CityQuilt

Tirtza Even
Teven12345@aol.com




Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. Navigable Movies
3. Adding a Temporal Dimension
4. Activating the Frame
5. Constructing and Deconstructing Space
6. The Goal
7. Acknowledgements




1.Introduction
My attempt here to present the work as a prototype to a large extent suppresses the value its specific detail has had for me. CityQuilt was never conceived as a type. It is very crucial for me that none of my work does. It has been, however, an early step in an ongoing search for interactive forms of narration in video format, which I intend to pursue in more advanced or complicated forms in future projects.

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2.Navigable Movies
Navigable movies were first conceived by Dan O'Sullivan a few years back as a means to represent a space in 3 dimensions. A rotating camera was set to record the 360 degrees image of a space, along a set of gradually increasing angles. The frames were then captured at regular intervals (an audio signal, triggered by the position of the camera within its 360 degree cycle, was recorded during the shoot; the captured footage was sifted on the basis of this audio cue). When linked, these frames formed a space which the user could navigate by positioning the cursor along the edges of the movie's frame. (In terms of programming it meant that if there were 50 frames in a cycle (50 audio signals captured), +1 would move the scene for instance to the right, -1 to the left, +50 or -50 up or down, +51 or -51 at a diagonal right up or right down, etc.). That is, the bulk of the effort was put into aligning the frames. Once that was achieved, programming was more than basic.

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3.Adding a Temporal Dimension
Both Dan O'Sullivan's quicktime movies, and Quicktime VR which followed (and which uses instead of an audio signal, a system of comparison whereby a regular degree of difference between frames becomes the means of adjusting their number in each cycle), in their attempt to open a new cinematic space, convey spaces extracted from their temporal dimension. activity cannot be part of these visual descriptions of space, because it has a direction, thus undermining the user's freedom to move back and forth. It draws the element of time into the image, rather than maintaining the separation necessary whereby action belongs outside - to the user, while the object of action, the temporally neutral navigable space, acted upon, is inside the frame of the work.

My goal in CityQuilt is to reintroduce time and movement as that which determines, and exists within, the space navigated. Furthermore, the spaces I explore are conceptual or thematic, rather than actual, although they are composed of fragments of documented scenes edited to form a collage, a quilt, or an overall metaphor of a space (in this instance, a city). In a project I have recently begun working on, the space navigated will attempt to embody a more general notion of "public space" v.s. "privacy", so that the link between an actual referent and the space navigated will become even looser.

While the conventional viewing experience of cinema is subjected to a linear (temporal) sequence (whether of the event shot or of the event of shooting), CityQuilt invites the viewers to direct their own viewing experience, to look around.

The piece contains two navigable movies that portray New York scenes within distinct imaginary spaces. CityQuilt Outdoors is navigated along an endless canvas of city sites shot from a bird's eye view, while CityQuilt Indoors slowly pans over the face of an urban building at night. That is, there are two types of spaces navigated by similar means. One is looked at from above down; the other - forward and sideways. The two were originally designed to be viewed simultaneously with the monitors positioned back to back (the users facing each other), so that the discontinuity and incompatibility of the two planes they imply will be emphasized, along with the thematic tension between indoors (private spaces) and outdoors (public spaces).

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4.Activating the Frame
Unlike traditional video, where the construction of an imaginary space relies on indices within the image (such as a camera motion up or down or sideways, which is encoded as an element of the image), here the frame itself is activated and brought to the fore-front.

As in any navigable movie, there are eight possible directions of motion - left, right, top, bottom, and the four corners - each made possible by placing the cursor over the frame of the movie. The closer the cursor is to the edges of the frame, the faster the movie plays. Movement stops when the cursor is placed over the center of the image or is altogether outside of it. In order to implement the visual directional cue, each movie contains short segments of sound pertaining to the different scenes. Depending on the visual navigation, the sound is generated from either the left or right speaker, or from both.

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5. Constructing and Deconstructing Space
In practice all eight directions, back and forth along the four axes, are digital camera movements impose upon images shot with a stationary video camera:


Each of these digital camera movements is imposed over a shared sequence of shots, and is stored as a separate section of the overall movie used by CityQuilt.

The illusion conveyed is that of an endless video canvas which the user explores and exposes by pushing the edges of the frame.


And yet the navigation is a navigation in time, only translated into a journey in space. The center of the imaginary canvas in effect shifts with the act of navigation. What is actually revealed is merely earlier/ later scenes in the four linear movies. Yet since the frame is active, a sense of unfolding of information in space occurs, in this instance, information about space as a theme - a city.


The above illustration depicts the actual map, at each moment, of the four movies (axes) which combine to create the sense of navigation. In accordance with where the cursor is placed, the next frame is called from one of the four movies. All four contain a similar sequence of frames, each sequence viewed through a camera moving in a distinct direction. If the cursor is positioned to the left, the frame of the movie which contains the horizontal pan is called; if the cursor is positioned up, the same frame, but from within the movie that contains the tilt, is called.

In order to overcome the direct link between space and time where left can always be identified with "before" and right with "after", I added a fifth axis which reverses the direction of movement along one diagonal line:


Once you cross this (hidden) axis the direction of your return is reversed, you either lose your way back or get caught in a loop until crossing the axis again. The outcome is a deliberate undermining of the sense of a coherent space. Furthermore, the sequence is looped to prevent navigation from ever reaching an edge. What I wanted to convey is a dissonance between the act of navigation (which assumes a regid structure that instructs the directions of movement) and the space explored, which never accumulates to a coherent whole. The purpose being, as with the incompatibility of the two movies' planes (indoors and outdoors) - to create a tension between a conceptual and a physical space; To bring to the fore the fallacy of the representation, precisely by using it and simultaneously undermining its effectiveness.

In CityQuilt Indoors I began to explore one more way of linking space and time. There, navigation proceeds along a temporal route formulated as a spatial passage by spreading the temporal span of a single scene (window) over different places in the path taken. In that way you visit distinct moments of a single space at different locations of the quilt. Again, the space revealed becomes less and less referential.

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6.The Goal
CityQuilt is presented as a prototype for a new type of documentary, or a new form of editing, whereby the goal is not to convey a coherent physical space or a linear narrative, but to make use of space as an interface (or metaphor) for the representation of other types of sequences (e.g. temporal, thematic).

My intention in a project I have recently begun is to complicate the navigation by introducing hidden layers you can peal within it, enclosure and concealment being among the main themes I explored in the current images themselves. I also intend to attempt to codify the sequence of the user's exploration, so that certain sections will unfold only after others have been traveled through or certain directions chosen. That is, the place you will see will respond to your navigation; sections will be closed unless you go in one direction for a long enough period, or close after you leave them; the various areas' availability will depend on the direction choices of the user. In that way a link between an event and its relative location on the canvas will be introduced, and the value of the navigation as a form of storytelling, brought to the fore. Being a form of storytelling, the presence of an author is clearly assumed and essential. To a large extent the activity of the user resembles exploration only in the limited sense that was used by Cocteau in one of the scenes in his trilogy, where he depicted the act of creation as an erasure of a black board which thereby uncovers a hidden image of a flower. The user's exploration is a creative act of rewriting a story already told by the author. The navigation, as open as it seems, occurs in a single and prescribed route, and functions principally as a means to comment about a space. And again, the comment is a statement the user realizes rather than expresses. I am using "interactivity" as a channel for expressing my own point of view.

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Acknowledgments

CityQuilt was shot and programmed by Tirtza Even.
Interface design by Meirav Solomon-Dekel.

The production of CityQuilt was made possible through The Interactive Telecommunication Program at N.Y.U. and the guidance of Dan O'Sullivan.

I would like to extend my warmest thanks to Michael Casey, Alison Cornyn, Amnon Dekel, Ruth Engelsrath, Despina Papadopoulos and Meirav Solomon-Dekel for helping me in the various stages of the making of this project.

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