Future Cinema

Course Site for Future Cinema 1 (and sometimes Future Cinema 2: Applied Theory) at York University, Canada

Soft Cinema

Soft Cinema
Lev Manovitch

Submitted by Ellen Wright

Soft(ware) Cinema is a dynamic computer-driven media installation. The viewers are presented with an infinite series of narrative films constructed on the fly by the custom software. Using the systems of rules defined by the author, the software decides what appears on the screen, where, and in which sequence; it also chooses music tracks. The elements are chosen from a media database which at present contains 4 hours of video and animation, 3 hours of voice over narration, and 5 hours of music.
From http://www.manovich.net/cinema_future/toc.htm

Concept
As cinema, Soft Cinema unfolds in the form of cinema but is developed through data. Soft Cinema removes the director, the actors and the script and creates what appears to be a spontaneously shifting array of images and sounds. In fact it is not the script or the actors that determine the visuals of the film, but rather the program of the software that determines the structure of the database of images. Lev Manovich describes his approach, “Rather than beginning with a script and then creating media elements which visualize it, I investigate a different paradigm: starting with a large database and then generating narratives from it.” http://softcinema.net/form.htm Although he has written narratives for each of three films, the narratives do not rely upon a sequential unfolding of character, scene and plot but as data responding to categorization. Manovich is also the author of the software program, and he produced the video. Clearly he has not completely handed over the reins to the computer program to combine images from an random database in a relentless arrangement of associations. On the other hand, the viewer is invited to interact as an onlooker only. In this way Manovich distinguishes his Soft Cinema films to be more ‘like art’ or film than like contemporary visual and audial digital data.

There are four areas of research that are distinctive in Soft Cinema:
1. Computer screen interface is divided into multiple frames
2. Soft Cinema software manipulates the layout (the number, size and positioning of the frames) and the sequences of all media in each frame
3. Database stores and organizes all media: the video clips, stills, graphics and text, sound and music which provide “a potentially unlimited” variety of films
4. Video is one kind of representation, and is combined with motion graphics, 3D animations, diagrams etc.
These 4 key concepts of Soft Cinema provide “a new aesthetic territory” where the database is manipulated in real time during each viewing of the films so that each viewing is potentially unique: “Not everything will be different with every viewing, but potentially every dimension of a film can change, including the screen layout, the configuration and combination of the visuals, the music, and the narrative.” Soft Cinema films are collaborative explorations, including multimedia artists, computer designers, sound artists and musicians, computer graphics designers and animators.
Manovitch is Director of Software Studies and Professor of Visual Arts at UCSD. His background in Visual Arts is evident in his choices for categorization of his images in the databank. For instance, The vast collection of moving images, graphics, sound and music recordings are organized according to programming rules or key words:
Each video clips used in Soft Cinema is assigned keywords which describe both the “content” of a clip (geographical location, presence of people in the scene, etc.) and its “formal” properties (dominant color, dominant line orientation, contrast, camera movement, etc.). Some of the keywords are generated automatically using image processing software while others are input by hand.

These “formal” properties, of colour, line and composition, contrast of light and dark, camera movement form the basis for the collection of images within the various screens at any one time. In Visual Art terms, these are modernist properties, reflecting the emphasis upon the visual, material properties of the video, photos and graphics. What he refers to as the “content” of the clip, such as the locations, activities, architecture and people, they are not in and of themselves the “content”. They develop their associative meaning for a viewer when the film is watched, and all of the visual and audial elements interact with each other.
As such, this distancing of the author and of the viewer from an overt story through the use of visual relationships, is closer to modernism than post-modernism despite the use of multiple screens and search engines. He describes the film, Texas “as a media object that exists ‘between narrative and a search engine’.” He admits that his values are inscribed in his choices of images and of the structures within the program, allowing for interpretation of his intentions and interpretations of the films by the viewer. These are not just random film clips from a faceless server, which to my mind, as film would be less interesting and compelling. There are three films in Soft Cinema, Texas, Mission to Earth, and Absences and although I have not seen any of these in full, clips may be found at: http://softcinema.net/movies.htm
As a visual artist, Manovich study and elaboration of the questions of narrative and viewer reception seems somewhat limited, particularly in comparison with Marsha Kinder’s more elaborate and historical view. She suggests that rather than labeling digital media as “interactive” it would be more productive to “position the user as a ‘performer’ of the narrative – like an actor, interpreting a role or a musician playing a score or a dancer performing traditional moves, contributing her own idiosyncratic inflections and absorbing the experience into her personal archive of memories.” A reappraisal of the viewer as a potential performer in relation to his Soft Cinema films, may launch Manovich’s software cinema outside of the realm of films as art and into the realm of database as narrative co-construction.
Questions
• What kinds of relationships can be created between viewers and non-linear films that use images that are primarily formal – focusing on composition, shapes, textures, colours, light and dark? Are these visual elements enough to sustain interest and continued viewing? How ‘fulfilling’ or satisfactory are formal images as narrative in the absence of an overall structured narrative?
• Manovich’s Soft Cinema database seems to be an enormous undertaking. Is the Korsakow program capable of this sort of work? Are people already creating similar databases, with video, photos, sound and music, which they organize and play for others?
• If non-linear collections are growing in popularity, and they are constantly shifting, without a chance of returning to a fixed point, how will that constant shifting and movement of visual, audial, cognitive information effect our ability to concentrate, to focus or to analyse? Is constant shift something to wonder about?

Websites of interest

Soft Cinema: Ambient Narrative http://softcinema.net/index.htm?reload
http://softcinema.net/images.htm#

http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/11/softbook.html Watch small video of large- screen project

Tetris Mountain for SoftCinema
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMGFQn-SHHU&feature=related

UC San Diego – Software Studies Initiative – Lev Manovich http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtbzVuDqSas
San Diego, Jan. 9, 2009 — High-performance computing and the humanities are connecting at the University of California, San Diego – with a little matchmaking help from the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

from Lev Manovitch, Software Takes Command. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/11/softbook.html

Wed, April 8 2009 » Futurecinema_2009

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