abstractmachine

In today’s edition of the French newspaper Libération, Marie Lechner published a review of our exhibition. She had nice things to say about my installation.

Parallèlement au très pointu colloque scientifique H2ptm (un jargon barbare pour hypertextes, hypermédias, produits, techniques et méthodes) qui s’achève aujourd’hui à l’université Paris-VIII, le département hypermédia propose au grand public une extension artistique et pédagogique, avec ateliers, performances (lire agenda ci-contre) et exposition d’installations interactives. Projets aboutis ou prototypes, nombre d’entre eux flirtent avec le cinéma et la notion de spectateur. Comme le prometteur Concrescence , de Douglas Edric Stanley, un dispositif de «cinéma algorithmique». En déplaçant ses mains au-dessus d’une table, le visiteur fait apparaître des mosaïques d’images animées (ici de très courts extraits de Psychose ) qu’il peut manipuler. L’ordinateur analyse ses mouvements et lui propose de nouvelles images à partir de celles dévoilées. A l’opposé d’un scénario interactif où l’utilisateur choisit le destin de l’histoire, Concrescence repose sur un subtil pas de deux entre l’humain qui influence l’histoire et la machine qui improvise des suites cohérentes. Pour une narration elliptique, fragmentée, ni totalement maîtrisée, ni vraiment automatique.

The rest of the article can be found here on the Libération Website: Scénarios pour un hypercinéma

• Installation: Concrescence
• Concept+Design: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Exhibition: Créer du sens à l’ère numérique
• Location: H2PTM, Saint-Denis, Paris
• Dates: 24, 25, 26 September, 2003
• Assistant: Pierre-Erick Lefebvre
• Co-producer: CIREN, MSH Paris-Nord
• Video: Concrescence Video Documentation (mp4)

I will be presenting a prototype for an interactive and algorithmic cinema platform, entitled Concrescence. The Concrescence project aims to build a non-linear cinema platform that allows for exploring moving images dynamically. It is both an authoring system, an editing suite, and a projection space. A specific form, the Hypertable, was built for it, allowing users to interact with the complex narrative suites in a simple and intuitive manner.

This prototype was funded by a grant from the DICREAM, Centre National Cinématographique, Ministère de la Culture.

Here are some screenshots from the program:

All images are cut out of the Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho. The film has been sliced, shot-by-shot, into morsels, each being injected into the Concrescence database. The “narrative” was then reconstructed by manipulating images associatively from within the Concrescence software. These connections and threads make up what the user then will explore from the film, through the non-linear process of concrescence. In this way, images are not mixed randomly (a common misconception: oh so it’s random), but rather through non-linear association, which is a very different process indeed. Hence the images are not programmed through some linear narrative, nor are they randomly thrown about the surface of the Hypertable. It’s a middle ground, where the user explores different possibilities, and the computer offers up related imagery and narrative elements in relation to manipulated images..

Described in a different light, we might say that the “body” of the film itself has been cut into pieces and placed into a trunk lowered into the swamps. By warming the surface of the table with one’s hand, images rise to the surface out of the swampy mass, and mix with other images also floating on the surface that are similar to it.

As such, it is the film itself that has been placed on the operating table. This explains the choice of the form itself of the table: we were trying to build something that would evoke the operating room, although something a little more ancient, almost like the operating room tables of Charcot and his hysterics.