Jeffrey Shaw

One aspect of our globalization is the development of a worldwide network of technological standards and production, distribution, and presentation norms necessary in order to recoup, via distribution to the mass global market, vastly increased film production costs. With its tendency to standardize, the image industry at the same time freezes the evaluation of the language of cinema. Hollywood has come to define cinema’s dominant forms of production and distribution, its technological apparatus and narrative forms. But the supremacy of this model is now being challenged by the new perspective of the digital media technologies. Not only are these new digital contexts seeding the explosion of the computer-game and location-based entertainment industries, they are also providing an appropriate platform for the future evolution of the independent, experimental, and expanded cinema, for the triumph return and rebirth of cinema as a personal, individual medium rather than purely collective industry. A new class of experts those individuals formerly called artists, have developed a technical competence enabling them to challenge a cinematic homogeneity supports by millions of dollars, and to rival and surpass Hollywood’s innovative, narrative, and expressive achievements. This book offers evidence of a surprising fact: Even the technological and ideological apparatus of huge industries can be inventively transformed by creative individuals.

»Future Cinema« is the firs major international anthology of current video-, film- and computer-based work that embodies and anticipates these new cinematic techniques and modes of expression. Based on the exhibition of the same title, the book for the first time brings together a large number of highly significant installations, multimedia and Net-based works produced in the digital field by both young and established international artists exploring algorithmic procedures and immersive and technologically innovative environment, such as multi-screen, panoramic, and dome projections, and multi-location virtual environments. Another focus is on works exploring creative approaches to the design of interactive, non-linear, modular narrative content. The catalog also documents the historical trajectory of those many and variegated cinematic experiments that prefigure inform, and contextualize our current cinematic condition the cinematic imaginary beyond film.Throughout the history of cinema, a radical avant-garde has existed on the fringes of the film industry. A great deal of research has focused on the pre- and early history of cinema, but there has been little speculation about a future cinema incorporating new electronic media. Electronic media have not only fundamentally transformed cinema but have altered its role as a witness to reality by rendering "realities" not necessarily linked to documentation, by engineering environments that incorporate audiences as participants, and by creating event-worlds that mix realities and narratives in forms not possible in traditional cinema. This hybrid cinema melds montage, traditional cinema, experimental literature, television, video, and the net. The new cinematic forms suggest that traditional cinema no longer has the capacity to represent events that are themselves complex configurations of experience, interpretation, and interaction.

This book, which accompanies an exhibition organized by the ZKM Institute for Visual Media, explores the history and significance of pre-cinema and of early experimental cinema, as well as the development of the unique theaters in which "immersion" evolved. Drawing on a broad range of scholarship, it examines the shift from monolithic Hollywood spectacles to works probing the possibilities of interactive, performative, and net-based cinemas. The post-cinematic condition, the book shows, has long roots in artistic practice and influences every channel of communication.
This exhibition assesses the impact of new production technologies on the conventions of cinema language. Here, the term "cinema" extends to any practice in which the projection of images plays a vital role, regardless of the media used (film, videotape, digital code). The curators Peter Weibel and Jeffrey Shaw bring together video and DVD installations, immersive environments as well as works designed for the Internet that reinvent projection devices and reconfigure narrative assumptions while stressing the reflexive dimension of the images.

The publication is a crucial tool for appreciating the works in light of a broader context that takes into account the history of these contemporary practices in the art of the sixties and seventies.

An introduction by curator Jeffrey Shaw presents the exhibition's overall concept and paves the way for 13 chapters that group the works by key concepts (the chapters are numbered backwards but presented here in normal order for easier reading). These chapters contain texts by authors on works by the exhibiting artists. Also featured are photo reproductions of the works as well as theoretical texts that delve into the issues explored by each chapter.

The first three chapters, devoted mainly to the historical background of the exhibited works, examine the particularities of how films have been produced and screened since cinema's invention. "The Cinematic Imaginary", the first chapter, focuses on metaphors and stylistic devices used by 20th-century avant-garde movements to define cinema as a phantasmagorical experience. The second chapter, "Screenings," spotlights key moments in the development of how moving images have been presented since the fifties. This section looks beyond the conventions of traditional Hollywood movies. The third chapter, "Theaters," considers the architectural spaces that have hosted cinema since its invention and suggests ways to subvert these spaces exemplified by installation practices emerging in the sixties and seventies.

The fourth chapter, "Codes," differentiates the indexical regime of film from electronic signal and digital code. "Remapping," the fifth chapter, provides a rereading of the conventions of the language and standard devices of cinema and video. The sixth chapter, "Transcriptive," explores artist projects that rely on new interactive platforms and modular devices for presenting works that test the linearity of cinema narrative. Linking other issues to this concept of non-linear narrative, the seventh chapter, "Recombinatory," presents works in which participants access the narrative content through databases and complex interfaces that recombine occurrences of memorized sequences. "Navigable," the eighth chapter, centres on a series of works containing virtual spaces that enable a kind of random exploration of their content. In these interactive platforms, the user's interaction with space-time parameters affects how image clusters are understood.

The ninth chapter, "Interpolated," examines research that, in a digital world, compares once incompatible notions by way of formal or media categories (factual, fictional, actual, virtual). In particular, the projects in this chapter measure the impact of spatial data on temporal parameters.

The 10th chapter, "Immersive," brings together environments where virtual space stands in for the physical space occupied by the user. The 11th chapter, "Calculated," zeroes in on works that feature abstract or narrative models generated by algorithms and abandon images captured by an optical device. Although the representation of these systems occurs in a simulated environment, a few projects make use of real data.

The 12th chapter, "Networked," comments on works whose content is disseminated through networks and on-line. The final chapter, "Screenless," proposes a series of projects using models of visualization that rethink the foundations of image projection by proposing the theory of a passageway between the body and data coming from a computer system.… (mere)