Together with my fellow filmmakers Frerk Lintz, Mirko Kubein and Hendrik Löbbert I’ve launched the film collective FILMFOREST.
We felt that there is the necessity for a new aaproach to online video journalism. Online video has been around for about five years now but most of the productions lack originality, concept and visuality. We think, now it’s time to leave the quick&dirty paradigm behind and try out new ways. Online video needs to free itself from the close-minded production structures of tv networks and publishing houses, on the net there is a global and awake audience, bored by the ever-the-same tv formats which chop information into easy-to-swallow bits and pieces.
We think online video is the medium to create new formats. We want to do films, which last as long as the story needs to be told, which speak with a strong visual language to the voice of a subjective, combative author.
Because it is the right time.
FILMFOREST will start as a blog, we’ll have some talks and screenings soon, and hopefully will be doing out own productions soon.
I’m invited to speak at the cinema Lumière in Maastricht on May 15th. The event is called Digitally Unreel and presents filmmakers, who incorporate digital effects in their work. I will show my short film Palindrome and some other works in progress. I will speak about how technology influences my work, but will also present some more general ideas on the the interplay of technology and art.
About:
“Film lovers define key moments in their lives by the movies that have accompanied them, but what is often lost in the ether is the technology that punctuates their emotional effectiveness and makes them memorable. It is for that reason that we decided to highlight the technological side of film making in discussing the digitization of film, but steer clear from getting bogged down in technologically determined rhetoric, we simply wish to showcase great film making techniques and leave the repercussions, knowing now how the digital was involved in the process, up to you, the audience, to determine.”
In the winter turn 09/10 at University Siegen I’m holding two seminars:
Musicvideoproduction
Supported by GrandHotel Pictures and in cooperation with SONY Music Enterainment we’ll realise a complete Music video production in this course.
Starting with some introductory sessions on the aesthetics and narratives of music videos, the students will later be teached how to develop ideas and write treatments. Thereby prepared for the business we’ll have a pitch for one of SONY’s bands - followed by the realization of one of the students’ ideas as a professional music video production.
Web Video - editorial and documentary formats
Video content is becoming more and more popular on the net lately. Publishing houses, networks and other media players use the more emotional and involving moving images to enhance their text based services.
Since the quick&dirty paradigm of the first years didn’t work there is more than ever the question which specific qualities web video can deliver.
The students will create their own online videos in this course, focusing on format development and strong narratives.
In the summer term 09 I offer a seminar on Visual Sampling as a cultural practice at the media science course at University of Siegen, Germany.
“Digital Media offer the discrete description of cultural products, every composition of images, sounds and words can be deconstructed into zeros and ones. The recontextulization of the small entities of meaning (sample/loop) to a new remix is mostly known from music, especially DJing. In this course the perspective on sampling will be expanded and focussed onto the visual aspects of the matter.
The medium Internet hasd changed the circumstances for remix works. Archives like YouTube provide an unlimted memory of forms, from which the remixer draws both his inspiration and his material. Besides this changes in production and distribution we will also discover the social processes of the web, because the dynamics of the remix culture are influenced by referencing onto each others works.”
Get more info about my work at the University on www.multimediale-systeme.de
Starting this semester I hold a seminar at University of Siegen on the subject “The Moving Web - New Forms of visual Net Aesthetics” together with my colleague and good friend Sascha Simons.
We’ll start the course with a formal analysis of principles of construction, visual language and cultural effects of a new audiovisual net aethetics (e.g. nonlinear, interactive logics of narration or the convergence with established form languages). Later on, the students will write concepts for new web video formats and realize them.
Some of the subjects will be:
Web Video: Case-Analysis – Forms, formats & genres.
From the Movies to Graphical User Interface and back.
Anne Friedberg „The virtual Window - From Alberti to Microsoft“.
How becomes video visible on the net? Platforms and logocs of presentation.
New forms of storytelling and aesthetics in editorial formats
Genuine Aesthetics? Non-Linearity and Self-Reflexivity
To learn more about my work at the chair for “Theorie und Praxis multimedialer Systeme” at the University of Siegen check www.multimediale-systeme.de.
Sonic Acts XII - the Cinematic Experience is a festival/conference, taking place in Amsterdam from 21-24 of february 2008. Besides a conference, screenings, performances and an exhibition they’ll have a publication which has an interview with me in it! It discusses how the Internet changes the cinematic experience both in terms of distribtion and artist’s production experiences. You can order the publication here.
On the occasion of the twelfth Sonic Acts festival, Boris Debackere and Arie Altena edited a multi-faceted book with nine essays and ten interviews dealing with various aspects of the cinematic experience. The book focuses as much on theories of the cinematic experience, as it does on the practice of artists working in the fields of cinema, contemporary media art and sound. It shows how artists develop their work and theories on the cinematic experience, using different technologies and materials, and offers a many-sided theoretical journey into the history, present and future of the magic we call cinema.
A new article for the german print magazine PAGE (issue 01/08).
I presented some projects which remix user generated content as a data resource for creative projects and by this create new web aethetics.
I wrote an article for the german print magazine PAGE (issue 10/07) on the influence of the web on movie distribution and marketing.
The article orginates from Four Eyed Monsters, the first full feature film on YouTube and, and broades the perspective to a general discussion om internet marketing and distribution for former cinema releases.
Moving Web is a blog I started accompanying my diploma thesis on the covergence of movin media and the Internet. It has grown into a lively discussion platform for progressive trends and developments, where I continue my research in the field of web video.
Moving web is a place to share thoughts about all forms of moving content on the web. As bandwidth keeps growing, the internet will converge with the moving media: film, tv & video.
Therefore the Internet as a textbased information medium seems to be the past - moving web explores the future possibilities of the internet as a more immersive entertainment medium. We choose a rather broadly based perspective on the theme of motion on the web: Flash Video, Mobile Web, WebTV, Viral Video, Interactive Narration - all these phenomena are discussed with the emphasis on how moving content will change the web.