10Oct
Osborne Court and ZeitEYE
ZeitEYE was a short (11 minutes) film I made in 2010. It is comprised wholly of stills - images I had begun to collect from 1994, when I had published my book (co-authored by the late Richard Oliver) The Cyberspace Lexicon (published by Phaidon) - an A-Z illustrated dictionary of digital and cybernetic terms, sprinkled with a twenty or so essays on the state of the cybernetic arts and where they seemed to be heading. Like Understanding Hypermedia of the year before, it was one of the first popular books published about the phenomenal surge of Digital Media, the Web/Net, AI and Robotics - and of course the Digital Arts and innovations that were driving this all forward.
So by 2010, when Paul Windridge and I were discussing our Visioneca Festival of Experimental Film at Freshwater Bay, I still had a flat in Osborne Court, Cowes, and all the work I did on ZeitEYE was done in my studio-room there - and as this was all digital, I just needed my 27” i-Mac, a scanner, and a broadband connection and I was in heaven. For the technically-minded, I was using a popular authoring program called Macromedia Director - an animation editor that you could automate and make interactive with a clever built-in scripting language called Lingo - a high-level coding language not dissimilar to Apple’s Hypertalk for Hypercard. This was ideal for me preparing ZeitEYE.
The ambitious process involved illustrating all the innovations in arts and media and media technology - and arts-media key figures - between 1900 and 2010 - I guess I ended up with around 5000 images. In Director you could establish the frame rate and by trial and testing I ended up with 7 fps - just enough I gauged for you to recognise an image, perhaps note a descriptor, before the next image replaced it - as you can imagine, this wasn’t for people who couldn’t take flashing images - but watching the film rewarded most viewers with a kind of rush of cognition that was exciting. So I ended-up with a film 11 minutes long, covering about 11 decades of time.Be warned - if you have problems with flashing lights - DO NOT RUN THIS MOVIE!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPXUGfOkyLg
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