Dates: 23-27 June 2012

Venue: ARTPLAY Club (Nizhnyaa Syromyatnicheskaya street, 10, str.9, entrance “C”)

The cinema which can be “watched with your hands”. The cinema which is watched by the “machine” instead of a human being. The filmshow, where the spectator can’t just relax in his chair, he has to create the movie. The participants of  “Media Forum – 2012” think that all this is much more fun than an ordinary Hollywood blockbaster .  One  of them – the artist Chris Hales – is literally crazy on the idea of the interactive cinema. Since 1990 he has authored more than 30 of such films and dedicated to the phenomenon his PhD thesis “Rethinking the Interactive Movie” (2006).

In his works Chris tests every method which can be used by the spectator to get involved in his films structure: to choose one of the offered options of the plot development or change the narrative details (in example, slam the protagonist’s flat and ruin his evening), or find the needed key to continue the film altogether.  One of his projects makes the spectator to follow several screens simultaneously and constantly interfere, otherwise the universal harmony will turn into universal chaos and the discord in one of the plot lines will spread onto others. At one stage it begins to look like a computer game, but with completely different art objectives and content. Besides Hales puts forward the works in various styles and forms: multiscreen film, landscape sketch, slapstick comedy, documentary. He combines the possibilities of cinema and visual art.

Professor Hales gives a practical course in Moscow on what happens in the world when the spectator touches the screen and thereby changes the film’s plot altogether

The master class structure:

23 June

• 10.00 – 17.00 – Open day. Dedicated to the history and theory of interactive cinema. Though it seems, that the artist himself worked off every possible strategy of cooperation with the audience, he will begin the workshop not with his own works. He will tell in detail what is the interactivity, who and how used its strategies over a period of all the “history of moving images”.

24 -27 June

• All the next days will be dedicated to the practical part of the workshop.More information at : http://mediaforum.mediaartlab.ru/

Project partners: British Council, Mondriaan Foundation, ARTPLAY Design Centre, Museum of Cinema, Centre Pompidou

Nowadays thanks to Hollywood a model for a feature film with a narrative basis and two-three hour length has been established worldwide. This is a cinema viewing situation we are accustomed to, but cinema is not at all limited to it. All through the XXth century artists and  avant-garde film directors have been dreaming of quite another cinema, whether a tactile one, wich can be touched, an interactive one – where a viewer can take an active part, a multiscreen cinema or cinema viewing as a meditation experience. In fact such cinema works are also created and they happen to be no less interesting compared with blockbusters – it’s just that we are not particularly aware of their existence and so are not able to watch or touch them.  

The Media Forum is a programme at the Moscow Film Festival which has been created especially to expand the familiar borders of cinema and to show that it can vary not only both in content and artistic construction of the text, but also from the formal point of view, the technology of its making and the viewing situation.

The central event of this year’s Media Forum is the Immersions. Towards the Tactile Cinema exhibiton. It consists of several sections each belonging to a certain type of director’s approach to working with screen and viewer.

• The first section, Pure Cinema is a reaction to art for art’ sake. Here  screen is used as a canvas, actually presenting cinema as an apotheosis of  painting. Works by Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Matyushin, Nam June Paik, Ken Jacobs, Paul Clipson, Hans Richter, Konstantin Adzher, Oleg and Olda Ponomarev are presented.
• Attractions’ Montage, the second section, is based on the “4D cinema” concept invented initially by Sergei Eisenstein and presents his followers: Pia Tikka, Herz Frank, Alexei Isaev and Elena Gorbacheva.
• The third section, Tactile Cinema, is about films that can be “watched with hands”, starting with Salvador Dali’s ideas. While working with Luis Bunuel, Dali  had quite another vision of the Chien Andalou realization. This is followed by Peter Weibel’s and Vali Export’s  “gripping watching” (beside which works by the TOT-ART group, Valery Ayzenberg, Konstantin Semin and Ekaterina Pavlova are presented).
• The forth section explores the Machine vision idea by Woody and Steina Vasulkas – a device that can replace both  the film director and the viewer, supplanting individual and inaccurate human vision by an objective gaze of the camera itself. Here Ken Jacobs, Dina Karaman and Alexandra Kuznetsova are also presented.
• The Interactive Cinema that unfolds with viewers’ participation is the fifth section comprised of works by Zbigniew Rybczyński, Chris Hales, Boris Debackere, Perry Bard, Mark Amerika and Olga Kiselyova.

Apart from the exhibition, the Media Forum programme includes workshops, lectures and seminars by artists that will take place both at the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation and at the ARTPLAY Design Centre. Chris Hales, Boris Debackere and Perry Bard will tell about the history and theory of interactive, tactile and haptic cinema and also introduce their audience to technologies and methods of work in this space. They will guide independent creative projects by those willing to participate in their classes.  

Location: Ekaterina Cultural Foundation (Kuznetsky Most st., 21/5, entrance from Bolshaya Lubyanka st.)

The exhibition will be held from June 22nd till August 19th 2012