Digital Field Trip - Clicks n Mortar - Kinoautomat
May 04, 2021
The night in March 2009 I chose to attend a cinema session I was curious. I’d read/played the pick-your-story books and Ian Livingstone & Steve Jackson dice rolling books. A pick-the-story film was new to me and that this one was a retro experience intrigued me. Definitely one of the distinct instances that has shaped the work I’m embarking upon in 2021.
Originally it was a performance, which combined a projected film with interventions from two stage moderators, which was shown for the first time in 1966. On this occasion it was being presented my the film makers daughter.
The film, One Man and his House, centers around Mr. Novák who finds himself caught up in various situations which represent moral dilemmas.
Using a specially constructed voting system, the audience members changed the trajectory of the film at several key moments by pressing red or green buttons. The direction voted by the majority would then be followed by the projection team.
Extract - Kinoautomat, prelude to the future
http://www.progetto.cz/kinoautomat-un-preludio-al-futuro/?lang=en
“The TV of tomorrow”, was the expression used by the British newspaper The Guardian, while the critic David Griffin spoke of it as a film that “uses the best elements from both video games and films”. The reference was to “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch”, released on Netflix just over a year ago, which attracted attention mainly due to being an interactive film in which the action stops at certain intervals and the viewer makes decisions for the protagonist, influencing the course of the narrative. A certainly compelling idea, but there were indeed quite a few viewers to whom the format seemed to be something already familiar.
Extracted - http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/kinoautomat
“The vote was executed by the projectionist switching one lens cap between the two synchronized projectors. The artfulness, ultimately, was not in the interaction but in the illusion of interaction. The film's director, Raduz Cincera, made it as a satire of democracy, where everyone votes but it doesn't make any difference.” (Quote from: Michael Naimark, Interactive Art - Maybe It's a Bad Idea, 1997)