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 [log in to unmask] ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu