Category Archives: film

subtitles and the future of reading

After enduring a weeks-long PR pummeling for its dealings in China, Google is hard at work to improve its image in the world, racking up some points for good after slipping briefly into evil. Recently they launched Google.org: a website for the Google Foundation, the corporation’s philanthropic arm and central office of evil mitigation. Paying a visit to the site, the disillusioned among us will be pleased to find that the foundation is already sponsoring a handful of worthy initiatives, along with a grants program that donates free web advertising to nonprofit organizations. And just in case we were concerned that Google might not apply its techno-capitalist wizardry to altruism as zealously as to making profit, they just announced today they’ve named a new director for the foundation by the name of — no joke — Dr. Brilliant. So it seems the world is in capable hands.
One project in particular caught my eye in light of recent discussions about screen-based reading and genre-blending visions of the book. Planet Read is an organization that promotes literacy in India through Same Language Subtitling — a simple but apparently effective technique for building basic reading skills, taking popular visual entertainment like Bollywood movies and adding subtitles in English and Hindi along the bottom of the screen. A number of samples (sadly no Bollywood, just videos or photo montages set to Indian folk songs) can be found on Google Video. Here’s one that I particularly liked:

Watching the video — managing the interplay between moving text and moving pictures — I began to wonder whether there are possibly some clues to be mined here about the future of reading. Yes, Planet Read is designed first and foremost to train basic alphabetic literacy, turning a captive audience into a captive classroom. But in doing so, might it not also be nurturing another kind of literacy?
The problem with contemporary discussions about the future of the book is that they are mired — for cultural and economic reasons — in a highly inflexible conception of what a book can be. People who grew up with print tend to assume that going digital is simply a matter of switching containers (with a few enhancements thrown in the mix), failing to consider how the actual content of books might change, or how the act of reading — which increasingly takes place in a dyanamic visual context — may eventually demand a more dynamic kind of text.
Blurring the lines between text and visual media naturally makes us uneasy because it points to a future that quite literally (for us dinosaurs at least) could be unreadable. But kids growing up today, in India or here in the States, are already highly accustomed to reading in screen-based environments, and so they probably have a somewhat different idea of what reading is. For them, text is likely just one ingredient in a complex combinatory medium.
Another example: Nochnoi Dozor (translated “Night Watch”) is a film that has widely been credited as the first Russian blockbuster of the post-Soviet era — an adrenaline-pumping, special effects-infused, sci-fi vampire epic made entirely by Russians, on Russian soil and on Russian themes (it’s based on a popular trilogy of novels). When it was released about a year and a half ago it shattered domestic box office records previously held by Western hits like Titanic and Lord of the Rings. Just about a month ago, the sequel “Day Watch” shattered the records set by “Night Watch.”

While highly derivative of western action movies, Nochnoi Dozor is moody, raucous and darkly gorgeous, giving a good, gritty feel of contemporary Moscow. Its plot grows rickety in places, and sometimes things are downright incomprehensible (even, I’m told, with fluent Russian), so I’m skeptical about its prospects on this side of the globe. But goshdarnit, Russians can’t seem to get enough of it — so in an effort to lure American audiences over to this uniquely Russian gothic thriller, start building a brand out of the projected trilogy (and presumably pave the way for the eventual crossover to Hollywood of director Timur Bekmambetov), Fox Searchlight just last week rolled the film out in the U.S. on a very limited release.
What could this possibly have to do with the future of reading? Well, naturally the film is subtitled, and we all know how subtitles are the kiss of death for a film in the U.S. market (Passion of the Christ notwithstanding). But the marketers at Fox are trying something new with Nochnoi Dozor. No, they weren’t foolish enough to dub it, which would have robbed the film of the scratchy, smoke-scarred Moscow voices that give it so much of its texture. What they’ve done is played with the subtitles themselves, making them more active and responsive to the action in the film (sounds like some Flash programmer had a field day…). Here’s a description from an article in the NY Times (unfortunately now behind pay wall):

…[the words] change color and position on the screen, simulate dripping blood, stutter in emulation of a fearful query, or dissolve into red vapor to emulate a character’s gasping breaths.

And this from Anthony Lane’s review in the latest New Yorker:

…the subtitles, for instance, are the best I have encountered. Far from palely loitering at the foot of the screen, they lurk in odd corners of the frame and, at one point, glow scarlet and then spool away, like blood in water. I trust that this will start a technical trend and that, from here on, no respectable French actress will dream of removing her clothes unless at least three lines of dialogue can be made to unwind across her midriff.

It might seem strange to think of subtitling of foreign films as a harbinger of future reading practices. But then, with the increasing popularity of Asian cinema, and continued cross-pollination between comics and film, it’s not crazy to suspect that we’ll be seeing more of this kind of textual-visual fusion in the future.
Most significant is the idea that the text can itself be an actor in a perfomance: a frontier that has only barely been explored — though typography enthusiasts will likely pillory me for saying so.

artist as blogger

last spring we invited Alex Itin to be our first artist-in-residence at the institute. i first met Alex in the fall of 2000, during an art festival in Dumbo. he was set-up in a gallery painting portraits on pages of used books. i quite liked the paintings and got the perverse idea that it would be interesting to encourage someone who was using books in this way to work on an electronic book. i was working at Night Kitchen at the time. we had just released the beta version of TK3, the software we made for authoring and reading media rich electronic books. we lent Alex a Mac and he made his first electronic piece, Zoodoo – a series of paintings done on paperback pages which accompanied a beautiful Amiri Baraka poem. (if you first install the free TK3 Reader you can download Zoodoo from this page.) Alex kept experimenting and over time began animating the surface of his scanned-in paintings. while there has been a long history of filmmakers who painted on the surface of film, Alex was perhaps one of the first painters to integrate video into his paintings.




From “Self Portait” by Alex Itin

as a condition of his artist-in-residency we asked Alex to keep a blog in which we hoped he would write about his work as he did it. we were amazed after a few days to realize that alex was beginning to use the blog not as a way to talk about his work, but rather it was just another venue for his work. at first Alex posted paintings, drawings and photos sometimes with a text commentary. after a while he started to include animated gifs and sound. although the artist-in-residency ended almost a year ago, alex has been keeping up the blog. in fact, he’s been on a creative tear the past few weeks. check out the last two entries — the “thousand year crane” (be sure to start the music track) and the Chinese new year tree.

(disclaimer: i’ve been collecting Alex’s work for six years now, so my interest in his success is not purely altruistic)

what I heard at MIT

Over the next few days I’ll be sifting through notes, links, and assorted epiphanies crumpled up in my pocket from two packed, and at times profound, days at the Economics of Open Content symposium, hosted in Cambridge, MA by Intelligent Television and MIT Open CourseWare. For now, here are some initial impressions — things I heard, both spoken in the room and ricocheting inside my head during and since. An oral history of the conference? Not exactly. More an attempt to jog the memory. Hopefully, though, something coherent will come across. I’ll pick up some of these threads in greater detail over the next few days. I should add that this post owes a substantial debt in form to Eliot Weinberger’s “What I Heard in Iraq” series (here and here).

Naturally, I heard a lot about “open content.”
I heard that there are two kinds of “open.” Open as in open access — to knowledge, archives, medical information etc. (like Public Library of Science or Project Gutenberg). And open as in open process — work that is out in the open, open to input, even open-ended (like Linux, Wikipedia or our experiment with MItch Stephens, Without Gods).
I heard that “content” is actually a demeaning term, treating works of authorship as filler for slots — a commodity as opposed to a public good.
I heard that open content is not necessarily the same as free content. Both can be part of a business model, but the defining difference is control — open content is often still controlled content.
I heard that for “open” to win real user investment that will feedback innovation and even result in profit, it has to be really open, not sort of open. Otherwise “open” will always be a burden.
I heard that if you build the open-access resources and demonstrate their value, the money will come later.
I heard that content should be given away for free and that the money is to be made talking about the content.
I heard that reputation and an audience are the most valuable currency anyway.
I heard that the academy’s core mission — education, research and public service — makes it a moral imperative to have all scholarly knowledge fully accessible to the public.
I heard that if knowledge is not made widely available and usable then its status as knowledge is in question.
I heard that libraries may become the digital publishing centers of tomorrow through simple, open-access platforms, overhauling the print journal system and redefining how scholarship is disseminated throughout the world.

And I heard a lot about copyright…
I heard that probably about 50% of the production budget of an average documentary film goes toward rights clearances.
I heard that many of those clearances are for “underlying” rights to third-party materials appearing in the background or reproduced within reproduced footage. I heard that these are often things like incidental images, video or sound; or corporate logos or facades of buildings that happen to be caught on film.
I heard that there is basically no “fair use” space carved out for visual and aural media.
I heard that this all but paralyzes our ability as a culture to fully examine ourselves in terms of the media that surround us.
I heard that the various alternative copyright movements are not necessarily all pulling in the same direction.
I heard that there is an “inter-operability” problem between alternative licensing schemes — that, for instance, Wikipedia’s GNU Free Documentation License is not inter-operable with any Creative Commons licenses.
I heard that since the mass market content industries have such tremendous influence on policy, that a significant extension of existing copyright laws (in the United States, at least) is likely in the near future.
I heard one person go so far as to call this a “totalitarian” intellectual property regime — a police state for content.
I heard that one possible benefit of this extension would be a general improvement of internet content distribution, and possibly greater freedom for creators to independently sell their work since they would have greater control over the flow of digital copies and be less reliant on infrastructure that today only big companies can provide.
I heard that another possible benefit of such control would be price discrimination — i.e. a graduated pricing scale for content varying according to the means of individual consumers, which could result in fairer prices. Basically, a graduated cultural consumption tax imposed by media conglomerates
I heard, however, that such a system would be possible only through a substantial invasion of users’ privacy: tracking users’ consumption patterns in other markets (right down to their local grocery store), pinpointing of users’ geographical location and analysis of their socioeconomic status.
I heard that this degree of control could be achieved only through persistent surveillance of the flow of content through codes and controls embedded in files, software and hardware.
I heard that such a wholesale compromise on privacy is all but inevitable — is in fact already happening.
I heard that in an “information economy,” user data is a major asset of companies — an asset that, like financial or physical property assets, can be liquidated, traded or sold to other companies in the event of bankruptcy, merger or acquisition.
I heard that within such an over-extended (and personally intrusive) copyright system, there would still exist the possibility of less restrictive alternatives — e.g. a peer-to-peer content cooperative where, for a single low fee, one can exchange and consume content without restriction; money is then distributed to content creators in proportion to the demand for and use of their content.
I heard that such an alternative could theoretically be implemented on the state level, with every citizen paying a single low tax (less than $10 per year) giving them unfettered access to all published media, and easily maintaining the profit margins of media industries.
I heard that, while such a scheme is highly unlikely to be implemented in the United States, a similar proposal is in early stages of debate in the French parliament.

And I heard a lot about peer-to-peer…
I heard that p2p is not just a way to exchange files or information, it is a paradigm shift that is totally changing the way societies communicate, trade, and build.
I heard that between 1840 and 1850 the first newspapers appeared in America that could be said to have mass circulation. I heard that as a result — in the space of that single decade — the cost of starting a print daily rose approximately %250.
I heard that modern democracies have basically always existed within a mass media system, a system that goes hand in hand with a centralized, mass-market capital structure.
I heard that we are now moving into a radically decentralized capital structure based on social modes of production in a peer-to-peer information commons, in what is essentially a new chapter for democratic societies.
I heard that the public sphere will never be the same again.
I heard that emerging practices of “remix culture” are in an apprentice stage focused on popular entertainment, but will soon begin manifesting in higher stakes arenas (as suggested by politically charged works like “The French Democracy” or this latest Black Lantern video about the Stanley Williams execution in California).
I heard that in a networked information commons the potential for political critique, free inquiry, and citizen action will be greatly increased.
I heard that whether we will live up to our potential is far from clear.
I heard that there is a battle over pipes, the outcome of which could have huge consequences for the health and wealth of p2p.
I heard that since the telecomm monopolies have such tremendous influence on policy, a radical deregulation of physical network infrastructure is likely in the near future.
I heard that this will entrench those monopolies, shifting the balance of the internet to consumption rather than production.
I heard this is because pre-p2p business models see one-way distribution with maximum control over individual copies, downloads and streams as the most profitable way to move content.
I heard also that policing works most effectively through top-down control over broadband.
I heard that the Chinese can attest to this.
I heard that what we need is an open spectrum commons, where connections to the network are as distributed, decentralized, and collaboratively load-sharing as the network itself.
I heard that there is nothing sacred about a business model — that it is totally dependent on capital structures, which are constantly changing throughout history.
I heard that history is shifting in a big way.
I heard it is shifting to p2p.
I heard this is the most powerful mechanism for distributing material and intellectual wealth the world has ever seen.
I heard, however, that old business models will be radically clung to, as though they are sacred.
I heard that this will be painful.

remix: the movie

Wired magazine reports that Michela Ledwidge is advancing the future of filmmaking, by taking cues from game moding. In early 2006, she will post all the raw material for her 10 minute sci-fi short film, Sanctuary, to the website:www.modfilms.com . People will be able to edit their own versions of the film. Sanctuary continues the open source trend also fostered by recording artists such as Jay Z who released vocal files of his Black album to encourage DJs to create their own mixes. Some die-hard Jay Z fans even posted everything you need in a similar fashion to Ledwidge.
I hope that many people submit films. I am very interested to see what the results will be on the aggregate level. While many people will undoubtedly create mashup versions with external content, I am especially curious to see the results from people who do not add much additional material. How many interesting stories can be told using these basic parts? Is there a “correct” shot selection or a traditional (i.e. “I learned to edit in film school”) edit? How wedded are we to traditional film narrative conventions which dictate what is “good” and “bad”? Will only a few compelling narratives arise or will many?

machinima’s new wave

“The French Democracy” (also here) is a short film about the Paris riots made entirely inside of a computer game. The game, developed by Peter Molyneux‘s Lionhead Productions and called simply “The Movies,” throws players into the shark pool of Hollywood where they get to manage a studio, tangle with investors, hire and fire actors, and of course, produce and distribute movies. The interesting thing is that the movie-making element has taken on a life of its own as films produced inside the game have circulated through the web as free-standing works, generating their own little communities and fan bases.
This is a fascinating development in the brief history of Machinima, or “machine cinema,” a genre of films created inside the engines of popular video game like Halo and The Sims. Basically, you record your game play through a video out feed, edit the footage, and add music and voiceovers, ending up with a totally independent film, often in funny or surreal opposition to the nature of the original game. Bob, for instance, appeared in a Machinima talk show called This Spartan Life, where they talk about art, design and philosophy in the bizarre, apocalyptic landscapes of the Halo game series.
The difference here is that while Machinima is typically made by “hacking” the game engine, “The Movies” provides a dedicated tool kit for making video game-derived films. At the moment, it’s fairly primitive, and “The French Democracy” is not as smooth as other Machinima films that have painstakingly fitted voice and sound to create a seamless riff on the game world. The filmmaker is trying to do a lot with a very restricted set of motifs, unable to add his/her own soundtrack and voices, and having only the basic menu of locales, characters, and audio. The final product can feel rather disjointed, a grab bag of film clichés unevenly stitched together into a story. The dialogue comes only in subtitles that move a little too rapidly, Paris looks suspiciously like Manhattan, and the suburbs, with their split-level houses, are unmistakably American.
But the creative effort here is still quite astonishing. You feel you are seeing something in embryo that will eventually come into its own as a full-fledged art form. Already, “The Movies” online community is developing plug-ins for new props, characters, environments and sound. We can assume that the suite of tools, in this game and elsewhere, will only continue to improve until budding auteurs really do have a full virtual film studio at their disposal.

It’s important to note that, according to the game’s end-user license agreement, all movies made in “The Movies” are effectively owned by Activision, the game’s publisher. Filmmakers, then, can aspire to nothing more than pro-bono promotional work for the parent game. So for a truly independent form to emerge, there needs to be some sort of open-source machinima studio where raw game world material is submitted by a community for the express purpose of remixing. You get all the fantastic puppetry of the genre but with no strings attached.

“everything bad is good for you” is really bad

just finished the second book discussion at the institute. first was neil postman’s building a bridge to the eighteenth century. second was steve johnson’s everything bad is good for you in which johnson presents a contemporary refutation of postman.
johnson’s basic premise seems harmless enough. games and tv drama are getting more layered, more complex. the mental exercise is likely making our brains more nimble, might even be improving our problem-solving skills. OK…
but how can you define good and bad simply in terms of whether one’s brain is better at multi-tasking and problem-solving. i’ll grant that this shift in raw brain power might make us more effective worker bees for our techno-capitalist society, but it doesn’t mean that the substance of our lives or the social fabric is improved.
we don’t need cheerleaders telling us everything is fine — especially when in our gut we’re pretty sure it isn’t. we need to look long and hard at the kind of world we are building with all this technology.
johnson’s book has been widely praised, making it all the more important to hold it up to careful scrutiny. over the next several days we’re going to launch a serious critique of “everything bad is good for you.” please feel encouraged to join in.

ubu, king again

It’s nice to see that UbuWeb, the great public web library of the avant garde, is back online after “a long summer of rebuilding.” At times when the web feels depressingly shallow, Ubu can be the perfect medecine. Among the many masterworks you will find is Samuel Beckett’s “Film” (1965), starring a very old Buster Keaton. It’s wonderful that anyone can watch this online (I’ve just spent half an hour in its thrall).

Also worth checking out are /ubu Editions – handsomely designed electronic texts ranging across an interesting selection of poetry, prose and theatre, including Ron Silliman’s “The Chinese Notebook,” which Dan blogged about a couple weeks back. These, like everything else on Ubu, are free.

ways of seeing, ways of writing – a conversation

The following discussion about a proposed exercise for a high school or college class began in an email exchange yesterday with Bob, Virginia Kuhn and Karl Stolley (Virginia and Karl are both teachers of rhetoric and composition and great intellectual partners of the institute). We thought it was getting interesting so we decided to slap it up here on the blog as a thought experiment. Please join in the discussion in the comment stream.
Bob Stein wrote:
karl and virginia:
this is an idea for an exercise for a high school or college class. i’m wondering if you think it would be interesting/valuable for both students and for those of us interested in understanding the relation of different media types.
*Ways of Seeing, Ways of Writing*
class is divided into four sections. one given pad and pencil. one given digital still camera. one given audio recorder. one given video camera*
the class is asked to “write” about a place (local historical site, downtown street corner, mall, supermarket, cemetary, etc. etc. )
or asked to “write” a response to a question, e.g. “was the response of the federal govt. to the rescue of New Orleans residents affected by the fact that the people needing rescue were mostly poor and black.”
each group “writes” their description of the place or answer to the question using the particular media assigned to their group.
the class reviews all responses, then each group is asked to make a synthesis piece using media captured by all groups.
*if resources aren’t a problem, it would be great if each of the groups with electronic capture devices has more than one.
Karl Stolley replies:
Hmmm…this assignment does offer interesting possibilities. But I guess I’d be interested in the rationale behind splitting the media-producing and -capturing activities between groups. On the one hand, from a teacherly point of view, it’s quite convenient. But viewed from the analogy of a cooking class, it would be like giving each group a set of ingredients plus a kitchen appliance, and then asking each group to take some of the results and make a dish out of it. I know that’s riddled with all kinds of logical holes, but I have to try and interrogate this somehow.
The thing that bothers me most about the assignment is that there is a serious disconnect between the artful choices required to both capture/produce AND compose/orchestrate, as though those activities can be discreet and separate (that disconnect is what tends to make a lot of multimedia assignments feel like the old Surrealist “exquisite corpse” drawing game; if that’s the rhetorical goal, then fine–but that’s limited to a particular kind of stance towards orchestration).
Instead, wouldn’t it be better to give students the question, and then consider which kind of media would be most effective to capture based on the rhetorical situation they’ve been confronted with, have the groups delegate that task amongst themselves? Beginning with the distribution of media before the question is putting the media/genre cart before the rhetorical horse, I think.
Bob replies:
karl,
thank you for your very thoughtful reply. before make specific comments, perhaps i should explain the origin of the idea.
ashton (girlfriend) and i try to spend as much time at her godmother’s place in sardinia as possible. one of the big draws is an island, actually a big hunk o’ dolomite – two miles long and 1500 feet high- that dominates the view from the shoreline. because tavolara’s rockface is mostly white and gray it changes color all day with the sun. (a few photos from recent vist here.) i literally can sit and watch it for hours. it’s been a dream to bring a group of artists to capture its beauty. this year i was thinking that it might be interesting to bring a writer (think someone like john mcphee), a painter, a photographer, a video artist or filmmaker, and an experimental interactive artist like mike naimark or josh portway and let them all have a go at it. my guess is that each would be inspired and the results while quite different would all get at some aspect of the beauty.
at the same time i was thinking about capturing tavolara in various media, i was thinking a lot about the increasingly nettlesome text vs. image (especially moving image) debate. i’m pretty sure the solution is not to give up words in favor of images, but rather begin to appreciate the value of all media and work toward new forms of _expression which call on different media types at different points or which merge them in useful new ways. i was also thinking about how the insitute might start to play a more active role.
thus the idea of coming up with a series of exercises that might be used in college and high school which helped students begin to understand the relative value and utility of different media types and also begin to experiment with how to use them together.
Specific comments:

Hmmm…this assignment does offer interesting possibilities. But I guess I’d be interested in the rationale behind splitting the media-producing and -capturing activities between groups. On the one hand, from a teacherly point of view, it’s quite convenient. But viewed from the analogy of a cooking class, it would be like giving each group a set of ingredients plus a kitchen appliance, and then asking each group to take some of the results and make a dish out of it. I know that’s riddled with all kinds of logical holes, but I have to try and interrogate this somehow.

i think a better kitchen analogy would be giving everyone the same ingredients (in the sense that tavolara or a question is the same ingredient) but ask one group to use a grill, one group to use a pan on a stove, one group to use only a cuisinart etc. but anyway, the pedagogical reason to get the students to use one media type is so that they can appreciate its properties on its own.

The thing that bothers me most about the assignment is that there is a serious disconnect between the artful choices required to both capture/produce AND compose/orchestrate, as though those activities can be discreet and separate (that disconnect is what tends to make a lot of multimedia assignments feel like the old Surrealist “exquisite corpse” drawing game; if that’s the rhetorical goal, then fine–but that’s limited to a particular kind of stance towards orchestration).

my instincts are that one of the problems with “multimedia” is that few of us really understand the components, that is we don’t really know what the different types can do on their own. i guess i don’t think we are so far advanced that we can conceive of a new media type which is multimedia. e.g. i don’t think people intuitively grasp how impt. sound is to a movie until it’s pointed out and they have an oppty to focus on it.

Instead, wouldn’t it be better to give students the question, and then consider which kind of media would be most effective to capture based on the rhetorical situation they’ve been confronted with, have the groups delegate that task amongst themselves? Beginning with the distribution of media before the question is putting the media/genre cart before the rhetorical horse, I think.

i’m not wedded to my schema, but it still seems like there would be some fantastic discussions in the classroom as students look at the different results and debate the advantages and disadvantages. it seems that experience would be helpful when they later start to create full multimedia projects.
and then of course there is the issue of interactivity which complicates everything exponentially.
b.
The conversation continues in the comment stream.

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