Most of the younger folks in the biz express frustration that the “system” is resistant to change, particularly the type of change that might render some people’s entire professions obsolete. And I get it – the fear of change is natural in every entrenched industry. No one wants to be faced with the possibility that large amounts of human and cash capital investments might be lost.

But I think what saddened me the most is that the creative people – writers, directors, producers – people shaping the content are so terrified of the forces of the market (and audiences) that they seem to be more conservative than ever in their creative choices. I’m sure the same was true of the artists who worked in silent films, when talkies came along, and of the unrivaled film industry when television came along, and on and on…

When I consider what has driven change in entertainment over the years, I see seismic shifts due to technology or social disruption that the industry then hobbles to catch up to. Very rarely do I see an instance of the business innovating from the inside. And I’m not talking about 3D technology either. I’m talking about creative shifts – experimentation WITHIN the medium of film.

The French New Wave changed film in a very radical way; it was a push within the medium that spoke to the era. And it changed the way in which storytelling in film had functioned until that point. This is an example of artistic innovation within the medium – introducing new ideas into the lexicon and pushing the possibilities of film further. I acknowledge that the movement came from outside the “establishment” and only slowly seeped into the way mainstream films were later made and viewed; BUT the movement was a real, working consideration of film as a process and a form, as art that evolves.

We are in a very different predicament today.  Filmmaking itself as we know it may be approaching obsolescence and there is little happening inside the medium that is a direct response to this issue. The fact that blockbuster movies are looking and sounding a lot more like videogames is a strong indication that without meaning to, the medium will experience inevitable, perhaps accidental change. However, without the minds of artists whose job it is to think these ideas through and experiment with what film *could* be in the future, we will accept a mishmash that is little more than the residue of innovation in other kinds of creative endeavors like gaming and interactive play.

As those who follow me know, I am a huge proponent of platform agnostic storytelling – I am after all, a transmedia storyteller. But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate and respect the specificity and art of each individual medium. I love reading books and I adamantly believe that the experience is like no other. I don’t read because there’s nothing to watch. I read because I love *to read*. I play games when I want that experience. I go to concerts when I feel like I want to be surrounded by the energy and life of the audience and band.  So while I am fully committed to working with connective storytelling, I am still a filmmaker who would like to find a space in which filmmaking as an art can grow deeper, more meaningful and expansive as a medium.

If film is to survive, we need to aggressively experiment creatively with the medium. That is our job as artists, and for the folks who make money off the work, they too must understand that innovation is not a choice – it’s that, or perish.

After watching the final selections, I decided to post two of the most interesting, provocative and relevant pieces.

The first, Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake turns out interestingly enough to be from the oldest artist in the lineup from what I can tell. Yet Perry Bard’s is the most interactive, having crowdsourced the footage that appears in the “remake” half of the screen. Footage was “shot by people around the world who are invited to record images interpreting the original script of Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera (1929) and upload them to her site. Software developed specifically for this project archives, sequences, and streams the submissions as a film.”

Most interesting to me is the fact that Vertov’s original 1929 film was itself a future-leaning re-invention of the visual narrative, an “database” style of montage that comes to mirror the experience of a platform like Youtube.

And from a young former Air Force Security Forces soldier, is Post Newtonianism (WAR FOOTAGE/CALL OF DUTY 4 MODERN WARFARE FOOTAGE), a terribly disturbing but arresting combination of a loop of actual war footage with gameplay from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Josh Bricker mixes “the in-game audio with a Wikileaks-released video of the U.S. military killing of two Reuters reporters and unarmed civilians.”

While I have not watched all the videos, I did notice that none of the experimental videos I recently discovered on Vimeo are among the selected. Of course I have no idea if the artists actually submitted to that competition or not but I suppose the idea is to be on YouTube, not Vimeo.

In any event, a somewhat lower-key call for artists was occurring over at Vimeo, and a peer vote for the Vimeo Festival Awards revealed a number of experimental artists’ work that stood out to me enough to share them as part of my occasional curations of experimental video.

The first is Oops, a mesmerizing collage of lo-rez found footage by Chris Beckman, whose feel for interstitial, at once mundane and often simultaneously terrifying moments captured from the camera’s perspective is brilliant. In this video, one feels the artist has a complete grasp of what makes web video sharing culture an act of voyeurism that can be shocking in its quietest stretches. At first it will seem like any old YouTube family fare you accidentally stumbled across. But stay with it, and you will be mesmerized by the rhythm and soul of this piece.

oops from Chris Beckman on Vimeo.

Insyn (Eng: Observation) is by contrast very formal and might at first seem stagey – the costumes will likely recall those people incessantly ridiculed on hipster-hater sites that proliferate almost daily on the web. No need to be daunted by Klara Elenius’s artifice; the choreography of this domestic scene between three young, almost emotionally impenetrable dancers is beautiful. I was drawn by the control of color and composition, a taut architectural vision of space, texture and movement that is pure video painting.

Insyn (eng: Observation) from Klara Elenius on Vimeo.

Such is the case in the new partnership announced last week between the illustrious Guggenheim Museum and Youtube, called YouTube Play. According to the Washington Post article on the launch, the Guggenheim sees this collaboration as an opportunity to “raise the standards” of YouTube. The writer of that piece takes issue with this idea, arguing that the beauty of user generated and curated content is precisely the randomness of it, and that it’s “strange to introduced a juried sensibility to a relatively new, user generated world”.

I feel as though this is a conversation I’ve had with folks who find “curation” as an idea to be yet another way to limit the forms and bind the creativity of artists, media makers and their audiences who are freely discovering all the randomness of the video/film art frontier on the web. While I don’t think institutions like the Guggenheim are well-informed enough about what is really happening in the frontier they are seeking, I do think there ought to still be curatorial forces that engage in thoughtful considerations of what is happening now, AS it is happening. We don’t have to wait a decade to figure out what the movements in video art were in the first decade of the 21st century. Information is readily accessible but it has to be searched for, studied and considered, before any grand pronouncements can be made.

In the museum world, there has traditionally been a very small pipeline leading to the galleries and eventually museums, and in order to have access to it, an artist had to be somewhat “in the know”. So I wonder now whether an open call for artists to submit their work publicly via YouTube isn’t just taking opposite yet similarly limiting tactic – that is to say the fact of YouTube doesn’t make for a better considered curation, it only makes for more submissions. It isn’t terribly different from any kind of open call, even a blatantly populist one like American Idol.

I wonder if institutions like the Guggenheim wouldn’t do better to study the troves of video ALREADY out there, and curate something based on real discovery, wherein a serious study of emerging video art forms is undertaken, and the discovery of video artists who may or may not consider themselves artists, might actually occur. We live in a culture of over-abundant content, and that is why I support curation. In my estimation, there shouldn’t just be a choice between clueless high-art curator vs. engaged user-curated option. There are lots of interesting movements happening right under our noses, and we don’t need a competition to discover them. Alright, Guggenheim?

The powerful web-based platform that has emerged as the model to watch is Kickstarter, describes itself as “a new way to fund creative ideas and ambitious endeavors” hosts projects by “artists, filmmakers, musicians, designers, writers, athletes, adventurers, illustrators, explorers, curators, promoters, performers”

I love the idea, and the fact that as an artist, you have to justify why you should be funded, and exactly what the money will be used for. AND, your patrons only get charged if your project is fully funded within the set time frame. It’s brilliant. And I think it works for everything from those really crazy estoteric ideas to those creative social change ideas – because communities gather enthusiastically around the entire range. Here are two projects that are fully funded and worth taking a look at:

Stories for Changemakers, a documentary series showing organizations and individuals doing remarkable work all over the world. It is even more remarkable that the footage is also handed over to these “Changemakers” to use for their organizations’ media outreach.

A truly out-of-the-box story based board game called The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands

By way of history, the Spanish Republican government commissioned cubist painter Pablo Picasso to create a large mural for the Spanish display at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937) Paris International Exposition in the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. As you can see, the painting depicts the bombing of the Spanish city of Guernica by the Germans and Italians during the Spanish Civil War.

Guernica, Pablo Picasso 1937

Imagine my surprise when I came upon this 3D rendering of Guernica by a Spanish autoCAD design company  GaliciaCAD. With my limited Spanish, I browsed their website and discovered that they’re actually not in the business of entertainment at all. It seems this piece was some sort of a demo for their design work. Interesting idea, I think. Of course, there is no better candidate for 3D than Picasso, given the dimensionality of his later work.

Now, to imagine the possibilities of 3D that is truly original!

Guernica 3D from GaliciaCAD on Vimeo.

Frame grab from Metropolis, 1927

I recently saw Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis – a masterwork of the German Expressionist period summarized here by Kino Video after its recent full-length re-release: ”Metropolis takes place in 2026, when the populace is divided between workers who must live in the dark underground and the rich who enjoy a futuristic city of splendor. The tense balance of these two societies is realized through images that are among the most famous of the 20th century, many of which presage such sci-fi landmarks as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner. Lavish and spectacular, with elaborate sets and modern science fiction style, Metropolis stands today as the crowning achievement of the German silent cinema.

Metropolis was a work of enviable imagination when it was created, something likely lost on contemporary viewers when watching the lengthy, silent flickering black and white spectacle.  But at its heart are haunting questions of power and modernity, labor and class, slavery and morality and of course, in the grand tradition of cinema – love.

It takes some patience to view in an age where we are bombarded with sights and sounds in 5.1 surround with grand pyrotechnic theatrics and the like. But I found myself mesmerized by not only the artful renderings of a future urban dystopic world, but by some of the most powerful images in the history of cinema. This image of the man grasping the hands of the gigantic clock that looms above the gulag type factory where workers toil below has to be one of the most brilliantly symbolic images of any science fiction film ever made.

Iconic clock image from Metropolis, 1927

This had been on my mind for weeks when suddenly through a twitter post by Maria Popova (@brainpicker) I discovered a very interesting parallel in the modern world. A few months ago, a series of photographs entitled Dubai, Transmutations had come into the media-sphere and somehow made its way through the cultural curations of the twitterati. The work of French photographer Martin Becka, these photographs brought my mind’s eye right back to Metropolis.

Using a 150 year old camera, Becka photographs Dubai in its current state: the once-bourgeoning city of the future as it were, languishing slowly in a concrete desert. Once fueled by the spoils of oil-rich empires and now suddenly empty of the hope and promise of a perfect metropolis. In the background of these images, construction cranes hover; not so much as objects of change and transformation but instead as gigantic relics of an unfinished world.

It’s unclear to me whether the photographer intended to make the connection between the film and his images or not – but either way, I thought it an interesting musing for the end of one decade and the beginning of another.

Cityscapes of Dubai, 2009

Here’s an excerpt from the exhibit:

The images of the thousands of building sites of Dubai’s metamorphosis have been captured with a wooden photographic tool of a very large format on negative waxed papers, using a process invented approximately 160 years ago by Gustave Le Gray. These photographs were then printed on albumin paper and toned with gold. Since its invention, when photography was still an expensive, elaborate and experimental pursuit for the happy few to the present day with its democratic ubiquity of camera phones, photography has remained the main technology through which we both understand and record the world.

You can see additional images from the exhibition on the The Empty Quarter gallery website, as well as more information on the technique.

This is a PS3 game. Not a piece of installation art. That’s all I’ll say for now. Ponder that while I go buy a Sony Playstation. Seriously though, I’m curious – really curious. So consider this Part 1. In Part 2, I’ll discuss what this could mean in the wider space of media art and storytelling.

Here’s some sample gameplay that shows you how it looks when you’re actually controlling.

My initial post had this WSJ video review but due to their technical issues streaming the embed this morning, I pulled the above clips. It’s worth reading.

This is an amateur movie made by a member of the The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society in 1947. Strange, you may think, as it seemed to me when I first watched this one of several films created by members of this Society as a way to analyze their dreams.

Initially, The Lion Dream struck me as the tender, heartbreaking story of a son (possibly Jewish) who lost his parents in WW2 Germany and then as an adult in 1947, attempts to re-visit the fear he harbored as a child that something devastating was about to happen.

But that’s only part of the story.

I selected this film from the materials that comprise the project  “Dreamland: The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and Its Circle, 1926-1972” because I found it haunting. Who is Teddy Weisengrund? Did he really dream this story? Or did he simply imagine it as an exercise in Freudian psychoanalysis?

The artist Zoe Beloff seems to be asking that question and many more about this curious group that was active in Coney Island between 1926 and 1972. What is not immediately apparent but which I later learned, is that this film may or may not be the ACTUAL film Teddy Weisengrund created in 1947. And maybe there was a Teddy Weisengrund or perhaps there wasn’t…

I was introduced to Beloff’s work by Mike Monello, who showed me a delightfully rendered book “written by” members of the group. It seemed for all intents and purposes a “genuine” work. But upon further investigation into Beloff’s project, I discovered it was in fact deceptively simple. As Monello astutely pointed out, this project is an unidentified piece of Transmedia storytelling – a kind of creativity without media boundaries, filled with such enormous passion for these stories and characters that you almost don’t care if it is “real” or not.

Zoe Beloff is one of those wildly creative figures whose ambitious work lives in a space somewhere between filmmaking and installation art. Her multimedia exhibition that showed at the Coney Island Museum this past summer was a combination of objects, films, drawings and writings about this visually prolific group of amateur psycholanalysts whose interest in Freud led them into all manner of activity, including trying to resurrect DREAMLAND a razed Coney Island museum and fashion it into “the first amusement park ever devoted to the elucidation of dreams in accordance with the discoveries of Doctor Sigmund Freud M.D.”

According to the New York Times article on the exhibit, Beloff, who works with found footage and objects, accidentally discovered relics of this fascinating bunch of psychoanalysis enthusiasts, and began this project to reconstruct their world. The article discusses Beloff’s prior interest in the relationship between the real and fictional, noting that most of her work “incorporates film and video in multimedia projects and environments in which the boundaries between historical fact and creative interpretation — what really was and what might have been — tend to blur.”

For the project, Beloff set about reconstructing these films, made for dream analysis purposes and imagining how each member (fictional or real) might have created his/her film. It seems Beloff has combined found home video footage with some new images fashioned in the style of the time and of the individual authors who puportedly created the films, to complete the ideas that make up the Dream Films 1926-1972 .

Beloff’s work, as wild and bizarre as it sometimes seems, illustrates what can happen when storytelling is released from the bounds of specific media or the constraints of the fictional versus the real. To me, The Lion Dream is a beautiful, understated testament to the quiet terror of a child in a moment of uncertainty made even more poignant by the possibility that it was recreated by one person in memory of another, in honor of two others.

Over tea in Brooklyn’s train-rattling DUMBO neighborhood, Monello and I spent a few lively hours discussing a broad range of ideas surrounding the practice of Transmedia and what it means to the form and art of the story when we cross into the wild, expansive possibilities of narrative without boundaries. Again and again, he cited examples of  audience engagement AS art, performance, and not simply the necessarily evil creative people have to suffer to get their work seen by audiences. I recognized that as artists, especially filmmakers, the “art” of audience engagement may be the hardest one to embrace yet in constructing the full Transmedia experience, Monello demonstrated how critical it is.

What struck me as we spoke was how accessible and practical Monello was but then I remembered that it was he and his group of collaborators after all, that were responsible for the savvy, practical and explosive phenomenon known as The Blair Witch Project. (He calls that an early, unidentified Transmedia project – which spawned lesser known books and games that expanded the story and appealed to varying audiences) Yet as the same time, I found myself his unbridled love for story and his zeal for the challenge of creating compelling, immersive experiences rather infectious.

Because it was my obsession with rapidly shifting world of narrative form and content that led me to start writing this blog in the first place, I bombarded Monello with questions about how he and his partners at Campfire manage to do what they do, convince brands to let them create cross-platform stories and experiences; badgered him for the requisite end-of-year 2010 predictions; and pestered him for speculations on when Transmedia might go wide. He was gracious and patient with his extensive answers – a limited selection of which I am posting here.

WHAT IS A STORYTELLER WITHIN TRANSMEDIA?
Rejecting the limitations of titles such as “filmmaker”, Monello says stories can be anywhere and on any platform so he privileges the term “storyteller” above all others. When a storyteller is effective, s/he is “conducting” and “orchestrating” a creative narrative experience for an audience, no matter where that might be. He is adamant that audiences should be able to engage as lightly or as deeply as they want, and that all engagement experiences should be built with that in mind – value at very level. Emphasizing that a Transmedia narrative might have a component as low-tech as a paper invitation (which Campfire used in the True Blood campaign), the goal is always to allow the audience to engage, and dig deeper if they so desire.

WHAT HAPPENS TO THE ARTIST/AUTEUR’S VISION IN TRANSMEDIA NARRATIVES?
In designing the narrative experience, Monello says, “the dirty little secret of transmedia narratives: creators have far more control over the story than anyone really lets on.” In more cases than not, when an audience engages with the intention of building/contributing to a narrative, they are playing a role that has been designed by the author of that story. So to all those auteurs nervous about crossing into the abyss of a creative world run by crazed mob fans, there’s nothing to fear. On the contrary, encouraging fans to engage can only increase the value of one’s brand.

WHAT WILL IT TAKE FOR TRANSMEDIA NARRATIVES TO BECOME MAINSTREAM?
Right now, he says he still struggles with mainstream marketing teams resistance “to constructing a convergent multiplatform narrative” because of the splintered way agencies handle all their platforms–hardly ever basing a campaign vision on a unified cross-platform story. Despite challenges on the brand side with which he works,  Monello thinks the Transmedia road is still a lot tougher on the Film and TV studio side where one might expect there to be more story innovation. The ideal scenario, he says, is that a powerful showrunner will initiate a Transmedia project across the board and turn it into audience gold but doubts that will really happen. He believes a more likely scenario is that the “game-changer will come from an indie creator,” not unlike a Blair Witch scenario of the next decade who “with the force of the fans will reformulate the system”.