New Media://Visible Evidence show opens
The New Media://Visible Evidence exhibition showcases several examples of mainly Los Angeles-based documentary practice that employ disparate new media forms. The exhibition will include examples from the Web-based portraits of LA and its inhabitants produced by Juan Devis for the KCET series titled Web Stories; media artist Natalie Bookchin’s Mass Ornament, composed entirely of clips from YouTube videos; and several interactive DVD-ROM documentaries created by USC’s Labyrinth Project under the leadership of Marsha Kinder. The show also includes Erik Loyer and Sharon Daniel’s interactive documentary Blood Sugar; The Iraqi Doctors Project: Research and Remix, which envisions remix as a scholarly practice and was produced by Virginia Kuhn, DJ Johnson and students in IML 340; Mobile Voices, a project created by and for day laborers using the MMS feature on cell phones; as well as several examples of database documentaries made using the Korsakow System, including Matt Soar’s Almost Architecture and Florian Thalhofer’s Forgotten Flags.
In addition to showcasing the projects in the School of Cinematic Arts Gallery, the exhibition will also include three lunch-time presentations during the conference, with Bookchin appearing on Friday to talk about Mass Ornament, Marsha Kinder and Scott Mahoy on Saturday to talk about the Labyrinth Project, and Katie Mills on Sunday to talk about Web Stories. We invite you to experience some of the innovative work produced in Los Angeles – the gallery showcasing the projects is located on the first floor of the Lucas Building in the School of Cinematic Arts; the lunch-time talks will take place between 1:15 and 1:45 in the gallery.
The exhibition was curated by Holly Willis and is presented by USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy in conjunction with the Visible Evidence conference.
Past Indiscretions: Digital Archives and Recombinant History
This chapter examines the impact of digital technologies on the writing of history, arguing that the narrative logics of the database and search engine have resulted in two divergent movements – one that seeks to articulate a “total” history that is encyclopedic in scope and rooted in relatively stable conceptions of historical epistemology; another that exploits digital technology’s potential for randomization and recombination in order to accommodate increasingly volatile visions of the past. At the opposing ends of this spectrum are the Shoah Foundation’s Survivors Project, a randomly accessible archive of over 100,000 hours of video testimonies by Holocaust survivors, and the Recombinant History Project’s Terminal Time, an artificial intelligence apparatus that constructs infinitely variable historical documentaries based on audience biases and beliefs. Although these two projects represent competing conceptions of historiography, both are enabled by the proliferation of digital information systems.
This book chapter is forthcoming in Interactive Frictions, edited by Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson (University of California Press).
Download “Past Indiscretions: Digital Archives and Recombinant History”
Review of Soft Cinema
A review of the recombinant narrative engine, Soft Cinema, by Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky
Abstract:
Much has been written about the transformative impact of digital technology on contemporary cinema. But while digital imaging – from the large-scale visual effects spectacles of the studio blockbuster to low-end vector-based animation – may be comfortably positioned on a continuum with other “revolutionary” imaging technologies of the previous century (Technicolor, 3D, high definition video, etc.), the Soft Cinema media-processing engine created by media theorist Lev Manovich and designer Andreas Kratky proposes a somewhat more radical intervention into the evolution of cinema as a storytelling apparatus. Indeed, as Manovich notes in his introduction to the recently released DVD Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database, conventional cinema is anachronistically rooted in the logic of the industrial revolution and its assembly-line mentality for delivering sequential narratives. By contrast, Soft Cinema emerges more or less organically from the logic of the computer database and the revised patterns of production/consumption that characterize the digital age.
Published in The Moving Image 2006
Media Mapmaker: An Interview with Rick Prelinger
An interview with film archivist Rick Prelinger, focusing on his recent work as an artist and activist at the forefront of the copyright wars.
Abstract:
For over two decades, his name has been synonymous with “Ephemeral Films,” but ever since Rick Prelinger turned over his collection of 50,000 advertising, educational and industrial films to the Library of Congress to be (ironically) preserved as part of our national heritage, he has continued his work as an artist, activist, litigant and librarian at the forefront of the copyright wars. In addition to serving as president of the Internet Archive and co-plaintiff (along with Brewster Kahle) in a pro-public domain lawsuit against the US government, Prelinger completed the all-public domain feature film Panorama Ephemera, which has received acclaim at festivals around the world. Most recently, he and his partner Megan Shaw Prelinger have opened an “appropriation-friendly” library in San Francisco that houses some 40,000 volumes. In all of these efforts, Prelinger remains committed to the value of cultural preservation, contemplation and recombination and a thoughtful engagement with the artifacts of the past.
Published in Res Magazine Sep/Oct 2005
Open Source: Cinema in the Public Domain
An article examining the historical, political and technological implications of the open source movement for cinematic production.
Abstract:
February 24, 2004. Also known as Grey Tuesday. Over 100,000 copies of DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album are downloaded from hundreds of sites across the Internet. An estimated million copies of this celebrated remix of the Beatles’ White Album with Jay-Z’s Black Album are traded over peer-to-peer networks within 24 hours. A symbolic gesture perhaps, but the electronic civil disobedience of Grey Tuesday eloquently speaks to both consumer frustrations with increasingly restrictive copyright laws and the growing power of peer networks to subvert the enforcement of those laws. Clearly the battle lines have been drawn for the culture wars of the 21st century. At stake is the continued existence of a meaningful sphere of free culture called the public domain. The battle promises to be epic, bringing cherished American ideals of originality, creativity and the ability to profit from one’s labor into seeming conflict with equally powerful desires for freedom of speech and expression. And what happens when the movie industry finally has its own Grey Tuesday? In spite of its demonstrated ineffectiveness, the MPAA appears determined to follow the music industry’s shock-and-awe strategy of indiscriminate prosecutions. All of which means more lawsuits, more bitterness, and ultimately, more effective tactics of resistance.
Published in Res Magazine Jan/Feb 2005
Select and Combine: The Rise of Database Narratives
An article examining the movement toward new storytelling sensibilities in interactive artwork at the intersection of cinema, video games, and networked computing
Abstract:
With the flick of a mouse, we glide effortlessly down the gloomy corridors of Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel, floating past cavernous ballrooms and windows overlooking elegant gardens and swimming pools. Around each corner and behind each door, ghostly figures replay events from a past that is at once real and imagined. A Kennedy died here, along with countless villains and plots of Hollywood noir. The number of possible paths through this story space seems limitless. Even familiar rooms tell different stories with each visit and earthquakes periodically rumble through the dilapidated building, triggering a barrage of images and hurling us into new spaces and times. This is the world of Pat O’Neill’s Tracing the Decay of Fiction, a DVD-ROM made in collaboration with the Labyrinth Project at USC’s Annenberg Center for Communication, which for the past five years has been a key player in the loose global network of digital artists and designers charting new territories in the field of interactive database narrative.
Published in Res Magazine Jan/Feb 2004
Download “Select and Combine: The Rise of Database Narratives”
Dissolving Boundaries: Pat O’Neill Experiments in Hollywood
A profile of industry iconoclast and experimental film legend Pat O’Neill
Abstract:
A new film by Pat O’Neill is to the experimental film world what a planetary alignment is to astrophysicists, a rare and momentous event, promising a glimpse into the workings of laws of light and movement – perhaps even a new way of seeing the world. For O’Neill to complete two projects at once – a 35mm film The Decay of Fiction and a DVD ROM Tracing the Decay of Fiction – is more like a supernova colliding with a black hole: the convergence of two extraordinary phenomena in a single moment – a nearly inconceivable occurrence from a man who thinks nothing of waiting an entire year to photograph a ray of sunlight shining through a window at a particular angle.
Published in Release Print September 2002
Download “Dissolving Boundaries: Pat O’Neill Experiments in Hollywood”
Dreamwaves
Dreamwaves is an exhibition space for dream-based artwork produced for the Labyrinth Research Initiative on Interactive Narrative as part of its investigation in the role of databases as the model for understanding narrative. The Dreamwaves website exists in dialogue with the scholarly journal Dreamworks, which was edited by Marsha Kinder and Kenneth Atchity in the 1980s and included work by leading writers and artists involved in understanding the role of dreams in creativity. Launched in 2003, Dreamwaves was the first web-based project to be undertaken by Labyrinth, which produced nine CD and DVD ROMs before shifting development to the web. The site was directed by Marsha Kinder and designed and programmed by Steve Anderson.
Steve Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Director of the Ph.D. program in Media Arts & Practice in the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He co-Edits the interdisciplinary online journal Vectors and is the creator of the fair use advocacy site Critical Commons. As a scholar-practitioner working at the intersection of media, culture and technology, his research interests include historiography, the theory and history of emerging technologies, documentary and experimental film and video, and interactive media design.