Videography Magazine
January 1998

Ana All the Time

Video, like a gun, is a powerful technology. It all depends on what you point it at when you pull the trigger. It seems strange now, but once upon a time the idea that video could be used for more than broadcast television-that such a powerful technology could be wielded by an individual rather than by a corporation-was rather revolutionary. I remember my own awakening to the notion that the video medium could be used by a lone artist to confront the establishment. It was 1975 and I had discovered a book called Guerrilla Television (Holt, Rinehart and Winston) by Michael Shamberg. It changed my life and my ideas about the future of electronic media. It was about the then-radical political, social, and artistic applications of innovative small-format video recorders and cameras with names like "PortaPac" and "Rover." I became transfixed by the idea that these technologies could democratize the medium of television and hopped aboard the bandwagon.

I soon became involved in what video engineers of the day considered "subversive" activities by being responsible for broadcasting a lot of so-called "non-broadcast" video. It was made possible by the recent development of the digital timebase corrector (TBC). Had I been Vin Di Bona, the developer of America's Funniest Home Videos, I might now be basking in fame and fortune. But my motives were very different and, unfortunately, not as entertaining. I was interested in the exercise of putting video in the hands of ordinary people. Today video technology has become so accessible that it is used for everything from capturing little Johnny's performance in the school play to analyzing his dad's tennis serve.

Even broadcast-quality equipment is inexpensive enough that when daring video shooters-reporting dangerous events-run into trouble, the rule is to save the tape cassette but ditch the camcorder. Video technology has become so common and so easy to use that it's hard to imagine a use to which it hasn't been put, no matter how mundane or personal.

But the other day I was amazed to find someone using a video camera in a more intimate way than I had ever imagined. I had discovered the Ana Cam on the Internet. Using a new information technology search engine, I decided to look up "Webcams," where people or organizations have pointed cameras out their windows, mounted them on top of buildings, or set them up in offices and made their pictures available over the Internet. For some reason, this relatively new Web phenomenon intrigues me. Today there are hundreds of such cameras pointed at this or that: the Brooklyn Bridge, the Tokyo skyline, fish tanks, coffee machines, and bird cages, in more and more locations all over the world. Even I have a "live cam" pointed out my laboratory window at Route 9A in Hawthorne NY. I can look at the scene before commuting there to observe the weather and traffic, and my wife can tell if my car is still in the parking lot or if I've departed for home.

What I discovered was someone who uses such a Webcam to put her whole life on the Internet day in and day out. She points a video camera at herself or a scene in her apartment all day and all night long. You can watch her sitting at her computer, answering E-mail, watching TV, eating meals, taking a bath, or dancing to music. As I write this I'm looking at her cat asleep on the couch where Ana also sleeps, something she claims to do very well. >From her small, rather messy apartment in Minneapolis, Ana Voog has become a star. She has fans across the world. Some of those who tune in to her daily activities send back images they have created of her that they've captured and painted or collected in montages. There is an archive of these images on her site. She also sells mementos of herself (coffee mugs, shirts, mouse pads, pens, and her own songs) and she offers to speak with fans on the phone for money (so long as they don't expect her to talk sex). Why does she do it? In a Web page called "Ana FAQ" (frequently asked questions), she writes, "This is a terribly arty, self-indulgent thing to do, so I just had to do it. It was such an intense idea. And I like intense, I like to push boundaries of what people think a woman is and isn't. Because I am in 'show biz' people always want to know about me, and they usually get it all wrong and try to put me into a neat little compartmentalized package for mass consumption. I'm also doing this to say: Here you go. Here's my life. I'm a real person and here I am in all my mundane and spectacular glory. Go ahead and analyze the crap out of it [grin]. You want Ana? You got Ana! It isn't easy to arrange a composition with the subject (herself) missing but Voog does it very well. She has at least two video cameras on tripods, which she points at herself and her surroundings and uses Webcam32 software by Neil Kolban (a shareware program available at www.kolban.com) to broadcast her image. The software grabs a frame of video from a video-capture card in her computer every couple of minutes and pushes it out to the Web address of those tuned in. It also allows her to insert a few words into the video frame as an explanation of what she's doing. Well, whether it's Ana or a host of others using cameras and computers to communicate, there are a growing number of specialized cameras with new sets of capabilities coming onto the market.

One of the first to bring out such a specialized camera for computer communication was VideoLabs with the Connectix. They were less expensive ($299), round, not much larger than a golf ball, and plugged into the computer's parallel port, thus obviating the need for a video-capture board. This year Connectix introduced the QuickCam VC, optimized for teleconferencing and costing $125, which has less resolution than the Color QuickCam but a faster frame rate. Panasonic has joined in this year with its Eggcam, which, with a video-capture card included, is priced under $200, or it can be used with a third-party capture card. Touted as having been specially designed for "sending video E-mail," according to the manufacturer, it delivers NTSC video so it could also be used with a VCR. I was especially excited, however, to learn about Canon's new VC-C3 Communication Camera. Although some Webcam sites on the Internet have experimented with remote control, no major camera manufacturer had yet put together the notion that a camera attached to a computer should also be controlled by the computer. But this camera unit, which at $1,495 costs significantly more than the inexpensive models mentioned earlier, comes with a computer-controlled pan-and-tilt base and computer-controlled zoom and focus. It also has a wireless hand controller for situations such as Ana's, where these functions need to be performed from in front of the camera. The picture quality of the VC-C3 is superb, with Canon's usual excellent lens crafting. The quarter-inch CCD puts out a horizontal resolution of 450 lines and a S/N ratio of 46 dB or better, and provides both S-Video and NTSC outputs according to Canon's specs.

Ultimately, though, when Canon offered me the opportunity of evaluating the unit, I was disappointed. I had dreams of using the unit's computer serial interface to program time-lapse pans of scenes over days, of setting up a Web site where anyone anywhere could point the camera wherever they wanted interactively. But I soon learned that no software at all came with the unit, and that one has to purchase the Software Developer's Kit separately ($180). And even though Canon promises to continue to provide updates to registered software developers, the Control Interface Manual provides information only about how to program the unit at the bit level. In other words, one needs to be a software programmer and to do quite a bit of coding in order to develop an interface for programming the unit to do things. I sincerely hope Canon will do something about this. The product is great, but incomplete until it's accompanied with a complete set of software tools. Then it could really go far. For example, I recently heard of a Taiwanese firm that responded to a special need shared by many companies in that country. These companies have manufacturing plants on mainland China, and the Taiwanese company has made a fortune installing Webcams in those plants so that executives don't have to travel there to oversee production. Webcams aren't going to go away.

So far we've only seen the proverbial tip of the iceberg. As part of my early video revolutionary activities, I invited a remarkable individual named Walter LaCosta onto a prime-time show about media. LaCosta shocked everyone when he said, "One day, we will all be on TV all the time and that will change morality forever." Today, Ana knows all about that right now.

By Jim St. Lawrence