1987 – 1990
In 1985 Robert moved from San Francisco to Atlanta and with Mitchell Bring started Still Current Design, a company to make interactive videodisc-based marketing systems. Robert designed a dual-screen authoring system that allowed the user to sketch a flowchart that created the logic and imagery for the interactive presentations.
Robert Edgar using the eMedia Authoring System, 1986
The eMedia authoring system, however, used the standard two-step process: first authoring, then (after compilation), interactive presentation. Robert wanted to move to a single-stage system where he moved through the files at the same time the presentation was happening, the same way a musician would move through a key and a scale when improvising musically in real time.
Memory Theatre One had a minimal interactive quality in that the viewer could wander through the rooms, and the eMedia system created a touch-screen based interactive system that the user could navigate through. But neither approached being musical, and Robert was after a type of instrument that could play a combined music and cinema.
In Film Form, Sergei Eisenstein wrote “When Joyce and I met in Paris, he was intensely interested in my plans of the inner film-monologue, with a far broader scope than is afforded by literature…
“…for only the sound-film is capable of reconstructing all phases an call specifics of the course of thought.
“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 racin 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 inter monologue…”
FIlm Form, Sergei Eisenstein, p. 105, 1949
With this passage in mind, Robert learned C-programming and programmed a system that would allow him to experiment in real-time with the idea of a ”inner-film monologue”.
Living Cinema was an early (1987) system for real-time exploration of montage across many channels: video, stills, text, synthesized voice, digitized and analog audio, and programmed logic. The computer was a 12-MHz 8-bit CPU.
Living Cinema was first presented to an audience in 1987, at Image, in Atlanta, Ga.
Living Cinema Premiere, IMAGE Center, Atlanta, GA 1987
Robert performed live with Living Cinema from 1987-1992, in New York, Atlanta, South Carolina, and California. He sometimes appeared with musician Dutch Knotts, who performed alongside using an audio sampler.
Robert Edgar and Dutch Knotts (left), Living Cinema Performance, Tisch School, NYU
LIVING CINEMA LIBRETTO FOR ELECTRONIC VOICE,1989
(PDF)