SOFT CINEMA: SUMMARY
Soft Cinema is a (potentially unlimited) collection of short movies in different styles. Some are in the tradition of “film essays,” some are fictional narratives, and some are non-narrative ambient music videos. While the sound track of each movie is fixed by the author, the visual track is constructed by software. The software decides what appears on the screen, where, and in which sequence. The decisions are based partly on a system of rules, and are partly random. In short, Soft Cinema can be thought of as a semi-automatic VJ—or more precisely, a FJ (Film Jockey).

This exhbition presents a particular set of movies constructed using the software. The source material for the visual track comes from a large database. Each video clip in the database follows Dogma 95 rules: it was shot in continuous takes without edits using a hand-held camera. Most of the clips have been recorded by the author while in Berlin, Tokyo, Moscow, San Paolo and other locations between 1999 and 2002; a few clips are simulated (i.e. a still image was animated to look like a video shot on location).

SOFT CINEMA: CONCEPTS
Soft Cinema explorers 4 concepts:
1. "Algorithmic Cinema."
Using systems of rules, software controls both the layout of the screen (number and positions of frames) and the sequences of media elements which appear in these frames.
4. "Database Cinema." The media elements are selected from a large database to construct a potentially unlimited number of different narrative films.
2. "Macro-cinema." Soft Cinema imagines how moving images may look when the Net will mature, and when unlimited bandwidth and very high resolution displays would become the norm.
3. "Multimedia cinema." In Soft Cinema video is used as only one type of representation among others: 2D animation, motion graphics, 3D scenes, diagrams, etc.

SOFT CINEMA: NARRATIVES
Texts used for voice in some Soft Cinema movies come from Global User Interface [GUI], a collection of short stories by Lev Manovich (1998 -).
Each story takes place in a different location: Texas, Hamburg, Kiev, Mongolia, etc. (In writing the short stories, I tried to follow the principle that they can only take place in locations that I have never visited.)

Each story have been divided into a number of short segments. At the beginning of each segment, the software generates a new screen layout, which can be comprised of two to six different windows. Soft Cinema also selects which video clips and animations will play in these windows and in what order. This process is repeated for each part of the narrative. Following the same modular logic, different voices are used for different parts of each story.

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

While the narratives make reference to the processes of globalization and their effects on subjectivity, the visual track makes similar references, but in different ways. Since most clips show typical urban activities, Soft Cinema at first can be thought of as belonging to the genre of "city films" defined by such classics as A Man with a Movie Camera, and A Symphony of a City. However, in contrast to these earlier films which included expressive shots of various forms 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 clips that were shot on different continents side by side, Soft Cinema can be more properly thought of as a “global city film.”