Scott Fisher

I am delighted Andreas is speaking tonight! However, I must “curb my enthusiasm” and miss this evening’s event. Sundown marks the beginning of Yom Kippur, with Kol Nidre services, and I will not be able to attend forum. Would it be agreeable and/or possible for someone to record this evening’s presentation?

Hear hear. I too will have to miss this talk for Kol Nidre but would really love to hear what Andreas has to say.

I never heard of database cinema before coming to USC, so for the longest time hearing people talk about it went right over my head. After watching some things about it since then, I can understand it better but I'm still somewhat confused about what makes it interactive. While there are some that I saw that give the viewer some choices about which clip shows next (the computer allows choices that have some relevance to the current clip) so I can somewhat understand that (is a bare minimum of choices still interactive? wouldn't that make any webpage within a webring be interactive?) but what makes one in which the computer itself choses the next clip interactive? What would make it different from any other movie? Can something be passively interactive?

It's possible that it's still in geosynchronous orbit over my head... :P

from kazys varnelis' netpublic blog post "maybe the video iPod will create a new boost to ambient video or to atmospheric movies that can be played over and over such as clips from NASA, Sofia Coppola's the Virgin Suicides or Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky's Soft Cinema."

I can see this database cinema stuff tying into Alex Singer's AugCog prototype...
intelligence reports can be translated to video and created on the fly with stock clips that are stored in a database.

It would have been nice to see Soft Cinema played on multiple screens simultaneously in order for the class to see the possible variations in video.

It was really brilliant to see the all the narrative possibilities and parallel structures Andreas presented in his collaborative database cinema projects.
It will be even great to see the collaborative editing and combination of the multimedia clips from the database through some search and editing keywords generated by the users.
I really believe that the right combinations of game design and interactive narrative elements are the way to create an attractive interactive database cinema.
Thank you to the founders for set the bases for keeping the interactive cinema going.

I enjoyed Andreas presentation and his work on the Layers of Los Angeles project. As a native Angeleno, it was quite fascinating to see how our dear city has changed so many times over and not necessarily for the better.

With that compliment said, I just have to ask the question: is cinema still cinema if someone is interacting with it? How much ownership of the original authors is kept intact when a user changes the trajectory of a story? Even though the orignial crafters may have provided the possibilites for a user, do they still belong to the author after the user has redefined them?

I liked the soft cinema presentation. It was a very noody abstract experience. Though I really would have enjoyed seeing film footage that showed more direct relation to the story. If I didn't know that this was soft-cinema. I would have been very confused. There were some parts where the soft cinema made sense but for the most part I really was looking for more.

I want to make my 507 a database project. Its a mock-umentary. I was just playing random clips together and it almost worked. I would be interested to see a database cinema comedy. Not so much edited to tell a story but to explore a world... in my case "Free Running."

I like Mark's idea of the video ipod and this concept being married.
I've also found this idea of breaking apart story concepts and putting them in a database that would draw from them to create a full story.

When watching the soft cinema work though I didn't feel there was a strong narrative. This is what I felt is missing.

Lev Manovich states: " As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world."

Given the above quote, Kratky's collaboration with Manovich attempts something radical by marrying the natural enemies of database and narrative. Their offspring, Soft Cinema, is a important statement in an emergent medium as well as being an elegiac mediatition on technology and Otherness. Also, it seems like the ideal form of content for the scenes that pervade our daily lives as Anna McCarthy discusses in her book Ambient Television.

I'd like to see where this goes over the next two years. There were moments (I forget specifically) where I was engaged and immersed. I also wanted to watch more shorts.