Medialogy

Watching a segment of Bärbel Neubauer’s work-in-progress, Morphs of Pegasus tonight, I was struck by the critical reversal that had taken place in material film art– the same path that her career had itself transversed. Bärbel Neubauer’s work had existed as paint on film for years, but in the last decades had transferred to the digital realm using programs such as ArtMatic, that render animations of mathematical functions creating fractals, chaos theory shapes, and other serial animated forms. As the name implies, Morphs of Pegasus has a pan-galactic quality, frequently looking like a representation of the maximal mathematical imaginary, outer-space, animating what looks like gaseous clouds, spinning galaxies, twinkling stars, and on. It occurred to me that her work in the digital was perfect representation– unlike cinema computer-generated graphics made to look like dinosaurs, or aliens, or what-have-you, these animations were direct translations of computer mathematics– perfect representations of the code. It is what Pollock did for paint, with numbers.

[caption id="attachment_142" align="alignnone" width="205" caption="one of the astronomical seeming clouds"][/caption]

The company Tunecore recently announced a promotion that would facilitate distribution for the independent film community on iTunes – for a fee, of course. It’s not the commercial aspect of this situation that interests me, however, it’s the very idea of distributing big-screen films on mobile devices. In the midst of what’s obviously a fervent rush to claim money-making territory in the industry of new media cinematic content, it seems as though no one is considering the actual size and shape of the screen image. More importantly, no one is really discussing the opportunities that arise to create fresh content rather than just shrink commercial cinema into a smaller package. The prospect of creating content for the mobile device screen seems like a perfect chance for the film and video artist to once again re-imagine the moving image, experimenting with forms ranging from narrative to structural to abstract.

Looking broadly at the situation, one can see a general trend over the past decade toward making and marketing new media—and television—projects more “cinematic”. This is a bit problematic, as the established language of cinema (or narrative cinema) is structured on a scale of communication that is subverted, or at least weakened, by the smaller scale of the personal moving image screen. It seems careless to ignore the impact of scale on visual language when creating content for these mobile devices screens, even for laptop screens or regular televisions. If commercial film content for mobile devices is being produced within the visual parameters of most commercial “cinematic” projects, then it is probably following a language of big-screen movies that is built around compositional and stylistic motifs honed and ingrained over the past five decades as a recognizable method of communication. If existing films are simply being shrunk down to iPhone size, then they absolutely follow this bigger-than-life language. The problem in applying such a particular cinematic vernacular to the small screens of mobile devices is that its fundamental impact is built upon relationships of scale that assume a screen size akin to that of a commercial movie theater. A giant Death Star is not the same as a Death Star the size of my fingernail. An enormous close-up of Klaus Kinski’s face does not carry the same visceral impact as the action-figure sized version. Even watching something inherently not commercially “cinematic”, like a handmade Brakhage film, is completely different on a mobile screen.

Is this size dynamic the reason, besides some sort of drive for social status, that people have always wanted bigger and better televisions? Is there something inherently lacking in the impact of cinematic moving images when processed through the small television or laptop screen? If so, what can be done to create content specifically for the small screen explosion, for these mobile and personal devices, that actually plays TO the scale of the interface?

I would contend that a possible solution is not, as some would argue, about interactivity, but about creating content that work with a small scale and employs a symbology of the personal. The scale of traditional cinematic language is based on something more than a personal viewpoint – something embodied, but also bigger than life and universal. The ontology of the personal screen device calls out for another language of visual representation, something small, something intimate. A language that connects with and refers to a culture of personal media identities and image-based communications, and certainly a language that takes into account the subversion of established narrative forms and temporal storytelling. Does that just mean amateur video and diarist recordings? Not really—controlled, stylized, creative content for personal screen devices would still fill a role that YouTube-style videos cannot. It would continue in the tradition of experimental film and video as a testing ground for new forms of perception and visual communication; concepts with inherently limited growth space in the YouTube structure, as most of those videos are inherently rooted in superficiality and created to be seen by way of spectacle and social exposure.

To date, the connection between cinema and emerging forms of mapping has not been explored in any depth through either cinematic or new media discourses. Nevertheless, there is an expansive theoretical and structural relationship found in emerging mapping practices and contemporary cinema art, particularly in terms of their engagement with spatial environments through screen-based mediators. I would argue that a shared logic of hypermediation—that is, mediated fragmentation and multiplicity—exists in both cinema art and new mapping practices, as well as a common engagement with the mediation of space.

The logic of hypermediacy and the hypermediation of space are found in mapping practices and cinema art through the presence of multiplicity, the act of fragmentation, and a constant reference to the presence of a mediator. Simply compared, new forms of mapping and modern works of cinema art utilize objects of mediation to frame disparate datasets of symbols and signs from divergent spaces. In doing so, they elicit the mental formation of navigable space in the viewer/user—a hybrid space created somewhere in-between exterior points of reference and the self-center of the viewer. They mediate and organize divergent datasets to integrate them into a cohesive space of multiplicity—a mercurial location where connections and possibilities may emerge that could not otherwise do so in the ontological rigidity of a finite, determined, single space. Essentially, these practices communicate the presence of space through the aforementioned characteristics of fragmentation, multiplicity, and reference to the medium. In such a way, both contemporary cinematic art and emerging practices of mapping engage in the rupturing of homogenous space and the multiplication of heterogeneous environments, affecting a hypermediation of diverse spatiality that redefines what attributes demarcate a unified space.
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Having seen the last big budget film of Beijing filmmaker, Yimou Zhang (of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon fame), Red Cliff, I recognized the grammar-less fantastics of the Beijing Opening ceremony created with the advertised budget of 300 million USD (you have to wonder at this figure, the budget of Hollywood films are normally expanded and hyped to become part of the PR campaign itself, but in this case perhaps the figure represents real dollars spent). His films are characterized by the combination of astonishingly high production value (albeit strange value to American eyes, where you notice the fake beard in a scene with 5000 costumed extras), especially focusing on the maximal use of people with a looseness of narrative… both the motives between scenes and between the action cut loose… practically gibberish, in the sense that the scenes are clearly cut on the basis of pageantry, like a song-less musical, instead of narrative cause and effect. I watched his newest, Red Ridge, just a few weeks ago in Singapore, and the audience refreshingly laughed through the whole thing… a refreshing expression of cynicism in the repressive Singaporean culture, his films functioning as a sort of camp of money—a post-irony camp, un-moored from any retro reference, but simply maximal and consumerist and extremely Chinese.

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