'String' Thread on [iDC] List

Relevant and interesting thread on the [IiDC] mailing list (Institute for Distributed Creativity) that explores narrative in distributed environments/with situated technologies, cybernetics, systems... (hard to encapsulate -- this thread covers a lot of territory, no pun intended).

[iDC] how long is a piece of string?

Katharine Willis
https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2007-October/002878.html

Mark Shepherd
https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2007-October/002883.html

Katharine Willis
https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2007-October/002891.html

A narrative is essentially a piece of information undergoing change. A story unfolds and ideally the process of unfolding is interactive - the storyteller reacts to an audience or weaves in pieces of information that tap into people's memories or hopes. So, as you say, it responds to the condition of in-betweenness (for more on this topic and how it applies to public spaces see karen martin and colleague's workshop on inbetweeness http://www.inbetweeness.org/) .

Mark Shepherd
https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2007-October/002896.html

[Pask's] Conversation Theory may be worth revisiting for a way of thinking through how the act of story-telling–as something that unfolds over time–produces a "shared" space "between" actors resulting in "outcomes" to which neither can lay claim to exclusive authorship.

Peter Timusk
https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2007-October/002897.html

Brian Holmes
https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2007-October/002892.html

Brian Holmes again
https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2007-October/002898.html

CNN Video as nonlinear storytelling

http://www.cnn.com/video/

Multiple channels of not-quite-related 'narrative fragments.'

When viewed from an article or channel page, different strategies for navigating through the other 'narrative fragments' include a list of "most popular," related stories, plus options to branch off to other stories, other topics, other media types.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/10/26/fire.wildfire.ca/index.html#cnnSTCVideo

(also NYTimes, YouTube, etc.... of course)

Our "Interactive" Existence

Nick Bostrom

ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?
http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html


http://www.nickbostrom.com/

David Michalek’s “Slow Dancing" time based instalation (natacha)

Outdoor Art Installations - Summer 2007

Throughout the month of July, Lincoln Center Festival 2007 presented David Michalek’s “Slow Dancing,” hyper-slow motion video portraits of dancers and choreographers from around the world that will be projected, larger than life, on screens suspended from the New York State Theater promenade.

Using a high-speed, high-definition camera recording at 3,000 frames per second, Michalek captures each dancer’s gestures and movement with a precision and definition that has never been seen before.

Michalek's subjects are some the today’s foremost modern and classical dancers and choreographers as well as noted interpreters of traditional dance from Southeast Asia, the Pacific Rim and Africa. Featured artists will include: Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones, Elizabeth Streb, William Forsythe, Shen Wei, Wendy Whelan, Eiko and Koma, Allegra Kent, Judith Jamison and Wu Hsing-Kuo. The combination of cutting-edge imaging technology and breadth of high caliber dance artistry creates a mesmerizing experience.

http://www.davidmichalek.net

non-linear storyteling in Himalayan art -(natacha)

http://www.exploreart.org/

non linear feature movie by NY based artist (natacha)

http://www.edinvelez.com/content.php?sec=video&sub=certain_foolish



http://www.edinvelez.com/

ZKM & Future Cinema + viewing options

As mentioned in class, ZKM (Zentrum Kunste Mediale/Center for Media Art) in Karlsruhe, Germany is a great champion of contemporary media art and also maintains a historical collection. Much of the work referred to or viewed in class can be seen in the catalog for the exhibition Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, Curated by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, 2002-2003.

Both are excellent resources. (Uh-oh, looks like the catalog may no longer be available).

Another important media art center to be aware of is Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. Also V2, the Institute for Unstable Media in Rotterdam, Netherlands. etc.

The viewing room at EAI (Electronic Arts Intermix)

The Media Center at Donnell Library (NYC public library branch across the street from MoMA)

Video Data Bank (VDB)

Please add to the list! >>>

Nonlinear Movies You Can Try At Home

It's nice to see filmmakers go nonlinear!
And it's fun to try their movies.

Here is Late Fragment
http://www.latefragment.com/

which the filmmakers say is based on Switching
http://www.switching.dk/en/

... branch, branch, branch, y'know?

Isaac Julien's 'WESTERN UNION: Small Boats'

Go see it.
Metro Pictures, 519 W. 24th St.
Tues – Sat, 10am – 6pm, T: 212 206 7100, www.metropicturesgallery.com

From the press release:

Isaac Julien’s film installation “WESTERN UNION: Small Boats,” a meditation on migration and the hope for a better life, opens at Metro Pictures on October 25th, 6 –8pm.

To escape deplorable economic and human rights conditions, thousands of African and Asian “clandestines” depart each year from North Africa on the 100-mile journey across the Mediterranean Sea to the southern coast of Sicily. Setting off in larger boats they are transferred mid-sea to highly overcrowded smaller fishing boats where they are left to drift for days on end until they are sighted by the coastguard or sink. Local fishermen often spot the boats first and have been complicit in what is frequently described as the “Sicilian Holocaust.”

Known for his extravagantly beautiful filmmaking, Julien depicts the picturesque seaside village of Agrigento and the grandeur of Palazzo Gangi (famed location from Visconti’s masterpiece “The Leopard”) in stunning juxtaposition to the deadly voyage. Employing a suggestive, non-representational cinematic style, “Western Union” subverts strict narrative, creating a collage of sound and image. Throughout the film, choreographer Russell Maliphant has created a series of vignettes echoing and rearticulating these dramatic voyages.

“WESTERN UNION: Small Boats” is the final installment of Julien’s trilogy about journeying across continents and cultures that includes “True North” (2004) and “Fantome Afrique” (2005).

Recent solo exhibitions include the Pompidou Centre in Paris (2005), MoCA Miami (2005) and the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover (2006). Julien is represented in the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim and Hirshhorn collections.

Julien’s theatrical collaboration with Maliphant, “Cast No Shadow,” will be presented at BAM, November 6 and 8- 10. The work is a commission by Performa, the international biennial of performance art.

PERFORMA07 (October 27-November 20, 2007) is the second biennial of new visual art performance presented by PERFORMA, a non-profit multidisciplinary arts organization dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty-first century. www.performa-arts.org

Kara Walker's 'My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love'

http://www.whitney.org/www/exhibition/kara_walker/index.html
(currently at the Whitney)

I've always been a fan of Kara Walker. Her work is an incredibly distilled and lyrical expression of the complex and charged issues (...memories, ghosts, demons, histories, violence, residual racism...) connected with African American identity in the US. Such courage! Such imagination! Such draftsmanship! ...Narrative, nonlinear and spatial.

Articles on Kara Walker and this exhibition

The New Yorker: Profile by Hilton Als in the Oct. 8 issue
slideshow on newyorker.com:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/10/08/slideshow_071008_walker

NYTimes: Black and White, But Never Simple, Holland Cotter

Rene Green's 'Code: Survey'

This looks like a great example of database documentary.

http://www.dot.ca.gov/dist07/code_survey/intro

Symphony of California?

Aside: not sure why she chose to use quicktime video over flash/flv for the web-based version of the piece.

From Rhizome:

October 17, 2007

Transmitting California

One of the most politically engaged works currently on view at the Istanbul Biennial is Rene Green's 2004-06 'Code: Survey,' commissioned by the California Department of Transportation. The starting point of the project is the fact that 'California is a specific and an imaginary location that can be perceived as a giant transmitter. It consists of dream factories, many modes of transport and a constant transmission of electronic signals.' However, as Green asks, 'amidst this production and diffusion, what else occurs?' In order to address this problem, Green has developed a powerful examination of today's global flux of people and goods by bringing together diverse documentary sources on geography in general, and contemporary individual and collective uses of the territory in particular. In Los Angeles, at the California Department of Transportation District 7 Headquarters Building, Green has installed 168 one-foot-square glass panels containing photographic, graphic, a! nd typographic materials related to this theme. In Istanbul, prominence is given to the online installment of the piece, with a set of computers allowing the viewer to explore a variety of visual and textual information--divided into images, codes, and keywords--that further consider this issue. As someone once put it, 'what emerges from this engagement with data, space, and time allows one to... question utopian claims of freedom associated with mobility.' Green thus continues her investigation into the gaps and shifts existing between the public and the private spheres and how these construct the prevailing visions of the world.

- Miguel Amado

Man With the Movie Camera

2008: Man With a Movie Camera is a participatory video shot by people around the world who are invited to record video according to the original script of Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera and submit it to a website which will archive, sequence and deliver the submissions to The Big Screen (www.biggerpictureuk.net) in 2007-08. When the work streams your contribution becomes part of a worldwide montage, in Vertov’s terms the “decoding of life as it is”.

http://mw.smokinggun.com/

notes on "Expanded Cinema ..." (Weibel)

Transformation of cinema ...

1960s --
Expanded Cinema

+ material experiments: extend cinema through the means of cinema itself
- change the material character of film -- scratch, paint, process, paint the film itself
- took apart and reassemble film equipment (i.e. cameraless films ...)

greg landow http://www.ubu.com/film/landow.html



+ multiple screen experiments: radical experiments with the screen itself
- exploded and multiplied, divided into multiple images
- liberated from the "frame", the screen
- multiple and mobile, flat or curved, replaced by other materials (water, wood ...)

HPSCHD 1969 (John Cage and Lejaren Hiller)
5 hour InterMedia Event, 8000 slides, 100 films projected onto 48 windows at the University of Illinois




+ narrative experiments: multiple projections, spatialized, editing, etc...
- multiple narrative perspectives -- new approach to narration
- a reflection of the social context of the 1960s, social unrest, etc.
- these experiments with multiple screens are the beginnings of immersive environments

(7th page of the article)
"the subjective response to the world was not pressed into a constructed, falsely objective style of narration but was instead formally presented in the same diffuse and fragmentary way in which it was experienced" ...

gregory markopoulos http://www.ubu.com/film/markopoulos.html

eames: glimpses of the usa
Shown over a period of weeks to nearly three million Soviet citizens in a Buckminister Fuller-designed geodesic dome on seven screens. Each screen was 20 feet high and 32 feet wide with 2200 images (mostly slides).



+ shift time and space: extend, slow, delay, abbreviate time

+ experiment with social and sexual issues: intensely intimate, excessive individualism, uncensored

+ sound experiments: use sound to determine structure of imagery, rather than as background to the image


1970s -- video art emerged

1980s -- shut down in development of Expanded Cinema and video art due to market

1990s -- re-emergence of Expanded Cinema from the 1960s
- more focused, methodical strategies than the 1960s
- more closely oriented to social issues than the 1960s
- experiments in new approaches to narration

Sam Taylor-Wood "Third Party" 1999
The 10-minute film sequence, shot with 7 cameras simultaneously, is accompanied by an elaborate sound installation and is about the tensions and erotic entanglements arising between persons in a closed environment, with professional actors and the British rock star Marianne Faithful. The simultaneous presentation in the installation space asks the visitor to individually synthesize the scenario.




THEN:
"Narration becomes a machine, a plot-machine, an engine".

NOW:
*** Multiple monitors and screens, multiple projections and perspectives, multi-perspective narrations and plots
- possibilities for new narrative techniques on multiple large-screen projections can now be expanded extensively

Mike Nelson. CreativeTime

for those of you that missed the fieldtrip, here are some pics of the Mike Nelson show... very cool set design, spooky ...
http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/nelson/

Manovich "Database Logic"

The Database is New Media's answer to narrative. It is a structure of information that can be more or less organized, and functions as a means of modeling the disparate collections of unstructured data in the post-modern world. The Database can can be seen as the new dominant structural form of the computer age, as powerful as linear perspective was to the Rennaisance, or scientific reasoning to the Enlightenment. Structured as a database, multimedia work needs no overt narrative. We can think of a museum as a database, and a multimedia CD-ROM is, essentially, a virtual museum. The web assumes a database structure, but is unique in that its content is not fixed; the information is continually augmented. Early artists working in digital media did not understand the potential for databases; they filled CDs with content, but failed to meaningfully organize it.
Computer games may contain databases, but are primarily algorythems. They present an ideal pattern of behavior for the user to discern and perform. Complex computer systems, we can thus see, consist of these two elements. The database is an arrangement of information and an algorythem creates the means of accessing that information. In our modern database era, we are seeing virtually all information being digitized and catalogued. One of our cultural algorythems is now: reality to media to data to database. With the breathless proliferation of databases, we are witnessing the production of catalogues outpace the production of the catalogued. The internet is the perfect example of this: there are more indexes of information than info itself, creating a vast network of differently categorized, but shared content.
A database, in its purest form, is a group of items with no order. A narrative is a series of events presented as causes and effects. Traditionally, New Media works are databases with a variety of interfaces. Even what is often refered to as nonlinear, or hyper narrative is only a fixed database with a variety of interfaces. Such works only become truly narratives if the system of creating trajectories through the data (the interface algorythem) is designed to create meaning. Film techniques such as montage can create either unreality (that which cannot be) or hyper-reality (an expression of reality that is closer to the lived experience than unlayered expression). This logic can be applied to New Media as well.
Symbolic systems can be divided into two groups: sytagmatic and paradigmatic, or the signs that are supported in space (or manifest) and how those signs are grouped to create meaning (or interpreted). In traditional story telling, the narrative is syntagmatic and explicit and the paradigm from which it arises is implicit. In database structures, the paradigm is manifest, while the narrative is implied. The user becomes the creator, and her choices of which screen to view create meaning just as the author chooses words to form sentences. New Media need not follow such a linear syntactic pattern, but such thinking is a convention established by cinema. Form is not derived from media type, however, books function equally well as databases or as narratives. Database and narrative are both human needs, and the two can be well integrated.
This reconciliation between database and narrative has already been accomplished. Despite ending up as a narrative, cinema is produced as a database. Only after compiling the footage is the data arranged into a storyline. Cinema can also be created as a random database of events. A third style, however, is exemplified by Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera. Vertov combines events from the creation, consumption, and plot of a fictional move and uses virtually every cinematographic technique to create a cohesive, but non linear database narrative. Watching the film, the viewer develops an algorythem to discern the meaning. As New Media aritsits, we must remember this lesson. To advance our art, the endless progression of technologies must be harnessed to method for the creation of meaningful trajectories.

Todd Haynes' "...Not a Bob Dylan Movie"

Speaking of hybrid and shifting identities, inner logic, quoting, self-conscious representation, nebulous time, films within a film, metaphor, metanarrative, etc.—the new film by Todd Haynes loosely based on Bob Dylan, "I'm Not There," sounds like a fluid montage that could be good inspiration for making nonlinear film. The character of Bob Dylan is played by six different actors, including Cate Blanchett. The process of making the film is compared to painting while stoned. An article in the NYT:

This is Not a Bob Dylan Movie, Robert Sullivan, NYT Oct. 7

Haynes generally makes films one of two ways: either with a story line or as a collage of ideas; the latter he once compared to painting while high. “I used to love getting stoned, playing music, getting lost in that canvas and not knowing what it was going to be,” he has said. The Dylan movie, he determined, would be that kind of film. He clipped photos, painted paintings, made cards filled with quotes from Dylan, from the Old Testament, the New Testament. “I will open my mouth in parables,” Haynes copied down from the Gospel of Matthew. “I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.” He copied down pages and pages of quotes from social commentaries, from folk songs, from Dylan songs. In one of his notebooks, under the heading “governing concepts/themes,” he wrote: “America obsessed with authenticity/authenticity the perfect costume/America the land of masks, costumes, self-transformation, creativity is artificial, America’s about false authenticity and creativity.” For Robbie, Heath Ledger’s Dylan, whose on-screen marriage (to Charlotte Gainsbourg) fails, he wrote, “A relationship doomed to a long stubborn protraction (not unlike Vietnam, which it parallels).” The notes themselves can seem like a great cache of insider art, printed out with nice fonts, with colors and graphics, reeking of time spent cramming. “I feel like anytime I’ll work on a film, it’s like a giant dissertation, a gigantic undertaking, and this is probably the biggest one,” Haynes told me. “Probably the Ph.D.”

ArtistShare

On Saturday I mentioned ArtistShare, the new web based model for funding and sponsorship/patronage of artists, and now the page for the film I have been editing is up, so here's the link: http://www.blastshare.com

Melissa

Game Design Workshop w/ Greg Trefry (recommended)

Recommended. I plan to go and it would be great to see as many of you from the class as possible, as this kind of thinking/design is really important to a contemporary understanding of nonlinear storytelling. Gamelab is an innovative and vital game design company that occupies a space in the game industry similar to an independent film studio.

Here's the email/info. Note RSVP info at bottom.

=

Using Game Design to Craft Experience
Featuring Greg Trefry, Game Designer, Gamelab
Sponsored by CISDD and the CUNY School of Professional Studies

The gaming space is growing by leaps and bounds. This workshop will provide attendees with an introduction to the fundamentals of game design and key gaming concepts through rules and dynamic systems. It will particularly examine how games can be used to craft the experience of players and allow attendees to work through some game design exercises to put the concepts into practice.

Regardless of your technical or programming skills, if you are interested in playing games and game development, or in user interaction, this workshop is for you.

Wednesday November 7
6:30 - 8:30 P.M.
CUNY Graduate Center
Room C201

Greg Trefry is a game designer at Gamelab, a New York City-based gaming company, and the director of the Come Out & Play Festival
www.comeoutandplay.org), a major street games festival. He has several years of professional experience as a video game designer and has done numerous street games as personal projects. He has taught a Digital Gaming History and Theory course at New York University, led workshops on game design and been a frequent speaker and writer on games and interactive design.


Please RSVP with your name, school and affiliation (student, faculty, alumni) to rsvp@cisdd.org.

scrapped, added

Some interest was expressed in knowing which readings I trimmed from the reading list since I taught Nonlinear Storytelling last year.

A few of these eliminated texts were replaced by others, i.e. the Manovich database reading replaced the another of his "Spatial Computerization and Film Language," and the Aarseth essay "Nonlinearity and Literary Theory" replaced "Hypertext Aesthetics, No Sense of an Ending." “Transmedia Storytelling 101,” and “Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling,” by Henry Jenkins replaced some essays from his blog.

These readings were added: “The New Disorder: Adventures in Film Narrative,” David Denby, Selections from “Six Selections by the Oulipo,” “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate,” Ted Nelson, from Theater of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal and “The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat,” Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer.

Here's the list of what was omitted:

“Intertextuality: An Interview with Julia Kristeva”

“A Holiday From History,” Slavoj Zizek, Dial History

“The Media in the Garden” and “Postmodernism Is (What Postmodernism Is)” (Parts II and III of “Chapter 1: Three Discourses on the Age of Television”), The Anxiety of Obscolescence: The Novel in the Age of Television, Kathleen Fitzpatrick

“No Sense of an Ending: Hypertext Aesthetics,” Cybertext, Espen Aarseth

"Writing, Identity, and Copyright in the Net Age," Kathy Acker

“Spatial Computerization and Film Language,” Lev Manovich, from New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative

From Broken Screen: Conversations with Alejandro Jodorowski, Stan Douglas, Claire Denis, Bruce Connor, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Pierre Huyghe, Mike Figgis, Matthew Barney

“Battle of the Images,” Raymond Bellour, Future Cinema

“Interactive Storytelling: The Renaissance of Narration,” Eku Wand, New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative

About: “Jennifer and Kevin McCoy: Horror Chase,” Timothy Druckrey, Future Cinema

About: “Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Consolation Service,” “Pierre Huyghe: The Third Memory,” Pierre Huyghe, “Isaac Julien: The Long Road to Mazatlan”, Future Cinema

“The Future of the Cinematic City,” Norman Klein, Future Cinema
“Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986,” Future Cinema

“The Cybermohalla Diaries” from Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life

“Interactive or Inhabited TV, Broadcasting for the 21st Century,” Alex Butterworth, John Wyre, New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative

“Grand Theft Education, Literacy in the Age of Video Games,” Jane Avrich, Steven Johnson, Raph Koster, Thomas de Sengotita, Bill Wasic, Harpers Magazine, September 2006

“Ruling the Reader: The Politics of ‘Interaction’, ” Espen Aarseth, Cybertext

Selections from First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, Game, Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan

Selections (tba) from grandtextauto

“Intrigue and Discourse in the Adventure Game,” Espen Aarseth, Cybertext

“Unit 1 Core Concepts: Interactivity,” Rules of Play, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman

hot topic of the week: copyright

Is Google book search "fair use?"
Lawrence Lessig on YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l2nrbmBQXg