Category: Creative Practice & Strategy

There is a new wave of cinema experiences emerging that points to the revival of the cinema event. Contrasting interactive film (which can be experienced by one person and the interaction is limited to a DVD or remote input), these cinema events require audiences to participate in some way in an event environment.

• Kinoautomat (movie vending-machine), 1967… 2007

This 1967 work by Radúz Çinçera, One Man and His House, is a film that was screened at the Montreal World Fair in a specially-constructed cinema with buttons for the audience. The film continually stops at certain points, two of the actors then come on stage and ask the audience to make their choice of direction.  This is regarded as the first interactive cinema work and is interesting too because the film was specifically designed for this interaction. However, it should be noted that the interaction (like many interactive works for various technical and skills reasons) was only the illusion of interaction. As Media Art Net observes, although a different filmic sequence was shot and screened based on the audience choice. The next choice was always the same. It has recently been revived with an English version being screened in Prague. An interview with Radúz’s daughter, Alena Çinçera , and more pics is here.

Image sourced from Media Art Net. Copyright Radúz Çinçera

• Cause and Effect , 2002/…

Inspired by Kinoautomat, Chris Hales has been creating short ‘interactive cinema performances’. Cause and Effect has been running specially-created short films since 2002 and is currently touring Poland and Finland. There is a video available for download on the site, and here is a basic description from the main page:

We experiment with various techniques of group interaction and the types of interactive film that are commensurate with it. Although using sophisticated methods, the show is designed to be portable, tourable, and suitable for most venues. Currently interaction methods enable audiences to influence films by shouting, passing around bright or coloured lights, using mobile phone handsets, waving, singing soprano and humming. A typical performance consists of around eight short interactive movies (chosen from a substantial repertoire) covering genres of video art, drama, non-fiction, education, and music. The show is both entertaining and intellectual and appeals to a wide audience demographic. It is constantly developing, with varied modes of interaction being explored and new films being regularly created. Certain films are customised for the actual theatre and the language of the country in which the show takes place during a rapid pre-production phase when we arrive at the location. This localisation adds to the audience’s surprise and involvement with the films presented to them.

Image sourced from Cause and Effect

• Lance Weiler’s “Cinema ARG”, 2006/…

As I’ve mentioned here before, Lance Weiler created a unique theatre experience for the screening of his latest film, Head Trauma. His ‘cinema ARG’ involves special screenings of the film with a band playing the soundtrack live, actors and props from the film in the audience and mobile phone interaction. It has been touring across the USA and is now expanding to the web. His latest description:

This fall the HEAD TRAUMA cinematic gaming continues. Players will interact with the film’s characters; offline, online, and via mobile devices in what is a cross between flash mobs, urban gaming, and ARGs. The game starts in late September with the airing of a special web series. The series will run across a number of outlets such as myspace, xbox, twitter, eyespot, stage 6 and opera. Then on Oct. 20th, live cinema games will play out in 10 cities across the country. Within the series are clues aka rabbit holes that lead to hidden sites, blogs, social networking pages and media. A full list of cities will be released in the coming weeks.

• MSNBC’s Newsbreaker Game, 2007

As I’ve mentioned before in my post that includes stats on its success, this example is an interactive cinema advertisement. They actually call the work ‘interactive crowd gaming’ in movie theatres. It was created by SS+K in collaboration with Brand Experience Lab for msnbc.com. Here is a video of one of the cinema events:

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All of these works show without doubt the reinvigoration of the embodied and multi-modal cinema experience. What I find exciting are the fact that many of these works (and more to come I’m sure) are being specially designed. Do you know of some other interactive cinema performances/gaming?

Kylie Robertson of Ish Media, the lass behind such interactive dramas Jupiter Green and the website for Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight, has launched her latest offering: Girl Friday. It is available for free via the web and mobile (in Australia). The main website is at www.GirlFriday.tv with videos at YouTube, including this trailer:

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Although not everyone realises it, I am actually based in Australia. I spend alot of time online checking out what is happening around the world. The Net is great for this, but at the same time I hardly ever get to meet my colleages in person. This year I’ve travelled to five countries and meet many researchers & designers who have come to Oz from OS. Here are some pics of me (in order of meeting) with some colleagues who share my research interest (I’ve met others but don’t have the pics): 

Photo by ?, uploaded by Eric Voight on flickr

This motley crew is the group shot from the First International Conference on Cross-Media Interaction Design held in Sweden in March. Wohoo! It was great meeting lots of people, including my fellow keynoter Liam Bannon. But in particular I was thrilled to meet Monique de Haas and Jak Boumans. In the pic: bottom right in the blue jacket is Monique, behind her is Liam, beside Liam is me, beside me (to the left) is Jak, and below Jak is Charlotte Wiberg who with Mikael Wiberg (the first guy to the left of Charlotte) are the conference organisers. 

Monique and I have been championing cross media for years now. We were discussing this stuff via emails and through our blogs long before it became a pervasive economic imperative. I got to spend lots of time with Monique as I stayed with her in Amsterdam and then Monique, Jak and I gave an impromptu panel session at Noordelijke Hogeschool where I was asked to give a lecture (organised by Eric Voight who is also in the pic). It was a delight meeting Jak — whose years of experience with the area has given him a balanced wisdom and generous spirit.

Photo by a lovely lady from AMP, on Jane’s flickr

This is myself and Jane McGonigal (right). Jane is of course the first major researcher of alternate reality games, she has lots of presentations and articles and a dissertation on the topic. It was especially great chatting with Jane because we got to talk about ARGs but also because she works in industry and academia. It was so good to share stories with someone who understands what it is like.

Photo by Tama Leaver, on flickr

This is Lisbeth Klastrup (left), myself and Jill Walker (right), both of whom I met for the first time at perthDAC 2007. Lisbeth co-wrote a paper with Susana Tosca on ‘Transmedial Worlds: Rethinking Cyberworld Design’, which I have referred to here and in my papers and is in my chapter on World Creation in my thesis. The paper is available for download on Lisbeth’s articles site. Jill has written on ‘distributed narratives’ which I’ve referred to here many times, in many of my presentations and of course is in my thesis too. Check out her dedicated minisite  and here is a snippet:

Distributed narratives don’t bring media together to make a total artwork. Distributed narratives explode the work altogether, sending fragments and shards across media, through the network and sometimes into the physical spaces that we live in. This project explores this new narrative trend, looking at how narrative is spun across the network and into our lives.

Now actually meeting people who share your research interest may not be exciting to you, but to someone who doesn’t get to meet people who work in this emerging area (and so not many looking at it) it is an absolute delight.