‘Vertical Cinema’ — a synesthetic art?
by kg
US media art theoretician Timothy Druckrey held a brilliant, 3-hour-length talk about the historic forerunners of Vertical Cinema at Kontraste 2013 festival in Krems, Austria.
Tina Frank: Colterrain (2013)
Timothy Druckrey gave an overview of the historic roots of cinematic and media art and — on the basis of a large number of rare image, sound and video examples — showed how our gaze has always been influenced by media technologies resp. media installations like dioramas, panoramas and kineoramas which each provided new points of view to large audiences.
Amongst other rarities Druckrey showed the TV report ‘The Shape of Films to Come’ which was produced in 1968 by Willard van Dyke for CBS News and which was a milestone in self-reflexive mass media coverage. He furthermore demonstrated how amusement park installations, world fair pavilions, movie dromes, expanded cinema installations and IMAX theaters all are experimental installations to gather the observers’ senses and provide them with a multimedia and multimodal sensory experience.
For Druckrey, synesthetic digital artworks therefore have to include an extensive examination of space and time experiences as well as the kinaesthetic body sense.