web.mac/armstrongjt

http://web.mac.com/armstrongjt

[email protected]

Henri-Louis Bergson (1859–1941) was a major French philosopher, influential in the first half of the 20th century.

Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness is the title of Henri Bergson's doctoral thesis, first published in 1889.

Bergson became aware that since time was mobile, the moment one attempted to measure a moment, it would be gone.

Duration = time. Time unfolds, every moment is new.A moment of time can not persist in order to be added to other moments.We can only recall a moment by remembering it and therefore instilling the new moment with a recollection of what came before it and in doing so pass on to a newer moment that can only be represented by a moment passed/past.

No two moments are identical, for the one will always contain the memory left it by the other.

Time is experiential.

We convert the notion of time into space; i.e. the clock, the sequential narrative, the cinematic montage. We use two kinds of space, one kind in the material world and another kind in the conceptual world where states of consciousness are symbolically represented in space.

Syntagma, a Greek word meaning "arrangement", a sequence of words in a particular syntactic relationship to one another; a construction of grammatical units; a sentence.Temporal media unfold in time. Static media are a single continuous unit.

An analogue is something that bears an analogy to something else.

An analogue is an analogan.

At first glance all analogical reproductions of reality; drawings, paintings, movies, theatre performances seem to be a message without a code, a denotative message.

But each of these messages or utterances develops in an immediate or evident fashion, beyond the analogical content itself, a supplementary message which is what we commonly call the style of the reproduction.

Here we are concerned with a second meaning, whose signifier is a certain treatment of the image as a result of the creator’s action, and whose signified, whether aesthetic or ideological, refers to a certain "culture" of the society receiving the message.

In short, all these imitative "arts" comprise two messages: a denoted message, which is the analogon itself, and a connoted message, which is the way in which the society represents, to a certain extent, what it thinks of the analogon.

Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms

Discourse is communication that goes back and forth (from the Latin, discursus, "running to and fro"), such as debate or argument.

Discussion occurs between two or more people. Discourse examines the who, what, where and why of that discussionand how that discussion fits into the larger areas of associativeknowledge and human expression. Discourse is used in semantics and discourse analysis. In semantics, discourses are linguistic units composed of several sentences,in other words, conversations, arguments, speeches and human utterances.

A hundred years after cinema's birth, cinematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating a story, of linking one experience to the next, have become the basic means by which computer users access and interact with all cultural data.

In this respect, the computer fulfills the promise of cinema as a visual Esperanto.

One general effect of the digital revolution is that avant-garde aesthetic strategies came to be embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. In short, the avant-garde became materialized in a computer.

Digital cinema technology is a case in point.

The avant-garde strategy of collage reemerged as the "cut-and-paste" command, the most basic operation one can perform on digital data.

The idea of painting on film became embedded in paint functions of film editing software.

The avant-garde move to combine animation, printed texts, and live-actionfootage is repeated in the convergence of animation, title generation, paintcompositing, and editing systems into all-in-one packages.

Lev Manvoich

Editing, or montage, is the key twentieth-century technology for creating fake realities.

Theoreticians of cinema have distinguished between many kinds of montage.

For the purpose of sketching an archeology of technologies of simulation that led to digital compositing we will consider two basic techniques.

The first technique is temporal montage: separate realities form consecutive moments in time.

The second technique is montage within a shot.

It is the opposite of the first: separate realities form contingent parts of a single image like the superimposition of images and multiple screens or windows.

Lev Manovich

Lev Manovich is a new media theorist and professor of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego, U.S. and European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he teaches new media art and theory.

His best known book is The Language of New Media, which has been widely reviewed and translated into Italian, Korean, Polish, Spanish, Lithuanian and Chinese.

In his 2001 book, The Language of New Media, Manovich describes the general principles underlying new media:

* Numerical representation: new media objects exist as data.

* Modularity: the different elements of new media exist independently.

* Automation: new media objects can be created and modified automatically.

* Variability: new media objects exist in multiple versions.

* Transcoding: The logic of the computer influences how we understand and represent ourselves.

Definition: REMEDIATION

The representation of one medium in another. A central idea for thinking about 'new' media since the concept of remediation suggests that all new media, in their novel period, always 'remediate'; that is, incorporate or adapt previously existing media.

Thus early cinema was based on existing theatrical conventions, computer games remediate cinema, the World Wide Web remediates the magazine, etc. Originally from Marshall McLuhan (1964: 23-24), but more recently usefully applied by Bolter and Grusin (1999).

The concept of remediation itself is reminiscent of McLuhan: "'the "content' of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph."

Machinima is the use of real-time graphics rendering engines (a game engine), mostly three-dimensional (3-D), to generate computer animation.

The term also refers to works that incorporate this animation technique. Some machinima-based artists, sometimes called machinimists or machinimators, are fan laborers and often use graphics engines from video games, a practice that arose from the animated software introductions of the 1980s demoscene, Disney Interactive Studios' 1992 video game Stunt Island, and 1990s recordings of gameplay in first-person shooter (FPS) video games, such as id Software's Doom and Quake.

Originally, these recordings documented speedruns—attempts to complete a level as quickly as possible—and multiplayer matches.

The addition of storylines to these films created "Quake movies". The more general term machinima, a portmanteau (a new word formed by joining two others and combining their meanings) of ‘machine cinema’, arose when the concept spread beyond the Quake series to other games and software.

After this generalization, machinima appeared in mainstream media, including television series and advertisements.

“Immediacy and Hypermediacy are the "twin logic of remediation.” Bolter & Grusin

When you watch a sitcom that makes you laugh or sit in a theater and experience fear, anxiety, or choke back tears, then you have experienced the phenomena of immediacy. The aspect of immediacy allows for the synthesized experience of reality; the images and scenes that you have witnessed on the screen are staged and artificially constructed, yet your emotions from the experience generated through immediacy are very real. In contrast, hypermediacy is the element by which we are able to recognize that there is indeed a medium present through which we obtain the experience.

Hypermediacy seeks to call attention to itself; it says, “You are experiencing this because of me. Look at my amazing construction, my cutting edge technology, my many buttons and tabs and bars.”

It attempts to remind us that the sense of reality that we experience is mediated. Bolter & Grusin

Transparent immediacy thinks of itself as "interfaceless” and immersive.

Hypermediacy is "opaque" and juxtaposed, and comes back into repeated contact with the interface.

Both transparency/immediacy and opacity/hypermediacy attempt to get beyond representation and into the "real". Bolter & Grusin see that over time transparent immediacy gives way to opaque hypermediacy. In other words, mediums are soon discovered to not be immersive and transparent, and the parallax between the real and the mediated starts to be explored and expanded, usually initially by artists.

What was once thought of to be completely immersive and "real" eventually comes to be explored as an aesthetics of a particular media format.

An articulation of the signifier. Hypermediacy has a fascination with media and mediation.

The common feature of all these forms is the belief in some necessary contact point between the medium and what it represents.

‘Metamedia’, as coined in the writings of Marshall McLuhan, refers to new relationships between form and content in the development of new technologies and new media. McLuhan's concept described the totalizing effect of media.

“The new avant-garde is no longer concerned with seeing or representing the world in new ways but rather with accessing and using in new ways previously accumulated media.

In this respect new media is post-media or meta-media, as it uses old media as its primary material.”Lev Manovitch

SOFT CINEMA explores 4 ideas:

1."Algorithmic Cinema.”

Using a script and a system of rules defined by the authors, the software controls the screen layout, the number of windows and their content. The authors can choose to exercise minimal control leaving most choices to the software; alternatively they can specify exactly what the viewer will see in a particular moment in time. Regardless, since the actual editing is performed in real time by the program, the movies can run infinitely without ever exactly repeating the same edits.

2. "Macro-cinema.”

If a computer user employs windows of different proportions and sizes, why not adopt the similar aesthetics for cinema?

3. "Multimedia cinema.”

In Soft Cinema, video is used as only one type of representation among others: 2D animation, motion graphics, 3D scenes, diagrams, maps, etc.

4. "Database Cinema.”

The media elements are selected from a large database to construct a potentially unlimited number of different narrative films, or different versions of the same film. We also approach database as a new representational form in its own right. Accordingly, we investigate different ways to visualise Soft Cinema databases.







In Soft Cinema, video is used as only one type of representation among others:2D animation, motion graphics, 3D scenes, diagrams, maps, music, sound, drawings, photographs, text, color etc.


The media elements are selected from a large database to construct a potentially unlimited number of different narrative films, or different versions of the same film. We also approach database as a new representational form in its own right. Accordingly, we investigate different ways to visualise Soft Cinema databases.







In Soft Cinema, video is used as only one type of representation among others:2D animation, motion graphics, 3D scenes, diagrams, maps, music, sound, drawings, photographs, text, color etc.


The media elements are selected from a large database to construct a potentially unlimited number of different narrative films, or different versions of the same film. The database is approached as a new representational form in its own right. The authors investigate different ways to visualise Soft Cinema databases.

H5 is a French graphics and animation studio started in 1996 by Ludovic Houplain and Antoine Bardou. Its work can mostly be found in the fields of music video (visuals for Air, Super Discount, Etienne de Crécy, Le Tone, Alex Gopher, Darkel, Cosmo Vitelli, Demon) and luxury advertising (Dior, Cartier, Hugo Boss, Hermès, Lancôme).

Since 1999, H5 has also worked as a collective of directors. They made their first animated clips under the leadership of Antoine Bardou-Jacquet (animated typography for Alex Gopher, cartoon for Zebda, digital animations for Super Furry Animals and Playgroup) then Hervé de Crécy.

H5 made the clips for Röyksopp's Remind Me (which won the MTV Europe Award for Best Video in 2002), Massive Attack's Special Cases, Goldfrapp's Twist, and a series of advertising campaigns for France and the wider world: Areva, Audi, Citroën, Volkswagen's Train Fantôme (1st award Film Cinema, Club of the DA on 2006).

History teaches us that old media never die-and they don't even necessarily fade away.

What dies are simply the tools we use to access media content; the 8-track, the Beta tape. These are what scholars call delivery technologies.

Delivery technologies become obsolete and get replaced; media, on the other hand, evolve; recorded sound is the medium, CDs, MP3 files, and 8-track cassettes are delivery tech nologies.

Historian Lisa Gitelman, offers a model of media that works on two levels:

1)on the first, a medium is a technology that enables communication.

2)on the second, a medium is a set of associated "protocols" or special and cultural practices that have grown up around that technology.

Delivery systems are simply and only technologies; media are also cultural systems.

Delivery technologies come and go all the time, but media persist as layers within an ever more complicated information and entertainment stratum.

History teaches us that old media never die-and they don't even necessarily fade away.

What dies are simply the tools we use to access media content; the 8-track, the Beta tape. These are what scholars call delivery technologies.

Delivery technologies become obsolete and get replaced; media, on the other hand, evolve; recorded sound is the medium, CDs, MP3 files, and 8-track cassettes are delivery tech nologies.

Historian Lisa Gitelman, offers a model of media that works on two levels:

1) on the first, a medium is a technology that enables communication.

2) on the second, a medium is a set of associated "protocols" or special and cultural practices that have grown up around that technology.

Delivery systems are simply and only technologies; media are also cultural systems.

Delivery technologies come and go all the time, but media persist as layers within an ever more complicated information and entertainment stratum.

A medium's content may shift (as occurred when television displaced radio as a storytelling medium, freeing radio to become the primary showcase for rock and roll in the late 50’s and 60’s).

A medium’s audience may change (as occurs when comics move from a mainstream medium in the 1950s to a niche medium today), and its social status may rise or fall (as occurs when theater moves from a popular form to an elite one), but once a medium establishes itself as satisfying some core human demand, it continues to function within the larger system of communication options.

Printed words did not kill spoken words. Cinema did not kill theater. Television did not kill radio.

Each old medium was forced to coexist with the emerging media.

Convergence is a plausible way of understanding the past several decades of media change rather than the old digital revolution paradigm.

Old media are not being dis placed. Rather, their functions and status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies.

The implications of this distinction between media and delivery systems become clearer as Gitelman elaborates on what she means by "protocols."

She writes: "Protocols express a huge variety of social, economic, and material relationships.

So ‘telephony’ includes the salutation 'Hello?' (for English speakers, at least) and includes the monthly billing cycle and includes the wires, cables, satellites, screens etc. that materially connect our phones. . . .

Cinema includes everything from the sprocket holes that run along the sides of film to the widely shared sense of being able to wait and see 'films' at home on video.

Protocols are not static; they shift and change as we produce and consume media.

Convergence theory discusses the relationship between three concepts - media convergence, participatory culture and collective intelligence.

Convergence is the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences.

Convergence is a word that describes technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes in the ways media circulates within our culture.

Convergence describes the circulation of media content across different media systems and multiple media platforms within competing media economies and national borders that depend heavily on consumer’s active participation.

Convergence is not only a technological process bringing together multiple media functions within the same devices but also represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content.

The Death of the Author is an essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes.

Barthes's essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of a text, and instead argues that writing and creator are unrelated.

The essay's first English-language publication was in the American journal Aspen, no. 5-6 in 1967; the French debut was in the magazine Manteia, no. 5. The essay later appeared in an anthology of Barthes's essays, Image-Music-Text (1977)

In his essay, Barthes criticizes the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author's identity — his or her political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes — to distill meaning from the author's work.

"To give a text an Author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text."

Readers must thus separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate the text from interpretive. Each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings.

In a well-known quotation, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a "text is a tissue [or fabric] of quotations," drawn from "innumerable centers of culture," rather than from one, individual experience.

The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the "passions" or "tastes" of the writer; "a text's unity lies not in its origins," or its creator, "but in its destination," or its audience.

No longer the focus of creative influence, the author is merely a "scriptor" (a word Barthes uses expressly to disrupt the traditional continuity of power between the terms "author" and "authority"). The scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work.

Every work is "eternally written here and now," with each re-reading, because the "origin" of meaning lies exclusively in "language itself" and its impressions on the reader.

In 1968 Barthes announced 'the death of the author' and 'the birth of the reader', declaring that 'a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination' (Barthes 1977, 148).

Barthes reader is the ‘body of mediation or medium’ for the texts effects to come into play.

The reader is not a passive vehicle, not an echo chamber, but rather the regent of the text.

The author then is an arranger or compiler of the ‘always already written’ likewise the text is, then, 'a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture’.

Barthes' theory of the text, therefore, involves a theory of intertextuality, in that the text not only sets in motion a plurality of meanings but is also woven out of numerous discourses and spun from already existent meaning.

Barthes intertextual text is:“woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (antecedent or contemporary), which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The framing of texts by other texts has implications not only for their writers but also for their readers.

Fredric Jameson argued that 'texts come before us as the always-already-read; we apprehend them through the sedimented layers of previous interpretations.

Claude Lévi-Strauss's notion of the bricoleur who creates improvised structures by appropriating pre-existing materials which are ready-to-hand is now fairly well-known within cultural studies

Gerard Genette proposed the term 'transtextuality' as a more inclusive term than 'intertextuality' (Genette 1997).

He listed five subtypes:

1 - intertextuality: quotation, plagiarism, allusion;

2 - paratextuality: the relation between a text and its 'paratext' - that which surrounds the main body of the text - such as titles, headings, prefaces, epigraphs, dedications, acknowledgements, footnotes, illustrations, opening credits,theme music, screen credits, trailers, etc.;

3 - architextuality: designation of a text as part of a genre.

4 - metatextuality: explicit or implicit critical commentary of one text on another.

5 – hypotextuality: the relation between a text and a preceding 'hypotext' - a text or genre on which it is based but which it transforms, modifies, elaborates or extends (including parody, spoof, sequel, translation).

6 - computer-based hypertextuality: text which can take the reader directly to other texts (regardless of authorship or location). This kind of intertextuality disrupts the conventional 'linearity' of texts. Reading such texts is seldom a question of following standard sequences predetermined by their authors.

Initial Glossary

Bible – The term bible originates in television and is also employed in the comic book and game industry. Almost every television series has a “bible,” a document for the use of the production team that spells out the character’s biographies and personalities, conveying the conventions of the series.

Canonical narrative – the narrative or core concept from which other narratives are derived.

Narrative “universes” such as Doctor Who and Star Wars treat contributions from many media and authors as authorized elements of a vast fictional quilt.

An “unfolding text” contains a number of distinct series in different media usually with different creators and intended audiences. It adapts to meet the changing demands of its audience over time.

It may be a successful series of comics, a series of films, an animated television series, a computer game, or all of the above, operating in a “multiverse” with one main character acting as separate individuals in separate, but parallel, mediated environments made by separate production teams for specific target audiences, within the periphery of a “bible”.

In transmedial storytelling content becomes invasive and permeates the audience’s lifestyle.

Fan culture: Culture that is produced by fans and other amateurs for circulation through an underground economy and that draws much of its content from the commercial culture.

Fan fiction: Sometimes called “fanfic”, a term originally referring to any prose retelling of stories and characters drawn from mass-media content, but deployed by LucasArts in its establishment of a policy for digital filmmakers that excludes works seeking to expand" their fictional universe.

Storyworld: "Diegetic," in the cinema, typically refers to the internal world created by the story that the characters themselves experience and encounter: the narrative "space" that includes all the parts of the story, both those that are and those that are not actually shown on the screen (such as events that have led up to the present action; people who are being talked about; or events that are presumed to have happened elsewhere or before).

Transmedial storytelling: Stories that unfold across mulliple media platforms, with each medium making distinctive contributions to an understanding of the world, a more integrated approach to franchise development than models based on urtexts (The original text of a musical score, literary work or film) and its ancillary products.

Vast narratives: What makes a narrative vast.

J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Marvel's Spiderman, and the complex stories of such television shows as Dr. Who, The Sopranos, and Lost all present vast fictional worlds.

Henry Darger's images of his Vivian Girls, trapped in an otherworldly battle for tens of thousands of pages written by Darger in virtual seclusion over the course of his adult life.

A vast narrative may have varied content, spread across multiple media, The vast narrative receives its designation not only due to the interior nature of the narrative, which may span unusual lengths but it exceeds the usual expectations of extent we have for a work of that form ( e.g. a three hundred page book, or a two-hour film.

While most television detective shows devote one episode to one investigation, The Wire, for example, can stretch a case out over a season, and the continuity of characters and settings puts demands on a viewer’s memory that other shows rarely make.

The Harry Potter series of books is considered the authoritative source of that fictional world even after the release of the films.

Lucasfilm delegates storytelling duties for Star Wars among books, movies, and animated series, and each addition extends the fictional universe in new directions in time and space.

Vast narratives can also be generative frameworks that allow for many reconfigurations of the characters and settings over several instantiations, as in computer role-playing games and their pencil-and-paper counterparts like Dungeons & Dragons.

DC Comics has reintroduced the concept of the "multiverse" to its stories, allowing differently branded versions of DC characters to appear in nonoverlapping (and noncontradictory) story lines, considered to be happening in parallel universes.