"My idea for this Soft Cinema edition was to create a film without a pre-formulated

narrative. I started with two assumptions. Firstly that meaning and narrative

coherence can be created through associative chains. Secondly – presuming that

human perception works to connect images that are presented together and to

integrate them into a coherent, meaningful, structure – that it is possible to create

these associative chains through the visual properties of images."

My idea for a new project to work on is to use to idea of "celebrity" that was created in pop culture and expose its randomness and use of "image." I will use footage that makes the viewer believe that the individual being documented will not be aware of the camera in some scenes. In other scenes, the character will be playing into the media/camera in their own characterization. This project will be an exploration of the construction of image and identity.

Response: Lev Manovich-New Media, From Borges to HTML

New Media means “Computer based artistic activities.” The beginning of the idea of new media did not become popularized until approximately 1980. In the beginning the new media art world had many problems at gaining acceptance within the art community. There was much hesitation from not only the government but the fine art world. An interesting piece of information that I was unaware of that this article stated was that in the 1990’s the art world in the United States was the most conservative cultural superpower in the world. Places such as countries in Europe were far ahead of the United States. A great hesitation among the art community was the idea of distribution. The idea of the gallery or auction house was taken completely out of the picture. This was intimidating to the art world because of its long standing use of traditional practice. Another controversy was the idea of infinite copies. New media therefore requires one to be an interactive component in a work. This medium finally elevated itself out of the underground art community into the main stream of art. The complexity of the medium of New Media is still to this day a difficult way in which to solidly understand and break down. Also the discussion of cyberculture was intriguing in this essay. Its relation to our culture and how it can be used to edit down what it is we can see. For me the most interesting aspect of this essay is that our culture can not put a definition of the idea of new media because with each new year some other form of society becomes reliant on the computer.

Response: Janet Murray, Inventing the Medium

“The engineers see the challenge of our time, finding the key to survival in an atomic age, a challenge to our intellects. The world has become more difficult to understand, so we need better ways of thinking about it, more powerful methods of mastering complexity.” This quote is an excellent example of what the medium of digital filmmaking is having issues with. It is impossible to fully comprehend what it takes to create a complex work. The computer is a tool just like any other in which a work is created with. This tool is compared to the printing press that was created 500 years ago and how its power was used for good and bad. The computer is a great example of a subject in which the potential is unlimited. The article also touches on how our current culture’s knowledge is more organized because of the Internet than any other culture before. This statement is a perfect example of what our culture is seeing today because in the last 100 years alone the knowledge that humanity has been able to produce is 100x what it previously was aware of. It was a necessity to be able to organize this information into a dispersible manner. It is a rational way to think about technology as a dangerous tool because of its quickness and ability to adapt. Our culture must just look into its past to consider what it has learned and apply it to our progression. We must always remember that all art is a tool of the collection of knowledge that humanity has been able to gather.

Untitled from Matthew Wilson on Vimeo.

Backwards Movie