◡◶▿ SOFT07 | Interface fiction
◡◶▿ SOFT07 | Interface fiction
🎹 How to inspire great robot art with your funky night moves. Béla Tarr's joystick cinema. Doug Engelbart's masonrypunk society. | Imaginary Software of the Filmmaking Future Week 07
Ahoy.
Last week, I closed by asking whether we should examine interfaces or appendages next. Next in our study of ‘imaginary software of the filmmaking future.’
Well, if you’ve read today’s subject line (above), you’ll know I have correctly opted to start with interfaces.
Correctly? Correctly. Because we are slowly panning away (as a classroom) from studying filmmaking software as it exists on traditional ‘hardware.’ Panning towards the sticky, human end of the deal. SaaS. (Software as a Sickness.) Software in the fingertips, software in the spleen, software in the brain, software in the audience.
But before we look at those interfaces, let’s quickly recap last week’s lesson: Naive robots. In which we learned how:
The naiveist filmmaker answers only to her inner understanding of the world (and the filmmaking that might occur in it). Great!
However, such powerful naivety is out of reach for the sophisticated filmmaker of today.
AI filmmaking software is fundamentally naive and often mediated through a chirpy, prelapsarian chatbot interface.
The filmmaker might use AI software to regain some of that creative innocence by accessing its toddler logic.
There was also a word of warning about the spectre of Artificial General Cynicism.
Missed a week? Joined late? Don’t worry about reading these lessons out of order. Each functions independently. They are sent in a sensible sequence but hardly reliant on it.
In today’s lesson we’ll look at:
🕹️ A quick count of the joysticks used behind the scenes in the first shot of The Turin Horse (2011).
🖱️ The software interface as the “fifth Beatle” of your film crew.
🧗♀️ Stone Age cinematography apparatus.
💃 Slinky-hipped directorial techniques.
Seems relevant:
Joystick cinema
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
The famous six-minute opening shot of The Turin Horse (Dir: Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011) tracks a rickety horse and cart along a rough dirt track in overbearing wind conditions. Despite the conditions, the image movement is smooth. The 35mm footage ebbs and flows between details of the horse, its harness, the driver, and the atmospheric conditions. Smoothly!
“It was pretty easy,” said Tarr in 2011. “On a parallel road, we had mounted a crane on the truck with a kind of Steadycam to compensate for the vibrations, which we moved using a joystick and monitor. Sometimes the camera was only 20 centimetres from the ground.” We now know that cinematographer Fred Kelemen used not one but two joysticks to control his rig.
To create the powerful and dusty wind, Tarr tells us, they ordered a helicopter to hover nearby.
That’s a third joystick. On the first set-up alone!
Interfaces
Such terrific software they make. For filmmaking and such. But how to communicate with it? How to manipulate the software’s output, or modulate the software’s manipulation of the user?
Interfaces and - ever more frequently - appendages!
A bold word or phrase indicates that an instruction of the same name and concept exists elsewhere in this module. The term is hyperlinked if it has already been published.
The interface is where the filmmaker meets the software. The appendage is where the software comes to, goes into, and partially re-emerges from the filmmaker. A new limb. A fully integrated cyborg interface.
But the interface is where the filmmaker meets the software:
Graphic interfaces on the screen or hovering in the air.
Plastic interfaces in the palm and under the fingertip.
Lenses, microphones, motion sensors, thermometers, all sorts of electrochemistry.
Gesture, “natural language,” mood.
The line between the interface and the appendage becomes indistinct - and perhaps a little sweaty - at this point.
The filmmaker chooses her interfaces with care. The same care with which she chooses her human collaborators and her software. She thinks about where the interfaces came from and where they might take her. She considers their disposition. Their feel and their mystery.
Or maybe not! Maybe she takes the interfaces that are right there and stretches her project to accommodate them. What might be the meaning behind that decision? Who’s interfacing who in such a scenario?
Masonrypunk interfaces
The engineer Doug Engelbart invented the computer mouse in the early 1960s. Perhaps he dreamed of the movies that might one day be made with his invention! Engelbart had tasked himself with “augmenting the human intellect” with systems, machines, and interfaces↑. That was to be his life’s work.
But Engelbart didn’t believe that such interfaces needed to be easy to use. They could be specialist tools that conferred great power to those who learned to wield them. Augmentation was a means of extending human capabilities. Not a means of “taking it easy.”
Englebart and his colleagues wondered how human civilisation would have developed if, instead of the pencil, the “neatest scribing tool” available to humans had been the shape and weight of a brick.
How did they explore this masonrypunk concept? “We fastened a pencil to a brick and experimented.”
In a masonrypunk culture, the “record keeping that enables the organization of commerce and government would probably have taken a form so different from what we know that our social structure would undoubtedly have evolved differently,” said Englebart.
“[…] The concepts that would evolve within our culture would thus be different, and very likely the symbology to represent them would be different—much more economical of motion in their writing. It thus seems very likely that our thoughts and our language would be rather directly affected by the particular means used by our culture for externally manipulating symbols.”
Live-action filmmaking developed with concrete block-scale technology. And only in the 21st century did widely-used cameras shrink beyond the scale of bricks, to roof tile or even pebble proportions. A reverse snowman-rolling situation: we started with the torso, and now we’re down to the flakes.
Some cameras have sprouted propellors or developed gills. Others are well on their way to fusing indivisibly to their host organism. As the apparatus gets smaller, cinematic language becomes more complex and versatile. Good?
Miniaturisation is possible due to advances in software, microchips, and battery technology. Snowflake-level filmmaking is available in the software. The interfaces for this software are ever more intuitive. They are retreating from the software towards the filmmaker. Soon, the filmmaker will have snowflake-level control over her movie in her limbs and organs.
Lighter, smoother-surfaced apparatus offer convenience. And the human filmmaker may enjoy the expanded possibilities they create. But these conveniences and possibilities come at the expense of:
heft,
a level of creative friction,
the intuitively and corporeal satisfaction of physical manipulation, and
physical feedback
(the vibrations of a camera motor against one’s cheek or
the crash of dolly, camera, and assistant to the ground.)
That’s a lot to lose. They had better be special snowflakes. The filmmaker had better give each one the weighty attention it deserves.
Non-textual interfaces
This essay includes a necessarily incomplete and unnecessarily disordered list. Let’s keep it open as a work in progress.
Text-to-video (and to-foley, -edit, -fully structured screenplay etc.) is just the earliest form of interface for common AI filmmaking software. As time passes, the interfaces↑ will diversify.
What else might you prompt the movie machine with?
Knobs and faders;
guitar pedals;
patch bay;
joystick;
digital crayons;
digital charcoal;
digital school desk engraving;
gesture;
dance;
flirting;
face expression;
ball or contact sports;
sex;
melody;
abstract chat (the non-semantic emissions of casual kitchen conversation as MIDI score);
thought;
inner voice assistant;
inner pop star/dictator;
first, second, and third inner voice etc. (multiple critics);
the internalised ‘Other’ and what they have to say;
imaginary friend(s);
potentially from across the minds of the crew;
casting sessions for actors’ imaginary friends (actor as shell - minimal trailer requirements);
the subconscious;
lower-level automatic processes;
bio-chemical samples;
bodily emissions;
a belch;
spit;
found swabs;
disposition;
mood;
sheer enthusiasm;
charisma;
neurosis;
perhaps. Each of these interfaces, in turn, has their potential combinations and subcategories. Each implies a different politics, symbology, language, and thought.
Not all of these interface categories are yet available with common non-military sector filmmaking software. But there is no reason not to use them as part of a more concrete or outdoorsy mode of live-action filmmaking.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Buttons and knobs
Do you remember when handbrakes were physically connected to the wheels they were obliged to stop? And car doors were heavy1 and stayed shut thanks to crudely fashioned metal latches instead of magnetism, computer programming, and faith?
So do European car safety authorities! They’ve had enough of virtual interfaces that make driving more like a Discord chat than the physical management of a fast and complex metal brick. And they’ve called for a return to knobs and buttons2. The extreme complexity of control touchscreens, they say, “may distract drivers, forcing them to look away for extended periods of time.”
Seems relevant. The filmmaker might also do well to battle against the tunnel-vision of the onboard digital tunnel. As Béla Tarr would tell us, you have to “listen to life.” Don’t look away, whether making a film or driving the latest Mercedes-Benz3. Listen to life. Push its buttons!
Talking of humans - which we were - I’m finally going to see The Human Surge 3 this week. It’s great to be alive!
Next week, imaginary software of the filmmaking future edges even closer to the damp interface of the human body. We’re talking APPENDAGES. New limb. Fully integrated cyborg interfaces. Gooey integrations.
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️
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