Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

The cinematic experience is a research project that wants to stimulate a discussion with different people active in the field of new media and film. This should result in different essays and lectures, bundled in a publication. The lectures will be organised at Vooruit Gent in the program “Almost Cinema” during the film festival of Gent and at the Beursschouwburg Brussels during the Cimatics festival. The essays will be part of a publication in collaboration with the Sonic Acts festival in Amsterdam that adresses for the upcoming edition the same theme.

Effect

One could say that in the evolution of mainstream film there is an emancipation of the effect, in its most striking form the ‘special effect’, techniques that try to amplify the audiovisual experience. Some film genres even subordinate a certain credibility and continuity of the story in favour of the effect. What if the ‘core business’ of this ‘cinema of attractions’ is rather the composition of effects where the story only functions as an intermezzo in between the different action sequences? Film maybe no longer remains a transparent medium but finds its immersion in exposing pure audiovisual impulses. Could we think in the current digital context of a hypermedial film with the same immersive qualities of an overwhelming blockbuster?

Live Cinema

Live Cinema, a term originally used to describe the live musical accompaniment to silent film, has been gaining popularity in the last few years. It is no longer defined as a backing to film but as a quest for a symbiosis between sound and image, performed in real time. It researches the possibilities of generating and manipulating audiovisual material in contrast with the reproductive quality of film. This introduces a new relation between user and screen (instead of viewer and screen) based on an interactive way of looking. A real language or theory of Live Cinema does not exist until now but there are clearly many connections with film, music, performance, theatre and graphical applications. Digital media do not represent, they generate. They are rather software than hardware. Networked media are, unlike any other media we have ever known, ephemeral: transforming and growing systems in itself. The modular qualities of software enable emergent processes, feedback loops and (re-)generating processes to unfold and flow into all kinds of applications where they become dynamic elements. The virtual instrument becomes a (re-) active actor in creative processes of producing visuals or making music. Working and interacting with this kind of dynamic processes given by digital means asks for different approaches from those in the era of mimicking media. The key question is: How to implement generative principles that change static objects into dynamic processes, in an art practice?