wmc_e6 2018.10.17 | “Hidden Variables,” part 2 of WCM_e6 “Cinema Expanding” is over. Please continue to visit this website where works in the show will be featured one by one| Flowpoints (2010), software written by Hector Rodriguez has churned out six prints and one animation with connected lives.
《Flowpoints》探索數碼的抽象性與電影手法再現之間的張力。
作品透過捕用以捉動態的程式去分析電影的逐格畫面並衍生成抽象線條，線條的構成源於線性的抽象化，但線條的形態無疑地指向程式所處理的電影素材。
圍牆之內，身份逐漸變模糊。前景的人物變成背景的襯托，身體變成影子，自我化為他者。角色融進這個裹覆著一切的建築，再重那裡冒出來。陌生人聚集，或許罪案亦在此發生。
《圍城私語》(Within the Walls)延伸著《流點線》(Flowpoints) 所探索的；這回的視像素材來自亞弗列・希治閣《 第十七號》選段。如《流點線》的操作，演算將每幀影格轉換成半抽象的彩色線條，組合構成煞有介事的敘事活動，卻又令人困惑而不知所措、難以定性的敘事空間。
The Flowpoints presented at WMC_e6 comprised of six digital prints and one animation titled Within the Walls.
Flowpoints the digital print series explores the tension between digital abstraction and cinematic representation in the information age. A motion tracking program analyses frames from classic films and uses the resulting data to generate abstract line renderings. While the resulting images are linear abstractions, they nonetheless hint at the contents of the films from which they were extracted.
Within the walls of an enclosed space, identities become unstable. Figure becomes ground, the body becomes its shadow, and the self becomes other. Characters blend into and emerge out of the enveloping architecture. Strangers gather and perhaps crimes are committed.
Rodriguez’s Within the Walls integrates video art with mathematics and computer science, exploring the tension between digital abstraction and cinematic representation in the context of an ongoing engagement with film history. This video is a collage of isolated moments from Alfred Hitchcock’s crime drama Number Seventeen (1932), which invites and yet frustrates the construction of a coherent narrative action and a narrative space. The work adopts the same motion-tracking system in Flowpoints with updates.
The work can be seen as a combination of experimental rotoscope animation and found footage cinema. The soundtrack is composed in the manner of musique concrete, using brute sounds from the original movie soundtrack, a method that Hitchcock himself adopted many years later in The Birds (1963).
***to watch Within the Walls… …
CREDITS
Produced and directed by: Hector Rodriguez
Computer programming and video editing by: Sam Chan, with Hector Rodriguez
Based on source code by: Philip Kretschmann and Hector Rodriguez
Mathematical consultant: Felipe Cucker
