MEDIA CULTURE "WITHOUT COMPRESSION"

Presentation notes

All human art can be thought of as a form of compression - condensing
individual and collective experiences, memory, and knowledge into symbols,
icons, short narratives, and images. While there are many reasons for this,
even if humans ever wanted to create significantly more detailed
representations, the limitations of storage media would not allow this.
   This situation fundamentally changed over the last few years as the
developments in IT now make possible for us for the first time to record
(and consequently organize and access) as much data as we want. How does IT
industry, computer science and engineering research, media design and art
are responding to this new 'post-compression' condition? I will discuss
developments across these different areas pointing towards a number of
strategies which already becoming visible:

- larger temporal samples:
   examples: Dogma 95 movement, Sokurov's "Russian Arc" (the whole film is
a single take), Figgis's "Timecode'" (each window is a single take which
lasts for the duration of the film)
   -note that the reliance on editing in 20c cinema can in part be related
to the limitations of recording media in film technology, which is removed
by digital video

- multiple media streams;  combining/fusing data from multiple sources:
   examples: surveillance and monitoring systems (multple screens);
multiple frame layout in "Timecode"; the composite image in Benyuan's
"Cosmomolis"

-  higher resolution images;
   examples: Maurice Benayoun's  "Cosmomolis" (uses 12K by 8K images);
Jeffrey Shaw's project (260 degrees panoramic moving image);
  - note the connection to detailed visual narratives common in Ancient,
Medieval, Renessance, and Baroque periods (for instance, Giotto, Bregel);
   -note that in all these examples, high resolution narrative images tend
to 'break out' into a number of semi-autonomous parts each presenting a
separate nafrrative/reality
   
             
-  comprehensive recording of various 'digital traces' + creating new
interfaces to the databases of such recordings
   example: IBM's MyLifeBits  project
   -note that since a significant part of our communication now passes
through computer systems, we automaticaly leave multiple "digital traces";
the easy availability of such traces in its turn leads to various research
and art media projects projects which use them as a source; at the same
time, dimensions of experience which (so far) cant be easily recorded become