Soft Cinema: Narratives

Soft Cinema includes a number of movie sets each presenting a fictional short story. The stories come from a collection of stories written by the author between 1998 and 2002 and entitled Global User Interface [GUI]. Each story takes place in a diffirent location: Texas, Hamburg, Kiev, Mongolia, etc. (In writing the short stories, I followed the principle that they can only take place in the locations I never visited.)

Typically a story has been divided into a number of sequential parts, each part becoming a short movie. At the beginning of each part software generates a new screen layout, which can consist from two to six different windows. Software also selects which video clips and animations will play in these windows and in what order. This process is repeated for each of the part of the narrative. Following the same modular logic, diffirent voices are used for the diffirent parts of a story.

The small window that always appears in the bottom left corner identifies the part of a stories currently playing (for instance, texas_01.txt, texas_02.txt, etc.) A narrow horizontal window presents scrolling sentences selected from the same story part.

While the stories refer to the processes of globalisation and their effects of subjectivity, the visual track makes similar references in diffirent ways. Since most clips show the typical urban activities, Soft Cinema at first can be thought of as belonging to the genre of "city films" defined by such classics such as "A Man with a Movie Camera" and a "Symphony of a City." However, in contrast to these earlier films which included the expressive shots of various form of industrial labor, Soft Cinema repeatedly returns to the same bland image of information labor: a person in front of a computer. In addition, since we often see the clips shot on diffirent continents side by side, Soft Cinema more properly can be thought as a “global city film.”

Put differently, we can say that the subject of Soft Cinema is a “global layer” – the layer which is gradually spreading over the whole planet (interacting - or not - with other layers of local cultures): the hotel lobbies, the airport waiting lounges, the info-workers staring at computer terminals, and other spaces and situations which characterize the “global style.”