Lev Manovich on Mon, 1 Jul 2002 23:03:01 +0200 (CEST)


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

[Nettime-bold] Welcome to the Multiplex: Documenta 11, New Generation FilmFestival Lyon, LA Film Festival


Lev Manovich

Welcome to the Multiplex: Documenta 11,  New Generation Film Festival
(Lyon),  LA Film Festivalıs New Technology Forum
-----------------------------------------------------------------


I was struggling how to fill 1000 words talking about Documenta 11, when I
was hit with a solution: why not talk about all three festivals I attended
this June: Documenta 11 in Kassel; New Generation, the first edition of a
brand-new film festival in Lyon; and Los Angeles Film Festivalıs New
Technology Forum. Since all three events focused on new (or not so new)
directions in moving image production and distribution, this will be the
focus of this review.

Just as the last time when I went to se Documenta 10 (1997), attending the
new Documenta left me with the same feeling: whatıs the big deal? On any
given day in New York or London you can just go to whatever museum and
gallery shows happen to be running and you will see as many first-rate works
by as many brand-name and ³emerging² artists. Of course it is nice to go to
Documenta parties (although itıs not Venice) and to sit in a cafe outside
the main exhibition hall trying to recognize the cultural celebrities going
in: here is Stuart HallŠhere is Walid Raıad whose Atlas Group presented one
of the smartest and though-provoking projects of the whole Documenta.

While the new Documenta makes a real effort to open itself up to global
multi-culturalism, the results are quite contradictory. The show in Kassel
is presented as the final ³Fifth Platform,² with the first four platforms
having taken place during the preceding year in Vienna, Berlin, New Delhi,
St. Lucia and Laso focused on topics such as ³Creolite and Creolization² and
³Under Siege: Four African Cities². Unfortunately one could not learn
anything about these previous four ³platforms² without buying the thick
catalog ­ there  were no references to them in the art show itself.

The long list of artists shown in Kassel included plenty of people outside
of Europe and US, like the group Igloolik Isuma Productions, whose film
Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) won a Prix DıOr for best debut feature film at
Cannes 2001. However, looking at the spatial layout of Documenta grounds it
became clear that each of three key buildings gave the largest central
spaces to the older European or US white artists such as Allan Sekula, Bernd
and Hilla Becher, and Constant. I had the feeling that Documenta curators
put on mini-retrospectives of these artists, added more big images of German
photographers and conceptual 1970s artists, and then filled the remaining
smaller and peripheral spaces with actual contemporary art.

Going through the show I also had the feeling I was in a kind of artistıs
cinema multiplex. Although I have not counted, it felt that at least half of
all the Documenta artists presented ³video installations² which almost all
followed the same standard exhibition format: a projection presented in a
small room. At least in a commercial movie theatre you get comfortable
seats, Dolby surround sound, and you can bring in a coke, but since
Documenta was about ³serious art² and not the pleasures of mass culture, a
typical room had hard and uncomfortable benches. Somebody pointed out to me
that all video and film installations presented at Documenta together added
up to more than 600 hours of running time. Somebody else noted that the size
of video and film installation rooms varied accordingly to the prestige of a
an artist The films by Jonas Mekas and Ulrike Ottinger, the veterans of
experimental filmmaking, which were between five and six hours each, were in
larger rooms which had a few row of comfortable chairs, like in a real movie
theaters. Other videos were stuck in small rooms with a single bench.

Given my interest in new forms of cinema I was attracted to a number of
multi-screen installations at Documenta, including works by such
heavyweights as Isaac Julien, Chantal Akerman, and Eija-Liisa Ahtila. I
thought that Ahtilaıs three screen installation worked the best: you feel
that she is seriously researching a new grammar for a multi-screen cinema.
(She is currently having a solo exhibition at  the Tate in London).

One great new media project that I did see at Documenta was OPUS (software
and accompanying theoretical package) by Raqs Media Collective (New Delhi).
Unveiled in Kassel, OPUS is definitely the most interesting new media
project I have encountered in quite a while. It is a sophisticated, both
theoretically and technically, system for multi-user cultural authorship in
a digital network environment. Do take a look at the site and check  their
new concept of "Rescension" (in OPUS Manual) that offers a very interesting
way to address the difficult issues of authorship in our "remix" culture.
OPUS raises the bar for all future practical and theoretical work dealing
with digital authorship.

The paradox of a an art show which became a multiplex movie theatre became
further apparent after I visited the brand new film festival in Lyon called
New Generation. Approximately one third of a festival was given to artistsı
videos. However since this was a film festival rather than art show, the
short videos were packaged together in ninety minute programs shown in a
movie theatre ­ in contrast to Documenta which followed the art convention
of giving each video its own room. For me, neither interface makes much
sense ­ why not put all video on a computer server and set up comfortable
personal stations where viewers can access and watch any video in any time,
the way it was done already a few years ago in KIASMA museum in Helsinki.
KIASMA digitized a whole collection of Finnish video art which was then put
on museum servers accessible through PCs set up in a special media room.

Next it was to a day of panels  making up the New Technology Forum at the
Los Angeles Film Festival. After a conservative Documenta and a sleepy Lyon
DV marathon, here I finally some real cutting edge stuff - new advances in
machinema, video creation software running on cell phones, Hollywood and
military collaborating on new AI simulations, and the like. Once again, I
was given  proof that creative techno-avant-garde is not in Kassel, Lyon,
and other traditional citadels of ³real culture² but in Los Angeles,
literally next door to Hollywood studios.

Katherine Anna Kang (Fountainhead Entertainment) talked about a
feature-length film her company is working on using a custom machinema
system. (For those who don't know, machinema is a subculture of amateur
filmmakers who use computer games as movie making tools. She called this new
kind of cinema ³machinemation.²  Another paradigm that also uses game-like
real-time 3D scene generation was demonstrated by Jeff Rickel from the
University of Southern Californiaıs (USC) notorious Institute of Creative
Technologies. The institute was established a few years ago with funding
from the US Army to work on new types of military simulations using
Hollywood talent. Rickel showed a particular ³peacekeeping scenario. ²
Written by a veteran Hollywood writer, the scene had three virtual humans in
a stressful situation. The goal of the simulation is to teach a soldier what
to do in an ambiguous situation. The scenario used high-end AI that controls
virtual humansı emotional expressions, speech, etc. If traditionally
simulations focused on machine operations (airplane, tank, etc.) and battle
action, USC work can be better thought of as interactive narrative, where
the user (the trainee) is presented with a dramatic scenario with simulated
humans.  

Bart Cheever from D.FILM festival (the digital film festival running since
1997) presented the gems from Digital Silverlake mini-festival he curated
earlier this year. Created by artists, filmmakers and designers living in
Silverlake and other areas of East LA, the works in Digital Silverlake
represents the next stage in the evolution of moving image aesthetics. If
1995 article ³What is Digital Cinema² I defined digital cinema as
compositing  live action + image processing + 2-D animation + 3-D animation.
Since then a new generation of designers who grew up with Flash and
Shockwave have started to make short films and music videos which add
typography and also privilege a 2-D flat look as key visual aesthetics. To
put this differently, while we see more and more ³hybrid² films, which use
plenty of compositing, 3D and 2D animation, but still have an overall ³film²
look (i.e., they present us 3D photorealistic space) - such as ³Amelie²
(2001) ­ there is also now a different type of ³hybrid² film which looks
more like what we expect to find in illustration and graphic design. I call
this new type of digital cinema aesthetics ³Post-Flash Cinema.²


Another digital cinema pioneer Jason Wishnow (who two years ago organized
the first festival of films for the Palm Pilot platform) suggested that a
movie trailer could be the prototype of a new genre appropriate to
micro-cinema running on cell phones, Palms, Pocket PCs, and similar devices.
He also discussed aesthetic features that characterized micro-cinema during
the one hundred years of its history (from Kinetoscope to Palm) such as
close-ups and loops.

On a distribution side, Ira Deutschman (Emerging Pictures) talked about his
companyıs plan to have 200 digital movie theatres in three years by placing
digital projectors in already existing but under-utilized screening spaces
such as museums. In his system,  digital film files will be downloaded to a
local server installed in a theatre, since the files will be too big to
download in real time.

In June, I found the cutting edge of moving image culture in Los Angeles.
However, I am spending the next three months in Berlin, and I am sure I will
see enough for another report by the end of the summer.



LINKS: 

http://www.documenta.de/
http://www.opuscommons.net/main.php
http://www.opuscommons.net/templates/doc/manual_left.htm  (check out
³Rescension² concept)
http://www.cinemanouvellegeneration.com
http://www.lafilmfest.com
http://www.dfilm.com/
http:///www.newvenue.com/
http://www.manovich.net/docs/augmented_space.doc (on video installations as
cinema) 

_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold