User:Ruben/RWRM/Interview on practive - update

Ruben, are you ready for the interview?

Depends on what you want to talk about.

Please tell us a bit about your background.

When I started studying I did two years of mechanical Engineering. Next to that I started with (website) programming. After these two years I started with Film Directing at the Utrecht school of the Arts. I graduated there about 1,5 year ago now. In a nutshell, that's it.

So you're doing your master now. You talked about that you're trying to combine your film background with a programming context. Could you say a bit about that?

I feel that filmmaking is what I want to do, so to say. It's a bit a simplification, but I feel I still need explore that further. On the other hand I have my programming skills, which is something I'm naturally quite good at -- the technical sides. There definitely can be an interesting synthesis between these two, though I'm not sure yet where, how, when etc... And I believe Piet Zwart is an interesting place to experiment with both.

What are you working on at the moment?

What I want to explore further now, is on emotions and also touches on the subject of self-performance. This theme came from the major strand 'cynicism', a theme on which I have based my earlier projects as well. It's a theme -- or rather a phenomenon -- that I see around me and experience in myself as well: I have a cynical response to a lot of things that come to me. I wanted to turn that unproductive (or even destructive) mode into a constructive thing. It was the starting point for my last project about the news as well.

The precise course for my new project is not clear yet, but I follow some topics that intrigue me. For example, at Transmediale I saw the talk about affective surveillance -- about emotion detection from faces. They also proposed that they could use it for autistics to learn how to relate to other people, so then it really becomes about how sincere are emotions, if you start to fake an emotive response. And I also think that in interactions with other people, there are sometimes less sincere emotions, although I'm not sure whether these less sincere emotions are necessarily 'fake' emotions.

When you think back a bit about cynicism -- it seems to be your starting point at the moment, or the main topic -- both 'interpretation' and the interest in emotions result from it. Can you give an example that you feel personal cynical about? Just to get it clear, what kind of cynicism we're talking about.

Politics, news, and a lot of marketing. It's mainly the things that are brought in this clear-cut manner, that disregards a lot of context. It's a bit like (and I hate to say this) the Twitter 'generation' -- if we can talk about it as being a 'generation' at all -- which compresses information to make it digestible for a lot of people, thereby disregarding a lot of facts that should have been kept in mind. To completely lose nuances of things. It becomes completely black and white.

For example, if we take marketing. And you'd feel cynical marketing as their kind of compressing a certain truth -- in a very broad term. Do you feel you want to come up with solutions for this kind of cynicism. Or do you feel you want to highlight it?

I'm not sure yet, what my goal would be. I feel that something should be highlighted. I'm not sure marketing would be the best target, as it's in a way obvious that it's disregarding a lot of facts, as that is what marketing is about: it's about selling a product.

So this losing of nuance, do you think that the medium of film is something that would fit a work that could go into that subject or theme? To go against it. Do you think film is the medium to show nuance?

I think it can, but I'm now sure how, or maybe it's better at showing the lack of nuance.

And programming, could that be showing the nuance? Or is that a blunt questions?

Well it is a broad question. But if you think about it, it is interesting that programming is about black and white in a way: it's about fixed states. On the other hand what is interesting for example, last trimester I ended up with a thought that if you ie. talk about Deep learning, than it is about laying relations between words. Then that way the computer understands things -- or starts to understand -- certain things/words/phenomenon/notions, is actually quite related to how a human does make sense of things. So maybe then you get into a different question of 'what is understanding?'.

I'm asking because I'm very curious about this combination of film and programming. So to come back to you emotion theme you're working on at the moment: you just said that you're trying to get human specific characteristics and you're putting that next to how computer can do it. And you're talking about emotion detection. All of these things seem to focus around a contradiction between a human and a computer. Is that something that interests you?

Not in particular, if you for example talk about glitches in computers. Maybe -- I'm not sure whether what I'm going to say now is completely true -- but it may be that it intrigues me because the computer becomes an interesting metaphor for interhuman relations. But I'm not sure whether that's true. Maybe the introduction of the computer has forced or made people to more strictly categorize and more strictly put things into certain taxonomies and certain structures in order to be used by a computer. If you look at the whole Big Data discussion for example: if the computer says somebody is a terrorist, he therefore must be a terrorist.

It's not that I would be afraid of Big Data in particular. It seems to be more the mindset that people have, or how that mindset changes. It relates to a certain awe that people have of the technology, and by that disregard a lot of notions that are more 'human' -- I'm not sure how to call it, soft qualities maybe?

I have the feeling your emotion project is still in its initial phase. Could you tease us with possible starting questions you're exploring?

Yes, although it will probably be more teasing for myself than for you. For example, what I talked about with you before is that emotions in film -- something which the medium is famous for, and which might make it a good medium to research emotions -- or any other fiction or narrative, might come from a certain 'game of make-believe' the spectator plays with the film. So you're 'pretending' that you have certain emotions. You can compare it with a child that plays with his father, who is acting as a monster. The father runs after the kid and the kid is screaming and running to another room, while on the other hand he is laughing. So there is enjoyment and fear simultaneously and both emotions are genuine. So in a way, the kid is in this game of make-believe: the kid is afraid of the monster. I think it's an interesting analogy, for when you respond emotionally to a film you still know it's not real, but yet you feel you should respond -- it's appropriate to respond.

I find it an interesting metaphor, or analogy, this kid and the spectator. I feel that you might see this game of make-believe in other interactions as well. Maybe you can even extrapolate it to human-to-human interaction. That we 'play' a role in each interaction. For example, my relation with you is completely different to my relation with Steve, my girlfriend or a king. It could be that in each of these occasions I have certain role, based on certain rules in society, or rules in my head.

I'm not sure whether this is a truthful analogy; whether it's always the case, whether it's a completely accurate assumption. But for me, now, I find it an intriguing starting point.

Yes it is an interesting point. Is the game of make-believe a film term?

No, it's more like 'doen alsof', as in the case of the kid. That he is acting as if something is happening, but by that experiencing it in a certain way as well.

So you're still in your research phase of you emotion project. Have you seen any other projects that is working with this theme of emotion that you're looking at? Or something related?

Actually, I want to go to Stedelijk (before 31th of May). There is an exhibition there which is about digital avatars, or something similar. But in a review about it I read that the non-images, these unidentifiable avatars, it's not even distinguishable what they are, who they are, what they represent, these could still trigger emotions in the reviewer while watching. I think it is very interesting than emotions become tools and that we humans become systems, and that if you press the right button that an emotion occurs. Emotions which are considered often -- or at least by me -- as being natural behaviour, in a way turn out to be quite fixed, or naturally programmed in us -- or maybe they're culturally programmed, I'm not sure. So for now there are still many questions.

Is film than an important source to refer to?

I'm not sure whether it's important to refer to the medium itself. It's mainly a tool that I feel like using at the moment, though that might not be the best reason to use it. On the other hand, if you for example talk about emotions in film, you quickly talk about the Hollywood structures of cinema which are focused at triggering the right emotions according to a certain (genre) structure. These structures work, and are proven to work and are quite rigid in those sort of films. So I think in that sense film is an interesting medium because the premise of an emotion is not in film perse, but definitely in our perception of cinema.

And do you feel cynical about Hollywood films in that? That they're using or misusing our emotions?

It's a bit of both worlds. In a way I am reluctant to it as they're repeating the same trick in the book, on the other hand I can be jealous how they again and again accomplish doing it.

Can we say the nuance of emotions gets lost in Hollywood films? I'm trying to relate it to the things we talked about earlier and see if there's a theme that comes back.

Often they can be quite blunt in their cuing of emotions. But I feel it is too broad to talk about 'Hollywood films' as a general term, so I'm not sure.

To wrap it up, your interests seem to lie in the human expertises we have: feeling emotions, feeling cynicism. Quite specific characteristics that are present in human to human contact. Do you feel this is a category or topic that you like to continue to work with in the future, or near future?

In the near future certainly, as that is pretty much this trimester. But for me it's important that there's some relevance in the topic, and I feel I should grab things that bother me at a certain moment. I think emotions are interesting because they are so ungraspable, but don't think I got to both themes in the same way. The theme of cynicism comes from a more introspective process, from the realisation that I can be quite cynical myself, while it can be a very unproductive mindset.

The theme of emotions is a subject I broached upon before and now we talked with Florian about it from the perspective of emotions being objects, which gave me some new questions. When I looked back at my notes of the talk at Transmediale on Affective Surveillance it suddenly became a topical question. That was when it started spinning for me.

Thanks

Thanks