Mark Amerika, John Vega, Chad Mossholder, Jeff Williams: FILMTEXT

FILMTEXT Scene 01

Artist(s):

Title:

FILMTEXT

Exhibition:

SIGGRAPH 2002: Art Gallery
More artworks from SIGGRAPH 2002:

Creation Year:

2002

Medium:

digital narrative

Artist Statement:

As art becomes less elitist and more cybernetic in its behavior and cultural performance, it takes on rhetoric’s early role as persuasive critique of everyday life. As a result of this movement out of art elitism and back into everyday life, art itself becomes integrated into the workings of everyday life by situating itself in corporations, universities, governments and, more importantly, the fluid vistas of the vast electrosphere where all of these “cultures” collide and mix.

By trying to fully immerse ourselves in these colliding “cultures,” we hope to explore the interrelationship between digital narrative and rhetoric using what has become the in-progress language of the World Wide Web and its strategic positioning in the new media economy.

Technical Information:

Our team of collaborators worked with a variety of tools such as digital video cameras, digital cameras, portable digital audio recording devices, 30 and Web animation programs, computer graphics software, HTML and text editors, audio editing software, and stereo microphones. The images captured for the piece were shot on remote locations including the Haleakala desert landscape. This required portable yet reliable and powerful technology as well. A small sampling of the technology used includes a Powerbook G3, a Sony TRV-900 DV camcorder, a Nikon 990 Coolpix Digital Camera, Simpletext, Photoshop, Flash, Vegas, Acid Loops, QuarkXPress, and Acrobat.

The most significant technology used in the creative process associated with our collaborative FILMTEXT project was decidedly non-instrumental: the social network itself. As with all of my previous Web-based projects, FILMTEXT grew organically from a seed concept that essentially asked: “What is the difference among a work of digital video art, a film, an interactive animation, an audio ebook, and an online novel and an expanded concept of cinema?” Working on the WWW confuses genres and makes problematic the creative process in terms of practice, theory, and notions of authorship. All of the artists who contribute to FILMTEXT as an ongoing work in progress all use current hardware and software platforms to manifest their desired digital effects, but the artwork itself, once published/ exhibited on the Internet, becomes something bigger than any of the constituent artists could have ever expected. This inevitably leads us to question the role of technology even further.

Process Information:

FILMTEXT is a digital narrative for cross-media platforms including Flash animation, MP3 soundtracks, experimental artist ebook, and live net performance.

Created in the tradition of filmmakers such as Vertov, Godard, and Marker, FILMTEXT attempts to translate cinematic language into more multi-linear navigational forms associated with emergent new media genres such as net art, hypertext, and motion-graphic pictures.

FILMTEXT integrates my digital film/video art, digital photography, writing, animation, and sound art into a unique online work of interactive cinema. The work also comes equipped with an MP3 concept album and a conceptual art ebook.

As with many works of digital art, FILMTEXT initiates three separate, yet interconnected, artistic unfoldings: image, sound, text.

The project is currently being developed at the University of Colorado’s TECHNE practice-based research initiative under the direction of Mark Amerika. TECHNE focuses on the evolving forms of digital narrative, multi-media performance, and network installation, while paying particular attention to the research and development of hybridized forms of Internet art that challenge conventional exhibition contexts.