Living Cinema is a desktop video performance system programmed and integrated by Robert Edgar. It premiered in Atlanta in March, 1988, and recently showed at the NCGA Arts Conference in San Jose, California. In this article Edgar outlines the sources of Living Cinema, tracing a line from experimental filmmaking to desktop video, and on to multi-media BBSs.
"What wonderful sketches those montage lists were! Like thought , they would sometimes proceed with visual images. With sound. Synchronized or non-synchronized. Then as sounds. Formless. Or with sound - images: with objectively representational sounds...
"Then suddenly, definite intellectually formulated words--as 'intellectual' and dispassionate as pronounced words. With a black screen, a rushing imageless visuality.
"Then in passionate disconnected speech. Nothing but nouns. Or nothing but verbs. Then interjections. With zigzags of aimless shapes, whirling along with these in synchronization. Then racing visual images over complete silence.
"Then linked with polyphonic sounds. Then polyphonic images. Then both at once.
"Then interpolated into the outer course of action, then interpolating elements of the outer action into the inner monologue, yourself, looking at and listening to your mind. How you talk 'to yourself,' as distinct from 'out of yourself.' The syntax of inner speech as distinct from outer speech. The quivering inner words that correspond with the visual images. Contrasts with outer circumstances. How they work reciprocally..."
-Sergei Eisenstein
Living Cinema is an attempt, among other things, to extend Eisensteinian montage into the realm of real-time decision making. This is not a narrowly-conceived montage of tiny strips of film edited together, but a montage of constructivist composition, informed by the captured nature of lens-based data gathering, and the instant query, hunt, and delivery nature of the computer medium.
Intellectually and sensually, Eisenstein is not the only precursor: Wagner's writing on the synaesthetic nature of the opera, Bruno's mis-en-scene populating of the constellations, the northwestern Australian original's map/memory/history/dream/narrative sand paintings, or more recently the rich philosophical and political juxtapositions of Goddar, and the sculptural films of Michael Snow. These are some of my own accidentally-juxtaposed sources which support the years of development I've given this project.
A SNAPSHOT OF LIVING CINEMA
Living Cinema is a computer-based system which allows me to capture, same, retrieve and display images, text, spoken words, other audio, m and motion video. Dutch Knotts is working with me on the project, and he is duplicating in sound what I do primarily with visuals. The hardware that makes up Living Cinema is presently as shown here:
Intel 286 MS-DOS based computer
Targa video Graphics board with video input and display
Video Disc controlled by computer
Speech synthesis board
Monochrome monitor for control panel
Color monitor or video projector for display
Separate computer and digitizer w/audio keyboard
The software that is Living Cinema is optimized for real-time performance, to allow me to operate in a number of modes: I can play back prestructured segments, or structure new segments, or manipulate the elements without recording them as new segments--all live, with a seamless passage from one to the others.
WATCHING LIVING CINEMA
As an example, I begin by playing back a sequence that finds and displays a sequence of photographs of an actress, as she changes her dress by slipping one on over one she is already wearing, never showing her naked skin. I use the mouse controller to copy a bit of her skin and paint it over her new dress, covering the dress completely.
Call up a presaved quote by the philosopher Quine, about a man who is replacing the wood of a raft, even while he is floating on it. This is spoken by the voice synthesizer, in an artificial-sounding but inflected voicing.
Call up and image from my videodisc: a poster mounted by Australian aborigines on a downtown Brisbane construction site, with the headline WE HAVE SURVIVED.
Turn on the record function.
Load again the image of the actress walking out of the room.
Advance the videodisc to a shot of people walking in and out of a pavilion.
Play it in slow motion.
Grab the videodisc image so that where the image of the actress was a moment ago, the image of the people is frozen; but outside her outline they continue to slowly advance.
Turn off the record function and save that sequence for use later in the same performance.
The result is a poetry that speaks not only through images, but also through the very computer-based functions that manipulate those images. The actress' dress is covered not by pink, but by her own skin. The people are frozen, and their continued walking defines the outline of the woman who had just been there, not by chiaroscuro, but by the temporal difference that builds within a single shot.
And while I can describe the functions, I can't describe the experience of slowly coming to realize what is happening to the image, as you slowly begin to see irregularities in the picture, and jump to the perception (beyond the simple experience of the forms and colors) that the irregularities are actually the outlines of the actress, and then that part of the image is frozen, and on to the poetic resonance, which is both sensual and conceptual.
THE DEATH OF CINEMA
In the late '60's and through the '70's, two cinematic-cum-literary figures claimed both a place in seminal cinema and a firm foundation in their predecessors: Brakhage and Frampton both spoke or wrote not only of their own work, but of that of Eisenstein and Griffith. Eisenstein, wrote Frampton, "...was at once a gifted linguist and an artist haunted by the claims of language--and also, by training, an engineer. It seems possible to suggest that he glimpsed, however quickly, a project beyond the intellectual montage: the construction of a machine, very much like film, more efficient than language, that might, entering into direct competition with language, transcend its speed, abstraction, compactness, democracy, ambiguity, power--a project, moreover, whose ultimate promise was the constitution of an external critique of language itself."
"Film in the House of the Word, in October 17, p. 63-64, Hollis Frampton, Summer 1981, MIT Pres."
Such a machine can no longer be intelligently constructed; the house of language itself determines what is outside and inside it, and therefore owns all the real estate. Nevertheless, anyone who has followed closely the coming of language in a young child has seen the child move from all-presentness to present/not present; from timelessness to sequence; and with this dimensioning opens up a space which receives words and syntax. This is movement I nurture as I experiment between sensation and perception, as experience outdistances words yet pauses (paternally, or maternally?) to allow it to catch up in a rush of explanatory algorithm, as language extends itself to fill the vacuum as it can.
Montage is sequence without deep structure (in Chomsky's sense), and while it can never replace language as some may have hoped, it can still outdistance it--either permanently, when sensations remain only sensations; or temporarily, when language extends to grasp something not previously clinched. This movement of language, through time, is the metaphor of narrative.
Today film theory has been wounded by its loss of equal status with language, and film practice mostly reduced to repeating previous strategies. At a recent (March 1989) National Alliance of Media Arts Council conference in Rochester, most of the discussion centered around how the marginalized could gain access to large enough batches of money and power to enable them to make cinema that would be distributed over network television. It seems that since pursuit of language has become an academic activity, the only other choice open is to embrace the bureaucracy of power, and wrest if from the controlling interests. Imagination is stagnant. Film is framed.
THE PHOENIX NEST
While film has been stagnating, computing has effortlessly propagated many new forms. One form which is important for the advancement of personal cinema is the BBS, or electronic bulletin board.
There are thousands of bulletin boards thoughout the United States and the world today. The bulletin board is usually a small computer that runs one program: a communications program that allows other computers to call over phone lines to read and leave messages. Most often the program arranges its communications in the form of a tree. Roots begin when someone starts a "conference" by writing a note or a question to which someone else may respond. Someone else calls up, reads the note, and then responds it. The response is listed under the original note, leaving a conference with two entries. Someone else may read those two entries, and append a third to the end. This continues over days, months, and/or years, with a discourse growing as it is recorded and published; no editors; no distinction between contributor and critic; no time delay in distribution, it is available as it is written. This open-ended format has much in common with the forgotten goals of experimental cinema, but it presently awaits the arrival of CASUAL MULTIMEDIA.
CINEMA IN A NEW LIGHT
Living Cinema has as its goal a system that allows me to make cinema as effortlessly and quickly as I write a personal letter to a friend. In fact, sometimes instead of writing I now make videotapes recorded directly from the output of Living Cinema. But this system, designed as it is for aesthetic experiment, could be pared down to deliver a more basic set of options that would be faster and easier to use. In two years, with the hardware that is already showing up, cinematoGRAPHy could be available as a standard mode of communication, distributed through video cassettes.
But there are other technologies now available for development: with at least two--DVI from Intel and UVC's systems--offering real-time analog-to-digital conversion and compression of RGB and NTSC video and audio signals. As compression ratios improve and transfer times shrink, Living Cinema will come to fruition as its rightful heir to experimental cinema form, as full motion and audio BS's spring up around the world. These will provide freedom from the centralized archive approach offered by the present-day networks and PBS. They will also free us from the currently vogue model which gives viewers using their multimedia reception equipment only the power to choose to consume more information than presently available (for instance, by using a hand-held controller to ask for stats on a quarterback in the game now on TV in front of the viewer).
The decentralized Multimedia BBSs will introduce cinema as montage/discourse in a way even Eisenstein could not foresee. Short 30-second pieces composed for its place in a local discourse, juxtaposed with those by other cinematoGRAPHers, in intellectual montage-trees. This is personal cinema; experimental, social, and decentralized. In this is CASUAL MULTIMEDIA even the epic nature of CINEMA ART is bypassed with the ease and frequency of creation, distribution and rejoinder, as montage sequence receives its place in the discourse of its virtual community.