it another go and went through all the preferences in Real Player. I checked the box called ‘Use specific UDP Ports’ under the Transport tab and it seems to have solved my problems! Strange, since this is the first stream I’ve had a problem with..

    Anyway, sorry to bother you all since the problem was on my side!

    I would still advise to take downloads under consideration. I’m quite a techy person and I think a mere mortal (i.e. normal person) would have given up by now..

    If the archived streams come direct from the Real encoder boxes, I guess it could be difficult to make good quality video downloads from them. Maybe you should think about archiving high resolution video straight from the camera, since alot of these presentations could be important to keep in the future.

    Thanks for the help guys!