Transcript Cinema - Cityarts

Future Cinema
Cinema
The classical cinema can be defined as collective experience of
one fixed stable projector projecting a moving image on one
screen in one room. Therefore each change of one of these
factors, for example multiple screens, panorama screens,
moving projections, different rooms, is already an expansion of
the contemporary practices of cinema.
The conditions of cinematographic art have changed
radically over the past years. On the verge of a
material revolution new possibilities of camera and
production techniques have emerged that also allow
new modes of narration and image languages.
» FUTURE CINEMA is the first major international
exhibition of current art practice in the domain of
video, film, computer and web based installations that
embody and anticipate new cinematic techniques and
modes of expression.
» Eija-Liisa Ahtila :: CONSOLATION SERVICE, 1999
Consolation Service follows a young finnish couple, Anni and JP, as they make public their decision to divorce. It is set in early
spring in Helsinki, with its frozen landscape on the cusp of
thawing.
» Judith Barry :: Imagination, Dead Imagine, 1991
For Imagination, dead imagine [1991] an androgynous head is
projected as if contained within a mirrored Minimalist cube. Sounds of
the head slowly breathing fill the space. The head is serene, waiting.
Suddenly a substance pours over it from all sides, drenching it in what
appears to be a bodily fluid. The spectator wants to turn away, but
cannot. Horror at the repulsive nature of the substances is replaced by
fascination with their beauty as they apparently change into majestic
but abstract landscapes
» Maurice Benayoun :: So.So.So. (Somebody,
Somewhere, Sometime) , 2002
So.So.So. is an interactive installation by Maurice Benayoun
that plunges the onlooker in the middle of the moment the one of
photography which reveals a complex network of characteristic
signs from our own experience of reality. What the visitor finds
with the help of VR binoculars is a series of spherical
panoramas which depict a moment, the same one, at 7.47 in the
morning in different places involving different persons in different
situations.
» Jean-Louis Boissier :: La Morale Sensitive , 2001
La Morale sensitive takes its title from a philosophical project
that Rousseau never completed, concerning the process of
learning and experimentation through the phenomenon of
perception. Using images taken for Rousseau’s real life works.
By moving a hand in a smooth gesture over the table, visitors
can displace the images and produce an act of visual montage.
Every move excites, evokes, and causes the selection and
extraction of another word, a text excerpt and a new video
association.
» Max Dean :: Mist, 2002;
Mist is a video projection on three screens, arranged in a shallow
horseshoe configuration that emulates the physical shape of Niagara
Falls. There are six different apparitions. The order of the video
sequences of each woman's legs' appearances is set up to be at
random, creating both anticipation and perhaps frustration, as a
computer orders the playing of all six clips before reshuffling and representing the six sequences. One may have to watch the same pair of
legs doing their stint several times, or else wait a while to glimpse again
the performance of a pair particularly fancied.
» Perry Hoberman :: Let*s Make a Monster, 2001
Perry Hoberman’s performance accompanies Kiasma’s
extensive summer exhibition, Future Cinema. In addition to his
installations, Perry Hoberman, a media artist from New York,
has used classic cinematic elements in his art. During this live
performance Hoberman will be mixing a new collage from
Hollywood horror movies
» Perry Hoberman :: The Sub-Division of the Electric Light,
1996
The Sub-Division of the Electric Light is a nostalgia machine allowing the
viewer to move from room to room and operate ancient machine and slide
projectors loaded with audio-visual footage of strangely shifting scenarios.
This active intervention into the flow of time itself creates a landscape of
the history of media while at the same time referring to the increasing
speed of our present day consumption of new technologies and to the loss
inherent in progress.
» Ian Howard :: SweetStalking, 2001
Sweet Stalking is an interactive work which requires the viewer to
explore a narrative relationship played out by the main female
character.Voyeurism, aspects of cinema verite and violent recording
techniques, rather than recording violence, contribute to the sense of
stalking the woman and stalking meaning in a relationship.
» Isaac Julien :: Long Road to Mazatlan, 1999
The presentation will consist of a related trilogy of video installations
and a recent work, which Julien produced during a fall 1999 residency
at Art Pace in San Antonio, Texas. A catalogue will be published to
accompany the exhibition. This publication will be the most
comprehensive book on Julien’s work and will bring together the
artist’s writings for the first time.
» William Kentridge :: Overvloed, 1999
William Kentridge’s dealing with the medium film is in a way a
documentation of the actual production process. When the drawings
are filmed in their continuous change they become animations as an
ephemeral metaphor for memory, cognition and repression. Overvloed
(Dutch: »flood«, »abundance«) was produced in 1999 as a sitespecific work for the monumental Civic Hall in Amsterdam. The film
was projected onto its vaulted baroque ceiling.
» Julien Maire :: Demi-Pas, 2002
"Demi-Pas" is a short film and is projected using a "reversed camera"
technique. A projector has been converted to house micro-mechanisms
that produce animated images using a principle similar to that of
cinematography. "Demi-Pas" thus finds its own narrative methods, its own
action and images, like a kind of projected theater. Real objects and
photographic material are transposed within the projector. The film
narrates a tale of one man's daily routine and highlighs both the simplicity
and the complexity of this reality.
» Michael Naimark :: Be Now
Here, 1995-2002
Be Now Here is an installation
about landscape and public places.
Visitors gain a strong sense of
place by wearing 3-D glasses and
stepping into an immersive virtual
environment. The imagery is of
public plazas on the UNESCO
World Heritage Centre's list of
endangered places - Jerusalem,
Dubrovnik, Timbuktu, and Angkor,
Cambodia – places both exotic and
disturbing. The style is ambient, as
if the imagery is live.
» Mark Napier :: The Waiting Room, 2002
"The Waiting Room" is a virtual space that 50 users share
through the Internet. The visitors to the space are strangers,
united by the software, the Internet, and the artwork itself. In
this space the visitor becomes a participant in a moving
painting. Their actions activate and shape the artwork.
» Jim Campbell ::
Church on Fifth Avenue, 2001
Illuminated Average #1 Hitchcock's Psycho , 2000
» Bill Seaman :: The Exquisite Mechanism of Shivers, 1997
33 brief image and musical scenes are each based on a sentence of ten
words. These »exquisite« image and sound compositions are
mechanically combined, but internally organized by a poetic logic
(»shivers«). »The fragmentary aspect of ›splinter‹ as well as the oscillation
of ›trembles‹ release appropriate associations, as the coherences in
meaning of the work are formed into sentences of oscillating sense from
the 330 fragmentations of the menu.
» Maciej Wisniewski :: Instant Places, 2002
Instant Places is a software fiction. It creates a network formed ad hoc to
connect dispersed data places. These data places can stretch over
multiple computers and multiple networks. They are not bound by
geography, time and space. The installation at the ZKM consisted of two
computers connected to the network
» Soft(ware) Cinema is a dynamic computer-driven media
installation. The viewers are presented with an infinite
series of narrative films constructed on the fly by the
custom software. Using the systems of rules defined by the
author, the software decides what appears on the screen,
where, and in which sequence; it also chooses music
tracks. The elements are chosen from a media database
which at present contains 4 hours of video and animation,
3 hours of voice over narration, and 5 hours of music.
SOFT CINEMA: FORM
» Soft Cinema explorers 4 ideas:
1. "Algorithmic Cinema." Using systems of rules, software controls both the
layout of the screen (number and positions of frames) and the sequences of
media elements which appear in these frames.
2. "Macro-cinema." Soft Cinema imagines how moving images may look when
the Net will mature, and when unlimited bandwidth and very high resolution
displays would become the norm.
3. "Multimedia cinema." In Soft Cinema video is used as only one type of
representation among others: 2D animation, motion graphics, 3D scenes,
diagrams, etc.
4. "Database Cinema." The media elements are selected from a large database
Algorithmic
»
1. The first is algorithmic editing of media materials. Each video clips used in Soft Cinema
is assigned keywords which describe both the "content" of a clip (geographical location,
presence of people in the scene, etc.) and its "formal" properties (dominant color, dominant
line orientation, contrast, camera movement, etc.). Some of the keywords are generated
automatically using image processing software while others are input by hand. The program
(written in LINGO) assembles the video track by selecting clips one after another using a
system rules (i.e. an algorithm). Diffirent systems of rules are possible: for instance,
selecting a clip which is closest in color or type of motion to the previous one; selecting a
clip which matches the previous one party in content and party in color, repalcing only every
other clip to create a kind of parallel montage sequence, and on on.
Algorithmic
Database
»
2. The second idea is database narrative. Rather than beginning with a script
and then creating media elements which visualise it, I investigate a diffirent
paradigm: starting with a large database and then generating narratives from it.
In Soft Cinema, The media elements are selected from a database of a few
hundred video clips to construct a potentially unlimited number of different short
films.
Database
Macro-Cinema
Multi-Media
»
4. The forth idea is to create a multi-media cinema. In Soft Cinema video is used as just
one type of re presentation among others: 2D animation, motion graphics (i.e. animated
text), stills, 3D scenes (as in computer games), diagrams, etc. In addition, Soft Cinema
supplements a "normal" video image with other types of lens-based imaginary commonly
used today by industry, science, medicine and military: the low resolution web cam image,
an infrared image, edge-detected image as employed in computer vision, etc. While some
music videos and artist videos already mix some of these different types of imagery in one
work, Soft Cinema assigns each type of imagery to a separate window in order to dramatize
the new status of ﾒnormalﾓ video, photographic and film image today ﾐ no longer the
dominant but just one source of visual information about reality among many others.