Future Cinema

The Poetics of Augmented Space

The landscape of media is rapidly changing, and with this change comes the cacophony of experimentation and the yearning to keep up. This growth has led to the ubiquity and commercialization of information, to the point where both our urban spaces and our personal lives are covered in screens. Lev Manovich attempts to understand these phenomena by discussing the ‘dynamic between spatial form and the information which has been with us for a long time and… functions differently in the computer culture of today’ (3).

Manovich starts by describing the rise of virtual space. It started in the 1990s with computers and cyberspace. It then moved on to Virtual Reality, inspired by the graphics of complex websites made for millions of users. This led to the subsequent rise and fall of the dot com era, which (around the time of the Y2K scare) in turn created a user landscape that found emailing and downloading MP3s to be quotidian. By the turn of the century, the saturation of the virtual space led to the desire to start exploring the physical space. Manovich then provides examples of tech applications that deal with data management in a physical space.

• Video Surveillance : cameras, microphones, GPS. These take the physical world and translate it to data.
• Cellspace technologies: tap to pay, Siri, email, web surfing. These take data and bring it to the physical world.
• Electronic displays: large scale displays for the public

Manovich then shifts his attention to technological examples that are pushing research paradigms forward. I will only list a few here that I find are the most relevant to our class.

• Ubiquitous Computing: moving a singular larger scale computing to multiple handheld devices
• Augmented Reality: overlaying dynamic information over a user’s FOV
• Intelligent Spaces: spaces that use interactions to create ‘smart’ responses and assistance

These technologies use various techniques to create what Manovich calls ‘augmented space’. This is the process of ‘overlaying the physical space with… dynamic data’ (6). Augmented space is derived from augmented reality and virtual reality, where AR is digital information in a real space, and VR is entirely virtual. The term space comes from the fact that, as Manovich states, ‘we are gradually moving into the next paradigm… augmenting the human also comes to mean augmenting the whole space in which someone lives’ (8).

If we are to start examining the space, there are various approaches to analyze. The first Manovich suggests is architectural theory. He posits the problem with augmented space is the method with which you must overlay the data in a physical space (9). He then uses two examples to illustrate methods that have been effective at creating augmented spaces.

• Janet Cardiff: a Canadian artist who created ‘audio walks’. Using an audio track played on a portable CD player, the user would follow instructions and receive a narrative through dialogue and sound effects. Manovich states that although the technology was basic, Cardiff was able to achieve a truly effective method of layering information over a physical space, by using the connection between audio and visual stimuli.
• Daniel Libeskind: an architect who designed the Jewish Museum Berlin. Libeskind created a map plotting the pre-WWII addresses of Jews living near the museum. Various points were connected and projected onto parts of the museum creating an image blending the past and present.

Manovich then segues into a retrospective of the use of artistic spaces. He starts with framed paintings being placed on walls. This is a simple two-dimensional use of space. This is followed by art galleries incorporating the use of all four walls for various paintings. This culminates in the idea of an art object itself being three-dimensional. ‘Finally, the white cube becomes a cube – rather than just a collection of 2-D surfaces’ (10). There was a clear progression from creating something to look at, to creating something to be inside and now creating a space with contextual overlaid information. While the art scene was making creative strides towards the third dimension, film had already been commercialized. It had been commodified and standardized. Each viewing would have the same environmental features: a dark room, rows of seating and a projector showing a 2D film. Manovich argues that art galleries represented a white cube, a space for a one-of-a- kind highbrow production, constantly pushing against the frame of 2D and stating how the ‘physical appearance of an object and the proposed mode of interaction with an object were open for experimentation’ (12). The direct antithesis is the black box of film, consistent, safe and commercial.

The white cube functions as a sort of contemplative artistic space, but there are new areas of experimentation. These spaces function as the next step for spacial use. They are being integrated and used in conjunction with each other, creating a flow of augmented experiences.

• Contemporary urban architecture
• Video displays in contemporary spaces for public consumption
• Retail environments
• Multimedia music events

The next creator discussed was Robert Venturi. He argued that architecture should be heavily influenced by commercial culture. He saw electronic displays as iconographic representation, a more purist method of using information surfaces. Manovich is quick to critique this narrow vision, as it ignores the totality of the space. There is more to be communicated through the use of the space itself than a pure information surface.  The example he uses is a medieval cathedral. A space that communicates ‘Christian narratives not only through the images covering its surfaces but also through its whole spatial structure’ (16). On the opposite end of the spectrum Lars Spuybroek emphasizes the tones of the interiors he uses. By eliminating traditional framing devices, he creates a space that fuses with the exhibition. This however, leads to a more intangible understanding of the space. Manovich describes the information surface Spubroek creates as ‘reduced to abstract color fields and sound’ (17).

Manovich then pivots to discuss clear, functional integration of architectural spaces with electronic displays. ‘Brandscaping’, a term coined by ’Otto Riewoldt, is the process of promoting a brand using a heavily designed space. Rem Koolhaas has applied this philosophy to the Prada store in New York. Using a variety of displays including electronic screens, and glass cages, Koolhaas has created a wholly immersive experience. Users explore a space tonally consistent and visually stimulating, their desire to purchase clothes evolves into the need to maintain a lifestyle. Riewoldt states he ‘has learnt two lessons from the entertainment industry. First: forget the goods, sell thrilling experience to the people. And secondly: beat the computer screen at its own game by staging real objects of desire – and by adding some spice to the space with maybe some audio-visual interactive gadgetry’ (19).

Manovich concludes the essay by restating the importance of seeing electronic media as more than a screen. He urges architects to go “beyond the ‘surface as electronic screen paradigm’” and consider the space of data flow as tangible and something to be studied (20).

an interesting music collaborative work

Thanks for your summaries , looking forward hearing your presentations wanted to share this collaborative music project http://www.wimp.com/virtual-choir-performs-via-webcam/

Mark Terry’s Responses to Maddison’s Questions for Today’s Class

Hi Everyone!
Since I can’t be with you in person today, I’m “mailing in” my responses to the reading by way of answering Maddison’s posted questions:

1. Murray seems to focus his analysis on visual arts. Can Murray’s thesis also be applied to other art forms such as music or even dance?

I believe they can. In particular, the infinite nature of the fold can be seen in the various ways music gets appropriated into other music (sampling), film (soundtracks) even social places (supermarkets, elevators). The same can be said for dance, but not so much for a particular performance which is often a singular experience for both performer and audience, but more in the sense of a style of dance (break-dancing, the jitterbug, the Charleston, etc.). These seem to transcend both time and artistic media as we see them re-surface in various arts, media and even social places (discos, clubs).

2. Can linear narratives also evoke the “fold”? Does traditional or mainstream cinema also have the ability to challenge spectators understanding of time?

I’m not sure about certain linear narratives. I’m sure there are examples, but none that spring to mind. But certain technical approaches to mainstream cinema and storytelling devices can be. I’m thinking of camera moves, editing techniques and storytelling practices that define and challenge the viewers’ understanding of time: the quick, blurred pan, the wavy transition and the calendar pages that fly off month by month, respectively. While these techniques define our understanding of time within the story, they also serve to be timeless methods of defining time for the viewers, especially in mainstream cinema, and to a less extent, television.

3. Referring back to one of Murray’s key questions, do you think the Baroque function is a marker of the death of cinema in the twenty-first century?

Not at all, to me, it seems like the Baroque function is simply another – currently popular – way of expressing cinematic story-telling. The fact that it transcends all form of cinema (art film, documentary, etc.) is testament to its popularity not only among artists and filmmakers, but also to the audiences for whom these films are
produced.

4. Do we have to know that we’re interacting with contemporary art in order for the fold to be enacted?

I don’t believe so. the fold exists – when it does – whether or not the audience is aware of it. Being aware of it makes the experience more interesting in the end, I think.

Reporting from Marrakech – Mark Terry at COP22

Hello Future Cinema Class!
My class project is being presented here at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, more commonly known as COP22. I’ve conducted an interview with Adriana Jiminez who is in charge of education, training and public awareness for the COP conferences. She has collaborated with me in the design features of my project, an interactive GIS map of world showcasing more than 250 video reports of new climate research worldwide. Here’s our interview: Mark Terry Interviews Adriana Jiminez at COP22 in Marrakech
Tomorrow, just before our class, at 5:00 pm our time, I will be holding a press conference for more than 300 journalists introducing this new data delivery system. I will be giving a demonstration of how it works – PLEASE technology, don’t fail me now! See you next Wednesday!
Mark

Discussion Questions

One last thing, here are some discussion questions for Wednesday!

1. Murray seems to focus his analysis on visual arts. Can Murray’s thesis also be applied to other art forms such as music or even dance?
2. Can linear narratives also evoke the “fold”? Does traditional or mainstream cinema also have the ability to challenge spectators understanding of time?
3. Referring back to one of Murray’s key questions, do you think the Baroque function is a marker of the death of cinema in the twenty-first century?
4. Do we have to know that we’re interacting with contemporary art in order for the fold to be enacted?

Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds – Chapters 1-5

Key Terms
Baroque: Historical term used to describe the art of the 17^th century that is characterized by ornate detail. This artistic style used exaggerated motion and  detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur.

The Fold: “a flexible or an elastic body still has cohering parts that form a fold, such that they are not separated into parts of parts but are rather divided to infinity in smaller and smaller folds that always retain a certain cohesion. Thus a continuous labyrinth is not a line dissolving into grains, but resembles a sheet of paper divided into infinite folds or separated into bending movements, each one determined by the consistent or conspiring surroundings.” (Deleuz)

Digital Baroque Summary

“Digital” and “Baroque” are two words we would not normally consider together. However, Timothy Murray’s Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds uses the concept of “the fold” (developed in Deleuze’s The Fold: Liebniz and the Baroque) to examine the interconnectedness of the two.

Murray begins Digital Baroque by posing two questions:

1. Does new media stand forth as a reminder of the mortality of cinema?
2. Does the Baroque function as a marker of the death of cinema in the twenty-first century as an energetic carrier of the figures of mourning, melancholia so fundamental to the Baroque?”

By providing close readings and analyses of films, videos, CD-ROMs, and installations attuned to the baroque nuances of the fold, Murray aims to shift critical attention away from the romantic and modernist strategies that have dominated the criticism and creation of new media.

Murray argues that new media art practices are informed by pre-modern thought processes and artistic practices, specifically, the Baroque. As Murray states, “new media screen arts consistently embody and display the tissue of baroque paradigms, from the dynamics of serial accumulation and the trauma of temporal folds to the cultural promise of what I will call digital incompossibility that makes quake the previously confident stature of single-centered subjectivity” (17).

Murray suggests that digital art (e.g., CD-ROMs, installations, interactive websites) is a representation of the Baroque for several reasons:

1. Murray uses a variety of new media artists such as June Paik, Bill Viola, Thierry Kuntzel, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Chris Marker, and more to highlight the relations between digital art and Baroque.
2. Unlike art of the Baroque period, we are capable of interacting with a piece of digital art. This interaction is significant in terms of the fold. The “communication between” digital artwork and its user is not simply a hyperlink to another website or page within a page. What now occurs between two texts is not a matter of opposition, but rather that adds too and extends the original piece. I.e. more folds.

By applying the concept of the fold to digital art, Murray suggests, “the fold is the machinery of intersubjectivity and inter-activity” (6).  Murray’s use of the Baroque, thus, suggests that the fold represents how participants are included in and become a part of art.

Murray divides Digital Baroque into 4 sections. Each section of the book focuses on a specific temporal mode (past, present, and future), but does not move in a chronological progression from front to back, but is folded and enfolded. Each section or chapter could point to, refer to, or provide a hyperlink to other chapters in the book.

Part I: From Video Black to Digital Baroque

Chapter 1 outlines performative passages through early modern space and epistemology by contemporary video installation artists. This chapter articulates how the new media subject becomes inscribed in the accumulating flow of digital data, information, and imagery. Chapter 2 applies this analysis of electronic intensity to the understanding of representational power put forth by the philosopher of early modern representation, Louis Marin, and the cinema and video artist, Thierry Kuntzel. Kuntzel’s work provides this chapter with a conceptual landscape for the consideration of paradigms of light, power, and corporeality. This is significant for contemporary politics of race and sexuality.

Part II: Digital Deleuze: Baroque Folds of Shakespearean Passage

This section brings Deleuze and William Shakespeare together to provide the textual and intellectual frameworks for cinematic statements on the Baroque by JeanLuc Godard and Peter Greenaway. Chapter 3 is shaped by Godard’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear for a dialogue between Godard and Deleuze. Murray looks at the restoring of a new baroque era where Godardian cinema seems caught within clashing systems of analog and digital representation. Chapter 4 shifts its attention to the panoramic mise-en-scène of “collective memory.” This positions Greenaway’s sensitivity to serialization, time, and trauma in dialogue with Deleuze’s articulation of the philosophical promise of new cinema. The cinematic fold is distinguished as the textured event shared by writing, the deep memory of the archive, and the digital technologies that produce, retain, and disseminate text and images.

Part III: Present Past: Digitality, Psychoanalysis, and the Memory of Cinema

This section concentrates on the memory of cinema in the digital age. Chapter 5 sketches the relation of melancholic baroque concerns with the death of cinema in the age of new media to narratives of loss and trauma as staged in a range of experimental projects in digital media, including tapes by Gary Hill and Daniel Reeves and CD-ROMs by Grace Quintanilla and Keith Piper.

In sum, Murray makes an unexpected connection between the old and the new, and analyzes the philosophical paradigms that inform contemporary screen arts. This connection between contemporary art and the past, as well as contemporary art and the Baroque, will be further discussed on Wedneday. In the interest of this summary, I did not detail the examples and case studies Murray uses to support his thesis. I will discuss these further in my presentation, as well as applying contemporary virtual reality technologies and experiences to see if these works can also apply to Murray’s work. I look forward to an enlivening discussion. See you Wednesday!

Digital Baroque Part III and IV

Hello everyone!

I won’t be presenting orally tomorrow, but please do check out the website I made on the text.

CLICK ^^^^^^

REFLECTION

In Digital Baroque: New Media and Cinematic Folds, Timothy Murray explores linkages between old and new. Murray takes two seemingly disparate terms, “digital” and “baroque,” and puts them in theoretical proximity, discussing the digital baroque “as enfolding the user in the energetic present, as articulated in relation to the analog past while bearing on the digital future.” (7)

In an investigation of the relationship between the philosophies of art that informed the Baroque period and the realities of new media art, Murray searches for the “in-between” he associates with the Deleuzian concepts of the fold and incompossibility. Murray contends:

In the context of new media art, I propose that we consider the form or event of the irrational interval in relation to a series of incompossible events: archival intensities, interactivities, coded automatons, and the returns of the future. (249)

Furthermore, Murray calls for a conceptual shift from “linear visual projection to nonlinear temporal folds intrinsic to the digital form.” (28) New media art transcends past, present and future, yet remains discretely demarcated, “always, it seems, in the temporal space of the in-between.” (237)

Part III of Digital Baroque is a contemplation of the “memory of cinema in the digital age” (28). Murray explores the traumas in the “present past” and examines the potential of “revolutionary melancholia” exemplified in Chris Marker’s Level 5 (128). Building on his analysis of Level 5, Murray goes on to call for a “psychoanalytical approach” to new forms of media. He takes Toni Dove and Zoe Beloff’s works as a suggestion of the ways in which artists engage with play and philosophy. In doing so, he examines the possibility of transforming, adapting and reshaping the rules of conformity (191). Zoe Beloff’s digital work Philosophical Toy World exemplifies his concept of the “uncanny kaleidoscope” through interactivity and the visual retelling of the history of image (192). Beloff’s work is also a reminder of Deleuze’s belief, which Murray iterates earlier, that “through digital memory [..] the panoramic organization of space might lose the vertical privileging of direction. The screen could become a data bank through which information and the methods of its production replace nature.” (176) Moreover, as does Chris Marker’s Immemory CD-ROM, which Murray terms a “feverish delirium of the digital archive” and which certainly calls for a paradigmatic shift by viewers from receivers of projection to active interacts (226). Immemory is a composite of hundreds of photos and documents stored on CD-ROM. This very individual vehicle for Marker’s tour of memory draws on historical image and text. It is “something like an overlapping of times” that defines Immemory and which relentlessly challenges linear narrative and temporal singularity (230).

In considering artworks that position the user in a state of becoming, temporality is groundless and the possibility of interactivity in digital art is for Murray, crucial. In his exploration of this in-between of becoming, Murray suggests that “recent developments in digital art once again offer a promising deformation of the visual apparatus in a way that refigures and reenergizes narrative performance while providing materialized metaphors for a better understanding of the vicissitudes of artistic affect.” (222)

In the concluding part of Digital Baroque, Murray turns his attention to the possibilities of future cinema. The “bringing together of the before and the after in becoming” is the Deleuzian center, and the final words written, in his book (260). Jill Scott’s Frontiers of Utopia is a final example of Murray’s vision of the digital baroque. Scott’s work situates the viewer in “shifting intervals of passing presents” as they interact with women from different geographic and historic locations (251). Ultimately, Murray’s complicated theoretical work draws powerful connections between the digital and the Baroque. Moreover, his diverse selection of art works and philosophy support his position on the promises (past, present and future) of new media art. No matter which direction you look, the future looks bright.

CASE STUDY: CHRIS MARKER

Revolutionary Melancholia and

Past-Present Traumas

This section focuses on major themes present in Part III of Digital Baroque. Death, grief and trauma play significant roles in Murray’s explanation of the folds present in Chris Marker’s Level 5.  Murray begins with the contention that locating death in the past becomes a psychological and social coping mechanism for dealing with trauma. He refers here to collective memory rather than personal memory, explaining that this mechanism is “not for the survivors themselves, who remained haunted by the specters of incorporation, but for the others, the children of the future, as if to protect them from the ooze of civilization’s deep wounds.” (160) Of Holocaust survivors whose pain was hidden away post-World War II, Murray writes, “they remained inside this collective body, as if mummified, with all their vivid details preserved and awaiting exposure.” (160) This “censorship” of public and private memory is taken up in Level 5 in Marker’s direct contemplation of the tragedy at Okinawa during WWII (161).

Level 5 follows Laura, a woman assigned to write a video game about the Battle of Okinawa. Throughout her research, Laura becomes entangle in the tragedy of Okinawa. While dealing with her own personal struggle of love lost, she contemplates memory, death and suffering. Marker’s mix of documentary footage and narrative fiction challenges the viewer to blur the line between history and story. Moreover, Marker’s work exposes the history of Okinawa and the mass suicides which remain marked by secrecy alongside Japanese and American complicity. Murray explains that,

Through these varying interviews and cinematic sequences, Marker’s film insistently sensitizes its viewer to how complexly the postwar approach to trauma was related to the codes and conventions of cinema and film’s approach to the horrific losses of history. (161)

Throughout Level 5, Marker acknowledges his own role as observer, as media maker, consistently redefining the relationship between producer and spectator. Marker’s work suggests the possibility of drawing from the contemplation of historical trauma in narrative cinema. By destabilizing the distinction between fiction and reality, our histories and our present, artists are able to generate “critical energy” making works that are moving and reflective. The political and the personal conjoin in the melancholic work Murray refers to, he explains,

Marker […] situates the unstable relation of memory and trauma against the backdrop of the history of international cinema and the ineluctability of sight, with a striking emphasis on the resounding variation of cinematic technique and tradition as demarcated by the conventional shifts of national difference and the clashes of cinematic style. (174)

Moreover, Murray turns to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s question of whether “cinematic pleasure” requires us, “not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown?” (171) In turn, Murray conceptualizes the “wounds of repetition,” citing the French film Hiroshima mon amour as an example of this possibility. These wounds of repetition are dispersed throughout digital art and history. Again, Level 5 is exemplary as Murray recalls,

…this film’s stress on the lingering trace of the pathos of memory even after it is screened. Laura concludes the film by acknowledging that “I almost lost the echo of something I don’t know . . . which I cannot know but what my programmer foresaw.”

Further,

Such a concluding display of the shadowy haze of self-representation effectively screens the ellipses occupied and performed by the repetitions of digital enhancement and encoding that peel open for the viewer of Marker’s film the wounds of civilization. (177)

In between these wounds of repetition, between all those who have died and those who will, are the folds that define the Digital Baroque.

Second Life

In May of 2009 the Harvard Film Archive Hosted a virtual encounter with Chris Marker. The evening’s interaction took place entirely through the virtual world of Second Life. Marker gave a tour of his virtual world through his avatar, discussed his work with moderator avatars, and took questions for audience avatars. Having already built an island in the virtual space and documented it in his work Ouvroir, Marker takes his inhabitance there to the next level as he reaches back out of the world. Inhabiting the space, while interacting with the outside, Marker negotiates the boundaries between virtual and material space with a contemplative ease. One of Marker’s last works before his death in 2012, this Second Life interaction is emblematic of Murray’s claim that, “digital aesthetics can be said to position the spectator on the threshold of the virtual and actual.” (195)

Works Cited

Kaganski, Serge, and Julien Gester. “Chris Marker’s Second Life.” The Criterion Collection. N.p., 13 May 2009. Web. 06 Nov. 2016.

Murray, Timothy. Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2008. Print.

“The Second Life of Chris Marker.” Harvard Film Archive. N.p., 2016. Web. 06 Nov. 2016.

QUESTIONS

1)         What are the possibilities of the Digital Baroque in music? Do we have any examples to add to Murray’s survey? What is the potential of interactivity in auditory projects?

2)         Is it possible for linear narratives to evoke the “fold” Murray refers to? Can traditional cinema, for example, challenge spectators understanding of time? Can it induce a feeling of movement across time in the same way as new media art?

Virtual Reality Lets WWII Veteran Revisit Town He Helped Liberate

Also, I came across this article the other day about how a particular virtual reality experience is allowing WWII Veterans to revisit towns from their past. In the example they describe in the article, one Veteran was even awarded with a medals of honor by the town’s mayor. Interesting use of the technology and might be worth discussing this week in class.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/virtual-reality-wwii-veteran_us_58208ec5e4b0d9ce6fbd2ad8

Horror and Transmedia Storytelling: This House Has People In It

While I have slightly changed the topic of my research paper, I figured I would still post the link to the short film I discussed in my oral proposal: This House Has People In It.

THHPII debuted as part of Adult Swim’s “Infomercials” initiative, which is known to air some of the most experimental stuff on TV. I highly recommend checking it out!

Constructed as a series of surveillance-camera recordings of a seemingly ordinary family, THHPII takes place on the day of the family’s son’s birthday. His sister, however,  begins to suffer from a bizarre condition.

The story spills beyond the confines of the video, however, and into a website for “AB Surveillance Solutions” that’s packed with hidden links, videos, text files, images, and audio recordings that further flesh out the story. One reviewer has found at least 2 hours worth of useful video files on the website, as well as an abundance of links and image and audio files.

While THHPII in undoubtedly creepy on its own as a short film, it becomes even more bizarre and disturbing as you dig through the transmedia materials. It is definitely worth the watch, and makes for an interesting case study on the immersive aspects of transmedia storytelling.

Learning Cree Syballics with VR

Hey everyone!

I thought some of you might be interested in how teachers are using VR to decolonize education! Very cool stuff.

Here’s the link to the CBC article