Movies of the mind

The idea of storing data in your mind like a mobile hard drive may not be far fetched.

In a fast approaching world where all data is being shared courtesy of the Facebook Internet by-law of 2018 - 'Share or we'll kick you offline", the only place to hide data may not even be a hole in your cranium.

Credit: Image courtesy of Freie Universitaet Berlin

If scientists can drive cars now purely through thought and electrode cables, then how far till we a) attempt to manifest these thoughts in a corporeal form e.g. movies, and then for someone to hack them anyway.

That's another discussion.

Movies of the mind already exist. Fictional Cinema. The illusion of the zoetrope - of flickering images that convince us of movement is a conscious aberration which we've shrugged off and accepted.

But creating films from the mind, well - that could involve a different sort of data excursion. Liquid films, altered realities.

This whole schema kicked at me this morning thinking about projects for the forthcoming festival of death at the Southbank.

Jude Kelly OBE, the Artistic Director of the Southbank Centre called us ( artists in residence) for a meeting about what we might have planned. I have got several, but one involves a taxonomy - which has emotional as well as business/ commercial values.

Language lives. We find new ways to express ourselves linguistically, though when was the last time you did this visually. Cinema linguist Christian Metz would have had something to say about this.

VideoJourney Beginning

 

Journey Beginning is an example of work which expresses transitions. In many way it represents the aestheticization of data again. By that I mean, we have become pre-occupied with making everything look appealing, as opposed to beautiful ( Kant), though I accept beautifying data is also on the rise.

Hans Rosling in this video on TED is beautfiying data

In the midst of writing this post, I went over to my tweet account and saw this:

zimbalist Michael Zimbalist

by evanvucci

Scientists use brain imaging to reconstruct the movies in our minds. You've got to watch the video to believe it. Wow. newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/bra…

Amazing ! We're nearing the area of videojournalism transcendentalism or reverse psychoanalysis. 

where were you?

Another world's sun

Out there

Last remnants of the old world

The road of no return

New Multimedia report

What's interesting about the film, which has DNA similar to Mike Figgis' Time Code, The Usual Suspect and the daddy of them all Rashomon - about a female assault from four different angles. etc is the multiple narrative approach to unravelling/piecing together a story.

The web site also sets up a playable game which no doubt will be translated to market research.



Photo/painting courtesy of the 1st-art-gallery.

I wrote about this some time back, but it continues to concentrate my thoughts and sets up an interesting question.

Can multimedia also infer multifocal or multimodal?

By its very nature and multiple delivery of assets, the PC is a multimedia tool, but how much bearing does that have on a lingua franca of "choice reportage - perspectivists approach"

In a videojournalism report I'm now compiling, what's clear is the multifaceted nature of term "multimedia" across disciplines from modern day founding father Vannevar Bush to today's graphic design community and the media.

there's an interesting moment in the film when we're at the Telegraph's hub being shown around by a senior executive and somebody asks how the newspaper and its web version reports are constructed. It's one of the hidden arc segments of the film, so you'll have to click on the film to access this

In itself there may be little to fuss about, but in semiotics this will have a bearing on the nature of the narrative in reportage.


To get a sense of this obvious focal story, what part do others in the picture play?

Before Broadcasting
Before the language of broadcasting was refined, a legacy, but not quite a whole lift from newspaper reportage's equitone from Addison and Steele, how robust and expansive was the storytelling language?

We might now easily take that for granted, but centuries ago, there was a different discernible paradigm in play.

Broadcasting, 60 years old, brought its one set of rules; the ever expanding web culture has its own.

Multimedia Reportage AD
A hypothesis: the bible - one of the oldest and most popular tombs lays a claim to multimedia reportage.

Matthew, Mark Luke and John - four differing perspectives towards one event and to fully comprehend the Bible the reader is required to cover all four gospels.

Some 500 years before this painting at the top by by Luca, Giotto di Bondone one of the greatest Italian Renaissance painters did the extraordinary with visual narrative and lines of perspective and focus.

By jumping through the periods you begin to get an idea that our way of doing things now is not so sacrosanct - time and change move very slowly over periods of decades rather than centuries.

So to this painting again and the original piece I wrote, as I get back to editing this multimodal report.

See you at the Cultural Exchange.

I stood there mesmerized for ten minutes, just studying the piece.... read original piece

Vantage Point - Multimedia film

One of the best cop series of the early 2000s was Boomtown.

The premise was an event e.g. crime viewed from several different angles, a style called Rashomon - after the film title from that great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.

For me it represented an interesting model for news and feature presentation.

The structure and content in news can often be about perspective and point of view; interpretation.

Experiment.

I once ran an experiment at a summer school where I had two young men run into the class I was teaching, shouting and yelling, scuffle on the floor and then take my bag on the desk.

After the class had calmed down, It was only about 15 seconds, I asked them what they'd seen.

You won't believe the different range of answers.

The excercise, once they realised it was one, was how we perceive and write up first hand incidents; effectively real news gathering as opposed to processing.

You won't believe the number of conflicting accounts I received.

Interpretation

So New's is about interpretation, and in punditry/professional comment you're seeking someone whose judgement aligns with your sensibilities.

You may disagree with them but they have the conviction of their argument, which explains why the same people crop up time and time again in punditry.

But what if you could choose your entry point into a news item via a multimodal point - the absence of a definitive visual linear hierarchy.

Think of an ensemble in a play etc.


The Future of News?

That's where I feel news has new areas to develop and why video hyperlinking will become a powerful model

This multiple strand look is the bed for Vantage Point starring Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker and Sigourney Weave.

As with most trailers the art is in the promo editing - breathless seemless palate of cuts

This is kinetic stuff.

Their site also introduces an interesting level of interactivity

Next week I'm giving viewmagazine.tv a make-over in expectation of a hugely important experiment being shared world wide, which I'm loking forward to sharing with a talk at the World Editor's Association in Sweden and Cultural Exchange

NB. No where near frenetic or even comparable, but the roll tape back effect is something I tried in a short piece Y-Generation, joining the CIA which you can see here.

Wait for the pic to load and click.

How the effect was made?

Make a mask in photoshop from any photo> gray scale> aply halftone effects and > radial Blur and import to your film timeline.
Process your film by 1000% speed deleting every other frame.

You'll get the juddering effect > then wash the tones through After Effect.