Non-linear narratives in video

I was reading this good article calledSegmentation and Reassembly of the Digital Moving Image by Susanne Jaschko, and she was giving examples of different works starting from 1993 Toshio Iwai’s Another Time, Another Space which comings and goings of people through the station were filmed by cameras and were manipulated in realtime by the computer to deform shape, time references and showing a different time-space environment on each monitor, and going with Manovich’s soft cinema which she gives as another example of searching new ways in video. Iwai’s example is good because he is playing with the spatiotemporal attribute of time, and it looks like he is the first one to play with this. Zerrfalten by Stephan Schulz and Nelson Vergara is another example of this play. There is an pdf in english tells in detail the process.The important part is segmentation of the data and re-using this in a new sense. The article is stressing the digital moving image’s liberation in today’s culture and manifesting that it is leading to new artistic models representing the complex concepts of time and space.

Well she is right at some point, because I came to this project actually before reading her article. Khronos Projector by Alvaro Cassinelli is a video time-warping machine with tangible deformable screen.

from the site:

The Khronos Projector is an interactive-art installation allowing people to explore pre-recorded movie content in an entirely new way. A classic video-tape allows a simple control of the reproducing process (stop, backward, forward, and elementary control on the reproduction speed). Modern digital players add little more than the possibility to perform random temporal jumps between image frames.

The goal of the Khronos Projector is to go beyond these forms of exclusive temporal control, by giving the user an entirely new dimension to play with: by touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time. By actually touching a deformable projection screen, shaking it or curling it, separate “islands of time” as well as “temporal waves” are created within the visible frame. This is done by interactively reshaping a two-dimensional spatio-temporal surface that “cuts” the spatio-temporal volume of data generated by a movie.

This project is interesting to me in two ways. First, it is good because it is commenting on the linearity that we are having in our everyday lives in front of the screen. It is showing us a new way of perceiving this phenomenon. The second, it is doing this with a tangible interface. This means a transparent interface between the user and the subject. I am really curious about the algorithm behind the morphing between the different timelines of the videos, they look really slick, it looks like opening a door in timeline. I want to do some experiments on this in jitter.

I came across to Khronos project before but now I have found the time to understand it yet better. It has won the Grand prize at Japan Media Arts Festival.

Golan Levin has an informal catalogue of slit-scan video artworks as he named at this site.