New audiences for Experimental Film

At Visioneca, we want to reach out beyond the usual confines of fellow academics, fellow practitioners and 'the usual supects' to address new audiences - to introduce something of the excitement we feel about the avant garde - and to trace the influence of innovators on contemporary mass-media film. How will we do this? This is an idea paper written while we were initially focussing on this problem:

Audience Outreach:

We have two main targets at Visioneca: the young and the old. We want to provide exemplars of what film media and audience education can mean for both generations. Outreach plans for both generations will be introduced, in partnership with organisations like Independent Arts, the Bournemouth Media Academy, Quay Arts, School Partnerships, and existing film clubs and societies and local colleges and universities.

Educating the Younger Audience: The primary issue is not lack of interest in Film or in New Media, but it is in the very limited exposure to these media, very largely focused on mainstream Hollywood and the global Games Industry, now broadened somewhat by smart phones, pads, and widening access to streaming video services on Youtube and Vimeo etc, and social media hubs like Facebook and Google Plus.

The temporal event horizon of most students enrolling on our film and digital media related courses at AUCB is only a few years - often only one or two years, and these cultural Horizons are very often limited to mass market products, blockbusters and fashionable genre films (vampires and zombies right now). Very rarely have students had any formal or even parentally-guided history of film, nor of the many overlaps between games and other digital media and film history. For many of these students, they seem to have developed a personal and often very effective critical methodology, often it seems by a process of osmosis - so there is nothing wrong with their critical apparatus. But exposure to the underground history or back-story of film is very limited, often non-existant. And as for digital media history and development, this is only very rarely on the curriculum agenda. So we have the ironic situation where never before have we enjoyed such universality of access to film and experimental film, while at the same time youngsters are leaving school with apparently no introduction to the history or the grammar and syntax of these dominant media -no experience or guidance in critically assessing or just navigating through this global archive. Videogames, web-art, online video, phone apps, social media - these are things that happen out-of-school, with your friends, not with your teachers. Kids leave school with absolutely no help in exploring this vast 'omnimedia' machine, no canonical guides, no mentors, no guides....

Visioneca will begin to address this kind of out-reach, experimenting with the learning modes and learning tools most appropriate for these new audience for the avant garde.

Wachowsky Bros: The Matrix, bullet-time rig

Into the Unknown: Our tried and tested pedagogical philosophy (over thirty years working at all levels of FE and HE), is that of examining the familiar and contemporary, and stretching cultural horizons back into the unknown and unfamiliar. For example, popular blockbusters and cult films like The Matrix trilogy can be used to underpin a variety of discussions on effects like Bullet Time,  linking it to the work of Edweard Muybridge, and Tim Macmillan’s Time-Slice Videos; Realtime and computed photo-grammetry and virtual cinematography, CGI and physical model and set building in films like Metropolis, Things to Come, and 2001 A Spece Odyssey, as well as the celluloid history of optical effects, rotoscoping, matte-creation, cel-animation and digital painting.

By deconstructing the technologies, methodologies and creative practices of contemporary media-makers, we can trace similar processes back through earlier iterations and examples, gradually expanding the cultural net of critical appraisal, research and exemplars back into previous periods, and out into similar practices in the digital domain.

The new media, especially since the Wii and i-phone/iPad inertial sensors, actively encourage kinesthetic learning, and Visioneca will support and run hands-on workshops with our local partners, exploring the potential of outreach to an often neglected sector of the community - the 30% or so who are kinesthetic and audio-visual learners.

An agenda for the over Sixties

We’re very aware down here on the Isle of Wight of that largest demographic to which we, the organisers of Visioneca belong: the baby boomer generation that are now in, or very nearly in, their sixties. The Isle of Wight has more than its fair share of over Sixties...And we are anxious to provide a significant outreach to this generation too. We will apply similar techniques to our androgogical projects, taking familiar favourites and tracing their generic and art-creative roots historically in previous movies, and technologically out into digital media practice.

Kenneth Anger: Scorpio Rising 1964

Sixties Mania features showings of works and films that in various ways characterised the Sixties. We will be featuring a programme of shorts and feature-excerpts from films that we think represent the best of experimental work produced from c1955 to c1975.These shorts will be contextualised by critically acclaimed features, though not often shown in contemporary TV  These films might include, the mix of mainstream and avant garde indicated below:

Kenneth Anger: Scorpio Rising

Stanly Kubrick: Dr Strangelove and Pasblo Ferro: Trailer for Dr Strangelove

D.A. Pennebaker: Don’t Look Back: Subterranean Homesick Blues

Yoko Ono The Cut Piece, Flux Film No4 ‘Bottoms’ and other works

Stan Brakhage: MothLight, Dog Star Man and other shorts

Stan Vanderbeek: Science Friction, Poemfield and other shorts

BBC: The Beatles and All You Need is Love

Andy Warhol: Chelsea Girls, Inner and Outer Space

John Stehura: Cybernetik 5.3
Patrick McGoohan: The Prisoner episode 1

Works by Jordan Belson and John Whitney Jnr

Jean Tinguely: Homage to New York
Peter Yates: Bullitt

Gene Roddenbury: Pilot No 2 for StarTrek

Richard Lester: A Hard Day’s Night
Peter Whitehead: And the Sixties
John Cage HPSCHD
Haskell Wexler:Medium Cool
Michael Elliot: The Year of the Sex Olympics
Arthur Penn: Bonnie and Clyde
George Dunning: Yellow Submarine 

John Luc Godard: Alphaville

Peter Watkins: The War Game
Norman Jewison: The Thomas Crown Affair

Peter Whitehead: 66-67 Pink Floyd The Movie, Benefit of the Doubt, and other shorts

Ken Loach: Kathy Come Home

Gillo Pontecorvo: The Battle of Algiers

Patrick McGoohan: The Prisoner episode 1

Michael Snow: Wavelength

John Boorman: Point Blank
Eduardo Paolozzi: History of Nothing

Roger Vadim: Barbarella

Albert and David Maysles : Gimme Shelter

Robert Fuest: The Final Programme
Malcolm LeGrice: Berlin Horse
Gillo Pontecorvo: The Battle of Algiers

Joseph Losey: Modesty Blaise

Norman McLaren: Pas de Deux
Nick Roeg + Donald Cammell: Performance
Stanly Kubrick: 2001 A Space Odyssey

Arthur Penn: Bonnie and Clyde

Andy Warhol Chelsea Girls 1965

These kind of cinematheque offerings are introduced by a film historian or practitioner, interpolated with Q&A sessions, seminar-style open discussions, and insights into the electronic video arts and performance developments (Nam June Paik, Jeffrey Shaw, John Cage, Cybernetic Serendipity, Expand Cinema, Douglas Engelbart, Carolee Schneeman, the work of DARPA, Fluxus and other groups - building a back-story understanding of the roots of 21st century new media.

Similar programmes will be created exploring other decades of the 20th century, perhaps focusing on the coeval developments of broadcasting, telecommunications and computing...

Russell Richards/VisuoSonic c2008

Visioneca Weekend Workshops

These intensive outreach film weekends combine:

hands-on workshops on motion-picture and motion-graphics - using both analog and digital tools, including stop-motion, elapsed time, motion-capture, motion typography, Youtube and Vimeo and other online video archives, blogs, Facebook profiles, Flickr accounts and other social media, webcams, Powerpoint, Keynote, Prezi, Concept Maps, and other downloadable freeware.. these workshops use a panoply of tools to respond to briefs that focus on constructing and telling stories, and publishing them online for critical examination at the coalface of the social media...The deliverables of such workshops include viral videos, personal presentation showreels, pop promos, audio-visual poems and readings, art videos, interactive works including timelines, hypertext and hypermedia stories, avatars, transmedia stories, motion graphics, 2nd Life avatars and venues, multimedia emails, ebooks, pdfs, and blogs, biometrics, sensors and augmented realities.

These are delivered by both invited practitioners, and alumni and current final-year undergraduates of interactive media and digital media, film and graphic design courses around the UK. We will use Skype seminars and group-tutorials to extend access to leading artists, designers and developers who can’t be physically present.

Hands-on workshops encourage the spread of peer-learning, cascade exemplars, learner’s knowledge transfer, informal and ‘play’ learning, as well as setting a formal structure that includes learning objectives, expected outcomes, transferable skill-acquisition, and individual mentoring and guidance.

The venues: these are local arts centres (such as Quay Arts. Platform One, and Dimbola Lodge), libraries, colleges, schools...and the Visioneca venue itself.

Bob Cotton example from a Prezi presentation 2009

Portfolio and job preparation sessions

For already committed art and design/media development students, or for young people thinking of applying for courses in these sectors, we will run informal sessions designed to develop skills in presentation, portfolio and showreel-development, personal branding, market research, interview skills, and interpersonal social skills

cinematheque sessions

On a variety of display media, including big-screen 16/35mm projections, big-screen digital projections and large flat-LCD and Plasma screens, laptops, iPads and smart mobiles, these programmes combine socially immersive experiences, communal viewings, focus-group audience-viewings, buddy and mentor viewings, and personal linear and interactive viewings (guided and prompted by ebook and motion-graphic style courseware interventions).

In a range of packages, we set out to introduce participants to both the canonical history of film, and the diversity of film genres. Each session provides an accessible, guided overview, contextualised by film graduates, working artists, researchers and lecturers talking about their specialist interests.

In the cinematheque sessions we provide a digestible overview of the subject, mixing film history with examples of genres, both as complete viewings or as representative clips and excerpts.

The VJ back-story: an eclectic history of experiments in immersive and synaesthetic media from Greek Drama to Wagner’s Gesamptkunstwerk, Ballet Russe to Sixties discos, Happenings and Light Shows. 80’s Dance and Rave to Festivals, Mediated Spectacles and Noughties VJing.

Shooting the Truth: the enigma of the documentary from Flaherty and Grierson to Vertov and Ruttman. British and US documentary, Pennebaker, Lerner, Maysles, Burns, Scorcese, Cousins, Macmillan, Loach, Watkins...We bring this story up-to-date with the latest developments in documentary-making that utilise reality-television style techniques, crowd-sourcing, fly on the wall covert cameras, guerilla journalism, and embedded journalism (etc), interactive documentaries, etc..

Reality TV and the webcam/spycam legacy

Viral Video

Animation

avant garde experimentation - back-story

Promo Video

wrap-around movies - 

web art

crowd-sourced video

computer-generated imaging

projection mapping

Virtual Realities and Augmented Realities

Video-mapping and locative media

HTML, xHTML, HTML 5.0 and new web video technologies

Indicative sessions include: 

early photography briefing

This viewing session is supplemented with hands-on workshops in camera obscura, pinhole cameras, stereography, panoramas and dioramas, wet-collodion plate-making (tintypes, ambrotypes, calotypes etc), and the cinematheque features documentaries on Fox Talbot, Niepce, Daguerre, Herschel, Davy, Wedgewood, Julia Margaret Cameron, Rejlander, Dodgeson, etc...

early motion-picture and film experiments, Muybridge, Marey and Mutascopes, Animation and Winsor McCay, Mediated Performance, Magic and Melies, George Albert Smith and the mixed media staged performance, the invention of editing, the language of film, the first special effects, the first feature films, the global archive experiments, motion-picture panoramas...

others include:

documentary films; experimental mixed media and art films; Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s; expressionist film-making; Neo-Realism; New Wave, New Hollywood;

visioneca: innovation and art

Innovation and Art

Artists explore the use of media and its impact on our sensory apparatus. They create new things, and new methods - innovations that often involve the creation of new media. This has been true since prehistory - since the smoke and pigment paintings of Lascaux, since the modeling of clay and the bone-carvings of the Neolithic.

The impact of art-experiment on the last century or so of the development of our modern media of communications and expression has established this kind of innovation as both a source of  inspiration and often the causal effect of mass production, mass media technologies, and mass media content.

Artists inspire. And now a new generation of artist-researchers-practitioners inspire business innovation - the making and bringing to market of new products, new services, new content.

I suppose a classic example is the development of multi-touch interfaces and touchscreen technology by among others,  Jeff Han and Johnny Chung Lee. These artists were exploring a theme of great interest to researchers, engineers and computer-scientists going back to the 1970s, but their widely publicised demos in the mid noughties seemed to prepare the ground for Apple’s iPhone (2007) and iPad (2010). Other recent examples would include webcasting, semantic network interfaces, geographical information sysatems, social network mapping, projection mapping,  and data visualisation. In all these areas, work by researchers and artists directly leads to commercial content management and geographical information systems (Google Earth and Maps) or database visualisation (LivePlasma)...

More importantly, the classic demos of Douglas Engelbart and his Augmentation Research Centre in the late 1960s - in which he showed his seminal invention - the mouse (!), and earlier, the Sketchpad PhD thesis of Ian Sutherland (1963) - which virtually kick-started the  nascent interactive computer graphics industry, and in turn inspired Ted Nelson (inventor of Hypertext), Engelbart and Alan Kay (the Dynabook, the Alto GUI, Smalltalk etc)

In terms of art-experimentation, the immersive media environments of Stan Vanderbeek and Jeffrey Shaw, the interactive art of Roy Ascott, the Joiner pictures of David Hockney, the time-slice experiments of Tim Macmillan, the multiscreen, multi-media experiments of Andy Warhol, the filmic experiments of Meya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Jordan Belson, John Whitney and others, the multi-print and painting techniques of Robert Rauschenberg - all these played a part in forming the sensibilities and inspiring artists, designers and engineers working in the 1960s and 1970s. The reason Visioneca focuses on these art and media interventions, is precisely because of their importance as an inspirational source of ideas.

Much of the important breakthroughs in content design stems from ideas first materialised by artists - the rapid montage of Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttman presaged the fast-cutting of commercial and feature films by several decades. Our sensibilities eventually caught up with that of the artists:

Each technological extension involves an act of collective cannibalism. The previous environment with all its private and social values, is swallowed by the new environment and reprocessed for whatever values are digestible. Thus, Nature was succeeded by the mechanical environment and became what we call the “content” of the new industrial environment. That is, Nature became a vessel of aesthetic and spiritual values. Again and again the old environment is upgraded into an art form while the new conditions are regarded as corrupt and degrading. Artists, being experts in sensory awareness, tend to concentrate on the environmental as the challenging and dangerous situation. That is why they may seem to be “ahead of their time.” Actually, they alone have the resources and temerity to live in immediate contact with the environment of their age. More timid people prefer to accept the content, the previous environment’s values, as the continuing reality of their time. Our natural bias is to accept the new gimmick (automaton, say) as a thing that can be accommodated in the old ethical order.

Herbert Marshall McLuhan Notes on Burroughs (1964)

Written about William S. Burroughs for The Nation, Dec. 28, 1964 (pages 517-519)

Reinforcing this, another comment by McLuhan concerned his opinion that to the rest of us, artists seemed to be ahead of their time, because we ‘looked at the present as through a rear-view mirror” - we called the first cars horseless-carriages, the first radio the wireless, etc. The artist appears to be ahead of his time because he/she is the only one who actually perceives the present.

From innovation to place-making and regeneration

The idea that arts organisations provide a wellspring of innovation for the creative industries and wider economy is now broadly accepted, although quantifying the extent to which the arts sector performs this role and the mechanisms and means by which it does so, is more hotly disputed. The least disputed interaction between arts and innovation is the continual, often disruptive innovation that artists and organisations pursue while engaged in their core artistic activity. NESTA, which has been leading research into the dynamics of innovation in arts and cultural organisations, describes a four-dimensional framework consisting of audience reach, artform development, value creation, and business models.2 This framework goes some way to describing how innovation can currently be perceived and measured within arts and cultural organisations.

from Tom Flemming and Andrew Erskine: Supporting Growth in the Arts Economy

The role of festivals, conferences and exhibitions in this arts-innovation-business ecology is that of both an inspirational hub (an overview of the leading edge current technologies and content innovations), and an important source of competitive intelligence - an indication of where the market is heading, what digital innovations are emerging, and what the competition is in this sector  Such new events then, provide essential briefings on these important market opportunities. Visioneca will provide this kind of inspirational overview and competitive intelligence hub, with leading practitioners, artists and researchers talking about their work. For artists, commercial content developers, media providers, broadcasters, publishers, event management businesses, PR and marketing companies, in fact all the sectors affected by digital media innovation - Visioneca should be on your list of intelligence sources.