Tekfestival, Rome, May 2008 - Call for Entries :: Deadline: January 31, 2008.

Starting on October 1 (2007) through January 31st (2008) Tekfestival, an international showcase of independent and social cinema, accepts submissions for the 7th edition that will take place in Rome in May 2008. Bringing to the surface wandering gazes, opening spaces to directors walking on the edges of cinema; screening the new Italian and international productions; mixing documentaries, fiction, live performances, video-installation and video-essays; rediscovering artists of the past, investing in directors who portray the present; organizing seven days of independent and social cinema, workshop, conferences, performances and exhibitions. Continue reading

Vooruit Arts Centre and the Film Festival of Flanders present: Almost Cinema - Twelve days on the border between film, live arts and media arts :: October 9 - 20, 2007 :: Several halls, Vooruit.

Almost Cinema 07 continues along the path set out by the first edition last year. The artists on the programme don’t belong to the traditional cinema world, but they have all been touched by it and this has influenced their work. During the Film Festival, Vooruit once again explores the borders between film, media art and live performances combining drama, dance and music. We’ll be doing this by means of an installation trail throughout the building, a theatrical dance performance deconstructing cinematic clichis, a late night storytelling session accompanied by flip books and a series of audiovisual performances which will each give their own interpretation of the term film. Continue reading

THE MACHFELD AFFAIR by JACK HAUSER :: July 23-August 11, 2007 :: Opening: July 23, 2007, 5pm :: MACHFELD | Studio, Max Winter - Platz 21/1, 1020, Wien.

Since 1999, Jack Hauser has been creating performative, subcultural interventions which he calls choreographic operations. THE MACHFELD AFFAIR is a transmedia exhibition in the rooms of the MACHFELD | Studio and references the motion picture The Thomas Crown Affair. Here and there are parallel concurrent strands which are showing the coherence of one work. The Thomas Crown Affair assisted by the Split-Screen-Technique the perfect planing of a bank-robbery. The movie contains the longest Kiss (55 Seconds) in film history. Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway needed 8 hours - over 3 days for the shooting. Continue reading

A Spontaneous + Collaborative Approach to Video Creation

The full paper written for Interact 2007 with http://web.media.mit.edu/~ishii/ is accepted! It shows how Textable Movie designed for facilitating video production has informed Moving Pictures. It presents a mechanism to seamlessly interface the various parts in video production and present our observations. The conference topic is socially-responsible interaction. So see you in Rio de Janeiro in September!

Abstract: The paper presents a novel approach to collecting, editing and performing visual and sound clips in real time. The cumbersome process of capturing and editing becomes fluid in the improvisation of a story, and accessible as a way to create a final movie. It is shown how a graphical interface created for video production informs the design of a tangible environment that provides a spontaneous and collaborative approach to video creation, selection and sequencing. Iterative design process, participatory design sessions and workshop observations with 10-12 year old users from Sweden and Ireland are discussed. The limitations of interfacing video capture, editing and publication in a self-contained platform are addressed. Download the 14 pages paper. [blogged by Cati Vaucelle on Architectradure] Continue reading

Crashing Ars

Falling Life is an ongoing project that was introduced for the first time in Berlin in August 2005. This urban screening project doesn?t need a curator or a gallery; it doesn?t need a fixed place or access to electric power. The artists are equipped with a car, a laptop, a compact light powerful projector and a small power generator. With this very mobile equipment the artists are able to have an instant presence in the urban landscape. They use facades of buildings that can be immediately changed into a projection screens. What makes the project exciting is the variety of possible buildings as a projection surface: the more uneven and in relief they are the more magic they look. Without any preparation and without any permits the artists are operating in a kind of projection guerrilla style.
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Manuscape: An Instrument for Non-Linear Storytelling

“I have just got back from Helsinki where I saw Pia Tikka’s interactive film Obsession at Kiasma Art Museum. This is a four screen work of immense complexity, working with an automated rules-based system of clip selection, influenced by an audience’s physiological reactions to what is seen on screen. Swivelling chairs allow the programme to compile data on viewers’s gaze direction, while an interactive handprint on the chair arm picks up subtle alterations in skin conductivity and pulse rate and augments the presentation of image according to arousal states. The subject of the film is sexual obsession and attitudes to rape-conflating female desires and fantasies with a semi-documentary narrative. This is an innovative work, using aspects of audience mobility and biology to alter content.” [blogged by Martin Rieser on Mobile Audience]
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Live Audiovisual Performance

Many sounds and images in our everyday lives slip past our notice simply because they are too small, or because we lack the proper receivers to pick them up. ResonanCITY is an ongoing project to gather these microscopic sounds from various cities, and to amplify and transform them. The goal is to build a new city of sound and visuals inside the old one, and to inspire curiosity and exploration of one’s own environment. Video artist Sara Kolster, searches for details and objects which she transformed in a microscopic way into macro-images. She uses different macro-lenses and a lightbox, capturing and manipulating these images live, without the use of any filters. The combination of film- and video techniques with analogue tools as found footage, positive film and photographs gives the performance a layered character.
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Live Movies

Cyburbia Productions, a multimedia performance studio, focuses on the collaborative creation of “live movies,” syntheses of cinema, theater and music. The company?s work employs digital projection and sound technologies, and filmic narrative techniques, to construct moving stage pictures and sonic theater, in which live actors interact with animated performers, and emerge from or vanish into projected environments, settings and dreamscapes.

Projects include: SILENCE & DARKNESS is a live movie for the cell phone age by Kirby Malone, and passages from Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and Heiner M?ller. See list of productions here.

Embodied Spectatorship

Paper abstract: For most of the past 100 years, cinema has been the premier medium for defining and expressing relations to the visible world. However, cinematic spectacles delivered in darkened theaters are predicated on a denial of both the body and the physical surroundings of the spectators who are watching it. To overcome these deficiencies, filmmakers have historically turned to narrative, seducing audiences with compelling stories and providing realistic characters with whom to identify. This paper describes several research projects in interactive panoramic cinema that attempt to sidestep the narrative preoccupations of conventional cinema and instead are based on notions of space, movement and embodied spectatorship rather than just storytelling. Example projects include interactive works developed with the use of a unique 360 degree camera and editing system, and also development of panoramic imagery for a large projection environment with 14 screens on 3 adjacent walls in a 5-4-5 configuration with observations and findings from an experiment projecting panoramic video on 12 of the 14, in a 4-4-4 270 degree configuration. [via USC Interactive Media Division]
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Emerging Infrastructures of All (Inter)net Research

Dr. Reinhold Grether’s network research | netzwissenschaft site maps the “emerging infrastructures of all (inter)net research endeavours. net.science as an anthropology of connectivity is trying to overcome the constraints of specialist method transfers on net matters. the protuberance of technical networks necessitates a professionalization of human net knowledge. neither the isolation of concepts as in basic research nor the encapsulation of processes as in applied sciences will ever be able to adequately describe the complex autopoiesis of networks. net.science is undoubtedly developing into a scienza nuova of its own right.”

Check out his Mobile Art and Virtual Performance research areas.