Real Time Live

Abstract

In March 2009, DreamWorks Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Katzenberg announced that in conjunction with the release of the animated feature film Monsters Vs. Aliens (2009, directed by Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon), all of his company's subsequent film projects would be produced and exhibited in 3D. The gambit allows the studio to delineate clearly between the cinematic experience as it is enjoyed in the theater and the DVD screening in the home--or airplane, desktop, mobile device, and so on. The immersive film event could, in addition, prompt higher ticket prices and hinder piracy. Despite the wonders of 3D, this attempt to revitalize Hollywood's increasingly marginal role in moving-image entertainment remains merely one of the many examples of a broad-based dismantling and reconfiguration of cinema at the turn of the century as a once relatively stable form splinters into dozens of image/sound practices, ones that not only reference the generally elided history of avant-garde experiments of the last century, but also respond to new forms of networked, digital life that invite artful reconfigurations of time, space, and social interaction. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] One of the happier outcomes of this dismantling and reconfiguration is the convergence of visual music, forms of video art, and the fundamental properties of cinema in what is known as by which I mean the live, real-time mixing of images and sound for an audience, where the sounds and images no longer exist in a fixed and finished form but evolve as they occur, and the artist's role becomes performative and the audience's role becomes participatory. As described, this notion of live cinema remains cheerfully broad, welcoming at once the Nervous System Projection performances of the New York-based avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs and the audiovisual spectacles produced by the Light Surgeons, a group of British artists who work intensively with the relationship between sound, image and, on occasion, story. It embraces VJ performances, in which video is mixed live to accompany the performance of music, as well as immersive, ambient media environments crafted on the fly. In an interview about live cinema in 2008, Thomas Beard, who edited the collection of essays for San Francisco Cinematheque titled Cinematograph 7--Live Cinema: A Contemporary Reader (2008,), adds several other examples to emphasize the diversity of the form. He says: It means the manipulations of multiple small-gauge projectors by artists like Guy Sherwin or silt or Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, the image processing of LoVid on their custom-made hardware video equipment, or even intrepid uses of moving images in musical performances, like Text of Light, who situate silent experimental films as a sort of additional member in a broader improvisation. (1) In each of these instances, artists perform with moving images, sometimes playing overtly with the structural conditions of traditional cinema, and at other times moving more toward illustrated musical performance. While these examples diverge dramatically in terms of histories, tools, objectives, practices, and audiences, they are nevertheless emblematic of the form's expressive potential, and both underscore a widespread international interest in exploring diverse cinematic forms and suggest that the unity of the definition is grounded in the desire for liveness. Recent developments in media processing software have certainly helped enable these new genres of computer-facilitated live cinema expression across the world, and for the last five years, the form has at once emerged and returned, with performances illuminating galleries, museums, and festivals around the world. While there may not be as yet any kind of coalescence or sense of stability, live cinema, in its myriad manifestations, points to new needs and agendas in a networked, mediated culture. Despite the range of performance styles or genres, three aspects characterize this recent spate of live cinema work: first, the works insist on the live interaction of artwork, performer, and audience and suggest the desire for the event and its specificity; second, they propose an interrogation of forms, asking us to contextualize the event within histories of cinema, video, performance, art, and music; and third, the works often play on the liquidity of information and the sense that we exist in a world characterized not by concrete spatial boundaries and fixed temporal coordinates, but instead by a mobile, accelerating experience of fluidity and flows. …