[courses]
Derrida DVD , SCI_Arc
[06.2006]
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A Software Seminar at SCI_Arc
Summer 2003
Benjamin H. Bratton
With Jose Caballer, Sean Crowe, Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering Kofman,
Database Aesthetics: storage is display, repetition is foregrounding, attribute is theme, portability is form, interaction is generation, script is program, input is movement.
Derrida DVD: Students will learn Apple DVD Studio Pro and will contribute to the design, development and production of the commercial DVD version of documentary film, Derrida, by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, and distributed by Zeitgeist Films.
We will use 26 hours of their original footage to develop several models for a more experimental (appropriate(d)) version of the DVD Derrida/Derrida DVD. Thanks to Kirby and Amy for letting us have at the raw goods.
http://www.derridathemovie.com
http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com
Key ConceptsCinema > Architecture Recently, much of the critical debates surrounding the relationships between cinema and architecture has been one in which architecture has been asked to assume the contours of a cinematic metaphor. Cities, buildings, spaces are, we learn, like films. But the dialogue between both systems can operate in the opposite direction as well. Cinema is architectural - it has form, shape, system, unfolding.
Digital Cinema Digital technologies allow for new kinds of architectural investigation of cinematic form, ones driven a by a database aesthetics of attribute, value and interaction. Digital cinema turns the image into bits, into data, fundamentally transforming the very material of cinema, and what can be done with it. Digital cinema is data, not film, and as such time, image and movement operate differently, no longer based in theatrical systems. However you can build with data, you can now build as and with data.
DVD The DVD format represents a new medium for cinematic exploration and expression, not just a silver platter on which to distribute cinema conceived and constructed for other means of dissemination. The format combines and recombines an array of digital image and sound files into coherent cinematic experiences. Employing DVD design software, the architect of digital cinema maps, structures and shapes cinematic form as a condition of recombinant data. Architectural logics of volume, grid, program, affect, texture, etc. not only still hold sway, they in fact condition the possibility of digital cinema design.
Deconstruction The exo-philosophical technology known as deconstruction is closely associated with the work of Jacques Derrida. Deconstruction, as an operation is not an analysis that comes from the outside and is imposed upon a "text" (literature, science, architecture, cinema, etc.) from this outside, but is rather reveals as an unfolding always already from inside each text, each containing its own limit, its own debt, its own undoing. Deconstruction is attentive to how the very mediation of a text (print, book, machine, reader, letter) is in fact the "content" of what the text would hope to be and to transmit. In this, it is precisely in the architecture of the text that is condition, its encounter, can be found.
Deconstructivist Cinema DVD affords unique opportunities to architect new modes of a deconstructivist cinema, one in which the structural logics of database aesthetics drive cinematic experience. Here the material systems of DVD become the basic building blocks of digital cinema and its deconstruction: display, storage, interaction, input, script, portability, etc.
Derrida DVDKirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman's award-winning documentary, Derrida, will serve as our case study. We will determine the criteria for deconstructivist cinema in the context of DVD, index footage taken over the year of shooting, metacode the footage according to project plan, architect cinema form according to metacoding and plan, encode relevant material in MPEG2 format, construct and script the disc, and develop a project autobiography along the way appropriate for press.
SCI_Arc and participating students will receive title credit on the commercial release of the disc and may use the project as part of their individual design portfolios.
NotesStudents will watch the film several times to construct options for the structural content system from with the database will be designed, and hence from which the multiple iterations of the footage will be derived.
GRID Allow for multiple remixes of the film according to generative database.
Produce experimental interactive forms from recombinant content.
Investigate relations between content types and forms.
SoftwareStudents will learn DVD Studio Pro 1.5
Students must be fluent in Photoshop, familiar with Avid, Final Cut or Premiere.
DocumentationThe course and the disc production will be documented for potential inclusion on the DVD as supplemental content.
Tags: digital media, sci-arc, theory
Published: 06.13.2006
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