Jeffrey Shaw

Interactive Cinema

"there is a dialectical relationship between technological progress and the re-invention of the narrative - with new technological possibilities, we can create new ways (and logics!) of story-telling. The viewer becomes a physical participant in the cinematic space. He showed a very nice example of a big white pillow-like sculpture that served as a projection screen while visitors could jump all over it (unfortunately he didn’t mention where and when it took place). Another example is his own work ConFIGURING the Cave (1996), a cave-installation with a wooden doll in the middle that serves as an interface to render the virtual environment projected into the cave. By moving the doll or parts of the doll’s body, the projected virtual world changes. There are a total of 7 different virtual environments in the work. The projection is all around you, on all walls, the ceiling, the floor, and gives you a feeling of total immersion. It becomes an all-surrounding, all enclosing cinematic space. This feeling of immersion is even strengthened because you are actually physically involved in the work."



"A 120-square metre circular screen surrounds the audience and provides the environment for an wholly ‘immersive’ three-dimensional cinematic experiences. AVIE allows audiences to wander at will through the projection space without having to sit in a fixed location as in a conventional cinema, interacting with the projected information as if they are really there. Viewers wearing three-dimensional glasses step inside a cylindrical cinema screen measuring four metres high and 10 metres in diameter. Twelve digital projectors create a high-resolution stereoscopic 3D image on this screen, and the audio is spatially enhanced via a 24- channel surround sound system. (…) Over three hundred video clips are simultaneously displayed and distributed around AVIE’s huge circular screen. Using a special interface the viewer can select, sort, re-arrange and link these video clips. These move about and play themselves in a virtual all-surrounding three-dimensional space that provides the viewer with an engrossing density and intensity of ever changing narrative events.”"


http://www.movingweb.org/2008/02/28/sonic-acts-xii-conference-report/

Keith Sonnier

Positive-Negative
1970
b&w, 12 min. silent

"Positive-Negative was made in the video studio of the Medical Studio at the University of California, San Diego, and projected during alive performance in the Art Department there. It was the first tape Sonnier shot in a television studio with the help of technicians and elaborate mixing equipment. Two large studio cameras and one-inch tape were used, and the lighting and technical facilities available mitigated the need for objects whichin the earlier situational tapes ad functioned as light modifiers or performance props. Rather than the camera being stationary and the activity dependent on one camera view, the set now remains stationary and the dial cameras, properly mixed, alter scenes instantaneously. In Positive-Negative, the two cameras frame the performer's head rotating full circle so that complementary views of it are seen simultaneously, on each half of the split screen, one in positive and the other in negative. As the performer turns, the cameras independently pick up her face and the back of her head, or her left right profiles, so that a constant binary relationship is maintained. Camera so arization (causing image disintegration), wipes, dissolves and, at the end of the kinescope, superimpositions, alter figure-ground relations."

http://keithsonnierstudio.com/fla/keith_sonnier_website.html

Bill Viola

Bruce Nauman

"You can watch for a while, leave and go have lunch or come back in a week, and it's just going on. And I really liked that idea of the thing just being there. The idea being there so that it became almost like an object that was there, that you could go back and visit whenever you wanted to."- Bruce Nauman (Art21)

"If you're an amateur artist, you can get it sometimes and not other times and you can't tell and you can't always do it over again. And the part about being a professional artist is that you can tell and you can do it over again, even if you can't say how you got there exactly. You've done it enough and you know how to get there."- Bruce Nauman (Art21)

Ann Hamilton

Ann Hamilton

ART:21:

Do your works embody something you want to communicate to others?

HAMILTON:

"I think they do. I don't think that they have a narrative. I'm very interested in my own process of research, recognizing all of the layers of meaning that a very simple gesture can have, without feeling like I need to put closure around it being any one of those. In the little thing that I wrote, trying to describe the piece in advance of it actually existing, I talked about a line, that it's a divide." "You know, we as bodies inherit ourselves as both containers and as being contained. And the paradoxical structure of my work is often to engage that place of in-betweenness; to engage it, not to make a picture of it, not to make it its subject, but actually to try to work at that place in a way that demonstrates it, that's demonstrative, that occupies it. You know it's very abstract, but concrete."