Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/Michael Ney's Cyberculture/Cyberculture/Digital Media Commission

Text File | 1994-09-02 | 40KB | 846 lines

Topic 389       Digital Media Commission: D.Cox, F
peg:paradox     cyberculture zone       11:36 AM  Jul 23, 1994


Morphing the Oz Indie Film Scene Paradigm, or, Why we need the
Digital Media Commission

First published in FILMNEWS, June 1994

The extraordinary increase in the development and availability of
CD ROM drive systems worldwide provide new avenues for the work of
AustraliaUs independent film and video community.

Real work.

There is much hype about *interactivity* and *multimedia* but if
carefully examined, digital  image and sound manipulation actually
represents  the bulk of current media production in Australia.

As a film maker engaged also as a producer in the world of video
games, I am conscious of the fact that to date, the worlds of
software publication and motion picture/video production are still
largely culturally mutually exclusive in the eyes of most of those
who work in either domain in Australia.

But this is changing, and fast.

KodakUs Cineon Effects system, developed largely in Australia
demonstrates AustraliaUs role in the convergence of technologies.
Cineon is a commercially available means to transfer film to data
for manipulation, then back to film again. Remove or add elements
to a scene, touch up the colours, remove the distant jumbo from
your period film. Add the T-Rex.

Beam Software in South Melbourne  are commercial producers of Sega
and Nintendo games for the US and European market. Many of the
games are film tie-ins. These include Star Wars, The Hunt for Red
October and Back to the Future. Beam employs 65 people full time.
Most of the software  tools for game development are engineered
in-house. The company is 15 years old. We have been offered by
Film Victoria finance to develop our first CD ROM titles.

This fact is very, very significant. It is a recognition by
government bodies normally in the business of providing money to
film and video makers that multimedia is significant, is here, and
requires active financial support. Not instead of finance to film
and video, but alongside and in concert with. This latter point is
crucial to understand and points the way for the evolution of
AustraliaUs next major cultural step into the information era.

AustraliaUs independent film scene has a long 100 year histoyear!
Graduates this year have had offers for work before the course has
even begun!

This is a real industry. With real growth and promise. One which
can benefit directly from the contribution of AustraliaUs existing
film and video community.

Yet no Multimedia courses are offered within the mainstream
channels of AustraliaUs major Film and Television Schools, the VCA
or the AFTRS.

Ponderous, isnUt it?

NeUer the Twain Shall Meet, Until Now.

Film is a linear media. Film organises sequential pictures as
gelatin layers strips of plastic photo-chemically. The
photochemical-optical approach which cinema uses has remained
unchanged for around 100 years now. This is not an inherently bad
thing, on the contrary. New technologies are not inherently better
or worse than older relatives.

Digital media treat all in Knowing about ourselves, what we want,
what we enjoy about the ideas we have and those of others
throughout history. These new media have entered our lives almost
without warning.

In terms of how the U.S. film and software worlds are converging,
Jim Cameron and Stan WinstonUs company Digital Domain represents
the attempt by Hollywood to integrate the benefits of digital
technology into the actual film production process instead of
marginalising it to the special effects realm, a la Terminator 2
and Jurassic Park. The problems faced here apart from the obvious
technical ones though, again, are largely cultural.

The software industry is, in contrast to the film world,
characterised by the conventions of print/publishing and often,
those of engineering an, the act of creation is often seen to lie
in the actual physical translation of  a concept into code. The
screenplay and the RproductS in terms of process are the same
document.

The tools used to create the product  (i.e. the computer) are
often also the medium used by the audience, or consumer.

As in LumierUs day, the camera and the projector are the same
device.

Many of the earliest software houses began publishing books, in
print. Those who remember the early eighties home computer game
era will remember having to type in line by line the code which
would eventually result in the final game. If you made a mistake
you had to go through the whole program and find the anomaly.

You almost had to be a programmer to play computer games on your
own machine, unless it was an Atari console, using cartridges. I
used to convince myself that a games machine was too limited:
after all you could *only play games* on an Atari. A simple 64K
computer allowed you write and run simple programs in Basic.

The code was listed in the pages of  magazines catering for the
users of the various machines: the Commodore 64, the Acorn
Electron, the Micro Bee ( the Australian pc). To save the code,
one used a cassette player. To load a game already stored as data
on a cassette you would load it in the tape player, set the volume
dial to just the right setting, tell your computer to *load* and
hit *Play*. With luck, the game would load. More often than not,
you would get three thirds through, and the signal would break up
and you would have to start again.

The fact was that as a game or computer enthusiast you had to know
roughly about the basic relationship between the hardware and the
*idea* or *soft* ware which was either printed for direct
transcription, or stored on magnetic media. But the results were
moving pictures, with sound and interactivity.

In practical terms by analogy, this was the equivalent of having
to know how to print, process and prepare motion picture film for
viewing, then how to thread a projector and set up the screening
room every time you wanted to watch a movie at home.

Today computer storage media are more efficient. Disk, eprom chip
(for game console cartridges) and CD ROM. The computers are
faster, cheaper and employ increasingly standardised operating
systems.

CD ROMs are very cheap to manufacture, (around 2 or 3 dollars
U.S.) and with the right compression algorithms, can store up to a
feature filmUs duration of full-motion video, games or any other
digital data.

Today, computer games are bigger in commercial terms than motion
pictures. They made more money than all the Hollywood movies
combined in 1992 and 1993.

Games are not movies.  But they are media. With moving pictures,
sound and, most significantly, the element which constantly defies
coherent description: interactivity. Involvement. Game play.

Why should film makers and video makers in Australia even consider
the digital media? Because even in terms of the one-way linear
structure film and video employ, computers enable increasingly,
cheap and efficient methods of post production, editing , reuse
and transmittable communication of material.

Low end multimedia authoring tools like Macro mind Director and
HyperCard enable the final audience to engage in some involvement
in the pictures and sounds. Commercial video games represent one
extreme: simple graphics but high levels of movement and
interactivity (just watch Sonic the Hedgehog on the screens next
time you are at the Department store) or iin new ways.

No one thinks twice about using word processing instead of typing
for writing screenplays and AFC applications. Why? Because cutting
and pasting text makes what you write semi interactive. You see
new combinations in the ideas on the screen and you can act on the
combinations.

Drag. Click. Drag. Click.

Imagery and sound can be treated in the same way. Pick it up. Put
it there. Combine it with this. LetUs hear it with that.

If you assume the final work is not to be a beginning to end
linear film, you can make the same digital information available
as a game, a non linear book, or a file for transmission to
someone else you want to work with it.

Using 3D modelling programs like AutodeskUs *3D Studio* it is
possible to build otherwise incredibly expensive and elaborate
sets and objects for use in films, render them with realistic
surfaces, then light them using tools which deliberately employ
film/theatre metaphors. Inserting actors into these environments
can be achieved by videotaping them acting against a blue screen
In post production. Electronic colour separation can enable the
placing of the actors in the *sets*. The composite is dubbed to
tape. The resolution is relatively low by Hollywood standards, but
the results are great for the cost. The PC CD ROM game *Return to
Zork* was done in this way.

We have yet in Australia to even scratch the surface of this new
territory.

Passive Audience: Not!  on of RaudienceS. Broadcast itself is no
longer a suitable paradigm to describe the relationship of the
network user to the material made use of by someone with a
computer and a modem.

Instead, the user is a wired online active participant. Like using
the phone as just a phone, a person feels a part of a shared
space, a *cyber* (the word derives from the Greek Kyber, to
navigate)  space where the notion of participation over a network
defines the circumstances of engagement with others also online.

The actual definition of identity when online is problematic, to
say the least. *Where* and *who* you are on the net is a legal and
personal twilight zone, not yet really understood even by those
who are regular network users. This is still something of a
frontier, where personal ethics govern a parallel society. One yet
to feel the full weight of the effect of railroads and telegraphs
and lawmen and .....highway construction. Those who want something
not yet broken to be quickly fixed will not have to wait long, one
feels.

The Death of Geography.

When the phone melts into the computer, you donUt need to be
anywhere specific for the digital work to be made usable, except
near the phone. The global network of government and academic
network servers known as the Internet allows film script writers
to share text over distances of thousands of miles. It also allows
editors and sound engineers to  share files and work
collaboratively when separated by distance.

No wonder Kerry Packer just bought 40% of Optus!
Telecommunications and media are more or less the same entity
now.

Games and Multimedia are Art Forms, like Film and Video.

They grow and change with the technology around them. When film
makers learn of the potential of digital media, it is most often
to seek ways to consolidate these advantages into the existing
paradigm of film making as it has been proven and understood until
now. This attitude is understandable, but in many ways quite
limited.

The notion of exploring the possibilities of computer media  for
its own sake is seldom a path seen appropriate to many working in
linear media forms. These are cultural barriers, borne from the
sheer newness of the tools, technologies and skills which
accompany them.

The computer world too has its prejudices: how can the model of
film making fit into the often highly mythologised and specialised
territory of the software engineer? The meeting point lies along
the path of what constitutes innovative and original work, no
matter what the technological apparatus used, and the
preconceptions of those who work within them.

Both make use of moving pictures, sound, storytelling but games
and interactives often involve the notion of difficulty and
achievement . Often works explore the textual complexities of
digital production itself, and place these issues literally in the
hands of the audience.

The index of a multimedia titles success can sometimes be measured
by the level of engagement it offers the player/user/audience.
Innovation and newness are the bywords of  a classic multimedia
production. Great interactives are usually inherently exploratory,
invite the user to solve puzzles, overcome obstacles, and
generally actively engage in the process of experiencing the world
on the screen.

Women are at the Forefront of Multimedia in Australia.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Australian innovators in the field
currently are made up largely of women. Linda DementUs RTyphoid
MaryS  offers an on screen journey into the tortured body and soul
of a digitised female terrain. Made available for playing at the
recent MIMA event, Women and New Imaging Technologies, this
interactive attracted much attention. The cut and bruised
digitised images of  Typhoid MaryUs body is intercut with witty
and ironic and utterly devastating text.

The work engages the participant in a vivid and confronting
exploration of a mass of cut up and stitched together bits of
person. The use of interactivity drives home without compromise
the body as a site for discourse about technology, gender, and
politics. The audience, through pointing and clicking is
implicated in the political process of a corporeal uncovering of
abuse. Unforgettable.

SydneyUs Cyberfeminist collectiveUs VNS MatrixUs *All New Gen*
demonstrates a delicious inversion and subversion of standard
video game premise of the player as 1st person empowered lone
avenger. Here the hero helps a cyberfeminist heroine, Gen, who can
mutate into different forms. Gen must hack the system of
patriarchal power in society, then confront *Big Daddy Mainframe*
- a perfect metaphor for the nexus of male technocracy and
international commerce.

This work embeds a critique of technology within technology
itself. An inversion and renegotiation of startling cultural
political insight. The potential for vivid hybridisation and
fusion of the political with the technological has few parallels
in linear media. With computers, the message is often very much
the medium, and the social conditions which serve to isolate
computers from creative people are automatically challenged when
accepted boundaries are crossed, and the work is released.
Liberated from the unspoken but familiar cultural constraints that
define the commercial, orthodox, sexist daggy computer mainstream,
works like *All new Gen* seek to problematise the gendered male
culture of the video game. And succeed.

Ruth LuxfordUs *The Fridge* (Swinburne Centre for New Media 1993)
uses Macro Mind Director multimedia authoring to present the user
with a refrigerator. By clicking on the magnets on the door and
then the contents of the fridge, unexpected sequences unfold, with
accompanying sounds. The sheer pleasure of inhabiting a fridge
with familiar products all right there to be interacted with
cannot be easily described. The joy comes from the engagement
afforded by the medium.

Discovery and play, very basic human needs are entertained in this
deceptively simple scene. Luxford is ,significantly, a trained
industrial engineer. She both writes code and also devises
compelling interactive scenarios. Like Jane CampionUs RPassionless
MomentsS the transcendent humour of the banal is celebrated for
its own sake in this interactive setting made significant by
familiarity.

3D graphics artists Moira Corby and Faye Maxwell create high end
images using high end workstations at places like RMITUs very high
end Centre for Advanced Computer Graphics. *Networld* by Fay
Maxwell is a virtual space where organic matter pulses
convincingly amid other forms. The notion of interior and exterior
is explored for its own sake, with sensational soundtrack music
making the whole ensemble live in ways very digital, and very
female.

Moira CorbyUs background in theatre and sculpture is evident in
the Gothic Archways of *My Memory, your Past* animation. Here the
full extent of the medium of 3D on Silicon Graphics machines is
presented with a monumental celebration of the means of
production. Gaining access to the machines and securing Film
Commission finance for its production were as much a part of the
story of the film as  the technical process. Corby is a
significant force in new media production and her work owes much
to a long term dedication to an academic concern with what it
means to use hi tech to make high art. This automatic association
of *high end* with legitimate art I find somewhat problematic, but
in this case the tools reflect the modus operandi of the artistUs
background where megabuck systems are explored for their own sake.
The act of doing forms the philosophy of the artwork.

In an interview with Lisa Logan for MESH magazine, Corby
explains:

RItUs such an accelerated learning curve when you first tap into
that space and youUre totally immersed in it. It is like a new
world and you come into contact with a lot of people from
different disciplines and with different expertise. You realise
you can convey your ideas to technicians and computer programmers
and that they also get things from you. For me art is not just
about product, its about process.S

Kim Bounds *Autarky*  (Swinburne Centre for New Media 1993)
employs a Molotov Cocktail of digital design and image/sound
processing techniques to describe a libertarian cyberfeminist
state of mind and body. Autarky is a manifesto. It advocates a
streetwise attitude to technology and culture which empowers the
female holder. It is also something of a rallying call for women
to seize the means of communication.

BoundUs background is commercial design, film making and in-store
presentation displays.

*Autarky* itself is linear, that is you sit and watch it run from
start to finish. But it employs the use of  a range of 3D and 2D
computer graphics tools for the imagery itself, much scanned in
and reworked hi 8 and 16mm with typeset fonts, and has been edited
with non linear tools. The frame accuracy of non linear editing
enables a flashing, patterned treatment of imagery unique to the
medium, and exploited to the maximum in *Autarky*. As data, the
work can be uploaded to someone overseas over the Internet or to a
Bulletin board system.

As data, digital films, videos, games and programmes can be sent
anywhere, over high speed modem or the Internet almost
instantaneously.

Unsurprisingly, Kim Bounds next big work will emphasise online
real time juxtaposition of materials on the Net with live
performance. This fuses 1990s multimedia with the 1970s idea of
multi-media which then described the combination of performance
art with other elements like music, tape, film, and light shows: a
la Laurie Anderson.

The great thing here is that the technologies of communications
are finding expression in film, theatre and performance. Time
based arts when employing modems *on stage* extend the performance
space to include the global communication matrix, where time zones
and distance normally separate whole populations.

By channelling pictures and sound over the net during live
performances, the geographic location of performances like Andrew
GartonUs pivotal landmark Brisbane Multimedia Opera  *The Black
Harlequin* are ushered into being.
*The Black Harlequin* due for Melbourne in 1995 uses onstage modem
linked machines to others elsewhere in the globe in different time
zones. Text and simple imagery is pumped to the onstage
RHarlequinS audience, who in response can channel pictures and
sound back into cyberspace.

Troy InnocentUs RIdea>On!S is an interactive virtual point and
click universe, where the icons used to navigate through a surreal
landscape of tin-toy and plastic creatures form part of the
terrain itself. The user interface, therefore, is as much the hub
of the work as the domains one enters by employing it. This
blurring of the distinction between the signs on the road and the
road, buildings and populations signified, makes Idea>On! a
milestone work in the history of the medium.

At the 1993 AFTRS and AFC *Multimedia and Film Maker* Conference,
Innocent gave a live tour of the worlds of Idea>On!, discussing
the importance of game elements, and notion of participation and
play.

Worlds have names like Cybaroque,  remains static with movement
occurring in a single figure gives Sintu the feel of an essay on
movement and the interplay of kinetics, digital imagery and sound.
The piece is short, but highly memorable.

As can be seen, digital media can be handled by computers in an
almost infinite numbers of ways. Perhaps the most significant is
the remarkable ability to copy and transmit and receive
information quickly and with little cost. This communications
dimension of digital media makes it historically truly unique. No
digital original is any different from its copy. In this way the
circumstances of the production of any digital media are always
expressed by the work itself as much as the *message* conveyed by
the work.

Being so freely distributable makes digital media self-promoting
machines for the production of ideas.

A film maker using computers can be his/her own distributor,
marketeer and sales person if required. A production can sit on a
bulletin board waiting for people to *log on* and download it. A
multiple choice RgateS can prevent unauthorised copying, and the
method of supply can also be the means to collect revenue: you
cannot gain access to work without agreeing to pay.

Unlike regular text and book publication, whose circumstances of
production have remained relatively unchanged for centuries,
software publications conditions change with the introduction of
new hardware. The ideas change with them . Storage and
transmission are less interesting to me than the potential of
digital media to not only tell existing messages better, but come
up with entirely new messages, with examples found nowhere else,
along with entirely new ways of presenting them. The work of the
artists I have already described is chiselling this new ground out
of the institutions that will support  them, despite the massive
barriers that exist.

 In film, literature and dance, a sea of historys contributors
 spans timeUs horizon. The Classics are landmarks on this horizon.
 What the Classics have in common is the thread of originality:
 weirdness, the unexpected, the rule breakers, the ideas which
 stood out because they were unique. In software, Classics seem so
 often to reside somewhere in the future.  How do you study the
 work of your predecessors in the games business for example, when
 the emphasis in constantly on bigger, better ways of doing the
 task?

The fact that the new media are ostensibly about storage means
they are great tools for actively forgetting. This can be a very
empowering thing, to not have countless examples of  other film
makers, other writers, other musicians occupying valuable shelf
space with their product next to yours!!

Everybody gets to be a pioneer.

Living outside the laws of aesthetic *taste* is what makes a
memorable work conspicuous, and hence true to its time. Honest
work is self confident and self assured and has *attitude* written
all over it. It takes little time however for an original idea to
become tired and dull, and this happens when the work is made
unoriginal by relentless conceptual duplication. Witness the
endless proliferation of examples of morphing in television
commercials.

Experimentation, uncertainty, strangeness are the hallmarks of
lasting contributions to new media.

The new media will benefit from the contributions of those most
able to grasp the full sociological, economic and psychological
implications of the technology and what it does best: copy,
transmit and make available.

Without necessarily meaning to, the new media promote
decentralisation. In a world of networks and file exchange, what
does the notion of *broadcast* mean? It means a central place from
whence pictures and/or sound emerge, controlled usually by a
bureaucracy. Multi media on the other hand revolves around being
digital and transmittable, without centre. Where is the centre of
the net? The same place as the centre of the global phone system.
Nowhere.

By contrasts, in film there is an established distribution system:
festivals, distributors. Very firmly rooted in physical,
geographic and cultural space.

In radio and television a signal emanates from an earth or sea or
space bound central transmitter to relayers to receivers. The
relationship of signal to user is one-way.

Existing catalogues of stored motion picture and sound material
are suddenly even more extremely valuable resources. *Repurposing*
(I hate that term) promises to *liberate* older work for
repackaging digitally for new products.

*Repurposing* alone is a linear approach to non linear media. It
is costly, and its advocates sometimes fail to grasp the full
range of ditigal mediaUs capabilities . The issue is not only
RcontentS, (where are we going to get all the material for the
productions?!?!?!) but context. Context between forms, and context
within the infrastructures which make these forms genuinely
digital and as much a part of the landscape of the phone and
satellite companies as the film libraries and archives of
parliamentary democratic governments. Governments feel comfortable
with  central metaphors. Vast libraries. Archives. Fine. We need
the National Film and Sound Archive, to be sure.

But the media I discuss here resist such polite and passive
centralisation with a passion!

With a laptop and a modem, a single person will soon be able to
transmit and receive moving images and sound over the phone line
to anyone likewise connected. The linear assumptions of the finite
copy, the central geographic site and the infrastructure to
process that finite work to any number of finite destinations
suddenly vanishes.

Our Media are Now Nebulous Clouds of Omniprescent Thought.

This paradigm shift is difficult to make, even for those familiar
with the technology. It  almost amounts to a cultural crisis,
potentially as historically significant as the invention of the
printing press and the telephone. It is a change which strikes
naked fear into many who remain blissfully ignorant of how the
digital world can suck up media and spew them out ad infinitum
anywhere, anytime from nowhere and no time.

Film making enjoys a multiplicity of approaches, as the means of
film production can vary with the circumstances of the film
makers. But constants in the film world have to do with how the
work is funded, made, sold and received. How moving imagery
relates to the society around it is, in the most literal sense,
culture. It is the expression of a cultures view of itself. In the
case of mainstream fiuter games are now thirty to forty something
and are looking for something which consolidates the
universalising power of the Nintendo/Sega joy-pad as a means to
access information, book planes, read encyclopaedias, and all the
things people of that age group like to do when offered a choice
of moving vision and sound with which they can interact and
control.

Media cross pollinate, and influence each other. We are all aware
of the ways in which big budget movies accommodate the games
market. Multi-modal publishing, means the simultaneous release of
titles as film, games, music, spinoffs and merchandise.

Music shops in the UK have been recently made aware that the means
of distributing CD software titles can share those of the music
industry. Indeed some game developers have even put out albums of
music. The music CD and the CD software share the same artwork,
and the a similar distribution system. In the US, kiosks are
available which enable you to cut your own audio CD. The result is
a custom object, maybe a compilation of favourite tracks from
different albums.

How far down the track can CD Based film and video kiosk pressing
be?  Bits of favourite films only. All the dream sequences of all
the David Lynch movies on one disk, royalties paid for with the
plastic, please (I wish!!).

The ability to choose, or filter information on the internet using
software tools like
*Turbo Gopher*, *Mosaic* (which uses the hypertext driven RWorld
Wide WebS) presents us with an existing model for sharing moving
picture information. In pieces. With many other people scattered
across the globe in a never ending ongoing cinema of idea
proliferation. This relentless unstoppable currency of data over
the Internet stands in stark contrast to the perceived extent of
the pote simple linear applications of potentially non linear
forms

(why just sit and watch passively when you could also pick and
choose and personally edit a film out of your favourite personal
criteria in any number of infinite combinations?)

2) the passive role of the consumer

Who is to say whether the di likely to persist with notions of the
audience as a captive passive recipient . Commercial T.VUs
delivery of  Reyeballs to advertisersS is attempting to find new
ways to do old things. There is a good chance though, that
RadvertisingS as we know it will probably not survive the
transition.

The telephone company has no interest (nor should it) in the
content of the messages it conveys. It just supplies the dial tone
and bills you for frequency and duration, depending on the
distance and time of day of the call. Why should broadcasters see
the data networks as new ways to broadcast *video on demand* over
the phone lines (how else will they get to your living room as
data except by satellite?) when the model of the central singular
broadcaster in a networked world is all but replaced by the
*Matrix*?

William Gibson, author of *Neuromancer*, speaking on Radio
National recently described the difference between  Internet and
the  *Data Highway* as similar to that between a shared communal
town square and a shopping mall. A shopping mall is a machine for
sucking up money. A town square is a neutral meeting place and
site for shared community.

Meeting strangers online is a profoundly moving and exciting thing
to do.  Film makers wanting to try this should call Pegasus
networks in Brisbane for details on membership for an email
address, access to newgroups etc (film related ones abound!!) .
The *Internet Relay Chat* or IRC is the thing to try, or a MUD
Rmulti user dungeonS.

If the experience of finding other net surfers were limited to
being given the option to agree to buy, or not agree to buy, a
fundamental wrong would have been committed by the authorising
institution that made it so.

Sitting at home with a remote ordering products by hitting the
*buy* button is not a particularly imaginative use of the new
technology.

Sending hi-8 footage to grandma and combining it with transferred
super 8 from the 1980s sent to you half an hour before from
Iceland is. There may however be issues of copyright. It is a
problem which crops up again and again. The question is, will the
laws (designed to protect the physical manifestation of ideas) be
able to survive in a world where digital products can not in any
physical sense be said to exist?

Ted Nelson, computer guru and inventor of the idea of *hypertext*
on his recent visit to Australia outlined his Xanadu networking
and copyright retrieval system. Bits of media are interlinked
across a network made up of special Xanadu servers. Those who make
material available on Xanadu are able to reclaim revenue on
material used, in exchange for relinquishing the context of the
work once bought by another Xanadu user. Here the benefits of
networked data exchange are made compatible with the need of
artists to be paid for the work they produce digitally.

But on a deeper level, Xanadu offers a *linked* software and clip
art culture where the endlessly connected cloud of data on the net
is available and just *there*. There is no centre, no start point,
no end. Just a great, ongoing kaleidoscope of linked information.
The significance of linked data cannot be underestimated. Data
interconnected could provide countless variations of image text
and sound: all customised to a personUs needs. A stately pleasure
dome for sure. Where copyright rules, Okay?

Games producers can rely upon encryption to some extent to protect
software. When the game is burned onto a chip, encased in a
cartridge or published on a CD ROM, the material is protected from
copying by the means of storage. You cannot really copy data
stored in these ways. Its *burned in*.

These elements are significant, because the independent film
community values its intellectual property and needs ways to
safeguard a livelihood from working as information producers. When
the community gets more wired, it will need mechanisms which
enable fair exchange of material.

Film and Games, Film and Games... what are the similarities, if
any, anyway????

Like film,

Games and multimedia can utilise narrative in that the context of
a players role in a game is often that of a story protagonist. The
game design operates like a script, but also encapsulates the
details of the character and the way they interact with the
settings, other characters. Chapters to stories take the form of
game levels. Usually the level of difficulty for the player
increases with each subsequent level achieved. Within levels there
may be several worlds Mapping and cartography play a huge role.

Like film,

Elements which make a game exciting have to do with its appeal to
its target audience,  The late Brian RobinsonUs Swinburne film
schoolUs script class *big 3*:compelling action, interactive
locations and startling characters apply to games as much as
films. This is true of documentary, narrative, or experimental
multimedia.

These are exploratory media, ones which facilitate concentration,
engage the imagination and challenge the audience member who then
feels by means of their proxy self on the screen, literally a part
of the action. The appeal and growth of multimedia games is linked
directly to this.

Barriers to the widespread acceptance of games as media stem from
cultural, technological, and generational misunderstanding.

Yet our day to day experiences are now touched by these forms
everywhere: the supermarket bar code pricing system, the
touch-screen kiosks in the department store and other public
spaces, the sampled phone number at the other end of directory
assistance. The automatic telling machine, the pager, the fax
machine, the security system at work and home. All online buttons,
all flashing imagery and processed sound.

Our cities are becoming themselves, giant video games.

Some desktop computer manufacturers now offer teleconferencing
video phone features built into computers which sell for around
$7000. They include cameras built onto the monitor to transmit the
speaking face, microphones to transmit the voice and utilities to
compress and send the real-time pictures and sound files across
the globe from an office desk.

Image and sound production is everywhere. Soon the bulk of the
affluent WestUs population will be involved in the routine task of
making imagery and sound for transmission and retrieval.

 Groovy aint it?

Film makers are already at the very centre of these developments.
John Hughes, Sue Macauly, Micheal Buckley, myself, Steve French,
Jeremy Parker, David Atkinson, Diana Leach, Kim Sansovini, Kim
Bounds, Sam Thomsom, Troy Innocent, Elena Popa. The list grows.
Film makers are in demand again.

Why Film Makers in Multimedia?

Few other art forms have as central to their modus operandi basic
understandings of the complex interplay between movement,
kinematics, juxtaposition, sound and all the fine delicate
elements you learn and create when making a film become real.

The motion picture arts are entirely compatible, and directly
relevant to the evolution of software and digital culture today.
Only the links are not yet fully understood because we, like the
rest of the world are in the centre of the storm of global
technological change. The feeling of post modern dislocation is
felt all the more by virtue of our cultural and geographic
distance from where the action happens faster and on a larger
scale.

But what was a *cringe* for film in the early 70s can be the fuel
to ignite an industry which is unaffected by geographic isolation
from commercial hot zones. Modems blast the coastlines into
insignificance. Borders donUt matter. Vast oceans donUt matter.
The bits and bytes flow like pollen in the wind almost at the
speed of light.  Our uniqueness as a cultural site is itself a
source of value in the digital era.

Digital technology does not mean the death of film. It does not
mean the end of video. Or standard magnetic or photo chemical
media. This is not a zero - sum equation. It is not some futurist,
modernist war of semiotic attrition. When I made Puppenhead, I
went out of my way to make the film a celebration of the
circumstances of its own production. The RfilmSness of the surface
of Kodak Tri-X was as much a part of the text as the *story* or
anything else. Film animation in literal terms can not really
exist in any other medium. Sure you can teach animation technique
without using film. But film is uniquely film. Photo chemical.
Real. Bright, glowing projected light (thanks Corrinne!)

I work in software now, but teaching film animation at Open
Channel reminds me of the importance film holds for me and others
who come to learn about Puppets and models and 24 frames a second.
Film lives and breathes within the hearts of those who have had
their lives changed by it. It just donUt go away....

This is not about what will replace film. It is about how can film
makers, frustrated at the stagnation of the media they love and
the institutions which support it find ways to engage their
talents, and contribute to the evolution of a whole new class of
making art and meaning? How can film makers make a living in the
1990s?

Go to the video game arcades. Look at this environment as someone
who shapes movement light and sound into meaning. Look at the
arcade as a film maker.Here is your new domain.Those are moving
pictures youUre looking at. Hear those amazing sounds!! Check out
the colours!!! The movement. Look at the level of engagement of
the people playing. If you are an animator, you have been here
before.

These things are the prototypes for an Esperanto of the
Imagination (to quote Brenda Laurel, Mondo 2000 issue 9)

As for effette concerns about *all the violence*, go tell it to
Phillip Brophy. HeUll show you how comics were treated in the
1950s around about the time of the McCarthy witch hunts. Comics
were popular with kids then, too. Besides the chief censor has
installed a classification system for games just like that for
films. Only it took me four months to get through *Doom* on the PC
and the British Film  Classification Board charges by the hour!!!
As a tax payer, I sure hope ours donUt!

As I was saying......Look at these video games and remember those
film school classes about where cinema first began. Think of how
Melies started, how Eisenstien and Dziga Vertov made the then
separate worlds of the circus, the illusionist theatre and
photography come together to become a new art form. Entertainment
for the masses. Behind the big top, next to the freak show. Our
precious art house *Cinemah* was once dismissed as mere sideshow
attraction too one hundred years ago. You entered a cinema with a
tinge of guilt, and touch of voyeurism. And a thrill.

ItUs time as film makers and artists to cultivate a process of
active participation in the development of the the New Media. But
we need support.

 We need an Australian Digital Media Commission.

We need new Commonwealth funding structures set in place to
finance games anould need to reflect changes not only in the
technology, but in the effect of the new media on the culture
around it. Like the Australian  Film Commission, The ADMC would
foster and cultivate a growing digital arts, entertainment and
commercial culture. The emergent lifestyle we experience will
benefit from such pro-active policy.

Multi Lateral Finance Strategy

I propose that such a funding body operate initially under the
guidance and active financial guidance of the Film Finance
Corporation, The Australian Film Commission, The Australia
Council, The Departments of Industry Technology and Regional
Development, the Department of Communications, The Ministry of the
Arts, The Ministry for Education. The ABC, SBS.

Corporate support could come from the AEDC, Telecom, Optus, Apple,
Microsoft, and a range of other corporate entities.

Changes made possible with Government finance could be far
reaching and   controversial.

Copyright, David Cox 1994.