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.

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.

Over the past fifteen years, cinema has become increasingly prominent as a material medium in the art world. As a material medium, cinema has been incorporated into art not simply by depicting moving images or through filmic allusions, but through the use of cinematic language and form as fundamental visual structures. By using cinematic language and form, modern art has also engaged cinematic space in various ways to expand the parameters of mediated territories and broaden the viewers’ experiences of on-screen environments. Contemporary cinema art blurs the lines between physical spaces, imaginary spaces, emotional spaces, and social spaces. This trend is exemplified in the cinematic works of Abbas Kiarostami, Yang Fudong, Tacita Dean, Anri Sala, Peter Tscherkassky, Matthew Barney, and Elija-Liisa Ahtila. In some manner, all of the cinematic works by these artists are marked by distinct and deliberate engagements with a self-conscious, mediated, hybridized, navigation of space.

As cinema art has expanded its engagement with space, a host of new mapping practices has arisen in response to virtual networks and on-line culture. The majority of these practices attempt to re-contextualize and explore the concept of what defines a “space.” Many of these practices are technology-driven and based in networks or systems of information (in mobile communication networks, satellite coordinate systems, and social networks) using digital media and communication-based platforms as a tool to navigate and address alternative perspectives on space. Projects exemplifying this trend are Waag Society’s Amsterdam Realtime; Scott Patterson, Marina Zurkow and Julian Bleecker’s PDPal; Proboscis’ Urban Tapestries; or Michelle Teran’s Life, A Users Manual. Many such projects have been implemented or integrated into the cultural sphere as public art projects or interactive public events that represent “alternate” cartographies and navigational tools. These emerging mapping practices, like contemporary cinema art, engage in a self-conscious process in order to integrate physical space with other spaces: networked spaces, communicative spaces, cultural spaces or political spaces.

Mapping with the cinematic medium uniquely addresses space through its dual existence as a process of mapping and a cohesive map object. It is inherently linked to the physical representation of space like no other form of visual communication. It communicates a corporeal experience of the primary senses, utilizes a pervasive and widely understood visual language, and subverts the distance of a zenith perspective. The unique mediating experience of a cinematic view is created by a tension of optical distance coupled with the intense proximity of a medium, unique in that it points toward the embodied possibilities that might emerge between corporeal and non-corporeal spaces. By articulating the possibilities, the extant plurality of a space, you create a larger space for possible existence; you draw out and articulate the inherent potential of an environment. In short, the more possibilities that exist for something, the more space is present. Since cinema is the basis for the modern cultural interface, an interface that mediates “complicated” space, it makes sense to utilize it for spatial engagement and mapping processes.

This reminds me of Barthes... particularly his affection for the fake beards in Ivan the Terrible

A desperate western interpretation... Photoshop-Tricks of Humanism.

The opening ceremony of the games was similar, but molded on to a staged performance— really astonishing in its novelty… a special effects film production made to be performed live, not for an audience sitting in front watching a framed screen, but sitting above, hundreds of meters away. The fluid combination of media with performance showed the continuing trajectory of media art for the stage—a hugely expanded Blue Man Group, that has come so far from Laurie Anderson in spectacle to be almost unrecognizable as the same genre of performed media, combining the novelty of technology with illusionistic stage performance, reminiscent of late 1800′s stage magic.

The show ostensibly provided a science-center like chronological tour through Chinese history, beginning with reference to the recently unearthed primitive Fou drums (and also a clear lift from one of the Blue Man Group’s epitomal pieces… drums as colored light), through Chinese early history, dynasty by dynasty: courtiers, courtesans, through to a naive expo-like future of people made of energy and floating astronauts. Curiously absent was the communist revolution, but perhaps, as the only piece of history not relegated to a symbolic life—in fact the political structure promoting and housing all other symbols—it need not be represented (looking again at the images of the ceremony, I am struck by China’s lack of inhibitions against potentially fascist imagery… in the west, such a maximal transformation of the human in to the mechanical would be immediately criticized, and would work against our delusions of humanism).

Can these symbols even be pulled apart? I wonder at the comparison to both the typical American half time show, a similar array of disconnected spectacle that seems to wish to iterate, ‘America Now!’… a performance by a pop star, a marching band, a waving flag, fireworks display, some hip hop dancers, dancing girls… and to fascist pageantry: displaying a united national history as proud and linear and homogenous… a sort of techno-Riefenstahl). Certainly it points, in part, to China’s curious relationship with it’s own history… the of-empire history that was rebelled against now repackaged as the national identity of the people… it’s very Chinese. A presentation of history as linear and unifying instead of problematic would be considered severely naive now in the West— can you imagine anywhere in America but the smallest town, dressing up it’s performers in the costumes of Paul Revere and George Washington, Indians and Pilgrims, Fur Traders, and French Merchants to perform the identity of the American nation? And yet in China, as the underdog always proving its deserved importance to the world, this is a needed communication…

That is, this show was made for us, not for them.