Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film

by John McGee

Maurice Benayoun, So. So. So. Somebody, Somewhere, Some Time, 2002, interactive installation (Image ©Z-A, Maurice Benayoun, courtesy ICC)

With the rise of computer games and home entertainment systems, "cinema" is no longer something reserved for first dates at the Bijou. This exhibition, from the Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany, shows how 26 artists employ new technology to expand concepts of cinematic viewing and storytelling. Some use documentary and narrative. Others focus on art and graphic design. 

The first videos set the stage for the show's two main themes: experimentation and interactivity. Film Before Film, a 1986 video, displays pre-cinema optical toys and how they work. The other documents examples of Czech interactive cinema from the 1950s and '60s. In one, audiences push a button at their seats to decide which of two options the protagonist should select, a movie version of '80s-era "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. 

This acquiescence of the author is a pretense of nearly half of the projects. Collage and Kuleshov go DIY—they give you images (or film archives) and you or a computer algorithm choose what to see and in which order. This yields one of two responses: "gee whiz" or "so what." 

Video games are exciting because you forget about the controller in your hand and focus on the world created on-screen. With too many of these interactive projects the opposite is true. And despite complex concepts and fetishized forms, they usually function as old-school CD-ROMs. 

Pat O'Neill, et al, Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a film by Pat O'Neill, 2002, interactive DVD installation (Image The Annenberg Center for Communication, USC, ©USC, courtesy ICC)

Much depends on the stories and images used. Some draw you in, like Pat O'Neill's interactive cultural history of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, a contemporary Hollywood ghost town overlaid with historical snippets of noir. But unfortunately too many are pedantic (e.g. The Panoptic Society and Immortally in Love with Death) or just dull. 

Film viewing is still essentially passive. Most people want no more interactivity than buying a ticket, inserting a DVD or programming a TiVo. The pieces that really work here have a similar simplicity or effortlessness. And, well, they are less like design lessons and more like art. 

Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser's Pedestrian (2002) is a floor-projected, black-and-white video that looks like a simulation game set in the streets of New York. You look down on people moving through a city from a roving bird's-eye perspective. The computer-generated people look basically real, but their motions are just awkward enough to be uncanny. Vignettes flow together—Stepford crowds in matching outfits run down the street in nearly synchronized but aimless motion, ice skaters carve and turn, couples stroll through a park—but no narratives develop. 

Max Dean and Kristan Horton's BE ME (2002) is a mirror stage where viewers face themselves as Wizards of Oz: When you sit in a chair and speak into a microphone, a giant, computer-animated head of a man projected on a screen in front of you mimics your speech and head and facial movements. It's like Al Pacino in the film "Simone," only instead of becoming a beautiful woman, you become a gaunt Big Brother with bad teeth. 

Archives of web-cinema from 1997-2002, curated by Nora Barry, and "Anarchive 2: Digital Snow" (2002), showcasing the work of art film veteran Michael Snow, give some good additional historical context to the exhibition. 

There's little cohesion in this uneven show. That's arguably one of its strengths: the exhibition indicates a number of possible trajectories in our rapidly changing visual culture.

This exhibition was held Jan-Feb 2004 at NTT/ICC Gallery in Hatsudai, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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