Mutable Cinema is an interactive movie installation which allows people to personalize and create their own viewing experience. An audience watches as a player edits movie clips in real time and generate new narrative sequences from a database of pre-formatted audio/visual content. The player interacts with the Mutable Cinema Interactive Engine by choosing clips to play on the big screen, organizing them, and selecting different point of views. Since this action takes place in real time, the player sometimes struggles and scrambles to keep up, just barely assembling a meaningful story.
Mario Marquez, a Mexican independent producer, is the main creator of this new media installation art piece. The Mutable Cinema project is showing next at the
Second International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Art in Perth Australia this September. Visit
www.mutablecinema.com for more information.
# posted by Michal Zebede @ 8/06/2007 03:31:00 PM
Comments (4)
Sounds like a game for 10 year olds. Also reminds me of a game you'd play at a carnival. Aside from that, I see no retail value.
Good try, though.
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posted by @ 8/07/2007 6:33 AM
In response to anonymous: must everything have retail value? Mutable Cinema is "played" in public exhibition spaces, which makes the movie-game much more about the decisions that the "player" makes.
I'm not saying that it's revolutionary or anything, but I appreciate the attempt to experiment with narrative form.
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posted by Chuck @ 8/07/2007 9:48 AM
Reminds me of a proposal I heard to build a tool that helps illiterate people participate in political debate. A village or group can be given access to such an interactive video program and they can use it to explore the multiple sides of an issue. Then, they can create their own consensus on a narrative arc that best represents their opinions.
I think Mario Marquez's idea has real value in this realm in addition to general entertainment.
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posted by David @ 8/10/2007 3:07 PM
The project was designed out of the need of a way of trying different types of interactive narratives (branching, parralel, dynamic object oriented)in an open system. Also to give the user and/or the audience the power to have a better representation of their own reality in the film (does the hero always win?).
I would like to aknowledge Pedro Gonzalez and Kiyoshi Osawa as creators too and David Montie and David Kretz as developers of the project at the Banff New Media Institute.
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posted by Mario @ 8/10/2007 5:44 PM
