Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database

Reposted from the Electronic Literature Foundation:

The MIT Press has just published on DVD the first collection of work by the The Soft Cinema Project, headed by Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky. Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database includes three narratives, Mission to Earth, Absences, and Texas, that explore the storytelling possibilities of “(soft)ware cinema.” This first release drew on numerous talents, including DJ Spooky, Scanner, servo, Andreas Angelidakis, Schoenerwissen/Office for Computational Design, and Ross Cooper Studios.

A summary of the Soft Cinema project:

Soft Cinema project mines the creative possibilities at the intersection of software culture, cinema, and architecture. Its manifestations include films, dynamic visualizations, computer-driven installations, architectural designs, print catalogs, and DVDs. In parallel, the project investigates how the new representational techniques of soft(ware) cinema can be deployed to address the new dimensions of our time, such as the rise of mega-cities, the "new" Europe, and the effects of information technologies on subjectivity.

At the heart of the project is custom software and media databases. The software edits movies in real time by choosing the elements from the database using the systems of rules defined by the authors.