Perhap my favorite site for Web videos at the moment is Video Haiku. Filmmaker/videographer Kevin O has the following rules for video haiku: the video should be two minutes or less, with five or fewer cuts, natural contemporaneous sound, and realtime playback. In other words, like haiku the videos are short, and there’s very little “rewriting.” And like written haiku, video haiku attempt to express a moment or place in a very compressed format.

What I like best about these video haiku is how you get a sense of the videographer’s body position during the film — as if the video almost manages to includes a muscle sense, or proprioception, as well as the senses of seeing and hearing. There’s been an overlap between performance art and video art since at least the 1960’s, of course, but the smaller video cameras and image stabilization available today allow the videographer even more latitude in staying off the tripod. At their best, these video haiku allow the viewer to feel as if they inhabit the space that the videographer originally inhabited.

My sense is that much of today’s Web videos are heavily influenced by performance art. However, most Web videos simply serve to document the performance of the subject/videographer. Think about the classic video blogger tricks and techniques — holding the video camera at arm’s length and pointing it at yourself, extreme close-ups of facial expressions — these are really tricks which document the videographer’s body, which force the viewers to feel as if they are in close proximity to the videographer, but which don’t allow the viewers to be (as it were) inside the videographer’s space. Given this distinction, Kevin O’s video haiku are more like poems which allow us to experience the world from the poet’s frame of reference.

Mind you, I’m not thrilled by all the video haiku on Kevin O’s Web site. But that too is in keeping with the haiku tradition — haiku are written in the moment, and many of them are later discarded by the poet. In general, though, I’ve found this to be a Web site worth looking at.