| "Absences" - Screenshot from the DVD |
Soft Cinema is an installation presenting algorithmic cinema. It extends the schemata of information design into the art context, combining mutliple parallel streams of information to produce a form of simultaneous cinema. The project is situated between classical film montage and the indiscriminate equivalence of database entries. The project is a statement imagining what cinema would be in the age of search engines and computer vision. The Soft Cinema engine creates emergent films and tests the limits of narrative and meaningful coherence as a function of algorithmic montage, pulling from various custom-designed databases. Soft Cinema is conceived as an experimental framework to explore different databases and meta-data sets focusing alternatively on narrative, on geo-location, and on image-inherent parameters, which are the functional principles of the different Soft Cinema Editions "Mission to Earth", "Texas" and "Absences."
Soft Cinema is a colaboration of Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky and was realized with support from the Center for Art and Media (ZKM). A DVD simulating the functional principles of the Soft Cinema engine was published as a DVD-Video by MIT Press.
> Soft Cinema - Navigating the Database at MIT Press