Future Cinema

Question (or is it a rant?) for today

In terms of Man with a Movie Camera Manovich writes, “Records drawn from a database and arranged in a particular order become a picture of modern life – but simultaneously an argument about this life, an interpretation of what these images, which we encounter every day, every second, actually mean.”

With personal photos, there was a ritual: you take photos, you remove the film, careful not to expose it to light, and take it to a store to get developed. You wait at least an hour to see the photos, after having waited possibly hours to finish the roll. You take your photos out, and you place them in an album. Or you distribute them. Maybe you got two sets to give to your friends. In a world oversaturated with images, sharing one photo with dozens of people has lost some of the mystique of giving one photo to a specific person. Does a personal image lose meaning when it is over-distributed, or does it still hold the same reflexive, and reflective, power? For my birthday this year, two friends printed out photos from a trip, put them in frames and presented them to me as a gift. I proudly, and fondly, display them, and while others may look at them, they can never posses them. While an archive is, for the most part, an accessible database documenting a time or a story or a topic, these photos nevertheless become a personal archive, one rooted in my time. Manovich writes that watching Man with a Movie Camera “is anything but a banal experience,” and yet viewing page after page of photos of babies and trips and outings on Facebook or Instagram or any number of social media outlets renders some of these experience as trite, even mundane (do I sound bitter, perhaps?). And yet, while these may not have much significance past the poster, some archives that have more academic worth may not serve much of a purpose for 99.93% of the population!

While the things we own and keep can be argued in various ways—as a database, as an archive, as a collection—with varying levels of importance, we nevertheless put together a life through images, videos, trinkets, toys, and mementos. Thinking specifically about photos, I’ve often asked myself, why do we take pictures? Why do we collect them? And how often do we keep physical versions of these pictures? Why, for the most part, have we given up our own physical archive for an electronic one that may, in any moment, disappear completely?

Yowza, visual sound???!?!!

https://www.wired.com/story/an-artist-uses-an-iphone-to-visualize-sounds-in-ar/?mbid=social_fb

Defining Narrative

It seems to me that in many of this week’s readings (and Manovich’s in particular) the definition of ‘narrative’ is somewhat restricted, even anachronistic. Isn’t any time-based activity, in essence, a narrative?

Question for LAST week’s class

I’m afraid that I was under the weather last week and only managed to catch up with the readings for the 15th over the last week. This post will have my question for that class; the question for this week’s readings are forthcoming. Sorry for the delay!

So… How does transmedia as an industrial practice operate in a transnational, globalized media world? In Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins describes the Wachowski’s recruiting efforts for different components of The Matrix story world as a planet-spanning, border-crossing creative collaboration between artists who admire each other’s work. Jenkins even positions the Wachowski’s interest in transmedia storytelling as the end result of a “fascination with what anthropologist Mimi Ito has described as Japan’s ‘media mix’ culture” (Jenkins 112).

Does this description of “collaborative authorship,” initiated by influential Western filmmakers, accurately account for the power dynamics that still exist between American media companies and the Asian artists recruited for The Animatrix? If transmedia is inherently transnational, what does that mean for concepts of cultural appropriation or colonization?

Questions for Today’s Class

Reading this week’s texts and in my studies in general, I am often struck by the conflation between the database, the archive, and memory. As such, I was wondering if we could discuss how the database differs from the archive and how they each function as metonyms for memory? How has database culture changed how we think about memory or how we remember?

- Theo X

Thoughts on Manovich, Kinder, and Database Cinema…

Hi folks — since I’ll not be in class today, I thought I’d share a few thoughts in reaction to this week’s readings as a roundabout response to Slav & Shiyam’s discussion questions.
(more…)

Summary: Database Cinema and interactive documentary practices – Manovich

By: Shiyam Ramachandran

Database as a Symbolic Form

This article is about the rise and domination of a form of cultural expression that affects virtually every aspect of communicative life within modernity: the database. Historically, cinema has privileged “the narrative” as the strategic means to convey meaningful information.

In fact, it has been so privileged that it is difficult to find something meaningful if it is codified otherwise. If in lieu of seeing a film in its final composite of shots, but were thrown into all the non-edited footage in a disorganized file folder (where file names aren’t at all meaningful but are randomly named) could we effectively call it a film? I think most of us would be inclined to think otherwise. But the database “structures” so much of life, that, according to Manovich, we should start thinking about it for what it is (and certainly not take it for granted). Or at least that’s my take from the article.

The framework of the internet is, essentially a database. There is no first or last page to the internet, beginning or end. It has no depth, only different levels of virtuality that are represented by other levels of virtuality (with the word “level” not necessarily implying hierarchy). If someone were to say “oh, I’m going to go and understand everything there is to know about the internet”, they’d be on an absurd quest, on account you can’t really understand the internet, because the internet isn’t a thing. It’s a database. And a database’ ontology is not meant for understanding in its entirety on account that it possesses no entirety and no boundary.

In the land of computers, Manovich future divides new media objects not just in terms of data structures but as well in terms of algorithms. Algorithms are executable, data structures are that from which one executes; indeed, they, as Manovich puts it, “have a symbiotic relationship”. I should add here, that data can exist as it is or as they are (depending on what one thinks of plurality). Algorithms are instructions needing an external instructor (computer or non-computer). Data, doesn’t have an external instructor on account that in most instances it has no externality or internality because it is what it is.

Perhaps the most complex part of the article – something I’m still trying to get my head wrapped around – is the paralleling the database/narrative dichotomy with the semiological dichotomy of the syntagm and the paradigm. If I may interpolate, the syntagm is “the dish” and paradigm is the “freedom of the cook”; in other words, the syntagm is whatever that’s present in communication, the paradigm is all else. So, in terms of the database vs narrative dichotomy, it’s easy to think of the database as being paradigmatic (because, it’s everything), and the narrative as syntagmatic (because it’s the final product). Of course, new media, inverts this “paradigm” in the sense that the paradigm becomes the seen and the syntagm becomes the unseen (or rather unthought). This in essence is what this article is about.

Soft Cinema

Software cinema essentially is the kind of cinema generated and compiled by a computer. It’s composed of two parts, a mechanism to generate imagery, and another to display it. The details I’m not sure really matter, as really, the main point to draw here is to look at a kind of simultaneous art made predominently through computer database processes as opposed narrative human processes.

Database Cinema and interactive documentary practices -Martha Kinder and Chris Marker

Summary: Database Cinema and interactive documentary practices

By: Slav

Martha Kinder  – “Designing a Database Cinema”

In 1997 cultural theorist Martha Kinder went to University of Southern California to work on “The Labyrinth Project” an applied research project developed in the digital media lab in collaboration with Pat O’Neil. This work produced three pieces for an exhibition, as well as a DVD rom and used 35mm film, found footage, audio narration and an interactive interface.

Interface designer Rosmary Comella and graphic designer Kristy H.A. Kang, worked with a team of students, alumni, and free lance professionals with Martha Kinder and executive producing. In combing archival and new content, Kinder states that the goal was to create “electronic fictions” but what was resulted was “interactive documentaries”. In further examination she classifies the work under two subgenres of interactive documentary; personal memoir and the second an “archeological exploration of a specific location through layers of time”. Kinder indicates that both are interrelated in that both sub-genres blur boundaries of fiction and rely on artifacts.

In contrast to Lev Manovich’s opnion to database narrative, Kinder states that database memory is : “Two compatible structures whose combination is crucial to the creative expansion of new media since all narratives are constructed by selecting items from databases (that usually remain hidden), and then combining these items to create a particular story. Despite the cyber-structualist dream of totality, the database, like the narrative, is always selective”.

Kinder indicates that all the Labyrinth project is “database narrative” where stories are all crucial to language. Although it does not have a clear cut beginning or ending, it presents a narrative field of story elements for the user.

Kinder speaks about the convergence of cinema with new media has shaped a series of database narratives in films such as “Ground hog day, slackers, Natural born killers and Run Lola Run”. She also refers to Crhis Marker’s CD –Rom Immemory (1999) and film Level 5.

Kinder touches on pre-digital interactive narrative models shown in books such as Laurence Sterne’s comic novel “Tristram Shandy” where the narrator makes a hypothetical lady reader go back and re-read a chapter.

In closing, Kinder reflects on previous narrative structures rather than future utopian structures and the evolution of storytelling through the combination of design, choice and chance.

Chris Marker – Immemory

Chris Marker is known for “essay films” where there is an unusual use of narrative as text where it is rhythmically interwoven with the image. This creates a complex montage structure which can be described following Gilles Deleuze’s “audio visual image’. This results in a new role of the viewer where they must actively participate in the film.

Dominant themes in Chris Marker’s works are recollection and memory. He uses film, installation and CD-ROM as a process of recollection and Marker uses images as a function and catalyst of changing views of history and past events.

First shown in 1990 at the Centre George Pompidou, Paris, Marker’s work “Zapping Zone, Proposals for an imaginary Television” used film, video, television, photography and computers as part of the installation. In the animation pieces, viewers can control some aspects with a mouse click that loops the sequences creating new narrative connections. Compared to Tarkosk’s film Stalker (1978) where the zone is a place that follows no logical views, in Marker’s “Zapping zone” there is no straight path to knowledge and that stories rather than one single history is the result.

In Marker’s CD rom work “Immemory” (1997) the zapping is replaced by a mouse click and memory is gained through seven “zones”. Themes of memory and archive are also reflected in this work and a number of paths can be taken by the viewer to review images and sequences. The motif of the journey also is apparent in this work and it does not present recollection and memory as a history book but rather as geography. The navigation allows multiple ways to branch off into other zones.

Questions:

1) What are different implications of Manovich and Kinder’s differences in the definition of Database Cinema?

2) Does Chris Marker’s Immemory reflect Manovich’s or Kinder’s definition of Database Cinema?

Question for today

In her article “Designing a Database Cinema,” Marsha Kinder, speaking of Luis Bunuel’s films The Milky Way and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, writes, “One can follow any of the [many] narrative strands [in the films] that, although ingeniously interwoven, purposely never cohere – a networking [of narrative strand] enabling the viewer to observe the narrative engine in action.”

In thinking of this interweaving of ‘narrative strands,’ I thought of the proliferation of mash-up culture, which grew in popularity in the mid-2000s when software for amalgamating and remixing both audio and video became readily available. In particular, I thought of Girl Talk, a mash up music artist whose compositions were coupled with remixed videos of the songs they sampled. The idea of remixing interests me because it takes a work that has a narrative strand (or, at a the very least, a structured beginning-middle-end), and flips it, distorts it, chops it up and restructures it, defeating the purpose of the original’s narrative and creating a new narrative.

My question is, when a work is purposely non-narrative, or appears as anarrative (a new word?), how often do you, as the viewer, attempt to create a narrative of your own? How often are we actually afforded the opportunity to do this? And does our ability to connect causal elements in visual media mean that a strict, structured narrative is not necessarily required when fashioning a ‘mental narrative’?

Some Girl Talk examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JBAxkZun3s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKqkcHvJN9k

shared doc for Nov 15th 2017 – thoughts and questions here

follow this link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZfcOTQI6FMk7HK7fYtVOgEZ7EK_bwztsl4xoNZOBXvI/edit?usp=sharing