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This page is for collecting information and thoughts on the EYE On Art 2016 programme.
This page is for the PZI ResearchLab EYE On Art 2016 programme.
[[File:Eye-floorplan.png|500px|right|Eye floorplan (red area)]]


== Team ==
==Boundaries of the Archive. Main project text for use in media/prints/promotion==


Please add your name to the list if you're not there yet!
Boundaries of the Archive


* Julie
* Christina
* Cihad
* Ally
* Solange
* Ruben
* Sarah
* Joana
* Lucas
* Thomas
* Arantxa (?)
* Samira
* Julia
* Natalie
* Benjamin (?)
* Yuzhen
* Stone


== Stage 1: Themes/Questions/Topics/... ==
The Piet Zwart Institute ResearchLab is focused on the boundaries of the archive. As media practitioners studying the structures and cultural impacts of our media technologies, we concentrate on the intricate and usually hidden aspects of EYE’s extensive archive.  


The idea is to first come to a collective theme/question/topic/description/... to form an umbrella for our works.
The EYE Collection is internationally recognised for its outstanding historical breadth and quality, particularly in relation to Dutch cinema culture. Any limitations, frictions and little noticed quirks in the archival system serve as poetic inspiration.  


Please prepare for our next meeting by putting your ideas in the following list:
The timing of this exhibition coincides with the moving of the EYE Collection to new premises. It provides a starting point to explore the materiality of both digital and analogue films, the poetics of cataloguing them, and the fragile semantics of a vast collection database.


* Questions: What practices lie in the boundaries between cinema, art and digital technologies? What can be said about their interaction today? (lucas)
==Individial works/projects==
* Theme: <span style="color:red">Colour</span>
'''Documentary film + 6 individual projects'''
* Theme: Time and space in cinema history , Future Prediction and/or view on the past true cinema.
Overview equipment/media:
* Question: what are the specifics that constitute film/cinema? What happens if we apply these to other things. (Ie. if film is about moving people, that what happens if a game emotes people?) Or what happens if we apply these specifics in an algorithmic manner?
* Cinematic emotions. Investigate how cinema (and maybe other media expressions) triggers emotions or set moods. See ie. [http://www.stedelijk.nl/en/exhibitions/70432 Ed Atkins]


*Documentary film: video only; no sound (to be projected in short wall opposite door...)
#Thomas & Jules: video only; no sound
#Nataliya: video and sound
#Solange: sound only & sculptural instalation (film cans)
#Lucas & Yuzhen: video and sound
#Cihad: video and sound
#Ruben & Cristina: video and sound


Let's not over-analyse things:
=== Documentary film ===
{{#widget:YouTube|id=rm94Lb2mz4s|height=360|width=480}}
The "documentary film" will be about 10 to 20 min long. No sound.
------------
'''Allyson (little Arantxa)'''<br><br>


Objectification of the subject in cinema<br>
It mixes the EYE Collection locations and archivists at work, in a non-narrative edit.
Gore and obscenity<br>
Propaganda<br>
Degradation<br>
Digitization<br>
Self exploitation via technology<br>
What is the role of exploitation in cinema / what is the propaganda value of self exploitation in cinema?<br>


-------------


==== Lucas Proposal 1 ("The legacy of Expanded Cinema in the Age of ditigal networks" blah blah highbrow blah etc)====
=== 1) Thomas and Jules===
The aim of the project is to merge symbolically all the items of the archive through the realisation of a single End credit video.
End credits list all the individuals involved in the production of a video. In this case, we would display the list of all individuals involved with the production of the content of the Eye's Archive regardless of the production they worked on. Those credits would be particularly long, (perhaps too long for the whole show) underlining the vertiginous amount of content gathered by the Eye's archive. Some names would be missing due to the very fact that they were not listed by the people who produced the data stored in the Archive's database. This doesn't really matter, as we consider that the relationship between a member of crew and the archive exists has the result of human labour (an archive's employee). Our approach is a way to insist more lightly on the physical difficulty for a human to apprehend the collection through a direct face-to-face.


As we will be dealing with a (historical) archive in some ways, I think it may be useful to tap into some of the history of experimental cinema, especially on expanded cinema.
Needed:
* a computer
* a video projector
* a bench


Proposal:
===2) Nataliya===
An audio-visual installation that explores metadata of the pieces from silent cinema collection, their visual language, and narrative specificities, to generate sound or, in other words, insonify the film. Few silent video pieces composed for 3 screens and insonifyed.
The archiving process follows strict policy and sustains personal/human impact. My project is a metaphor for this process. I investigate the possibility of creating 'objective' model of sound generation and my personal impact on it as the author of maxims for the process. Insonification is based on motion vectors, extracted from the video and mapped to the process of sound generation. The way sound is synthesised is based on metadata and the rules I set up for it.


“The legacy of expanded cinema in digital culture.
Facilities, needed for installation:
* Three screens
* Sound system (To discuss. Maybe we all will use headphones, maybe not)
* laptop to synchronize videos


I propose to explore practices and works that lie at the boundaries of “traditional” cinema, art and (today’s) network culture.
===3) Solange===
For my personal project for the EYE, I’m going to give films an anthropomorphic voice to tell about their own individual experiences
in the EYE archive. Each film tells a narrative, about their self’s, there past or present in the archive. Each with a different character
and voice. I present an archive of narratives of the film archive. I present the past in the present.
This will be an audio piece, but I was thinking of whispering voices. (You have to get close to her it)


This could be approached as “the legacy of expanded cinema” today.
What do I need:
*Sound system (I prefer not headphones, but that’s in consideration)


Expanded cinema refers to a wide practice of moving-image art/films from the 1960s onwards (the term was first popularized by Gene Youngblood’s 1970 influential study on film and media art “Expanded Cinema”). Mainly refers to cinematic and film-based works that go beyond the two-dimensional single screen convention. The central motto for artists and filmmakers associated with expanded cinema is to have “an expanded concept of art”, where art does not have to conform to traditional categories.
===4) Lucas & Yuzhen===
One concept I was developing involves the reading of the keyword list (Trefwoorden-thesaurus) - a selection of about 100 entries. The reading is done by several people, all non-Dutch speakers. (to highlight the language limitations in accesibility of this international archive).


Is "Expanded cinema" still a useful category today though? Does it refer to a "medium", in the sense usually understood? With the ubiquity of moving-image installations, and the inclusion of moving image components within larger and complex works, does it make sense to speak of expanded cinema today?
The thesaurus system applied to the Eye Archive is a one to many system, in another word, there are many secondary items under each thesaurus that are correspnsive to the content of the Eye Archive. So I take each item into images.google.nl(because the staff from the eye also use google translate their thesaurus in English), and get the first image from the search results and make them into a sequence. Later on, it reminds me that when I did the "Dreamachine" research, Ruben showed me his mock up of this flicking effects with sequencing images. So I consider to make the video in this manner in this way to imply its limited communicability.
:I discussed with Lucus if it is possible to combine our works, since he has the audio parts and I have the vision part. Then maybe I should aplly the rhythm of images to his sound recordings. 
:I tested with the genre-thesaurus items, but Lucus suggested that the keywords system is more subjective.


For this reason (these questions), works from the archive can be presented as historical precursors to current practices that go beyond traditional cinema and act in the intersection of digital, network culture, film and art.
Equpment:
* Headphones
* one screen, no need to be big, could be 21.5" screen wrape with black surround.


questions: How to bring something new to the conversation of cinema / art / media / networked technology, etc?
===5) Cihad===


A synesthetic cinematic spectacle, where the notions of conventional film language (narrative, structure, etc) are extended outside the single-screen space, and into:
*Beamer
* multiple projections,
*Sound shower
* mixed media,
* complex film projects,
* live action / performance films,
* intermedia techniques
* audience participation


===6) Ruben & Cristina===
Equipment:
*Monitor or projector
*Headphones


Things that can be included apart from moving-image based works:
== Equipment ==
*Printed ephemera
What the EYE says:
*Publications
*Flip-books


-------------
They have:
*'''3 beamers''',
*1 monitor, (though Anna mentioned they might have no monitors/tv screen at all)
*sound speakers,
*probably one headphones.
*We are going to project on the walls in dark grey, which enhances the colors of the videos, both colour and black and white works.
*We will use beamers with 4000 lumen and probably media players for mpg. More specifications will follow
*Contact on media player technical details, and overall equipment: '''Communication will be through Simon''' (Anna Dabrowska is not in charge any more on ResearchLab)


==== Lucas Proposal 2: <span style="color:red">Colour</span> ====
== Exhibition design ideas ==


Colour in moving-image
* Archive-porn film to be projected on the shorter wall, directly opposite the door.


Moving Colour
== Resources ==
=== Main Database ===
[http://catalogue.eyefilm.nl/ce/ Database]


The treatment of colour in art cinema.
User name: bezoeker


The history of cinema is, of course, closely related with the advances in its technology.  And perhaps this is most obvious in the use of colour in film art. It could be interesting to contrasts different approaches to colour in different times and technologies:
Password: ceguestwelcome
*film (16mm, etc. the practice of painting directly onto the filmstock)
*video (analogue tape and video signals)
*digital (digital film/animation, internet-based)
*moving-image installations (i.e. Olafur Eliasson, etc)


Since the advent of abstract painting within the historical avant-gardes, artists have experimented with abstraction and non-representational cinema. But only with colour techniques the use of abstraction was brought into a new level to a pair with experiments in painting at the time.
=== Links ===
[http://pzwart1.wdka.hro.nl/pad/p/eye_project_2015_2016 Eye on the Pad]


Approaches to colour in film have been very varied, from romantic, sublime considerations and themes (Stan Brakhage), to clinical and structuralist strategies (Malcom Le Grice, etc).
[https://www.eyefilm.nl/collectie/selectie/bits-and-pieces Bits and Pieces]


There might be plenty in the EYE archive to play with the range of these approaches.  
[https://www.eyefilm.nl/en/activities/library Library webpage]
Though experiments in colour tend to take the form of abstract works and installations (it is probably easier then to tackle “pure” colour),  we could also underscore the power of colour beyond abstract films works: examples in which a particular palette choice gives meaning to an image…


(any “four seasons” film come to mind?....)
[http://bibliotheek.eyefilm.nl/opc_internet/index.html Library catalogue]


We could use distinct areas of the gallery to have works with mainly different colours, like a predominantly blue area, etc.
[https://www.eyefilm.nl/files/eyecollectionpolicy2014-2017pdf-0/download Eye Museum Collection Policy 2014-2017]


(Although I’d rather concentrate on experimental film, video art, arthouse cinema and mixed works that disregard the division of traditional cinema and art, it could be useful to see the changes in cinematographic choices in narrative feature films – I mean, in “traditional” cinema. This might include consideration of the photographic palette in, for example, Kiewslovki’s Three Colours trilogy, Dereck Jarman’s Blue, Almodovar’s red settings, Peter Greenaway colours, etc …  that is, films in which the colour plays an important part in the movie, in the narrative or by its meaning, or whatever. (yes I know, these examples are the usual suspects in modern/contemporary film … have to dig up more into the archive, although I’d rather this be a side thing…)
[https://www.eyefilm.nl/en/collection/selection/collection-dossiers/experimental-film-in-the-netherlands Experimental film in the Netherlands]


[http://kortefilmpoule.eyefilm.nl/ Korte Film Poule] (short film pool)


-------------
[http://www.filmbank.nl/ Film Bank]


'''Some more keywords/etc by Lucas'''
From EYE presentation:
* Contact Tessa or Anna, ask Solange or Thomas
* '''The collection of Bits & Pieces''' (fragments from the early cinema in public domain suitable for remixes) can be accessed at any time but, except in a few cases,  it is mostly in SD resolution.
* '''The collection of the Korte Film Poule''' (http://kortefilmpoule.eyefilm.nl) will be always available for curated  screenings.


*The EYE archive has a collection of film fragments, and we can use this, etc.
=== Old wiki page (initial ideas, etc) ===
*But what is it about fragments? Can we say that an archive (an a history) is always fragmentary?
*Films of fragments / A fragmented film.


* How is the EYE archive organized? Maybe the EYE Institute has a classificatory system, with keywords, etc...
Archived at: [[EYE on Art 2016 - Initial drafts]]
* We can look into the way te EYE archive is constructed, pick ''their'' keywords and present a programme based on ''their''' classification....


-------------


==== Some keywords from Sol ====
=== IMAGES ===


Non-human, human, s-f, space, outer space, alien, imaginary, unimaginary, perception, hyperreality, believe, desire
[[File:Eyeonart00.jpg |600px ]]
 
[[File:Eyeonart01.jpg |600px ]]
-------------
[[File:Eyeonart02.jpg |600px ]]
 
[[File:Eyeonart03.jpg |600px ]]
===='''Cihad''' ====
 
*Some of us were part of Thematic Seminar with Florian last year. We investigated media as an object.
*Maybe we can use some subjects from these notes or we can use this subject(object). Archive as an object? Film as an object?
*What kind of relation we have with film? with archive?
*film is non-human made by human
*What is the relation between human and film(non-human)
*What are the components of film? time, space, darkness, sound? How do they effect us? What is the future cinema? hyperreality?
 
 
[[File:Encyclopedia Media Object.JPG|750px]]
 
==== Benjamin ====
 
* "light" topic vs topic connected to our/the course
 
# Do we want to attract an audience that understand easily what our exibition will be about?
 
* We should have a clear look at their archive, maybe as soon as possible to get an idea what it is and what it means and can mean to us. Maybe we should have a clear look at it before we decide what the topic of our show will be.
 
* Expanded Cinema/ out of the box-presentation / Video and screens as installations
# https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJhgIcbSEeM
# https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a56RPZ_cbdc
# Projections to the ceilling
 
==== Ruben ====
 
 
Lacking a strong knowledge of film history, I believe we should be careful in approaching the EYE film archive from such a perspective. On the other hand, what distinguishes PZI is that it can investigate/interrogate the fundamentals and structures, the fabric, of the archive -- both technically and 'ethically' -- and use that as a starting point for works.
 
Possible questions could then be:
 
* How is the database annotated?
** Ie. How are genres determined/attributed
** What about other 'tags'?
** Is there another system?
* How is chosen what is in the archive? Ie. who currates it, based on what/based on which assumptions?
* What is absent from the archive? Ar the proposals that are rejected not as much part of the Dutch film history as those that were accepted and produced?
* What are ways to order the archive? Utilise algorithms (see ie. the project from Michael)
* ......
 
Or in short: What story is in the archive?
 
'''Possible Reads'''
 
Foucault - The history as archaeology text Some database aesthetics ...?
 
== Meeting Monday 28th ==
 
[[File:Eyemeeting280915.JPG|400px ]]
 
*Cinema art - Technology, Distribution, Circulation
*Time/Cinema History (Time and Space)
*Future Predictions (Society-People-Technology
*What Constitutes Cinema?
*Objectification of Subject (Gore,Propaganda,Self Exposure )
*Digital Decay
*Cinematography Change Over time
*Metadata, tackling archive , bias.. Failures of taging, errors
*Record keeping of the Archive
*Misleading Cinema
*Catagorys

Latest revision as of 11:34, 16 May 2016

This page is for the PZI ResearchLab EYE On Art 2016 programme.

Eye floorplan (red area)

Boundaries of the Archive. Main project text for use in media/prints/promotion

Boundaries of the Archive


The Piet Zwart Institute ResearchLab is focused on the boundaries of the archive. As media practitioners studying the structures and cultural impacts of our media technologies, we concentrate on the intricate and usually hidden aspects of EYE’s extensive archive.

The EYE Collection is internationally recognised for its outstanding historical breadth and quality, particularly in relation to Dutch cinema culture. Any limitations, frictions and little noticed quirks in the archival system serve as poetic inspiration.

The timing of this exhibition coincides with the moving of the EYE Collection to new premises. It provides a starting point to explore the materiality of both digital and analogue films, the poetics of cataloguing them, and the fragile semantics of a vast collection database.

Individial works/projects

Documentary film + 6 individual projects Overview equipment/media:

  • Documentary film: video only; no sound (to be projected in short wall opposite door...)
  1. Thomas & Jules: video only; no sound
  2. Nataliya: video and sound
  3. Solange: sound only & sculptural instalation (film cans)
  4. Lucas & Yuzhen: video and sound
  5. Cihad: video and sound
  6. Ruben & Cristina: video and sound

Documentary film

The "documentary film" will be about 10 to 20 min long. No sound.

It mixes the EYE Collection locations and archivists at work, in a non-narrative edit.


1) Thomas and Jules

The aim of the project is to merge symbolically all the items of the archive through the realisation of a single End credit video. End credits list all the individuals involved in the production of a video. In this case, we would display the list of all individuals involved with the production of the content of the Eye's Archive regardless of the production they worked on. Those credits would be particularly long, (perhaps too long for the whole show) underlining the vertiginous amount of content gathered by the Eye's archive. Some names would be missing due to the very fact that they were not listed by the people who produced the data stored in the Archive's database. This doesn't really matter, as we consider that the relationship between a member of crew and the archive exists has the result of human labour (an archive's employee). Our approach is a way to insist more lightly on the physical difficulty for a human to apprehend the collection through a direct face-to-face.

Needed:

  • a computer
  • a video projector
  • a bench

2) Nataliya

An audio-visual installation that explores metadata of the pieces from silent cinema collection, their visual language, and narrative specificities, to generate sound or, in other words, insonify the film. Few silent video pieces composed for 3 screens and insonifyed. The archiving process follows strict policy and sustains personal/human impact. My project is a metaphor for this process. I investigate the possibility of creating 'objective' model of sound generation and my personal impact on it as the author of maxims for the process. Insonification is based on motion vectors, extracted from the video and mapped to the process of sound generation. The way sound is synthesised is based on metadata and the rules I set up for it.

Facilities, needed for installation:

  • Three screens
  • Sound system (To discuss. Maybe we all will use headphones, maybe not)
  • laptop to synchronize videos

3) Solange

For my personal project for the EYE, I’m going to give films an anthropomorphic voice to tell about their own individual experiences in the EYE archive. Each film tells a narrative, about their self’s, there past or present in the archive. Each with a different character and voice. I present an archive of narratives of the film archive. I present the past in the present. This will be an audio piece, but I was thinking of whispering voices. (You have to get close to her it)

What do I need:

  • Sound system (I prefer not headphones, but that’s in consideration)

4) Lucas & Yuzhen

One concept I was developing involves the reading of the keyword list (Trefwoorden-thesaurus) - a selection of about 100 entries. The reading is done by several people, all non-Dutch speakers. (to highlight the language limitations in accesibility of this international archive).

The thesaurus system applied to the Eye Archive is a one to many system, in another word, there are many secondary items under each thesaurus that are correspnsive to the content of the Eye Archive. So I take each item into images.google.nl(because the staff from the eye also use google translate their thesaurus in English), and get the first image from the search results and make them into a sequence. Later on, it reminds me that when I did the "Dreamachine" research, Ruben showed me his mock up of this flicking effects with sequencing images. So I consider to make the video in this manner in this way to imply its limited communicability.

I discussed with Lucus if it is possible to combine our works, since he has the audio parts and I have the vision part. Then maybe I should aplly the rhythm of images to his sound recordings.
I tested with the genre-thesaurus items, but Lucus suggested that the keywords system is more subjective.

Equpment:

  • Headphones
  • one screen, no need to be big, could be 21.5" screen wrape with black surround.

5) Cihad

  • Beamer
  • Sound shower

6) Ruben & Cristina

Equipment:

  • Monitor or projector
  • Headphones

Equipment

What the EYE says:

They have:

  • 3 beamers,
  • 1 monitor, (though Anna mentioned they might have no monitors/tv screen at all)
  • sound speakers,
  • probably one headphones.
  • We are going to project on the walls in dark grey, which enhances the colors of the videos, both colour and black and white works.
  • We will use beamers with 4000 lumen and probably media players for mpg. More specifications will follow
  • Contact on media player technical details, and overall equipment: Communication will be through Simon (Anna Dabrowska is not in charge any more on ResearchLab)

Exhibition design ideas

  • Archive-porn film to be projected on the shorter wall, directly opposite the door.

Resources

Main Database

Database

User name: bezoeker

Password: ceguestwelcome

Links

Eye on the Pad

Bits and Pieces

Library webpage

Library catalogue

Eye Museum Collection Policy 2014-2017

Experimental film in the Netherlands

Korte Film Poule (short film pool)

Film Bank

From EYE presentation:

  • Contact Tessa or Anna, ask Solange or Thomas
  • The collection of Bits & Pieces (fragments from the early cinema in public domain suitable for remixes) can be accessed at any time but, except in a few cases, it is mostly in SD resolution.
  • The collection of the Korte Film Poule (http://kortefilmpoule.eyefilm.nl) will be always available for curated screenings.

Old wiki page (initial ideas, etc)

Archived at: EYE on Art 2016 - Initial drafts


IMAGES

Eyeonart00.jpg Eyeonart01.jpg Eyeonart02.jpg Eyeonart03.jpg