Response to Hansen

A new artform that has emerged recently emerged is Alternate Reality Games. An ARG is an interactive role-playing narrative in which players use various mediums to engage in a story that is told in real time. These games are rooted in the Internet and digital images / videos, however I think it is difficult to deny the immanence that exists in the participation. Although there is always a creator and a group of people leading the game, the story is being told in real time, by the players (anyone who wants to participate). Immanence also comes in the way that the users access the content. The content is often hidden and the users have to solve puzzles in order to access it. So everyone will find the media at different times, through different means, and often in different orders. Each player’s experience has a different “aura” around it.

This sort of digital art certainly includes moving images, however the image is not at the center of the piece. I do believe, however, that the moving image can be the central focus of Internet art. It will no longer cinema, or at least cannot be experienced the way that we are used to experiencing cinema, in a passive state. This would be ignoring the nature of the beast. It is not to say that cinema as we know it is obsolete, this is just a new form emerging.

As Hansen writes, “What we will discover in the process is that the frame in any form – the photograph, the cinemematic image, the video signal, and so on – cannot be accorded the autonomy Deleuze would give it since its very form (in any concrete deployment reflects the demands of embodied perception, or more exactly, a historically contingent negotiation between technical capacities and the ongoing “evolution” of embodied (human) perception” (8).

Recently, I have been conceiving of new ways to create video work for the Internet. One of these experiments is to live stream improvisational comedy sets to the Internet. Rather than just having one shot though, the viewer would have a chance of 5 cameras (a CU on each of the three actors, as well as a wide shot and a second camera that would be moving through the space to create two-shots). Each actor would also be mic’ed with static microphones as well, so the viewer can create their audio tracks as well. The interface of the website streaming the video would make it easy for the viewer to change the shots / audio and create their own cut of the piece as it is happening live. This is just a starting point, but the idea is to give everyone the opportunity to create their own experience as they are viewing a creative work.

--Jake