How to Get From Zero to One

Media Design MA, Piet Zwart Institute Summer Trimester Thematic Seminar

Title: How Long Does it Take to Get from Zero to One?

Tutor: Richard Wright

INTRODUCTION
The overall subject of this seminar series is time and media. By which I mean media which is experienced in time rather than being about time. We will begin by exploring moving image and animation as the first dominant forms of time-based media and their differences to recent forms of digital or “new” media. Why is new media so concerned with the immediate and the simultaneous rather than with duration? Can we see how new media “moves”? Can it produce its own “image of time”? How long does it take to get from 0 to 1?

STRUCTURE
The seminars consist of presentations, discussions, demonstrations, screenings, class activities and exercises (some literally) and project assignments to be completed in between sessions.

PROJECT ASSIGNMENTS
Project assignments are expected to be taken as far as a prototype, pilot or rough. Where this is not practical with the time or resources available in this short seminar (if you needed to time lapse record a plant growing, for example), a realistic production plan would suffice.

ASSESSMENT
Assessment is on the last day, Friday 14th December.

1. MOVEMENT – MIMESIS - LABOUR
11:00 – 17:00, Wednesday 19th – Friday 21st September

In this session we will finds ways to use animation to understand the relation between time, the body and media. Mimesis is the most primitive ways of acquiring knowledge and animators use it particularly to understand how things move. How to represent movement is also the original problem that triggered the birth of cinema, such as in Muybridge's well known studies. The movements of media workers then became an object of “scientific management” itself. When digital media became dominant, where did this movement of working go?

SCHEDULE
Wednesday 11:00
Introduction: “Freedom of Movement” presentation and discussion
Screenings: “Little Nemo”, Winsor McCay, 1911, etc
Text: “Biometry and Antibodies. Modernising Animation / Animating Modernity”, Edwin Carels.
Wednesday 14:00
Discussion: Media as a form of movement and labour – bodies vs. cameras.
Workshop: Media Production Olympics

Thursday 11:00
Discussion: Representing movement – mimesis. How do animals walk?
Screenings:
Text: “The Uses of Live Action in Drawing Humans and Animals”, chapter 13 in “The Illusion of Life”, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.
Workshop: Build a cheap and simple motion capture studio.
Thursday 14:00
(Continue from morning).
We compare rotoscoping, 'photo-stats' and motion capture.
Screenings: The body moving as a technology.

Friday 11:00
Discussion: The interface - from physical labour to perceptual and cognitive labour.
Text: “Surveillance and Capture”, Phil Agre.
Friday 14:00
Workshop: Does the “movement” of the media artist still exist?

PROJECT ASSIGNMENTS (one of these suggestions):
i) A History of Walking (could be your own, could be biographical, could be an animal or even a toy, could be over the course of a single day).
ii) Represent the “movements” of a new media worker. Can you make them into a “work”?

TEXTS:
“The Uses of Live Action in Drawing Humans and Animals”, chapter 13 in “The Illusion of Life”, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, Hyperion, 1981. This book is still the bible for classical animation, and although it heavily promotes the Disney version, it is full of information. This chapter gives some intriguing insights into the kinds of cross-overs between live action and animation during the 1930s, including how to “become animal”. How does all this relate to recent motion capture technologies? “Biometry and Antibodies. Modernising Animation / Animating Modernity”, Edwin Carels. In: “Animism”, Anselm Franke (ed), Sternberg Press, 2010.

“Surveillance and Capture”, Phil Agre, Information Society, 10(2): 101-127 – April-June 1994. (available online) Although this is apparently about surveillance, it provides a way of describing our interactions with a computer as a form of movement or a “grammar of actions”. What makes this “grammar” fundamentally different from previous kinds of rationalised movement?

2. CHAIN REACTION – A MACHINERY FOR NARRATIVE
11:00 – 17:00, Wednesday 7th – Friday 9th November

Narrative knowledge can be thought of as the opposite of mimetic knowledge. But perhaps there are forms of narrative that betray its inner workings in unexpected ways. A very popular modern genre is the “chain reaction” work, often in the form of a film but also in games as well. In this seminar we explore how far it has come to function as a general idea of time, risk and contingency.

SCHEDULE
Wednesday 11:00
Screenings: “The Way Things Go”, Fischli and Weiss, 30 mins, 1987.
Youtube ping pong ball videos – where are the misses?
Text: “Constructive Instability. Or: the Life of Things as the Cinema’s Afterlife”, Thomas Elsaesser. In: “Video Vortex Reader”, ed. Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer, Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.
Wednesday 14:00
Research: How far can we extend the chain reaction approach?

Thursday 11:00
Discussion: Chain reaction as a principle in animated narratives.
Screenings: “Mickey Mouse – The Chain Gang”, Disney, 8 mins, 1930, etc
Thursday 14:00
Workshop: What is a narrative “event”? Is it simply cause and effect?

Friday 11:00
Discussion: New temporal structures.
How far do computer games embody the principles of the chain reaction?
Screenings: “Run Lola Run”, etc
Friday 14:00
(Continue from yesterdays workshop)

PROJECT ASSIGNMENTS:
i) Your own chain reaction work in any media.

TEXTS:
“Constructive Instability. Or: the Life of Things as the Cinema’s Afterlife”, Thomas Elsaesser. In: “Video Vortex Reader”, ed. Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer, Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.
Elsaesser uses the phenomenon of “chain reaction” films to articulate the modern condition of risk and “tipping points”, such as ecological or financial. At the end he tries to extend this mode to describe how you stumble your way through networks.
“Time's Arrow”, Martin Amis. Vintage Books, London, 2003 (1991). A short novel written in a “reverse chronological narrative”, that is, backwards. Does this form of narrative help us to understand the subject in any new way?
“Retreat Syndrome” in “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale”, Philip K Dick, Orion Books, 2000. Pp 67 – 85.
A short story about loops written by Dick in 1965. Compare it to another story in the same collection called “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts”.

3. RHYTHMANALYSIS
11:00 – 17:00, Wednesday 10th – Friday 12th October

In this seminar we look at an unusual approach to analysing contemporary “everyday life” in terms of time.

SCHEDULE
Wednesday 11:00
Introduction to a theory of rhythm using two short texts:
“The Rhythmanalytical Project” and “Attempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities”, Henri Lefevbre and Catherine Regulier.
Wednesday 14:00
Workshop: Rhythms of Rotterdam – is Rotterdam a solar or a lunar city?
Screening: The “city poem” genre.

Thursday 11:00
Research: What is “rhythmanalysis” for?
Thursday 14:00
Discussion: Mediated rhythms and the rhythms of media.
Workshop: How does Lefebvre deal with rhythms which are not visible or not at a human scale?

Friday 11:00
Workshop: Continue our rhythmanalysis of Rotterdam (or somewhere) with consideration of media.
Friday 14:00
(Continue from morning)

PROJECT ASSIGNMENT:
i) Conduct your own rhythmanalysis in any media.

TEXTS:
“The Rhythmanalytical Project”, Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Regulier, Communications, 1985. “Attempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities”, Henri Lefevbre and Catherine Regulier, 'Peuples Mediterraneen', 37, 1986.
Henri Lefebvre is probably the only person to attempt to define a “theory of rhythm”. A big influence on the design of urban space, at the end of his life Lefebvre turned his attention to time instead. Lefebvre and Regulier describe various ideas and methods, and a central problem emerges as to how to study rhythms that are beyond human scale and perception.

4. IS THE NETWORK A TIME-BASED MEDIUM?
11:00 – 17:00, Wednesday 12th – Friday 14th December
(Friday 14th is assessment day)

Film maker Babette Mangolte posed the question of why is it so difficult for the digital image to communicate duration? Perhaps networked media are not time based media but spatial media. But surely we can find ways to challenge this...

Wednesday 11:00
Discussion: Cinema runs at the speed of thought. What new temporalities can we construct in modern media?
Texts: “The Digital Event” section in “The Virtual Life of Film”, David Rodowick.
“Video, Flows and Real Time”, Maurizio Lazzarato.
Screenings: My “Bank of Time” project, 2001.
“Looking for Mr. Goodbar”, Michelle Terran etc
Wednesday 14:00
Workshop: Make a work that runs “in reverse”.
Instead of a Time Machine, design a Now Machine.

Thursday 11:00
Presentation: Michelle Terran and her “Wireless Walks”
Workshop: Wireless video.
Thursday 14:00
Workshop: Building networks with wireless video.

Friday 11:00
Assessments
Friday 14:00
Screening (if necessary):
“Gandahar”, Rene Laloux, 1988. Animated film. An idyllic community are threatened by a force from both 1,000 years in the future and 1,000 years in the past. Only the deformed are spared by the men of metal.

PROJECT ASSIGNMENTS:
None because we are done.

TEXTS:
“The Digital Event” section in “The Virtual Life of Film”, David Rodowick, Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp 163 – 174.
Film theorist David Rodowick tries to answer Babette Mangolte’s question “Why is it difficult for the digital image to communicate duration?” using Sokurov’s film “The Russian Ark” – a feature film made in one continuous take. So why is it so difficult according to Rodowick?
“Video, Flows and Real Time”, Maurizio Lazzarato. In: “Art and the Moving Image”, ed. T Leighton, Tate Publishing, London, 2007. Pp 283 – 291. http://gentiliapri.com/images/library/Lazzarato_Videophilosophy_chapter_2_1.pdf
A slightly theoretical essay, but Lazzarato manages to summarise some recent thinking about the moving image as a form of electronic media, as part of a general “space of flows”. Watch out for the passage where he links all of this to problems of “political representation”.
“Time Frames” chapter in “Understanding Comics”, Scott McCloud, Harper, 1994. Pp 94 – 117. Famous popular study that uses comics to analyse comics. This chapter is particularly good at explaining how forms of time are created through spatial arrangements of cartoon elements. Could you produce a similar study of a web site?