New Digital Cinemas – Holly Willis

● cinema at the turn of the millennium as end and beginning
● pessimists see it as the passing of real film
● others see it a means to democratize film
● (same argument could be made for press and web?)
● video – the dissolution of the medium? death of video art?
● new forms of criticality “forms that eschew the distinction between artwork and criticism” (2)
● many artists use both film and video – or film is edited digitally (merged?)
● the “post-medium” condition – Hollywood is mainly a business, challenged by digi tech
● ...the availablity of consumer-level digital video cameras and desktop editing software tools in the mid 1990s, along with the growing capabilities of Internet streaming and the gradual convergence of media screens, have marked a considerable shift in cinema, not just in the US but internationally, and not only in terms of mode of production, bu tin regard to distribution and exhibition as well” (3)
● we are witnessing the most “extensive reworking og the role of images since the inauguration of cinema” (4)
● defining 'digital' – transcription and conversion (distinction)
● film can reproduce (light hitting emulsion) the world but “also reinforces a general – a controversial – supposition that we can can represent reality” (5)
● video – light strikes a censor, analogue to digi, held on magnetic tape
● for both video and film, the final form of info is analogous to its original form
● film: analogue media store info (through transcription) on physical material, displayed directly (photo) or through display (another instance of transcription)
● generational loss through duplication, limiting quality and number of copies
● video: process of conversion, defined by math algorithms “as formal relationships in abstract cultures” (6)
● 2 factors – rate at which digi info is sampled and degree of compression
● analogue video – 1960s (portapak)
● video art rarely appeared on TV, more in galleries and museums
● profess and commercial vs. amateur (artist) but now digi video makes artists rival best
● this is important b/c digi image production has “radically altered some of our most basic aspects of our daily lives” (7) – communication, sharing ideas and images, purchasing, understand community etc
● *** “potentially infinite reproduction of material with no loss of quality, affording new modes of production based on appropriation and sampling, and indeed, contributing to a culture of sharing and recycling” (7)
● computers are the other half of digi revolution
● macs introduced in 1984, software for editing in early 90s, etc alter modes of prod and aesthetics
● creation of various magazines like Wired, Res, etc – “champion the role of the consumer as producer”(9)
● intermedia around since 1940 (John Whitney), Sony's first artist in res – dev. “visual music” (10)
● immersive environment (Gene Youngblood) 1970, attempts to expand consciousness through new kinds of consciousness
● replicate realistic worlds through artifice, effects as transparent as possible
● indieWood
● film festivals
● home theatre system and DVD rentals – “theatre-style viewing” at home (16)
● online film ownership and bandwidth increases (dwld over the Internet)
● revitalize museum and gallery world --> multiple/plurality of cinemas
● philosophical responses to ana to digi shift: “digitextuality” where “old media are transposed into new forms” (17) based on Kristeva's notion of intertextuality “new digital media technologies make meaning not only by building a new text through absorption and transformation of other texts, but also by embedding the entirety of other texts (analogue and digital) seamlessly within the new” (18)
● remediation – Bolter and Grusin
● recursive – Manovich
● recursiveness as reduction to on/off, produces set of projected images (real or not?), purely a product of programming and exist only in that state of projection (??)
● liquescence – Critical Art Ensemble – means for describing present social condition
● Godard – wanted small portable camera (big equipment determines the where and when of filmed images); determines which stories are told
● sketch with camera
● Coppola – creating fake spaces
● Benning – Pixel Vision – late 80s, autobiographical video diaries
● cinema of generation x (born bw 61 and 71): deaths of many pop icons (drugs), murder attempts, immense social change, pop culture immersion, “youths responded by creating a culture characterised by irony, apathy and general disenfranchisement” (23)
● advocates for a return to the real/authentic
● do DIY techs make us more accepting of tools of surveillance and corp. manipulation?
● von Trier – Dogme 95 (Danish in origin), against auteur concept, filmmaking not attributable to the individual, not to create illusion, (Manifesto p.25)
● Third Cinema – create collaborative practice, against authorship and control
● asserts that 35 mm film must be employed
● (Korine like vonTrier) “celebrating a degree of chaos during the production process and in fomenting a fundamentally inscrutable narrative trajectory while mining intensities of emotion onscreen; both films also provoked violent reactions among audiences and critics alike” (28)
● hoping idealistically for some way to connect with the authentic in a world where such a thing no longer exists” (29)
● potential to mobilise democracy, equality and a better and easier life
● technological sublime – dimensions/limitations beyond our imagination
● slickness of Hollywood not central to appeal of a film (miniDV ) films
● digital docs – miniDV (Festen, The Cruise) – low budget, filmmaker as “gleaner”
● indexical relationship or connection to the world, confrontation with reality
● Manovich – “elastic reality” (35) crafting new story spaces and rethinking distribution and exhibition
● Three trends in experimental uses of DV in feature films:
● 1) hybridity of media – more about capturing than about shooting, collecting and manipulating instead of crafting meticulously; hybridity – filtered through a pt of view, mixing film and video;
● 2) is highly referential – often collages of new and appropriated materials “there is a sense of entitlement toward images, as if, like words, borrowed images constitute the basic building blocks of a shared language” (36)
● 3) pushing films outside the boundaries of the cinema - “onto the internet and into the gallery spaces where stories are repurposed as they are re-spatialised” (36)
● the shift signifies a willingness to abandon the seamlessness of traditional narrative in favour of calling attention to disparate registers of reality, memory or consciousness, here signified by different media” (38)
● desktop aesthetic” (39) – cacophony of frames and layers
● frame circumscribes images
● passionate detachment” (Mulvey)
● screen divided in 4 quadrants, single-shot film, database narratives
● third aesthetic” - sequences screened in any order (41) “the aesthetic has no discernable origin and no teleological aspirations” (42)
● avant-garde and oppositional refunctioning “the theft of and recycling of images from contemporary culture, and an almost violent depletion and destruction of the beauty and glamour of the image” (42)
● Blair – hypertext on Net as “processed narrative” (43) both narrative and image processed via tech
● Bruce Elder (2001) – images composed entirely of images from Internet
● open source filmmaking, free use and exchange of images

Chapter 2:

● design shorts – tools of ads or broadcast “Their position at the intersection of media art and commercial production is significant both for their impact on the aesthetic sensibilities of a wide range of commercial practices and as an innovative art form in their own right” (46)
● motion graphics, popularity of logos, branding stations, film titles and credits
● music videos
● designers began to endorse the sort of communication that would promote multiple rathe rthan fixed readings and provoke the reader into becoming an active participant in the construction of the message” (50)
● music videos – decorative and lacking depth and complexity? directors seen as theives f the avant garde (collage, surreal, photo jump cuts, slow motion, scratching, etc)
● recurring tropes – desire to represent the unrepresentable, (memory and cyberspace), re-purpose the tools of surveillance and control, underscoring equipment and techs, visualise sound, geo mapping, charting space
● re-articulating the notion of space
● 2 key texts:
● 1) Henri Lefebre – the production of space (space is actively produced – we make our own geo)
● Jonathan Crary – the techniques of the observer – distinction bw observer and spectator
● observer as one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities system of limitations and conventions
● 2) Ernie Gehr – serene velocity – role of the lens – creates space in our minds
● digi filmmaking:
● 1) assert the primacy of space as our era's primary focus of concern; net as space that is not a space; “As data plays an increasingly central role in our daily lives – from the technologies used by the military to banking systems – a new aesthetics has evolved, one that is about processing, networks and the use of constant re-use of images culled from an immense cultural database. This in turn creates a new role for vision and for space” (54)
● 2) contemporary media practices – modes of prod and exhibition space
● 3) desire to penetrate an map and chart spaces – utopian possibilities of constructed spaces (second life??)

• sense of freedom from digi imagery (Vivian Sobchack) as in freedom from the body
• beyond confines of the frame
• collision of texts as example of kaleidoscopic aesthetic and "rampant desire to use existing imagery as the material for subsequent projects" (57)
• "the questions underlying the impetus to appropriate have everything to do with power, and to the shifting role of the spectator, from passive viewer to active consumer, one who can transform cultural material through tactics or re-use and refunctioning" (57)
• hybrid spaces - melding real with fake - reflection of mediated world and immediate world (these are getting harder to separate)
• force us to confront contradictions of space
• the real becomes virtual eg of scenery edited to beat
• "these live-action/graphic hybrids point to cultural anxieties about who and where we are in an increasingly mediated world" (60)
• wonder and empowerment - :allowing us to consider representations of space and time that refuse the sense of dissolution caused by giant networks of control; they also offer methods fro constructing our own ensembles of space and time" (60)
• graphic-driven video - concrete poetry, typography
• "the video maps the intersection of an astonishing array of systems, pointing to the centrality of data and our existence in an information-saturated world" (61)
• animated shorts and music videos
• introduction of Flash - (1996) designed for delivery over the internet rather than on movie screens
• traversals of space (shots) - reminiscent of war imagery - targets, radar screens, etc
• WAR and ADVERTISING
• depicting space as affected by the movement of the enemy
• influence of electronica music
• allowing unprecedented mobility and utopian tendencies (always the figure of a map?), transcending bodies and boundaries,
• identity anxiety - seeing, being, becoming - shift from formal to thematic, the role of the body in a technosphere,
• observing body - (link to delauretis??)
• anxiety about identities "which is now grounded in information, and in turn exists across innumerable invisible databases" (67)

Web Cinema
• "web cinema" - films made for the Web in late 90s
• "web cinema generally entails a solitary viewer, often seated at a desk, looking at a small screen rather than a viewer in an audiencelookinf upward at a large screen; web-based films tend to be short; the stories are clear, and often exhibit an individual voice and are often personal; the stories need not necessarily be confined to a single narrative structure." (68)
• multipath movies, db movies, choose your own adventure
• cell phone films, PDA screens, quality and size issues
• pushing boundaries of cinema and interactive works

live video
• editing in real time - harder and less dev than editing tools
• "These video works constitute the most compelling site for discerning the central issues that we face as a culture, and indeed, these rather disparate are practices offer a map, often literally but more often metaphorically, of our world" (75)

Immersion and Excess
• video installation - since 2000 - in galleries and museums
• tour the world
• key elements: "its insistence on the role of the body in the reception of the artwork; and its attention to the larger apparatuses of image culture, from the staging of visual spectacle in the most pragmatic even technical sense to the role of images in an increasingly, corporatised art culture" (77)
• focus on the body is significant
• to speak of tech is to speak of the body
• "Body and machine become co-extensive, and yet the predominant trope for understanding the relationship between the two trends to presuppose a desire to be rid of the body altogether, or to view technology as a prosthesis" (77)
• the "technophenomenological subject" constant state of flux with the world around it
• cyberspace prompts even further anxiety about the body
• note of the importance of the inter-subjective nature of contemporary video installation
• rather than being inspired by film, video artists were far more inspired by video's liveness, and its capacity to record and project in real time" (78)
• video installation - 3 stages
• 1) phenomenological and performative - share minimalism's fascination with creating spaces within which viewer engages "with issues about the status of the artwork, the viewer, scale, space, institutions and so on" -- subject/object relations
• 2) sculptural - issues of space, form and shape
• 3) cinematic - intersubjective engagement "to rekindle the awe of the cinematic experience, now transported to disparate, non-theatrical settings" (78)

• beyond gallery and museum
• artists from disparate backgrounds and influences - changing the form \
• eg. fast-paced cutting and pop imagery of music videos and tvcommercials
• eg. interest in spatialized narrative
• eg. "focus on cinema as a source from which to cull imagery for the purpose of critical and aesthetic analysis" (79)
• eg. desire to take one displine and reconsider it within the parameters of another (painting)
• eg. showing images in large spaces, movement, reflection and conversation
• some fit museum while some are created to disrupt the power of the museum "by sparking insights that illuminate the contradictions implicit in creating a locus for art that is separate from the outside world" (79)
• installation calls into question location
• puts into question the private/public and the art world from the real

• spatialised narrative - stalwarts of video abrogated narrative but narrative became popular 90s onward bu tplay with storytelling, "trying at once to deploy its power while undermining its hegemony in a series of experiments that entail placing narrative within spaces, thereby unpending the viewer's traditional role as a startionary receiver" (80)
• 4 trends in video installation -
• 1) reduction and critique - lured into narrative stories
• 2) ambient narrative - inspired by cadence of electronic music - org. by repetition and variation,
• 3) episodic narrative - influence of tv, we take in more media than ever, creating narratives that are fragments, frustration and disjunction
• 4) spatialisation - multiplying the screens, often about space, fragments, abundance of meaning - opens up themes, "Further, in disrupting narrative, video installation impedes its naturalised policing function - if traditional narrative, especially as it is embodied in the programmatic and prescriptive codesof Hollywood cinema, tells us to behave, video installation can, in some instances, offer a form that allows the questioning of those rules and norms" (84-85)
• the body in space: immersive installations - questions about perception, space, body and constructions of subjectivity
•

to be continued...