Quantum Cinema

This Blog is on Vacation Until Further Notice

2011-08-06T15:47:00.000+02:00

Dear Quantum Cineastes,

I have decided to stop updating this blog for the foreseeable future. While at some point I may revive posting on here, now that I have my own blog on my personal website I feel it's somewhat redundant to continue posting on both sites. This decision is primarily motivated by convenience.

I am still passionately committed to continue the theoretical and practical dialogue about the future of cinema, so be sure to subscribe to gabrielshalom.com for the latest posts about Quantum Cinema.

Thanks for reading!
Gabriel

3D Video Capture with Kinect vs Neato Robotic Vacuum

2010-11-23T20:08:00.005+01:00

Let's see this done with two Kinects and some kind of interpolation algorithm, so that we get full-on volumetrics! That, or trump the whole Kinect thing by hacking the XV-11 Lidar!

Object Recognition using Kinect on the PC

2010-11-14T18:04:00.000+01:00

If this kind of thing is possible with a live video stream it should be possible to have seamless hardware and software integrations in the future. Either the camera sees objects and writes semantic objects into video metadata while recording, or video could be processed after being recorded.

One Step Closer to Universal EDL

2010-11-09T13:47:00.003+01:00

Last week I attended the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona. It gave me an opportunity to collaborate with an amazing ad hoc team of people in the context of the Open Video Lab, chaordinated by Brett Gaylor and David Humphrey. Together over the course of a two day sprint, a big team of us collaborated on a demo of the popcorn.js javascript library that really shows off the potential beauty of web made movies. The vimeo video above is just a screen capture; for the live demo visit this page.

Photo by Samuel Huron BY-NC-ND

It was a very rewarding experience to contribute to the aesthetic and conceptual process. I enjoyed the challenge of conducting interviews in languages I don't speak, and collaborating with the multilingual Xabier Cid on the editing process. I was honored to be able to address the audience at the "BEST of the FEST closing variety slam showcase" for the need for new approaches to film school in the face of scrum/agile approaches to storytelling.

What is great about the demo is how it utilizes time-coded metadata to retrieve live content from flickr and twitter in real time. It shows how as we move towards an object-oriented moving image we will continue to redefine what cinema is and also our notion of editing. The tweets are aggregated from the #futureofeducation hashtag. The flickr photos that appear in the demo are called based on timeline metadata that I approximated by putting dummy content (the blue events in the screenshot above) on the timeline to get a sense of a rough rhythm. I then gave a rough approximation of that timecode information to Berto Yáñez, the programmer who did much of the heavy lifting on the demo. Oscar Otero helped with the design of the page. Oscar, Berto and Xabier all work together at the Galician web company A navalla suíza.

Photo by Homardpayette

This process, which involved swapping lots of data across computers via USB sticks, underscored the need for a Universal Edit Decision List (EDL). This was something I identified about a year ago as part of my rubric for open source cinema. The Universal EDL got discussed quite a bit during the video lab, and together with the amazing work that's already been done creating a web-based timeline interface with Universal Subtitles, it seems like the seed of inspiration to take things a step further has been planted. I am very excited to have contributed to these developments towards an object-oriented open source cinema!

It would be great to see all the names of the participants in the workshop added to the demo. During the demo Laura Hilliger, David Humphrey and I put together a nice cloud-based credit concept for solving the dilemma of crediting multiple parties with multiple credits. Laura should have a rough list of names and roles, and those who are missing could use the #drumbeat #videolab hashtags on twitter to ID themselves, or comment on the video, so we can round everybody up.

Hypercubist Manifesto – Pecha Kucha Berlin, 31 August 2010

2010-09-03T09:26:00.002+02:00

Multiple Sidosis

2010-08-20T17:39:00.001+02:00

An amazing early example of hypercubist videomusical aesthetics, thanks to the Split Screen blog!

Sony RayModeler, a 360-Degree Autostereoscopic Display Prototype

2010-07-28T21:27:00.000+02:00

NICT Table-Top 3D Display for Multiple Users : DigInfo

2010-07-27T10:34:00.000+02:00

New surveillance camera system provides text feed

2010-06-06T10:53:00.001+02:00

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed a prototype surveillance camera and computer system to analyze the camera images and deliver a text feed describing what the camera is seeing. The new system aims to make searching vast amounts of video much more efficient.

read the full article

Augmented Reality vs. Aura Recognition [part 3]

2010-03-15T23:55:00.001+01:00

This post was first published as part three of a series of three posts on Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1

Part 3: The Crystal Ball

Film Still, The Wizard of Oz.

During the 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy visits Professor Marvel and has him read her fortune from his crystal ball. He asks her to close her eyes and takes the opportunity to “read” the belongings in her basket. From these artifacts, Professor Marvel pieces together a story based on his intuition of the meaning of the objects and the context of Dorothy’s visit. Professor Marvel is reading Dorothy’s aura by diving into her metadata and delivers his observations in dramatic and persuasive tones.

Now imagine if Dorothy visited Professor Marvel in the 21st century. His crystal ball is a web-ready mobile device capable of scanning Dorothy’s possessions, clothes, face – maybe even her DNA. This cloud of data is cross-referenced and interlinked with Dorothy’s online profiles and he’s able to quickly conjure up an extremely detailed impression of Dorothy’s past, present and future. At the very least, he’d spot Auntie Em in Dorothy’s Flickr account and come to similar conclusions about Dorothy’s family situation as he does in the film.

As aurec technology improves it will know more and more about us; it will become better at predicting what we do and how we prefer to do it. It will enable us to customize our interactions with everything that surrounds us while also allowing us to share these preferences with others. Search is the essential experience of the web (witness Google). The web asks us “what are you looking for?” every time we use it. To understand the potential of aurec we need to be sensitized to the fact that it will reduce the importance of the question/answer relationship posed by the web and open up an environment of ambient data.

It is my hope that shared aurec experiences will have positive effects on our relationships with other people, allowing us new degrees of emotional intimacy and mutual understanding. Aurec has the potential to change our relations with natural and urban environments by revealing otherwise hidden information on a bespoke basis. This could lead to increased corporate and governmental transparency/accountability as the norm shifts to a sharing paradigm as opposed to hiding data. The more we shift our attention away from gimmicky iphone apps and focus on the broader ontological implications of aura recognition, the more aurec will have the best chances of actualization.

Special thanks to NotThisBody for brilliant insights and reflections while writing this article.

Augmented Reality vs. Aura Recognition [part 2]

2010-02-06T14:41:00.005+01:00

This post was first published as part two of a series of three posts on Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1

Part 2: Infinite Summer Afternoons

Images from Initiations-Studies II by Panos Tsagaris with Kimberley Norcott

Having summarily rejected the term augmented reality for the reasons listed here, I’ll now propose alternate terminology to describe the phenomenon. The following elements contribute to this formation:

The mobile web will enable us to become aware of metadata that was previously obscured in day-to-day life.
Many current AR applications pride themselves on exposing indications of present metadata relationships which are not as readily apparent as traditional urban indicators (think: fashion).
Contemporary visions of AR as something which will merely allow us to hold up our smart phones and look through an AR “window”.

This process of metadata revealing is termed “aura recognition” (or aurec for short). In a future post I will address what I see as shortcomings of visual interfaces for aurec.

In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), Walter Benjamin makes the following observations regarding aura:

“If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.”

Certainly – since 1935 – these two “social bases” identified by Benjamin have reached their apex in contemporary digital life. Never before have we had as much convenience in bringing things – whether physical objects or information – into our immediate proximity (think: Amazon, Ebay, Google). Neither have we had the experience of such widespread meme and brand propagation in our physical environment (eg shopping malls, international airports, and fast food franchises). Benjamin continues:

“Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.”

This “sense of the universal equality of things” is the hallmark of the web. All searches are, ostensibly, equal before Google. Yet, among the ruins of this auric destruction, the web is simultaneously imbuing our lives with all kinds of unique and permanent phenomena. These phenomena make up the essence of our digital auras; auras created less by physical objects than by the specificity of context, relationship and juxtaposition. Aura Recognition is the means by which we access these phenomena.

Consider for instance how unique it is to geophysically meet someone who you’ve only previously known online. In the best case scenario, aurec will help us make sense of the emotional significance of digital phenomenon in ways which are meaningful and helpful. Location based services (think: GPS technology) provoke new experiences which are just as dependent on proximity as Benjamin’s proverbial summer afternoon.

(to be continued in "Part 3: The Crystal Ball")

Augmented Reality vs. Aura Recognition [part 1]

2010-01-16T15:10:00.002+01:00

This post was first published as part one of a series of three posts on on Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1

Part 1: Absurd Assumptions

As many opinion leaders have noted, Augmented Reality (AR) may very well be the next evolutionary step in bringing the metadata of the web into our day-to-day lives. Some suggest that AR technology may even surpass the Web in its sustained impact on culture.

While I whole-heartedly agree with this observation, the use of the term “Augmented Reality” may actually impede any progress forged by these technologies, especially in terms of broad/mainstream acceptance.

The first reason why the actual phrase “Augmented Reality” may impede the cultural uptake of associated technologies is via the use of the word “augmented” – meaning to raise or make larger. AR enthusiasts seem to be comfortable implying that this new technology is somehow the first technology to augment or enhance our reality. This seems absurd, as human societies have a well-documented history of using biochemical technology to augment reality in the tradition of psychotropic plant-aided shamanism. The innovation of written language was a concrete visualization of reality-augmenting metadata. The city may also be considered an extension of reality considering cities are highly constructed frameworks of architecture, roads, sewers, electrical and telephone lines. It seems more relevant to utilize a word that more accurately describes the idiosyncratic peculiarities of a mobile web-ready experience.

My second reason for objecting to the AR term stems from when the word “reality” is employed in relation to what are (in most cases) mobile-web applications. This usage implies that other computer applications are not affecting reality, or at least are not affecting reality sufficiently to be labeled accordingly. This also seems an absurd assumption; the host of software which has prevailed during the history of computing have had an affect on reality too (this, of course, is a total understatement). If it were not for preceding software which has already changed our reality, these so-called “augmented reality” applications would not even exist. Furthermore, this use of “reality” in this context indicates that there is one concrete reality which we are in the process of altering with specific technology. Yet, each of us have our own subjective “reality” experience, with some physicists even postulating theories of a holographic reality. While standards for augmented reality ought to be open to ensure accessibility by any mobile web-enabled device, it is a fallacy to interpret these standards as a consensus on reality itself. This new technology is posed to allow us to customize and tweak our own experience of our reality like never before, as well as the “reality” we share with others.

(to be continued in "Part 2: Infinite Summer Afternoons")

People Playing

2009-10-26T13:17:00.000+01:00

Video games are the first stage in a plan for machines to help the human race, the only plan that offers a future for intelligence.

— Chris Marker, Sans Soleil

Tesseracting in Action

2009-10-16T17:53:00.001+02:00

Now let's see them grab the sound too!
Thanks to notthisbody for the link.

Postmodern vs Hypercubist

2009-10-09T12:08:00.002+02:00

PhotoSketch: Another Tool for Atomizing the Frame

2009-10-08T11:01:00.000+02:00

There's some great controversy stirred up over on Vimeo about whether this is fake or not. Regardless of whether it's legitimate science or great science fiction, this video is another beautifully clear example of how we are moving towards an object-oriented image making paradigm.

Volumetrically Enhanced Dance Performance from United Visual Artists

2009-10-07T14:06:00.000+02:00

This subtle and elegant dance performance from United Visual Artists uses some type of volumetric recording technique to generate a real-time object-oriented video backdrop. It's not surprising that the data points are being displayed in a similar aesthetic to the House of Cards video which I love talking about so much; photo-realistic data sets would be a burdensome load for a real-time or even non-real-time process.

Anyone have a prediction on how soon we'll see photo-realistic real-time volumetrics? Let's start a wager! ;)

Thanks to my friend and colleague Carsten Goertz for the link to the video!

Object-Oriented Byproducts of Image/Video Manipulation

2009-10-04T00:32:00.000+02:00

These technologies will simultaneously help increase the demand for volumetric cinematography while being made obsolete by its widespread arrival.

Open Indie

2009-10-01T23:20:00.002+02:00

Arin Crumley's new project OpenIndie.com looks like a great idea!

Time Traveler Through Title Graphics: Dan Black's "Symphonies"

2009-09-29T10:10:00.000+02:00

I am too busy at the moment to post another videoblog so I thought I would share this beautiful new music video which features Dan Black as a kind of time traveler through various genres and graphic styles from title sequences of very well known films. Amongst many well-known others, we get glimpses of the essence of Lost Highway, Tron, and James Bond.

If film title sequences are your thing, you should also check out Submarine Channel's excellently curated site Forget the Film, Watch the Titles.

A Rubric for Open Source Cinema (beta)

2009-09-20T19:17:00.000+02:00

I am very excited to publish my very first videoblog entry to Quantum Cinema in which I give my candid reactions to RiP: a remix manifesto as well as the website Open Source Cinema. Sorry in advance for the somewhat noisy audio; next time I'll see to it that the audio is better quality.

A Rubric for Open Source Cinema (beta)

Identification of Objects in the Frame
Universal Editing Timeline Metadata
Timecoded Text Transcription

Sample-Based vs. Hypercubist Audiovisual Culture

Eclectic Method remix the Colbert Report:

Memo Akten performs mathematical transformations on Radiohead's data:

Ian Mackinnon interprets Radiohead's data with Lego stop-motion:

As we can see, Radiohead's data is a far more transformable medium than the clip from the Colbert Report. Hypercubist aesthetics are characterized by this fluidity.

PS: I have setup the domain www.hypercubist.com to redirect to Quantum Cinema so if you feel like sharing the blog with your friends, now you can remember the URL just a little bit easier ;)

Quantinuity: Towards a Theory of Continuity for Hypercubist Cinema

2009-09-20T18:35:00.000+02:00

Updated 20 September 2009: an excerpt of the lecture is now available!

This is a summary and expansion of ideas originally delivered as a lecture at Perestroika

12 November 2008 – Porto Alegre, Brazil

HYPERCUBISM

Hypercubism is an attempt to define a movement that can encompass and surpass postmodernist theory by demanding a new language for describing the zeitgeist of contemporary media. It is in recognition of a new constructive tendency which unites the particles created in postmodernist deconstructionist analysis. In this sense hypercubism can be said to be a synthetic, associative movement. It is a movement for the 21st century although its roots can be traced back to the early 20th century.

We can see the new structure of knowledge as the primary driving force behind the need for this new language. The continuum which passed through agriculture and books in the form of an ever-broader branching Tree of Knowledge is slowly coming to an end, as the internet reshapes human knowledge into a Data Cloud. This restructuring of knowledge has profound ramifications, from the way people learn to the way governments govern and companies conduct business. The principle transformation is from hierarchies which favor a single vantage points to a plurality which favors the wisdom of crowds. [1]

The Dawn of the Cloud Era

For a long time it made sense to model the world in tree-based structures. The tendency of tree-based thought is to divide things into smaller and smaller pieces, creating a branching structure.

When this vector of inquiry reached its peak, humans split the atom. This development literally blew apart most people's notions of the world of human knowledge when atom-splitting technology manifested itself in the massive, cataclysmic destruction of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This marked the first visualization on a global scale of the new cloud of human knowledge and symbolized the beginning of a new era of human civilization. Incidentally, to this day we are not sure how far you can go in splitting matter into tiny bits. Just this year CERN inaugurated the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most complex scientific instrument. So the search for smaller particles is still alive and well.

Incidentally, CERN would be the site of the technological innovation that actually transformed the cloud into a metaphor with positive potential: the internet. With the birth of the internet, humanity embraced knowledge as a data cloud, unbounded by the physical world of books.

This new cloud of knowledge is ever-changing. With smug certainty we can already predict that the internet as we know it today in 2008 will be radically different in another five to ten years. Evidence comes in the rapid spread of phenomenon like Wikipedia, YouTube, Skype and Facebook; services which are simultaneously extremely new and yet need no introduction due to their immense popularity and widespread mass adoption.

With the advent of mobile internet the cloud based consciousness is starting to transform not only the spaces of offices and bedrooms, but also the public commons. Many of us walk around with radical spacetime portals capable of siphoning knowledge from the data cloud right in our pockets – smart phones. The 1990s critique that surfing the internet made people lazy and detached from society is giving way to the present critique that people are more and more distracted when you meet them in person. An individual constantly being interrupted by their smart phone is a person caught between various conflicting spacetimes.

Ostensibly the physical interface of smart phones will ultimately implode so that our access to the data cloud is a seamless part of everyday reality. Perhaps one step forward will be miniature displays embedded onto the surfaces of contact lenses.

The internet may not be worth calling the internet in the future; it might indeed be better to call it the Metaverse. As reality changes and accquires this layer of metadata, our day to day lives change. One way to think of it is that the rate of coincidence is on the rise. With more access to metadata our decisions will be better informed in regard to naturally occurring patterns in our social, professional, creative and civic spheres. Patterns that used to be invisible. Instead of making plans with your friends you might prefer to have your proximity-based services module alert you when your friends are in your vacinity. A natural result of this changes in reality will be a change in how we tell stories.

QUANTINUITY

Splitting the Pixel

Quantinuity (quantum + continuity) is a theory which attempts to create grammar of a particlized cinema much like the dueling theories of Hollywood Continuity and Soviet Montage attempted to describe the grammar of celluloid cinema. Cinema has followed the same progression that matter has undertaken in the world of particle physics. We have seen a medium born in transparent plastics evolve into a magnetic signal to eventually become pixels.

Finally, in this year of 2008, new efforts to "split the pixel" have finally resulted in the cinematic equivalent of splitting the atom: Radiohead's groundbreaking music video "House of Cards" created together with Google using 3D laser plotting technologies; instruments normally used to study car crashes or rainfall from satellites. This collaboration is of fundamental significance because of the stature of the band and the technology company and their combined undeniable influence on popular culture and technology respectively.

The effect of "splitting the pixel" has not been particularly dramatic or intense, and it could very well be because "House of Cards" does not surpass the aesthetics of the signal based analog video medium; the Rutt Etra video synthesizer produced similar visual results with waves. As recently as 2004, New York band TV on the Radio has revived the Rutt Etra ghost in its music video "Staring at the Sun".

It will take a fully rendered, photo-realistic 3D holographic feature-length movie to drop the cinematic atom bomb. It will take a hypercubist narrative that surpasses the tired tropes of singers, landscapes and party scenes of music videos and proves that you can do more with all this particlization than just nifty special effects, for instance Trinity's jumpkick in the first Matrix movie. Despite this shot being composed of many shots, it is wholly insufficient to describe the process as "photo stitching" or special effects. The characteristic quality of such a cinematic moment is the particlization of the celluloid frame and the resulting simultaneous visualization of multiple spacetimes. It is adding dimension and depth to the frame and creating a hypercube.

Recognizing the hypercube as the new unit of cinematic reality – as the particle left behind after the "splitting of the pixel" – demands a new terminology to describe the process formerly called editing or cutting. As a hypercube can also be called a Tesseract (its mathematical name) we arrive at the term tesseracting – manipulating the new spacetime of hypercubist cinema.

Standard moving image technologies do not capture depth because of an inherent celluloid bias towards flatness. Furthermore, these same technologies tend towards low frame rates which hover around multiples of 24 due to the high expense of celluloid and the engineering challenge of projecting film at high speeds at low cost (even IMAX HD only runs at 48 frames per second). Meanwhile we have amazing multi-channel surround sound systems and the capacity to sample audio at incredibly high resolutions of 48,000 samples (and significantly higher) per second. Surely our visual perception is not at the same degree of resolution as our hearing, but it is in the hypercubist reality of video games, which accelerate frame rates into the hundreds for high speed animations of gunfire and race cars, where we can finally find a commercially viable precedent for higher temporal resolution in moving images.

Marketplace pressure will also spur the development of affordable holographic systems. Evidence can already be found at MIT's Center for Future Storytelling in its Holographic TV project, as well as the Musion Eyeliner holographic projection system.

Hypernarrative

Until now this discussion has been focused on the hypercube, the microscopic level of Quantinuity. As we take a broader perspective we can observe in the postmodern deconstruction of the narrative a universe consisting of larger chunks of information; characters, scenes, episodes and sequels.

At this level of Quantinuity we again find a lack of adequate terminology to describe contemporary cultural phenomena. This time the problem stems primarily from the critical postmodernist vocabulary of samples, remixes, mashups, remakes and fakes – techniques which had their roots in Dada that gained widespread acceptance due to the influence of Hiphop, eventually reaching their summit in micro house and glitch pop via the work of musicians such as Akufen and Girl Talk. The expression in moving images takes the form of narrative mashups in which characters serve as the linking element (a trailer for Titanic 2 hinges on a myriad of Leonard DiCaprio performances) or mere titles of pieces clash worlds (Fellini's "8 ½" and Eminem's "8 Mile" converge to become "8 ½ Mile").

The work of these artists addresses all of the content of pop culture as a cloud of data; of influence. Like the surrealists, this work is associative. You surf Wikipedia in a similar manner, jumping subjects from Africa to South America to Japanese to Pets to Protests. The process conjures a series of associated forms that haunt a Dalí painting.

Postmodernist sampling is the "lumberjacking" of narrative trees and the re-contextualization of the samples (lumber) into other structures. It is taking pieces of discrete narrative works and combining them in a time-based collage process. How then can we reconcile the characters who appear in the Weezer music video for "Pork and Beans" – a video which the Süddeutsche Zeitung inaccurately described as the "ultimate mashup" – since they are transported into Weezer's story world wholly intact. These characters are not references to other media, they are the other media, exhibiting a friendly alliance or association with Weezer in which they have "re-contextualized" themselves into another reality on their own, sans lumberjack.

These characters are a subset of the growing pantheon of hyperheros; certain members of the first global generation who have achieved fame by transcending the monopoly of the major media outlets through their own perseverance. They have successfully imprinted themselves on our global culture as memes, often using very simple humor to transcend nationality. Weezer's video represents an instance of the metanarrative cloud discharging a lightning bolt of charged story quanta.

As the network grows and interconnects, the metanarrative cloud gets more and more dense. The likelihood of associative coincidence increases and global culture materializes around these "lightning bolts" the more we tag, link, wiki and blog. This is something that could not happen in traditional libraries; books would collect dust – they wouldn’t get progressively more cross-referenced. Knowledge is getting more integrated and refined than ever before in the history of human civilization, and as regular people acquire more knowledge (not to mention ever-cheaper means of digital video production) they exhibit a growing desire to participate in the creation of cinema.

Participatory Cinema

Lightning is "an atmospheric discharge of electricity". Metanarrative lightning can in this way be viewed as the spontaneous result of the right story elements overflowing together. For these manifestations of culture to take on forms which resemble cinema, certain people (we'll call them Tesseractors) are stepping forward to channel this energy into the form of specific narrative projects. We can think of these participatory cinematic projects as lightning rods; engineered structures specially designed to attract these discharges of metanarrative culture.

Some of the more successful participatory cinematic projects have tapped into this lightning rod tendency; Matt Hanson's project A Swarm of Angels uses the power of crowdsourcing to write, crew, cast, produce and finance an entirely emergent £1 million movie. Big Buck Bunny is an open source 3D animated short movie produced entirely by volunteers at the Blender Foundation on free software via collaborations enabled over the internet. Artists Arin Crumley and Susan Buice document their romantic relationship via podcasts and their experimental feature "Four Eyed Monsters" while using a customized Google Map to enable fans to request local theater screenings.

These are just a few examples of a rapidly increasing trend of hypercubist cinema to incorporate social networks which accelerate the implosion of the entire celluloid film making apparatus, from writing through production all the way to distribution and merchandising.

Conclusion

Quantinuity and Hypercubism are works in progress. I am eager for all feedback and comments, recommended readings and new sources, refutations and alternate terminologies.

Footnote

[1] Many of my ideas about the structure of knowledge are inspired by David Weinberger. View his presentation on why Everything is Miscellaneous to better understand where our views intersect.

Peaches "Take You On" vs. "Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc."

2009-08-31T18:50:00.007+02:00

Two new videos revisit the aesthetics of an object-oriented moving image paradigm, this time in addressing the age-old dilemma of how to get more characters than usually physically possible into the same virtual space. For more background on my thoughts about object-oriented images, see this post from January where I discuss it with some other nifty examples.

Continuing a tradition of blue screen music videos reminiscent of the works of Zbig Rybczynski, the latest Peaches music video produced by Angie Reed is a sarcastic and entertaining solution to the puzzle created when a musician has multiple visual identities and a treasure trove of wacky costumes. The simulated 3D of the video allows us to access Peaches in all the glory of her various selves in the same Tron-inspired virtual space.

On a more hi-fi tip, utilizing Soho's best and brightest to do some super cool compositing and motion capture, Partizan and Chris Cairns present us the highly entertaining and vaguely Cunningham-ish "Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc.". This videomusical composition also solves a similar 'how to get enough characters in the same space' dilemma, this time by removing their bodies and just leaving their heads!

Be sure to check out the Neurosonics Microsite for some behind-the-scenes photos.

Soon Your Computer Will See You Always

2009-08-05T20:39:00.004+02:00

This little demo of some webcam background removal and face tracking trickery from Chris Harrison is auspicious of things to come for the future of viewing moving images. As long as our viewing devices are flat we'll have these slightly compromised aesthetics. Reminiscent of the previously posted DIY Nintendo Wii 3D Tracking Hack.

Time Travel is Possible, Even in China

2009-08-05T00:24:00.003+02:00

Christoph Rehage continues the infoviz practice of stopmotion time travel with his walk across China captured in poetic HD resolution photos. It would be cool if the text subtitles were optional like a DVD, the music were less goofy and the ending less schmalzy. But there is still something alluring about this guy's examination of self.

Visions of Singularity

2009-08-01T19:45:00.002+02:00

This Kevin Kelly TED talk has been a point of inspiration for me for several months. He outlines some paradigm shifting statistics that point towards a future with ever greater potential for disruptively unexpected events to occur.

How refreshingly sweet and optimistic, then, to see this lighthearted and hypernostalgic vision of a Singularity from the adorable video hipsters from Chicago, Grocerybag TV:

Full Text of the voiceover:

My life is an integrated circuit.
I am inside of my human body, but I don't feel it yet.
We all thought 2012 would be so much more dramatic...
Something religious... or sacred.
Things were more laughable back then.
Back when I was a text message.
We're going to be plugging in our brains soon and nothing will stop the human race from racing.
We'll all be inside containers chasing everything they put in front of us with a pretty logo on it.
It's the internet.
It exists and people are not going insane.

X-BOX Project Natal

2009-06-04T19:18:00.003+02:00

Would love to see this working on the movie-theater scale.

Carl Sagan Explains the Hypercube

2009-05-31T10:36:00.000+02:00

Stories Cull Writers from the World

2009-05-26T17:52:00.001+02:00

"Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don't fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

The theme of much of what I write, fiction as well as nonfiction, is the relationship between power and powerlessness and the endless, circular conflict they're engaged in. John Berger, that most wonderful writer, once wrote: "Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one." There can never be a single story. There are only ways of seeing."

Arundhati Roy
18 September 2002
Santa Fe, New Mexico

Atomized Brazilian Literature

2009-05-11T13:48:00.003+02:00

The easy-to-use interface of this project really can't be underestimated in terms of its importance in making the project a success. It is a good example of how designers will continue to play a bigger role in storytelling as narratives become byproducts of participatory frameworks.

Hypercubist Romantic Comedy

2009-03-04T20:33:00.002+01:00

What a lovely short Hypercubist video! This gives great visual presence to ideas of time travel and teleportation within photo-realistic aesthetics. Bravo!

Hypercubism makes friends with its French cousin Altermodernism

2009-03-02T00:27:00.007+01:00

Consider the following manifesto, written by French art critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud, upon his curation of last year's Tate Triennial:

Altermodern - Manifesto

Travel, cultural exchanges and examination of history are not merely fashionable themes, but markers of a profound evolution in our vision of the world and our way of inhabiting it.

More generally, our globalised perception calls for new types of representation: our daily lives are played out against a more enormous backdrop than ever before, and depend now on trans-national entities, short or long-distance journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe.

Many signs suggest that the historical period defined by postmodernism is coming to an end: multiculturalism and the discourse of identity is being overtaken by a planetary movement of creolisation; cultural relativism and deconstruction, substituted for modernist universalism, give us no weapons against the twofold threat of uniformity and mass culture and traditionalist, far-right, withdrawal.

The times seem propitious for the recomposition of a modernity in the present, reconfigured according to the specific context within which we live – crucially in the age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodernity.

If twentieth-century modernism was above all a western cultural phenomenon, altermodernity arises out of planetary negotiations, discussions between agents from different cultures. Stripped of a centre, it can only be polyglot. Altermodernity is characterised by translation, unlike the modernism of the twentieth century which spoke the abstract language of the colonial west, and postmodernism, which encloses artistic phenomena in origins and identities.

We are entering the era of universal subtitling, of generalised dubbing. Today’s art explores the bonds that text and image weave between themselves. Artists traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs, creating new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication.

The artist becomes ‘homo viator’, the prototype of the contemporary traveller whose passage through signs and formats refers to a contemporary experience of mobility, travel and transpassing. This evolution can be seen in the way works are made: a new type of form is appearing, the journey-form, made of lines drawn both in space and time, materialising trajectories rather than destinations. The form of the work expresses a course, a wandering, rather than a fixed space-time.

Altermodern art is thus read as a hypertext; artists translate and transcode information from one format to another, and wander in geography as well as in history. This gives rise to practices which might be referred to as ‘time-specific’, in response to the ‘site-specific’ work of the 1960s. Flight-lines, translation programmes and chains of heterogeneous elements articulate each other. Our universe becomes a territory all dimensions of which may be travelled both in time and space.

The Tate Triennial 2009 presents itself as a collective discussion around this hypothesis of the end of postmodernism, and the emergence of a global altermodernity.

Bourriaud's conclusion that Altermodernism is giving rise to ‘time-specific’ artistic practices is a very resonant idea with my notion of Hypercubism. As I see Hypercubism as an inclusive theory that is not contradicted by other similar theories, but rather strengthened, I have no desire nor need to rebut or extensively qualify what I think of Altermodernism. I can simply say that the two movements are highly interrelated, and it is perhaps quintessentially Hypercubist/Altermodern that no one label for this phenomenon is agreed upon. Multiple names can comfortably co-exist.

Nonetheless, I will admit that I find the language being used here to characterize Altermodernism is of an all-too-familiar French intellectual style which reminds me of classic postmodernist works such as A Thousand Plateaus. For me there is something very attractive about being able to talk about such a fundamental shift in aesthetics in a more accessible language, given the fact that popular culture has had such a profound influence in bringing this Hypercubist era into being.

Panel Discussion: Audience Building for Digital Films

2009-02-27T12:49:00.006+01:00

"The future of independent film is not in content aggregation, which is quickly becoming commoditized, but in audience aggregation. Sustainability for filmmakers lies directly in the hands of the audience. Direct to audience models have shaken the core of the music industry. But the power of Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 true fans” seems good in theory but where do you start? What are the steps to building an audience around your work and most importantly how do you keep the conversation going? Discussion Leader: Saskia Wilson-Brown (Current TV) - Arin Crumley (Four Eyed Monsters) - Micki Krimmel (expert in social media and online community) - Alex Johnson (digital media strategist / filmmaker) - Lance Weiler (The Last Broadcast, Head Trauma)"

Reposted from DIY Days

DIY Nintendo Wii 3D Tracking Hack

2009-01-27T23:28:00.003+01:00

Seems to me after watching this video that widespread 3D holographic effects are just around the corner. I wonder how difficult it would be to get this working with most webcams in most laptops, or if the necessary sensor technology could be embedded easily.

Thanks to Rigo for showing me this video :)

Cubism vs. Hypercubism

2009-01-22T18:06:00.002+01:00

I thought I would take a stab at a concise definition of Hypercubism, a word I use quite often and have until now perhaps not defined so exactly. For the sake of reference, here is an excerpt of Wikipedia's definition for Cubism:

In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form — instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct characteristics.

In contrast we might consider this summation of Hypercubism:

In hypercubist artworks, objects are particlized, analyzed and synthesized in a realistic form — instead of depicting all objects from one temporal perspective, the artist (or artists) depict the subject from a multitude of temporal perspectives to represent the subject in a greater temporality. Often the surfaces of intersect seamlessly, creating a coherent four-dimensional spacetime illusion. The background and object planes are always distinct to create deep concrete space, one of hypercubism's distinct characteristics

Besides being a bit of encyclopedic revisionism, these two definitions set up a useful theoretical dichotomy between Cubism and Hypercubism. Simply put:

Cubism shows multiple spaces in the same time while Hypercubism shows multiple times in the same space.

Microsoft's C-Dragon and Video Synth

2009-01-22T18:03:00.000+01:00

I thought I would resurrect this post and talk a little bit more about what I think the implications are for Hypercubist Cinema with technologies like C-Dragon and Photosynth.

These technologies illustrate perhaps the most fundamental aspect of my theory of hypercubism, namely, an aesthetics in which multiple times are visible in the same space.

If the set of a fictional movie were photographed using such technology in concert with some of the multi-camera object-oriented methods and/or scanners, I imagine a robust hybrid system could emerge which would realistically texture map the photos onto detailed clouds of spatial data. The implications for the editing (read: tesseracting) afterward would be tremendous, allowing granularization of every object and every word, every facial expression or movement.

I predict that the difficulty will be in recording sound in such an environment. In a way, we might see a second era of silent films with the emergence of early hypercubist systems. My hunch is that commercial pressure will force new innovations in multi-track recording to the degree that individual sound sources in the same acoustic space will be able to be mixed independently of one another as if they'd been recorded in separate isolation booths. This theme of hypercubist synchronous sound deserves its own post in the future.

PS: sorry for the long BMW advertisement at the end of this video; BMW sponsor the TED talks...

200 Cameras, 2.5 million frames and 20,000 Gigabytes worth of Toshiba Magic

2009-01-18T11:42:00.019+01:00

Although we've seen this effect used since The Matrix in numerous advertisements, films and spoofs, this example reveals in its reduced, contemporary aesthetics the object-oriented nature of the hypercubist revolution on its way. The subtle interplay of the different players in this "time sculpture" (as the ad agency people call it) reveals the short-comings of 2D compositing while also hinting at an entirely different image world.

Of course my contention is that the methodology used in this process is already theoretically obsolete. I predict that the scanning technologies of the future should be able to yield clouds of photo-realistic data without the necessity of 200 distinct video cameras. Nonetheless, state-of-the-art Californian motion capture company MOVA is also using a highly complex strobing multi-camera system together with phosphorescent makeup.

Their white paper on volumetric cinematography is a great quick read, written in accessible, non-scientific language, and resonates strongly with my own hypercubist theory.

These developments surely must be fascinating for the early pioneer of blue-screen proto-hypercubism, Zbig Rybczynski. His 1980 film Tango was an essential forerunner of such object oriented imagery.

The concept sketches, diagrams and film still from the finished composite of Tango reveal a direct hand-crafted analog predecessor of the Toshiba spot;

The Explosion of Cinematic Time

2009-01-01T16:20:00.000+01:00

This coy video from Dan Goldman of Adobe Systems alludes to some pretty fundamental concepts of what an object-oriented cinema might entail;

Drawing on Objects
(making graphic changes to objects which stay with the object in time, as opposed to simulating object-oriented change by altering every frame)
Delineating Paths of Objects
(tracking and displaying an objects path through space)
Attaching Visual Metadata to Objects
(text annotations in the form of cartoon speech bubbles)
Object Timeline Scrubbing
(using a "click and drag"approach to scrub the timeline)
"Throwing" Objects
(giving objects the ability to be manipulated using analog velocity controls)
Segmentation of Objects
(enabling puppet-like effects)
Hypercubist Time
("drag and drop" manipulation of individual objects through their own timelines to create composite hypercubist time)

Dan explains that his software system analyzes the movement of points and allows the system to recognize moving objects. The video also demonstrates how algorithmic analysis will be able to accurately calculate hypercubist compositing to eliminate visual artifacts.

The curious and persistent question in my mind is: when will this hypercubist vision for moving images be embraced by the video camera manufacturers? Why not displace some of the processing power needed to identify the objects into the camera system itself? There are certainly high-end special effects tracking systems for the commercial industry to do all kinds of compositing and layering of 3D and real images, but I think lower price point systems have a genuine appeal for numerous less glossy applications. It seems like Dan is already on this tip in his experiments with puppets.

The Dynamic Graphics Project at the University of Toronto has also been contributing to this field with its Dimp video player prototype which allows to browse video clips by directly dragging their content.

These interface prototypes are a great step forward in establishing hypercubist video aesthetics. I think 2009 looks auspicious for these projects. With YouTube's recent launch of annotations even with a silly example like this its not hard to imagine more and more regular consumers demanding sophisticated object-oriented video tools.

MIT Creates Center For Future Storytelling

2008-11-29T00:26:00.004+01:00

MIT's new Center for Future Storytelling is an amazing and encouraging development. Several of the projects they plan to take on are addressing key questions I have posed throughout the history of this blog.

3D Morphable Model Face Animation

2008-09-04T16:14:00.003+02:00

What is amazing is that this video was posted to YouTube in 2006.

Temporal Resolution

2008-09-04T02:10:00.002+02:00

In my very first post to this blog I complained about the limitations of video frame rates (temporal resolution). I was reading more on the products offered by Geometric Informatics and it seems their GeoVideo Real-Time Motion Capture Camera runs at a frame rate that begins to make things interesting on the road towards what I will call Granular Motion Synthesis.

Granular Synthesis in reference to video has been inaccurately co-opted for some years by Kurt Hentschlaeger and Ulf Langheinrich when in fact they are only breaking down the video signal into frame-lengthed grains; 1/25th of a second or 40 milliseconds. The microsound time scale makes this claim to Granular Synthesis more poetic than truthful;

"Microsound includes all sounds on the time scale shorter than musical notes, the sound object time scale, and longer than the sample time scale. Specifically this is shorter than one tenth of a second and longer than 10 milliseconds"

GeoVideo claims to acquire "absolute coordinates at 180 fps" - this equates to 7.2 times more temporal resolution than standard 25 fps PAL video. These GeoVideo "frames" are therefore each 5.5 milliseconds in duration. To give this some context on the microsound time scale, 5 milliseconds is the duration of a honey bee’s wing flap.

Of course the problem lies in a lack of real-time playback systems for 180 fps video. No DVD player, tape player, celluloid projection system or means which doesn't involve custom hardware or a computer is capable of playing this kind of content back to an audience at its full temporal resolution. Even IMAX HD is only 48 fps.

So put plainly, even if I could make a composition of a honey bee dancing wild patterns through spacetime using Granular Motion Synthesis, I would only have the satisfaction of watching it on my laptop. Showing it to a large theater of people seems to still be a ways down the road.

Quantum Camera Revisited

2008-09-02T23:53:00.006+02:00

In January of 2007 I posted about what I considered "Quantum Camera Components". I made reference to speech recognition technology, dynamic time warping, and depth perception as key elements of the so-called Quantum Camera of the future. I am happy to report that now, only a little more than a year and a half later, major elements of that system have evolved which are beyond what I was expecting. And the real fireworks is that the brain of the Quantum Camera has already been put to use in a beautiful music video for Radiohead "House of Cards". Here is text from Google explaining:

"No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes."

The data the LIDAR scanner produces in Radiohead's video is limited, ostensibly, by some arbitrary factors. I guess this includes such things as:

- scanner-head rotations per second
- number of lasers
- various settings concerning thresholds of signal to noise.

It is beautiful how the LIDAR imagery is distorted and skewed through analog processes. The video has something reminiscent of the Rutt Etra video synthesizer, not only for its visual aesthetics but also in relation to how the property of depth is a factor in the data-visualization.

Yet it is possible to imagine that in the not-to-distant future, a more evolved scanning system would be able to reconstruct a photographically accurate four-dimensional reality. In this light, the team behind this Radiohead video have achieved a remarkable milestone in the history of moving images and cinema. If we are already seeing LIDAR visualizations in this year of 2008, it should be within the next couple years that the full impact of this new medium will reach its visual potential. I can't wait!

Meanwhile on the speech recognition front, Cambridge-based company Everyzing has technology which, if its scalable for the entire searchable web should be able to help on the Hypercubist sound stage. While not conceived for use in production, it would probably be a matter of logistics and inspiration to get the computers needed to crunch the transciption data in close to real time.

As you watch the video above, try to imagine replacing key words of Thomas Wilde's monologue as per the following rubric. It won't work in every sentence, but it might help you see my perspective on the future of this technology and how it relates to cinematic workflow.

"major search portal" - major movie studio
"large destination website with multimedia" - major motion picture
"if these videos are on the web" - if these takes are in the material we shot
"search economy" - editing/tesseracting timeline/hyperspace
"users expect fine grain control online" - editors/tesseractors expect fine grain control when editing

This brings me to the dynamic time stretching issues, and to a recent post I made about Microsoft's Video Synth project. At the time I merely archived the video without comment. What I liked about the technology was its ability to use geolocation data to create visually meaningful relationships from various different photographs.

The potential to combine a technology like Video Synth with a LIDAR scanning system strikes me as the next logical step. This next generation Quantum Camera could allow the true atomization of moving images and usher in an entire new era of cinematic imagery. Instead of Frames, Hypercubes; instead of Continuity, Quantinuity; instead of editing, Tesseracting. This will be a wild ride, and the evidence suggests we've only just begun.

Wow. Just contemplating the Petabytes of data this new cinema will generate gives me a headache.

Thanks to Brandon Rosenbluth for dropping the hint about "House of Cards".

Cosmopolitan Cyborg Explained

2008-07-18T14:01:00.003+02:00

Given the goal of creating an entertaining and cutting edge new station identity campaign for the Italian music network All Music, two words stood out as key concepts:

Cyborg

A human who has certain physiological processes aided
or controlled by mechanical or electronic devices.

Cosmopolitan

Pertinent or common to the whole world.
Having constituent elements from all over the world or from many different parts of the world.

Young people today are more connected to new technologies than ever before. Computers, mobile phones, and mp3 players are just some of the array of gadgets that define the aesthetics of the contemporary youth culture. Today’s young person can be viewed as a cyborg, as many processes which were formerly time consuming real world events are now done virtually with the click of a button.

Globalization has accelerated the mixing and mashing of cultures, producing hybrid forms of art and music. Today’s young person is connected through the internet to large networks of creative influence from all over the world, with an identity that is as digital as it is cosmopolitan.

To express these aspects of the contemporary digital landscape, I proposed to create a personality emblematic of these qualities his/herself: the Cosmopolitan Cyborg. He/she is a hypercubist composite personality made up of the faces and voices of the All Music network’s own VJs. Using only original sounds recorded with the human voice, elaborate yet recognizable genres of contemporary music are synthesized. The result is a concrete answer to the tired world of lip-sync found in music videos. I call it videomusic.

The payoff, which translates to: “All Music, a republic founded on music”, as spoken from the mouth of the Cosmopolitan Cyborg, reads as an intriguing commentary on contemporary Italian music culture, simultaneously conscious of the past and yet boldly jumping into the future of digital aesthetics.

In the future I hope to be able to work with musicians, bands and composers in this manner to create a new definition for music videos befitting our contemporary era of hypercubist aesthetics.

Take that, Goliath!

2008-06-04T11:05:00.003+02:00

The new Weezer video "Pork & Beans" is proof of the slowly crumbling mass media. Corporate media's Goliath is besieged by a swarm of YouTube celebrity Davids!

Quantinuity

2008-04-28T11:07:00.003+02:00

Quantinuity:
noun, plural -ties

Any strategy which articulates vectors of consistency within a multiplicity.
In microcinematics, methods of manipulating video durations which produce results that are not reproducible with celluloid film.
In hypernarrative, methods of dispersing traditional narrative structures across multiplicities inherent in networks and swarms.

[Origin: Coined by Gabriel Shalom in 2007 in a letter to Sven König, a portmanteau of quantum and continuity]

See also Continuity Editing.

Ubiquitous Computing

2008-01-30T11:53:00.000+01:00

Johannes Krause & Max Neupert's Video Sampler

2007-12-17T23:40:00.000+01:00

While the thesis of Johannes Krause & Max Neupert's Video Sampler is very convincing, this demo video only seems to barely scratch at the surface of the intention behind the software. I hope they get a new sequencer module video up soon!

Maintenance

2007-12-17T23:38:00.000+01:00

As the blog is approaching its one-year anniversary I have decided to remove all the contributors who never managed to post a single entry.

Excerpt from letter to Sven König

2007-12-01T19:53:00.000+01:00

I was checking out your recent project .download finished! and I was pleased to see Small Room Tango made it into the fray of the early videos put through the process.

The process of stripping the video of its key frames and leaving only the delta frames behind suggests another aesthetic to me; one in which the materials to be processed are created with this in mind to craft a kind of "quantinuity" -- my word for describing my new formal theory of Quantum Continuity (as opposed to classical Hollywood Continuity) The particalization of the image into pixels is consistant with this theory in that it strips an edited sequence of images of their temporal edges. If one were to write their own compression algorithm which still wrote delta frames but didn't chunk pixels into blocky groups, perhaps this could create a "cleaner" effect? Although the chunks admittedly have a more "painterly" look -- if that's your thing...

Pioneer Set to Radically Alter Live Cinema

2007-10-24T18:36:00.001+02:00

The new Pioneer SVM-1000 AV mixer, pictured here with Pioneer's DVJ-1000 DVD decks sets the stage for a new era in live cinema. Although intended for club performances, this piece of gear has remarkable implications for the construction of narrative as well.

Hot Chip - Over and Over

2007-07-02T18:11:00.001+02:00

David Lynch and guests on Consciousness and the Brain - UC Berkeley

2007-06-11T02:02:00.001+02:00

University of Washington develops video post-production technologies with quantum implications

2007-05-30T12:40:00.000+02:00

Cornelius - Wataridori (music video); Gum (live)

2007-05-22T14:36:00.000+02:00

I saw Cornelius play in Washington DC several years ago and it remains to be one of the best live shows I have seen in which audio and video were presented in tight relation to one another. Their sense of visual music is spot-on.

Bill Viola Interview and Marc Aschenbrenner's Zweite Sonne

2007-04-25T16:21:00.000+02:00

I like Bill Viola's comparison of video cameras to reindeer bones with notches cut into them. He is profound in his assertion that its the telling of stories and leaving of objects that is the fundamental activity of human existence.

I recently attended the Düsseldorf and Köln art fairs and it was transparently clear that the contemporary art world is dominated by a marketplace driven by the collection of objects. What little video I did see I found remarkably boring and derivative, with the exception of Zweite Sonne by Marc Aschenbrenner on exhibit at the Olaf Stüber Gallery booth in Köln. It exhibited a property I would like to associate with my slowly developing theory of Quantinuity; namely that it transported an otherwise virtual object into physical space. The video was projected inside a giant black plastic balloon-suit that also appears in the video itself as the central subject of the video.

Eyeliner 3D

2007-04-19T02:09:00.000+02:00

Is Eyeliner 3D really holography or just smoke and mirrors?
And does it even matter?

Given my background and formal education, as well as my admitted nostalgic love of certain masterpieces of celluloid cinema, it is challenging for me to conceive of my work in terms of depth. I have always been inclined to see 2-dimensional pictures in my head when imagining a story for a film. And I guess that's just it; proto-quantum cinema and/or live cinema are not really films at all; they may be "features" or even "feature-length" at times, but I am feeling more and more that the proto-quantum cinema will find its deepest roots in theater. Stumbling across technologies like Eyeliner 3D confirm this suspicion.

So while it may not be possible in my lifetime to realize true holographic projection (and certainly not nanopixels), several layers (perhaps as many in late-stage 32-bit video games) may be around the corner. The promise that these virtual layers of inszenierung may have for proto-quantum cinema may in fact cross the minimum thresholds of depth reconstruction necessary to truly define a new artform.

So do we really need absolute depth resolution? Or will foreground, midground and background (with some additional layers) suffice?

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest & In My Language

2007-04-19T02:00:00.000+02:00

I just watched One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest for the first time in about seven years. I had always regarded this piece as an amazing character study and a beautifully shot human drama. Watching it today in 2007 I became painfully aware of its shortcomings in terms of its depictions of women as either tramps or sadistic bureaucrats. Yet its inability to be gender equitable bothered me less than its somehow predictable narrative structure and its blantantly ethnocentric construction of the Native American dilemma.

The salient points of the film which redeem it are its cinematography and stellar performances by a perfectly cast ensemble. The art of Milos Forman's directing was flawless; it is the script that poses a problem for me.

The main issue I find is that our theories of psychology and pharmacology have advanced considerably since Cuckoo's Nest was written. Shock therapy and lobotomies have been overshadowed by the pharmaceutical industry. Did the terms ADD and ADHD have relevance in the 70s the way they did in the 90s? I posit that the media landscape itself has had such a drastic effect on the collective human consciousness in the past thirty-odd years that it has made its depiction an entirely different proposition than it was when Cuckoo's Nest was made.

Created by an autistic woman, I find this video far more arresting and inspiring in today's media climate as a vision and interpretation of mental illness. It is a marvel of internet technology that such an individual is able to express herself in this way to such a large audience;

"8 1/2 Mile"

2007-02-24T23:41:00.000+01:00

Sample-based aesthetics point to a larger grammar of clashing various media with topical or visual similarities to create mutant remixed offspring. While my personal approach with video is to use the formal processes common to sample-based work on materials I create myself, I still find a good mash-up to be rare finds in the cluttered landscape of audiovisual collage. This clip by The AV Club is particularly multi-dimensional in its result. The best mash-up work is something that will never be made better through automation; it is hi-tech handiwork.

My personal mash-up triumph was a track I made from ODB's Baby I got Your Money and Pink Floyd's Money, decorated by choice samples of Noam Chomsky talking about economics. I called it Dirty Money.

WiiJ

2007-02-19T23:20:00.000+01:00

Well it didn't take long for people to hack the Nintendo Wii controllers. Once again music makes another leap forward in interface design. Like the guy says at the end of the first video, its show business. I wish it would stop being show business and start addressing the needs of artists. But like the Sony portapack video camcorders, technology somehow must always be hacked for artists. I wonder if it would have a negative effect on creativity if artists were able to buy really well designed technological tools. My intuition tells me the answer is no. I mean, do painters dislike the fact that they can go get great brushes, canvas and pigments easily?

Another example of how far ahead music technology is opposed to video technology in our ability to manipulate the digital media.

Video For Ray

2007-02-19T20:12:00.000+01:00

This music video was made by many people contributing stills and video clips according to a pre-determined structure which, during the video's production, took the form of a wiki at zefrank.com. Unfortunately it seems as if the wiki with all the instructions on how to participate in the shot list is now gone, replaced by collaborator credits.

By soliciting and assembling individual cinematic elements over the internet this work is a pretty interesting collaboration. And while its probably not the first video to be made in this manner, it may well be the most popular ever made.

Ultimately the content of the video is cryptic and low-quality. It is probably more meaningful to the participants than to non-participants. At least the music is somewhat entertaining. Yet the concept begs for a better author to step forward and lead such a project.

Bill Viola Framed: Where are the angels?

2007-02-18T23:28:00.000+01:00

Watching a clip from Bill Viola's "I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like" on YouTube, it struck me how the computer restates the frame again and again. I took this photo to try to communicate the phenomenon of how my computer monitor, the web browser and the YouTube site, triple the frame of Viola's piece, which itself has a frame in its own frame (the frame of the video monitor, here with an image of a toucan). Yet even as the idea struck me to document my observation I realized I would be compounding it further by blogging it; adding the frames of the blog, the browser, and the computer again.

I have been thinking about a solution to the theoretical problem of the holographic cinema. My solution is theoretically elegant and potentially physically and technologically impossible. It was a flash of insight I had in a bar in Berlin during my visit to Transmediale.

The tyranny is the projector. The revolutionary answer is what I like to call the nanopixel. Imagine a microscopic cube capable of emitting a different colored light on each of its faces. Now imagine millions of these microscopic cubes suspended in some kind of electromagnetic vacuum. Each cube can wirelessly receive color information, luminosity information and dynamic positioning information in space. These nanopixels form ephemeral solids representing actors, sets and props; digital skins containing hollow cinematic bodies. A kind of elaborate, programmable, kinetic, narrative sculpture medium.

To record the data for the six faces of the nanopixels, a sophisticated system of either four (tetrahedron formation) or six (cubic formation) high-frequency, high-resolution imaging scanners would be deployed on set to get all angles necessary. The audience could sit in the round or in more conventional theatric seating.

My friend Florian Grond analyzed it in terms of mystical metaphor in which the scanner-cameras are the omniscient eye-of-god and the nanopixels are angels.

"Nostalgia"

2007-02-10T23:59:00.000+01:00

I just watched Tarkovsky's Nostalgia. The only other film of his I have seen is Stalker. I find his storytelling incredibly compelling for its theatric and meditative qualities (obvious draws).

Another perhaps more subtle thing which seduces me is his proclivity for carefully composed wide shots. He tends to avoid medium shots, relying on either canvas-like settings or closeups in the tradition of portraiture. I was also acutely aware of the sound design being heightened and immersive. I am interested in these qualities because of their musical nature. The visual separation of characters and objects within a Tarkovsky frame are often as elegant a composition as a painting. But these are paintings in time which, reinforced by a strong sound design, speak to me as audiovisual music.

"Every Day"

2007-02-08T02:37:00.000+01:00

Last week I was in Berlin visiting Transmediale and Club Transmediale, the twin events which ostensibly represent Germany's most cutting edge media art festivals. Unfortunately I admit I was quite disappointed with the work that I saw. Thank goodness this is the Transmediale chief curator's final year. Club Transmediale was better quality in general, with more exciting and relevant work, in my humble opinion.

During my visit I started reading The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. I have been thinking alot lately about time travellers and so I thought this video would be an appropriate starting point. Perhaps I will continue collecting other time travellers in the future.

Among other things I saw (and disliked) at Transmediale was a lame video called The Chronic Argonauts, apparently titled after an unused title for H. G. Wells' book. It unfortunately was not worthy of the distinction.

Everything is Miscellaneous

2007-01-16T01:13:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Joyce Shintani for blogging this. I found it relevant to the mpeg7 discussion, among other things that I like in general about interenet culture.

Let The Games Begin?

2007-01-10T19:21:00.001+01:00

Hi all! I'll be taking a somewhat different tack in my contributions here because of my different background. I am a social worker, with some backgound in neuropsychology and cognitive science from my undergraduate experience. I am also a phenomenologist and attempted writer, but have very limited knowledge of cinema per se. My primary interest in these technologies are:

a) in the feedback mechanisms which could potentially be used to incorporate viewer response into the process of "recomposing" quantum films
b) the subjective experience of viewing such a "self-composed" film
c) the social consequences of the loss of conventional shared narratives
d) applications of quantum cinema outside "art"

I want to start off this conversation by saying that quantum cinema already exists and it is called video gaming. Whether Pac Man qualifies for the medium is an academic discussion that is hardly relevant at this point. The new wave of game systems offer games in which characters can be designed, rendered somewhat realistically, and directly controlled to move within certain specifications. This creates virtually limitless possibilities of narrative in a sense, although games are almost universally unsatisfying as stories.

One reason is that the stories tend to bottleneck at certain points (usually during the preconcieved "cinematic" sequences during which the character does not have control). This creates the existencial conundrum of having absolute control but no optins.

A second reason is that the system gives too much control and predictability for the brain to translate into an emotional response. Most intense experiences I have had with cinema have been accompanied by the intense feeling of not being able to control outcomes and therefore being dependent on the story. One good example is watching an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and becoming painfully uncomfortable with the actions of the characters, feeling for example the intense need to apologize to the other characters for the actions of Larry David while at the same time feeling a great deal of sympathy for/with Larry David because of the actions of his wife.

The reason linear cinema is so succesful is that it allows the film maker to speak directly from the story and therefore "make a statement". If you ask a videogame player (full disclosure: I am one, I especially love shooters) what makes a game great, the most common answer is not the story, the music, the graphics, or even the design of the maps or the artificial intelligence. It is something called The Engine, the invisible but explicitly felt algorithms which determine the ways in which the manipulation of the controls translates into modifications of the game world. The well known Halo franchise, for instance, won out largely on the strength of it's engine. Will fans of cinema one day stop talking about stories and start talking about engines?

Quantum Camera Components

2007-01-07T01:08:00.000+01:00

The quantum camera has a brain and ears.

Speech recognition software performs best when you train the software by speaking a series of important words and sentences. It seems to me that the technology already exists to make prototypes of a system that would embed videos with full text transcriptions of everything spoken on camera as metadata. Nevermind the fact that if what you were shooting had a screenplay you could feed the entire screenplay to the camera before you shoot so it can anticipate what the actors will say.

Techniques such as dynamic time warping would accomodate the variations between different takes of the same shot so that they are all regarded as versions of one another. Seems like mpeg7 would be the best possible way to store this data today.

Frameline 47 lets you take advantage of the mpeg7 standard quite fully and its not surprising at all that a company like Eptascape would be in the security and surveillance market. What we need is the metadata to be entered half-automatically during the shooting process combined with a learning curve for the camera where you have it learn what the actors look like and sound like. A sophisticated infra red camera would help define actors from the background. Using three cameras (one on the X, Y and Z axis) could help to define the physical space and depth. And now a dog in infrared:

Wrinklers In Time

2007-01-06T13:35:00.000+01:00

I have just been researching wormholes, string theory and Stephen Hawking's chronology protection conjecture.

Quantum editors will be called tesseracters because the medium they compose with will have four dimensions instead of two.

The Tyranny of The Frame

2007-01-06T11:27:00.000+01:00

I have been thinking about Greenaway's "Tyranny of the Frame". It is pefectly acceptable to me that we should have a frame, whatever the format of the rectangle. I also have nothing against those artists who like to project on round things or whose fetish it is to go beyond our peripheral vision in 360° panorama.

The real tyranny of the frame of celluloid cinema is that it is in two dimensions. Above is an animated projection of a rotating tesseract. Why should the video frame be flat?

The camera of the last 100+ years of cinematic history is essentially a glorified eyeball with sophisticated spectacles.

The Quantum Camera will attach these free-floating, bespectacled eyeballs to brains. Brains capable of perceiving reality more like the way our nervous system works. When I was at University of Maryland I had a class about visual communication where the professor had us read a book about visual perception. Humans have depth perception. We can tell the foreground from the background without any trouble, and if something that was moving ceases to move, we can still distinguish it as a separate entity. We have had multi-track audio recording equipment for years. We need multi-depth video cameras. Cameras that record the background and the foreground to separate layers of video. Goodbye keying and matting, hello alpha channels!

But it needs to go further than just what keying can accomplish. Layers are still a 2D concept. Containers (I admit I borrow the word from conversations I have had with Philipp) are a much more appropriate model. Here is a film still from Lost In Translation:

The quantum camera would ideally see (at least) these containers:
(Restaurant (Charlotte) (Table (Food) ) (Steam) (Bob) )

Of course our eyes can discriminate an incredible level of detail:
(Bob (Costume (Sweater (Shirt) ) (Wristwatch) (Pants) )

And we can even infer things which we cannot see, such as socks, underwear and shoes.

It may also be necessary to "teach" the quantum camera in order to get it to learn to recognize these containers and their IDs. With the above example, I can imagine that it would work that first you would show the camera the empty table and benches and ID it Restaurant. Then you could put the food on the table and ID it Food. Then a threshold knob would be adjusted to catch the steam and ID it Steam. Lastly Bob and Charlotte would each be added to the composition and IDed respectively. Or perhaps you could use a combination of RFIDs and threshold settings for brightness, depth and movement on the camera.

When I was at Bard I attended a screening of Let's Get Lost by Bruce Weber (see this site for video clips). The screening was presented by Bard alumni Jeff Preiss, an accomplished cinematographer. With a successful career in commercial advertising, Jeff knew some secrets of the image industry. He mentioned that he had heard of major corporations developing cameras that photograph all surfaces of physical reality in the hope of creating photographic 3D space.

What are they waiting for?

Peter Greenaway's "Four Tyrannies"

2007-01-06T02:33:00.000+01:00

I was having trouble in YouTube making this playlist, so for now its not in the best order. But the ideas are interrelated enough that it works. I might fix this some time in the future.

4 vs 3

2007-01-06T01:39:00.000+01:00

Tonight I watched the two DVD set of "Ten Minutes Older" a compilation of 15 short films by 15 different directors. Despite Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, and Spike Lee being among the directors, I was basically unimpressed. There was a Mike Figgis piece called "A Staircase - About Time 2" which used the same 4-panel split screen as Figgis' 2000 quantum experiment Timecode but the story wasn't compelling and the imagery was gaudy.

I vividly remember seeing Timecode when it came out at the Dupont Circle theaters in DC. I went alone and was thoroughly captivated by the experience. If quantum cinema is the cinema of multiple universes, then here was a film that interpreted that premise by showing the views of four cameras at all times. Like a video installation for four monitors packaged for the big screen, this technique pushes the limits of our perception with four simultaneous points of view. To hold our concentration on one thing at a time, Figgis mixed the audio higher in the quadrant that ought to command our attention.

Whereas Greenaway's mini-frames have always bothered me for their cut-and-paste aesthetic, Figgis' approach is a step up. It allows dramatic tension to rise and fall by creating suspense across the four quadrants. When two quadrants reveal the same subject from different angles there is an immediate gut-level "ah-ha!" which is quite pleasing.

On the other hand, I wonder if four frames is too many for the visual sense. I have the feeling that perhaps three is a magic number in this regard. My friend Tobi Wootton has done a piece with three simultaneous video angles which works exceptionally well. Four seems to be just above a threshold that guarantees that a substantial portion of what happens will remain subconscious or unconscious. Perhaps some directors find that acceptable. Certainly there is an argument for keeping subtle cinematic information buried, only to be revealed upon multiple viewings.

PictoOrphanage

2007-01-03T23:30:00.000+01:00

The Pictoplasma PictoOrphanage is a nifty concept which could be extended to included characters from quantum cinematic projects.

In physics the quanta refers to an indivisible entity of energy. In quantum cinema the quanta is the character. This view is constructive in that it views a character as a basic building block of larger narrative forms.

Characters

2007-01-02T21:43:00.000+01:00

Peter Greenaway has always been ahead of the times. Today I just stumbled across his Tulse Luper project (Archive Promo Game)

His decision to drive the experiment with a character confirms suspicions I have had since I was at the Pictoplasma conference. While I worked videotaping lectures, performances and karaoke, I couldn't help feel a strong affinity for many of the designers and artists. It wasn't just because of my background in comics and illustration; there was a deeper structure that was revealed to me that could tie all artistic mediums together, both digital and analog. The character was serving artists like Tim Biskup (Helper) and Nathan Jurevicius (Scary Girl) as a means to tie together paintings, comics, animations, and collectible vinyl toys. You could say that for these artists merchandising was part of their approach towards being pervasive. I see quantum cinema as using characters as the particles which bind multiple universes and stories together across different mediums.

Now here is a picture of me dressed in a wooden Helper costume at Pictoplasma 2006:

Ze Frank Wearing Full-Body RFID Spray?

2007-01-02T19:27:00.000+01:00

More On Frame Rates

2007-01-01T23:57:00.000+01:00

Apparently IMAX HD is shot and projected at 48 fps.

The 100fps website seems to have some answers about physical thresholds of how many frames per second we can see.

Now, just for fun, a slow-motion video of a coke can being destroyed by an arrow at 4000 fps (courtesy of Photron).

Cinenet

2007-01-01T23:24:00.000+01:00

NASA Unveils Spray-On Circuits
The space agency showed how it can spray a thin film of metal on any object to create RF antennas and electronic circuits.

Sept. 26, 2002 -- Like many breakthrough discoveries, this one happened by accident. NASA had built a vacuum chamber in which astronauts could practice welding in space. The problem was, whenever the astronauts tried to weld something, it created a vapor that left a thin film of metal on the inside of the chamber.

The Russians had similar problems. But while the Russians learned how to get rid of the vapor, NASA figured out a way to control it and use it. The space agency created a "portable vacuum thin film deposition" device, which is a fancy way of saying NASA developed a handheld unit that lets engineers spray a thin film of metal on just about anything.

At the Frontline conference in Chicago on Tuesday, Fred Schramm of NASA's technology transfer department displayed a feather, a tissue, a piece of plastic wrap and a dollar bill coated with a thin film of chrome, as well as photos of rocks and other objects covered in chrome and copper.

NASA's main interest in the technology, which is still in development, is to create smart structures. Agency engineers spray the metal coating on a part and then analyze the film to determine what happened to it during space flight. But Schramm says that NASA has used a mask, or stencil, to create data matrix, two-dimensional matrix symbols that contain dark and light squares.

Schramm told a rapt audience that the same technology could transform the RFID industry. "We now have a handheld device that's roughly the size of a hair dryer," he said. "You could walk up to a wall and put a metal layer on it. We've created masks to make data matrix on a surface, and if you change the mask you can make an antenna or a circuit."

NASA hasn't made either yet because low-cost RFID is not an area of interest. But it does want to transfer the technology to the private sector. Schramm held out the possibility that one day, RFID tags could be sprayed on packaging, the way bar codes are printed right on many packages today.

Schramm say how long it would take before a product would be on the market, but it would likely be a couple of years. He also declined to say how much a reader would cost to build. The prototype probably cost in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, to create. A company called Vacuum Arc Technology Inc. is working to commercialize it.

Schramm said RFID companies have contacted him about using the technology to create low-cost tags. "We see [the technology being used to create] the antenna first, then the circuit," he said. "One day, you are going to have somebody putting circuits and sensors right on walls, bags, anything."

He said these spray-on RFID tags and sensors would respond to a reader the same way existing technology does. "New technology impacts every corner of our society," Schramm said. "This is a quantum leap, not a baby step."

The real quantum leap would be to use a transparent, non toxic RFID spray on actors in full costume and makeup, then develop a camera technology that could generate a 2D mask within the video image, eliminating the need for blue screens. You could shoot action in any kind of lighting in many different scenarios and always be able to separate the foreground from the background. The internet of things becomes the internet of actors, props and set elements. This article is over four years old; when will the be coming to a theater near you?

We need a word to describe digitally networked and trackable actors, props and set elements in cinema. Perhaps this could be called the cinenet?

More Martin Arnold

2007-01-01T00:24:00.000+01:00

My favorites are the second piece ("passage à l'acte") and the third piece ("Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy"). The flipping of the frame in the first piece ("pièce touchée") reminds me of Artavazd Peleshian. I like Peleshian's use of flipping better, but ultimately I don't find the effect so great except when certain actions cross through the frame and make nice visual palindromes.

Boy Game Boy Game

2006-12-30T20:40:00.000+01:00

"Video games are the first stage in a plan for machines to help the human race, the only plan that offers a future for intelligence."
— Chris Marker, Sans Soleil

The Quantum Studio Theater

2006-12-30T11:15:00.000+01:00

You arrive at the quantum theater, a vast contemporary black structure with no windows. On the digital marquee is a silent trailer for the current season's production. You approach the ticket counter and enter your credit information into a terminal. A small plastic ticket-card is dispensed to you. This ticket doubles as your access to the lobby and the theater. You enter the lobby and sit down at the bar. At the quantum studio theater the show starts at the beginning of the season and ends at the end of the season, so there is no rush. Did I mention its 4 in the morning? The quantum studio theater is 24/7.

At the end of the bar is an aging man you recognize as an actor from the last season. He gives you a nod and as you finish your drinks you slide down to converse with him. Seems as if this season is even better than the last he says. Last season was written by Greenaway, Lynch and the Coens. This season showcases some new talent; a collaborative effort between Jonze, July and Coppola. Now it hits you as the man's words slide out of his mouth between sips of Whiskey; you are conversing with Dennis Hopper.

The polite chit chat between you and Dennis subsides and he gets up to enter the theater. Again your ticket-cards grant you access to the voluminous darkened room. You follow Dennis as he stumbles into the middle row center seats past a pair of teenage girls and a sleeping old man. You begin to get lost in the story. A story that lives because you are there watching; a story which is assembled cut by cut based on information stored in your ticket-card; a story which modifies its emotional dynamics the way an orchestra will crescendo and dimenuendo at the command of the maestro. And yet the maestro's skull has been digitally peeled back, with the genius brain now receptive to the subtle variations in the audience. Each audience member is a variable in an elaborate equation.

The drama hits a soft spot and Dennis coughs out a raspy laugh. The scene is of a boy asking his mother about the effects of global warming on the family hamster. The boy has accidentally substituted "radiation" with "aviation". You wonder on a subconsious level about the alternate takes of this scene. If the boy had said "vacation" or "salvation" would Dennis had found it as funny? Closeups of the hamster running in its pathetic metal wheel are strangely symmetric, as if the hamster is running in a perfect loop. Perhaps it is a perfect loop. Perhaps the duration of that loop is chosen from a matrix of possibilities by a logic that is dependent on your own ticket-card. It's hard to say. Moments later the father character arrives home from a long day at the office and pours himself a whiskey. He interrupts the conversation between his son and his wife with a raspy laugh. A raspy laugh that you swear you've heard before...

Zbigniew Rybczynski

2006-12-29T19:33:00.000+01:00

When I was a kid my parents used to rent me Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation which included Tango by Zbigniew Rybczynski. It's funny that the first video I ever cut was called Small Room Tango. This could have been an alternate title for Zbig's film. Zbig has to be the master of the blue screen.

Why Don't You Listen When I Scream At You?

2006-12-29T19:20:00.001+01:00

80s era cutup of dialogue demonstrating the minimum threshold of sound being smaller than one frame of video.

Theater's Legacy

2006-12-29T16:01:00.000+01:00

So theater has been with us since the ancient Greeks. It has endured and refined itself over time, constantly adapting and reinventing different aspects to new technologies.

Cinema (ancient Greek: movement) was initially presented in the theatric context with big movie palaces and grand openings. Today Hollywood has become so formulaic and predictable that big-budget movies are often not worth seeing. Yet theater has perservered. There are still interesting plays produced. Why? Because despite its scripts and rehearsals, theater is always live and therefore subject to subtle variation.

I would posit that this subtle variation is what has kept theater popular over hundreds of years. Audiences feel the thrill of the possibility of nuance. Its similar to the feeling of going to see live music insofar as many bands sound different on stage than on CD. Ironically today's pop music is often performed in such a way as to imitate the sound of the CD, removing musical nuance, or even worse, making musical nuance something to which audiences are trained to dislike.

For cinema to survive perhaps we need to make it more like theater. Perhaps each time you see a film it should be different. I think solid-state memory will go a long way towards this goal. No more moving parts means closer-to-instantaneous random access. Not like a DVD or harddisk that is spinning. Alternate takes, scenes, and entire montages might be swappable or transposable.

Frame Rates

2006-12-28T21:03:00.000+01:00

Let's hit the ground running, so to speak.

This afternoon I was hanging out with the Vasulkas and we were discussing video frame rates. Basically most of us have to choose between 24, 25, or 29.97 frames per second. While these frame rates allow us the persistence of vision necessary to perceive motion, it is interesting to think about the potential of high-speed video to produce other perceptual effects.

Steina said she believed that higher (read much higher) frame rates might actually trick the brain into forgetting that the images we see are video. Perhaps create an immersive cinematic image so realistic that the brain would no longer be able to discriminate between it and reality.

Yet naturally just as there is a low end on the perceptual threshold of movement in video (two frames) there is probably also a high end. Is it 50 fps (frames per second) 100 fps, or is it way up there in the tens of thousands like audio? My guess is its somewhere below 100 fps.

Economic forces have kept us from being able to experiment with high-speed video. High-speed film has the problem that just a couple seconds takes up valuable physical space and expensive resources (film stock). Yet in today's world of relatively affordable gigabyte harddrives, the prospect of storing high-speed video is not so intimidating. Perhaps the bottleneck today is the processors and video cards we would need to playback such higher frame rate material. Ideally we would have dedicated high-speed hardware and software.

Film sound is standardized at 48,000 Hz sample rate. This means that audio is sampled forty-eight thousand times per second! And yet for video we only "sample" our images at 25 frames per second (for the sake of simplicity I will assume the PAL frame rate). When you get down to 1/25 of a second there can still be an abundance of variation and movement in sound, yet you have only a still image.

Here we have the audio information from 1/25 of a second. Seems like a lot of variation right? At this duration we get a rumbling dirty wave pattern. If we go to the smallest grain of audio we end up with a pure high-pitched tone. These fluctuations in sound are interesting. So interesting, in fact, that granular synthesis is a very popular method of contemporary electronic music composition.

Think about what Martin Arnold might have done if he had had higher frame rates. While you are pondering this, enjoy this little clip of one of my favorite things he did, despite these arbitrary limitations: