Hi all:



I thought readers of Screen-L might be interested in this DVD. For more 

information, please visit 

http://mitpress.mit.edu/promotions/books/FL2005026213456X.  Thanks!



Soft Cinema

Navigating the Database

Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky



What kind of cinema is appropriate for the age of Palm Pilot and Google? 

Automatic surveillance and self-guided missiles? Consumer profiling and 

CNN? To investigate this question, Lev Manovich, one of today's most 

influential thinkers in the fields of media arts and digital culture, 

joined with award-winning new media artist and designer Andreas Kratky. 

They also invited contributions from leaders in other cultural fields: DJ 

Spooky, Scanner, George Lewis, and Jóhann Jóhannsson (music), servo 

(architecture), Schoenerwissen/OfCD (information visualization), and Ross 

Cooper Studios (media design).



The results of their three-year explorations are the three "films" 

presented on this DVD. Although the films resemble the familiar genres of 

cinema, the process by which they were created demonstrates the 

possibilities of soft(ware) cinema. A "cinema," that is, in which human 

subjectivity and the variable choices made by custom software combine to 

create films that can run infinitely without ever exactly repeating the 

same image sequences, screen layouts and narratives.



Mission to Earth, a science fiction allegory of the immigrant experience, 

adopts the variable choices and multi-frame layout of the Soft Cinema 

system to represent "variable identity." Absences is a lyrical black and 

white narrative that relies on algorithms normally deployed in military and 

civilian surveillance applications to determine the editing of video and 

audio. Texas, a "database narrative," assembles its visuals, sounds, 

narratives, and even the identities of its characters, from multiple 

databases. The DVD was designed so that every viewing of each film 

generates a different version.



Lev Manovich is Professor of Visual Arts, University of California, San 

Diego. His book The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001) has been hailed 

as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall 

McLuhan."



DVD-video with 40-page color booklet, ISBN 0-262-13456-X





David Weininger

Associate Publicist

MIT Press

55 Hayward Street

Cambridge, MA 02142-1315

617.253.2079

617.253.1709 fax

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Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the

University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu