Journeys in Travel: An Infinite Digital Database Film Project
Symposium:
Session Title:
- The Uses of Digital Database
Presentation Title:
- Journeys in Travel: An Infinite Digital Database Film Project
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
This is a report on a practice-based research project that investigates contemporary modes of non-linear and recombinant digital storytelling based on algorithmic computer-controlled systems. The video installation ‘Journeys in Travel’ is a story of travel and investigates relationships between travelogue, cinematic essay and digital database narrative. The Open Source Software ‘PD’, which is mainly used to create live-algorithmic musical improvisation and (interactive) music composition, controls here an infinite audiovisual narrative. It is a temporary, open-ended arrangement, which sets in motion a seemingly endless chain of references to related topics: Travel, being elsewhere in foreign places, tourism, ethnography, globalisation, a hyper-connected world, reality and simulation, movement, pace, rhythm and the relationship of film (structure), narrative, music and travel.
‘Journeys in Travel’ is designed as a laboratory for multiple investigations of contemporary digital narrative constructions. The database of video and sound elements can act as a source for varying research questions and experimental approaches where the ‘data’ or ‘units’ of the story are arranged and assembled according to different computer algorithms.
The link between digital database narrative and cinematic essay has not yet been intensively investigated and emerges as one of the central aspects of the project. But there are also close and historical connections between travel, film and narrative, that are revisited and re-contextualised in the digital era. Travel can be understood as the reading of an audio-visual narrative, a sequence of images and sounds of unfolding events, captured while we are moving through time and space.
Another interest lies in investigating relationships between structuring processes in film and music creation via principles of ‘macro-aleatoric’ music composition, which are determined by elements of chance or an uncertain outcome. ‘Aleatoric’ alignment of ‘data’ has long precident in music dating back to the beginning of the 20th century. Aleatoric music composition supports structure but also variation and chance within structure, and is similar to approaches in nonlinear recombinant film. The film units/sequences will be created after knowledge of musical units and rhythm preserving original proportions of a formula to create a structure where the possible combinations of narration reach to infinity.
