Cinema Tree current design prototype

EMERGENT-C! The Emergent Cinema Project – CINEMA TREE

a project being developed out of York University's Future Cinema Lab

Because of this, perhaps it is now time to practice a kind of generosity, a spirited inclusiveness which welcomes in sights and sounds which have been unseen and unheard of: to trade fear for an embrace, and to realize that to abuse power you first must have it.
Barbara Kruger, 1991

The Emergent Cinema collective was formed in Buffalo, New York in 2003 with the goal to make film without adhering to a singular agenda, i.e. the vision of a Director. Instead, the film is assembled through a process of combinatory creativity. The quality in a film that we associate with directorial decisions instead emerges from the process of each cellular part providing a link in a chain.

The first projects of Emergent-C! worked on the basis of embracing the militaristic structures of Hollywood production, while removing the ‘king’. Secret society cell structures were formed: actors, art department, camera people, sound people. Each was given a breakdown of tasks, no list complete, and brought together independently to form a film, without knowledge of eachother or the film itself.

The current project of Emergent-C!, Cinema Tree, is a riff on the surrealist exquisite corpse automatic compositions: to create an interactive website where video clips can be uploaded, and assembled in sequence on the fly. The concept is simple: a single clip is posted on the website or other network, additional clips can be uploaded from anywhere in the world and added in sequence to the first clip. A user can either add to the existing sequences, or create alternate ‘branches’ from anywhere in the tree. The website graphically records and represents the ‘family tree’ of the films created using open-source graphical information representations. A viewer can select any point on the tree, and watch the film stream to this point, which has been sequenced on the fly from the database of videos. In time, multiple feature films (and beyond) will be composed, sharing and diverging in clips like hypertext narrative, providing a view of alternate imaginations, aesthetics, and cultures.

There are multiple outlets for the Cinema Tree project in the art gallery and in the community at large. Possibilities include interactive kiosks that project and display the structure and random samplings of the films they contains, closed networks where a roster of world video artists would be scheduled to add clips to the Cinema Tree throughout the period of its installation, and open-network internet installations which could include community installations of recording web-cameras that encourage viewers to add their own narratives and imaginations to the tree.

Current Project Status, November, 2007
Design prototypes of CinemaTree have been completed by Daniel Quattrociocchi in Flash, and can be viewed here. We are now developing the rear-end architecture to handle the re-drawing of the data visualization from video database. Two content structures are planned as second stage proto-types: a basic, open network, exquisite-corpse based website, and a more specific application, where a closed network of filmmakers alternately interpret an early American pictograph.