Category: Conferences & events

Patrick von Sychowski. Cinema is an experience.

The transition to digital technology has freed cinema technologically and creatively. However, 124 years of film tradition still dictate how films are consumed in public forums. How is cinema evolving to compete with films available on any platform? Is streaming an enemy or ally? What are the most advanced experiences that cinema can learn from? This tour of the current world cinema situation will put the image on the big screen in a broader media context.

Patrick von Sychowski

EDITOR AND CO-FOUNDER OF CELLULOIDJUNKIE.COM  

Spent the past two decades writing and consulting about/for cinema industry. Fascinated by what keeps cinema going after 120+ years. Editor and Co-Founder of CelluloidJunkie.com    

Worked on both sides of the fence, implementing new cinema technology (Hollywood and Bollywood in London and Mumbai), as well as covering new developments in the Chinese and Asian markets from Singapore.    

Dividing time between London, Berlin and Asia. Member of CTC, EDCF and BAFTA. Frequent contributor to Cinema Technology Magazine. Never tire of popcorn – salt only.

Marta Materska – Samek. Cinematic VR Business Model – A disruptive or a sustaining change?

Cinema, for over one hundred and twenty years, has been an important meeting place for the artists and their audiences. Despite the development of parallel distribution channels and repeated predictions of its replacement by VHS, DVD and recently VOD, it has not lost its importance and prestige in promoting and distributing the art of film. However, new, particularly immersive, forms of visual narration require specialised equipment and individual operating conditions, as well as verification whether existing funding, programming and distribution models are still valid. This analysis includes an overview of the factors that determine the development of new visual narrative projects, models for financing production, and discusses scenarios for the distribution and exploitation of immersive content in the context of the existing film distribution system in Europe.

Marta Materska – Samek

Experienced ICT project manager, expert in the field of cinema market and regional, national and European funds. Author of innovative projects introducing ICT tools in the area of education and cultural industries. She worked as president of the Cinema Development Foundation and coordinator of the Malopolska D-Cinemas Network – the first European cinema digitisation project co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund, distinguished by the European Parliament as an example among the challenges for European cinema in the digital age.

 

Geogre Legrady. From hardwired to automation: visual narrative through computation

I will present a series of computer-generated, time-based artworks realized in my studio that explore multi-linear visual narrative from the early 1990s to the present. These works came to be through intersecting diverse resources such as the current state of artistic visual exploration, the analytical methodologies of cultural studies, and the evolutionary confines of technological availability. For instance, sampling of documents through scanning, the capture of time-based audio and images were all introduced in 1992. The primary multimedia tool that introduced multilinear narrative flow at that time was Macromedia Director where sequences were hard-wired. Other approaches included the organization of data accessed through hierarchical and relational databases introducing metadata. Since then, due to the increased speed and bandwidth of data processing, and data-processing algorithms with statistical analysis, multi-linear visual narratives increased in real-time, based on computational dynamic decision-making through artificial neural-networks and machine-learning. Through the examples that I will present, I will share ideas about data processing, the narrative potential of visualization, and compare engineering and media art approaches.

George Legrady
Artist & professor with focus on research and experimental projects in the areas of data visualization, algorithmic processes, computational photography, and interactive installation. Creator and manager of the Experimental Visualization Lab at the California Nanosystems Institute / University of California, Santa Barbara.

Roderick Coover. Cinema of immersion, interaction and database

Roderick Coover will present samples from his works ”The Key To Time” (2019), ”Penelope” (2019), ”Toxicity: A Climate Change Narrative” (2016), ”Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project” (2016) and others in a discussion of expanded cinema and narrative forms. He will offer a historical view that looks back to his interactive cinema works of the 1990s and 2000s. He will discuss ways that he and others have work with code to made generative and combinatory works in the 2000s and 2010s that build stories out of databases that are different every time you watch them. He will consider how these forms may merge with immersive cinema in its various forms. He will discuss approaches to working with highly experimental, multimodal methods to engage critical issues like climate change and human rights. In doing so, he will also introduce his new edited book ”The Digital Imaginary: Literature And Cinema Of The Database” (Bloomsbury) and discuss ways that emerging forms illuminate trajectories for narrative imagination and production.

Roderick Coover

He lives in Philadelphia, where he is Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University.

Creator or co-creator of award-winning works of digital, interactive and emergent cinema, virtual reality and digital arts. His latest works include the VR films The Key To Time and Hearts And Minds, the algorithmic films Penelope and Toxicity: A Climate Change Narrative, and the book The Digital Imaginary: Literature And Cinema Of The Database (Bloomsbury). His works use expanded forms of narrative and documentary cinema to address critical contemporary questions like climate change, migration and extinction.  

www.unknownterritories.org

Sara Kolster. To click or not to click?

Should every story be interactive? Is that where we are heading? A story well told opens up new perspectives of the world around us. How can we involve the viewer (or listener) in a more engaged way?

Sara Kolster
Sara Kolster is an independent interactive director and designer who specializes in digital storytelling. She’s drawn to socially committed themes and within her work likes to combine different media and techniques ranging from animation and photography to Virtual Reality. Her work is shown at international festivals and exhibitions in Amsterdam, Sao Paulo, Tokyo & Berlin.

Kuba Mikurda. An essay in space.

A discussion of three visual essays created by Kuba Mikurda & Jakub Woynarowski – “Gilliam’s Atlas” (2011), “Corpus Delicti” (2013) and “The Story of Landing” (2015). Mikurda & Woynarowski identify the priority of space over narrative in the work of Gilliam, Borowczyk, Lynch and Tarkowski and draw from their films to develop visual discourses that would properly capture their “spacialized narratives”, including maps, catalogues and 3-D models.

Kuba Mikurda

Kuba Mikurda is a film scholar and filmmaker based in Warsaw, Poland. He started as film critic, journalist and publisher, then worked as TV director and TV presenter for Canal+ Poland. He works as an Assistant Professor at Film School in ?ód? where he runs the Essay Film Studio. 

Gaëlle Mourre. Do humans still have a monopoly on creativity?

AI (with machine learning and real-time story engine) guides you through your own personal journey in an interactive, multiuser social experience, powered by VR and live actors – the time has come!

Gaëlle Mourre
Gaëlle Mourre is a director and screenwriter based in London. Having lived in Asia, the US and Europe, Gaëlle brings her cultural experiences into the worlds that she creates in her films. Her fiction projects include Awakening (“Best Drama” NY International Short Film Festival) and The Feast (“Best Production Design” at Underwire Film Festival), which both screened at various Oscar, BAFTA, BIFA as well Méliès award qualifying festivals. She also produced and directed a commercial for the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni, starring Lambert Wilson. Her latest project, Mechanical Souls, premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and at SXSW. Mechanical Souls was selected as part of Google Jumpstart’s 2018 program, as well as the 75th Venice Biennale Production Bridge and was a part of the Kaohsiung Film Festival VR Lab. She is currently working on the development of several projects, each tied together by the common themes of emancipation and the exploration of ethics within surreal settings. Gaëlle trained as a director at the London Film School and holds an MA in Filmmaking and a BA in Art History and Spanish Literature. She also produces branded content as well as fiction content. Gaëlle is a classical 2D Filmmaker as well as a VR Director. Bilingual in French and English, she works in both languages and is always up for a new challenge, travelling internationally for her projects.

Ludger Pfanz. Space-Time Narratives

Over the coming decades new technologies, like AI and immersive new media, will change our lives and the way we perceive it beyond our imagination. But most new technologies like VR are not offset by adequate content. In most cases traditional stories are combined with VR effects – that is comparable to provide a silent movie with an audio track. My lecture is based on three hypotheses: firstly, this new technology can only achieve authenticity if the space (topos) is offered meaning already in the script and project development. Secondly, in VR one can no longer work with images (frames), for the technology requires a thinking in spheres. In addition, besides the construction of suspense or tension on the time-line, we also have to consider the tension of space – such as the vertical, horizontal and parallax tension. The lecture will focus on new narrative forms, from “space-time–experiences“ to “space-time narrations” and the quantum theory of digital dreams including an outlook to “artificial and artistic intelligence“.

Ludger Pfanz

ZKM | CENTER FOR ART AND MEDIA 

Works as a producer, director and author. After studying theater and literature at the Free University of Berlin, he completed his diploma in filmmaking at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg with honors.  He has been an instructor and head of the studios at the University of Arts and Design at the ZKM Karlsruhe since 1997. In 2010 he founded the research-laboratory “Expanded 3 Digital Cinema Lab”. Pflanz is Founder and Head of the “3D Alliance Karlsruhe”, the European program “Parallax” , the international VR Consortium, the international festival „BEYOND“, the international Symposium „Future Design- Artistic Visions for Europe and BEYOND“ and the „Future Design-Institute“. 

 

Pola Borkiewicz. New XR narrative paradigm

The XR Media Taxonomy (All Reality) is a subject of an ongoing discussion. This process takes place in the spectrum between the poles of Reality (physical) and Virtuality (synthetic), revealing the continuum of our experience (Milgram, 1994). In defining, in the broadest sense, the concept of cross-reality or XR, I refer to the X symbol as a mathematical variant that allows to describe potential realities (XR) emerging in the process of systematization of the categories of all experiences (VR, AR, MXR, MXYR, multiMXYR or AllR), (Mann, 2018). In practice, artistic and research activities, where the key aspect is communication within the work of interdisciplinary teams, there is a need to develop a common language that transcends hermetic areas of meaning within individual disciplines. From this need a project of codification of the media language of potential realities (XR) is born. It will have the form of a useful tool for both artists and researchers. In my speech, I would like to present the publication project I am currently developing on a digital publishing platform as well as the process related to the shaping of a new paradigm of spacial media narrative, starting with the virtual experience of 3D spherical film or Cinematic VR (CVR).

 

POLA BORKIEWICZ

Head of VR/AR | Visual Narratives Laboratory | Lodz Film School.

Interdisciplinary artist, researcher, designer, director, cognitiveist, writer.

PhD student at the Laboratory of Virtual Reality and Psychophysiology of the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where she conducts research on the subject of Cinematic VR (New paradigm of the narrative of the spherical 3D VR movie. Research on immersion and the sense of presence in the film experience of virtual reality). 

She is working on a monograph about the Sign System of Audiovisual Language (SSOAV) and components of potential realities (xReality).

She publishes on cinematic VR narrative language and bioethical consequences of virtual environment development (AR/VR/MR).

She is involved in the broadly understood psychology of perception, new technologies and neuroaesthetics.

Domna Banakou. Being somebody else: the future of narrative storytelling

Research in experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and virtual reality has provided evidence for the malleability of our brain’s body representation. It has been shown that a person’s body can be substituted by a life-sized artificial one, resulting in a perceptual illusion of body ownership over the fake body. Several studies have shown that when people are virtually represented with a body different to their own, they exhibit behaviours associated with attributes pertaining to that body. By exploiting Immersive Virtual Reality to induce body ownership illusions over distinct virtual bodies, I will show how altered self-representation can influence one’s self-perception, perception of the environment, and implicit biases, with the potential to bring about positive change.

Domna Banakou

Researcher | EVENT LAB | University of Barcelona

Domna Banakou obtained her bachelor degree in Computer Science in 2009 from the Ionian University, Corfu, Greece. In 2009-2010 she did a MSc in Computer Graphics, Vision and Imaging, at University College London (UCL). In 2017 she received her PhD degree in Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology using virtual reality from the University of Barcelona (UB), Spain, funded by the FI-DGR 2014 Grant for universities and research centres by the Generalitat de Catalunya. She is currently a postdoc researcher at EVENT-LAb (UB).    

“My research interest focuses on virtual environments and how people respond to events within these. I’m attracted by the idea of simulating situations that are difficult (or impossible) to realise in physical reality, and I am especially interested in the topic of bodily representation within virtual environments. I study transformations of the virtual bodily appearance, exploring the perceptual and behavioural correlates of body ownership illusions that occur as a function of the type of body in which embodiment occurs.”