Page 84 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

84cinema and television come into it, but also music, literature... actually everything. Insisting on not seeing the overall situation amounts to a head-in-the-sand approach.Cinema was the rst art which needed machinery to exist and technology is part of its very nature. Therefore what is frightening is not the evolution of the media but the decline of an established way of operating.Not only the world of lm or the cultural industries have changed: this is a global movement that extends to all areas of life.The world we live in doesn’t bear much of a resemblance to the one that gave rise to motion pictures in the late nineteenth century, or to the twentieth century, where they enjoyed their heyday as an industry.The digitisation of technology is bringing a period of our history to a close, but it’s also opening up new avenues for exploring that are lled with fascinating possibilities.Granted, these many new paths have not yet been developed to the point of becoming pro table business models (I’ll return to this later on), but from a purely formal viewpoint we’re experiencing a moment of rich potential never before witnessed.To start o with, 3D lm, after many attempts (that failed to achieve convincing results), has nally become another o ering for audiences, now with appropriate technical guarantees.Admittedly, as a language it’s still in its infancy: we’re at the showing o and technical wonder stage (the wow e ect): priority is given to objects that come ying towards the viewerand all kinds of reworks that exploit the visual possibilities of the medium over a reasonable use based on the storyline, but it’s a phase that has to be gone through. (The same thing happened with cinema, or don’t we remember any more?).9A similar case is video-mapping, the technique of projecting images onto various surfaces (usually buildings) where the audiovisual has been created especially for the projectionsite. As I pointed out earlier, although the rst examples are a display of technical rather than storytelling prowess, there are new possibilities to be explored.10Another eld worth examining is 360-degree video. The fact – which many people nd unsettling – of losing the frame as a reference has sparked doubts about its e ectivenessas a narrative device. In fact the problem isa di erent one: it’s not that videos aren’t framed, it’s more that the director has lost the privilege of doing so, which now belongs to the user.11 Although we can view these images ona computer screen, smartphone or tablet, the experience is unarguably better when we usethe headsets designed especially for this typeof work.12 In this case they are for individual viewing, but it will only be a matter of timeuntil the necessary technology is developedfor collective (and interactive) viewing, just as MMROG (massively multiplayer online role- playing games)13 have made it possible for various players to interact simultaneously in a shared gaming environment.A fourth avenue is interactive audiovisual, which is already o ered by many platforms, including Youtube.14In the last two cases we are dealing with formats that o er immersive possibilities which up until now were only available with videogames. Once again, it is surprise and fear of losing control that makes professionals reluctant: the forking paths Borges wrote about are an audiovisual reality, just as it is a fact that these two media are moving closer together and are destined to meet.So far I’ve detected only one possible problem that has any proper substance, and which we have the power to avoid. I am referring, as Laura Ruggiero so aptly puts it,15 to viewers’ possibleDATA, INTERFACES & STORYTELLING: AUDIOVISUAL IN THE DIGITAL AGE · MONTECARLOSmart Culture: Impact of the Internet on Artistic Creation