UNMOVIE - www.unmovie.net

directed by Philip Pocock

with Axel Heide, OnesandZeros, Gregor Stehle

produced for 'Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film' exhibition

ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology Karlsruhe Germany

book published by MIT Press, USA, containing this essay by Philip Pocock.

/* def begin (unmovie, darkness): */

def __init__(self):

try:

not about illusion

If one may speak of beginnings in cinema anymore, it begins (and ends) with a darkness contained in a black box. UNMOVIE presents ZKM’s cavernous darkness

with a fountain of bubbling blackness as its breathing opsign after illusionism, where time enumerates rather than denominates space.

except history:

The future of cinema begins:

“Genauso muß der Film, eine andere Dienstmagd, sich befreien und endlich, wie es die kubistischen Maler taten, verstehen, daß die Malerei ohne Gestalt, Alltag,

Gesicht und Ideenbild existieren kann. Erst dann wird der Film über seine Kultur 'an sich' nachdenken”. [Kasemir Malevich, 1925]

try:

don’t move!

Date: Di, 16. Jul. 2002 23:10 Subject: gregor/unmovie/time

A film is a succession of images, that's called movement-image. The fact that you believe there is a history depends on the fact that the movement or the speed gives us

an illusion of cause-and-effect between images.

In a ‘unmovement’ moment, an image exists by itself and it doesn't know about the past and the future images.

So when it is possible to go from image to image without connecting the moment-images, avoiding the illusion of history, past, present and future, you can speak

about existence-time.

The point is you can't stop the movie. Time always does retain the form of leaving and coming. The moment you realize that, you are unmoving time, which is just

Existence-Time itself.

/* def onConnect (clouds): */

def connect(self,clouds):

try:

floating aroundcloudyghostsinthesky

Date: So, 05. Mai. 2002 06:46 Subject: Re: sphere or hexagon??

**hi P, we do something new now. its about brightshinyclouds. the words are included, no separate speechbubbles. only 3-4 words are shown each cloud then they

fade out andnew words come in. this handles the space problem. the characters are now like bright ideas floating aroundcloudyghostsinthesky containing words and

color.

and they react to the mood of the discussion.

... be prepared : ) 10

except without shadows:

UNMOVIE.net frees time from under space. It plays with it.

UNMOVIE.net doesn’t spill time, as it were. It swims in it.

UNMOVIE.net is Code-Art calculating sequence as consequence.

UNMOVIE.net puffs clouds obliterating shadows as data does.

and darkness is a mirror:

Your screen is a BOT’s brain thinking about a database of anonymous online video all the time.

except cracks_in_reality:

The tables turn, and the flood of images, action, movement and other sensory-motor images, customarily highlighting cinema, becomes an image-flood, the

compound word’s substantive and, consequently, its image becoming that of the flood - a ‘time-image’; the stream-as-image in-and-of-itself.

/* def UNMOVIE (stage, stream): */

def stage(self,stream):

try:

navigating through unmovie stage

UNMOVIE.net’s open-source code stages a ‘BOTfarm’ - a self-regulating, game-like vehicle for variable, programmed ‘net-personalities’, ‘actor-media’ that

wander, seek or avoid, talk or listen in dialogue with guests or other BOTs. The current cast includes: Dylan (all his lyrics), Dogen (Master Eihei Dogen’s 13th

C. Zen

teachings), Lovers (their chat log), Nietzsche (“Beyond Good and Evil”) and Tarkovsky (“Sculpting in Time”).

Each is animated linguistically, adapting open source artificial intelligence for this purpose (megahal).

Your and the BOTs interaction write the endless script, displayed as type-images on the stage. The script is visualized in real time by streaming Net-videos stored in

the UNMOVIE database.

and unmovie is a hexagrid :-)

Date: Fr, 10. Mai. 2002 14:58:08 Subject: Re: hexagon01

some new stuff in technicolor. maybe something for the book.

what it does is. it generates the hexagrid in the back and maps the bots’ movements onto that. bots react to other bots, if they get side to side. then a discussion forks

off (or the bot joins a running conversation). speechbubbles or speechlog will be there at some point. you see the relationship if you drag 2 bots in a discussion apart. that

causes the discussionline to disappear. the dragging, will be replaced by some sort of server remote control. at least for the bots.

it's more a problem with the timing, than with the performance. everything happening in the movie is done via timed execution. that's why the actionscript code is >500

lines for a rather simple movie. Just about everything has to be synchronized with other clients, that means most of the procedures in the movie have to be interrupted or

informed by a call from the server. right now i only go for commands like: move bot.

to keep you up-to-date. i wrote some new classes for the server side movement. right now the server spits out the grid which gets interpreted by the flash-file quite

nicely. snap to grid and such is done server-side to prevent clients occupying the same spot. actually what previously was inside the flashmovie - the hexagon stuff - is

now on the server written in python, the flash client now can be a lot dumber. if 2 bots or clients share the same neighborhood, a conversation is set up. next weekend i'll

do the bots’ talk scheduling, if that works out ok the foundation is set.

elif doc.nodeName==“Time-Image”:

self.authorDate(Deleuze,1989):

“And the screen itself, even if it keeps a vertical position by convention, no longer seems to refer to the human posture, like a window or a painting, but rather

constitutes a table of information, an opaque surface on which are inscribed ‚data’, information replacing nature, and the brain-city, the third eye, replacing the eyes of

nature.

... The life of the afterlife of cinema depends on its internal struggle with informatics. It is necessary to set up against the latter the question which goes beyond it, that of

its source and that of its addressee”.

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Unmovie Stage, Stream and other Links at: http://www.unmovie.net