Future Cinema

I’ve had this in my list of “exhibits to visit” and I thought I’d post it up here (I like to post stuff here as reference, which I can later easily find through the site’s search function). FUTURE CINEMA takes place at the NTT InterCommunication Center Gallery until February 29. Here’s a blurb on the event:

“The visual environment is changing rapidly, as our daily lives grow ever more palpably saturated with images, not only from movies and television, but from computer monitors, video games, cellphones, car navigation systems, cash registers, ATMs, and huge street advertising displays. In contemporary society, such a new type of the image has become a key interface between people and information and already penetrated every aspect of our daily life. The development of multimedia technology may in fact be serving to link everything with some form of visual or cinematic imagery.

The 20th century has been called the century of the image, and films and television were the principal makers of its history. This process gave rise to theoretical discourses concerning cinematic narrative and structure, relations of image production and reception, and the social and commercial significance of these activities. At present, the image gropes for expressive form and definition in the nexus between tradition and the new. As long as the image remains an image there will be methods for conveying it, but as the image takes on new forms, it will become increasingly independent of media such as film and television. For the cinematic image, the present is a period of transformation, a period of confusion-that is to say, a period of opportunity.

In this context artists are working, with all of the imagination and media technology at their command, to express uniquely their perspective on the cinematic experience as it develops into the future. The works on display in this exhibition employ a wide range of techniques, from multiprojection and immersive virtual reality systems to networked, interactive, and database-driven pieces. The artistic visions unfolding via this technology have been produced as examples of “FUTURE CINEMA,” while at the same time representing the varieties of present-tense cinematic expression. There we can see revolution, chaos and possibilities, the nature of the visual image as it morphs from past to present and into the future, with the idea that this will have a transformative effect on our usual patterns of vision.

The exhibition is produced by ZKM (Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany), and is currently on a global tour.”