The constantly growing quantities of media data which are
available in numerous public and private archives and databases,
or which can be generated on purpose (by storing all access
logs of a website, by continuously recording the output
of some sensors or video cameras and so on) represents not
only the problem to be solved (if it can be solved at all)
but also a unique artistic opportunity. This unique opportunity
can be summed up as the shift from sampling to complete
recording.
One of the most basic principles of narrative
arts is what in computer culture is called compression.
A drama, a novel, a film, a narrative painting or a photograph
compresses weeks, years, decades and even centuries of human
existence into a number of essential scenes (or, in the
case of narrative images, even a single scene). The non-essential
is stripped away; only the essential is recorded. Why? Narrative
arts always have been limited by the capacities of the receiver
(i.e. a human being) and of storage media. Throughout history,
the first capacity remained more or less the same; today
the time we will devote to the reception of a single narrative
may range from 15 seconds (a TV commercial) to two hours
(a feature film) to 40 hours (the average time spent by
a player on a new computer game) to maybe hundreds of hours
(following a TV series or soap opera). But the capacity
of storage media recently changed dramatically. Instead
of 10 minutes that can fit on a standard film roll or two
hours that can fit on a DV tape, a digital server can hold
a practically unlimited amount of audiovisual recordings.
The same applies for audio only, or for text.
If both
traditional narrative arts and modern media technologies
are based on sampling reality, that is, representing/recording
only small fragments of human experience, digital recording
and storage technologies greatly expand how much can be
represented/recorded. This applies to granularity of time,
the granularity of visual experience and also to what can
be called social granularity (i.e. representation of one"s
relationships with other human beings.)
In regards
to time, it is now possible to record, store and index years
of digital video. By this I don"t mean video libraries of
stock footage or movies on demand systems; I am thinking
of recording/representing the experiences of individuals:
for instance, the POV of a single person as she goes through
her life, the POVs of a number of people etc. Although it
presents combined experiences of many people rather than
the detailed account of a single person"s life, the work
by Spielberg"s Shoa Foundation is relevant here, as it shows
what can be done with the new scale in video recording and
indexing. The Shoa Foundation assembled, and now makes accessible,
a massive number of video interviews with Holocaust survivors:
it would take one person 40 years to watch all the video
material, stored on the foundation"s computer servers.
Examples
of new, finer visual granularity are provided by the projects
of Luc Courchesne and Jeffrey Shaw, which both aim at continuous
360° moving image recordings of visual reality. One
of Shaw"s custom systems, which he called Panosurround Camera,
uses 21 DV cameras mounted on a sphere. The recordings are
stitched together using custom software, resulting in a
360° moving image with a resolution of 6000 x 4000 pixels.
Finally,
an example of new social granularity is provided by the
popular computer game The Sims. This game (more accurately
referred to as a social simulator) models ongoing relationship
dynamics between a number of characters. Although the relationship
model itself can hardly compete with the modeling of human
psychology in modern narrative fiction (since The Sims is
not a static representation of selected moments in the characters"
lives but a dynamic simulation running in real time), we
can at any time choose to follow any of the characters.
While the rest of the characters are off-screen, they continue
to "live" and change. Just as with the new granularity of
time and the new granularity of visual experience, the social
universe no longer needs to be sampled, but can be modeled
as one continuum.
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