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Accidental
Cinema - Chance Operations in Film and Digital Media: a mixed program
of experimental expanded cinema and algorithmic digital films at
7.30pm at Cinematheque, Brighton.
The 'Expanded Cinema' movement is a school of experimental filmmaking
that was active in Europe and America during the 1960s and 1970s
and that remains influential today. Expanded Cinema involved the
creation of new kinds of cinematic forms and attempted to achieve
a ' basic reorientation of the cinematic experience'. Malcolm
Le Grice, a filmmaker and theorist who is associated with the
movement, explains that
"The concept of Expanded Cinema was part of this general
move by artists to break old artistic boundaries, explore cross-media
fusions, experiment with new technologies but, most importantly,
to challenge the constraints of existing art discourses."
Four decades after the beginnings of the Expanded Cinema movement,
a new generation of artists is once again experimenting with new
technologies, and is producing artworks that seem to recapitulate
some of Expanded Cinema's main conceptual themes. The generative
film is a provocative challenge to auteur theory and even the
notion of authorship itself. The film is longer viewed as evidence
of a past occurrence, or as a carefully constructed human fabrication,
but can only be understood in the terms of an event in progress.
It is as an activity unfolding at this moment in time. An algorithm
whose execution may be unpredictable and heavily influenced by
chance. Its a live broadcast from the internal workings of a calculating
machine.
In this program, curated by Sam Woolf, we presented several films
that have creatively explored the possibilities offered by the
use of chance operations in film. Some have been created by artists
whose practice radically re-orientates the use of traditional
analogue film, and some have been created by new media artists
whose use of digital technology explores the use of novel filmic
structures.
David
Gatten What the water said, 16', 16mm, 1997-8
The result of a series of camera-less collaborations between the
filmmaker, the Atlantic Ocean, and a crab trap. For three days
in January and three days in October of 1997, and again, for a
day, in August of 1998, lengths of unexposed, undeveloped film
were soaked in a crab cage on a South Carolina beach. Both the
sound and image are the result of the ensuing oceanic inscriptions
written directly into the emulsion of the film as it was buffeted
by the salt water, sand, rocks and shells.
"Bypassing half of the usual mechanical needs of filmmaking,
Gatten instead uses nature as his recording device. The film is,
indeed, about process, but also about nature as both subject and
author ... the process yields a stunning range of results: at
times quiet and lyrical, at others the scratching is so dense
that it leaves a nearly white screen and a loud roar, evoking
the waves crashing on shore. ... The overall feel is amazingly
organic and seems to defy the random action of the ocean's weathering
- it seems structured, following a predetermined pattern: one
almost senses an underwater intelligence in its formation."
- Patrick Friel, Chicago Filmmakers
Guy
Sherwin Newsprint, 5', black & white sound 16mm,
1972
A newspaper glued onto clear film is projected as audio-visual
typography. A film made without a camera.
"I glued a sunday newspaper onto clear 16mm film then punched
out the clogged-up sprocket holes to enable the film to run through
the projector. Later I shone a strong light through this 'newspaper-film'
to copy it onto another strip of film. This shows up the letters
and words clearly, which can also be heard as they pass over the
sound-head in the projector."
Nick Collins Greenwich Park, 5', 18 fps, silent, c.
1985
Greenwich Park was made in two halves, in winter and summer. Each
half 'documents' a similar walk across the park. At each step,
the hand-held camera was swung through a series of seven or eight
arcs in the same plane, with a frame being taken slightly further
along each arc each time the action was repeated. A single frame
was also taken with each step, with the camera looking forward,
giving a sense of forward motion. The overall feel of the film
is visceral, and the sense given by the film that of a place in
flux.
Nicky
Hamlyn Rhythm1 & Rhythm 2, 8', 1974
Both films were made on unsplit Standard 8, which gives four frames
in the space of one 16mm frame. Rhythm 2 (1974, four minutes,
silent) used number sequences made by throwing dice to determine
the number of frames for each shot. Each of the four frames has
a possible chance/random possible permutation of no exposure,
single exposure, another single exposure, or a double exposure.
The four images are circle, square, triangle, cross.
Rhythm 1 (1974, four minutes, sound) uses a similar system to
film four possible permutations of image: still camera still subject,
still camera moving subject, moving camera still subject, moving
camera moving subject. A propellor spins in front of the lens
to randomly give the four possible combinations of image as in
Rhythm 2.
Alex Evans
Tom
Thumb, Computer Generated Film, 3', 2002
The film is generative in the sense that each time it is rendered
by the computer, many of the details are changed. generative work
with computers throws up interesting questions about free will,
and where the work of the artist ends and the job of randomisation
begins.
In this first attempt at a generative work, I only wanted to randomise
the details - so that each rendering feels like the same (scripted)
film, but is more like a "performance" by computer,
rather than a traditional movie. Each time a human being performs
a theatrical piece (for example), the script stays the same, but
the minutiae change each night.
The music, for example, is partly random: it is resequenced each
time the film is rendered; in fact the whole soundtrack, including
the design of all the sounds, EQ and FX, was "written"
entirely in C code. the melodies are random, based on repeating
patterns of intervals chosen by me, which "decay" gradually
during the course of the film, gradually becoming more atonal.
The shape of the environment also changes: the pattern of triangles
on the ground, as well as the whole tree, and the vines, are generated
using fractal and randomly seeded genetic algorithms. the vines
are programmed with "AI" to grow up the tree, balancing
their desire for light with the need to be close to the tree trunk.
Finally, the fragments of words and human faces overlaid onto
the film are changed; they are taken from 3 hours of footage of
two actresses (Florence Evans and Alison Bauld) who were recorded
speaking the words of the classic English fairytale "Tom
Thumb". The words are rearranged using a statistical technique
known as "markov chains", which results in gibberish
containing fragments of the original text, which still sounds
vaguely English but makes little sense. Tom thumb was designed,
edited and rendered entirely using custom software written in
C++.
Lev
Manovich Mission
to Earth, 23'
Inga is an alien who comes to Earth from Alpha-1, a planet which
is about twenty years behind Earth... Mission to Earth is an allegory
about Cold War and East and West which uses footage of a secret
radio telescope built in Latvia by the Soviets in 1971. The film
is also about contemporary immigration experience in general which
is becoming the norm for majority of the inhabitants of many mega-cities.
While hybrid identity is often celebrated as progressive, the
film reminds us about the psychological trauma it entails.
'Mission to Earth' was created using Lev Manovich's Soft
Cinema system, an algorithmic, database driven approach
to filmmaking.
Soft Cinema explorers 4 ideas:
1. "Algorithmic Cinema."
Using systems of rules, software controls both the layout of the
screen (number and positions of frames) and the sequences of media
elements which appear in these frames.
2. "Database Cinema." The media elements are selected
from a large database to construct a potentially unlimited number
of different narrative films.
3. "Macro-cinema." Soft Cinema imagines how moving images
may look when the Net will mature, and when unlimited bandwidth
and very high resolution displays would become the norm.
4. "Multimedia cinema." In Soft Cinema video is used
as only one type of representation among others: 2D animation,
motion graphics, 3D scenes, diagrams, etc
In the process of working on this film, Soft Cinema software
was significantly expanded. The new version allows the authors
to "sculpt" cinematic experience over time by specifying
the type of layout, the number of windows and their content at
every point in time - or leave any of these choices to the software.
Accordingly, in some places in Mission to Earth, particular visuals
are "hard-wired" to the narrative, while in other places
the software can choose from a larger number of alternative variations.
I have also scripted the type of layout for every section (the
position if a big window and a number of small windows).
Sam
Woolf One and Three Thousand Electric Chairs / Rainbow,
Computer Generated video 3:32/4.12
Digital shorts made with my generative film software, the
GooglePoweredGoggleBox. This software takes texts
entered by the user and uses them to retrieve sounds and
images from Internet search engines. These sound and image
files are then assembled into a film by the software that
uses probabilistic rules to determine the sequences and
transitions between events. The text used to create "one
and three thousand electric chairs" was simply the
word 'chair' repeated multiple times. For rainbow, it was
"red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet".
Paul
Brown Where's
the red wedge?, computer generated video
Paul Brown has been working in the field of artificial life and
artificial intelligence for over 30 years. As an art student in
Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was fascinated by
theories of form and procedural art practices. Determined to explore
alternatives to the romantic ideal of art as an intuitive expression
of an individual's inner emotional life, he was drawn to the study
of computing and the logical languages used in programming. "Where's
the red wedge?" is one of a series of computer-generated
video works based on arrays of patterned tiles.
Brown writes: "The tiles I use have patterns on them which,
in the final piece, dominate the visual appearance of the work.
Many viewers are, in fact, surprised to discover the underlying
tile matrix and the relative simplicity of the elements that make
up often complex images. The idea of complexity emerging from
simplicity -or- to use the older homily "the whole is greater
than the sum of the parts" has been a guiding concept behind
my work for longer than I can remember. I find myself equally
attracted to holism and reductionism and constantly oscillate
between these two extremes"
Andy
Webster Through
Whites, 5', mini-DV, 2004
Using the original footage from his previous generative film 'ROYGBIV',
five minutes of red, five minutes of green, and five of blue are
overlaid on top of each other to create a white, minimal shimmering
filmwork. This obviously works perfectly if the colour balance
between the RGB elements is correct. However this is rarely the
case as the colour mixings and interference detracts from any
pre-imagined sense of purity.
Seminconductor
Inaudible
Cities: Part One, 10', video, 2000
The first in a series of short films where cities are made of and
controlled by sound. In this episode, every detail of an urban landscape
is built by the sonic pressures of an oncoming electrical storm.
The very fabric of this isolated world is defined by the noises
and frequencies that surround a space in another aural dimension.
Semiconductor wrote a program which listens to the various parts
of the soundtrack and constructs the animated environments.
Ian
Helliwell Filmosounds, Catylist, Megatherm Leader,
Super-8 & electronics
Living in Brighton since 1985, Ian has produced and developed
music, Super 8 films, installations, electronic instruments, film
and live music programmes and light-show projections for concerts
and club nights. Self taught, operating alone and without funding,
he has worked with second-hand, obsolete equipment to produce
over 40 short films since the early 1990s. Many of these have
been screened at international festivals in Europe, and are distributed
by Lux, London and Light Cone, Paris. He is currently running
courses in Super 8 filmmaking and analogue electronic music at
the Phoenix Arts Association.
Filmosounds (2001-04) An experimental film and video combination,
assembled from found 16mm footage cut into short sequences and
spliced together to form an audio collage. The film soundtrack
was then fed into a specially modified TV test pattern generator,
to give a synchronised visual representation, in the form of blue
horizontal bands of varying density. (4:45)
Catalyst (1997) A short test film shot with Super 8 off a specially
modified television, showing abstract Lissajous patterns generated
by sounds from homemade tone generators. The footage was immersed
in bleach and the piece was completed with a soundtrack of electronic
music. (1:25)
Megatherm Leader (1999-2002) A leader film assembled especially
for projecting onto the Megatherm, Helliwell`s light sensitive
electronic instrument made out of discarded hospital apparatus
bought at a car boot sale. The sections of Super 8 footage, of
varying colour and brightness, trigger the Megatherm`s light sensors
which control volume and a switching sequence to alter the electronic
sound output in exact synchronisation with the film (4').
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