moment of inter-zen

i've had a vision of what can be done with truly searchable video for a few years now, ever since i heard about the fraunhoffer institute's idea to create mp7 (i believe it was around 2000 or 1999, but can't recall exactly). one example scenario:
imagine being able to create a storyline, in text, and have it dynamically generate different video streams. take, for example, the outline: "children playing; sunset in calcutta; beach hawkers; calcutta street". imagine being able to stipulate this sequence, and have it directly translate to video segments which can be spliced together. take that one step further and imagine that this outline can create hundreds of different video streams - all from different cinematographers.
this is the first in a long list of uber-cool ideas surrounding a project called pad.ma. their about page states that they:

.. see PAD.MA as a way of opening up a set of images, intentions and
effects present in video footage, resources that conventions of video-
making, editing and spectatorship have tended to suppress, or leave
behind. This expanded treatment then points to other, political
potentials for such material, and leads us into lesser-known
territory for video itself... beyond the finite documentary film or
the online video clip.

Dense annotation is the key to making this happen - and this has been an elusive idea in video. it's even more elusive in audio. at least our contextual perception of video and text is similar. audio and text are entirely separate beasts that really need to have more work done to bridge the gap.

pad.ma is developed by 2 german hackers working with the alternative law forum, and a friend of ilya's and lawrence's (sanjay). the moment of zen here for me is that pad.ma is something i've been thinking about for a while, and ilya told me about it and i found out that it was an alf project, and told lawrence how cool it is, and lawrence forwarded by email to sanjay, who is a pal of ilya's and so just as sanjay was asking lawrence how to get in touch with me ilya's sending sanjay my contact information!

should be interesting to see how pad.ma is coded, since it'll all be released under CC/GPL.