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Beyond Movies Kevin Kelly’s by Roger Rose
Sketch of Kevin Kelly. Drawing: Joshua Swanbeck
Previously, we covered the address before an audience at the San Franciso International Film Festival by Kevin Kelly, former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog and the founding executive editor of Wired magazine. Kelly is considered by many to be an expert in digital culture. The Wachowski Brothers required the principal actors of The Matrix to read three books prior to the start of filming, including Kelly’s 1995 book Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, and Introducing Evolutionary Psychology by Dylan Evans.
In his informal talk, cinema maven Kelly indeed showed remarkable foresight about the future of film. Noting that he is “a little bit of an outsider,” Kelly started by saying that movies aren’t made with all the various distribution modes in mind, and quoted technologist Carver Mead: “Listen to the technology; see what it wants to say.” Kelly spoke about what he thinks the technology is telling us – that films, TV, and games are all converging, as media spreads into everything we do.
One small point that Kelley covered concerned the deconstruction of the image-capture experience – using Avid and Final Cut Pro, we are learning to ‘unravel’ the elements of the image to a ‘naked object,’ then recombine them with lighting, location, textures, colors – ending up with a virtual mosaic of tiny elements.
Kelly is a powerful proponent of what he calls ‘the Gutenberg Shift’ – the shift from a ubiquity of written text (signage, labels, manuals, newspapers, magazines, books, and all manner of the written word) that surrounds us each day, to a ubiquity of visual images. We are so immersed in text that we don’t even notice its pervasive presence anymore. Kelly points out that we’re currently going through the Gutenberg Shift in the visual world, in what he calls ‘vizuality.’ His striking analogy is Harry Potter’s The Daily Prophet – a newspaper on which the images are moving – and he says that this is only a minute away, that soon we will be so surrounded by the moving image that we will hardly notice the change.
We have e-ink in Kindle readers, and soon we’ll have electronic digital ink on a flexible page in a newspaper – our favorite newspaper will change all the time, with moving images. [A ‘refillable’ magazine was developed at MIT as few years ago.] The moving image is already becoming part of our literacy: YouTube, Hulu, Seesmic, and other Websites to post videos. Comments on videos are made with other videos – a video conversation, made possible by the facility of the process, by built-in laptop cameras, by image literacy.
Image literacy involves indexing and parsing of data. A problem with moving images is the ‘temporal penalty’ of the time it takes to watch it. In text data, we can read an abstract. Creating an abstract of film is center-stage in research, and methods are being developed to summarize, condense, and digest a clip or small movie. YouTube shows the exact middle frame of the clip as a thumbnail, which is very elementary. Other experimental methods include compressing a center slit in all the frames, creating a little storyboard out of frames taken at intervals, mixing a standard image with frame slits, making a collage of the edges of all the frames, or using time-lapse with all the movement on one ‘still’ shot. The ‘salient still’ compresses a movie into one image, and MIT Media Lab makes an extruded volume of a motion picture.
Some data is on a film’s cover poster, some is in a storyboard, some in a slideshow or collage. Or you can have a skim or trailer, which is actually a highly-crafted version of the film, and there are computational ways to actually make trailers automatically out of films. And there’s the fast-forward – experimenters have determined that you can watch a film 200 times faster and still understand it. You will lose 50 to 80 percent comprehension, but enough remains for recognition purposes.
Images are becoming our new literacy. We are learning to annotate things within a film: face recognition, object recognition, which will leads to tools for searching images and not the tags associated with them. YouTube is giving people the desire and opportunity to learn sampling and remixing and mashups and appropriating, and image generation things – all part of the new Gutenberg language, this Gutenberg syntax and grammar for dealing with motion pictures.
Kelly says that this liquidity is actually the great attraction. File-sharing in music was important was not because it was free, but because it was liquid – you could manipulate the data into playlists or reconstitute an album, you could parse a song and make a database. And that same kind of fungibility is happening now in motion pictures. We’re taking the images apart in a very malleable medium – a medium so malleable that it bleeds over into painting. Photoshop creates pictures that less photograph than painting, and it’s happening in motion pictures – the film 300 seems painted, like a moving graphic novel, and it is a kind of moving painted art.
We’re also seeing a marriage of text and image that didn’t exist before. Screen resolution has helped this transition, as has advertising and magazine design. Kelly calls it ‘TV that you can read,’ and points out that we see it in commercials and movie credits.
One of our most profound cultural shifts was the movement from oral culture (‘orality’) to literacy. Gutenberg’s printing press helped increase literacy, which blossomed with words and templates for written text and books – all of which helped create Western civilization as we know it. Orality was the foundation; literacy built on the old stories. And now ‘vizuality’ will create new and revolutionizing impacts on our culture.
The new paradigm will combine text, music, texture, and movement – then take it all to another level in which “we can take that layering of information in films and project it on top of the world that we see” through glasses – augmented reality. Some call it ‘metamedia,’ meaning ‘the larger media,’ while others call it ‘intermedia’ – the media of all media.
And Kelly says that intermedia is what ‘vizuality’ is really about: intermedia is a copy machine and anything copiable will be copied. Once copied, it will flow in super-distribution through wires – and never be eradicated. In this supra-intermedia, the copies become so abundant that some people call it ‘the free economy.’ Business models are already affecting this shift: when there is a superabundance of copies, they’re really worth not very much and the only valuable things are those that can’t be copied, which include immediacy, personalization, authenticity, patronage, interpretation, accessibility, and embodiment. You can wait for a cheap or free copy of a film, but you must pay a premium for the immediacy of getting it as soon as it comes out. You can eventually get a soundtrack or a new music CD, but you will pay to have customized or personalized to the acoustics of your living room. Many people want to know for certain that they are getting the authentic version of software or music or a video – and it’s worthwhile to them to pay for that certainty. These things can’t be can’t be copied.
Some people also want to have a relationship with the creator, supporting the creator, so they will pay to do that. And as in the old software joke, “the software’s free but the manual’s $1,000.” People will pay to be able to interpret it, to actually maintain it, to figure out how to use it. And they’ll pay to have someone direct them to it, or bring it forward, to have access to it 24/7 – accessibility. Or the copy will be free, it costs to see the performance, to see the singer embody the music – or, in the case of a text, to own the the embodiment of the book. People will pay for the book, even though they can get a free electronic copy.
These things are called generatives – they aren’t copyable. Because they must be made at the time, they will become most powerful in this economy. In the coming abundance of copies, scarcity will be found only in things that dwell in and focus around attention – “wherever attention flows, money is going to flow later.” Fewer people read newspapers, while more read online – so the advertising money is moving online. And stories – the narrative form – have a fantastic power to hold our attention.
We live in a world where many screens are operating in our environment, all connected in various ways: phones connected to each other, laptops connected, all forming one large machine – as if cell phones are transistors in a larger computer. And it’s all running on the Web (and basically if it’s not on the Web, it no longer exists). Every screen is literally a window into the same machine. [There’s currently a project using thousands or personal computers to tackle big mathematical or scientific programs.] It’s called ‘cloud computing,’ which means that your computer will communicate with a remote computing process, where movies and music are stored, and we’ll only have to maintain a small receiving device for a larger computer that lives elsewhere: an interface, like the cell phone, to everything contained in the cloud.
Every device made today contains a chip as smart as an ant. No smarter than an ant, that chip is connected to make something smarter than its parts. As everything is becoming connected, it all becomes an Internet of devices. Right now, they all contain words and documents linked to each other, but very soon we’ll see connections of motion pictures (what Kelly calls a ‘new literacy’). We’ll have a worldwide database of devices and film parts. Lev Manovich, at UC San Diego, calls it ‘Database Cinema,’ where you can unravel everything into a database and then reassemble it from the parts. Movies will become like software programs that you compute from your database of parts. All possible shots of everything and every lighting angle will be in this database. As an example, Flickr contains 151,000 shots of the Golden Gate Bridge – virtually every possible shot – so you don’t need to take a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, since it’s been done in every achievable way.
And soon, the whole world will be covered like that, not just in still photographs but in film or video. Google has the 3-D Warehouse, with the things that exist and wire-frame 3-D models, all for free: the complete Shanghai waterfront buildings, every city in the world. You can get the full 3-D rendered, ready-to-use version for your film – it’s already done. By 2010, there will be four billion camera phones in the world, recording everything in high definition, sending it into the cinema database, and you – the ‘Wikipedia you’ – will be sharing all of it, making films from it all together.
“Like words in a book,” says Kelly, “these parts are going to be reassembled and remixed and read and cogenerated by others, and then annotated and quoted and owned by us.” We’ll soon be collectively making motion pictures. And Kelly is quick to point out that this is not impossible. The Web, which has changed our lives, is only 5,000 days old. All the newest technologies – Google, iPhones, Flickr – is all less than 5,000 days old. At the beginning, people said that there wasn’t enough money in the world to make the Web happen, that it was literally impossible, inconceivable. But it was possible, and we’re enjoying the benefits of it today.
Kelly’s most important question: What’s going to happen in the next 5,000 days? We’re moving from being people of the book to people of the screen. You may be reading this on a computer – if so, you’re part of this new culture of the intermedia of the screen. Posted on Dec 04, 2008 - 01:45 AM