Ever wonder how Jimi Hendrix would cover Lady Gaga? The day is approaching when you should be able to find out.
Musicians’ opportunities to sell their recordings may be drying up due to cultural shifts brought on by changing technology, but other aspects of technology are creating a promising new market for music: the licensing of the musical style or personality of recording artists.
The concept goes well beyond basing the avatars in guitar-based videogames on famous performers, although the idea is similar. Using complex software, North Carolina’s Zenph Sound Innovations models the musical performances of musicians from Thelonius Monk to Rachmaninoff, based on how they played in occasionally old, scratchy recordings. Using that model, the company creates new recordings as they would be played by deceased musicians, if they were around to record with today’s equipment, to critical acclaim. And that’s just for starters.
Venture capital firm Intersouth Partners led a $10.7-million round of Series A funding in the company in November, a move that saw former Intersouth venture capital partner Kip Frey take over as the company’s CEO. He told us on Monday that Zenph has ramped up to 15 employees in preparation for new releases in its series of re-recordings.
Zenph also plans explore a variety of new markets, including licensing clear versions of muddy recordings to films and software that could eventually let musicians jam with virtual versions of famous musicians. Picture an Eric Clapton plug-in that reinterprets your solo to sound like it was played by “Old Slowhand” himself.
Zenph’s specially designed robotic pianos take high-resolution MIDI files created by software that simulates the style of classical and jazz performers from days gone by and them into sound by literally depressing the keys using between 12 and 24 high-resolution MIDI attributes. So far, the company offers new albums by legends including Art Tatum, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Glenn Gould, and up next is jazz pianist Oscar Peterson.
These robotic pianos have wowed crowds in “live” settings at Carnegie Hall, Steinway Hall and on the Live from Lincoln Center show, with their note-for-note renditions of performances of the past. Zenph plans to take them on three tours later this year. Its engineers have nearly completed work on a playerless double bass, and plans to work on the saxophone model next, with the ultimate goal of creating every instrument in a typical jazz band — then guitar, and so on. However, due to the complexity of playing those instruments, Zenph plans to simulate them being played in software and reproduce the sound with speakers (updated).
Hear virtual Sergei Rachmaninoff play a composition by the real Rachmaninoff (1873 – 1943):
As things stand now, Zenph’s technology looks at actual old recordings to find out how a performer played a certain song, and is not capable of figuring out how a musician would play a new part. “We hope — but we can’t demonstrate today — that after we’ve done several re-performances of a given artist, we will understand enough about that individual’s musical style to be able to suggest how that style might manifest itself in the performance of a work that the artist never actually performed,” said Frey, clarifying that today Zenph’s software only reproduces performances, it doesn’t create them.
Of course, causing a musician’s musical style to inhabit a device would require a new type of licensing deal. If Courtney Love blew her gasket when Kurt Cobain started rapping in Guitar Hero, just think how she would react to a virtual version of her ex-husband playing on albums without the proper permission.
Once Zenph secures the necessary rights to make these re-recordings through one-off licensing deals with an artist, or his or her representatives or estate, it creates a new sound-recording copyright, which won’t expire for decades. This creates the opportunity to license perfect-sounding recordings from the past for use in films and television shows. A scene featuring Thelonius Monk playing in a club, for instance, could feature newly recorded music reconstructed from a hissy live recording using Zenph’s existing technology.
Taking these pianos on tour, on the other hand, is no small feat. “The problem is moving the pianos around,” said Frey, “it’s not like you can just go grab any piano in any city.”
rachmaninoff-cover-1500His long-term vision for Zenph involves solving one aspect of that problem by modeling instruments virtually, so that computers can generate music in the style of a variety of musicians all on their own, without expensive hardware. This would allow amateur musicians to play along with virtual versions of famous performers, and let fans choose which performer plays a certain part and even what mood they should be in as they play.
“It introduces a whole bunch of interesting intellectual-property issues, but eventually, you ought to be able to, in essence, cast your own band,” said Frey. “You should be able to write a piece of music and for the drum piece, have Keith Moon, and for the guitar piece, you can have Eric Clapton — that is a derivation of understanding each of those artists’ styles as a digital signature. That’s further down the road, but initially, you’re going to have the ability for artist to create music and have the listener manipulate how they want to hear it — [for example] sadder.”
Clearly, the licensing of musical personalities has the potential to create a new revenue stream for artists and their estates, but because there’s no compulsory license for this sort of thing — and there shouldn’t be, because artists or their estates should have control over what their personalities do — each deal must be negotiated individually.
But if Zenph and other companies succeed in the quest to create virtual musical personalities, the market will likely create licensing mechanisms that allow a wide range of artists and labels to license their personalities to interactive music formats, potentially resulting in wrangling over music licensing. The problem has philosophical overtones: If a machine has to license a certain performer’s style, why doesn’t a human? Licensing the style or personality of performers would open a strange can of worms, even if the intent is just to fairly compensate those involved.
“The idea of extending copyright in general I’m not much in favor of, but the idea of extending copyright to style is incredibly distasteful to me,” said Eric Singer, creator of the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, or LEMUR. “It basically means that the entire history of music, where people have listened to other musicians and been influenced by their style is basically up for grabs. Whether a brain is doing it or a computer is doing it, how are they going to make that distinction?”
Whatever licensing is involved, it would involve a new right that falls outside of current copyright law (updated). Frey clarified, “Copyright protection is reserved solely for original works of authorship that are fixed in tangible mediums of expression, such as books or recordings. From a legal perspective, there is no way that whatever rights might be relevant to this hypothetical notion about artistic style would fit within the logical framework of copyright, and Zenph would never propose that copyright be extended in this direction.” (We should also make clear that Zenph negotiates deals with artists or their estates for each re-recording and would be required to do so in the future, so it should not be seen as subverting copyright law or hijacking artists’ performances.)
For governing the use of artists’ personalities, perhaps the “right of publicity,” which governs how a person’s likeness and persona can be used, would be the place to start. However it happens, the laws will need to catch up in the years to come, because virtual musicians are already real, and they’re only getting realer.
Chicago – Could it be that blogs have become online fodder for the more mature reader?
A new study has found that young people are losing interest in long-form blogging, as their communication habits have become increasingly brief, and mobile. Tech experts say it doesn’t mean blogging is going away. Rather, it’s gone the way of the telephone and e-mail – still useful, just not sexy.
“Remember when ‘You’ve got mail!’ used to produce a moment of enthusiasm and not dread?” asks Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Now when it comes to blogs, she says, “people focus on using them for what they’re good for and turning to other channels for more exciting things”,
Those channels might include anything from social networking sites to others that feature games or video.
Older users
The study, released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, found that 14 percent of Internet youths, ages 12 to 17, now say they blog, compared with just over a quarter who did so in 2006. And only about half in that age group say they comment on friends’ blogs, down from three-quarters who did so four years ago.
Pew found a similar drop in blogging among 18- to 29-year-olds.
Overall, Pew estimates that roughly one in 10 online adults maintain a blog – a number that has remained consistent since 2005, when blogs became a more mainstream activity. In the US, that would mean there are more than 30 million adults who blog.
“That’s a pretty remarkable thing to have gone from zero to 30 million in the last 10 years,” says David Sifry, founder of blog search site Technorati.
But according to the data, that population is aging.
The Pew study found, for instance, that the percentage of internet users age 30 and older who maintain a blog increased from seven percent in 2007 to 11 percent in 2009.
Pew’s over-18 data, collected in the last half of last year, were based on interviews with 2 253 adults and have a margin of error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points. The under-18 data came from phone interviews with 800 12- to 17-year-olds and their parents. The margin of error for that data was plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.
Social networking
So why are young people less interested in blogging?
The explosion of social networking is one obvious answer. The Pew survey found that nearly three-quarters of 12- to 17-year-olds who have access to the internet use social networking sites, such as Facebook. That compares with 55 percent four years ago.
With social networking has come the ability to do a quick status update and that has “kind of sucked the life out of long-form blogging,” says Amanda Lenhart, a Pew senior researcher and lead author of the latest study.
More young people are also accessing the internet from their cellphones, only increasing the need for brevity. The survey found, for instance, that half of 18- to 29-year-olds had done so.
All of that rings true to Sarah Rondeau, a freshman at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.
“It’s a matter of typing quickly. People these days don’t find reading that fun,” the 18-year-old student says. She loves Facebook and has recently started using Twitter to share pictures of her dorm room and blurbs about campus life, which are, in turn, shared on the Holy Cross web site for prospective students.
Meanwhile, New Yorker Jackie Huang hasn’t made a posting on her long-form blog in two years, and she now uses Facebook and Twitter because her friends do – though she’s still not too hot on tweeting.
Now 25, she started blogging when she was in her first year at university, using Xanga and then Wordpress to tell friends, family and a few strangers about anything from travel experiences to pop culture to politics.
“My blog was my own little soapbox,” says Huang, who now works for a communications agency. “Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m interesting enough for my followers to want to know where I am every hour of the day and what I’m thinking.”
Blogging won’t die
Few doubt that blogging will die. Lenhart suspects that those who blog for personal reasons may focus more on events – a wedding, a trip, a baby’s birth.
Arax-Rae Van Buren, who writes about trends, travel and food on her Kiss and Type blog, is relaunching her site with a mobile audience in mind. “It is imperative that the site design is translatable to a phone,” says the 24-year-old New Yorker.
There also are early signs that “microblogging” on sites such as Twitter might actually create long-form bloggers out of people who get frustrated by the constraints of the 140-word limit. Already, sites such as Tumblr and FriendFeed have emerged to allow for expansion of thought and content, though it remains to be seen whether those services will catch on with younger people.
“Blogging is actually a quite involved form of self-expression. It takes a lot of time and effort,” says Eszter Hargittai, an associate professor of communications studies at Northwestern University.
She and other tech experts also suspect that fewer young people have an interest in sharing their every thought with the whole world.
“Five years ago blogging was a club,” says Sifry of Technorati. “There was this wonderful, delicious feeling of being able to talk privately or semi-privately with people who shared your interests. And there were few consequences of being able to share with your friends on a blog.
“I think we’re seeing a deeper awareness of the perception of privacy and how that can affect your life if it’s violated.”
Editor’s note: Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable, a popular blog about social media. He is writing a weekly column about social networking and tech for CNN.com.
London, England (CNN) — A U.K. firm is set to launch a camera to capture every moment of a person’s life. While you may reel at the privacy implications, I’d wager that the high price of not capturing and sharing every moment of our lives will soon dwarf the cost to our privacy.
The SenseCam, worn on a cord around the neck, will retail for $820 and capture an image every 30 seconds. Originally developed by Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, the technology has been licensed to Oxford-based Vicon, which will produce a version for Alzheimer’s and dementia researchers by the year’s end and a consumer version in 2010.
It’s easy to see the associated risks of a life-logging device. From stalkers to identity theft, recording such information (and to unlock its true value, posting it online) makes us vulnerable to all manner of bad actors.
But what about the cost of not sharing? In the online realm, that might mean you simply don’t exist.
Privacy is dead, and social media hold the smoking gun.
Photo-sharing site Flickr made a brave decision in its early development: By default, photos would be public. Though ambitious at the time, the choice now seems obvious. What value do photos have when they’re not shared?
Twitter followed suit: Its private accounts are rare, meaning Twitter’s fire-hose of updates is becoming an invaluable stream of the world’s consciousness (incidentally, this month saw that stream licensed to both Microsoft and Google to bolster their search efforts).
Even Facebook, which once held fast to its model of private sharing among close friends, is pushing an “everyone” button that makes your updates public.
Unknown and unemployed
The value of a life led in public is most obvious to those seeking employment. Working in media, I frequently find myself talking to journalists who now possess a distribution channel entirely separate from their publication.
With thousands of Twitter followers and hundreds of Facebook friends, these writers are building large audiences for their personal brands that make them a valuable asset to employers.
As he tweets out his latest story to his 1.1 million Twitter followers, does David Pogue need The New York Times, or does The New York Times need David Pogue? And what becomes of the newly unemployed journalist who doesn’t set up a Twitter account like Pogue, who has posted more than 2,000 tweets on technology, fatherhood and other topics?
Without industry connections or a valuable audience for your work, you aren’t even on the radar.
Unemployment is just an extreme example of the cost of not sharing in professional life, of course. The “who you know” mantra holds true throughout the world of work, and the more content we share, the more connections and opportunities open up.
Location-based services lead the way
New York-based Foursquare is being heralded as the “next Twitter” by the team at Mashable, early adopter Robert Scoble and numerous thought leaders in the tech space. Posting an update from your phone every time you “check in” to a restaurant or bar might be seen as an invite to have your house robbed … but what of the hundreds of missed connections when you choose not to share? In this connected era, a private life is a lonely one.
Foursquare is far from alone, however: From Twitter’s upcoming location-based features to Google Latitude, not to mention the fact that most modern smartphones ship with GPS, sharing your location looks set to become the default, too.
You can’t improve what you don’t measure
This month also saw the first shipments of the Fitbit: This clip-on pedometer is worn day and night, logging your exercise and sleep patterns and sending the data wirelessly to the Fitbit Web site whenever you’re near the base station. Do I need to mention that this data is then shared with friends and family?
The benefits here are obvious: Logging all your physical activity online gives incentives to improve and accurate measurements of your progress. Roping in friends and family makes this a shared goal. You’re not alone in your fitness regime.
Don’t want to share? Scared what others might think? Ask yourself whether the opportunity cost is really a price worth paying.
In the attention economy, privacy is obscurity
We’re living at a time when attention is the new currency: With hundreds of TV channels, billions of Web sites, podcasts, radio shows, music downloads and social networking, our attention is more fragmented than ever before.
Those who insert themselves into as many channels as possible look set to capture the most value. They’ll be the richest, the most successful, the most connected, capable and influential among us. We’re all publishers now, and the more we publish, the more valuable connections we’ll make.
Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Fitbit and the SenseCam give us a simple choice: participate or fade into a lonely obscurity.
real-time sketchbook The word ‘documentary’ itself derives from the French, who used the term to describe travelogues by the term documentaire. (Grierson in MacCann 1966, p.207) The mobile-mentary vblog functions in a similar fashion while creating a visual database as resource for the micro-movies.The visual sketchbook is providing a documentation of the production process in (almost) real-time as the feature develops and simultaneously uses new media technology to create a connection to visual principles of experimental documentary filmmaking.
mobile-mentary
weblog The mobile-mentary blog provides further background information about the project and at the same time the weblog functions as a portfolio listing the film-festivals, conferences, lectures and symposia, which featured the mobile-mentary project.
mobile experiments The mobile experiments portray the interplay between the different video-production formats. Shoot on location in April 2006 on HD and G3 mobile device.
The mobile filmmaker Expertimental short filmed in London early 2006.
This short film by Kaganof was made in November 2008 during the three-day seminar of the same name at the University of Malmo from 2nd – 4th November. Compared with earlier works in his filmography, this one is very different. It is also slightly ironic. This hint of irony also makes it different. It is gentle and discreet and becomes especially obvious at the end of film when the director appears in front of the camera, giving us an “optimistic” thumbs’ up. Michael Blake’s music is just as gentle and sporadic as the resulting irony. This backs up a poem by the director which appeared a few days later on the KagaBlog – “most academics aren’t intellectuals, they’re intellect managers” (see “How I died (again)” of 15th December 2008).
Among the academics attending the seminar we can make out Anne-Marie Duguet, Lajos Varhegyi, Michael Heim, Dick Hebdige and various others. They are all turning towards the camera at the start of the film before leaving the scene to Kaganof. Nobody cites their names, either during the film or in the credits! We’d met Anne-Marie Duguet at the Parisian festival “Astarti” in 1998. She is professor at the Sorbonne and specialises in video art. She also directs the wonderful theoretical series “Anarchives”, whose ambiguous title achieves its aim. This same ambiguity characterises most of Kaganof’s creations. The American Michael Heim is also a composer and the nature and quality of his art (like that of our aforementioned idol) could take the seminar in a new direction. The most famous professor at the seminar had to be Dick Hebdige, an Englishman working the States. He is also the darling (among others) of the hugely influential Palais de Tokyo in Paris, which has made reference to his writing several times. “He is particularly interested in the white working class and its subcultures in relation to music, from teddy boys to mods, from rockers to punks and skinheads” (in “Palais” N° 7, Paris, Autumn 2008, page 90). His incredibly famous work “Subculture: The Meaning of Style” has just been translated into French for the first time – an inadmissible thirty years after it appeared in English. “The translated version of the text, now available from publishers La Découverte, enables us to assess, thirty years late, the decompartmentalisation of cultural studies’ disciplines, from which France has distanced itself for such a long time” (Gallien Dejean, in “Zéro Deux” (Nantes), N°49, Spring 2009, page 35).
To return to our argument at the start on Kaganovian irony, which has a new socio-political dimension this time, let us quote once again from the poem “How I died (again)”, inspired by this encounter:
“i can’t
be the only one
who’s onto what an
extraordinary waste of
time and energy this gathering
is?”
The film “New Media Politics – Experiment number 1” is not only available on the famous KagaBlog, but also on You Tube.
Written by Dionysos Andronis, translated by Lucy Lyall Grant
Filmed with a cellphone, we sneak a peek into the making of TXT ME, a stage production about how cellphones have changed the world we live in today.
Originally performed at the Fringe Festival of the 2006 National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, new life has been breathed into the characters of TXT ME by means of a short “doccie” style film.
“TXT ME: A reading … filmed with cellphone camera” is a work of cultural activism that takes seriously Melvin Kranzberg’s insight: “Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.”
TXT ME tells the story of a cellphone romance during a conference about mobile phones. It also makes the connection between the ongoing war in Democratic Republic of the Congo and the mining of coltan, a mineral used in the manufacturing of cellphones. It poses questions about the human and environmental costs of using a cellphone. TXT ME is a story about the continued underdevelopment of Africa during the Information Age.
Mobilefest London presented by FILMOBILE and Limkokwing University of Creative Technology.
On the 13th November a roundtable discussion on the subject of mobile creativity and innovation will take place at the Limkokwing University of Creative Technology in London. During the event a live-web broadcast with the Mobilefest in São Paulo is scheduled to take place. Following the event delegates and participants are invited to join for a networking and a wine reception.
The event is free to attend but registration via email is essential: Max@limkokwing.edu.my
13th November 2009
4pm – 7pm
Limkokwing University London
106 Piccadilly
London W1J 7NL
(Tube Green Park)
São Paulo Panel:
(chair Marcelo Godoy)
Anotni Abad, Caroline Bernard, Greg Giannis, Kasia Molga, Martha Gabriel, Rachel Jacobs
London Panel
(chair Max Schleser):
Dr. Chris Fry, Gaby David, Dom Oliver, Dr Frank Thomas, Julia Kazarina, Waiming
Many things have already been said about the importance of Cassavetes films, both in the lectures today and in many writings and documentaries about his work. His DIY / Dogma avant-la-lettre style, his emphasis on human values, relationships and love, the influence he has had on filmmakers like Martin Scorcese, Abel Ferrara, John Sayles, and Sean Penn and other independent filmmakers. So, in speaking last at this seminar, I see myself presented with a challenge: what to add to the richness of this acknowledged legacy of Cassavetes in contemporary culture?
Over the last weeks I was thrilled again by the intensity of the sometimes awkward but always ultimately deep rewarding sensations of films like Gloria, A Women under the Influence and Love Streams. Online I saw many Youtube-clips on and of Cassavetes. I felt the bewilderedness and embarrassment of Dick Casset and his audience when John Cassavetes, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, invited guests to the famous TV show on the occasion of the release of Husbands in 1970, behave like fools: Cassavetes throwing himself on the floor every three minutes, Gazarra taking of his socks and shoes showing his hairy legs, and Falk ignoring the host of the show only addressing the audience; in another Youtube clip, a 1965 episode of the French film programme Cinemas Cinemas, Cassavetes gives a guided tour in his house while he and his team are working on Faces; and the documentary I’m Almost Not Crazy reveals (in four 10 minutes parts) insights about Cassavetes philosophy of love; In ‘Cassavetes in 60 seconds’ and other clips Cassavetes repeatedly expresses that he thinks the world is very ‘chicken’. However, slowly but surely other images started to impose themselves to me, not from the wonderful Cassavetes retrospective or the DVD-box, not from Youtube’s viral archive, but images from my memories of another film, namely David Lynch’s Inland Empire.
Many filmmakers have acknowledged their direct or indirect dept to Cassavetes, but to my knowledge Lynch never did. Moreover, Lynch’s often surreal and dark enigmatic images do not seem to connect easily with the earthly world of Cassavetes. So I wondered, was my own mind playing tricks on me, or is here actually something that is worthwhile exploring? I decided to investigate this unexpected Cassavetes-Lynch connection, the results of which I will present to you in the next 30 minutes. Let me start by proposing the thesis that Cassavetes and Lynch are indeed actually soul mates – although this becomes only perceptible now. By ‘going digital’ with Inland Empire, Lynch’s work reveals more explicitly than ever before similar concerns as expressed in Cassavetes’ films, especially in respect to the role of spectacle and madness in contemporary media culture. Let me explain this further.
Youtube aesthetics
Cassavetes’ films seem a no-budget celluloid precursor to the DIY/Dogma digital aesthetics that are currently common practice both in Independent cinema, European cinema and on Youtube. Lynch on the other hand, is much more known as a ‘celluloid fetishist’ who likes high production values who, arguably, even has set the standards for high production values of contemporary quality television series when he shot in the beginning of the 1990s Twin Peaks, the series, on 35 mm and with budgets of over 1$ million per episode.
However, with Inland Empire he has jumped into the digital with a big leap. Lynch is a fast adaptor. ‘Film is like a dinosaur in a tar pit’, he even declared in an interview recently. Inland Empire was shot on a relatively primitive Sony PD-150, a consumer-grade model that was introduced in 2001 at a retail price of less than $4000, a medium of home movies and viral video, a DIY medium indeed. As a reviewer argues, this movie is great on the big screen but its natural home is in fact the small screen: ‘Watch Inland Empire on DVD and you sense that this lurid, grubby fantasy springs from deep within the bowels of Youtube as much as from inside its heroine’s muddy unconscious. (…) And not only does Inland Empire often looks like it belongs on the Internet, it also progresses with the darting, associative logic of hyperlinks. Indeed part of the movie originated on David Lynch’s Website, davidlynch.com, itself a labyrinth of wormholes and worlds within worlds.’ Others have described the film as ‘random access cinema’, typical for the digital age, characterized by a database logic and a digital poetics.
So all of a sudden, this switch to the digital has brought Lynch’s work immediately closer to Cassavetes, if only in terms of a shared frayed aesthetics. In terms of production, with the camcorder, Lynch too, has discovered the kind of freedom it grants to allowing for a smaller crew, and no accountability to the money men. A kind of freedom and independence that have always already been dear to Cassavetes. Let’s see if there are further points that can be made about the aesthetics.
Bodies and Brains
With this suddenly shared aesthetics and production freedom, I absolutely do not wish to argue that Cassavetes and Lynch make the same films. One layer below the surface of the looks of the films that now show some similarities, there is a basic difference in the source from which the their respective films are made, namely the body or the brain. If Cassavetes is a very physical director of a cinema of the body, Lynch is a cerebral director, who makes ‘brain cinema’, so to speak.
As Gilles Deleuze has argued in his book The Time-Image, ‘body or brain is what cinema demands to be given to it, what it gives to itself, what it invents itself, to construct its work according to two directions, each one of which is simultaneously abstract and concrete, each one being equally emotional and thoughtful. But they constitute two different types of cinema: ‘either the body gives orders to the brain, which is just a part of it; or the brain gives orders to the body, which is just an outgrowth of it.’ One could argue that Cassavetes and Lynch are like body and brains of contemporary screen culture.
Cassavetes really works from the bodies of the actors, theatricalizes or ‘spectacularizes’ them – not in the sense of glamorizing them, but in the sense that the characters are brought back to their bodily attitudes that become expressive of a feeling (tiredness, boredom, despair, depression, love) and that constitutes the truth of their character. In Faces bodily attitudes are expressed in the face, in A Woman under the Influence Gena Rowlands expresses and constitutes a housewife ‘under influence’ of social norms and boredom by her bodily attitudes and gestures, in Gloria the abandoned child sticks (literally) to the body of the women who first pushes him away, which constitutes a powerful bond between the two when they are on the run in NYC. Cinema of the body. Full of intense feelings, full of unconscious thoughts.
Lynch on the other hand, has always been intrigued by mind matters. His main inspiration is in surrealism, which insists on the mental sur-reality of dreams, visions and the delirium. And his films have always been presentations of characters emotions by presenting their inner life. In Blue Velvet the passage into the inner and dark fantasies of the main character is still marked very clearly and quite literally when the camera zooms into a cut of ear – and a zoom out at the end of the adventure of the mind. But Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive are much more ambiguous about the status of images. And the title of Inland Empire most probably should be taken as inner/mental empire, where the virtual and the actual are completely indistinguishable. Cinema of the brain. Full of intense thoughts, full of unconscious feelings.
As a footnote I have to remark that while Lynch has become more ‘Cassavetian’ in allowing more frays and sloppiness in his aesthetics, It also has to be remarked that Cassavetes in his last films also presents sometimes mental images, such as the dream (or is it a flashback or flashforward) and a delirium at the end of Love Streams. Sarah, the sister, dreams a loving dream of her husband and daughter – Robbert, the brother sees a naked hairy man in his room (‘who the fuck are you?’) that turns into his dog / or turns out to be his dog.
The role of spectacle
So if the source of their filmmaking is so very different, where or how do Cassavetes and Lynch meet – because, as you know, that is what I am arguing. Well, here we have to dive again one level deeper into the worlds of Cassavetes and Lynch and see how they direct their actors and how they see how they conceive role of ‘the spectacle’ or ‘mediation’.
In A Constant Forge, the DVD documentary on Cassavetes, Peter Falk explains how he did not understand at all what he was doing or saying in A Woman under the Influence (for instance on the dinner table when he starts talking about seeing babies everywhere), in any case he never knew what his character’s motivation was. This ambiguity makes that the actors had to rely on their bodily performance. And very often it was only on screen that they saw what this performance revealed.
Laura Dern, the main character in Inland Empire has expressed a similar experience of confusion for her as an actress having no idea what she was doing, why and in what kind of world she was operating (real, imaginary, Hollywood, Poland). In 2007 the Foundation Cartier in Paris exhibited David Lynches paintings, one of which with the title “Bob finds himself in a world for which he has no understanding”. This, Lynch comments in the DVD extra’s, is a common condition for us human beings.
So, although they both have a different starting point to construct their films from, both directors share a basic feeling of ambiguity about the nature of behavior, about the nature of reality, about the possibilities of knowing. Nothing is crystal clear in both Cassavetes and in Lynch’s world. In both worlds characters are quite lost, in identity crisis. Nothing is familiar, so the only reliable way of ‘understanding’ is by intuititive performance or unconscious acting.
Here we see how Cassavetes and Lynch are moving towards each other in terms of an uncertainty of knowing and an ambiguity of reality that calls for ‘a constant forge’ into the unknown territories of life, hidden in either the body or the brain. Moreover, both filmmakers, even though that might be stating the obvious, use ‘the spectacle’ as a form of exploring these territories. For only in ‘the spectacle’ true creativeness can emerge, and some truth about (emotional) life can escape.
We must understand here that this is a very different conception of ‘the spectacle’ than Guy Debord’s critical understanding of ‘the society of spectacle’. In the society of spectacle, mediation (film, television other media) absorbs life and returns it only as a shallow simulation (think of Baudrillard as well; reality, real life disappears in the copy of the copy of the copy in audio-visual culture). The spectacle numbs and dumbs people in this conception of the spectacle. In the way Cassavetes and Lynch look for dramatization, theatricalization, performance, mediation and spectacle, life is constituted or reconstituted in front of the camera. This, it seems to me, is an important insight that is relevant if we look at contemporary mediated culture and see how it relates in different ways to spectacle that both Cassavetes and Lynch show us.
For Cassavetes his life and his films are completely intertwined. In Opening Night he and Gena Rowlands are a couple on three levels: in real life, the film and in the theater play within the film. It is well known that his own house served as location for most of his films. And in order for the husbands in Husbands to become friends Cassavetes, Falk and Gazarra really had to spend time together and become friends. And out of that intimacy and friendship, out of the playing together as performance, something true emerges.
Lynch is much less personally involved in his films, but at several moments he has investigated the opposite borders of the spectacle: where for Cassavetes actual bodies, actual friendships, actual relationships create something genuine in a spectacle that makes you forget that you are looking at a technologically mediated form, Lynch shows precisely the opposite, namely that technology and mediation can create real experiences and emotions. Think of the famous scene in Mulholland Drive in Club Silencio, where the host of the show announces it is all a show, all playback, and yet the performance of the singer Rebekah del Rio of Roy Orbinson’s ‘Crying’ is so moving that it is one of the most really intense and dramatic moments of the film. And in Inland Empire the most realistic moment in the film, where Nikki/Sarah dies among the homeless on Hollywood Boulevard, is revealed as spectacle when the camera is revealed by a widening frame and we hear ‘cut’.
Both Cassavetes and Lynch also know that their own approach of ‘the spectacle’ is not a common one. Cassavetes has expressed his contempt for Hollywood as an industry and repeatedly argued that ‘television sucks’. And Lynch comments on Hollywood and the false illusions of stardom, wealth and happiness it creates in Muholland Drive where the dream career as an actress turns out to be the delirum of a junkie. Laura Dern’s character Nikki in Inland Empire (or Sue in the film within Inland Empire) ends op ‘stabbed in the gut and staggering along Hollywood Walk of Fame, leaving a trail of blood…’ It’s not so difficult to read that image as a commentary on the Hollywood industry.
So again, Cassavetes and Lynch have different approaches but both reveal the reality in and of the performance which makes them so interesting ‘blood brothers’ of the truth of the spectacle – and thus exemplary for a shift of thinking about the spectacle that contemporary culture demands.
Collecting and Connecting
Another aspect of Cassavetes and Lynch late works that relate to contemporary culture has to do with ‘collecting’ and ‘connecting’.
Love Streams is about a brother and sister, Robert Harmon (played by Cassavetes) and Sarah Lawson/Harmon (played by Rowlands). Sarah has just been divorced from her husband who also got custody over her child, and Robert is a famous writer and womanizer. They are both collectors: Sarah collects luggage and animals that she offers to her brother, Robert collects women.
CLIP: LOVE STREAMS
Ch. 9 ex-vrouw met zoontje Alby aan deur → huis vol vrouwen
Ch 12 stukje terug (aankomst taxi met al haar koffers) &
Ch. 21 (aankomst taxi met dieren)
Deleuze describes these collections as the desire for connecting by collecting:
‘How can one exist, personally, if one cannot do so alone? How can something be made to pass through these packets of body, which are at once obstacles and means? Every time, space is made up from these excrescences of body, girls, luggage, animals, in search of a ‘current’ which would pass from one body to the next. ‘
It seems to me that here we have another image – a metaphor almost for contemporary culture, where within the quantity of data, we look for the quality of relations and connections.
In Inland Empire Laura Dern does not so much collect things, objects, or persons, as that we are offered a walk through the seemingly wild and random collection of worlds and images that she enters in her mind. Like Cassavetes’ film, it is hard/impossible even to give a plot summary, or in any case a plot summary just does no justice to the experience of the film. But it is clear that the heroine is emotionally in turmoil by what she experiences when she tries to make sense of the different type of images, among which Eastern European women (prostitutes, women traded?) and double or doubles of herself, a bunny family (‘It had something to do with the telling of time’), shifting places.
How do these collections of mental images connect? Note that Nikki/Sarah regularly sees the word ‘axxonn’ written on walls. (Axxonn is not only the title of an online drama series by Lynch but as you know, also the neurons in our brain that send out signals to other neurons, dentrites – in other words neurons that are looking for connections).
CLIP: INLAND EMPIRE
58 min. Axxonn (also online mysery drama 2002)
1.07.50 ‘Strange what love does’ - 1.12.13
1. 24.56 ‘Locomotion’
As in Love Streams the connections fail for large parts, and yet, something passes through. Something of a current, a connection, a stream passes through the body, passes through the brain.
A Woman in Trouble – A Woman of Mystery
There is one more element that needs to be raised, a strong and striking similar concern that both directors share, which is the image of a ‘Woman in Trouble. Both Cassavetes and Lynch have portrayed more than once women in trouble (think of Mabel in Women under the Influence or Dorothy (Isabella Rosselini) in Blue Velvet).
In an article on Cassavetes Jonathan Rosenbaum describes his experience of a theater play That Cassavetes directs right after Love Stream, which he considered as an afterthought and postscript to Love Streams. The title of the play was A Woman of Mystery and according to Cassavetes himself in his notes ‘About the Play’ the play has to do with an unexplored segment of our society referred to as the homeless, bag ladies, winos, bums. It has been difficult to explore this particular woman of mystery. She is not only homeless (if homeless means without the comfort of love), but she is nameless, without the practical application of social security, or any other identity. Alone, she clings to her baggage on the street. (…) The woman has been permanently disabled by the long discontinuance of feelings of love.”
As such, this nameless woman of mysteries resembles Sarah in Love Streams, the aging actress in Opening Night and Mabel in Women under the influence (who also temporary looses her home when she is put into a clinic). Both in the film and the play Cassavetes brings the image of a homeless women who lives in a state of suspended identity, not knowing where to place her continuing love (love is a continuous flow, it never stops, she says in the film) with such an intensity that this love actually jumps on the spectator, affects the spectator directly. And as such, Love Streams – and other Cassavetes films, restores ‘a belief in the world’ even though this belief is broken by personal disappointments, trauma’s and the incapacities to ‘connect’ (because of jealousies, pettiness, ignorance, or whatever reason). And, as Deleuze indicates ‘surely a true cinema can give us back reasons to believe in the world’, but the price to be paid, in cinema as elsewhere, was always a confrontation with madness.’ As we know, Cassavetes has never been afraid to show this confrontation with madness either.
Interestingly enough, when asked about Inland Empire Lynch responded that it is “about a woman in trouble, and it’s a mystery, and that’s all I want to say about it.” Here too, we can argue that the woman in trouble, the woman of mystery is homeless: Laura Dern, Nikki, Sarah does not where or when she is (she has trouble recognizing the order of things), and the film even suggests that even in her three identities, she could be the dream of yet another women. All women relate to a group of other homeless women, prostitutes, bag ladies. In fact all women are in trouble in Inland Empire, and the emotions are often of panic or despair.
Nevertheless there is also room for more affirmative motions. In any case the lyrics of one of the songs in the film which also features on the Dvd menu are ‘Strange what love does, so strange what love does’. At the end of the film, Lynch with all his dark emotions and scary places, even stages a strange family reunion (was it Nikki/Sarah’s alter ego?), and the film ends with the word “Swwueeet” and cheerfully dancing women (the eastern European smuggled women from earlier in the film) and happy faces even if the whole mise-en-scene is somewhat absurd. Contrary to Cassavetes who is actually less optimistic about the fate of his homeless women, or in any case leaves their fate even more open than Lynch does.
In final analysis it is clear that neither Cassavetes nor Lynch are afraid to torture their audience by presenting emotionally disturbing images, by annoying us with ambiguities in characters behavior and confusion of spatial and temporal references. Both directors undermine all our habitual forms of recognition of place, time and fixed identities. Their unconventional attitude towards the centrality of the spectacle, of filming in a free and independent way, looking for connections and intensities to escape from the spectacle, makes their work very relevant for digital screen culture. When asked about his digital cinema, Lynch frequently compares film to a spiderweb: “We are like a spider. We weaves our life and them move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe”. In the documentary I’m Almost not Crazy, whose title indicates again a confrontation with madness, Cassavetes points towards the importance of the spectacle without the metaphor of the spiderweb. Indicating first that philosophy means ‘to know how to love’, he then says: “You start thinking about life, and you realize everything is a movie.” The spectacle brings love and life. Life itself is not enough.
However different they may be, in digital culture (of which Cassavetes was ahead in spirit, and which Lynch with highspeed catches up), both ‘body’ and ‘brain’ need to connect to others. With their emphasis on the search for love and the confrontation with our emotions, especially (but not exclusively) embodied in the spectacle of the ‘woman in trouble’ both directors show that indeed, love streams in datastreams, or in any case it should…
this paper was first presented at Filmmuseum / Universiteit van Amsterdam
John Cassavetes Seminar
‘Life is not Enough’ -Cassavetes, creativeness and contemporary screen culture
Saturday 31 October, 10.00 – 17.30
On Saturday, 12th September 2009 in celebration of Steve Biko, the Pan African Space Station (PASS) II launched their online radio to the world. Listen here.
Provoking new forms of creative expression and social mobilisation, PASS is a 30-day music intervention that takes place online through a freeform music radio station and live across venues in Cape Town.
Now in its second year, PASS continues its cyber-spatial voyaging, bringing together diverse pan-African sounds from ancient grooves to future hip-hop.
PASS includes 30 days of cutting-edge music that is being streamed live via the internet. The station will feature guest DJs, themed shows, live performances, readings, tributes, debates, sound art, speeches, interviews and much, much more.
The second live musical expedition takes place between Thursday, 30th September and Saturday, 4th October. This will include acclaimed international artists Kora maestro Toumani Diabaté in his first ever South African performance; the nine-piece, Chicago-based Hypnotic Brass Ensemble; Cameroonian funk-master Franck Biyong and his Massak Afroletric Orchestra; Zanzibar’s legendary taarab orchestra, the Culture Musical Club; LA-native Ras G and the Afrikan Space Program; and Ghanaian “afro-punk” with Wanlov the Kubulor’s “pidgin music”.
Local artists include Queen of Ndebele music Nothembi Mkhwebane; Siya Makuzeni adds adventurous sonic textures to world-renowned drummer Barry van Zyl’s Baboti; and slamming jazz upstarts uDaba are joined by poet and spoken-word author Kgafela oa Magogodi. PASS II will also feature some of the continent’s most progressive DJs, including Dar es Salaam’s DJ Yusuf Mahmoud and Cape Town’s own Fong Kong Bantu Soundsystem.
The live events starting on 30th September will be launched with the collaborative, experimental choral work based on the novella War Chorale by pioneering Chilean academic, visionary, writer and revolutionary Fernando Alegría, with composition and direction by jazz guitarist Bheki Khoza.
This article will outline the influences, which shaped the editing and montage process of the experimental feature film Max With a Keitai. The city film was shot entirely on a mobile phone in Japan in 2006 and is now being distributed for cinematic and mobile media release. The project illustrates a case for considering approaches within moving-image production, which make use of colour and movement as the driving parameters for a mobile documentary film. A visual flow is constructed within the film. Max With a Keitai is based upon a visual rhythm integral to the sequences of mobile video and the quality of 3gp video. The movement within the frame was used as an initial parameter to edit the 180 hours of filmed material in almost four month on location.
Lev Manovich argues in The language of New Media (2002), that Dziga Vertov can be thought of as one of the major database filmmakers of the twentieth century. The mobile phone filmmaker Max Schleser is extending this argument and comes to the conclusion that Vertov’s creative practices can be described as a pioneering conceptualisation of VJ techniques. Using contemporary VJ software applications such as Grid Pro, Resolume or Motion Dive Tokyo, one can edit and create montage effects live on the fly.
VJ performances are based upon a live montage of video database fragments. In a way analogous to the methods of Vertov where he filmed fragments of Soviet city life, the mobile phone user accumulates a personal video database of mobile fragments. Max With a Keitai was recorded with the caméra-stylo (Astruc 1948). During the production process of Max With a Keitai, the video-blog functioned as a video database. In the first instance the mobile phone videos were indexed daily according to their time and date on location. Within the database, the assembled files are placed into different categories based upon their photographic and abstract representation. In the second instance the mobile video fragments were evaluated and edited to short clips and uploaded to the vblog. As I was working with the mobile phone for the first time, I evaluated the mobile film work at the end of each day. Within this process the video clips were copied and saved in two other databases. I developed a taxonomy based on thematic tags such as (transport, tradition or Tokyo) and one according to the visual characteristics of the medium, i.e. dominant colour in the frame (such as green and orange) or movement on a horizontal and vertical plane. The structure of Max With a Keitai itselftook shape during the editing process. I started to insert the videos in the non-linear desktop editing program’s timeline in a similar way as the videos had been featured on the mobile-mentary vblog (www.mobile-mentary.co.uk). The database, which includes the moving images tagged according their parameters, provides a basis upon which to create the visual flow according to the images visual rhythm. In the final stages of editing the video files are then linked according to this visual rhythm, which is reminiscent of the kinkos’ interval filmmaking method.
“The School of kino-eye calls for construction of the film-objects upon ‘intervals’, that is upon the movement between shots, upon the visual correlation of shots with one another, upon transitions from one visual stimulus to another.
Movement between shots, the visual ‘interval’, the visual correlation of shots, is according to kino-eye, a complex quantity. It consists of the sum of various correlations, of which the chief ones are: the correlation of planes (close-up, long shot, etc.); the correlation of foreshortenings; the correlation of movements within the frame; the correlation of light and shadow; the correlation of recording speeds…. To reduce this multitude of ‘intervals’ (the movement between shoots) to a simple visual equation, a visual formula expressing the basic theme of the film-object in the best way: such is the most important and difficult task of the author-editor.” (Vertov in Michelson 1984, p.90).
Also one can mention here Hans Richter’s approach to producing unscripted work on location, which provides another reference point for working with mobile phone video texts. The 1920s avant-garde filmmakers foreshadowed the practice of editing clips on the fly.
“Along with Walter Ruttmann and Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger must be recognized as one of the first film pioneers who worked to combine movie and sound tracks. His abstract “Absolut Film” is considered the precursor to audio-visual experimentations, such as Vjing. Forms such as the 60s (liquid) light shows, the expanded cinema, the formal movie, multi-media performances, and many others have made the new, hot, and hip art of Vjing/live cinema possible.” (http://www.soundframe.at/sf_info_e.html)
VJ performances are based upon a live montage of video database fragments. In a way analogous to the methods of Vertov documentary filmmaking approach collecting fragments of everyday life. The non-fiction genre provides a creative approach to explore montage and moving-image media according to the parameters of the medium.
The theatre-trained film pioneer Eisenstein asked the artist and filmmaker Richter at the avant-garde gathering at Le Sarraz, Switzerland in 1929:
“… repeatedly what I wanted to say when I made Ghosts Before Breakfast. He could hardly believe that the content, the story – rebellion of objects against daily routine – developed, so to speak, as the by-product of rhythmical conception and by improvisation. The painter had directed the writer, not the other way around.”
(Richter 1977, p. 145)
VJ performance, live editing audio-visual texts in various environments ranging from clubs to galleries, creates a visual rhythm through improvisation. Mark America defines the VJ as a “provocateur who knowingly intervenes in the mainstream art, club, and cinema culture and opens up new possibilities for hybridized art and entertainment events.” (Amerika 2007, p. 56) Writing in VJ: Audio-visual Art and VJ Culture, Bram Crevits traces the term VJ back to its origin, which was first used in the New York club Peppermint Lounge (Crevits in Faulkner 2006, p.14), while simultaneously pointing to the influences from video art and expanded cinema. Elliot Earls situates the current VJ culture as still being off the cultural radar. (Earls in Faulkner 2006, p.14) Recent publications (Faulkner 2006 or One Dot Zero 2006 and 2007) reveal the diverse practices, approaches and backgrounds, which the practioners bring to this field. It is beyond the scope of this present research to map out the field of contemporary audio-visual art practice entirely, but its links to avant-garde practice of the 1920s filmmakers and its application in the editing process of Max With a Keitai are omnipresent. Another common determiner is the form of non-linearity. The experience of a VJ performance, installation or exhibition can be compared to the general unfamiliarity and newness of an emerging art-form found in descriptions of early cinema screenings. In the Struggle for Film, Hans Richter outlines a viewing account of a projectionist who emigrated to Jerusalem in 1923.
“One day by mistake the last real was first. Surprisingly there was no complaints. Even the “regulars” failed to stir. This intrigued the cinema owner. He wanted to find out if anyone objected, and if not why, so he ran all the reels in any order. No one seemed to mind. “Why ?”, he wondered in some amazement, and never grasped the plot, even when the film was shown in the right order. It was clear that they only went to the cinema because there one could see people walking, horses galloping, dogs running.”
(Hans Richter, 1930, p.41)
In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan provides a similar account of first time non-western audiences who were not sufficiently visually literate to decode narrative, due to their cultural backgrounds, which are mainly oral traditions.
“Our own talkies were a further completion of the visual package as a mere consumer commodity. For with silent film we automatically provide sound for ourselves by way of ‘closure’ or completion. And when it is filled in for us there is very little participation in the work of the image.” (McLuhan 1964, p. 287)
McLuhan’s argument can be backed up through a more recent analysis by Stephen Barber as presented in Projected Cities.
“…the arrival of synchroniszed-sound cinema implied the destitution of that evocatory power of the film image as all of the great European experimental film-makers of the period foresaw: vocal sound would trivialize cinema into dramatic narrative forms and open it up to forced global appropriation by Hollywood.” (Barber 2002, p.31)
Hollywood as a commercial business aims towards selling as many productions as possible. The linear narrative produced on the assembly line in the studios is packaged for the spectacle of cinema. The mobile phone with its low res capabilities operates in an alternative space. The narrative can contradict the visual development of a story and is therefore secondary in mobile-mentaries.
“Narrative, then, is not an essential quality of film, but only a potential and secondary quality arising from the production of time in the differentiation within and between frames. To misunderstand this leads to a more serious mistake, that of endowing the discrete machinery of cinema with the illusory attributes of continuous flow. … The cinematic event tends towards incompleteness. Its subject is constituted in the ephemeral movement from frame to frame, mobile and unfixed.” (Cubitt 2004, p.40)
The fragments of narrative, which are introduced in Max With a Keitai, function like a short text message. These SMS and the new development of a Keitai aesthetic (as outlined in the next chapter) are based upon a practice specific to mobile devices. In Narrated Theory: Multiple Projection and Multiple Narration (Past and Future), Peter Weibel writes about “reversible rhizomatic narration” in 2002, two years after the introduction of the first mobile phone camera in Japan.
“In the future era of calm technology and ubiquitous computing one person is going to carry and use a lot of microcomputers… anybody is going to be able to see any movie in any place at any time: x persons see x films in x places at x times. Anybody, anywhere, any time is the formula for the digital image technology of the future.”
(Weibel 2002, p. 53)
The experience of viewing the micro-movies in the cityscape has like “the rhizome, has no beginning nor end, but always a middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p.27) from which the micro-movies can be accessed. The documented environment of Tokyo’s cityscape reflects the same rhiziomatic structure. “Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line! Be quick, even when standing still!” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p.27) or ‘Hayaku’ (=’be quick’) as the Japanese would say.
The experimental documentary Max with a Keitai is exploring Japanese metropolitan centres through the lens of a mobile phone and captures a new emerging mobile phone video aesthetic, which surfaced and characterises the years 2005-2008. The city film captures the everyday life of the mobile phone filmmaker Max during the mobile-mentary (mobile documentary) production and the Japanese megapolis in the Taiheiy? Belt. The cityscapes are depicted as a hybrid of tradition and progressive technoculture. Max With a Keitai provides an alternative reading of the technologically most advanced centre to that of the films produced by Wim Wenders and Chris Marker (Tokyo GA 1985 and Sans Soleil 1983) in the 80s political and cultural landscape. Through a critical lens Max Schleser records the failures of the technoculture, such as the derelict shopping mal in Den-Den town (= Electric city). This sequence can be seen as a requiem of consumer culture, a shopping-centre equipped with a rollercoaster, but no customers and abandoned shops is an epitome for the economic recession that hit Japan in the 1990s. These new images of Japan, which stand in contrast to the futuristic progressive images of Sans Soleil (1983) or Tokyo GA (1985) have a very current connotation referencing the global economic recession. The affect of the Japanese economic recession in the 90s can be contextualised through the work of the photographer Toru Kurihara. Note of Ruins – Dilapidated spaces show nostalgia illustrates the ruins of urban consumer culture projects in Japan. The haikyo phenomenon [1] provides a largely unknown picture of the postmodern megalopolis revealing its economic downside in juxtaposition to the most advanced technoculture. Naturally Max With a Keitai shares some ideas with the 80s city films, which have influenced the project in specific parts of the production process. Sans Soleil can be seen as a direct inspiration to produce a city film in Japan, while Tokyo GA became more influential in the editing process. Here one can point at the train sequence used in Max With a Keitai that reflects Marker’s and Wender’s impression of Tokyo. In Max With a Keitai trains are a visual representation for data traffic in the network of the megapolis. The mobile phone as a ready-made consumer product, a low res format, was used to produce the feature film for the silver screen, which can also be presented as a live remix (see FILMOBILE exhibition, www.filmobile.net). The pixel, a new aesthetic and construct is driving the film’s plot and/or the VJ performance. Its exposure to the most expressive state is depicted in the A-Dome scene. This sequence is a symbolic statement, which emphasises the status of the pixilation on the discursive layer. Hiroshima marks the destruction of the traditional Japanese life and simultaneously introduced a new epoch of consumer culture. The significance of this reference is manifested through the atom test conducted in North Korea during the time of production [2]. The fragmentation of the digital pixel is suggesting the atomic implosion, which is characteristic for the Keitai aesthetic when blowing up mobile phone video footage to cinematic dimensions. Furthermore the mobile phone as a tool for cinematic communication has pushed the representation of the digital city to the next layer. Max With a Keitai has logged and captured the impact of mobile technologies in an abstract form and portrayed the ‘Global City’ Tokyo and other Japanese metropolitan centres through the lens of a mobile phone.
“The erosion of the film image’s status coincided with the rise of its digital cityscapes, transmitted pre-eminently from the façades of the city itself, via the immense image-screens of its department stores and corporate advertising zones, and also from the minuscule, hand-held digital screens which contribute to the obsolescence of the city’s cinema screens; those digital screens are maintained in intimate proximity to the endangered urban body in transit.” (Barber 2002, p.153)
The city screen nexus is captured with the mobile phone and has provided an update for the city film genre. Historically the city films have been concerned with the exploration, expression and examination of a cinematic forms and technologies. Max With a Keitai expands the city film genre into the mobile realm. The idea to produce non-scripted films as formulated by René Clair in La Tour (Clair, France,1928), the candid camera techniques applied in Berlin Symphony of a City (Ruttmann, Germany, 1929) and the experimentation with unconventional camera practices and techniques are a relevant approach to work with mobile media. Writing in The films of René Clair, R.C. Dale refers to Claire who said “we really just went out and shot a lot of footage, and I didn’t know what was going to happen to it until I started to put it together in the cutting room, where I assembled it largely by trial and error.” (Dale 1987, p.112) Furthermore Dole says Clair had dreamed the film would be free of any restrictions and restrains imposed by narrative fiction.” (Dale 1987, p.112).
Before the premiere of Berlin, which can be described as Germany’s first documentary (Prümm 2005, p. 411), Ruttmann said that no language or no concepts are existing to define his project. “A film without a story, without love drama and without happyend” (My translation, Prümm 2005, p.411). Mobile filmmaking requires not only new techniques, but also new terminologies, such as the mobile-mentary [3] (mobile documentary). Through the saturation of the mobile phone, keitai, cell phone, Handy, the mobile devices, mobile computers and mobile cameras created “new opportunities have merged for cultural intermediaries to filter this jumped-up micro-content to big media organisations” (Goggin 2006, p.147). And I would like to add new opportunities have come into experience for the big screen as mobile feature films like SMS Sugar Man (Aryan Kaganof,2008, South Africa), Nausea (Matthew Noel-Tod, 2005, UK), Why didn’t anybody tell me it would become this bad in Afghanistan (Cyrus Frisch, 2007, Holland) or indeed Max With a Keitai (Max Schleser 2008, Japan/UK)have illustrated. In difference to the mobile feature productions SMS Sugar Man, Nausea and Why didn’t anybody tell me it would become this bad in Afghanistan and Max With a Keitai is, that the latter is exploring the potential of mobile phones not only as a camera, but also as a viewing device. The prototype experiment is exploring the possibilities to distribute one project filmed on mobile phones for a single screen cinematic projection and simultaneous as new mobile viewing experience. The consideration of form becomes a long-term investment into the construction of knowledge about a specific media format. On the Video Vortex blog hosted by the Amsterdam based Institute for Network Cultures, filmmaker Andreas Treske, points to the essay on Online Video Aesthetics written in January 2008 to illustrate the parameters of the mobile-media:
“However portable devices, such as the iPhone, are used ubiquitously, which is different from cinema … It is therefore inevitable that we study new methods of impact and discover new ways relating it to video.” (Andreas Treske 2008 [online])
The mobile-mentary Max With a Keitai and the mobile-mentary micro-movies project are edited according to the specific viewing experiences. The mobile-mentary can function as a cinematic project, challenging the cinematic qualities itself and simultaneously as a mobile media project. The new mobile experience results from the viewing of micro-movies in the streets, which are distributed via a Bluetooth hubs and edited for a viewing experience in the city outside a cinematic environment. By means of viewing a city-film outside the cinema in an urban environment a new experience is crafted. The translation between the silver – and mobile screen functions via montage;
“the combination of two elements, resulting in the production of a specific effect that could not be produced by either of the two elements.” (Aumont 1992, p.48)
The micro-movies are sent at intervals at different times of the day. The micro-movies create an experience, which merges the location of the viewing (ie in this case London’s cityscape) with the filmic representation of a place on the other side of the world. The user experience is taking the potential viewing time into consideration. The 23 micro-movies are constructed in a non-sequential fashion and can be viewed in any order to establish an understanding of the whole project. The mobile AV productions function as a unique experience fusing the phenomenal everyday environment with the on screen pro-filmic audio-visual work. Most likely the mobile micro-movies will be viewed in situations where no other screen media is available. Consequentially the user might not solely focus on the micro-movies as one is viewing the content while being on the move.
The 23 micro-movies were designed to represent Tokyo’s impressions conceptually.
Tokyo as a city is made up of 23 wards, therefore I chose to create 23 micro-movies. In comparison to Western city structures Tokyo presents an entirely different formation, which does not consist of one central hub, (but an central area, which is made up of six wards [4]), nor the Western concept of the Cartesian city. In the 18th Century the classical Cartesian cities were constructed with one centre hub or location, usually churches, cathedrals or city halls. “The essence of the Cartesian city consists in the geometrical principle which unifies and dominates the totality of the city” (Sasaki 1998, p. 54). Ken-ichi Sasaki summarises in the discussion about cityscapes For Whom is City Design? Tactility vs. Visuality that the visuality of the Cartesian city was addressed to the God’s eye. (Sasaki 1998, p. 56) Japanese cities are characterised by a tactile experience and a lack of stylistic unity, which creates according to Sasaki an impression of noise and energy. (Sasaki 1998, p. 64) The non-existing centripal structure can be explained historically. In the Edo period (1603 to 1868) the government adopted a policy of keeping the temples away from the city centres, removing them to its periphery (Sasaki, 1998 p.64). The traditional Japanese cityscape transformed rapidly in the following century through the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923 and the 2nd World War bombings, which “urged hyper-modernisation of this city” (Yoshioka 1998 p.71). Tokyo’s model of development was mirrored by other Japanese cities in the Taiheiy? Belt. Ever since the Meiji Period, the word city has simply meant Tokyo.
“Tokyo multiplied modernity all over the country within a surprisingly short period of time….Modernisation is Tokyo.
… in a sense, all Japanese cities are small Tokyos.” (Yoshioka in Paetzold 1997, p.71)
Writing in Where the streets have no names: The Japanese City and its Future, he argues that the city consequently is everywhere and nowhere. In Center-City, Empty Centre, Barthes argues that the West has constructed all cities as concentric for historical, economical, religious and military purposes. Tokyo possesses a centre, but
“this centre is empty. The entire city turns around a site both forbidden and indifferent, a residence concealed beneath foliage, protected by moats, inhabited by an emperor who is never seen, which is to say literally, by no one knows who.” (Barthes 1983, p.30)
Japanese cities, as exemplified through Tokyo, are conceptually structured like a network. This relationship between media- and city- scapes is also implemented in the definition of micro-movies. The term ‘micro-movie’ was coined in the 1980s in Nicholas Negroponte’s Architecture Machine Group at MIT and expanded in 1993 by Glorianna Davenport (Director of the Interactive Cinema Group at MIT Media Lab) in the context of interactive video databases – which were introduced in 1997 at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. (Wolf 2005 [online]) In Orchestrating Digital Micromovies, Davenport describes a micromovie as a short piece of video with descriptive information attached to it (Davenport in Wolf 2005 [online]).
The mobile-mentary micro-movies are an experiment in cinematic communication for the small screen using visual information of colors and movement. The micro-movies explore the aspect of translating mobile phone video from the cinema screen to mobile devices via the application of colour and movement. In mainstream cinema we are presented with a continuous narrative story construction, which cannot be interrupted at any point. Continuous editing drives the linear story line from beginning to end. Therefore it is bound by this notion of chronological development. In a cinematic environment the viewing experience is relatively standardised (a dark room in which one is facing a screen in front of the cinema projector). The viewing experience and the narrative construction are thus a linear process, a spatial confinement of the narrative genres.
“It has often been pointed out that the mute cinema, whose expressive techniques are installed with a certain coefficient of non-reality (no sound / no colour) in some ways favoured a considerable lack of realism in its narration and representation.” (Aumont 1992, p.33)
On a mobile device each location can alter the viewing experience and linearity does not provide any flexibility to take this into account.
“Linearity and chronology, as classical parameters of narration, fall victim to a multiple perspective projected onto multiple screens. Asynchronous, non-linear, non-projected onto multiple screens is the goal. These narrative procedures comprising a ‘multiform plot’ have been developed with reference to and oriented toward such rhizomatic communication structures as hypertext, ‘associational indexing’ (Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, 1945), text-based ‘multi-user dungeons’ (MUDs) and other digital techniques of literary narration.” (Weibel 2002 p.50)
The everyday surroundings shift to the foreground and can alter the viewing experience. The mobile phone enables us to view images in any location, which traditionally used to be connected to the fixed point of the cinema theatre, home or desktop space. The Situationist notion of psychogeography references the significance of location. The Lettristes and after that the Situationist used dérive to formulate the idea of psychogeography. Writing in the book, which bears the name of this concept, Merlin Coverley illustrates psychogeography, as a combination of literary movement, political strategy, a series of new ideas and a set of avant-garde approaches, which
“is resisting definition through a shifting series of interwoven themes and constantly being reshaped by its practioners.” (Coverley, 2006, p. 11)
Writing in Rethinking the city – Formulary for a new urbanism, Simon Sandler illustrates psychogeography as
“playful, cheap and populist, an artistic activity carried out in the everyday space of the street rather than in the conventional art spaces of the gallery or theatre.”
(Sandler 1998, p. 67).
In the Situationist international – A user’s guide, Ford says the Situationist city “had to be reinvented on a personal level, to be reconfigured along the lines of a new nomadic lifestyle. Historical precedents include Baudelaire’s description of the flâneur.“ (Ford 2005, p.34) The production of two city films in Japan by the end of the 1920s was foreshadowed by Berhard Kellermann’s 1912 publication Ein Spaziergang in Japan (= A drift in Japan). Writing in Benjamin’s Flâneur in Japan: Urban Modernity and Conceptual Relocation, Rolf Goebel illustrates Kellermann’s work as
“The flâneur seeks to decipher the ‘Winke and Weisungen’ (= hints and directions) that buildings and streets, through ‘sprachlos, geistlos’ (= voiceless and spiritless) themselves, offer to someone obsessed with the hidden significance of wayward, half-forgotten details of the cityscape.” (Goebel 1998, p.380)
Max With a Keitai depicts these half-forgotten details, which were encountered through drifting and exploration of the city by unconventional means. Dérive functions here as the process of exploring a location or cityscape. Moreover Tokyo requires a flâneur-like approach to exploring the city as there are no house numbers and only a few main streets have names in Tokyo.
“You must orient yourself in it not by book, by address, but by walking, by sight, by habit, by experience; here every discovery is intense and fragile, it can be repeated or recovered only by memory of the trace it has left in you: to visit a place for the first time is thereby to begin to write it: the address not being written, it must establish its own writing (Barthes 1983, p. 36).
Also Christopher Gray points to the influence of communication media within the conceptualisation of psychogeography in “Everyone will live in his Cathedral”:
“psychogeography was a study and correlation of the material obtained from drifting…During the same period (1958-1964) they (the situationists) were also toying with new forms of communication and deconditioning within the city.” (Ivain in Gray, p.4)
Moreover he refers to Chtcheglov (Gilles Ivan), whose “central theme was that the city was itself the total work of art…to play with time and space” (Ivain in Gray, p.4)
So how can a mobile phone viewing experience be conceptualised through this ‘play’ with time and space?
By means of extending the idea of montage into a hybrid technique, micro-movies can be linked to any location. New media artists, practioners and theorists have utilised the montage technique ever since its first defining experiments by Kuleshov in the early 1920s. By means of using a split screen it is possible to extract micro-movies from the feature length project. A fruitful conceptualisation was introduced by the filmmaker Hans Richter at the beginning of the 1920s. Hans Richter published in the De Stijl magazine the article Film:
“The existing challenge is defined through the tension, which in detail produces the light’s space, becomes the basis for the construction in the assembling of the whole, so in consequence not only a sum of space constructions is developed but a new quality.”
(Richter in Peterson 1968, p.66, my translation)
A mobile media montage creates a new quality of its own, a hybridity between city and cinematic space. As outlined in the previous section of this chapter a connection between the micro-movies and Tokyo is decipherable. Writing in EACH ONE A HERO-The Philosophy of Symbiosis, Kisho Kurokawa outlines “A Master Plan for Redeveloping the Nation: The Symbiosis of Redevelopment and Restoration”. His work is constructed in order to preserve the “Jumble of Tokyo’s Rhizome”.
“The mazelike, jumbled chaos of Tokyo is a natural rhizome that possesses the potential for becoming a city of night, a Postmodern city of symbiosis. Tokyo today seems chaotic, without order… But as I have said before, we are living in a new age, with a new value system and sensibility that transcends Modernism. Anyone would prefer to walk the back streets of Shinjuku, Shibuya, or Harajuku over the broad avenues of Kasumigaseki, lined with the same square Modern boxes. While there’s nothing wrong with broad boulevards and high-rise buildings, we also want cluttered mazelike districts to explore.” (Kurokawa 1997, p.232)
These lines lead us back to this concept of nomadic exploration, flânerie [or now-a-days the Phoneur (Luke in 2005, p. 186)] and the Situationist practice, which contextualise the experience of viewing mobile-mentary micro-movies.
The camera phone enables agents to navigate through a number of territories and spaces, which could previously not be connected to a cinematic experience. Here a composite of city and cinematic space is introduced.
“Open a book, enter a movie theatre or dial up a track on your iPod and your attention is constantly shifted to another place time or time. The dense embedding of these discrete media spaces in the urban fabric yields a city that, like a film with jump cuts and flashbacks is experienced and understood as a sequence of spatial and temporally discontinuous scenes, some of them expressions of the current, local reality and other ephemeral media constructions.”
(Mitchell 2005 p.14)
Sandler describes the Situationst City as a constant play of contrast, between confined and open spaces, darkness and illumination, circulation and isolation. (Sandler 1998, p.72) Within the Situationist techniques of drifting and psychogeography, which originate from the lettrists (Ivan Chtcheglov aka Gilles Ivain 1953 Formula for a New City), junctions with the exploration of the city were termed “Plaques tournantes” (Sandler 1998, p.88)
“The term punned on so many meanings that it is not possible to translate it straightforwardly. A plaque tournante can be the centre of something; it can be a railway turntable; or it can be a place of exchange.” (Sandler 1998, p.88)
Sandler describes Paris as a “plaque tournante of culture” and Marseilles one of trafficking. (Sandler 1998, p.88). Without question Tokyo is the capital, plaque tournante, of hybrid culture, Eastern and Western, modern/post-modern/hyper-modern and traditional, Tokyo is the society of the spectacle (Fashion, culture, commerce, screens in public places, galleries in department stores, zoos in high rise skyscrapers, etc…).
“A circus, a show, an exhibition, a one-way transmission of experience. It was a form of ‘communication’ to which one side, the audience, can never reply; a culture based on the …consumer capitalism was to be simply the society of the spectacle.” (Gray 1998, p.6)
Tokyo reflects exactly this notion of exchange or an in-between state, sometimes chaotic, but nevertheless structured in the hustle and bustle. Trains leaving the stations at the moment the precise moment the second indicator on the digital clock jumps to zero and entertainment, a red-light district, traditional shrines all next to postmodern architecture in one ward. Parallel phenomenons are found in all 23 wards. Max With a Keitai captures these expressions through rhizomatic lines, which are crafted in the editing process as a visual flow. This visual flow is based upon the colour and movement of the mobile video clips. Moreover Max With a Keitai visually references the idea of drifting by means of navigating through the film via Tokyo’s subway map. “Make maps, not photographs or drawings” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p.27). The film’s non-linear approach is based upon a network structure, which can be graphically illustrated through the subway maps. In addition the idea of a Keitai culture is represented through the superimposed images of the Kenka matsuri [5] (fighting and thunder drum) festival. The festival, which is taking place in the town of Shirahama, Himeji city, is an expression of the concept of mobility. During the festival portable shrines are carried by the man of the local villages. Next to the parades in which the shrines are carried up a hill, the festival also includes fighting rituals in which the different village groups try to topple the shrines. Conceptually the dynamic of the Keitai culture is enunciated through the idea of moving portable shrines around different locations, rather than going to the locations. The portable shrines, the mikoshi, yasa and yatai create an experience in the city rather than in a confined area of a temple. The mobile-mentary micro-movie project has been influenced by these observations during the production of Max With a Keitai.
Why would I create AV productions on a mobile phone for the silver screen?
The mobile-mentary project is an experiment in cinematic communication. The practice-led research examines the impact of mobile phones on the transforming mediascape, focusing on the convergence of communication technologies with lens-based media. In order to explore how mobile documentaries (mobile-mentaries) contribute to and extend the definition of documentary theory and practice I set out to work in the original parameters of the cinematic medium/format. Documentary originated as media format on the cinematic screen. Max with a Keitai is produced on a mobile phone (Keitai) as a single screen cinematic work. The main objective was to discover if it is possible to produce work with a mobile phone for the big screen. Three years ago mobile phones had limited storage capacities (512 mb microSD cards), recorded in 12 frames per second on two megapixel cameras and worked with the first generation of the 3gp compression format, which could not be transferred directly into non-linear editing suits. Technically it seemed almost impossible to film a feature project on a mobile phone.
The mobile-mentary project is referencing the early definitions of documentary, which is defined through a hybrid of the contemporary categories of experimental film and new media. The mobile-mentary research investigation explores the viewing experiences for mobile devices as a form of a new mobile media experience. Both screen formats, the large scale cinema screen and the small mobile device are conceptual tangents in the montage process. As one of the first findings from the pre-production experiments, one can emphasise that no matter how pixelated the images are and how low the resolution on the small screen (174×144) movement will always be decoded.
“The basic cinematic rhythms, achieved through editing, coordinate with the equally basic movements of subject motion and frame motion. The effectiveness of any given shot may depend not only on motion within and motion of the frame, but the motion evoked by juxtaposition. Thus, seven fundamental rhythms are responsible for cinema being the art of creating movement. The use of motion in every shot are based on two- at least subject motion and one of the editing types – or more possible rhythms.” (Gessner 2003, p. 167)
Robert Gessner writes in The seven faces of time: An Aesthetic for Cinema that once cinema’s uniqueness is more fully understood, we shall have an aesthetic key capable of unlocking new windows. (Gessner 2003, p. 167) The cinematic uniqueness is defined through a filmic quality, which can be underscored through producing a visual rhythm. Working with mobile phone video one can thus create a visual rhythm according to the screens’ parameters for 174×144 or 576×420. With the aim producing an experimental documentary on a mobile phone Japan was chosen, as it is the country with the longest history of mobile devices in this new media. Jphone introduced the first mobile phone with a video camera, the SHARP SH-04, in Japan in 2000. Seven years later in 2007 a Digital Video [6] issue lists a Finnish mobile phone as a video-camera under £500. This mobile phone company is now the worlds largest camera manufacturer and there are now more camera phones in circulation than digital video and stills cameras combined [7]. Last year the N95 was released and introduced a new standard for mobile filmmaking. The mobile device has got 5 Megapixel Carl Zeiss Optics camera, which has the capacity to record images in native video desktop format (VGA 640×480). In the feature Max With a Keitai, I made a distinct choice in using a 2005 mobile phone recording in a low-res resolution (3gp / 176 x 208 pixels). Simultaneously the feature film is illustrating the potential of advanced mobile phone camera technology by means of using a progressive Japanese camera phone in the production. The Foma N902is already had the capacities to record in mpeg4 compression and native video format in 2006.
The research is framed through the technological advancement in the years 2004-2008. Three years ago in 2005 when I started my research file size limitations and video technology in mobile devices made this task a high risk endeavour. Writing in the 2006 publication Cellphone Cultures, Goggin outlines the format of the 3GP media devices.
“The quality of their lenses is inferior to that of analogue and digital cameras, as they are made from plastic rather than glass. So far resolution has been relatively poor, compared to the standard quickly established by digital cameras. Other early problems included limited storage capability, relatively short battery life, and lack of control over exposure, focus, and lense size, compared to fuller-featured digital and analogue cameras.”
(Goggin 2006, p.152)
There were a number of problems ranging from the non-existence of any technical support or instructions to incompatible file formats, landscape and portrait formats of mobile phones. The implementation of two mobile devices, a traditional European and an advanced Japanese model allows reflecting upon the advancement of mobile video technology within the project and the timeframe of production. Max With a Keitai can document the technological advancement in camera phone filmmaking juxtaposing the technical quality of a Japanese mobile phone and a European model. The latter camera phone captures the images with a digital two megapixel camera, which pixelates extensively when blown up to the native video format. The video is filmed in the native 3gp format (176×144) QCIF with 12 frames per second. The advanced Japanese mobile phone incorporated the mpeg 4 codes, which allows working with mobile phone video files in the digital standard size QVGA 320 x 240. As the name indicates this is a quarter of native video format VGA (640×480) and therefore video does not pixelate when imported in a standard DV environment. In addition the keitai video camera records with twice as many frames and stereo sound that can be matched with consumer DV camera quality.
The ‘low res’ obstruction of the camera phones can be utilized as a creative feature by means of working with the mobile video in an abstract form. Furthermore the captured mobile phone video material depicts the notion of a hybrid culture on the discursive layer. Japan is a hybrid of Asian and Western cultures, which are blended into one commercial fashion/consumer culture in the city centres. Post-modern high-rise temples sit side-by-side traditional Japanese architecture. Traditional shrines are one minute apart from Pacionko halls, art-exhibitions are found in Tokyo’s convention centre Big Sight or on the top floor of shopping centres, which are two subway stops apart from derelict entertainment and shopping malls. The juxtaposition of hyper-modern and tradition is omnipresent in Japan and defines its own ethos. This bricolage is mirrored in Max With a Katei through using the 3gp and mpeg standard. Since the pre-production experiments in 2005 [8], technology has advanced and lens-based mobile devices have reached new standards. The mobile-mentary Max With a Keitai is referencing Japanese progressive technology by means of incorporating a Japanese and a European mobile phone in the feature film production. On the discursive level the distinction between the 3gp and mpeg4 compression codec also reflects a discrepancy in contemporary Japanese culture between the traditional values and consumer-culture lifestyle. The pixilation of mobile video is a result of the compression formats. On a conceptual level one could describe Japanese cities and the Taiheiy? Belt as a ‘CITYpeg’. The megapolis is highly populated and space zipped (meaning compressed) by any means.
Max With a Keitai is a digital record of a vblog (www.mobile-mentary.co.uk). The video-blog was produced at the end of 2006 during the production on location in Japan. The experimental city film Max With a Keitai was edited on location and screened for the first time in Japan at the Design Fiesta in Tokyo (http://www.designfesta.com) in December 2006. The screening of the film to a Japanese audience became part of the project and is a direct reference to the Man With a Movie Camera (Vertov 1929 Soviet Union). In a similar way as Vertov (or Wenders Tokyo GA) describes his filmic project as the diary of a cameraman, the mobile-mentary feature project draws upon the mobile-mentary vblog in the form of a visual (almost) real-time sketchbook. Simultaneously comments from the vblog commentators have been included in the city films as inter titles. The web 2.0 impulse is therefore implemented in Max With a Keitai and allows other people beyond the filmmaker Max to give a ‘voice’ in the film. Max With a Keitai bridges the filmic and online formats and environments through the simulation of sms-inter-titles appearing on screen. In addition the vblog functioned as a production diary and travel log. One can notice a conceptual similarity between documentary and (video) blogs at this level. The word ‘documentary’ itself derives from the French, who used the term to describe travelogues by the term documentaire. (Grierson in MacCann 1966, p.207) The mobile-mentary vblog functions in a similar fashion, while creating a visual database as resource for the feature project. The Vblogs or moblogs can be seen as an extension of the documentary format on the websphere.
“A weblog is a record of travels on the Web, so a mobile phone log (moblog) should be a record of travels in the world. …As we chatter and text away, our phones could record and share the parts we choose: a walking, talking, seeing record of our time around town, corrected and augmented by other mobloggers.” (Hall in Goggin 2006, p.143)
Another factor that needs to be mentioned when dealing with mobile media is the notions of the immediacy and intimacy of the mobile device.
“Rather than being a somewhat distinct, or even formal part of the recording, documentation, and remembering of an event or ritual, the camera phone often has become part of the event itself. Camera phones are perceived to offer a sense of immediacy, lessening the time elapsed between the time when the photo was taken and the time it is reviewed.” (Goggin 2006, p.149)
Goggin quotes Wilhelm’s phrase of the ‘power of now’ in Mobile convergences. With immediacy, real time simulation and liveness take the position of indexicality. Rather than re-evaluating the capacity of film to capture actuality, Max With a Keitai and the mobile-mentary micro-movie project focus on the formation of a new mobile experience. As a documentary filmmaker one would normally place the camera in a safe position and then use the tele-focus lens to film a scene at a distance from where the action occurs. The mobile phone does not have these capacities and requires the filmmaker to be involved in the action. This directness is transmitted on screen. The images captured on mobile devices are so close that one could touch them. The notion of immediacy, which is often linked to mobile productions, is explored in the city film through the perspective of the filmmaker. Max reminds the audience showing his projection using the camera-phone in mirrors. Max breaks the 180° rule and thus establishes a link to the audience. Through the immediacy of the medium one can identify with the role of the filmmaker. The obstructions of low-res camera technology can be used in a creative way, which is reminiscent of filmmakers using Super 8 or Pixelvision. The abstract pixel is treated as a driving parameter in the construction of the story, which is revealed through the movement and visual flow of the mobile images. In addition the status of a filmmaker shifts into an invisible phenomenon. As mobile phones are ubiquitous one has the possibility to film without attracting much attention. Max With a Keitai does not claim to work as a fly on the wall, but rather provides a intimate perspective of a subjective view of the world. Max with a Keitai films some scenes using a pocket to hide the camera, while drifting through the cityscapes. Also the phone was attached to bicycles and trains, which references the city films travelling shots. The spirit of the Kinkos is present in the mobile-mentaries as we hold the possibilities for filmmaking in our hands on a daily base. The means of production have been made accessible as the Motorola advertisement slogan reveals: We’re all filmmakers now. The industry is trying to market the mobile device as professional camera equipment (which can be exemplified through the Samsung advertisement, which uses professional set lights.) The mobile-mentary research positions the mobile media practice in a rather alternative space. At this point one can also mention the economical factor for mobile-mentaries. The budget for producing a mobile-mentary is located in the region of Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, 2003, USA) rather than a blockbuster film project. The recording device, the mobile phone was ‘bought’ for free with a mobile phone contract.
The mainstream entertainment media is fighting for pole-positions in the race to attach the fragmented users and consumers to their mobile brands. Mobile phone manufactures now produce more lens based media than any other media companies and are also shifting into the domain of internet and social networking services.
“On the one hand, new media technologies have lowered production and distribution costs, expanded the range of available delivery channels, and enable consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. At the same time, there has been an alarming concentration of the ownership of mainstream commercial media, with a small handful of multinational media conglomerates dominating all sectors of the entertainment industry. No one seems capable of describing both sets of changes at the same time, let alone show how they impact each other. Some fear that media is out of control, others a world where gatekeepers have unprecedented power. Again, the truth lies somewhere in between” (Jenkins 2006, p. 18)
Without entering the field of cyborg theory one can now point to the extraordinarily fast developments in the field of augmented and alternative reality games. Jenkins quotes Jane McGonigal in Convergence Culture describing alternate reality games as
“an interactive drama played out online and in the real-word spaces, taking place over several weeks or month, in which dozens, hundreds, thousands of players come together online, form collaborative social networks, and work together to solve a mystery or problem that would be absolutely impossible to solve alone.” (McGonigal in Jenkins 2006, p. 280)
AR (augmented reality) or toolkits like HP’s mscape technolgy [9] have the potential to bridge the two distinct domains: the cinema industry and the games industry. The mobile-mentary micro-movies project works on a similar layer as unique experiences are created by means of watching micro-movies in the city. Different sections from the feature film are extracted as micro movies via Bluetooth and/or the Internet. As the micro-movies can be viewed in any location, they create new experiences, which can be described as a hybrid of the city and filmic space. “Convergence involes both a change in the way media is produced and a change in the way media is consumed” (Jenkins 2006, p. 16) The mobile device is broadening the field in which mobile media artefacts and video footage can be screened. Thus the mobile-mentary project can be viewed as a cinematic single screen project, as a vblog online, as a micro-movie in the city, in a gallery exhibition and/or as a VJ performance.
The mobile-mentary micro-movie project explores the fusion of city and mediascpe. Tokyo, as one of the highest populated urban areas and cosmopolitan centres, presents itself through a futuristic endless cityscape. Tokyo Ga mirrors Max’s ginji (foreigner) impressions and perspective of Japanese fast pace everyday life.
“The first impressions present a city and a population in constant movement: sounds from video arcades, pachinko halls, and televisions, augumented by the ever-present, discordant soundtrack, the constant rush of traffic, of trains and of people in the Metro system that create a flood of images, and an inescapable cacophony of audio impressions that blend into a monstrous chaos.” (Graf 2002, p.106)
In one weblog entry entitled Hayaku (=’be quick’) the impression of the city is symbolically compared to a computer microprocessor.
“The city is criss-crossed by trains, cars and pedestrian bridges. The illuminated billboards flash like microprocessors directing the traffic of the town. The post-modern impression of a city is fueled through the Japanese mentality. Office ward workers, couriers, businesswomen, and lots of other passers-by seem to be in a constant hurry. At the street junction in Shibuya a video billboard uses live-video input. …” (Thursday, September 28th, 2006 www.mobile-mentary.co.uk)
As a ginji it is a difficult endeavour to break into traditional Japanese circles, but through the non-conventional means exploring the city seemingly hidden traditional spaces have been revealed and captured through the lens of a mobile phone. The futuristic appearance, as framed by Chris Marker and Wim Wenders is extended through the vision of the mobile phone, which captures the contemporary digital city. Max With a Keitai pushes the pixel aesthetic to its limits and beyond any formats fund in mainstream media (, as one can clearly notice in the Hiroshima section of Max With a Keitai.) The limited camera technology depicts the city as a digital and pixelated image. Max With a Kaitai is a film about Japanese cities and thus reflects the structures of the city both formally and aesthetically. Tokyo is a bricolage of tradition, hypermodern, derelict and new emerging consumer temples: a vast hybridity.
During the time filming on location, I realised that the structure of the emerging film can be compared to the rhizomatic structure of Tokyo itself. A topological map of the subway system represents the non-linear structure of the film. Moreover the subway map uses a colour code to represent the different options available navigating the city. Max With a Keitai is edited with an emphasis on a particular colour code of orange and green. These colours represent Japan’s nature and botanic, the green Japanese gardens turn orange as the maple leaves change colour in the autumn season. In order to show the parallelism in Tokyo’s formation and Max With a Keitai I will briefly outline the concept with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) formulated in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Deleuze and Guattari use the metaphor of an organic botanical growth (subterranean stem, which is different from roots and radicles) to explore psychoanalysis, language and other ‘plateaus’: “Any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p.24) The underground stems can be seen as transport stations on the map, which allow multiple connections. The micro-movie extracts from the feature project can be viewed in ‘any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities’. Despite the fact that Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concepts are open to criticism, their abstract writings and the concept of the rhizome provide a dynamic framework by which to explain the synergies in between cinematic and city space. The rhizomatic patterns are applied in architecture (Varying Title: plan to unify departments and campus. Architecture and Urbanism, 1994, p. 102-9 and Buona Vista masterplan Competition Project. Architecture and Urbanism (2004) p. 84-91), new media (Weibel 2002) and consequently can form a continuum between city, filmic and mobile media space. Deleuze and Guattari outline rhizomatic structures through the five principles of connection and heterogeneity, multiplicity, a signifying rupture, and the principle of cartography of decalomania. The rizomatic characteristica of discontinuity, rupture, multiplicity, contiguity and immediacy (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p.17) define the montage between the filmic, mobile media and cityscape. The new mobile montage “connects any point to any other point” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p.23) and this is reflected in the editing process of Max With a Keitai and numerous VJ performances.
Wits Digital Arts
Wed 3 June
13:15 – 14:00
Convent Seminar Room
Since the 1980s, festivals have been the most important hubs for
the promotion and distribution of media art. The evolution of these
festivals therefore also reflects the way in which conceptions of
media art have changed. First founded in 1988, the Transmediale
festival in Berlin, for instance, was initially a venue only for
video art, and only in the course of the 90s opened its programme for
interactive and multi-media art. Its traditional critical approach,
first articulated by many political documentaries in the programme,
later resulted in major conferences on the social impact of digital
media. Andreas Broeckmann, who was the director of transmediale from
2001 - 2007, will discuss the transformation of media art over the
past 20 years and will offer an outlook onto the preparations for the
ISEA2010 RUHR, the 16th International Symposium on Electronic Art,
which he is organising in the German Ruhr region for next year.
For more information please contact:
Prof Christo Doherty
Head of Digital Arts
Wits School of Arts
University of the Witwatersrand
christo.doherty@wits.ac.za
+27 11 717 4682
+27 84 331 9590 www.wits.ac.za/artworks
dis.grace is a hybrid art project that digitally re-appropriates South African author JM Coetzee’s controversial Booker Prize-winning 1999 novel, Disgrace in order to explore the failure of language to maintain its authority in a complex global, postcolonial world.
The work literally translates the full text of Coetzee’s novel into images using the Google Search Engine’s “Image Search” functionality. It matches each word in the book with its equivalent No.1 Google search image to create a new book, a visual text that is rewritten through the eyes of a global, digital popular culture.
Situated consciously within the context of a post-apartheid South Africa, dis.grace exposes the struggle for primacy between the written word and the image, the page and the screen. It questions the disgraced Western literary parameters of “white writing” considering its history of ideologically objectification and predation, while at the same time exploring the amnesia and historical self-invention that seem to form the basis of the decolonized, post-apartheid mind.
These artists who insert their own work into that of others contribute to the eradication of the traditional distinction between production and consumption, creation and copy, readymade and original work. The material they manipulate is no longer primary. It is no longer a matter of elaborating a form on the basis of a raw material but working with objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, which is to say, objects already informed by other objects. Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape marked by the twin figures of the DJ and the programmer, both of whom have the task of selecting cultural objects and inserting them into new contexts.
In a deliberately provocative presentation on 13 May, Professor Christo Doherty of Wits University’s Digital Arts department opened the Digital Media For Broadcasters Conference at the Wanderer’s Club in Johannesburg by stating that where the Internet is concerned, content is NOT king.
For decades broadcasters and content producers have adhered to the adage that content is king. Doherty made the point that in the digital age of new media, connectivity is king.
“We’re all learning how to live in the connected world. The idea of this conference is to pose questions about the nature of the Internet as a communications tool. I think we need to raise controversy on this subject because no-one really knows what’s going on,” said Doherty.
In closing Doherty maintained that broadcasters should realise that the networked world is both anti-hierarchical and against commercialism.
See full story and report on the Digital Media for Broadcasters Conference in the June issue of Screen Africa.
