2008
Neil
Brown, Dennis Del Favero, Matt McGinity, Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Weibel
"... a film is not made up or composed of a number of shots,
rather it is decomposed by the shots; when we see a film of 500
shots, we also see 500 films.”
Raoul Ruiz, The Poetics of
Cinema
T_Visionarium was created for the UNSW iCinema Centre’s Advanced Interaction
and Visualisation Environment (AVIE), and it offers the means to capture and
re-present televisual information, allowing viewers to explore and actively edit
a multitude of stories in three dimensions. For T_Visionarium, 28 hours of digital
free-to-air Australian television was captured over a period of one week. This
footage was segmented and converted into a large database containing over 20,000
video clips. Each clip was then tagged with descriptors—or metadata—defining
its properties. The information encoded includes the gender of the actors, the
dominant emotions they are expressing, the pace of the scene, and specific actions
such as standing up, lying down, and telephoning. Dismantling the video data
in this way breaks down the original linear narrative into components that then
become the building blocks for a new kind of interactive television.
Two hundred and fifty video clips are simultaneously displayed and distributed
around AVIE’s huge circular screen. Using a special interface the viewer
can select, re-arrange and link these video clips at will, composing them into
combinations based on relations of gesture and movement. By these means the
experience of viewing the television screen is not so much superseded as reformatted,
magnified, proliferated and intensified. It is the experience of this new kind
of spatial connectivity that gives rise to a revolutionary way of seeing and
reconceptualizing TV in its aesthetic, physical and semantic dimensions. To
use the T_Visionarium apparatus is not to view a screen or even multiple screens,
but to experience a space within which screen imagery is dynamically re-formulated
and re-imagined.
T_Visionarium actively and ongoingly explicates television but most importantly,
it engages the domain in which it operates. Here, media is not an object of
study but a material landscape in which we are component parts. T_Visionarium is a useable technology that locates us within a mediascape and makes us actutely
aware of its operations, uncovering a televisual vocabulary of gesture. Stripped
of its conventional narrative context, the aesthetic, behavioural and media
qualities of television become strikingly apparent. And by affording us an
active involvement T_Visionarium hones both our awareness of and our dexterity
with this media.
In essence, it is not so much a tool that delivers control of a mediascape
but a mode of inhabiting our surroundings: a sphere of pure and endless mediality.
In this and many other ways, T_Visionarium is a moment in the history of media:
post cinema, post narrative, new media, but at the same time, a major study
in television and an embodiment of a new, media aesthetics.
Jill Bennett
(Cf: Jill Bennett, T_Vi
sionarium
: A User's Guide, ZKM/UNSW Press, Karlsruhe/Sydney:
2008)
Credits
Project Directors: Neil Brown, Dennis Del Favero, Matthew McGinity, Jeffrey Shaw,
Peter Weibel
Lead Software Engineer: Matthew McGinity
Distributed Video Engine: Balint Seeber
Application Software: Jared Berghold, Ardrian Hardjono, Gunawan Herman, Tim Kreger,
Thi Thanh Nga Nguyen, Multimedia and Video Communication Research Group (Dr Jack
Yu) NICTA
Co-Ordination and Interaction Design: Dennis Del Favero, Volker Kuchelmeister,
Matthew McGinity, Jeffrey Shaw
Management: Damian Leonard, Sue Midgley
Assistants: Caitlin Fraser, David McKenzie, Gabriel Nervo
Audio Software: Tim Kreger
This project was supported under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery
funding scheme and produced by iCinema Centre and co-produced by ZKM, Karlsruhe.
more...
page:      
|
|
|
