interactive cinema

Talk with Your Hands Like an Ellis Island Mutt is a recombinatory cinema project that utilizes video material from my digital lyric memoir DADDYLABYRINTH, which appeared in the ELO 2014 exhibition and later premiered at the ArtScience Museum of Singapore, to create an interactive, polylinear narrative cinema experience. From the video “selfies” of DADDYLABYRINTH I have culled individual hand gestures and, through image manipulation and repetition, created sixty-four separate videos eight to twelve seconds long that can be recombined using a variety of strategies, from the performative to the algorithmic. A three-minute video describing the project is at https://vimeo.com/113867362. The sixty-four building blocks that make up Hand/Mutt are compiled at https://vimeo.com/113860613 and the original source videos can be found at www.daddylabyrinth.com. This interactive cinema project uses associational thinking to reach beneath common storytelling tropes and into the proto-narrative subconscious, where story is born in the collision between one image and another. My approach is indebted to the contrapuntal editing of Sergei Eisenstein’s theories, and informed by two more contemporary theoretical approaches. Walter Fischer’s Narrative Paradigm posits that the human mind will create narrative from any stimuli that are offered to it; Eugene Dorfman’s concept of the narreme sees narrative as consisting of discrete, recombinable building blocks – just as linguistics sees language as a combination of morphemes. My approach to recombinatory cinema rests on the faith that what we call “film” can be a polylinear narrative environment in which narremes, brought together into a variety of lines by the interactive viewer, can generate story experiences unique to each individual and thus be bound, by the co-creative process of interactivity, to each viewer’s psyche. In time for the Bergen conference I will develop, from the visual elements of DADDYLABYRINTH, interactive recombinatory cinema experiences using (1) the touch-screen based interactive narrative platform Opertoon (http://opertoon.com) and (2) the database-driven VJ software program Isadora (http://troikatronix.com). Hand/Mutt is the prototype project for a database-driven interactive and performative cinema system, and I will use it to explore how databases and interactivity let us conceptualize new ways in which the fundamental building blocks of cinema are capable of colliding – and what stories our minds create when they do. THE PROJECT IN THE CONTEXT OF ELO 2015 As evidenced by the 2014 ELO exhibition, which featured several projects that were cinematic in nature, it is clear that a branch of electronic literature has been heading toward film – and thus that film is indeed one of its “ends.” A forthcoming panel I organized for the 2015 Society for Cinema and Media Studies, “The Experimental Cinema/Electronic Literature Frontier,” directly addresses this relationship. Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (1970) suggests a coming art in which “the computer becomes an indispensable component in the production of an art that would be impossible without it” and in which “the machine makes autonomous decisions on alternative possibilities that ultimately govern the outcome of the artwork.” What Youngblood presaged has been fulfilled in electronic literature, and it is this cusp that I would like to explore. (source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

The End: Death in Seven Colours is a non-linear Internet artwork made in the interactive authoring environment Korsakow. Seven deaths (corresponding to seven colours of the rainbow) are examined through the prism of popular culture and film in a vast, encyclopedic mash-up. The work presents an “exploded view” diagram of our culture’s relationship to death and narrative closure. Like a chose-your-own-adventure conspiracy theory, The End weaves together a paranoid meta-text organized around themes of the unknown, concealment, secrecy, and the shifting boundary between animal, man and computer in the post-human era. The deaths of Alan Turing, Sigmund Freud, Princess Diana, Jim Morrison, Judy Garland, Walter Benjamin, and Marcel Duchamp become the touchstones for many impractical segues and short circuits peppered with recurring motifs such as 4 a.m., His Master’s Voice, Snow White,The Rainbow, Chess, The Man Behind the Curtain, and an array of famous surrealist artworks that find new meaning in their entanglements with these stories.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)

Terminal Time is a history "engine:" a machine which combines historical events, ideological rhetoric, familiar forms of TV documentary, consumer polls and artificial intelligence algorithms to create hybrid cinematic experiences for mass audiences that are different every single time. History as it was meant to be told! History is in your hands! Through an audience response-measuring device (applause-meter) connected to a computer, viewing audiences respond to periodic questions reminiscent of marketing polls. These questions occur every 6 minutes during the story. The loudest applause determines the winning answer. Your answers to these questions allow the computer program to create historical narratives that mirror and even exaggerate your biases and desires. Just clap, watch and enjoy. At long last, Terminal Time gives you the history you deserve! The Terminal Time engine uses the past 1,000 years of world history as "fuel" for creating these custom-made historical documentaries. Each program generated by the machine can be either projected on a screen or broadcast on television monitors. (Although the video and sound are constructed in the computer, the signal is compatible with standard video technology.) Each program lasts approximately 30 minutes.

(Source: Artists' description from the Terminal Time site)

This CD-ROM explores how hypertextual writing and image-making merge in creating projects with nonfiction materials such as photographs, video clips, audio recordings and observational notes. The work includes two hypertextual field projects, one concerning a wine harvest in Burgundy, France, and the other concerning a series of performances in Ghana. The project uses an html-based format to weave among differing modes of writing and image-presentation. The section "The Harvest" was selected for exhibition in the 2001 ELO "State Of The Arts" symposium gallery. Based on two months of participant observation working the harvest at a small vineyard in France, the project combines diaristic writing, visual notes, dialog, exposition, and other forms of writing alongside a fifty-four image sequence. The work also includes videos and slide shows. "Concealed Narratives" offers two routes, interactive paths by which users travel to a series of public events in Ghana. The work explores how cultural battles are imagined and how stories get expressed through performances, visual tropes, and metaphors. The work also includes a critical essay about how to merge techniques of metaphor and montage in creating artistic and ethnographic projects based on material evidence. The work bridges practices of the arts, humanities and social sciences.

(Source: Author's description in the Electronic Literature Directory)

"Canyonlands" is a web-based, interactive project that blends text and video imagery on a vast, scrolling environment. Following in the footsteps of the novelist and essayist, Edward Abbey, users navigate paths through a desert landscape that is being overturned through dam-building, road-building, mining, and industrial tourism. The project combines maps, photos, archival films, original video, and many other elements on a scrolling, virtual landscape suggestive of the Colorado River, its canyon lands, and the deserts of Utah, Arizona and California. Users arrive in a desert American West in the 1950s. The work incorporates nonfiction materials in an artistic environment to offer an interdisciplinary blend of art, writing, and scholarship. Recorded in the deserts of Utah, Arizona and California.

(Source: Author's description in the Electronic Literature Directory)