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Interactive States Cinema and Digital Media Convergence-2003-Leggett-27-35
Interactive States Cinema and Digital Media Convergence-2003-Leggett-27-35
Mike Leggett
Flux The 1 q~Os - the limits of the photoplay are reached - in Russia,
Germany and France the constraints and demands of the Producer
Showman are challenged - it is the artists who know what the audience
want.
Flux describes the state of film culture back then - could the present
state of ’digital culture’ be described similarly now? Such proposals are
tautological as there are few parts of the wider culture which are not
touched in some way by the ubiquitous microprocessor or silicon chip -
from the personal computer and the cell phone(card) to the washing
machine, the car and the toothbrush. Delivered after a short gestation,
the pixel, the byte, the digital video camera are seamlessly integrated
into contemporary practice. There are few photographic surfaces or
projection screens where the term ’new media’ is regarded as anything
but a recent technology, a development path to which image
practitioners have constantly contributed. The time-based technologies
that have been used to fix light to a time signature have thus been in
constant flux, each component in the tool chain being constantly honed
and eventually replaced. The act of making an image has been wholly
integrated within this evolution, procedures and technology defining
outcomes alongside the imagination and the skill of the artist.
Such a blending reminds us that the root of the word is tekhn6 from the
Greek word meaning ’art’. It came into usage about six centuries ago,
at about the point oral culture was beginning to use the new technology
of graph or writing which was to move Indo-European culture toward a
state of empirical consciousness dominated by literacy and numeracy.
A fuzzy epistemology of the flux around the term ’new media’ will move
from ’interactive multimedia’ and towards anticipating an interactive
cinema, or one reliant on reflex and cognition, agency within the
architecture of the virtual and the actual, now, here, there and then.
The web’s search engine sets out to create links to the archive (and the
established epistemology}1 to help describe the contemporary and
invent the future.
Objects Movies that have migrated from cinemas to galleries and exhibition
Ephemera halls most directly are those that confound expectation, disorientate, for
Processes instance, by foregrounding material process and refuting immersion
Network within the narrative process. Film as Film recreated a cinema within the
Hayward Gallery (London, UK, 1979), hung images on walls, an event
challenged the politics of
Instances that celebrated the modern but
contemporary (1) connoisseurship whilst avoiding the exhibitors’ realpolitik of gender.
Objects Another challenge, The Video Show at the Serpentine (London, UK,
197~), placed production and exhibition in the same space, on-the-fly,
LIVE! Artists’ installations were like so many garage bands arriving for a
gig and equally ephemeral, except for those represented by dealers
who (unlike most of the film makers) could become part of a collector’s
~
holdings.
~
-
Burning the Interface <International Artists’ CD-ROM> (Sydney,
Australia, 19g6)’ was another pioneering survey show, a selected
inventory that was both didactic and revelatory, with the art arriving on
1 ~crn shiny discs (that promised the collectors’ patronage) or via
telephone cables strung into the space and appearing on the face of
modified office equipment - the computer. The discrete encounter with
~
these early interactive multimedia works, while recreating the intimate
a~
space between book and reader, and often mirroring the artist’s
working space for the visitor to encounter, was a restraining experience
~ for many accustomed to the physical ’performance space’ of the gallery
? and museum. In the words of one recalcitrant reviewer: ’Peering at a
monitor is an impoverished aesthetic experience.’2
~,
~ sculpture, there is a precise limit, for instance, to how many
people can ’view’ the work at one time. A general gallery-
going public may therefore find the nature of this type of
exhibition limiting and frustrating. This raises the question of
placing single-user works in a multi-user public space
Space Odysseys (Sydney, Australia, 2001) ’sensation and immersion’
morphed the timeline from work made in the 1970s (Bruce Nauman’s
Triangle Room 1978-80) and the 1990s (James Turrell’s Between the
Seen, 1991) using the fundamental architectural technology of electric
light, form and colour, to the most recent, the premiere of Luc
1/0 (Input/Output) - read and then return/write to memory (why else was
writing invented? Surely not to conduct discourse ...).
Code, the ephemera of Human/Computer Interface (HCI) linking
Intention with Outcome (I/O), the new age of scribes, cutting and
assembling code ’objects’ (Object Oriented Programming), like so many
shots hanging in the vast trim bin of internet code ’libraries’. For
example, jM~4~ is a software tool requiring coding skills and is used by
the Australian group Lalila for video installations - customising it to their
needs was in conjunction with two other collaborators, more
experienced in the fields of code writing and jMax, one in Germany,
the other in Canada. ’[V]ideo is analysed in real time, generating
sounds. We only allow ourselves to manipulate the video, meaning that
video is our musical instrument - so we function in a video image
manipulation space but the aim is building an audio performance.&dquo;
Thus they are able to make available to all, on their website, ’an
extensive library of video data stream manipulation objects, which can
be used seamlessly with audio manipulation objects. 15
Processes Lalila now share their acquired code-writing talents with the
international community who tend to cluster around specific objectives
and interests, and have found that the pride of contributing abilities is a
motivating factor across the open source ’movement’. The ranges of
expertise are wide but each contribution is regarded seriously as a
learning process for all, with stages where outcomes become apparent
but where the process never ends. Lines of code from one project might
conceivably end up in another but as Deleflie observes: ’It is like
receiving a compliment whenI see someone else using my code.’6
the individuals and small groups creating the conditions for
These are
’things happen’: online, offline (in the studio or the gallery), for other
to
groups or individuals, making art yes, but also making the many other
things that a vibrant culture needs, the telematic culture identified by
Roy Ascott 30 years ago,’ that increasingly is using not only words but
pictures and sounds to communicate and absorb. Fundamentally
Instances archival Kino Eye (Dziga Vertov 1924): from the market to the farm -
didacticism for the urban proletariat, about food origins; for the rural
proletariat, about city markets; and agit-prop trains - ’all education is
political’ - the kinoscope.
Anti-melodrama, anti-escapism, free-form Constructivism with industry
and technology the
asheroes. The meat sequence is presented in its
entirety, in reversed (backwards) motion (an instance of Kierkegaard’s
_
maxim on memory: ’Life is lived forward, but it is understood
It backwards.’ A filmic process, as the projector handle is cranked, that
returns the meat (and the propaganda) from the proletariat to the
~ peasants - city/country, collective/cooperative, hand/mind, film
material/narrative nutrition.
(in another place at a similar time, Henry Ford had visited a Chicago
stockyard and observed the packed meat coming out of the slaughterhouse
in cuts - he reversed in his mind’s eye the process and established in 1913
the first moving production-line assembly of the model T.)
Man with the Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov 1925) explores the system
crf film by demonstration, the ending dialing with the future and the
other new media about to affect the lives of the new nation. In the
Workers’ Club the radio with a loudspeaker, the Radio Ear, linked with
the Kino Eye (objects) - as the workers read (ephemera) whilst in the
cinema, sound is made visible (process)i anticipating the expansion of
sound, film, telephone and radio to the nation (networks).
Here istechnology at work and the worker is the icon, the hero, the
masses who are the audience of individuals. Visual indexing and
symbols of distance, time, speed and acceleration - cutting bench
rewinds - speeding frames, speeding trains. Speed - blur - flux.
in control. Cough during a John Cage recital and you are part of
the performance. That’s an interface.9
~
Portrait One (Luc Courchesne 1990)&dquo; - interaction, through sometimes
~ risque conversation with the on-screen persona of Marie, the simulacra,
p the cyborg, is patently a fiction. The ’virtual relationship’ that we strike
up with Marie:
~,
F
of how we meet ourselves, through others, in a virtual
environment such as the CD-ROM or, more generally, in the
context of digital media that will increasingly surround us.&dquo;
The Greeks oracists and rhetoricians, who before the alphabet had
been handed down, developed an elaborate form of artificial memory,
described so fully in Yates’ Art of Memory. 13 Ars memoria, ’a series of
loci or places. The commonest, though not the only type of mnemonic
place system was the architectural type.... We have to think of the
ancient orator as moving in imagination through his memory building
whilst he is making his speech, drawing from the memorised places the
images he has [previously] placed on them.’(p. 18) The first movies it
could be claimed then, were a conceptual model made by the Greek
rhetoricians, complete with wide shots, tracking shots, panning, tilts,
close-ups and flashbacks, all played in the cinema of the mind’s eye, a
’Classics film narrative.&dquo; The imaginary perambulation allowed the
speaker, like today’s interactive multimedia, to have options for
changing the pathway through the discourse.
The computer-mediated interactive installation, its articulation within the
medium-to-large scale physical public space and determinations of the
coding and decoding of the experience of encounter, has been
developing a steady level of acceptance amongst audiences and their
various agencies. The contemporary art gallery and the international
Biennale, the didactic tool of museum and touch-screen guide, the
recreational platform in club and arcade, all have enabled widespread
personal interaction with electronic assemblages. As with multifarious
consumer items that appear daily, these customised machines are
assuredly pupating into a new phase that further blurs the roles of
producer and performer.
The embodiment of the visitor in the physical space and the mediated
system through the acknowledgment of both their tactile and non-tactile
presence, has since then become a priori the direction taken by those
artists working in actual space (whilst sometimes annexing the virtual
space of the internet). In many cases, artists and designers have
contributed significantly to the design parameters of hardware and
~
j~
tjJhk some scanning mechanism, replacing what was there with what is