Filmarcades - the atlas of mancipated spectatorship

An atlas is not just a collection of maps, it’s a space of imaginary journeys, a thing to be touched, swiped and used. My project aims to open up the land of film, the same way the original Mercator’s Atlas opened up the world’s geography. It invites you on an armchair exploration of the creative possibilities enchanted in the film medium.

It’s been almost two decades since the term web 2.0 was coined. Millennials born with computers in their cribs were supposed to be breathing internet and editing instead of writing by now. Web based environments were believed to shutter the everlasting division between passive viewers and active content providers. It’s 2016 now and people truly did acquire necessary skills and do use their computers in an intuitive fashion, but the real participatory revolution never occurred.

Our educational system relies heavily on textual (linguistic) processing of knowledge and it still takes us years to learn how to engage writing in a critical thinking process. What we acquire from our teachers, colleagues and writers throughout the years is tacit knowledge – impulses, habits, procedures – of taking notes, constructing sentences and paragraphs. It takes much more than the alphabet to internalize writing as a component of thinking. It’s no different when it comes to image/sound manipulation or programming.

The FilmArcades project tries to tackle this problem by inventing a special VR environment that would reinstate the model of participatory apprenticeship in a digital form. I invited leading figures of the video essay scene (filmmakers, critics, academics) to work with me on a simple editing task structured around the EYE Film Institute’s Bits&Pieces collection. Those collaborations are being captured with multiple Kinect sensors and recreated as ‘playable’ 3D scenes, allowing users to participate in our endeavors and edit their own videos out of the unique materials acquired from EYE.

FilmArcades is not only a unique observational documentary allowing you to follow the procedures of critical thinking through video editing, but also an enhanced participatory tutorial – enabling you to collaborate virtually with the best specialists in the field. Last but not least, it creates a unique opportunity for the museums or archives to release their audiovisual collections to users and deepen their level of engagement – turning passive spectatorship into active co-creation.

www.filmarcades.com

Year

2016

Crew

Director Stanislaw Liguzinski

Unity developer Kornél Varga

Collaborators Catherine Grant, Kuba Mikurda

Prospective collaborators Kevin B. Lee, Kuba Woynarowski

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