ACM Multimedia'96 Hynes Convention Center
November 18 - 22, 1996 Boston, MA, USA
Storytelling after Cinema I
Thursday, November 21, 9:00 - 10:00 am, Room 306, Panel 4,
Moderator: Cynthia Goodman
Panelists: Monika Fleischmann, Peter Callas, Walter Siegfried, Beat Funk
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#Cynthia Goodman
InfoART, an interactive CD-ROM art catalog, highlights the achievements
of sixteen of the leading artists in the world who are working in new media
including Nam June Paik, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, Scott
Fisher, Perry Hoberman, Paul Earls, Paul Garrin, Steina Vasulka, David
Rokeby, Tsai Wen-Ying, Peter d'Agostino, Edmond Couchot, Benjamin Britton, Grahame Weinbren, Luc Courchesne and Jean-Louis Boissier.
InfoART was edited and produced by digital art authority Cynthia
Goodman and published by Rutt Video and Interactive, New York.
Many of the works included premiered in the InfoART Pavilion at
the ,95 Kwangju Biennale organized jointly by Goodman and Paik.
The interactive multimedia compositions on the CD utilize video,
virtual reality, digital photography, synthesized music, three-dimensional
laser imagery, digital life and the world wide web. The work of
each artist is explained through interviews, video documentation,
diagrammtic illustrations, biographical information and criticism.
CV
Dr. Cynthia Goodman was former Director of the IBM Gallery of Science and Art, New York, where she organized the landmark Computers and Art exhibition. The acompanying publication Digital Visions: Computers and Art serves as a textbook in the field. As Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT, she was director of Arttransition '90. Currently she is organizing a large travelling exhibition of interactive art for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, writing a book on interactivity and art as well as developing interactive art projects at Rutt Video and Interactive.
email: CGood5474@aol.com
Media: CD-ROM, Mac/PC
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#Monika Fleischmann
Storytelling after cinema
Storytelling in virtual performance environments (internet, on-line tv, virtual theater) has to consider:
- the effect of a work on its audience but also the quality of the presence
- the structure of narrative itself
- the needs or desires of the performance maker
- the signification of gesture, body, mouvement, dialogues
- the interaction between actor and stage and props but also the audience
- the use of technical and creative support as such as sound and video
- the perception and acting concept but also the organisation
and management of the performance-places.
Using virtual objects, spaces and bodies, ways are shown in which
the influences of the technology / the media can be reflected
at an aesthetic level, and in which several types of relationships
of man and technology can be designed and tested. Traditional
tools of illusion such as theatre stages or TV screens are basically
defined by delimitation and therefore have to be separated from
the viewers. The virtual media, however, provide access to spaces
without frontiers. They deal the dissolution of space and time
- and the telling of non-linear stories. The human body is the
interface between the inside and the outside, between reality
and virtual reality. Works discussed: Home of the Brain, Liquid
Views, Rigid Waves, Virtual Performance.
CV
Monika Fleischmann is a media artist and head of computer art activities at GMD's Institute for Media Communication. In 1988 she was one of the founder members of ART+COM, Berlin, a research institute for computer assisted media research. Her multidiscipline background (fashion design, art and drama, computergraphics) made her an expert in the world of art, computer science and media technology. Her artistic works deals with identity and perception, the research projects are based on interface
design, and new forms of communication. Her main interest is to
bring poetry and imagination into media artworks. Opposite to
the theory of the disappearing body her position in media theory
is to recover the senses of the body.
email: fleischmann@gmd.de, http://viswiz.gmd.de/fleischmann
Media: S-VHS-NTSC
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#Luc Courchesne
Authoring a hypermedia play: Salon des ombres / Hall of Shadows
Interactive theatre for four virtual beings and a live audience using
five networked computers with touch pads, four laserdiscs players and
four video projectors. Produced in collaboration with the Musee
d'art contemporain de Montreal, with support from the Canada Council,
The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec and the ZKM / Karlsruhe.
The idea for my new work Hall of Shadows, which I call an interactive
video theater, came when I imagined out of nowhere these four characters busily entertaining each other while tolerating my conspicuous presence. I felt that, if they didn't really want me to get involved in their
discussion, they would simply have to deal with it if I did. The set up
for writing an interactive "play" was in place. From my position Ñ eventually the visitor's Ñ I felt a delicate ballance had to be achieved between watching and getting involved. A finished "hyperplay" script could look like an extravagant music score, the problem being how to reference the context for each sceen to help the actors. In my case, the shooting involved 4 cameras simultaneously recording the four actors interacting. I played visitors on the set. The difficulty in editing, and programming the footage was in making the now virtual actors play together as tightly as possible. It was like directing them again. As in theater, the "play" has to be staged. The exercise includes camouflaging electronic equipment and cables. Getting the most important content features to impact on visitors and monitoring their actions as prescisely as possible.
After Portrait One (1990) which explored the potential of the
conversational interface and of the fictional approach to hypermedia
portraiture, and after Family Portrait (1993) which experimented with
networking, multi-user systems and also with the the documentary
approach to hypermedia portraiture, The Hall of Shadows (1996)
further develops the user interface by introducing, along with
the imposed conversational framework which has become the trademark
of the previous work, a form of visitor modelisation that will
strenghten the impression of communication between visitors and
virtual beings.
CV
Luc Courchesne was born in 1952 in St-Leonard d'Aston, Qubec. He studied
at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax (Bachelor of Design
in Communication, 1974), and at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge (Master of Science in Visual Studies, 1984). He
began his explorations in interactive video in 1984 when he co-authored
Elastic Movies, one of the earliest experiement in the field with Ellen
Sebring, Benjamin Bergery, Bill Seaman and others. He has since produced
several installations including Encyclopedia Chiaroscuro (1987), Portrait
One (1990), Family Portrait (1993) and Hall of Shadows (1996). His work
has been shown extensively in galleries and museums worldwide.
(Sydney's Art Gallery of New South Wales, New York's Museum of
Modern Art, Montreal's Musee d'art contemporain, Ottawa's National
Gallery of Canada, Los Angeles County Museum of Art). He is professor
of information design at Universite de Montreal, and currently
artist in residence at the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington.
email: courchel@ere.umontreal.ca
Media: Video, Slides
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#Walter Siegfried
Sound-Tracks to Reality
I will present a type of work that I have developed over the last years - the composition of walks. These are compositions that were developed for a certain area and are presented via a walkman to the audience during a temporal coordinated walk. So the "story" develops during the movement of the walk, the route becomes the main thread of the composition, which is formed out of noises, elements of conversations and musical fragments.
The decisive factor is that the storytelling doesn't lead to an internal imagination, but leads perception out to the things and happenings that surround us. "The film" is composed of an unchanging artificial-artistic sound and of an active reality which is continuously developing a new, and which establishes itself as the real imageworld under the sound.
Hence the programmatic title of the first work of this type is:
"Sound-Tracks to Reality".I will try to convey the basic
idea in a talk using slides and sound illustrations.
CV
Walter Siegfried was born 1949 near Lucern, Switzerland. Finished his studies of Anthropological Psychology, History of Art, and Philosophy in 1977 with a doctoral dissertation on dance. Various teaching activities in Art Academies and Universities in Germany, France and Switzerland. 1982-85 Research work at the Max-Planck-Institute (Ethology) in Seewiesen on the biological aspects of dancing - published in "Beauty and the Brain" (Boston, Basel 1988) as "Dance, the Fugitive Form of Art. Aesthetics as
Behavior". Since 1986 free artistic projects encompassing
such fields as "Installation" (The Cable Core), "The
Art of Walking" (The City Dancers / Compositions for Walks
/ A Schubert Walk) and Performance" (Kleine Implantologie
/ Echo-Tope).
email: 106415.1060@compuserve.com (Walter Siegfried)
Media: Slideprojector for Euro-Slides (50x50mm), Audio cassette recorder
(Stereo), Amplifier, Speakers
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#Beat Funk
Cinematic Space
It is generally acknowledged that as a part of the cinematic experience,
the border between inside and outside tends to dissolve, the barrier
between what we call inner experience mental, emotional, psychological
processes, and that which takes place outside ourselves, outside
our bodies, out there in that thing which we have agreed to call
reality. Given the notion of an autonomous subject, that border
is something clearly defined, immovable. Inside is not outside,
and vice versa. The way in which the cinematic experience is staged,
even more than the movie itself, functions to diffuse that border.
The darkened room and the upholstered seats function in this manner;
they turn that room into a refuge for regression. The effect of
the cinematographic apparatus dimmed room, illuminated screen,
projector is to soften up that border, to stage a hypnotic session.
Any stimulation from outside is as far as possible eliminated;
seats are covered with soft upholstering so that pressures to
the body are kept to a minimum, as they might irritate the spectator.
Instead, the spectator's attention is focused ahead not on a pendulum,
not on a rotating optical disk but on the screen. And on that
screen, the cinematic space is enacted, which is filled in by
the recipients. Every now and then, this will effect the strange
experience of having one's perception of reality mixed up, of
hallucinating in the middle of the cinematic experience. Seen
in this way, the cinematic space is an anticipation of cyberspace
in several aspects. There, we are seated in an upholstered chair,
moving through cinematic space; here, we are seated in front of
a "screen", too, moving within the world-wide network,
and the only difference is that in the latter case, we interact
with others. In both cases, the body remains unharmed. We sit
where we sat before.
CV
Beat Funk, born 1957 in Aarau (CH), studied history, philosophy and science of film. He is a Filmcritic and Media Expert in Zuerich.
email: bfunk@mail.access.ch
Media: S-VHS NTSC, QuickTime
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