Spatialization of the Moving Image/Expanded Cinema

Week five

Overview

The idea of expanded cinema is a continuation of the desire to fuse the observer and the image together, but unlike the dioramas & panoramas the image is now a moving image. Actually many panorama rotundas were converted for that purpose and superseded by film.   A stereopticon was first used in 1894, consisting of 12 slide projectors and by 1900 when ten 70mm films were shown at the World Exhibition in Paris, the cinematographic panorama was well and truly born.

Around the 1920s Enrico Prampolini came up with the idea of the expanded stage - the polydimensional Futurist theatre.   Bauhaus artists have also impacted on the ideas of fusing audience and stage with the idea of Total Theatre, explored by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy & Walter Gropius.   But it was the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti who applied this idea to cinema.  

Sergei M Eisenstein, a new media theorist and film director, used Tarkovsky's view of film as an emotional reality, to cause total psychological engagement in the viewer. Morton L Heiting developed an idea of the Cinema of the Future that was to exceed the imaginary vision of Feelies in Huxley's Brave New World and offer an experience that engaged all the senses, including taste, smell and touch.   IMAX (Image Maximization) cinemas of the 1990s are a contemporary version of a total immersive cinematic experience.  

Film, from the time of its conception, has been mainly regarded as a spectacular medium.   Rudolf Arnheim had a different idea in the 1930s and set out to classify film as art. There is a challenge inherent in the utilization of the newest technologies of illusion. That is the illusion of immersion tends to wear off and what used to captivate ceases to convince us as the exposure is increased.

The advances in the design of the immersive computer interface mark another crucial phase, equally radical to the changes brought on by the technologies of moving pictures.   The developments have now shifted to the realization of Gene Youngblood's utopian propositions of direct brain interface, where thoughts and mental images would be immediately translated into images via a computer - the idea of the ultimate computer as the sublime aesthetic device.

The Whitney Brothers, Stan Vanderbeek, Lilliamn Schwartz, Jordan Belson, Lucas Ihlein , Michael Naimark , Luc Courchesne , Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Jim Campbell , David Blair , Jennifer & Kevin McCoy , Nick Crowe , Jorge la Ferla, August & Louis Lumiere , Jud Yalkut, John Cage & Ronald Nameth , Milton Cohen's Space Theatre, Seiko Mikami & Soto Ichikawa,

Primary Reading

Grau, Oliver 2003 Virtual Art From Illusion to Immersion , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ch4

Youngblood Gen 1970 Expanded Cinema , P Dutton & Co, NY

Part Six: Intermedia

More

Arnheim, Rudolf 1933 Film, Faber & Faber, London

Arnheim, Rudolf 2000 The Coming & Going of Images , Leonardo 33, no 3, pp167-168

Benjamin, Walter 1936 The Work of Art in the age of the Mechanical Reproduction

Bolt, Richard 1984 The Human Interface: Where People and Computers Meet , Lifetime Learning, Belmont CA

Brill, Louis 1993 Looking-glass Playgrounds Hit the Entertainment Bullseye , Virtual Reality World, Nov/Dec, p 41-49

Burdea, Grigore 1994 Virtual Reality Technology , Wiley, NY

Dixon, Steve   Futurism e-visited

Eisenstein, Sergei M 1943 The Film Sense , Faber & Faber, London

Eisenstein, Sergei M 1949 About Stereoscopic Cinema , The Penguin Film Review, no8. p 35-45

Frohne, Ursula That's the Only Now I Get

Gibson, James 1986 The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception , Erlbaum, NJ

Gropius, Walter 1925 Total Theatre

Hersh, H & Rubinstein, R 1984 The Human Factor: Designing Computer Systems for People , Digital Press, Maynard, MA

Korfhange, R & Isaacson, P (eds) 1977 Computer: National Computer Conference NCC, Proceedings,   AFIPS Press, Arlington, June, p 13-16

Latour, Bruno & Weibel, Peter 2005 Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy , ZKM / The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass

Licklider, J C R 1960 Man- computer symbiosis , IRE: Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics HFE-1, March, p 4-11

Licklider, J C R 1968 The Computer as a Communication Device , Science and Technology, April, p 21-31

McLuhan, Marschall 1964 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man , McGraw-Hill, London

Marinetti, Tommaso Filippo 1916 Futurist Cinema Manifesto

Max, Nelson 1982 SIGGRAPH '84 Call for Omnimax Films , Computer Graphics 16, no 4, p208-214

Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo Theater der Totalitat

Negroponte, Nicolas 1972 The Architecture Machine , MIT Press, Cambridge MA

Panofsky, 1936 On Movies , Bulletin of the Dept of Art and Archeology of Princeton University, June, p 5-15

Prampolini, Enrico 1915 Manifesto on Futurist Scenography

Shaw, J & Weibel , P 2003   Future cinema , MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Sutherland, Ivan 1968   A Head-mounted Display in Proceedings of the Fall Joint Computer Conference Conference , vol 33, AFIPS Conference Proceedings, Thompson Book Co, Washington DC, p 757-764

Turning, Alan 1950 Computing Machinery and Intelligence , Mind 59, no 236, p 433-460

Wiener, Norbert 1961 Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine , MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Zielinski, Siegfried 1999 Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr'actes in History , Amsterdam Uni. Press, Amsterdam