The Korsakow workshop held this past weekend at Concordia University was, by all accounts, a huge success. The participants came away with a much better sense of the possibilities offered by Korsakow, and we (the development team – Florian, Dave and Matt) got some valuable feedback in terms of the current strengths and weaknesses of the application.
The workshop also served as a reminder about how confusing it can be simply to prepare video files for specific uses. The wonderful world of video codecs (literally COmpression and DECompression), with their mysterious names (eg H.264) can be intimidating even to the most savvy tech person. With this in mind, we’re making available a small set of preprepared video clips that can be used by anyone to allow them to just get on with exploring Korsakow, and not to have to worry about prepping them so they’ll work properly. These were originally put together by the very talented Steve Anderson for the recent Korsakow workshop at USC. All the files are at a manageable frame size and file size, and have been lovingly compressed using H.264. They were sourced from quirky old public domain films found at the invaluable Prelinger Archives. (Like all Public Domain materials, they are free to use for any purpose whatsoever without asking anyone’s permission, ever. Including us. So don’t ask. Just. Do. It.) Download the entire package here (143MB, zip).
Finally, one of the participants at the workshop, PhD student Mél Hogan, produced an intriguing k-film which riffs on the cultural mythology of an impending 2012 apocalypse. It also demonstrates the flexibility offered by Korsakow in terms of conceptual approach and interface design. And it deserves extra points for being entirely type-based. 
Take a look now, or begin by reading Mél’s background notes.
The context
This is a project completed during a 2-day workshop at Concordia University (Jan 2010). Over the course of a few weeks, I have collected comments on YouTube about 2012 prophecies. Contemplating the end of the world, these comments debate and emote our global fate.
The motive
While the Korsakow System is a computer program for the creation of database films, this project happily thwarts the process by using text-based stills all the while cashing in on the system’s incredible capacity for balancing rules with randomness. This was important for this project which I organized according to meaning and intensity. Scenes relate to one another according to these two organising principles: intensity of emotion (based on a colour scheme) and meaning (based on categories like science, history, religion). Where you end up, when the ‘x’ options disappear, may reveal something about your subconscious hopes and fears. Korsakow was an ideal tool for this project because of the conceptual interactivity it provides, allowing me also to send this project back out to where it came from.
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