Lobby Dreams
Chronic Arts' "computer films" offer a new way of seeing the virtual world.
By Alvin Lu
AS MANY who have spent lifetimes going to the movies know, often it's not the film that makes the moviegoing experience -- it's the lobby. The Zakros InterArts kiosk, located in the lobby of the AMC Kabuki 8 theater during the San Francisco International Film Festival (through May 5), looks like an oversized version of its arcade-game cousins down the hall, and in a way it is. However, the kiosk doesn't show your typical CD-ROM game/adventure/art hybrid but what Randall Packer, head of both Zakros InterArts and the San Francisco State University Multimedia Studies Program, and Beln Garca-Alvarado, curator of the displayed works, call "computer films."
These "films" are short even by shorts standards, but unlike computer animation, they aren't designed to be seen like traditional films. Their compressed imagery and densely layered effects are meant to be seen on the computer, and like your typical video game, they are meant to be seen again and again. In the case of the works at the Kabuki, grouped under the title Chronic Arts, almost all the motion derives not from digitized video or film but from still images reprocessed by computer-effects software (CoSa AfterEffects, Adobe Premiere, Gryphon's Morph). Most of the films are the completely individual efforts of artists David Berry and Relja Penezic.
For those expecting video games, then, the Chronic Arts series may disappoint. The point is to watch the stuff in linear fashion and not, like, play with it -- at least not with your hands. To play it with your eyes might be a better approach; it's the eyes that catch the hypnotic, looping motifs that create more of a mental game than a visceral one ("abstract television" is another term Packer uses).
The trick works surprisingly well. While the rest of the multimedia world tries to grasp the meaning of "interactivity," Berry and Penezic's approach is to isolate a quality rarely found in films and only accidentally in multimedia -- that odd, floating, disjointed sensation you get while watching digitized images. Think of Myst and its descendants: the lasting effect of these games is not their herky-jerky interactivity (which always somehow manages to thrust us out of the games' dream worlds), but the uncanny feeling of being taken through a digitally rendered version of a vaguely familiar world. Berry and Penezic's computer films take us on uninterrupted rides, and the experience is not unlike that of watching silent films: one part is sheer visual sensation; the other is trying to figure out, while looking at the out-of-whack images, what is going on.
Chronic Arts isn't for everybody, and Zakros InterArts CD-ROMs probably won't be making their way into Costco anytime soon -- museums are a more likely landing site. But for those interested in seeing where the noncommercial end of the digital revolution is going, these quaint, floating-world artifacts are a place to start looking.
David Berry and Relja Penezic discuss their works Sat/27, 5:30 p.m., in the AMC Kabuki 8 lobby, 1881 Post, S.F. Free. (415) 931-FILM or (415) 904-7740.
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