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Thesis Info
- LABS ID
- 00336
- Thesis Title
- Latent State: a theoretical and practical study of Live Cinema
- Author
- Andres Colubri
- E-mail
- andres AT interfaze.info
- 2nd Author
- 3rd Author
- Degree
- Master in Fine Arts
- Year
- 2009
- Number of Pages
- 83
- University
- University Of California, Los Angeles
- Thesis Supervisor
- Erkki Huhtamo
- Supervisor e-mail
- erhuhta AT ucla.edu
- Other Supervisor(s)
- Casey Reas, Jennifer Steinkamp, Daniel Shiffman
- Language(s) of Thesis
- English
- Department / Discipline
- Design Media Arts/Live Cinema
- Copyright Ownership
- Andres Colubri
- Languages Familiar to Author
- English, Spanish, Korean
- URL where full thesis can be found
- interfaze.info/latent-state
- Keywords
- Performance, Live Cinema, Real-Time, Space Shuttle, Challenger, Childhood
- Abstract: 200-500 words
- This work explores the practice of live cinema performance, which can be defined as the creation of audio-visual pieces where the recording, editing and projection/playback of the video and sound material is performed by the artist(s) in real-time in front of a live audience. This exploration was carried out in three complementary levels: a meta-level concerned with the narrative and audiovisual languages involved in this type of live performances, a technically-centered level that deals with issues of software architectures and interfaces suitable for real-time manipulation of video, audio and post-processing effects, and a more "practical" level which involves the entire process of creating a live cinema piece from the initial conceptualization to the final performance event. Thematically, this work can be seen as a meditation on the collision of childhood fantasies with the harsher facts of the “adult” world, such as tragedy and death, within a highly mediated environment. Footage from the accident of the space shuttle Challenger on January 28th, 1986, intertwined with playful fantasies of space travel, supplies the raw visual and emotional substance for these meditations. From a more technical standpoint, this piece has been created using new open source video and image filtering libraries for the Processing programming language. This libraries and other software components I implemented are part of an ongoing research on real-time audiovisual practices, particularly from the standpoint of performer-computer interfaces. The combination of high performance video capabilities with the ease of use and accessibility of Processing leads to an opensource framework where live cinema experiments can be carried out more freely.