EN: MIT Media Lab Europe: Designing an Instrument for Cinema Editing as a Live Performance

Its refreshing to see that even the MIT sees "Live Cinema" as a valid future artform and dedicates a course in its European Media Lab to the development of a Live Cinema Instrument.
The result is interesting as it gives a glimpse of how the future with transparent screens and kickass fast computers could give us - yet it is also a rip off of the fabled "Minority Report" movie interface where Tom Cruise is switching through millions of video shots like a mad man just with the movement of his hand.
This is exactly how the system proposed by the MIT Media Lab works. With gestural movements you move images over a half transparent screen and arrange them into an order - then you fire off cuts on a what they call "video drum". That is drum as in "banging loud rocknroll drum" and drum as in "drum for holding a roll of film". The drum is spinning and you can scratch with it - hitting it produces a cut hitting it hard produces a flash-cut. By being a nice concept that I would like to play around with I do not think that it would work for a purely narrative work - even so that was the goal in designing that system. It leaves little too much room for loosing the narrativity and gives to little room to change actual things - unlike a DJ which they use as a metapher I never found adjusting the timing of the video to the timing of the music through changing the speed of the video clip satisfactory.
Yet the accompanied document has a nice few tidbits in it that I would like to highlight as I think these are very important thoughts on the matter.
First of all the hilarious side kick to the normal VJ when they explain the background. They write:

The nature of the (VJ) visuals comes from the sampling culture, graphic
design, pop art and psychedelia.

this is then accompanied with the following graphic:

I thought this was fittingly funny.

Then they say something very intriguing that has been said so many times before but since I think its of utmost importance (yet something that has to be resolved through technology and no bitching whatsoever can help here - also not their solution to the problem) and can not be restated often enough:

The other problem, familiar to electronic musicians, resides in
using the laptop as an instrument. During our shows, most non-
specialist audience members assumed video was prerecorded and
did not understand the performer’s role on stage. We concluded
that the interface needs to be : transparent, because the audience
wants to see the process. It wants to see the performer’s actions
and understand what is happening behind the scene; and
performative, so that the audience can be engaged in the
performer’s effort and perceive how it is related to the images and
sounds produced.

Yes transparent screens will be a huge boost to VJ and Live Cinema and Live Electronic Muisc alike - it just goes length into showing the audience that you are not just a nerd that needs to bring his laptop in a club and that besides drinking lots of water you are actually sweating for a reason. The halftransparent OLEDs can not come fast enough.

Then the document rolls on with disecting the nonlinear editing bussiness today - while I do not agree with all of the claims - especially since the findings are based on the interview with an old time film cutter and I just know that they are a dying breed with an awkward "celluloid hangs in strips we need scissors and tesa tape" thinking that has no place in a digital world (the reasoning they use against mouse, menue, window, file doesn´t resonate with me at all). Yet two points I see as vital in a Live Cinema environment that haunt me in a normal nonlinear setting as well:

The screen real estate is obfuscated by too many one-use buttons
and information not relevant to the editing tasks ; the only
elements really needed are the images and a way to cut and paste
them. Important elements shoulds be visually emphasized.

Yes you see these multibillioniconinterfaces in nonlinear editing as well as in VJ application and it just takes up so much brainpower to decipher them all the time and press the right one that its really something to focus on when designing a new Live Cinema application.
Then they say:

Last, the importance of the accident is underestimated : coming
across lost rushes was one of the main sources for creative
combinations in the task of editing. The technological drive for
speed and efficiency has ignored that.

Uh yeah... accident driven performances have been a real winner in the past. There was this click that wasn´t supposed to come or you choose the wrong clip (something that was easy with one of the later VDMX versions which had this bug that always selected a clip below the one you originally wanted) and all of the sudden you had a composition that was somehow much cooler then you ever thought these two loops could look like together. So it shouldn´t be too much. VJing in itself with its 8 hour performances will lead to complete random "oh I run out of loops lets see what we can throw up" moments and then it gets chaotic, uncontrolled and stressy on the screen.
The comment that really run home with me was in the last paragraph and I would like to restate it because it sums up my thoughts when coming from a Filmmakers perspective rather then a VJ perspective:

With Live Cinema, we want to bring back the filmmaker
in touch with the audience; try to make film allographic, as art
theorist Nelson Goodman would call it, so that it would be
different every time it is shown. As a true performance, the film
would only exist in the presence of its author. Why live arts ? For
the contact, the act of gift between artists and audience; For
the risk, the thrill of the audience toward the unexpected, the
accident, the insight into the construction process; For
improvisation and open forms, because text and recording are not
holy and should be subject each time to reinterpretation and
recreation.

It just reminds me of this big discussion why the "VJ TV Show" we were prototyping for school needed to be live - the consent in the class was "Oh you record it and then broadcast it later". No record will give you that gift between artist and audience - that kind of interaction - even if the audience is only virtually present.