Now we can begin Phase Two of operations. <maniacal laugh>

P.S. Don’t miss the Asset Store for lots of inspiration:
Asset Store In Depth Newsletter and Asset Store Action News.

Introductory 001 – Overview	Introductory – 002 – The…
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I thought that this might be of interest to the class. Highly recommended! For a sample of his work, check out his Jawa video The Game.

Necropolis is an immersive video and new media installation. It realizes the translation of over a decade of ethereal video experiments and theorizations into a real world, tactile audience experience. Necropolis consists of six new works contained within context-specific spaces housed inside a single super-structure.

Curated by Rhonda Corvese.

Information:
February 4 – April 1, 2012
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN ART
952 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON, M6J 1G8
www.mocca.ca/
Hours: Tues–Sun 11:00–6:00 p.m.

PUBLIC JOURNAL Issue #40 ‘Screens’

Cinema in Your Hand, Cinema on the Street: The Aesthetics of Korean Cinema

HyeRyoung Ok

Korea has a history of disparate governments that demanded restrictions and censorships over what people could and could not watch; under the Japanese colonization and Korean governments that came along later. In the 1990s censorships were loosened up and today the Korean film industry is well acknowledged around the world.

In this article HyeRyoung Ok discusses a new cinematic approach in Korea called the “mobile cinema”. This term is not to be confused with movies made ‘with’ mobile phones but movies made ‘for’ mobile screens. Lee Hee cheul along with Han Sang-Hee and Lee Sang-Ui produced the first movies exclusively for mobile phone screens in 2002 commissioned by SK telecom one of the largest mobile service providers in Korea.  After the success of these experiments, the same year SK telecom commissions some of the well known filmmakers of Korea to make an omnibus series of movies to be screened only on one of their mobile channels (June) that had been launched earlier that year. Yigong series, which contained of twenty short films ranging from five to fifteen minutes in length, marks what mobile cinema in Korea today has been influenced by and relies on in terms of mise-en-scene and narrative structure. A new visual style was created for the small mobile screens. The Yigong series was a collaboration of the film industry and the mobile industry to keep track of the fast growing media context.

HyeRyoung Ok explores on the Yigong Series to demonstrate the new visual language that has been created for the mobile screens and how they can be affective and engaging with the viewers.  Also he argues that the mobile cinema takes what is already available in terms of media conventions, and transforms it into a new way of addressing the audience.  The emergence of the mobile phone not only enhanced personal interaction and communication in social context; it transpired a new personal viewing experience of a portable small screen.

There are a few strategies that are applied on the films to make them appropriate for the mobile screen. The cinematography- the use of close ups are very common specifically for intimate moments to seize the viewers’ attention on the little mobile screen. Also by using Soft focus filter, high key lighting and different camera angles, they tend to create engaging images. Most Yigong movies have little or no dialogue at all, and some provide voice narration.  The use of heavy music is a popular tool to create mood. Small situational and real stories are more often shot in concise spaces such as indoors. In the Yigong series the main derive of the story is the visual montage.

There are particular types of genres such as ‘action’ films that would grab your attention and keep you attentive; furthermore, the images have to be visually attractive and striking. HyeRyoung Ok gives an example of a Yigong film called, Fucked Up Shoes, that makes use of three stationary long shots that alternate between fast and slow motion which creates a rhythm. He further explains, that due to this approach of camera use, the director is unsuccessful in delivering the immersive experience on the small sized screen of the portable device.

Since the invention of television, cinema as we know it, a public space (where we gather to observe moving images on a big screen while situated in the dark), has declined, and even more so with the creation of the multi-media mobile screens. In my opinion, cinema will never be fully abolished since, the experience you attain by fully giving yourself and watching images move on a big screen is utterly unlike what you would receive on the small screen; for instance, while sitting in a space surrounded by loquacious people.

1 Anthony C.Y. Leong, “Korean cinema: the new Hong Kong: a guidebook for the latest Korean new wave” (Victoria, B.C: Trafford, 2003)

The following videos appear courtesy of some late night Googling and the discovery of Grégoire Cliquet’s READi Design Lab at L’École de design Nantes Atlantique in France. (If anyone’s curious, I was looking into how to VR-enable something like Gephi but it’s not that easy.)

SCOPE – Augmented Reality Toys.v3 from Frantz Lasorne on Vimeo.

leARn physics from Victor Manselon on Vimeo.

FYI all, there is a lecture on Database Cinema tomorrow in Nat Taylor Cinema. I was reminded of this in my New Media: The Database course and thought I’d invite people here.

Thursday, Feb. 2 @ 9:30am-12:30pm in Nat Taylor Cinema (N R102)
Lee Knuttila, the course director, will conduct a short lecture and screen the film ‘Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait’.

“Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate.”
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
- Canto 3, Line 9 of Dante’s Inferno

Documentation of our 2nd AR assignment can be viewed here and our source footage can be viewed here.

Augmented reality, by blending the virtual and the real, results in spaces that simply cannot exist in the physical world. Through our project, Facebook is induced in a augmented space to encapsulate many of the concepts presented in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities by perpetuating a space in which virtual communication is encouraged, bypassing physical interaction. In our project,   facecanto  , virtual space slowly consumes physical space, inducing a feeling of alienation.

One of the concepts dealt with in Invisible Cities is that of desires: both those unfulfilled and those better left unfulfilled. Social networking systems like Facebook superficially meet the most basic need for human contact, while at the same time leaving the user with a feeling of spiritual and emotional emptiness.

Towards the end of Invisible Cities, Calvino points out that the reasons we use for creating invisible cities stems from a confrontation with what he calls “the inferno of the living” (165), which in itself recalls Dante’s Inferno. The Inferno of Dante is itself an elaborate architectural construction through which the protagonist descends level by level, as though through an inverted building, to the lowest point, which allows him to pass through into Purgatory. Since Dante’s Inferno is not the terminus, but the first leg of his protagonist’s journey, it is differentiated from Calvino’s concept of the inferno, in that Calvino’s inferno is an end result.

Calvino explains that “there are two ways to escape suffering the inferno.” (165) The first is to just “accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it.” (165) The second is riskier and demands “constant vigilance and apprehension.” (165) In this process, Calvino advises that we “seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure and give them space”. (165) Our project, through dialectical engagement, entices the spectator to enter Facebook, and thus experience the inferno, causing the world around the user to alter into a hellish cacophony of noise, colour, and visual/aural over-stimulation. Through the AR headgear, we hope to provide the spectator with a vision of the inferno so that once it is removed (s)/he will see reality itself as that which endures and give into to its sense of space and wonder. In other words, in order to escape the inferno, the user must choose to log out or learn to “like” it.

- Clint Enns, Chris Alton, Jan Benes

Cinema is the memory of the lives we haven’t lived. Like amnesiacs in search of lost memories, we watch lives we might have lived, loves we might have loved.

Like a pill combating Alzheimer, Cinema projects in our minds other people’s lives, romances and sorrows.  The physical places where these events take place hold and contain those memories.  The ultimate Cinematic Place we have all lived is New York. The idea of New York is not in the US. It is a town seen by everyone, everywhere. It is in every country, every city, in every room of every house of the World. We all dream ourselves American.

We share memories of apartments in the east village where we have never lived, the smell of midtown hotdogs we have never eaten. We are familiar with the anarchic energy of its streets. We recall kisses, stolen in the shadows under the Brooklyn Bridge.

We share our nostalgia for a town we’ve never been in. We all remember it because, as with memories, this New York does not exist in time. Cinema split New York in half, divided it in two. The memories of Cinematic New York do not belong anymore to that town, nor to this World. This place exists on a different plane of reality.

Like a rake in a sand garden, Cinema collects memories and drags them together to form reality.

As artists, we remember New York. We remember through memories that don’t belong to us. Our aim is to recreate the Virtual Network of a collective, shared memory of a timeless place. We recreated a piece of this phantasmagorical Network of Lives weaved together. It is without end.

This Memory-Net is made of some of our dearest memories of movies. These are our gigantic skyscraper-climbing apes, black and white boxing matches Our Central Park, our condo with a breathtaking view of Manhattan. Memories of a crazy escape involving a yellow taxicab, a woman and a man in a trench coat.

Ask yourselves this: If movie New York exists in all our minds, it is reasonable to assume we also exist somewhere in the crowded streets of this Invisible City.

BY:

Tara Khalili

David Balazs Beleznay

Ferdinando Dell’Omo

Mehran Jabbari

SPECFLIC is an ongoing creative research project directed by Adriene Jenik (2003 – present) in a new storytelling form called The Distributed Social Cinema.

I believe that Jenik has taken the notion of the Russian formalist verfremdungseffekt which, commonly translates as alienation effect, which also has been coined by playwrite Bertolt Brecht which prevents the audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character created by the actor, and which consequently leads the audience to be a consciously critical observer.”^[1] Brecht’s term describes the aesthetics of his epic theatre.

As Jenik explain, in a performance or cinema experience, the audience is confined to follow certain rules and expositions. For example, not speaking with one another, or having their mobile phones turned off or to silent mode so and incoming calls does not disrupt the show. Conversely however, Jenik, is quite interested in fusing all of these gadgets together with like tele-matic performance, pre-recorded media elements street performers, and more importantly the audiences social ability to actively be apart of the multi-modal story experience.

Majority of her projects are held in an iconic public space and is free and open to the public. Jenik SPECFLIC focus stories in the near future year of 2030 designed to explore the intersection of digital media, books and reading. It is performed over time and space in layers of media forms. Live performative media and pre-recorded video were projected on multiple surfaces of the library, and the public provided some of the content—via camera phones, text messaging and interaction with performers. ^[2]

Jenik’s research experiment was a New Form of Cinema Promoted by UC San Diego New-Media Artist at The Martin Luther King Jr. Public Library in San Jose , CA in August of 2006.

The idea of a global infosphere is to take an overwhelming existing amount of information and to be able to share it amongst public by the infospherians who exist to assist in locating the bits of knowledge they need.

The usage of modern technology, which is consumed within the everyday public, comes into play and transforms the usual storytelling from a spectatorship to participation module. Therefore for example, the notion of mobile is a key component in conveying the story via sms (sending and receiving text messages). Thus allowing to further the notion of socially connecting participants with each other. This also alludes to the overwhelming scenario that lays with technology today – an examination of changing dynamics in our relationship with technology.

1 ^ Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964) 91.

2  http://www.calit2.net/newsroom/article.php?id=926

Hi everyone, this is a drop in replacement for arlab.bonk. Drop it in Max5/Cycling ‘74/max-externals and replace the arlab.bonk that’s there.

This update fixes the very small collision zones and reports collisions more accurately. You can also send the message “radius N ” where N is the object/outlet you wish to change the sensitivity for and is the number of units of distance at which to start reporting a collision.

For an example, copy the code below and in Max select “File> New From Clipboard…” and it will show up as a patch.

----------begin_max5_patcher----------
352.3ocqS9saCBBEF+Z7ofbxtz0HZ01t61ywRyBpzV1TnQvrt0z28IG09msZ
iMaWH34b9.93GvdOBjp2IL.8I5KTBYuGgfobIHcwDnjuKqfaPYvpBsptD7aK
07qTUHrXMVWxUZk0H+Rf4BmDbRqt11KNrKaaJ6maEstvs.bK3SgTtZMPW1oa
K2lsQpV+ZkHy1JMJInYxornXWWLFD1zdbLxbzx5z2dLFNybJdItZvyURdA3J
bvyy03ORJTJLF9ZQ+jZE6POAU7bYsgxnOvtJhBuGDwFBQihJIIttYsAyuNUh
9eohR7Qyr9KnvqJ3oSR0p2oVmYY+8aOrfAYi+H9tE+XKlgHawTraZvj3guVw
FG.wgBER0OeqgquK+kT0nqqx52QcGTzSFHWXrRE2J0pyzvtPyFYdt.K2ipRY
9VsTYM82SV31Yr4ya2fIGinKu5Y+X8Z7H7Zz840KbTSvAuuAA94DcC
-----------end_max5_patcher-----------

“Many of the visitors come with a deeply romantic vision of Paris – the cobbled streets, as seen in the film Amelie, the beauty of French women or the high culture and art at the Louvre.

“http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6197921.stm