Computational Cinema

Professional video recording is a complex process which often requires expensive cameras and large amounts of ancillary equipment. With the advancement of mobile technologies, cameras on mobile devices have improved to the point where the quality of their output is sometimes comparable to that obtained from a professional video camera and are often used in professional productions. However, tools that allow professional users to access the information they need to control the technical quality of their filming and make an informed decision about what they are recording are missing on mobile platforms. In this paper we present MAVIS (Mobile Acquisition and VISualization) a tool for professional filming on a mobile platform. MAVIS allows users to access information such as colour vectorscope, waveform monitor, false colouring, focus peaking and all other information that is needed to produce high quality professional videos. This is achieved by exploiting the capabilities of modern mobile GPUs though the use of a number of vertex and fragment shaders. Evaluation with professionals in the film industry shows that the app and its functionalities are well received and that the output and usability of the application align with professional standards.

Digimag was an independent online monthly magazine focused on the impact of digital technologies and science on contemporary art and culture at large, featuring 72 issues from 2005 to 2012. A milestone of the expansion of new media consciousness at national and international level, it quickly become a reference and evolved year after year, issue after issue, morphing into a cultural instrument, a tool for academics, researchers, students, artists, designers, geeks and practitioners connected to the main international media centers, universities, art galleries, festivals and worldwide networks. Essays, interviews and reports were written by a whole international generation of authors, critics and journalists, assigned, curated and selected by Marco Mancuso and the Digicult editorial staff. All Digimag issues are available online in English and Italian, for free as pdf, epub, mobi, Issuu and Print on Demand, under Creative Commons licenses.

The Digimag website: https://digicult.it/digimag-journal
The Digicult Network: https://digicult.it/authors-network

Il numero in Italiano:
http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/digimag71ita.pdf

Why are art-science dialogues important, and how should they take place? How do our everyday culture and institutional constructs define and delimit such possibilities? Why do contemporary art lovers still presume they are immune to and from scientific knowledge? How should a visitor of a media art event make sense of the machine work? Algorithmic Art: Shuffling Space & Time (AA) directed these questions to technical experts, artists, art lovers, and the public through a series of themed discussions and a six-hundred-square-meter indoor playground of machines and computational installations. AA also sought to key in on the question of survival. What mark has the struggling existence of the twenty-year-old School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong left to Hong Kong’s (media) art history? The school remains the only pedagogic research center in Hong Kong where conceptual issues of new media art creation and how to “live” in an age of big data are interrogated throug...

Digital death is a growing concern as personal data and archives are increasingly digitised and stored in networked servers. It refers to the issues surrounding data owner- ship after a person’s death. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have a rising number of deceased users. These companies have consequently developed policies for what happens after their constituents die. E.g, Facebook has a profile memorialisation option while Twitter will discontinue the account. There is very little said however about the erasure of digital data. The question then becomes, with the advent of digital technology, and cheap, plentiful storage devices, how is this nearly limitless archiving affecting our need to forget? 

The Readers Project is an aesthetically-oriented system of software entities designed to explore the culture of human reading. These entities, or 'readers', enact specific reading strategies and function as autonomous text generators, networked writing machines visible beyond the texts they 'read'. As the structures on which they operate are culturally implicated, the project's readers shed light on a range of institutional practices surrounding the digital literary and the aggregation of the linguistic commons by corporate interests. In this paper, we present the practical and theoretical considerations guiding the project's development, and consider various strategies to resist the commodification and enclosure of literary culture within the corporate 'cloud'.

Professional video recording is a complex process which often requires expensive cameras and large amounts of ancillary equipment. With the advancement of mobile technologies, cameras on mobile devices have improved to the point where the quality of their output is sometimes comparable to that obtained from a professional video camera and are often used in professional productions. However, tools that allow professional users to access the information they need to control the technical quality of their filming and make an informed decision about what they are recording are missing on mobile platforms. In this paper we present MAVIS (Mobile Acquisition and VISualization) a tool for professional filming on a mobile platform. MAVIS allows users to access information such as colour vectorscope, waveform monitor, false colouring, focus peaking and all other information that is needed to produce high quality professional videos. This is achieved by exploiting the capabilities of modern mobile GPUs though the use of a number of vertex and fragment shaders. Evaluation with professionals in the film industry shows that the app and its functionalities are well received and that the output and usability of the application align with professional standards.

Moving image practices is my tactical location. That is me speaking as a media cultural historian, an art educator with a Critical Theory orientation, and as an experimental artist who cares about pushing boundaries. This is also the point of departure from which I build a divergent network of relations – to connect personal callings, aspirations and desires, doubts and questions of survival with the institutional and techno, to bring together different domains of knowledge and the dialectical relations of these different planes and moments. This map of connectivity is affinitive with the concept of “general organology” （普遍器官學）that Bernard Stiegler develops from medical biology and the study of musical instruments. To advance my argument for critical, experimental practices, an “organological” approach shows moving images occupying the interstitial – between epochs, generations, between dream and awakening, representation and knowledge, control and enlightenment, and between consumerist marketing activities and artistic creation, which is supposed to be a realm of progressive thinking. Following from this, moving images, no matter how problematic or subject to the capitalist logic, is precisely where critical response or experimental action for change should begin. In this sense, I do not want to remain a mere stake-holder in art but, if possible, also someone who seeks change and transformation, a role that analytic philosopher Amie Thomasson calls a “grounder of a name’s reference.” What kind of re-grounding do I attempt? Refreshing the kind of ontological questions to ask of art; ensuring a dialogical model; re-enlivening our sensual, cognitive-perceptual experience; re-activating the audience; opening up the meaning of art; engaging critically with the question of why preserving the autonomy of art is important and what that means... This essay will use several accessible examples from my practice to illustrate this thoughts.

Professional video recording is a complex process which often requires expensive cameras and large amounts of ancillary equipment. With the advancement of mobile technologies, cameras on mobile devices have improved to the point where the quality of their output is sometimes comparable to that obtained from a professional video camera and are often used in professional productions. However, tools that allow professional users to access the information they need to control the technical quality of their filming and make an informed decision about what they are recording are missing on mobile platforms. In this paper we present MAVIS (Mobile Acquisition and VISualization) a tool for professional filming on a mobile platform. MAVIS allows users to access information such as colour vectorscope, waveform monitor, false colouring, focus peaking and all other information that is needed to produce high quality professional videos. This is achieved by exploiting the capabilities of modern mobile GPUs though the use of a number of vertex and fragment shaders. Evaluation with professionals in the film industry shows that the app and its functionalities are well received and that the output and usability of the application align with professional standards.

“Tracing” is multiple. Following, step by step, moment by moment. Recording. Scanning. Compiling. Archiving. Unfolding. Reconstructing. Decomposing. Deconstructing. Streamlining. Visualizing. Sonifying. Mediating. Transforming. Translating. Transferring. Associating. Mapping. Combination. Permutation. Integration. Hypothesizing. Calculating. Estimating. Interfering. … These are the manifold actions that the artists of WMC_e5 have enacted on the data they are working with. The impact of computation on both aesthetic expression and aesthetic criticism has been widely felt. Not only artists but also critics are using digital technologies to analyze works of art and literature. Computation generates new modes of art by which criticism and artistic creation meet, an apt description for many works in this exhibition.
This catalogue, edited by Linda Lai, is a post-exhibition documentation of the 5th exhibition of the Writing Machine Collective at Connecting Space-HK in October 2014.
Contributors include Hector Rodriguez, Daniel Howe, Winnie Soon, Audrey Samson, James Coupe and Harald Kraemer.
This project is fully funded by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.

This is the catalogue for James Coupe's spring 2013 exhibition at The Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. Coupe's exhibition was comprised of a network of video cameras that were installed across the campus and in the college museum. My essay, "Waiting to be Seen," describes the concept behind and execution of the exhibition.