Lev Manovich
Soft Cinema
15 November 2002 - 23 March 2003
info@manovich.net
www.manovich.net
Soft Cinema (2002) was commissioned and produced by ZKM (Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe).
Lev Manovich – with Andreas Kratky, DJ Spooky, Christine Bokelmann, Anne Pascual and Marcus Hauer / Schoenerwissen, Olia Lialina, Ruth Lorenz / maaskant, Jason Danziger / think/build group, Andreas Angelidakis, Gloria Sutton, Rachel Stevens, Francesca Ferguson, Rachel Beth Egenhoefer, Ted Apel.
Soft Cinema (installation version) will be shown at ZKM as a part of Future Cinema exhibition. Soft Cinema (screen version) will be shown in other exhibitions along with the earlier projects Little Movies (1994-1997) and Anna and Andy (2000). Conceived for the Web in 1994, Little Movies is a eulogy to the earliest form of digital cinema QuickTime. Anna and Andy is a streaming novel which uses Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina as a script that drives a computer-generated re-creation of Warhol’s Screen Tests.
Soft Cinema Book (limited edition) will be available at ICA and ZKM bookstores.
November 2002 Exhibition Schedule:
Future Cinema | ZKM (Center for Art and Media), Karlsruhe, Germany
15 November 2002 to 23 March 2003 | opening: November 15, 7pm
Soft Cinema (installation version)
Lev Manovich: Adventures In Digital Cinema | ICA London
Exhibition at Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)
November 7- 30, 2002
Soft cinema + Anna and Andy + Little Movies
e-magic v.0.1 | Thessaloniki, Greece
November 12-14, 2002
Soft Cinema + Anna and Andy + Little Movies
Video Biennial | The Digitalartlab, Holon, Israel
November 20-26, 2002
Soft cinema + Anna and Andy
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Coming up:
Soft Cinema at Transmediale 03 exhibition, Berlin
February 2003
SOFT CINEMA
How to represent the subjective experience of living in a global information society? If daily interaction with volumes of data and numerous messages is part of our new data-subjectivity, how can we visualize this subjectivity in new ways using new media?
Soft(ware) Cinema investigates a few approaches toward answering these questions. Fictional stories excerpted from a collection entitled GUI (Global User Interface) are presented as a series of short movies. While the voice over which narrates the stories was edited before hand, everything else is constructed by the software in real time, including what appears on the screen, where, and in which sequence. The decisions are based partly on a system of rules, and are partly random. In other words, Soft Cinema can be thought of as a semi-automatic VJ (Video Jockey) or more precisely, a FJ (Film Jockey).
The source material for the visual track comes from a large database. Each video clip in the database follows Dogma 95 rules: it was shot in continuous takes without edits using a hand-held camera. Most of the clips have been recorded by the author while in Berlin, Tokyo, Riga, and other locations between 1999 and 2002; a few clips are simulated (i.e. a still image was animated to look like a video shot on location).
www.manovich.net/soft cinema/
