In 2006, the artist Carlo Zanni creates a short film hosted in a website that is re-edited every day, adding different content based on data from users who have seen the film. This project is called “data cinema”, and refers to the use of cinematic language to create a fiction based on the data obtained in real-time from the Internet. This type of creation brings the infinite variety of a process executed by a computer to cinematic narrative. In the digital era, a film is also a set of data, and this data can be processed and reinterpreted by a machine in an endless loop.
This selection of digital art works includes several pieces that have no defined duration, and therefore each of them will be screened continuously in the cinema of the Film Archive of Murcia during one day (see program), allowing viewers to enter and leave the room as they wish. Thus, the works not only suggest a transformation of cinematic language but also a new experience for the viewer, who decides the duration of her viewing of each film.
Curator: Pau Waelder
Artworks
Computers Watching Movies
Benjamin Grosser, 2013
Computers Watching Movies shows what a computational system sees when it watches the same films that we do. The work illustrates this vision as a series of temporal sketches, where the sketching process is presented in synchronized time with the audio from the original clip. Computers Watching Movies was computationally produced using software written by the artist. This software uses computer vision algorithms and artificial intelligence routines to give the system some degree of agency, allowing it to decide what it watches and what it does not. Six well-known clips from popular films are used in the work, enabling many viewers to draw upon their own visual memory of a scene when they watch it. The scenes are from the following movies: 2001: A Space Odissey, American Beauty, Inception, Taxi Driver, Matrix and Annie Hall.
Fractal Film
Antoine Schmitt y Delphine Doukhan, 2013
The generative video installation Fractal Film proceeds to an exhaustion of the view on a given scene : an autonomous programmed camera explores and shows us the same scene indefinitely and always differently. Projected in large format, the short cinematographic scene plays, over and over. Although in a loop, it is never seen with the same angle, the same camera position, movement and behavior. The scene, written and shot by Delphine Doukhan, is a short but complex drama with multiple plot levels, a wordless burlesque huis clos involving six characters during a troubled reception with a sense of tacit ritual. This very precisely choreographed scene was shot in very high definition (5K) at eight different angles. At exhibition time, a software-based camera, designed and written by Antoine Schmitt, navigates by zooming inside this source video material to explore and display of the scene in infinitely various ways. To do so, it follows written rules of movement, defined by the authors, and drawn from cinema language, from animal behavior, from mathematics and physics. Some of these rules explicitly leave freedom of movement to the camera, within certain limits. At each scene occurrence, the camera chooses one rule at random and follows it. The result is an infinitely variable way of looking at a given scene.
The Possible Ties Between Illness and Success
Carlo Zanni, 2006
“The Possibile Ties Between Illness and Success” is a short movie transformed by an Internet data flux and re-edited server-side when web statistics (Google Analytics) are available: the public who visited the website could watch a new movie every day. The short movie tells the story of a ill man whose body is filled by cancer-like cells which number and position depend on the number of users – and their country of origin- visiting the website. At the time the project was online, there was no way to watch the movie if not visiting the website. Doing this the public was adding his presence on the body of the actor under the form of a cancer like cell, contributing to the spread of the illness. It was like an endless circle. This project tells about the relationships between manic-depressive illness forms and success at large and also speaks about our intimate balance between isolation and public presence that in these days of continuous exposure becomes a daily delicate negotiation. Music is by Oscar winner Gabriel Yared, while the voice over comes from the last page of American Purgatorio, a book by American writer John Haskell. Every second day of the month the process was restarting, so basically the second day of each month the server produced a film with a number of stains taken from the online visitors of the first day of that month. And so on until the end of the month, that presented the accumulation of almost 30 days of visitors. The project was online for about a year producing almost 360 movies.
The Pirate Cinema
Nicolas Maigret, 2013
THE PIRATE CINEMA : TPC is based on a data interception software. It reveals, through a simple diversion, different aspects of exchange platforms, such as the global and multi-situated nature of Peer-to-Peer networks (P2P), the potential for viral transmission, and alternative social models. Its purpose is to make available for aesthetic exploration the pre-existing potentials of Peer-to-Peer architectures. The video installation of TPC relies on an automated system that constantly downloads the most viewed torrents. The intercepted data is immediately projected onto a screen, after which it is discarded. Depending on the exhibition space, the installation involves one to five computers, each one monitoring specific categories of files. This allows the system to visualize fragmentary files received and sent all over the world.
Sodome@home
Grégory Chatonsky, 2008
The subtitles of the film “Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom” (Pier Paolo Passolini, 1975) are automatically translated into a photograph with Flickr. A new film is set before us then produced at the core of the network and traces of lives left by users.
