SOFT CINEMA: IMAGES

hi-res stills for print
[3200 x 2300 ]


jpeg 2.3 Mg
tiff 5.8 Mg

jpeg 1.5 Mg
tiff 3.9 Mg

screen grabs
[800 x 580]
jpegs 30-40 KB each

screen layout
examples

SOFT CINEMA: SUMMARY
How to represent the subjective experience of a person living in a global information society? If daily interaction with volumes of data and numerous messages is part of our new “data-subjectivity,” how can we visualize this subjectivity in new ways using new media— without resorting to already familiar and “normalized” modernist techniques of montage, surrealism, absurd?

Soft(ware) Cinema investigates a few approaches towards answering these questions. The fictional stories which come from a collection entitled GUI (Global User Interface) are presented as a series of short movies. While the voice over narrating the stories was edited before hand. everything else is constructed by software in real time, including 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 other words, Soft Cinema can be thought of as a semi-automatic VJ (Video Jockey) —or more precisely, a FJ (Film Jockey).

Using Graphical User Interface, financial TV programs and Mondrian as the templates, Soft Cinema breaks the screen into a number of frames. The video which appear within these frames selected 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 ideas:
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.


Concepts: Medium-length Version (500 words)

Soft Cinema explorers 4 ideas.

1. The first is algorithmic editing of media materials. Each video clips used in Soft Cinema is assigned keywords which describe both the "content" of a clip (geographical location, presence of people in the scene, etc.) and its "formal" properties (dominant color, dominant line orientation, contrast, camera movement, etc.). Some of the keywords are generated automatically using image processing software while others are input by hand. The program (written in LINGO) assembles the video track by selecting clips one after another using a system rules (i.e. an algorithm). Diffirent systems of rules are possible: for instance, selecting a clip which is closest in color or type of motion to the previous one; selecting a clip which matches the previous one party in content and party in color, repalcing only every other clip to create a kind of parallel montage sequence, and on on.

2. The second idea is database narrative. Rather than beginning with a script and then creating media elements which visualise it, I investigate a diffirent paradigm: starting with a large database and then generating narratives from it. In Soft Cinema, The media elements are selected from a database of a few hundred video clips to construct a potentially unlimited number of different short films.

3. The third idea is what I call macro-cinema. While filmmakers such as Peter Greenaway and Mike Figgis have already used a multi-screen format for fiction films, thinking about the visual conventions of Graphical User Interface as used in computer culture gives us a diffirent way to do macro-cinema. If a computer user employs windows of diffirent proportions and sizes, why not adopt the similar aesthetics for cinema? In Soft Cinema, the generation of each video begins with the computer program semi-ranomly breaking the screen into a number of square regions of diffirent dimensions. During the playback diffirent clips are assigned to diffirent regions. In this way, software determines both temporal and spatial organisation of a work, i.e. both sequnecing of clips and their composition.

4. The forth idea is to create a true multi-media cinema. In Soft Cinema video is used as just one type of representation among others: 2D animation, motion graphics (i.e. animated text), stills, 3D scenes (as in computer games), diagrams, etc. In addition, Soft Cinema supplements a "normal" video image with other types of lens-based imagiory commonly used today by industry, science, medecine and military: the low res web cam image, an infrared image, edge-detected image as employed in computer vision, etc. While some music videos and artist videos already mix some of these diffirent types of imagery in one work, Soft Cinema assigns each type of imagery to a separate window in order to dramatize the new status of “normal” video, photographic and film image today – no longer the dominant but just one source of visual information about reality among many others. The additional inspiration for using diffirent representation of the same scene next to each other comes from the display setups used in medecine, aviation and other contemporary workplaces. Finally, rather than simply using these diffirent types of representation for a purely visual effect, Soft Cinema investigates the possibilities of using them together for fictional narration.

Concepts: Extended Version (1200 words)


Project History

Soft Cinema incorporates the project macro-cinema (1997-2000) which was developed as reaction to the earlier project little movies (1994-1997).

Additional Texts

The original Soft Cinema proposal for ZKM (2000):
www.manovich.net/cinema_future/manovich_proposal_1.htm

The text from The Language of New Media on macro-cinema (1999):
www.manovich.net/macrocinema.doc

Soft Cinema is an example of a "database narrative" proposed in my article Database as a Symbolic Form (1998)

SOFT CINEMA: ARCHITECTURE
Referencing “brandscaping” (the three-dimensional design of brand settings), early algorithmic computer art, and the logic of modernist art movements (in which painting, graphic design, architecture, and industrial design were typically driven by a single aesthetic system), we used the same algorithm to generate the screen layouts, the layout of the Soft Cinema book, and the 3D layouts of the Soft Cinema installation. If Le Courbusier’s system of proportions was based on the dimensions of a human body, our system takes as its origin the dimensions of a DV NTSC image: 720 x 480 pixels. In addition, the contrast between various types of images (video, 2D animation, etc.) used in Soft Cinema movies is translated into the contrasting materials used in the installation.

(Concept by Jason Danziger – think/build group)

INSTALLATION ARCHITECTURE

Project History

Lev Manovich: Initial Concepts | July 2002
1 | installation description
2 | theory part 1
3 | theory part 2
4 | overall view
5 possible spatial layouts


Jason Danziger / think/build group | September 2002
plan PDF
elevation PDF

Ruth Lorenz / maaskant: ZKM Future Cinema version | October 2002
two alternative elevations
final elevation (built version)
axonometric view

Andreas Angelidakis: two proposals (unrealised)
design 12/01
design 8/02

SOFT CINEMA: NARRATIVES

Texts used for narration in Soft Cinema movies come from GUI (Global User Interface) [GUI], a collection of short stories I have been working on since 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.)

Typically, a story have been divided into a number of sequential parts, each part becoming a short movie. 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 related 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.”

Put differently, the subject of Soft Cinema is the new “global style,” or a “global layer” of globalization: the hotel lobbies, the airport waiting lounges, shopping, the info-workers staring at computer terminals, the reflective and transparent surfaces of office buildings, people waiting for the next train at a new shiny station, etc.

RELATED PROJECTS

www.thickspace.net
[ AVRA - free software for random playback of video]

www.korsakow.com
[Korsakov tool - free software for the construction of interactive movies]

www.muvee.com
[commercial software]

www.artscilab.org/expandedcinema.html
[text of Expanded Cinema, 1970]

www.neither-field.com/ok
["an autonomous video texture generator
constant remixes from a d.base of graphic abstraction"]