Andreas Kratky "Absences"
Name: Absences
When was it released?: May 1, 2004
When has it been shown?: It continues Manovich's interest in database as a new film medium. Malcolm Le Grice was exploring this notion about fifteen years ago, and doing the coding himself. Here, Manovich and Kratky work with software developers Shoenerwissen/Office for Computational Design to visualise their video database.
b) Detailed Description:
Soft Cinema: Lev Manovich describes soft cinema as the creative opportunities of software culture, cinema and architecture. Its specification include films, dynamic visualizations, computer-driver installations, architectural designs, print catalogs and DVDs. The aim of projects show new representational forms of software cinema to use new dimensions of our time and the effects of subjectivity. Each performance is unique. The database is programmed so the story is never the same. Aim, how narrative and database can work together. Lev Manovich ideas soft cinema to allow the human mind to create a story for themselves and each scene is a unique interpretation.
Soft Cinema explorers 4 ideas: Algorithmic Cinema, Macro-cinema, Multimedia cinema and Database Cinema.
1. Algorithmic Cinema: Focusing on experimental film and contemporary "new media" production. Much of the filmmaker, Hollis Frampton, who anticipates todays algorithmic ways, Frampton's work about new media have some significant consequences and some authors and artists follow his works about new media, such as, Lev Manovich, John Simon, P.Adams Sitney.
2. Macro-cinema: Computer user employs windows of different proportions and sizes.
3. Multimedia Cinema: 2D animations, motion graphics, 3D scenes, diagrams, etc.
4. Database Cinema: Database becomes the center of the creative process in the computer age and the artist made a unique work inside of a particular medium. The story develops by selecting scenes from a given collection. Linear narrative structure opposite of the traditional cinema. New Media objects lack this strong narrative component, they do not have beginning or end they just start or stop any point when they want to start or stop. Lev Manovich first related the database to cinema to understand the changing technologies of filmmaking techniques in media. Database and narrative are natural enemies.
Soft Cinema, the database is an ambitious project by Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky. There are three films; Texas, Mission to Earth and Absences. All three works use space to explore feelings between the individuals and their environment and relationships. "Soft Cinema project is designed to take a number of forms, including different movie editions, installation versions, and publications. Each edition movie presents different narratives and uses different media databases".
" For the Absences database each film clip was analyzed in regards to several visual qualities such as brightness, contrast, texture, activity, the difference between the center and the periphery, and the difference between the upper and the lower part. The soundtrack of Absences comes from the same parameter space: the curves describing the temporal development of the activity, brightness and contrast values of the individual clips were used to synthesize sounds that were then combined with location sound. The rhythm of the filmic montage also creates a sonic rhythm. The overall film sound track follows the progression of film visuals from more concrete to more abstract by moving from location sound to the layered abstract sound".
Absences: Like previous works, the images shown unique parameters. These parameters include brightness, contrast, texture, activity, frequency, and others. The Absences was created without pre-set narrative.It gives different sets of images and footage, the theme surrounds the aspect of natural and urban surroundings. "The montage and split-screen structure are also spatial in their relativism. Kratky's work is more distant, more of a poem to Manovich's prose, which perhaps also has something to do with his use of the film noir aesthetic".
Andreas Kratky's Absences is the more abstract than Texas and Mission to Earth. The artist use the black and white narratives in the movie and the fragments of film describing urban and nature scenes. This movie has three main aspects that are sound, parameters and montage. It is interesting the differences between part of the frame, contrast, texture, activity, etc. There are many different visual experiences cause not to fully focus one by one.
"Today I am going to leave...I will be on the way again, heading to some other place...I do not belong here..."
Absences is a movie that use many small windows and some sentences to explain ideas about alienation, solitudes, and escape from everything. We can understand there is a woman in this movie because of her ideas about a lovely boy and sentences like comes from her mouth without seeing her. She feels that everything and everyone same in the world and she should go somewhere else to escape everything. She thinks that there is no reality anymore and she wants to follow the light to go other country. The light symbolize the 'hope', the 'brightness' and the good 'feelings' in this movie. Because the scenes are black and white like an everything shows depressive feelings. She does not feel to belong herself in this area and she just wants to run away everything to find light.
In this movie we can obviously see the alienation for woman. Alienation; a feeling of being alone and aparts or distance from the society and others. In this video, the woman also thinks that she does not belong in her life and she wants to escape everything about her life. "I do not belong here...."
References
Soft Cinema- Lev Manovich & Andreas Kratky
Database as Symbolic Form-Lev Manovich
Soft Cinema- Ambient Narrative. Lev Manovich & Andreas Kratky
http://www.softcinema.net/absences.htm
