| UNMOVIE.net : A New Noo-Cinema
Axel Heide, OnesandZeros, Philip Pocock, Gregor Stehle.
/* def begin (Unmovie, empty): */
def __init__(self):
try: perspective of time
If one may speak of beginnings in cinema any longer, Unmovie begins in darkness. Not as a cinema house but crystallized as a Ôtime-imageÕ[1] object, a koan-like fountain bubbling blackness in ZKMÕs cavernous ÒFuture CinemaÓ space, jet black calligrapherÕs ink evaporating in a glass aquarium well, air pumped in breathing irrational op- and sonsigns out at exactly one second per second via webcam, UnmovieÕs ÔBubblecamÕ, to the Unmovie portal alongside UnmovieÕs synthespian ÔStageÕ, an Ôany-space-whateverÕ[2] updated to Ôany-cyberspace-wheneverÕ for Ôactor-mediumsÕ[3], software language ÔbotsÕ, algorithmically hyperscripting no beginning or end cyberanthrological travels along a neverending ÔStreamÕ of Ôcode-imagesÕ[4] flowing from the growing Unmovie database of ÔfoundÕ netvideos and their Unmovie-authored descriptors (a second hidden script). Unmovie starts already echoing HamletÕs ÒTime is out of joint.Ó remark, releasing time from its chronic[5] sensory-motor role in cinema. UnmovieÕs time frame, aionically[6] enumerates rather than denominates screen space, animating Ônoo-screensÕ[7] out of time in a game of ÔafterlifeÕ[8] for cinema.
try: wall==screen
If one may speak of beginnings in cinema once again, Unmovie begins with the ÔWallÕ. ZKM built Unmovie a standard, hollow, whitewashed, partition museum upright. UnmovieÕs ÔuncurtainÕ wall acts as interactive code-image display presenting the logo-, op- and sonsign goings-on on both the Unmovie Stage and Stream, as well as all readymade devices carrying the data to and from its interactors; a PC, an Ethernet hub, speakers and, baroquely, power and transmission cables, through which Unmovie data comes and goes, hanging by handmade hooks of glass and bronze. The Unmovie Wall screens its entire virtual and actual character as a Ôtable of informationÕ[9]. The Unmovie Wall is its screen. Walls are screens, always have been. The earliest documented wall acted as a windscreen for dwellers on the shore of Olduvai Lake in Africa 1,8 million years ago. During the last Ice Age, sturdy palisades appeared to screen predators and belligerents from communities within. And at the same time, the cave wall acted as virtual screen, in Grotte Chauvet screening a manual for survival on the outside for spectators inside. The Unmovie Wall presents itself as actual and virtual screen at once.
def __Unmovie__(chronic,aionic):
try: time crystals
ÒTime is the moving image of eternity.Ó states Plato in "Timeaus.Ó This equation applied to motion picture media governs analogue and digital sensory-motor scenarios but it flips when applied to time- or code-image hypermedia. UnmovieÕs Stage is hacked and scripted to generate and compose an endless hyperscript. Devoid of an end and therefore without a beginning users online always enter the Stage game in the middle, the standing now (nunc stans). The Stage dialogue code-poetically encourages topic words to emerge and subside. Topic words are the key that unlocks the floodgates to UnmovieÕs database of internet-sampled and subsequently scripted net-videos. In concert with the incessant streams of artificial consciousness unfolding on Stage, an equally neverending digital video Stream containing cyberanthropological travels online is ÔirrationallyÕ cut and shared 24-7 on internet anywhere noo-screens. The permutations of narrative undercurrents rippling the surface of the Stream are mind-boggling. Still that is not to be confused with UnmovieÕs program of non-narrative meandering about time itself. If film is a river in time, Unmovie is an ocean-image forever. The count of anonymous digital video clips in the database currently numbering 7500 factors out a logogenetic self-organizing logic for the Stream, with the Stage and Stream scripted to act as co-editors, so montage becomes ÔmontrageÕ steered moment for moment in concert with user dialogue in the company of actor-mediums on Stage. These bots may not remember each otherÕs lines but they store new vocabulary and syntax from human users in their ÔbrainsÕ, affecting their language down the hyperline. What appears to have passed (past) on Stage and in the Stream is actually associative recall, memories arriving in the present, crashing if you will. What is foreseen as future possesses an intention lent to it by poesis alone, an instance about to be driven forth from a chaosmos of potential presents. Unmovie, appealing to artmakingÕs first premise, reverses PlatoÕs Ôtimeßmoving imageßeternityÕ equation, where time==Chronos and eternity==Aion to become hypercinematically Ôeternityßmoving imageßtimeÕ, issuing a timeless present as long as electricity allows, initiated by, yet remaining out of frames of passing time. UnmovieÕs crystal ball turns chronocentric media inside-out, freezing time like some cultural quantum mechanic metaphysical equivalent spinning from SchroedingerÕs Ôtime-independent equationÕ (1933) or the paradoxical quantum gravity Wheeler-Dewitt equation in which time disappears altogether (1965). Unmovie deals with the Ôproblem of timeÕ, a zone of concern in the arts, humanities and sciences more and more, conjectured to "become to the 21st century what fossil fuels and precious metals were to previous epochs."[10]
try: existence-time and unmovement
From: gregor.stehle@web.de
Date: Di, 16. Jul. 2002 23:10:47 Europe/Berlin
Subject: gregor/Unmovie/time
A film is a succession of images, that's called movement-image. The fact that we believe there is a history depends on the fact that the movement or the speed gives us an illusion of cause-and-effect and an independence of the separate images.
But in a ÔunmovementÕ moment , only an image exists by itself and it doesn't know about the past and the future images.
So when it is possible to go from image to image without connecting the moment-images, what will be, immediately evokes the illusion of history, past, present and future, and we can speak about existence-time.
The point is we can't stop the movie to see an individual moment separated from the others. Time always does retain the form of leaving and coming, but we can understand that what we see is an illusion of time, of cause-and-effect, and in the moment we realize that, we have the present moment of Existence-Time, which is just Existence-Time itself.
def __onConnect__(self,clouds):
try: floating aroundcloudyghostsinthesky
From: 10@onesandzeros.de
Date: So, 05. Mai. 2002 11:06:37 Europe/Berlin
Subject: Re: sphere or hexagon??
**hi P, we do something new now. its about brightshinyclouds. the words are included, no separate speechbubbles. only 3-4 words are shown each cloud then they fade out andnew words come in. this handles the space problem. the characters are now like bright ideas floating aroundcloudyghostsinthesky containing words and color.
and they react to the mood of the discussion.
Ébe prepared : ) 10
except toy_story
From: ah@roteroktober.de
Date: Fr, 10. Mai. 2002 14:58:08 Europe/Berlin
Subject: unmovie is a hexagrid
Some new stuff in technicolor. maybe something for the book.
What it does is. it generates the hexagrid in the back and maps the botsÕ movements onto that. bots react to other bots, if they get side to side. then a discussion forks off (or the bot joins a running conversation). speechbubbles or speechlog will be there at some point. you see the relationship if you drag 2 bots in a discussion apart. that causes the discussionline to disappear. the dragging, will be replaced by some sort of server remote control. at least for the bots.
It's more a problem with the timing, than with the performance. everything happening in the movie is done via timed execution. that's why the actionscript code is >500 lines for a rather simple movie. Just about everything has to be synchronized with other clients, that means most of the procedures in the movie have to be interrupted or informed by a call from the server. right now i only go for commands like: move bot.
To keep you up-to-date. i wrote some new classes for the server side movement. right now the server spits out the grid which gets interpreted by the flash-file quite nicely. snap to grid and such is done server-side to prevent clients occupying the same spot. actually what previously was inside the flashmovie - the hexagon stuff - is now on the server written in python, the flash client now can be a lot dumber. if 2 bots or clients share the same neighborhood, a conversation is set up. next weekend i'll do the botsÕ talk scheduling, if that works out ok the foundation is set.
except history:
Kasemir Malevich glimpses a darkness looming for cinema as Now as it was in 1925: ÒGenauso mu§ der Film, eine andere Dienstmagd, sich befreien und endlich, wie es die kubistischen Maler taten, verstehen, da§ die Malerei ohne Gestalt, Alltag, Gesicht und Ideenbild existieren kann. Erst dann wird der Film Ÿber seine Kultur 'an sich' nachdenken.Ó
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[1] Gilles Deleuze, ÒCinema II : Time-ImageÓ, 1989. ÔTime-imageÕ: "Éa little time in its pure state': a direct time-image which gives what changes the unchanging form in which the change is produced." p.17. ÒÉtime is no longer the measure of movement but movement is the perspective of time.Ó p.23.
[2] ibid.
Fro an 'any-space-whatever', ÒThe connection of the parts of space is not given, because it can come about only from the subjective point of view of a character, who is, nevertheless, absent, or has even disappeared, not simply out of the frame. but passed into the void.Ó p.8.
[3] ibid. "Éwhat might be called professional non-actors, or, better, Ôactor-mediumsÕ, [are] capable of seeing and showing rather than acting, and either remaining dumb or undertaking some never-ending conversationÉ" p.20.
[4] ibid.
ÔCode-imagesÕ occur ÒWhen the frame or the screen functions as instrument panel, printing or computing table, the image is constantly being cut into another image, being printed through a visible mesh, sliding over other images in an Ôincessant stream of messagesÕ, and the shot itself is less like an eye than an overloaded brain endlessly absorbing informationÉÓ p.267. ÔCode-imagesÕ compute, connect and visualize data algorithmically for globally-minded Ônoo-screensÕ.
[5] The Chronos cosmological myth recounted in the ÒTheogenyÓ of Hesiod (2700 BP) sequels his creation myth in a most time-telling manner. Chaos, the origin spawned Gaia, Goddess of Earth. With Uranus, God of Sky, she bore Chronos, God of Time, who hated his father for hiding him on Earth. With his motherÕs help Time castrated Sky or Heaven and tossed his genitals into the sea, their foam spawning Aphrodite, Goddess of Love. In short, chronological time, the past, present, future, killed aionic time, the eternal present. As consolation timelessness was replaced by libidinal love on a conspiring chronocentric Earth in a myth that is a fable perhaps for Hollywood until Now.
[6] The adjective ÔAioniosÕ is coined in PlatoÕs ÒTimeausÓ Òto denote that which has neither beginning nor end, and that is subject to neither change nor decay, that which is above time, but of which time is a moving image.Ó 37d8.
[7] ÔNoo-screenÕ (Greek 'noos' for 'mind') denotes the progressive integration of translocally shared screens, digital interfacing to an evolving ÔnoosphereÕ as described by Teilhard de ChardinÕs in "The Phenomenon of Man": "No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever increasing speed which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every day that passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively."
[8] Gilles Deleuze, op.cit.
ÒThe life of the afterlife of cinema depends on its internal struggle with informatics. It is necessary to set up against the latter the question which goes beyond it, that of its source and that of its addressee.Ó p.270.
[9] Gilles Deleuze, op.cit.
"And the screen itself, even if it keeps a vertical position by convention, no longer seems to refer to the human posture, like a window or a painting, but rather constitutes a table of information, an opaque surface on which are inscribed 'data', information replacing nature, and the brain-city, the third eye, replacing the eyes of nature." p.265.
[10] Gary Stix, 'Real Time', "Scientific American", 10.2002. |