User:Emily/Self-Evaluation trimester IV

Notes

Here is the page for gathering research materials focusing on moving image studies. The reading and notes will help me to understand the history and changes of the mechanism of moving image production. Through examining those mechanisms, I want to address my strategies to build new connections among moving images and explore alternatives with human interfering or maybe body involvement.

There are a lot of terms within or related to moving image, such as Cinema, Animation, Video Art, Media Art etc. What's more there are even more genres under them, like music video, video game, avant-garde film to name just a few. I believe there are overlay within those terms and in oder to make the study clear, I take the term moving image, which I emphasised on the mechanism of producing movement or illusion of the dynamic. Under such huge range, I think I should also pick several main subjects to look at. Briefly starting with pro-cinematic devices (Phenakistiscope1832, Thaumatrop, Zootrope1833, Pranxinoscope), then cinema because it has a systematic language, cinematic language, to start with. Then gradually get to digital cinema which is actually be considered as a particular case of animation by Lev Manovich, and last but not least several cases in computer-based moving image.

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What is digital cinema

Cinema is not equivalent to storytelling and 'what used to be cinema's defining characteristics have become just the default options, with many other available.'

'As testified by its original names(kinetoscope, cinematograph, moving pictures), cinema was understood, from its birth, as the art of motion.' At its origin, it requited manual action to create movement. (twirling the strings of the Thaumatrope, rotating the Zootrope's cylinder, turning the Viviscope's handle.) 'The movement itself was limited in range and affected only a clearly defined figure rather than the whole image' The movement were based on loops, sequence of images which can be played repeatedly. Although cinematic machines had been built to increase the duration of loop, in order to adopt a much longer narrative form, cutting short seems foredoomed to be developed.

'Once the cinema was stabilised as a technology, it cut all references to its origins in artifice...all of this was delegated to cinema's bastard relative, its supplement, its shadow --animation. Twentieth century animation became a depository for nineteenth century moving image techniques left behind by cinema.' 'In contrast, cinema works hard to erase any traces of its own production process.' 'It pretends to be a simple recording of an already existing reality --both to a viewer and to itself. Cinema'a public image stressed the aura of reality "captured" on film, thus implying that cinema was about photographing what existed before the camera, rather than "never-was" of special effects.'

What is Digital Cinema 1. rather than filming physical reality it is now possible to generate film-like scenes directly in a computer with the help of 3-D computer animation 2. once live action footage is digitised (or directly recorded in a digital format), it loses its privileged indexical relationship to pro-filmic reality. 3. if live action footage was left intact in traditional filmmaking, now it functions as raw material for further compositing, animating and morphing. 4. previously editing and special effects were strictly separate activities Digital cinema is a particular case of animation which uses live action footage as one of its man elements. Born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its boundary, only to become one particular case of animation in the end. In principle given enough time and money, one can create what will be the ultimate digital film: 90mins, i.e., 129600 frames completely painted by hand from scratch, but indistinguishable in appearance from live photography. In commercial cinema, the use of computer is always carefully hidden. with examples from Manovich, it can be perceived the shift from re-arranging reality to re-arranging its images.

To conclude, for me, the circular transformation from animation to cinema back to animation again, the challenge which digital media poses to cinema extends far beyond the issue of narrative, but the very essential making of moving image, the language and syntax.

Computational Cinema

In the 60s technology and software became a field of research to a few artist and scientist in search for new visual and musical dialect. Graphic representations of codes became the main subject. In the 80s main pursuit shift to create the photorealistic image via computer modelling, rendering and to serve asa special tool. nowadays, the theme of visualising codes of complex digital structures, methods and the relation between sound and image that underline the working of the computer's inner information flow became the interest once again by new generation of artist.

Cinema & New Media

Cinema as New Media

Any digital representation consists from a limited number of samples.(digital still imgage is a matrix of pixels: a 2D sampling of space). Cinema was already based on sampling -- the sample of time.(twenty four times a second.)

Cinema as Cultural Interface

cinematic way of seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating a story, of linking one experience to the next are being extended to become the basic ways in which computer users access and interacct with all cultural data.(visual Espreanto)

Printed word tradition structures interface language; now it is cinema's turn. The most important case cinema's influence on cultural interface Culture Interface -- mobile camera. As computer culture is gradually spatializing all representations and experiences, they become subjected to the camera's particular grammar of data access. Zoom, tilt, pan and track: we now use these operations to interact with data spaces, models, objects and bodies. Another feature of cinematic perception which persists in cultural interfaces is a rectangular perception which persists in cultural interfaces is a rectangular framing of represented reality.(Cinema itself inherited this framing from Western painting. Since the Renaissance, the frame acted as a window onto a larger space which was assumed to extend beyong the frame.) Computer interface benifits from a new invention introduced by cinema: the mobility of the frame. As a kino-eye moves around the space revealing its different regions, so can a computer user scroll through a window's contents. (with a VRML interface, nature is firmly subsumed under culture. The eye is subordinated to the kino-eye.)

Element by element, cinema is being poured into computer both in software and hardware. This encoding is consistent with the overall trajectory driving the computerization of culture since the 1940's, taht being the automation of all cultural operations.(To take the automation of imaging as an example, in the early 1960's the newly emerging field of computer graphics incorporated a linear one-point perspective in 3D software, and later directly in hardware.)

first one-point linear perspective; next the mobile camera and a rectangular window; next cinematography and editing conventions, and, of course, digital personas also based on acting conventions borrowed from cinema, to be followed by make-up, set design, and the narrative structures themselves. From one cultural language among others, cinema is becoming the cultural interface, a toolbox for all cultural communication, overtaking the printed word.

reference works

• Ernie Gehr - Serene Velocity (1970)
• Zbigniew Rybczynski - tango (1981)