Future Cinema

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Future Cinema
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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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• Eija-Liisa Ahtila CONSOLATION SERVICE, 1999
• Consolation Service follows a young finnish
  couple, Anni and J-P, 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.

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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 Rousseaus
  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.

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• 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
  re-presenting 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.

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• Perry Hoberman Lets Make a Monster, 2001
• Perry Hobermans performance accompanies
  Kiasmas 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

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• Perry Hoberman The Sub-Division of the
  Electric Light, 1996The 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.

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• Ian Howard SweetStalking, 2001Sweet 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.

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• Isaac Julien Long Road to Mazatlan, 1999The
  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 Juliens work and will bring together the
  artists writings for the first time.

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• William Kentridge Overvloed, 1999William
  Kentridges 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
  site-specific work for the monumental Civic Hall
  in Amsterdam. The film was projected onto its
  vaulted baroque ceiling.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• Jim Campbell
• Church on Fifth Avenue, 2001
• Illuminated Average 1 Hitchcock's Psycho , 2000

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• Bill Seaman The Exquisite Mechanism of
  Shivers, 199733 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.

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• 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

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• 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.

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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 to construct a
  potentially unlimited number of different
  narrative films.?

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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.

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Algorithmic
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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.

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Database
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Macro-Cinema

• 3. The third idea is what they call macro-cinema.
  While filmmakers such as Peter Greenaway and Mike
  Figgis have already used a multi-screen format
  for fiction films, thinking about the visual
  conventions of Graphical User Interface as used
  in computer culture gives us a different way to
  do macro-cinema. If a computer user employs
  windows of different proportions and sizes, why
  not adopt the similar aesthetics for cinema? In
  Soft Cinema, the generation of each video begins
  with the computer program semi-randomly breaking
  the screen into a number of square regions of
  different dimensions. During the playback
  different clips are assigned to different
  regions. In this way, software determines both
  temporal and spatial organization of a work, i.e.
  both sequencing of clips and their composition. ?

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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 ?normal? video,
  photographic and film image today ? no longer the
  dominant but just one source of visual
  information about reality among many others.

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