Lev Manovich’s Soft Cinema

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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VJ-Fleet

by Julie Andreyev, at New Forms Festival 2003, consists of 3 cars fitted with video projection on the rear windshield. Each car has a theme determined by the character of the car, and by characteristics of the host city where the fleet is mobilized. The choice of cars for the project reflects the specific car culture of the host city expressed through customization and branding.
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Chris Salter’s current work presented at the Subtle Technologies Symposium, University of Toronto, Canada, reminds me that we become savvy to knowing that at the ATM, on the roadways and sidewalks, in shops, in elevators, we are being recorded, monitored. We have grown accustomed to speaking publicly in everyday distributed conversations that are publicly private. Yet we ride the subways not seeing each other, cultivating not looking.

Are we so comfortable with the pervasive camera that we would automatically turn away if we didn’t wish to have a particular action captured? Can we maintain that awareness in a invisibly sensing environment? How does coming to live comfortably with this change us? Are we aware, or is it just our environment that’s aware?
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2004.06.02 Helen Thorington
Looked at a piece called Dancing Beyond Boundaries done in 2001 between the Universities of Florida, Minneapolis, Campinas, Brazil and the SuperComputing Conference in Denver. Using the Access Grid and Internet2. It seemed to exploit technology in new ways but not explore virtual space as a stage, as over and against using a screen where a real-life stage is shown via film (video). Or: is this the perspective of the archivist?

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Hacktivism (electronic resistence within the network) has fed into tactical media: urban, mobile performance events.

Being ‘wired’ has become mobile, ubiquitous, sentient, pervasive, OMNICIENT monitored, computing. As we desire our movies and games to be more realistic – hyper-realistic – we now inhabit our computer-mediated, if not computer-generated worlds. We interact through joysticks that exert pressure to our response. We track oursleves with GPS-equipped devices, we pass and receive data streams: enveloped, engaged, connected, linked.

There’s a surge in public events – happenings – Kaprow’s “Environmental Theatre” of the collective, enabled by wi-fi technology and taken to the streets: MOBILized.
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2004.04.05 Helen Thorington, writing about an early conference proposal:

The following are examples of distributed performances:

Finding Time (Jesse Gilbert, 2000). Finding Time linked performers on six continents in a series of live musical events, each an hour?s duration.

World Wide Simultaneous Dance (1998, Laura Knott). The project took place simultaneously in twelve countries.

In both examples the performers played to audiences in their performance spaces and to a worldwide Internet audience by means of especially created websites.
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SPEC-FLICDescribed by Adriene Jenick as a “Speculative Distributed Cinema Project….a series of fictional events performed as distributed cinema. SPEC-FLIC is a platform for speculation, creative experimentation and imagination among UCSD students, faculty, staff and the larger public. SPEC-FLIC’s title refers to speculative fiction (an area of science fiction that is focused less on new science/tech and more on societal impacts) as well as to the size (a “speck”) of the PDA-based video frame that serves as the conduit for this durational collective performance. Originally described as a distributed science fiction soap opera in three phases.” Continue reading

Goings On in the 50s and 60s:

They were non-verbal, theatrical productions that abandoned the stage-audience structure, did away with the usual plot or narrative line of traditional theatre; made objects of the performers and set them within an overall design of environment, timing, sound, color and light. They were accidental, spontaneous and planned — each a unique event shaped by the action of the audience that participated in it.

See: “Happenings in the New York Scene (1961)” (Kaprow, Allan, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, University of California Press, 2003) ” ?a happening cannot be reproduced. The few performances given of each work differ considerably…and the work is over before habits begin to set in.?

July, 1962:
Nam June Paik devised a piano concerto for simultaneous performance in San Francisco and Shanghai, with the left hand part being played in the USA and the right hand in China. The first telecast to Europe and America took place over Telstar 2 in July 1962.

Woodstock, New York, August 29, 1952.
David Tudor placed John Cage?s hand-written score, 4’33” on the piano and sat motionless. The score indicated three silent movements, each of a different length. Tudor signaled its commencement by lowering the keyboard lid of the piano. The sound of the wind in the trees entered the first movement. After thirty seconds of no action, he raised the lid to signal the end of the first movement. It was then lowered for the second movement, during which raindrops pattered on the roof. The score was in several pages, so he turned the pages as time passed, but played nothing. The keyboard lid was raised and lowered again for the final movement.

And so Cage initiated a “creative process which successfully detaches itself from the intentions of its author ? and from the self-expressive intentional purpose of music” ? and introduced a new aesthetic of unintentional sound.