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