Paula and I plotted out a viewing experiment for An American Family:
All twelve episodes play simultaneously, and the audience controls which one has volume by pointing a laser at it.
Some more attempted flourishes—Kaldi-Closed-Captioning on non-active video, Selfie timecode-printed stills on demand, summary/transcript/thumbnail pamphlets—but the essence of the experience was simply a crowd-negotiated audio-focus.
I was pretty nervous for the first 5-10min, when everyone was acclimatizing to the form with varied levels of maturity. In the end, I had the sense that it was quite a successful experiment, though I think people’s experiences varied. I, for one, felt a collective energy, & focus of the room, and left with a much better sense of the breadth of material contained within the entire An American Family season. On the other hand, the reducing the purpose/motivation to temporal efficiency wasn’t exactly what I was going for, but I don’t think I have a much more sophisticated justification for the experiment.
Custom film stills are very compelling. I now have dozens of timestamped postcards from the evening that look like this:
These still take way too long to come out of the printer, which prevents their fluid memory-aid-incorporation (i.e. thought -> print -> scribble on back), but I’m sure at least a couple of these will cue strong memories from anyone who was present.
On an implementation level, I used Seatbelt independent of the Room because Chrome only supports simultaneously playback of six videos. In the process (of rewriting a camera laser perspective warper tracker thing) I noticed how often the ps3-eye script seems to be restarting, which is very unnerving—it never used to quit like that when I first wrote it. If there seem to be random-seeming ~2second laser latencies in the room, this would seem to be the problem. (The camera script was restarting ~5-10 times a minute, which some attendees noticed because the exposure flashes up on restart and was sometimes triggering playback of the first video.) I will try to get to the bottom of this, but fear it could be at a libusb level of the stack…
I’d love to hear if others had impressions or took photos. People seemed excited about trying a variant of this; I’m tempted to either try with even rawer footage, or else to go the other direction and tear through a season of The Bachelor.
Your correspondent,
R.M.O.
On Aug 22, 2015, at 1:42 PM, Robert M Ochshorn wrote:In 1973, American viewers were consumed with the five Loud children and their parents, who handled their travails with a composure that, depending on your point of view, was either admirable or chilling.On Monday, September 21, 2015, at 7:30pm, Bay Area viewers are invited to CDG* to consume the Loud family as we consider “reality” and its capture/representation.<19_craiggilbert.w215.h143.2x.jpg>Hope to see you there,R.M.O.*Secret CDG Office Info (please don't share): 3rd floor of 2South Park, San Francisco. Entrance is on 2nd street, next to
Jeremy's. Press "Start", then #, then **** on the keypad to getinto the building, and take the stairs to the top. If you require the
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