Help me find a video
March 12, 2010 8:35 PM Subscribe
Help me find a video.
A long long time ago I saw a short video which was amazing. It started with an empty room. Then one person came into it and did something and then left. That kept looping. A second person got added. Then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and over and over and by the time it was finished there were like 25 people doing things repetitively without running into one another.
One I remember specifically was a window on one side. A ball comes through the window and bounces a couple of times and then stops. A boy climbs in, gets the ball, and climbs out again.
I have a really vague memory that it was called "Fugue" but when I search for that on YouTube I drown in Bach references, and I'm not even sure I'm remembering the name correctly.
It seems like the kind of thing that Norman McLaren might have done, but I don't think it was him. Does this strike a bell with anyone? I'd love to watch it again.
A long long time ago I saw a short video which was amazing. It started with an empty room. Then one person came into it and did something and then left. That kept looping. A second person got added. Then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and over and over and by the time it was finished there were like 25 people doing things repetitively without running into one another.
One I remember specifically was a window on one side. A ball comes through the window and bounces a couple of times and then stops. A boy climbs in, gets the ball, and climbs out again.
I have a really vague memory that it was called "Fugue" but when I search for that on YouTube I drown in Bach references, and I'm not even sure I'm remembering the name correctly.
It seems like the kind of thing that Norman McLaren might have done, but I don't think it was him. Does this strike a bell with anyone? I'd love to watch it again.
Interestingly, the progression seems to all pivot on the moment the child witnesses the primal scene. After that, everyone exits, one by one. It only occurs once. Just a little bit of overanalysis from a fan.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 8:43 PM on March 12, 2010
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 8:43 PM on March 12, 2010
Crap, that version cuts off. Here's the whole thing.
posted by contraption at 8:46 PM on March 12, 2010
posted by contraption at 8:46 PM on March 12, 2010
psst. I found a torrent of his work, and Mein Fenster and Video are also really cool. HEre's what I wrote for basically a homework assignment on his project (WARNING: MEDIA THEORIST WONKERY):
Zbig Rybczynski's Oscar-winning short film Tango exemplifies the nature of his artistic project, which has, over the course of thirty years, concerned new methods of creating interactions between media types in rigorously physical forms, thereby modeling an ideal of cybernetic ability, of bodily interaction with and control over image content. I'd like to share here a few of the pieces of his work which are available online, and expound on their relevance to notions of agency and narrativity, as prefigurations of specific interactivity ideals or their technologically-implemented approximations.
In Tango, comment is made on the responsibility of the viewer to select what they wish to take away from the visual text -- viewer agency -- but thematically, Tango also apprehends human nature in a critical capacity, conveying a noisome deluge of images and habitations of space as the human experience from birth to death. Frustratingly to most viewers, the animations of figures onscreen (not characters, mind you, since one or two animated figures are of an adult with child), though they move in impossibly close proximity, and even pass through one another at times, they never seem to interact with one another. The "Tango" of the title, which we often say "it takes two" to do, is instead a dance of oblivious individuals, wrapped up in their own affairs. Watching the film three or four times, two possible exceptions to this rule are observable. One is an encounter which occurs twice, near the end of the film. The toddler who enters the scene in the arms of a woman and is changed on the bed in the foreground, then exits at the left, only to seem to stare in shock at the copulating couple on the bed. When this is iterated a second time, it seems to signal the beginning of the end; at that moment, characters begin making their final exists, and the many who have aggregated in the room dissipate as quickly as they appeared. The other exception is a black-suited man, who very inconspicuously appears and rarely faces the camera, but instead seems to be quietly examining or observing various other figures. Without being too strident, I think this figure's role in the life cycle Tango depicts is as an agent of the state, of surveillance.
All in all, Tango's role in Rybczynski's oevre is a clear elucidation of his outlook on the oppressive aspects of the social and the state, to which he will, in other works, posit interactive media as a refuge.
Media presents the boundaries of the real and the represented as permeable, as circumscribed by boundaries which can be, within mediated spaces at least, transgressed by technological virtuosity, modeled by his own organic animation and matte work. He models an interaction with media apparatus onscreen in a reflexive commentary on his creation of the film itself, but moreover, does so in a bodily sense, and with a pronounced sense of play. In tossing the tv monitor around like the ball represented on it, the film conveys that mediated images and their technological appratuses both can be tools as well as toys, controlled by our bodies and minds and made tactile by us for our own expression and enjoyment. I would say this film models a joyful, early idealizartion of media interactivity which prefigures such actual technologies of today as multi-touch screens, projected touchscreen interfaces, and cyberspace.
This notion, of intermedia or intramedia virtuosity crossing over, and making possible material changes in extra-diegetic, unmediated space, comes from within media itself, but continues to find iteration in SF entries in film and tv. It is the way media forms enable us to extrapolate from their realism further dimensions of possibility. I eagerly await the development of imaginings beyond the capabilities of the immersive cyberuniverses we can now visit.
Close to the Edit, MTV Music Video Award for Best Experimental Music Video, Diana D, for Chuck Mangione, Hell in Paradise for Yoko Ono
In his music video work, an interest in the composited, image-based nature of contemporary reality can be seen. Perhaps it is in the fissures between these matted compositions or mosaics of screens that new ways of interacting with the real world can be discovered. In any case, his work models the form of media interactivity as agency that has, over the course of the life of time-based media, become increasingly democratically accessible: media creation and manipulation. If our world is composited of images, a hypermediated realm, as some of his works aver, perhaps intermedia and intramedia virtuosity is the same thing as extramedia virtuosity.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 8:49 PM on March 12, 2010 [4 favorites]
Zbig Rybczynski's Oscar-winning short film Tango exemplifies the nature of his artistic project, which has, over the course of thirty years, concerned new methods of creating interactions between media types in rigorously physical forms, thereby modeling an ideal of cybernetic ability, of bodily interaction with and control over image content. I'd like to share here a few of the pieces of his work which are available online, and expound on their relevance to notions of agency and narrativity, as prefigurations of specific interactivity ideals or their technologically-implemented approximations.
In Tango, comment is made on the responsibility of the viewer to select what they wish to take away from the visual text -- viewer agency -- but thematically, Tango also apprehends human nature in a critical capacity, conveying a noisome deluge of images and habitations of space as the human experience from birth to death. Frustratingly to most viewers, the animations of figures onscreen (not characters, mind you, since one or two animated figures are of an adult with child), though they move in impossibly close proximity, and even pass through one another at times, they never seem to interact with one another. The "Tango" of the title, which we often say "it takes two" to do, is instead a dance of oblivious individuals, wrapped up in their own affairs. Watching the film three or four times, two possible exceptions to this rule are observable. One is an encounter which occurs twice, near the end of the film. The toddler who enters the scene in the arms of a woman and is changed on the bed in the foreground, then exits at the left, only to seem to stare in shock at the copulating couple on the bed. When this is iterated a second time, it seems to signal the beginning of the end; at that moment, characters begin making their final exists, and the many who have aggregated in the room dissipate as quickly as they appeared. The other exception is a black-suited man, who very inconspicuously appears and rarely faces the camera, but instead seems to be quietly examining or observing various other figures. Without being too strident, I think this figure's role in the life cycle Tango depicts is as an agent of the state, of surveillance.
All in all, Tango's role in Rybczynski's oevre is a clear elucidation of his outlook on the oppressive aspects of the social and the state, to which he will, in other works, posit interactive media as a refuge.
Media presents the boundaries of the real and the represented as permeable, as circumscribed by boundaries which can be, within mediated spaces at least, transgressed by technological virtuosity, modeled by his own organic animation and matte work. He models an interaction with media apparatus onscreen in a reflexive commentary on his creation of the film itself, but moreover, does so in a bodily sense, and with a pronounced sense of play. In tossing the tv monitor around like the ball represented on it, the film conveys that mediated images and their technological appratuses both can be tools as well as toys, controlled by our bodies and minds and made tactile by us for our own expression and enjoyment. I would say this film models a joyful, early idealizartion of media interactivity which prefigures such actual technologies of today as multi-touch screens, projected touchscreen interfaces, and cyberspace.
This notion, of intermedia or intramedia virtuosity crossing over, and making possible material changes in extra-diegetic, unmediated space, comes from within media itself, but continues to find iteration in SF entries in film and tv. It is the way media forms enable us to extrapolate from their realism further dimensions of possibility. I eagerly await the development of imaginings beyond the capabilities of the immersive cyberuniverses we can now visit.
Close to the Edit, MTV Music Video Award for Best Experimental Music Video, Diana D, for Chuck Mangione, Hell in Paradise for Yoko Ono
In his music video work, an interest in the composited, image-based nature of contemporary reality can be seen. Perhaps it is in the fissures between these matted compositions or mosaics of screens that new ways of interacting with the real world can be discovered. In any case, his work models the form of media interactivity as agency that has, over the course of the life of time-based media, become increasingly democratically accessible: media creation and manipulation. If our world is composited of images, a hypermediated realm, as some of his works aver, perhaps intermedia and intramedia virtuosity is the same thing as extramedia virtuosity.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 8:49 PM on March 12, 2010 [4 favorites]
Response by poster: Contraption, that's the one. But your second link is null; could you post it again?
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:46 PM on March 12, 2010
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:46 PM on March 12, 2010
Best answer: Not sure which one he found but here's the one I use.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 10:08 PM on March 12, 2010 [1 favorite]
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 10:08 PM on March 12, 2010 [1 favorite]
Background trivia: That piece won an Oscar. Having received his statuette, Zbig, wearing sneakers with his tux, left the Oscar on his seat, and ducked out a side entrance to have a smoke. Security wouldn't let him back in (probably the sneakers) words were exchanged, and he spent the night in jail. The next morning, thankfully, the Oscar was still sitting where he left it.
posted by StickyCarpet at 5:09 AM on March 13, 2010 [1 favorite]
posted by StickyCarpet at 5:09 AM on March 13, 2010 [1 favorite]
Also reminds me of Michel Gondry's video for Come Into My World.
posted by Adam_S at 8:21 AM on March 13, 2010
posted by Adam_S at 8:21 AM on March 13, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by contraption at 8:41 PM on March 12, 2010