LIVE CINEMA - REALTIME AND AUDIOVISUAL PERFORMANCE
Mia Mäkelä's presentation consisted of talking about live cinema, a recently coined term for real-time audiovisual performances. The term seems to have spurred from the need to separate this practice from pure VJ / club-context. She first talked a bit about her background, from media art studies to "fiftyfifty.org", a distributor and later organizer of cutting-edge digital cultural events and workshops, and from there to starting an audiovisual impro-band in the beginning of the laptop-era. She showed Ukiyo-e video from the earlier times, a noisy post-nuclear video, which she worked on with limited resources of those times: low ram and CPU, which also made the process interestingly challenging, just like in the early times of multimedia and CD-ROMs. A later piece, titled as Kaamos, showed a much better quality technically speaking. In all her works, there is a story or theme behind them. Ukiyo-e is about war, made just before the Irak War started. Kaamos was filmed in Finland during the darkest time of the year, and the result was multi-layered and finely processed visual poetry about the search for light.Mia also talked about aminima, a magazine about digital culture and media art, published in Spanish and English. She had edited the December number specialized on live cinema. Editing the number was a continuation for her thesis about the language of live cinema, which she finished in 2006, and which was supposed to function as an opener for discussion about the essence of real-time audiovisual performance. In the end of the presentation she also mentioned mediaarchitecture practice, which combines architecture and audiovisuals in the urban landscapes. Huge media facades are being built around the world, especially in Asia, and maybe it's the time for the creators to wake up before they are all filled with purely commercial material.
Later during the ragtag-workshop Mia gave a short introduction to Isadora software, which she considers a good and easier alternative to max/msp/jitter and puredata. In the workshop, people noticed how it is possible to build an interactive installation in 5 minutes with camera and sound-in options in the software.
Links:
http://solu.org
http://solu.org/LIVE_CINEMA.pdf
http://www.mediaarchitecture.org/
http://www.aminima.net
http://www.troikatronix.com/products/isadora
http://www.cycling74.com
http://www.puredata.org
http://www.sonicacts.com/wordpress/
