Introduction to Digital Media
ARS 162, Spring 2006
Instructor: Barbara Lattanzi

ARCHIVAL VIDEO AS A SOURCE FOR HYPERTEXT

IMAGE AND SIMULATION CAMERA EXERCISE - PART 2 (of a 3-part assignment)

PART 2 is due on Tuesday, February 28

Use your 10 screen-grabbed images (from one film in the Prelinger Archives). These screen-grabs are to be your templates for 10 photographs. You will shoot the photos using a digital still camera (Sony Cybershot or equivalent camera, available at the Center for Media Production).

Note that when you borrow the camera from the Center for Media Production, you want to get the most reliable equipment. Therefore, you should tell them that you need to reserve/check-out one of the still cameras specifically set aside for Lattanzi's classes (ARS162 and ARS361) .

The camera manual is usually kept with the camera itself. But you can also access a pdf copy of the same manual on-line. It will probably be enough for you to simply review pages 18 and 19 of the camera manual.

Here are technical settings that you should learn to adjust on the digital camera:

Shoot 10 digital photos.

Each photo should be based on one of the 10 screen-grabbed film frames. Each photo should involve a simulation of the original film image: mimic, restage or depict a match based on shape, line, direction of movement, scale, color, tonality, etc. Note that you do NOT need to completely recreate the original film image. You need only SUGGEST one or more aspects of the composition of the image (or portion of the image).

You will be creating image pairs similar to Diane Bertolo's "Daily Thing 2004" and "getDate()" . (You can visit the Net Art work of Diane Bertolo and other artists - Jess Loseby, David Crawford, etc.- listed in the citations for Week 3.)

Each pair of images you assemble (screen-grabbed film frame plus a camera-shot image) will involve some kind of formal or other kind of compositional mimicry; matches based on shape, line, direction of movement, scale, color, tonality, etc.

Obviously, your image pairs will be DIFFERENT from Bertolo's (and other net artists) because you will be using an archival film as your source material. Nonetheless, the artifice of image pairs (the mimicry of one visual composition by another visual composition) is meant to sharpen visual perception of formal relationships. The question is: to what degree will these visual relationships, in turn, trigger unexpected associations (that are essentially non-visual, since the associations exist only "between" the two paired images)?

Eventually we will be building a larger whole from this phase of the project...a whole which produces a complex result out of the parts of an accumulated database derived from the archival film you have chosen. We are experimenting with multifaceted representations of a cultural artifact (the archival film itself, treated as a database).