Nonlinearity: New Media, Old Ideas

Googling “nonlinear” (arts), as well as reading about the many innovations in screen images at Expo67, I’ve discovered that many current ideas around non-linearity, multiple screens, immersive experiences (installation), and tessellated and distributed imagery that I think of as part of new media practices are actually old ideas.

Wikipedia says:

Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67) is the first novel to experiment with nonlinearity.

and

Experimentation with nonlinear structure in film dates back to the silent film era, including D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) and Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927).^[4] Nonlinear film emerged from the French avant-garde in 1929 with Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (English: An Andalusian Dog). The surrealist film jumps into fantasy and juxtaposes images, granting the filmmakers an ability to create statements about the Church, art, and society that are left open to interpretation.^[5]

Gance’s Napoléon (1927) used three film strips filmed by three cameras shown side by side, tripling the aspect ratio to show a staggering panorama of a battlefield. At the very end of the film, the outer two film panels were tinted blue and red, creating a widescreen image of a French flag.

This leads me to re-think what is then really new about new-media, and I have come to 3 conclusions thus far:

1. It can be infinitely changed and re-arranged without destroying the original.

2. Changes can happen in real time.

3. New Media, and many other things, are now globally collaborative.

This causes me to re-evaluate my understanding of what I have thought of as new media based work, and to continue to question what “new media” really is. How does the discussion about the importance of “context” apply to viewing and understanding new media works? Is context about where and how we locate and participate, or about how we understand them? This still confuses to me.

 

Food for thought . . .

Today’s discussions and examples have left me thinking about the paradigm shift required to approach new media from the perspective of relationships and connections rather than the perspective of technology and aesthetics, which often appear so visually cumbersome. Steve’s comment about the enmeshed links between technology, concept and process was also a new way of getting past the “blockage” that I sometimes feel around new media art.

While the possibilities, options for control “on the fly” and innovative combinations and uses of media are really exciting, I have often felt that a lot of new media art seem like “much ado about nothing”: a whole lot of hardware, complex systems and programming for a “shiny new effect” that doesn’t feel all that new aesthetically, or very thought-provoking conceptually. Until today, I had never considered the development of the technologies themselves as a new art form, or that new media art needed to be viewed from quite different points of reference.

Discussion after class today recognized the enormous and complex systems, hardware, and mechanics of production, distribution and creation that the contemporary film industry requires. The amount of money, time, labour and materials in making, showing and distributing films is vast, and as Joanne pointed out, they are also largely invisible to us since we are so familiar with them. Other than seeing the final credits roll, these processes are generally not acknowledged or referred to in any way during a film screening. Janis commented that even the logistics of getting 100 or more people into a theatre at one time to see a film are vast. Since culturally we now know and understand the ideas, processes, rituals, and behaviours required in seeing a film in a theatre, we are immune to recognizing the underlying network and considerations that support it.

All of this reminds me a film Ed Slopek showed in Media Languages, “Lumiere’s Arrival of the Train”, in which an early film audience got out of their seats and ran from the theatre when a train on the screen came rushing towards them, larger than life.

For further discussion of this, please see:

http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=hI4ngceuXiwC&oi=fnd&pg=PA45&dq=early+cinema+train+and+panic&ots=q7axmAWIjq&sig=s5yXjVxitoKfx5IRM5ngjFsrag4#PPA46,M1

pg. 46 of

The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity

By C. Nadia Seremetakis

In another clip, a man enraged by what he saw in the film got up and tore the screen to shreds, fighting with the man shown on it. He even ran around behind the screen looking for the “perpetrator”.

Therefore the understanding of what film is, and what appropriate behaviours for viewing it are, including simple things like lining up to buy a ticket, are learned, and this learning we take for granted.

In this light, the complexities, processes and hardware of new media may also need to be socially learned to be more fully appreciated and seamlessly integrated into our experience of it. Like viewing painting, photography and film, the means to creating them either becomes invisible, or feels like part of a fully-resolved presentation.

 

Oxymoronic!

Here I am in “Narrative and Interactive Forms”, setting up my blog, flickr and digg accounts as I prepare to dive into new media. How to sort out the overwhelming amount of information and get postings related to my thesis topic are next!

Arriving home later on, my daughter asked me how classes were today. I told her what we had been doing, and then she then showed me HER first blog, created in Grade 7! She made another one this term for a class project.

So . . . just as I’m finding out how to use these new tools, I am also finding out that I am way behind the average teenager! This is graduate school? Or an oxymoron?