Seven on Seven · Rhizome at the New Museum · May 3, 2014
Sawbaum
A tool for painting with Vine. Paste six-second videos onto a page, drag them against one another, blend them with transparency. Built in a single day.
#5 The Spatial Montage Theory of Vine (or, painting with video)
Before we all had smartphones, the awkward, accidental cut was a staple of home video. By stopping and starting the camera strategically, one could create fake eyeline matches and hugely inappropriate juxtapositions of tone. It was Vine that re-introduced montage to the lexicon of home video. Where the smartphone camera generally creates a separate clip for each shot, Vine allows users to piece together their six-second videos from short fragments, the way moving image is supposed to be.
In their collaboration, Avi Flombaum and Hannah Sawtell took this collage-esque logic a step further, not just assembling video fragments in time (through editing) but in the space of a web page as well. Their tool, Sawbaum, allows users to create pages out of many Vines, butted up against one another in what Lev Manovich would call a spatial montage (as opposed to temporal montage of video editing).
Sawtell said she liked these sharp juxtapositoins the best, but the tool is intended not just for spatial montage, but for what Avi described as "painting with video," using layers and transparency to blend multiple sources together in fluid compositions.
Michael Connor, Seven Big Ideas from Seven on Seven 2014, Rhizome, May 5, 2014.
About this restoration
Sawbaum ran on Rails 4.1 and pulled every video straight from Vine's servers. Vine shut down in 2017 and its archive closed in 2019, so none of the montages made at the event can be played again. The source code survived on a backup drive. This page rebuilds the show and edit screens around a new montage cut from 2026 Knicks footage, so the kind of thing Sawbaum made can still be seen.
The deck
