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Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database
Leading artists from different cultural fields collaborate on three films that explore the aesthetic possibilities of computer-driven cinema.
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). 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. Mission to Earth, 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. Absences 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. Texas, 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.
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). 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. Mission to Earth, 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. Absences 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. Texas, 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.
- GenresNonfictionFilm
40 pages, CD-ROM
First published June 10, 2005
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About the author
Lev Manovich
44 books72 followersLev Manovich is an artist, an author and a theorist of digital culture. He is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Manovich played a key role in creating four new research fields: new media studies (1991-), software studies (2001-), cultural analytics (2007-) and AI aesthetics (2018-). Manovich's current research focuses on generative media, AI culture, digital art, and media theory.
Manovich is the founder and director of the Cultural Analytics Lab (called Software Studies Initiative 2007-2016), which pioneered use of data science and data visualization for the analysis of massive collections of images and video (cultural analytics). The lab was commissioned to create visualizations of cultural datasets for Google, New York Public Library, and New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
He is the author and editor of 15 books including The Language of New Media that has been translated into fourteen languages. Manovich's latest academic book Cultural Analytics was published in 2020 by the MIT Press.
Manovich is the founder and director of the Cultural Analytics Lab (called Software Studies Initiative 2007-2016), which pioneered use of data science and data visualization for the analysis of massive collections of images and video (cultural analytics). The lab was commissioned to create visualizations of cultural datasets for Google, New York Public Library, and New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
He is the author and editor of 15 books including The Language of New Media that has been translated into fourteen languages. Manovich's latest academic book Cultural Analytics was published in 2020 by the MIT Press.
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May 21, 2022
It's about the installation of Manovich and Kratky
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