January 31, 2006
EnterFrame:
Cage, Deleuze and Macromedia Director
"..Director recasts the information-processing computer as a movie-making machine, or a signification engine bolstered by interactivity that can be mechanically scripted with finite options or driven by the fluid dynamics of video game methodologies. But when one introduces the program to the cinematic philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the compositional approaches of John Cage it can become something else entirely. When interactive media is introduced to Deleuze's radical theories of cinema-thought and Cageian silence--which can be understood as the dynamics of a system that is left to "be itself"--a sort of "idle" artificial awareness becomes possible...
...In his 1937 essay "The Future of Music," avant-garde composer John Cage wrote that "the 'frame' or fraction of a second, following established film technique, will probably be the basic unit in the measurement of time" as far as the composer of sound was concerned. Cage was already prepared to think in terms of music as cinematic apparatus composed via a system driven by external events and not prescriptions. Cage was prepared to accommodate accident within structure, and was not afraid of electronic instruments. If we switch the phrase "composer of sound" for "author of media" we find ourselves in some version of Cage's predicted frame-driven future. From megahertz to refresh rates, the computing environment is a choreography of events possessing the complexity and precision of a Balinese gamelan, operating at speeds that border on the unimaginable..." From EnterFrame: Cage, Deleuze and Macromedia Director - multimedia authoring software - Evaluation Afterimage, July-August, 2002 , by David Goldberg.
Posted by jo at January 31, 2006 10:37 AM
