FUTURE
CINEMA
The Cinematic Imaginary
after Film
Curated by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel
16 November 2002 - 30 March 2003
ZKM Karlsruhe | atria 8 & 9, Media Theater
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The conditions of cinematographic art have changed
radically over the past years. On the verge of a material revolution
new possibilities of camera and production techniques have emerged
that also allow new modes of narration and image languages. FUTURE
CINEMA is the first major international exhibition of current art
practice in the domain of video, film, computer and web based installations
that embody and anticipate new cinematic techniques and modes of
expression.
The exhibition offers the context for bringing together
for the first time a large number of highly significant cinematic
installation, multimedia and net based works that have been produced
by both young and established international artists working in this
field. At the same time the exhibition will premier numerous new
works, some specially commissioned for this exhibition, and a few
actually produced at the ZKM | Institute for Visual Media. A strong
curatorial emphasis will be on installations that diverge from the
conventional on the wall mounted and projected screen format and
which explore more immersive and technologically innovative environments
such as multi-screen, panoramic, dome projection, shared multi-user,
and on-line configurations. Another central focus will be on works
that explore creative approaches to the design of interactive non-linear
narrative content.
Besides the installation works, the ZKM will use
its Media Theater to present a number of performances and changing
installations. While the exhibition itself will focus on current
artistic practice in the field of digitally expanded cinema, a major
catalogue will be published that documents the historical trajectory
of those many and variegated cinematic experiments that prefigure,
inform and contextualize our current cinematic condition.
The history of cinema is a history of technological
experiment, of spectator-spectacle relations, and of production,
distribution and presentation mechanisms that yoke the cinema o
economic, political and ideological conditions. Above all it is
a history of creative exploration of the uniquely variegated expressive
capabilities of this remarkable medium.
Despite cinema's heritage of technological and creative diversity,
it is Hollywood that has come to define its dominant forms of production
and distribution, its technological apparatus and its narrative
forms. But the current hegemony of the Hollywood model of movie
making is about to be questioned by the more radically new potentialities
of the digital media technologies, which is why the rise of the
video, computer game and location based entertainment industries
is such a significant phenomena. These new digital contexts are
setting an appropriate platform for the further evolution of the
traditions of independent, experimental and expanded avantgarde
cinema.
Though it is still early in the process, one can
identify some of the focal features of this emer-gent domain of
the digitally expanded cinema. The technologies of virtual environments
point to a cinema that is an immersive narrative space wherein the
interactive viewer assumes the role of both cameraperson and editor.
And the technologies of computer games and the Internet point to
a cinema of distributed virtual environments that are also social
spaces, so that the persons present become protagonists in a set
of narrative dis-locations.
The digital domain is above all distinguished by
it variegated range of new interaction modalities. Needless to say
all traditional forms of expression are also interactive to the
extent that they must be interpreted and reconstructed in the process
of apprehension, but digital interactivity offers a new direct dimension
of user control and involvement in the creative proceedings. The
traditional cinema's compulsive spectacle-spectacle relationship
will be transformed as the growing spectrum of input-output technologies
and algorithmic production techniques are applied to the digitally
expanded cinema.
Cinema builds hyper realities, space time constructs
that are conjoined to the presence of the spectator in the darkened
magical space of the movie-theater. From Cinerama to 3D to Omnimax,
the cinema has yearned to construe its fictions in a space of equivalence
with the real. The objective, as in many forms of art, is to bind
the experience of being to such a place that induces a totality
of engagement in the aesthetic and conceptual construct of the work.
At the same time the digitally expanded online-cinema offers the
convergence between PC, TV, www and the experience to be dis-located
from a place and to make emotional and cognitive experience in various
locations.
The intention is not a totalitarian spectacle that
overwhelms and belittles the viewer, rather it is an inspiring manifestation
that affirms each viewer's unique position and critical relationship
to the representation. Furthermore the new networking technologies
allow these cultural experiences to extend themselves into virtual
social spaces that can constitute a further level of immersion.
The accomplished Chilean filmmaker Raul Ruiz has
criticized the compulsive attributes of the central conflict theory
in the Hollywood cinema (Poetics of Cinema, 1995), and calls
for strategies whereby the autocracy of the director and his subjugating
optical apparatus can be shifted towards the notion of a cinema
that is located in the personally discoverable periphery. How exactly
to achieve this is a very pertinent challenge, and solutions are
being offered by new methods of visualization and utilization. The
biggest challenge for the digitally extended cinema is the conception
and design of new narrative techniques that allow the interactive
and emergent features of that medium to be fulfillingly embodied.
Going beyond the triteness of branching plot options and video game
mazes, one approach is to develop modular structures of narrative
content which permit an indeterminate yet meaningful numbers of
permutations. Another approach involves the algorithmic design of
content characterizations that would permit the automatic generation
of narrative sequences that could be modulated by the user. And
perhaps the consummate venture is the notion of a digitally extended
cinema that is actually inhabited by its audience who then becomes
agents of and protagonists in its narrative development.
The Future of Cinema can be delineated from two sources.
One way is the expansion of e-xisting cinematographic methods and
codes into new areas. The other way is the convergence of cinema,
TV and net. The classical cinema can be defined as collective experience
of one fixed stable projector projecting a moving image on one screen
in one room. Therefore each change of one of these factors, for
example multiple screens, panorama screens, moving projections,
different rooms, is already an expansion of the contemporary practises
of cinema.
On the level of the material display of the image
many new techniques are also in development. Smart materials are
developed which can be new sources of light and colour. New lenses
are developed which contain information as a temporal code. In general
there is a change from refractive optics to diffractive optics.
Especially new results are to be expected from multilocal
and multiuser virtual environments, from massive parallel virtual
worlds, which can be developed on the basis of the global net. These
new communication channels of the net in combination with GPS-Systems,
satellite transmission and WAP mobile phones are allowing new forms
of interactive personal and collective cinema on a digital basis.
The exhibition will give an overview about
future possibilities in this three areas of cinema-tographic research
through selected prototypes. The show will be a laboratorium, where
scientists and artists meet, a window into the future.
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