Monday, November 24, 2008

The Birth of Primary Cinema from the Spirit of Sound - Feature Article by Frank Rothkamm

on Furthernoise http://www.furthernoise.org/index.php?url=page.php&ID=273&iss=71
It is about eleven o'clock in the morning in my studio in Los Angeles. I look out the window and stare at the Hollywood sign in the distance. The phone almost never rings. If it does, I pick up and nobody is on the line. After a while my mind drifts and a single thought forms in my head like a mantra:
As the rate of information is increasing, so is its comprehensibility decreasing.
I realize that this is especially true for motion pictures, arguably the first digital art form because they're made of single images floating by at the rate of twenty four frames per second. At this rate however, the perception is one of continuous motion. Because of the high rate of images per second, or, of information given per second, the brain (or let me use a Kantian term: the understanding) can no longer understand or process the single image. The development of the modern cinema in Hollywood has only increased the misunderstanding of the single image by constantly increasing the rate of events per second. When I turn on the TV, a SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon is interrupted by a commercial. The longer the show continues, the more often the commercials are shown. The scenes in these commercials are cut so fast and there are so many images per second that I have no idea of what I'm actually watching and thus, no idea what it is that I'm supposed to buy. I do not try to understand anything anymore, I just sit here and let the events pass by.
My eyes drift back to the Hollywood sign: Motion pictures are based on an illusion.

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