May 3-7, 2005
Thesis Presentations
721 Broadway
at Waverly Place
4th Floor
South Elevators
New York, NY 10003
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| Spatial Cinema | ||
|---|---|---|
| Author(s): | Gabriel Winer | |
| Instructor: | Baxi, Kadambari | |
| Class: | Final Project Seminar | |
| URL: | http://www.gabrielwiner.com/spatialcinema | |
| Keywords: | spatial cinema, spatial, cinema, video, film, space, audio, installation, interactive, immersive, narrative, participation, social, cultural, physical, story, art, video art, soundscape, surrounding, environment, design, thesis, gallery, bowery, new york, city, urban, deep, actor, actors, directing, engaging, visual | |
| Spatial Cinema is and a new form of cinema that engages the viewer physically, socially, and culturally. | ||
| These days, people watch movies in the dark, without speaking or interacting with each other, and they eat dinner in silence while they watch the television. Audio-visual narrative is our predominant form of cultural communication, and we learn about our cultural environment by watching television, cable, movies, and DVD’s, yet they are designed to serve an individual consumer. The viewer has an individualistic psychological experience of the content being provided, and the content is created and presented in an explicit way by an unseen culture-maker. People are becoming increasingly alienated from their real-life social situation and they have trouble developing meaningful personal narratives or local culture based in real experience. Alienation is a problem urban residents, for whom these methods of introspective escape eliminate the need for a socio-economic or cultural relationship with the overall community. In order to counter this trend, it is necessary to promote methods of entertainment that are not escapist, that facilitate meaningful socio-cultural interaction, that allow the social production of culture, and that are accessible to the overall public. The contemporary mass media formats are not useless, but it is necessary to reconsider the viewing process, the audience experience, and the creation of narrative. Rather than creating individualized narratives, media must foster the creation of engaging cultural narrative in the collective unconscious of a localized group. Several distinct changes must be made: - The medium must overcome the use of two-dimensional media planes, such as screens or projections, which operate as an escapist portal between reality and a second utopian space that exists beyond the screen. - The media must not overtake the real space, creating an immersive escapist experience. - The spaces of reality and fiction must be understood together as a single location for the production of culture. - In addition, the audience member must become the culture-maker. - The body of the audience member must be brought off the couch and integrated into the localized space, and the cultural experience. | ||
| Personal Statement: | In my video work, I am focused on creating new cinematic experiences that engage the audience in space while fostering social interaction and cultural participation. The medium of cinema allows for collective experience of a fictional space. An audience get together and loses themselves in the world of a movie, but they do not truly share the experience with other audience members or even with their own bodies. My interest lies in making this experience more physical, social and participatory. I have made several installations and screen-based works in my exploration of those ideas, but two projects stand out as being the most relevant to the development of Spatial Cinema. In my first large-scale installation, titled Stony Creek (2001), I developed the idea of taking video and audio recordings of a specific space, and then spatially reconstructing that sensory experience in a different, clandestine location. As the audience stood in the gallery, part of them was also at a beach in Stony Creek, CT. A video camera tracked the viewers’ positions and a computer program built in Max/MSP used that information to reconstruct the beach setting around them, according to their movement. At some moments, the audience members treated the space as a gallery setting, but at other times they interacted in the space as though it was a beach setting. It became clear that the audience was experiencing neither the gallery, nor the beach. Instead, they were beginning to understand their surroundings as a hybrid place, with its own, new codes of behavior and cultural context. Since the Stony Creek installation, I have been working to understand the process by which an audience creates new domains of this kind in their collective unconscious. Specifically, I have been working with video and audio as a means to inspire peoples’ imaginations about their surroundings. In a recent piece at the Chelsea Art Museum, titled See Through Wall (2004), a video camera was placed on one side of a wall and that video feed was projected onto the other side of the wall, in a way to create the sensation of seeing through the wall. As audience members watched the projection on one side, or wandered in front of the camera on the other side, the projection alternated between live video of the museum-goers and prerecorded scenes of actors imitating museum-goers in the same space. The audience never knew whether the events on the other side of the wall were real or fictional. In this case, viewers became very disconcerted with their inability to grasp the reality of the space, and eventually accepted the live and fictional events as equally real. Although both Stony Creek and See Through Wall both engaged the audience in space and created a fun social environment, they did not promote the creation of coherent narrative, and neither engaged their local audience in a culturally meaningful way. For this reason, Spatial Cinema is a focused attempt to build a process of meaningful cultural production into the successful structure of my previous work, while continuing to bolster the installation’s ability to promote physical and social interaction. | |
| Context: |
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| Audience: | The location of the final installation will most likely be either a public space used more by well educated and wealthy urban residents, such as a museum or gallery. These audience members moving through the space will be following their chosen protagonist through a fictional representation of the underlying, the underworld, the abstracted \"downtown\" of global cities. They begin to escape the social setting of the installation space and they begin to participate in a collective fiction where contrasting sides of the urban social environment are forced to coexist. They follow and relate to the on-screen characters, the space of the \"downtown\" environment begins to seem as real as the viewing space, and a new psychologically constructed urban space is formed. It is one where the lines between income, class, and culture are blurred and where individual, social, and cultural narratives are freely and enthusiastically constructed by the imaginations of the audience members. It is the goal of this first video, and the medium as a whole, that the audience members will temporarily develop a collective fiction of this kind. Hopefully it is neither the reality of the gallery, nor the onscreen fiction, nor a hybrid of the two, but rather a new narrative space, inspired by fragments of spatialized cinema.
The opposition is based on the Victorian role of The Bowery in New York and the East End in London, an outlet for the alienated upper class, where they could pursue their personal interests in secrecy | |
| User Scenario: | The first content for the installation, entitled Deep, is comprised of three five-minute scenes. Inspired by Michaelangelo Antonioni\'s La Notte, it is about the relationship between individual alienation and social necessity in the urban downtown. The scenes portray a single night in the lives of four city people, winding through an open street, a crowded party, and a private apartment, exploring locations of privacy and social interaction. The four main characters are all caught between the pursuing their own personal agendas and finding meaningful social interaction. Two of the characters are trying to alienate themselves, while the other two are trying to escape alienation, each in their own way and with their own circumstances. The narrative and characters are defined, however much of the dialogue will be left up to the actors in the workshopping process leading up to the shoot.
Each of the four characters is presented without prejudice, neither a protagonist nor an antagonist. The audience member decides which character to follow between the private and public sections of the fictional space, and which character to relate to. Since the audience member decides their own perspective throughout their viewing of the fictional events, they do much of the work in creating the characters and plot of the story that they come away with. In addition, since the medium provides only a glimpse of the fictional setting, much of the story and most of the fictional space are left up to audience’s imagination and interpretation | |
| Methodology: | Each scene is shot with the exact same setup of four video stationary cameras and eight microphones, and without cuts. The cameras and microphones do not move during the shoot, so the actors perform in the space of the location as though it is a stage, ignoring the cameras’ fields of view or the microphones’ sensitivities. Thus, the narrative is dependent upon, and reflective of, the documented setting. The cameras and microphones capture only a portion of the entire performance.
When the video and audio are brought into the installation space, the fragments are presented in the same relative positions from which they were recorded. The video is presented on four flatscreen monitors, each of which is positioned to represent the perspective of one of the four cameras. In the same way, the sound is reproduced in the gallery by an array of eight parabolic speakers on the ceiling, which are positioned to represent the relative locations of the eight microphones. This process of reconstructing the media in space, which I call \"respatialization\", creates a fractured version of the fictional space overlaying the real viewing space. As the audience moves through the installation, they can follow the fictional characters from screen to screen, and through the soundscape, as though they are in the same space. An audience member can follow an onscreen character pace for pace in the room, listening to their footsteps and observing their movement as they pass through the screens’ field of vision. The respatialized video and audio allow the fictional space to overlay the real space, giving visual and auditory glimpses into a fictional world, with fictional characters, that has the same dimensions of the gallery and its inhabitants. | |
| Sources: | UTOPIAN IMMERSION: SOCIAL & CINEMATIC
Ann Veronica Janssens - Blue, Red, and Yellow Michael Naimark - Be Now Here Doug Aitken - Thaw Earth Vision FRACTURED IMMERSION & SPATIAL NARRATIVE Luc Courchesne - Landscape One VIDEO SCULPTURE & SPATIALIZATION OF VIDEO Carl Von Weiler - Matrix Fashion Show Research on Spatializing Video SPATIAL INTEGRATION Luc Courchesne - Passages, Video CINEMA IN SPACE & SPACE AS CINEMA Matthew Barney - The Drone\'s Exposition Disney World Luchezar Boyadjiev - Gazebo NARRATIVIZED SPACE & RITUAL SPACE Rirkrit Tiravanija - Untitled (He Promised) Simon Moretti - A Space For Conversation Philip Johnson - Crystal Cathedral Vodoun/Yoruba - Hounfour AUDIENCE AS NARRATIVE PARTICIPANT Eija-Liisa Ahtila - Tuuli/The Wind Sam Taylor-Wood - Third Party, and Pent-Up Mike Figgis- Timecode, Hotel, Mix, and Script | |