Last weekend Amsterdam attracted many sound artists and scholars from all over the world who wanted to attend the Sonic Acts Festival. This year’s theme was “The Cinematic Experience”. Although I was in fact only able to attend very little of the Sonic Acts conference, I will try to sum up what was most interesting for me…

The session I attended was entitled ‘Interactivity and Immersion’ with presentations by Jeffrey Shaw and Marnix de Nijs.

Jeffrey Shaw is a media art artist who was made numerous installations, such as the milestones The Legible City, The Virtual Museum and Evolution. He was one of the founders of the Amsterdam based Eventstructure Research Group (1976-1982), founding director of the ZKM Institute for Visual Media in Karlsruhe (1992-2001) and has been founding director of the UNSW iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research since 2001.

I was very excited to hear Jeffrey Shaw speak about interactive cinema. We learned a lot about him, read texts and saw his work at the ZKM during my MA, so I was wondering what he would be like ‘as a real person’. In his presentation he mainly talked about some new camera technologies that help to immerse the viewer/user in a work, and why they work so well (the strategies behind it). As Shaw says, there is a dialectical relationship between technological progress and the re-invention of the narrative - with new technological possibilities, we can create new ways (and logics!) of story-telling. The viewer becomes a physical participant in the cinematic space. He showed a very nice example of a big white pillow-like sculpture that served as a projection screen while visitors could jump all over it (unfortunately he didn’t mention where and when it took place). Another example is his own work ConFIGURING the Cave (1996), a cave-installation with a wooden doll in the middle that serves as an interface to render the virtual environment projected into the cave. By moving the doll or parts of the doll’s body, the projected virtual world changes. There are a total of 7 different virtual environments in the work. The projection is all around you, on all walls, the ceiling, the floor, and gives you a feeling of total immersion. It becomes an all-surrounding, all enclosing cinematic space. This feeling of immersion is even strengthened because you are actually physically involved in the work.

Shaw is busy developing new cinematic techniques with his team in their lab at the UNSW in Sydney, like a 360 degrees screen/movie, a panoramical camera and a spherical video camera. They have also created the iCinema, a hemispherical projection environment. Viewers are able to rotate the point of view in the recording through an interface, and so they can suddenly see more than in classical cinema, they can go ‘beyond’ the classical screen. This gives a feeling of being present in the scene of the recording. By means of the interface, users can find their own unique narrative path through the work. A good example for this is the movie There is still Time…Brother by the Wooster Group which was especially created for Shaw’s iCinema:
»The Wooster Group’s first war movie, in 360 degrees. The mercurial host tries to articulate the implications of the unique ‘narrative space’ while massively outnumbered British troops battle the French for control of Fort Calypso. In the center of an interactive panorama, surrounded by children’s toys, narrator-bloggers, pornography, bloodletting, war, hamsters — what will you watch and what will you turn away from? A final tearful goodbye on the shore, then the submarine disappears beneath the waves — Is there still time?«.

Here are some stills, the whole movie can be watched in quicktime here (upper right corner of the site is where you find the link). It’s a really nice piece, you should take your time to watch it (of course it would be nicer in the installation set up, but nevertheless, it gives a good impression of what you would experience!).

Other projects made for the iCinema are Place Hampi (2006), an interactive environment in which the user can navigate through a virtual world. He can then enter several different spaces visualized as cylinders, and then see a virtual representation of the site of the World Heritage of Vijayanagar in Hampi, southern India:”PLACE-Hampi is a vibrant theatre for embodied participation in the drama of Hindu mythology set into a real-world landscape. PLACE-Hampi provides the setting for a stereographic virtual landscape, populated by sixteen cylinders enclosing a constellation of cinematic events in which the audience can participate, traverse and examine at will. It is a modular interactive cinema where three kinds of narrative spaces are conjoined: The cylinders comprise augmented high resolution stereoscopic panoramas that present the most significant archaeological, historical, and sacred locations (…). Conjoined within this rich scenery are lively narrative events, enacted by computer graphic characters, based on the mythologies specific to the site that have been composited into the three dimensional landscapes. The scripted narrative animations are latent events that come to life when the operator of the interface focuses attention on particular features within the panoramic scene.”

Yet another interesting work developed for the iCnmea is the T_Visionarium: “In contrast to conventional cinema, where viewers passively watch a singular linear story unfold on a flat screen, iCinema’s T_Visionarium allows viewers to explore and edit a multitude of stories, in three dimensions, on a 360-degree fully surrounding screen. (…) A 120-square metre circular screen surrounds the audience and provides the environment for an wholly ‘immersive’ three-dimensional cinematic experiences. AVIE allows audiences to wander at will through the projection space without having to sit in a fixed location as in a conventional cinema, interacting with the projected information as if they are really there. Viewers wearing three-dimensional glasses step inside a cylindrical cinema screen measuring four metres high and 10 metres in diameter. Twelve digital projectors create a high-resolution stereoscopic 3D image on this screen, and the audio is spatially enhanced via a 24- channel surround sound system. (…) Over three hundred video clips are simultaneously displayed and distributed around AVIE’s huge circular screen. Using a special interface the viewer can select, sort, re-arrange and link these video clips. These move about and play themselves in a virtual all-surrounding three-dimensional space that provides the viewer with an engrossing density and intensity of ever changing narrative events.”

The session then moved on to media artist Marnix de Nijs. He introduced his work, in which he explores dynamic confrontation between human bodies, machines and other media, to the audience during a conversation with the session moderator Arie Altena. In his work, just as in Jeffrey Shaw’s, immersion is produced via physical engagement by means of a special interface. In Run Motherfucker Run, for example, the user is running on a treadmill: “Run Motherfucker Run is an interactive installation whereby anyone in good physical condition may try his or her luck in a city of empty streets, disserted intersections, ominous alleyways and unexpected obstacles. When you take position on the treadmill before an enormous 8 x 4 metre screen you are subjected to a mix of film and 3-D imagery. The distance you run on the conveyor belt is the same distance you will cover in the virtual city in front of you. By quickening your pace, the acceleration of the belt as well as the speed of the image increases and depending on your running behaviour and the directional choices you make, the progress of the film is determined. A film with an atmosphere somewhere between a thriller chase and urban horror”.

Thanks Jeffrey and Marnix for an inspiring session!!!