A Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Emerging Cinema and Media Arts
Emergent technologies have provided the impetus for the evolution of traditional cinematic viewing experience to shift dramatically from a largely passive viewer to a progressively more actively engaged participant, with the potential to influence the unfolding of a multiplicity of narrative streams within the same tale. The complexities inherent in these interactive relationships have enormous socio-cultural and psychological implications not only on how cinema is currently being produced, but perhaps more significantly on how it is being received as an art form.
A new vocabulary has been added to the toolset of cinema: interactivity, locative media, dynamic content, game engines, and sensor technology, to name a few. These present significant new opportunities to redefine cinematic art in our time.
This research theme area will look at these tools and their impact on the construction of new narrative forms and how they relate to the production of cinema in the 21st century as well as to the histories of cinematic practices.
Emerging technologies provide new ways of organizing the complex logistics of film production workflow. This includes redefining the roles and hierarchies of the traditional production chain as well as reconfiguring the creative process.
This research theme will investigate how new modes of collaboration and process can adapt to the demands of cinematic production in the digital age. For instance, how does the idea of 'crowd sourcing' - that is, the act of taking a task traditionally performed by one individual, and outsourcing it instead to an undefined, generally large group of people connected through the internet - provide a different model of production from the 'assembly line' form of industrial television production. By extension, how has this profound opening up of the means of production to the community at large, allowed for an expansion of creative influx from a wider, more culturally diverse base.
Research in this theme area could encompass the development and integration of emergent technologies as well as the scholarly inquiry into the various social, interpersonal, and pragmatic consequences and implications resulting from these rapidly occurring changes.
Cinema is no longer primarily an art of the theatre. The screen has proliferated into many spheres of our public and private lives. The production and distribution of cinematic material has become democratized as wider populations have ready access to the means of production.
Digital locative media such as GPS, laptop computers and mobile phones, as growing interactive modes of presentation, allow for exciting new opportunities to deliver narrative work. Expanding the possibilities for experiencing enhanced realities, work in this area has the potential to trigger real social interactions through the collisions of virtual and real worlds in specific geographic locations.
This theme area of research could involve the conceptual and practical aspects of developing work for locative media technologies. At the same time, this will provide opportunity for focused study on the pronounced and altered experiential effects that distributed cinematic narratives can have on the increasingly more engaged viewer.