1-Intro.mov:
1: Ye Olde Bool of Multimedia.
3: From Staineglass windows to html.
4: Seeing, feeling and thinking… Moholy-Nagy.
5: The genetic evolution of media forms…
6: The convergence of media industries and technological forms.
7: The Skills needed for the new media industry…
8: John Logi Baird, The Noctovisor and the first TV image (Terry Wogan?).
9: Where does a telephone conversation take place?
10: SERGEI EISENSTIEN (1898-1948), Storyboard.
11: John Cage, Score with Razor blade.
12: namrepus
13: "Train arrival in the station of La Ciotat," 1895, Auguste and Louis Lumière.
14: Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin, 1925, USSR, 75 mins). Dir: Sergei Eisenstein; Writer: Sergei Eisenstein and Nina Agadzhanova Shutko; Cinematography: Eduard Tisse; Original music: Edmund Meisel and Dmitri Shostakovich; Editor: Sergei Eisenstein; Art Director: Vasili Rakhals.
15: Tralfamadorians…
16: Kurt Vonnegut’s narrative models.
17: Narrative Structure diagrams…
18: TV time…
19: Michel Gondry, Cibo Matto, Sugar Water.
20: A recent plan of the coded future… already out of date. The move from dead to live, fixed to improvised…
21: Pallasmaa…
22: Oh you pretty things… The Village of the Damned, (1960). Directed by Wolf Rilla. Writing credits John Wyndham (novel), Stirling Silliphant.
A CHANGE IN PERSPECTIVE:
Lets just put things in context...
We had been awake all night my friends and I, under the mosque shaped chandeliers which starry like our souls were lit by the inner radiance of an electric heart. For hours we had trampled opulent oriental carpets; soiled quantities of paper with frantic thought..... We were alone before the stokers who sweat before the satanic furnaces of great ships, alone with those black phantoms who ferret in the bellies of red hot locomotives as they hurtle forward at insensate speeds....... We all started up, at the sound of a tram rumbling past, ablaze with multicoloured lights, like a village in festival dress that the flooded Po tears from its banks and sweeps through the gorges and rapids, down to the sea. Afterwards the silence grew deeper and we heard only the muttered devotions of the old canal and the creaking of the arthritic, ivy-bearded palaces ..... Suddenly we heard the roar of starving cars ..... Let us go, I cried, let us depart. Mythology and Mystic Idealism are defeated at last. We are in at the birth of the centaurs, we shall see the first angels fly. We must rattle the doors of life, test the hinges and the bolts. Let us go. There on earth is the first dawn of history and there is nothing to match the red sword of the sun, slashing for the first time through the shadows of a thousand years.
Filippo Tomaso Marinetti
'Le Futurisme', Le Figaro, Paris,
20 February 1909
“TODAY, WE TAKE ON SPACE AND TIME.
The space-time continuum is being challenged. The notion of communication is changed for ever. All the information in the universe will soon be accessible to everyone at every moment.”
From a full page advertisement in the New York Times on 5 January 1994, for MCI.
Tracey M, 1998, The Decline and Fall of Public Service Broadcasting, Oxford University Press, pp192
“We are at the farthest point of time!... Why look behind us when we should be crashing down the doors of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are now living in the absolute since we have created eternal omnipresent speed.”
Marinetti FT, 1909, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, Le Figaro February .
There is not only this sharpening of refinement of the brain going on, but there has been what our great-grandparents would have considered an immense increase in the amount, the quality and the accessibility of knowledge. As the individual brain quickens and becomes more skilful, there also appears a collective Brain, the Encyclopaedia, the Fundamental Knowledge System, which accumulates, sorts, keeps in order and renders available everything that is known. The Encyclopaedia organisation, which centres upon Barcelona, with its seventeenth million active workers, is the Memory of Mankind. Its tentacles spread out in one direction to millions of investigators, checkers and correspondents, and in another to keep the educational process in living touch with mental advance.
Wells HG, 1933, The Shape of Things to Come.
“-seeing, feeling and thinking in relationship and not as a series of isolated phenomena. It instantaneously integrates and transmutes single elements into a coherent whole”.
(Moholy-Nagy, 1946, p12) Moholy-Nagy L, 1946, Vision in Motion
“In the photograph must learn to seek, not the ‘picture’, not the aesthetic of tradition, but the ideal instrument of expression, the self-sufficient vehicle for education.”
(Moholy-Nagy, 1936, Telehor 1,no.2)
“But images, as I have labored to show, are substantially analogic representations of the things they stand for, and this distinction has a very crucial implication. It means that in principle, images are capable of representing the entire range of variation in a realm of experience and need not collapse this range into a more limited number of categories.”
(Messaris, 1994, p26) Messaris P, 1994, Visual Literacy, Image, Mind and Reality.
“The images have no narrative meaning, they are rather a series of visual stimuli intended to create a psychological drama within the viewer, ‘rousing the mind by osmosis without verbal transposition’.”
(Curtis, 1972, p29) Curtis D, 1972 Experimental Cinema
“The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies interconectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of mystery. Any photograph has multiple meanings; indeed to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination.The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. now think-or rather feel, intuit- what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks that way.” Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, peculation, and fantasy.”
(Sontag, p23, 1977) Sontag S, 1977, On Photography.
“our very word “grasp” or “apprehension” points to the process of getting at one thing through another, of handling and sensing many facets at a time through more than one sense a a time. It begins to be evident that “touch” is not skin but the interplay of the senses, and “keeping in touch” or “getting in touch” is a matter of a fruitful meeting of the senses, of sight translated into sound and sound into movement, and taste and smell. The “common sense” was for many centuries was held to be the peculiar human power of translating one kind of experience of one sense into all the senses, and presenting the result continuously as a unified image to the mind. In fact, this image of a unified ratio among the senses was long held to be the mark of our rationality, and may in the computer age easily become so again.”
(McLuhan,1964, p60) McLuhan M, 1964, Understanding Media.
“The experience of space and time have imploded and become fused by speed. As a consequence of this implosion we are witnessing a distinct reversal of the two dimensions, a temporalisation of space and a spatialisation of time. We live increasingly in a perpetual present, flattened by speed and simultaneity, and grasped by instantaneous perceptions of the eye. The only sense that is fast enough to keep pace with the astounding increase in the technological world is sight. But the world of the eye is threatening to turn into the flat world of the present.”
Pallasmaa J, 1996, The Eyes of the Skin, Polemics, Academy Group Ltd, pp12
“The percept of the body and the image of the world turn into one single ciontinuous existential experience - there is no body seperate from its domicile in space, and there is no space unrelated to the unconscious image of the percieving self.”
Pallasmaa J, 1996, The Eyes of the Skin, Polemics, Academy Group Ltd, pp27
“The Spect-actor Paradigm. This paradigm is a contemporary development in theatre - again, one which has been enthusiastically adopted by TIE practitioners. I believe that it has the most acute application for the production of multi-media material - it presents an ideal to which educative interactive programs might profitably aspire.
The term, “spect-actor”, is one coined by the Brazilian theatre practitioner, Augusto Boal. Boal’s work, like Brecht’s, is motored by an impulse for social and political change. Unlike Brecht, through Invisible Theatre and, more particularly, Forum Theatre, he has developed new theatrical forms in which members of the audience cross, ultimately consciously cross the boundary between watching and taking part in the action.”
Turley S, 1997, Designing for Audience Response, Intelligent Tutoring Media, Vol 7 No’ 3&4, Mediaspace 3, pp28
“Telematic Vision is a vacant space of potentiality, it is nothing without the presence and interactions of the participants who create their own television programme by becoming the voyeurs of their own spectacle.”
Sermon P. 1997, From Telematic Man to Heaven 194.94.211.200, Conference Proceedings Consciousness Reframed 1997, CAiiA, University of Wales College, Newport.
It is said that all the sciences can trace their roots to Aristotle: but the science of cosmic aesthetics started with Sarutobi Sasuke, a famous ninja (a samurai who mastered many fantastic arts, including that of making himself invisible, chiefly to spy upon an enemy). The first step for a ninja is to learn how to shorten distances by shrinking the earth, that is, how to transcend the law of gravity. For the satellite, this is a piece of cake. So, just a Mozart mastered the newly invented clarinet, the satellite artist must compose his art from the beginning suitable to physical conditions and grammar.
Paik NJ, 1984, Art and Satellite, Contemporary Art, Nam June Paik: Art for 25 Million People: Bon Jour Mr. Orwell: Kunst und Satellite in der Zukunft (Berlin:DAAD Galerie.
..........................................................
Other Papers:
•A S Rogers, 1994, Virtuosi- Virtual Reality for Group Working, BT Technology Journal Vol 12 No 3, pp81-89
•A Pentland, 1996, Smart Rooms, Scientific America, April 1996, pp54-62
•H Ishii et al, 1994, Interactive Design of Seamless Collaboration Media, Communications of the ACM August 1994, Vol/37, No8, pp83-97
•P Brown, 1990, Metamedia and Cyberspace, P Hayward, Culture Technology & Creativity, John Libbey & co Ltd, pp227-241,
•M McLuhan, Hybrid Energy, Understanding Media, Routledge, pp48-61.
•Nat Chard, 1995, Architecture of Our Interior, Integrating Architecture, Art & Design Journal, pp81.
•S Mann, 1996, ‘Smart Clothing’: Wearable Multimedia Computing and ‘Personal Imaging’ to restore the Technological Balance Between People and Their Environments. ACM Multimedia, pp163-169.
•J Pallasmaa, 1996, The Eyes of the Skin, Polemics, Academy Group Ltd, pp6-16.
•R Coyne, Where in the World is Cyberspace, Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age, Chapter 4 pp147-177.
•C Greenhalgh, 1992, Inhabited T.V: Collaborative Virtual Environments for the Consumer, Eurographics, pp217-221.
•L Rieber, 1996, Seriously Considering Play: Designing interactive Learning Environments Based on the Blending of Microworlds, Simulations, and Games, ETR&D, Vol 44. No2, pp. 43-58
•G Weinbren, 1995, Mastery Computer Games, Intuitive Interfaces, and Interactive Multimedia, Leonardo, Vol 28, pp403-408.
•C Davies, 1997, Changing Spaces: VR as a Philosophical Arena of Being, (Conference Proceedings, Consciousness Reframed, CAiiA, UWCN).
..........................................................
Video extracts:
• Small Objects of Desire, The Photograph. Diverse Productions, BBC2, 1991
• Peeping Tom, Michael Powell, 1960. Final sequence.
• A very British Psycho, Peeping Tom Documentary, 1997, Channel 4
• Battleship Potempkin, SERGEI EISENSTIEN (1898-1948) The Odessa Steps Sequence
• FORD ADVERT: What do you do in yours, shown during TV premiere of Ground Hog Day.
• The Sensorama.
• Extract from Kamikaze, French with subtitles.
• North by North West, A. Hitchcock.
• The Image The text and the Gun, BBC 1990 Omnibus
• Video Art BBC compilation.
• Extrats from VR reprsentations....
• The Pillow Book, Peter Greenaway
• Seven
• The Conversation F Coppola
• etc...
..........................................................
• THEORIES OF MONTAGE
Metric Montage Film length - Time
Rhythmic Montage Rhythm of frame /motion content
Suspension of Time The moment repeated
Shock Attraction Composite image - the third meaning
Tonal Montage Light, vision
Cutting to Form Shape
Overtonal Montage Combination and conflict of above within the frame
• THE PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGE from Image, Music, Text. Roland Barthes.1977.
Denoted Message Obvious meaning.
Connoted Meaning The second meaning
Connotation Procedures: TRICK EFFECTS / THE POSE / OBJECTS / PHOTOGENIA / AESTHETICISM / SYNTAX
..........................................................