Bruce Elder

Followers

Following

Public Views

R. Bruce Elder is a filmmaker, critic, and teacher in the Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at Ryerson University. His film work has been screened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Millennium Film Workshop, Berlin’s Kino Arsenal, Paris’ Centre Pompidou, the San Francisco Cinematheque, Atlanta’s High Museum, Los Angeles’ Film Forum, Stadtfilmmuseum München, and Hamburg’s Kino Metropolis. Retrospectives of his work have been presented by Anthology Film Archives (NY), the Art Gallery of Ontario, Cinématheque Québecoise, Il Festival Senzatitolo (Trento), Images Film and Video Festival (Toronto) and Paris’ Festival des Cinémas Différents, EXiS (in Seoul, Korea) and Circulo de Bellas Artes (Madrid). In announcing their “Tribute to R. Bruce Elder” Cinematheque Ontario proclaimed: “R. Bruce Elder is not only one of Canada's foremost experimental filmmakers, he's one of our greatest artists, thinkers, critics, and filmmakers, period.” Elder has received numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Department of External Affairs/DFAIT. He was an early user of digital image processing techniques in filmmaking

less

Interests

Uploads

Papers by Bruce Elder

International Experimental Film Congress

Proceedings of lectures, panel discussions, and presentations outline current issues in experimen... more

From Painting into Cinema: A Study of Jack Chambers’ Circle

Journal of Canadian Studies, 1981

Toronto : A Play of History (Jeu d'histoire)

Conceived as the inaugural show for this new gallery, this thesis/exhibition attempts to draw a r... more Conceived as the inaugural show for this new gallery, this thesis/exhibition attempts to draw a representation of Toronto art activity from 1977 to 1987 by focusing on the work of 35 filmmakers, visual artists and video artists. The main catalogue essay, by Dompierre, discusses the historicization of contemporary art resulting from the exhibition process, critical writing and the artworks themselves. Twenty essays by artists enliven the diversity of opinion.

A Machine Intelligence Approach to Virtual Ballet Training

IEEE MultiMedia, 2015

This article presents a framework for real-time analysis and visualization of ballet dance moveme... more This article presents a framework for real-time analysis and visualization of ballet dance movements performed within a Cave Virtual Reality Environment (CAVE). A Kinect sensor captures and extracts dance-based movement features, from which a topology preserved "posture space" is constructed using a spherical self-organizing map (SSOM). Recordings of dance movements are parsed into gestural elements by projection onto the SSOM to form unique trajectories in posture space. Dependencies between postures in a trajectory are modeled using a Markovian empirical transition matrix, which is then used to recognize attempted movements. This allows for quantitative assessment and feedback of a student's performance, delivered using concurrent, localized visualizations together with a performance score based on incremental dynamic time warping (IDTW).

An Approach to Ballet Dance Training through MS Kinect and Visualization in a CAVE Virtual Reality Environment

ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, 2015

This article proposes a novel framework for the real-time capture, assessment, and visualization ... more This article proposes a novel framework for the real-time capture, assessment, and visualization of ballet dance movements as performed by a student in an instructional, virtual reality (VR) setting. The acquisition of human movement data is facilitated by skeletal joint tracking captured using the popular Microsoft (MS) Kinect camera system, while instruction and performance evaluation are provided in the form of 3D visualizations and feedback through a CAVE virtual environment, in which the student is fully immersed. The proposed framework is based on the unsupervised parsing of ballet dance movement into a structuredposture spaceusing the spherical self-organizing map (SSOM). A unique feature descriptor is proposed to more appropriately reflect the subtleties of ballet dance movements, which are represented asgesture trajectoriesthrough posture space on the SSOM. This recognition subsystem is used to identify the category of movement the student is attempting when prompted (by a ...

Download

Special Effects in Film/Video Making: A New Media Initiative Project

2006 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, 2006

We present a system and a set of tools for producing special effects in film/video making by appl... more We present a system and a set of tools for producing special effects in film/video making by applying image processing and human centered computing techniques. A combination of shot detection, object segmentation, background generation, and image warping techniques are used. The user selects the image frame or the object of interest, and the image warp transformation to be used from the GUI. Wrapping can be performed either on a whole image sequence or on an object of interest in the sequence. In the latter, the object is first segmented and its motion tracked. Object segmentation is achieved either by snakes or graph cuts. Steerable Pyramid background generation is then used to fill in the portion cut from the foreground.

Download

An Advanced Computational Intelligence System for Training of Ballet Dance in a Cave Virtual Reality Environment

2014 IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia, 2014

This paper presents a computer-based system for assessment and training of ballet dance in a CAVE... more This paper presents a computer-based system for assessment and training of ballet dance in a CAVE virtual reality environment. The system utilizes Kinect sensor to capture student's dance and extracts features from skeleton joints. This system depends on a structured posture space, which comprises a set of dance elements that represent key moments-"postures", that typically will be so briefly held as to experience as a fleeting moment in a flux -in the dance movements whose performance we are attempting to assess. The recording captured from the Kinect allows the parsing of dance movement into a structured posture space using the spherical self-organizing map (SSOM). From this, a unique descriptor can be obtained by following gesture trajectories through posture space on the SSOM, which appropriately reflects the subtleties of ballet dance movements. Consequently, the system can recognize the category of movement the student is attempting, and this allows us make a quantitative assessment of individual movements. Based on the experimental results, the proposed system appears to be very effective for recognition and offering generalization across instances of movement. Thus, it is possible for the construction of assessment and visualization of ballet dance movements performed by the student in an instructional, virtual reality setting.

Download

Michael Snow: Wavelength (review)

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2011

ABSTRACT Writing on Michael Snow&#39;s artworks poses an interesting challenge that writers o... more ABSTRACT Writing on Michael Snow&#39;s artworks poses an interesting challenge that writers on contemporary art seldom encounter. Snow is erudite, deliberate, and very bright, and his own commentary on his works is extensive, insightful, and expressed with a wit and novelty that almost unfailingly provokes insight. A commentator on Snow&#39;s work therefore confronts a choice: cleave closely to Snow&#39;s remarks and, while benefiting from Snow&#39;s remarkably level-headed understanding of his creative methods, risk being turned into someone who merely elaborates on and explains the artist&#39;s &#39;authoritative&#39; comments (generally by translating them into a form that lacks the poetic irony so characteristic of Snow&#39;s own discourse); or blaze one&#39;s own path, by finding novel things to say about Snow&#39;s work - a tack that, given the extent and richness of Snow&#39;s own remarks on his work, risks turning the commentator&#39;s remarks into fanciful misprisions. So how does Legge manage in navigating between this rock and this whirlpool? Essentially, she takes the second route - and that is commendable, since only that way might lead to fresh insight into a film that has generated a sizable literature, much of which has the character of commentary on Snow&#39;s commentary on the work. I say &#39;essentially&#39; because Legge frequently quotes, or alludes to, Snow&#39;s own statements, but (perhaps in order to avoid turning the book into a commentary on the filmmaker&#39;s own commentary) she doesn&#39;t treat them as ironic and plurisemic constructs, but as straightforward statements about the artist&#39;s intent and methods. The course Legge set for herself allows her to turn up some treasures. Her comments relating Snow&#39;s ideas on equivalence to those of Sigfried Giedion&#39;s Space, Time and Architecture (1941) seem to me a rich vein (that might have been exploited further). Her comments on the radio bringing sounds from the outside world into the loft and the phone call carrying sounds from the loft to the outside world are perspicacious. It is wonderful, and revelatory of the context in which Snow made Wavelength, to read Legge&#39;s respectful acknowledgement of &#39;the very scope and density&#39; of Susan Sontag&#39;s intellectual references as installing &#39;erudition as a unique identifier of contemporary approaches to art, film, and writing.&#39; (Among Snow&#39;s friends and associates, think of Hollis Frampton&#39;s formidable erudition, or Paul Sharits&#39;s, or of Ernie Gehr&#39;s meticulous and probing analytic intelligence.) It is also wonderful to see Legge doing what is so rare, that is, to introduce the theory of the gaze without utterly misrepresenting Lacan (Legge correctly understands Lacan to have proposed that the gaze uncannily belongs to an inapprehensible point in the object [or picture] from which the viewing subject is gazed at). But then (acknowledging that this represents a turning away from Lacan), she does what I find unfathomable: she resorts to the politically motivated distortion of psychoanalysis Laura Mulvey offers, to ground what strikes me as a fatuous commentary on Snow&#39;s &#39;Walking Woman.&#39; Her Barthesian inflected commentary on narrative similarly relies on overly literal readings of signifiers that are far less determinate than that section of the book makes them out to be. Here, she might have benefitted from paying due heed to Snow&#39;s assertions that he is not a storyteller. The book&#39;s major shortcoming is to propose that the film&#39;s devices resemble features of human vision. The avant-garde cinema that immediately preceded Snow&#39;s - Stan Brakhage&#39;s lyrical and mythopoeic films - is commonly thought (with some justification) to have been based on an analogy between human vision and cinematic constructions that are rooted in the medium&#39;s nature. Snow&#39;s cinema broke radically with that, in adopting a &#39;God-like above-it-all&#39; vision. Legge&#39;s remarks that closely draw together forms from Wavelength and features of human vision reduces the radical challenge that Snow&#39;s film posed to the avant-garde cinema of 1968. Further, it flies in the face of Snow&#39;s own remarks that contrast art forms that accord great value to...

Bruce Elder

Uploads

Papers by Bruce Elder

Log In