false 3302691 1 What kind of cinema is appropriate for the age of Palm Pilot and Google? Automatic surveillance and self-guided missiles? Consumer profiling and CNN? To investigate this question, Lev Manovich, one of today's most influential thinkers in the fields of media arts and digital culture, paired with award-winning new media artist and designer Andreas Kratky. They have also invited contributions from leaders in other cultural fields: DJ Spooky, Scanner, George Lewis, and Johann Johannsson (music), servo (architecture), Schoenerwissen/OfCD (information visualization), and Ross Cooper Studios (media design).<br /> <br /> The results of their three-year explorations are the three "films" presented on this DVD. Although the films resemble the familiar genres of cinema, the process by which they were created demonstrates the possibilities of soft(ware) cinema. A "cinema," that is, in which human subjectivity and the variable choices made by custom software combine to create films that can run infinitely without ever exactly repeating the same image sequences, screen layouts and narratives.<br /> <br /> <i>Mission to Earth</i>, a science fiction allegory of the immigrant experience, adopts the variable choices and multi-frame layout of the Soft Cinema system to represent "variable identity." <i>Absences</i> is a lyrical black and white narrative that relies on algorithms normally deployed in military and civilian surveillance applications to determine the editing of video and audio. <i>Texas</i>, a "database narrative," assembles its visuals, sounds, narratives, and even the identities of its characters, from multiple databases. The DVD was designed so that every viewing of each film generates a different version. 3339505 10 6 2005 Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database total:1|4:1| 1 4 5 0 0 0 false false Sun Sep 06 13:05:27 -0700 2009 Sun Sep 06 13:05:27 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Mon Jul 13 20:52:47 -0700 2009 Mon Jul 13 20:52:55 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Thu Jun 04 17:09:04 -0700 2009 Thu Jun 04 17:20:37 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Tue Jun 10 11:44:14 -0700 2008 Tue Jun 10 11:44:15 -0700 2008 0 0 false false Mon May 12 21:25:43 -0700 2008 Mon May 12 21:25:45 -0700 2008 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=3302691