Open Ear: Cinema
Above: The End of Dans la Nuit (1929) by Charles Vanel
Cinema
The majority of cinema as a form seeks to:
- capture ideas and impressions of the spaces and places we inhabit or
- visualise those we can’t.
The former of these, representation, has been more dominant throughout cinema’s history. The lens has in effect become a means of capturing our ‘reality’, allowing us to store and later reproduce sights and sounds to be replayed as a substitute for personal memories.
With the arrival of computing and it’s now widespread use within cinema we see the latter begin to take dominance. Cinema as representation is changing to cinema as simulation, creating an era more important than the transition from silent to sound or from black and white to colour. Cinema has the possibility to become a form without any necessarily inferred referent, it is known, quantifiable (pixels) and so can be modified, abstracted, constructed in numerous ways. It’s method of production can be improved, changed or even reconceived allowing it’s authors to work as never before. Cinema arrives at the end of an era with promise of a new one enabling it to become immersive, live, participative, interactive, navigable, recombinatory, distributed, networked, coded etc.
On March 11th 2007, Open Ear hosted an event curated by myself at Canterbury Christ Church University Broadstairs Campus (http://www.canterbury.ac.uk/) entitled Cinema presenting performances and screenings on this theme. Works were intended to address the future of cinema and explore a diverse set of possible directions. The line-up for the evening was as follows:
- Semiconductor (http://www.semiconductorfilms.com/)
- Paul Adams (http://www.mrpauladams.com/)
- Frédérique Santune (http://www.saturne-feerique.net/LABO/)
- John Kannenberg (http://www.johnkannenberg.com/)
- Adam Chapman (http://www.adamchapmanart.com/)
- Inga Burrows & Sean Tuan John (http://www.wellinever.org/)
- 33dB (http://www.myspace.com/letageramegot)
Videos of all the performances are available here with some images of video works available here.
The Venue
Canterbury Christ Church University Broadstairs Campus, situated on the east coast of Kent, England approximately 30 minutes from Canterbury, opened in 2000 with a wide selection of higher education courses. The campus is committed to the arts and cultural regeneration of the area and regularly host’s events, exhibitions and performances on site.
Open Ear, audio-visual events and performances 2007 – 2008 are supported by Canterbury Christ Church University.
Open Ear
Open Ear, formed in 2006, is a loose collaborative group of like minded individuals creating audio-visual art and organising live events within club, gallery, open air or site specific venues. Our principal interests include collaboration, live performance, generative audio-visual work, hybridised art, DIY soundart, circuit-bending and networks.