73 research outputs found
The Poetics of Combinatory Cinema: David Jhave Johnston interviews Roderick Coover and Scott Rettberg
No full textFor the past several years filmmaker Roderick Coover and fiction writer Scott Rettberg have collaborated on a series of film and digital media projects that address climate change, environmental catastrophe, cross-cultural communication and combinatory poetics. Working between Philadelphia, USA, where Coover directs the graduate programme in Film and Media Arts at Temple University, and Bergen, Norway, where Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen. Their projects, including The Last Volcano, Rats and Cats, Three Rails Live (with Nick Montfort) and Toxi•City, deal thematically with contemporary and past moments of environmental change and human loss, and formally with interdisciplinary practice and combinatory poetics. Coover and Rettberg were interviewed by digital poet and experimental filmmaker David Jhave Johnston, Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong
The Poetics of Combinatory Cinema: David Jhave Johnston interviews Roderick Coover and Scott Rettberg
No full textFor the past several years filmmaker Roderick Coover and fiction writer Scott Rettberg have collaborated on a series of film and digital media projects that address climate change, environmental catastrophe, cross-cultural communication and combinatory poetics. Working between Philadelphia, USA, where Coover directs the graduate programme in Film and Media Arts at Temple University, and Bergen, Norway, where Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen. Their projects, including The Last Volcano, Rats and Cats, Three Rails Live (with Nick Montfort) and Toxi•City, deal thematically with contemporary and past moments of environmental change and human loss, and formally with interdisciplinary practice and combinatory poetics. Coover and Rettberg were interviewed by digital poet and experimental filmmaker David Jhave Johnston, Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong
Storytelling in VR, CAVES and other emerging forms: An interview with Roderick Coover by Katarzyna Boratyn
No full textThe following interview with Roderick Coover asks how emerging cinematic technologies transform documentary storytelling. Though his early ethnographic projects, such as Concealed Narratives (1996, filmed and photographed in Ghana) and the Harvest (1999, filmed and photographed in France), he created interactive documentary forms that could bridge modes of expression. The works combine field-notes, editing observations, exposition, travel narratives, encounters and interviews with evocative imagery. In works such as Voyage Into The Unknown (2007), Canyonlands (2009), and Estuary (2013). Coover uses scrolling map environments to offer interactive, cinematic experiences in which users create paths among video clips and data; the works explore spatial knowledge and storytelling, national myth-making and land use. In works such as Something That Happened Only Once (2007) and The Last Volcano (2011), he layers stories on animated panoramic settings to present disturbing disjunctions in the expression of place and memory. His recent collaborative works Three Rails Live (2013) and Toxicity: A Climate Change Narrative (2016) are algorithmic. They use code to combine voices and images from a database in an ever-changing order; the works use storytelling and new technologies to address the questions of climate change and industrial waste. In Hearts & Minds: The Interrogations Project, a VR work about US military torture in Iraq, he and his collaborators use immersive arts, storytelling and gaming technologies to introduce challenging accounts of human rights abuse
Code-Driven Narratives: Chance, Meaning and Story in Combinatory and Generative Film
No full textThrough combinatory systems, generative creation and structured constraints, code-driven cinema challenges enduring narrative structures, altering both creative processes and viewer expectations. The methods introduce unpredictability and ambiguity, engaging audiences in meaning-making processes while also helping to illuminate complex relationships between humans and machines. Intertwining past, present, and future, code-driven films pose questions of time, memory, place and story.
In combinatory cinema, also known as database film, algorithms select elements from pre-recorded fragments from a database of clips and sounds, and in generative cinema, original media is created by code. Unlike interactive cinema, which privileges user choice, these forms often emphasize chance, generating ambiguous and fluid meanings through montage, compositing and other forms of aleatory juxtapositioning. Drawing from avant-garde traditions such as Dada and Surrealism, as well as constraint-based artistic practices like those of the Oulipo literary group, combinatory and generative cinema leverages randomness and hidden parameters, exposing latent narrative structures. The tension between fragmentation and coherence in these systems challenges linear expectations in novel ways.
The paper offers five examples that demonstrate diverse approaches to code-driven filmmaking, particularly through combinatory and generative methods. Three Rails Live (Coover, Rettberg and Montfort 2013) employs randomized sequences and poetic combinatory structures which create an ever-evolving cinematic experience. Toxicity: A Climate-Change Narrative (Coover and Rettberg, 2016) intertwines fictional and nonfictional elements using a combinatory system that offer possibilities of hope and survival in the face of climate catastrophes. Penelope (Coover and Rettberg 2019) generates algorithmically structured poetry from a database of textual, visual, and auditory fragments, evoking themes of memory, loss and migration. It will happen here (Coover, Vidiksis and Montfort 2021) and its live performance variant, The Floods, integrate documentary footage with generated text and sound, creating immersive, site-specific experiences that immerse viewers in experiences of environmental change and collective memory. Lastly, Water on the Pier (Coover, Vidiksis and Montfort 2021) employs live environmental data and interactive elements to situate and personalize climate urgencies. These works highlight the possibilities of combinatory and generative filmmaking to expand the interpretative capacities of audiences and creators alike. Further, the approaches enrich collaboration between filmmakers, writers, and composers by offering nonhierarchical, iterative, and responsive processes of production and re-imaginings of narrative structures.
The paper argues that combinatory and generative cinema and related code-based methods not only reveal the mechanics of technological storytelling but also interrogate how industrial and post-industrial paradigms shape cultural narratives. By disrupting linearity, these systems offer new approaches to time, memory, and meaning, fostering a deeper understanding of the conditions that govern contemporary media environments. They expand understanding of an evolving relationship between storytelling, computation, and human perception. The approach challenges the fixity of meaning, presenting a dynamic and ever-shifting expressions that reflect the instabilities of memory, time and experience
Choice, Chance and the Database: Transforming Narrative Structures through Combinatory and Generative Cinema
No full text In works such as Toxcity: A Climate Change Narrative (Coover and Rettberg, 2016), Penelope (Coover and Rettberg, 2019), The Floods (Coover, Vidiksis and Montfort,2021) and Water On The Pier (Coover, Vidiksis and Montfort,2021), algorithms drive the cinematic montage to continually alter how images, sounds and language combine to create imaginaries and suggest narrative arcs. These code-driven, combinatory and generative films ask viewers to make build meaning out of fragments that are combined by forces beyond human control (Ulrik and Pold, 2018). This structural condition also serves as a metaphor of challenges faced in confronting hyper objects (Morton 2013) like global warming and mass extinction, whose forces and narrative trajectories can seem similarly beyond human agency. The methods produce stories that unfold in multiple directions to reveal ambiguities, entanglements, and correspondences. (Manovich 2013, Coover, 2019) Through acts of naming and narrativization, the multimodal approach builds meaning in the gaps and sutures that draw disparate elements together. The paper considers implications for agency, collectivity, and resilience.
In Toxicity: A Climate Change Narrative, which is a code-driven feature designed for wide screen cinema or three projection instation, combinatory systems continually mix sound, image, text and other data to create cohesive but ever-changing stories. Language and montage express ways of responding to conditions of flux while bridging fact and fiction. Stories about six characters living in a near future shaped by climate change co-exist with nonfiction accounts of climate-related deaths at the time of Hurricane Sandy. In Penelope, which is design for single monitor installation and viewing, ancient narratives are restructured in relation to contemporary concerns of migration and extinction; using a similar combinatory structure to that of Raymond Queneau\u27s Cent mille milliards de poèmes (Queneau 1961), the computer-code-driven combinatory film can produce millions of variations of a sonnet that weaves and then unweaves itself to reveal patterns of meaning in response to forces beyond one\u27s control. Meaning is built through algorithmic montage, generative poetry and combinatory musical composition. The Floods, which is designed for large scale immersion and installation, uses a machine-based system that combines combinatory and generative methods. Conditions of sea-level rises are expressed as a flow and flux mixing cultural signs, stories, and fields of inquiry into layered experiences that defy any single interpretation or narrative. Water On The Pier is a work for site-specific installation that combines large scale projection, VR and locative media. In this work live climate data, including signals from hydrophones placed in tidal waters, continually alter the cinematic experience; the public uses locative film tools to interact with these unpredictable elements.
The talk will consider how such systems disrupt narrative expectations and offer conditions in which signs can take on multiple, or even contradictory, significances. The models expand discourse on relationships between digital imaginaries and embodied experiences. (Hayles 1999, Hansen 2006) The talk suggests how such models may transform creative approaches to enduring narrative challenges and urgent contemporary conditions
KNPR Interview
No full textAuthor Robert Coover has returned to a topic he first wrote in the mid-1960s. His first novel was The Origin of the Brunists. The sequel, The Brunists\u27 Day of Wrath has just been published. The first book explained how a millenialist cult took hold in a small town that was almost wiped out by a coal mine disaster. Now, five years on, the cult has spread nationwide and it returns to the town to celebrate its origins. Robert Coover will be discussing his book on Thursday at the Black Mountain Institute
The Digital Imaginary
No full textThis book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Over the past half century, computing has profoundly altered the ways stories are imagined and told. Immersive, narrative, and database technologies transform creative practices and hybrid spaces revealing and concealing the most fundamental acts of human invention: making stories. The Digital Imaginary illuminates these changes by bringing leading North American and European writers, artists and scholars, like Sharon Daniel, Stuart Moulthrop, Nick Montfort, Kate Pullinger and Geof Bowker, to engage in discussion about how new forms and structures change the creative process. Through interviews, commentaries and meta-commentaries, this book brings fresh insight into the creative process from differing, disciplinary perspectives, provoking questions for makers and readers about meaning, interpretation and utterance. The Digital Imaginary will be an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including storymakers, educators, curators, critics, readers and artists, alike
The Digital Imaginary
No full textThis book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Over the past half century, computing has profoundly altered the ways stories are imagined and told. Immersive, narrative, and database technologies transform creative practices and hybrid spaces revealing and concealing the most fundamental acts of human invention: making stories. The Digital Imaginary illuminates these changes by bringing leading North American and European writers, artists and scholars, like Sharon Daniel, Stuart Moulthrop, Nick Montfort, Kate Pullinger and Geof Bowker, to engage in discussion about how new forms and structures change the creative process. Through interviews, commentaries and meta-commentaries, this book brings fresh insight into the creative process from differing, disciplinary perspectives, provoking questions for makers and readers about meaning, interpretation and utterance. The Digital Imaginary will be an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including storymakers, educators, curators, critics, readers and artists, alike
Bartscherer, Thomas and Coover, Roderick eds, Switching codes Thinking through digital technology in the humanities and the arts
No full textThe editors of this volume are Rod Coover, an internationally renowned visual anthropologist and digital artist based at Temple University, and Thomas Bartscherer, who is well-known for his research at Bard and CNRS into digital infrastructures to support the humanities. This collaboration has produced a fascinating series of experimental interdisciplinary conversations about many aspects of computerization, from factors involved in creating searchable online research databases through to dig..
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