Site Archive
Expanded Cinema: Still fresh after forty yearsWritten by David Tames on August 17, 2010
Filed Under Art, Books, Featured, Filmmaking, New Media
2 Comments
A few months ago I pulled Gene Youngblood’s classic Expanded Cinema (E.P. Dutton & Company, 1970, available online) off the shelf and read it again. The pages in my well worn softcover edition were falling out, the glue having dried over the two decades I’ve owned the book.... Continue Reading...
Memory and the end of realityWritten by David Tames on August 11, 2010
Filed Under Art, Critical Theory, Front Page, New Media, Writing
6 Comments
The transformation from media as a form of cultural production to media as entertainment has lead us into a crisis as we enter the fifth phase of history. Marshall McLuhan (1962, 2005) divided history in four phases: 1. culture of oral communication, 2. manuscript culture, 3. the Gutenberg... Continue Reading...
2010 Bumpkin Island Art EncampmentWritten by David Tames on July 27, 2010
Filed Under Art, Documentary, Events & Screenings, Filmmaking, New Media, Photography
Leave a Comment
If you live in the Boston area, here’s an idea for what to do this weekend: The 2010 Bumpkin Island Art Encampment! Consider making a day of it and come out and visit on one of the public visitation days, Saturday, July 31st or Sunday, August 1st. Seven artists groups homesteading on... Continue Reading...
Thoughts on video on the web and HTML5Written by David Tames on June 3, 2010
Filed Under Featured, Media Technology, New Media, Sound, Tools, Video on the Web, Web
1 Comment
If your web site has video on it, I believe the time has come to take into consideration viewers using mobile devices if you’ve not done it already. The desktop is no longer the only platform for viewing video, and Flash, long dominant as the web video standard (at least as far as web... Continue Reading...
Fragments from The Conversation 2010 (March 27, New York)Written by David Tames on March 28, 2010
Filed Under Business, Copyright, Distribution, Events & Screenings, Front Page, New Media, Web
2 Comments
On Saturday I attended the “The Conversation” at Columbia University, a conference focused on “Social Media, Distribution, and the Future of Film.” Related material can be found by searching on the #convonyc hash tag. Here are my notes, not everything here is a faithful... Continue Reading...
Metropath(ologies): ecstasy of communication or ambivalence of information?Written by David Tames on May 23, 2009
Filed Under Art, Featured, New Media, Reviews
Leave a Comment
Judith Donath recently spoke at MassArt. In anticipation of her talk I went to see the Connections exhibition of works by Donath and her Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. I was particularly taken by Metropath(ologies), an immersive installation that is at once beguiling and enchanting.... Continue Reading...
Making Media Now 2009: the premiere New England independent film conferenceWritten by David Tames on April 21, 2009
Filed Under Business, Events & Screenings, Filmmaking, New Media
Leave a Comment
Making Media Now 2009 is a full-day conference that will take place on Friday, June 5, 2009 at Bentley University. The event will bring together filmmakers from all over New England with national industry experts for lectures, workshops, and panels confronting the most daunting challenges facing... Continue Reading...
A postmodern remake of a futurist classic: Perry Bard’s Man With a Movie Camera: The Global RemakeWritten by David Tames on March 29, 2009
Filed Under Art, Documentary, Featured, Filmmaking, New Media, Web
Leave a Comment
Video artist Perry Bard’s Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is a participatory project made with contributions from people around the world who upload video clips interpreting Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera (1929), a film that is still fresh today in surprising... Continue Reading...
Bard’s work is the kind of machine-assisted participatory filmmaking that brings Vertov’s vision into the new millennium and enabled by computers and the net. I’m sure Vertov would have loved it. Man With A Movie Camera was Vertov’s mechanical vision of a new socialist society with Vertov as auteur, Mikhail Kaufman as the cameraman, and Yelizaveta Svilova as editor, and with Soviet society and the machinery of the industrial age as the protagonists. Bard’s project presents a global social reality in the new millennium. Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake, or as I like to think of it, “People with Video Cameras” brings the machine and ordinary people into the process of movie production and delivery, providing a collective vision consistent with Vertov’s futurist masterpiece of the modern era but remade in a postmodern setting with the media and tools of our generation: participation, camcorders, the internet, and computation. The perspectives of multiple contributors is consistent with Vertov’s philosophy, Joseph Schaub wrote in his essay, “Presenting the Cyborg’s Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye“, “Kino-eye, then, is a cyborg construction that contains multiple positions for the production of film meaning.” OK, I’m stretching a little, but ideas are fun to play with, I see them as guides to possible worlds.
Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake provides a crisp example of the first, second, and fourth characteristics that Janet Murray suggests in her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck, make new media a powerful vehicle for literary creation: 1. Procedural, 2. Participatory, 3. Spatial, and 4. Encyclopedic. The site does not make use of the spatial dimension (except for some aspects of the interface, which traditional cinema lacks completely), however, It’s pretty easy to see how the project could become more spatial in an interesting manner by adding geographical information related to the video when it is uploaded to the site, underscoring the truly global nature of the effort. Regardless of being light in the spatial dimension, Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is one of the most interesting participatory video projects I’ve had the pleasure to experience and points the way to the future of cinema. While theater owners worry over sagging ticket sales and studio moguls fear the audience’s move to net, as creators and participants we can move beyond the industrial practices of the past and look forward to a re-invented, participatory, global, postmodern, Kino-Eye.
This post is based in part on a post written for my Design Seminar II class at MassArt in response to Scott Kirsner’s Media Tech Tonic presentation, “Inventing the Movies.”
--> Four books covering Internet and WebWritten by David Tames on October 14, 2008
Filed Under Business, Featured, MassArtDMI, New Media, The Media, Web
2 Comments
If I had to pick four relatively current books that will help readers develop a better understanding of the World Wide Web, I would suggest the following books. It was hard to narrow down the list to four, but sometimes less is more. This particular list stems from a recent conversation with... Continue Reading...
DIY DAYS coming to Boston October 4, 2008Written by David Tames on September 13, 2008
Filed Under Art, Business, Distribution, Events & Screenings, Filmmaking, New Media, Web
1 Comment
The DIY DAYS conference will be held in Boston on Saturday, October 4th at MassArt, along with screening of From Here to Awesome films the night before, also at MassArt. This traveling conference, recently held in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, explores how independent filmmakers... Continue Reading...
Recent Comments