As a Biennale
of Sydney 2008 parallel exhibition, the iCinema Centre is presenting T_Visionarium,
described by the Sydney Morning Herald as:
"the cutting edge of digital media art"
WHEN
Thursday 19 - Sunday 22 June 2008 | 1pm - 5pm
Screenings every 30 minutes from 1pm, last screening 4.30pm
WHERE
iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research
Lower Ground Floor
The John Niland Scientia Building (G19)
The University of New South Wales
Kensington Campus
iCinema Map
GETTING THERE
iCinema Centre at UNSW is easily accessible by public transport:
- 891 express bus from Central Station (Eddy Ave Stand D)
- 890,892 UNSW Peak hour, 392, 394, L94, 396, 397 and 399 operate along Elizabeth Street, City
- 370 from Leichhardt, Glebe, Newtown, Green Square and Coogee
- 400 from Bondi Junction, Airport, Rockdale, Burwood
- Other bus services to UNSW include 302,303,357,395 and 410
For more information on public transport to UNSW, call 131500 or click here.
Parking stations on the UNSW campus can be accessed through Barker Street Gate 14 or through Botany Street Gate 11.
Levels 5 + 6 are for visitors. Parking tickets can be purchased at $4.00 for 5 hours. Metered street parking is also available around the University.
For map of Kensington Campus click here.
T_Visionarium: A User's Guide
"Cinema leads images back to the homeland of gesture…What is relayed
in gestures is…the
sphere of a pure and endless mediality."
Giorgio
Agamben, Means Without End
"…a knowledge that multiplies gestures in a short time, in a limited space, so
that it renders information more and more dense, until it forms a rarer place
that sometimes becomes a dark solid…"
Michel Serres, Rome: The Book of Foundations
T_Visionarium offers the means to capture and re-present televisual
information, allowing viewers to explore and actively edit a
multitude of stories in three dimensions and in so doing, acting as an unprecedented
architectural framework for televisual databases. To achieve this, T_Visionarium
deploys the world’s first 360 degree stereoscopic projection cinema – the
Advanced Visualisation and Interaction Environment [AVIE] created by the
artists and engineers of iCinema. Viewers wearing three-dimensional glasses
step inside a cylindrical 120-square metre cinema screen, which creates the
environment for a fully immersive three-dimensional cinematic experience.
Twelve digital projectors generate a high-resolution stereoscopic 3D image
on the enveloping screen, and the audio is spatially enhanced via a 24 channel
surround sound system. Unlike the fixed seating arrangement of a conventional
cinema, AVIE allows audiences to wander freely through the projection space,
interacting with the projected information.
For T_Visionarium, 28 hours of digital free-to-air Australian
television was captured over a period of one week. This footage
was segmented and converted into a large database containing over 20,000
video clips. Each clip was then tagged with descriptors—or metadata—defining
its properties. This information includes the gender of the actors, the dominant
emotions they are expressing, the pace of the scene, and specific actions
such as standing up or lying down. Dismantling the video data in this way
breaks down the original narrative into components that then become the building
blocks for a new kind of interactive television.
Over two hundred video clips are simultaneously displayed and
distributed around AVIE’s huge circular screen. Using a special interface the viewer can select, re-arrange and link these video clips at will, composing them into combinations based on relations of gesture and movement. By these means, the experience of viewing the television screen is not so much superseded as reformatted, magnified and intensified. This immersive environment of T_Visionarium is not the simulator merging the virtual with the real, or the fantasy of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), which dissolves the distinction between televisual image and viewing space, but something closer to Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002), in which Tom Cruise shuffles video streams with his finger tips. The nature of this interactive engagement reveals something – more than we would usually see – about
the screen character, or media character of its source imagery.
It is the experience of this new kind of spatial connectivity that gives rise to a revolutionary way of seeing and reconceptualizing TV in its aesthetic, physical and semantic dimensions. To use the T_Visionarium apparatus is not to view a screen or even multiple screens, but to experience a space within which screen imagery is dynamically re-formulated.
In so doing, T_Visionarium actively explicates television but most importantly, it engages the domain in which it operates. Here, media is not an object of study but a material landscape in which we are component parts. T_Visionarium is a useable technology that locates us within a mediascape and makes us acutely aware of its operations, uncovering a televisual vocabulary of gesture. We see in sharp relief, the range and limitations of contemporary televisual gesture and action. Stripped of its conventional narrative context, the aesthetic, behavioural and media qualities of television become strikingly apparent. By affording us an active involvement, T_Visionarium hones both our awareness of and our dexterity with this media.
In essence, T_Visionarium is not so much a tool that delivers control of a mediascape but a mode of inhabiting our surroundings: a sphere of pure and endless mediality. In this and many other ways, it is a moment in the history of media: post cinema, post narrative, new media, but at the same time, a major study in television and an embodiment of a new, media aesthetics.
Jill Bennett
Credits
Project Directors: Neil Brown, Dennis
Del Favero, Matthew McGinity, Jeffrey
Shaw, Peter Weibel
Lead Software Engineer: Matthew McGinity
Distributed Video Engine: Balint Seeber
Application Software: Jared Berghold, Ardrian Hardjono, Tim Kreger, Thi Thanh Nga Nguyen, Gunawan Herman, Multimedia and Video Communication Research Group (Dr Jack Yu), NICTA
Project Co-Ordination and Interaction Design: Jeffrey Shaw, Matthew McGinity, Volker Kuchelmeister, Dennis Del Favero
Project Management: Damian Leonard, Kate Dennis, Sue Midgley
Project Assistants: David McKenzie, Caitlin Fraser, Gabriel Nervo
Audio Software: Tim Kreger
more...
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Location of the iCinema Centre
The John Niland Scientia Building
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