An online short-film editing machine with a fixed structure and pseudo-infinite combinations. (An artistic artifact to reflect on the violent balance between humans and technologies today)

for generating a new movie online: http://iam.caotic.net

an already generated movie:

iAm Teaser from Quelic Quelic on Vimeo.

This project intends to reflect on the possibilities of generating automated, pseudo-aleatory cuts of a 25'' short-film. The director's cut becomes a software's cut created, by a viewer's demand, as a unique random instance of the potential combinations of the short.

The artefact involves different disciplines, and has 3 main parts: the shooting of an audiovisual repository according to a specific script, a web-based software interface based on a visualization of the amount of footage and its possible instances/combinations, and a server-side software that dynamically edits the selected shots in real time and encodes the result into a web-friendly format for on-line viewing.

The audiovisual content of the shots reflects on how technology is changing our daily lives and often shifting us from natural contexts to stressful landscapes of information overload. It questions who is really in control: humans or machines. The very design of the project reinforces this dilemma by generating an automated cut, never edited before and only conditioned by the pattern set up by the director, but out of his control.

The content has 6 different situations/sets, with a total of 217 different takes, 9 soundtracks, 5 sub-themes with 37 written sentences and more than 2 hours of archive footage that can be randomly combined in a structured manner to generate a 25-second unique resulting clip.

Besides the interest of the narration, interface and data visualization of this experimental audiovisual, other theses arise; It is known that viewing the same video many times give us different information and our perception of it evolves. Would viewing many instances of a pattern be more efficient on communicating an abstract concept than the repetition of a single cut? What possibilities open up in terms of algorithmic story-telling? Who is the protagonist of this artefact; the viewer, the author or the code? Is the message as relevant as the interface we look through? Is it possible to create a self-explanatory interface?