1. Shows this week
Christopher Harris "Speaking in Camouflage
Sept 20th 7pm Whitney Museum
The Whitney Museum of American Art will present an onsite film screening of three films by Christopher Harris for the 2024 Whitney Biennial on Friday, September 20 at 7 pm. Screened in the Museum’s theater, this program features the global premieres of two new short films, b/w and Speaking in Tongues: Take One, as well as the premiere of a newly restored 16mm print of Harris’s early masterwork still/here.
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Gallery hours: Tuesday–Saturday: 11 AM–6 PM
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer RCA is a Mexican-Canadian electronic artist living and working in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He creates platforms for public participation by using robotic lights, digital fountains, computerized surveillance, and telematic networks
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Assignment 1: Responses
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Underlying Concepts
1. Assembling a movie out of multiple disparate shots
• Top Down The production process begins with a plan such as a script, treatment, storyboard or other shot-to-shot description, developing the final work out of a preconception
• DatabaseCinema
Lev Manovich: "Database as a Symbolic Form"
Narrative / Database. two types of structuring of media.
Most databases are not time-based. E.g a bank statement, a recipe, a list of parts,
An event is something that happens in time
Therefore cinema, which is time based, is a good match for narrative
Music is also time-based and structured, but rarely sequenced by narrative
Music demonstrates that time-based database structures need not be narratives
Some methods of navigation for video editing foreground the idea that the database is fundamental. But not all . . .
Lev Manovich suggests that editing a movie is navigating through a database of audio-visual elements: shots, sounds, stills, texts, etc.
Database navigation involves:
• sort (e.g. alphabetical, by color, by size)
• select / navigate (develop a route through the data)
• manipulate (change one or more values, e.g by combining or splitting data)
Consider Instagram as a database of audio-visual elements, and consider how you navigate it (as a viewer) or add to it (as a user). Hash tags and 'followers' are a means of selecting the data, and 'stories' as a means of navigating, building a llimited dataset, adding text or audio as manipulating or changing the data
• Links are an important feature of databases, especially in reference to the internet: we can link a datum from one database to a datum in another database, giving us a way of navigating between databases. But this concept doesn't usually apply to movie editing
• interactivity is essential to databases because all the above steps involve examination of a sub-set of the database. Videogames are no more and no less than exploration of a databases using the above four concepts.
Elementary techniques that transform a viewer's understanding of the image
Vertov’s film consists of at least three levels. One level is the story of a cameraman filming material for the film. The second level is the shots of an audience watching the finished film in a movie theater. The third level is this film, which consists from footage recorded in Moscow, Kiev and Riga and is arranged according to a progression of one day: waking up – work – leisure activities. If this third level is a text, the other two can be thought of as its meta-texts. Vertov goes back and forth between the three levels, shifting between the text and its meta-texts: between the production of the film, its reception, and the film itself. But if we focus on the film within the film (i.e., the level of the text) and disregard the special effects used to create many of the shots, we discover almost a linear printout, so to speak, of a database: a number of shots showing machines, followed by a number of shots showing work activities, followed by different shots of leisure, and so on. The paradigm is projected onto syntagm. The result is a banal, mechanical catalog of subjects which one can expect to find in the city of the 1920s: running trams, city beach, movie theaters, factories ...
. . . Film editing in general can be compared to creating a trajectory through a database, in the case of Man with a Movie Camera this comparison constitutes the very method of the film. Its subject is the filmmaker’s struggle to reveal (social) structure among the multitude of observed phenomena. Its project is a brave attempt at an empirical epistemology which only has one tool – perception. . . .
. . . In contrast to standard film editing which consists in selection and ordering of previously shot material according to a pre-existent script, here the process of relating shots to each other, ordering and reordering them in order to discover the hidden order of the world constitutes the film’s method. Man with a Movie Camera traverses its database in a particular order to construct an argument. Records drawn from a database and arranged in a particular order become a picture of modern life – but simultaneously an argument about this life, an interpretation of what these images, which we encounter every day, every second, actually mean.