DE-SERIES. Generative cinema making project. 2014
CCA Sokol. Moscow, Russia
The project De-Series explores potentialities and limits of transferring authorship to a computer. TV-series is a popular media format which is produced industrially. The team of artists analysed this form, identified its basic formal qualities, in order to demonstrate the possibilities and boundaries of computer generated content. This exhibition analytically deconstructed TV-series and exposed some manipulative schemes inherent with it. The project resulted in the universalization of the method of TV-series production, which fundamentally updates this media format as a field of contemporary artistic intervention.
Each artist chose a short scene from popular TV-series and broke it into its formal elements: characters, dialogues, actions, and so on. This information was fed into a computer generator specifically programmed for this purpose. It instantly produces new scenarios from the randomly chosen elements of the respective categories.
Exhibition at the Contemporary Art Center Sokol included:
- scene from De-Series.
- an interactive studio which used pregenerated phrases to enable the viewer to participate in generative film production. The chromakeyed series was projected live onto the nearby wall.
- computer program which showed slowed-down process of scenario generation.
- project documentation: texts, images.
- video of an actor rehearsing.
- Generator-2 activated five video screens randomly distributed in space to display 15 seconds fragments from the video documentation of the project creation process. Each demonstration was interleaved by a pause of random length. To follow the non-linear narrative of this new series the viewer was forced to move through the exhibition and to create an individual image of the project.
Participants: Vasily Zharkoi, Mariam Pesvianidze, Yulia Yastrebova, Nikolai Spesivcev, Dina Zhuk, Nic Degtyarev, Nadya Degtyareva, Tatiana Efrussi, Maria Volkova, Vera Gagarina, Elena Klabukova, Alexander Leshchev, Vasily Ryzhov, Natalia Nikulenkova, Gleb Nechaev, Semen Kats, Natalia Bobryakova, Ivan Shpak, Vitaly Maisuradze, Sergei Zyabko, Alina Ilanskaya, Klimenkov Ilya, Dmitry Ivanov, Anton Kuryshev, Antonina Baever, Yaroslav Aleshin.