the future of film

Last week I was at Recombinant Media Labs, where it is headed by director Naut Humon, who is somewhat of a cultish figure in San Francisco circles and the rest of the art world, sits on the jury for Ars Electronica and owns Asphodel Records here in the city.



In his 360 degree projection room, I felt completely at peace.



Here, artists from around the globe came to experiment and visualize their work. As I was sitting and walking, pacing, prancing, meditating, and carefully listening to the minute decibel changes within this space, I could see that this is really the future of cinema- the future of audiovisual narrative works. It would be years before it would be realized, but soon, perhaps within the next 50 years, this is what Hollywood would soon copy, integrate and market to the rest of the world.



We are used to seeing a traditional narrative on one screen with surround sound. Naut Humon has created a theatre in which exists 10 screens that interconnect, so that artists can create multiple-narratives that revolve around the space. I started imagining what sort of film I could devise in this fashion- if all screening theatres had this option.

As a filmmaker, I found one of the obstacles was not how you create your work- but really how it should finally be exhibited. Films come in multiple formats, vary by director and most theatres do not accompany most of these aspect ratios except for the National Film Theatre in London, England, in which they are able to accommodate every format imaginable, whether you show your film in 4:3, 16:9, 1.85:1, 2.39:1 etc.

A 360 degree projection space with 10 screens meant that one could potentially manipulate time and space. It doesn't have to be that a split/ or quadra screen is necessary in developing multiple story lines- rather, ideas could synchronize, come together and separate. One could show multiple scenes of the same event from different angles. As I was thinking of the possibilities, Naut tells me that the next installation was going to be a little "loud".

He had chosen a compendium of international artists who used abstract visual pieces synched with music in his demonstration of the projecting room's capabilities. Sound was sometimes atonal and minimalist, to loud and theatrical. I found that there was something ultimately beautiful about Naut's own vision, to have produced this space in order for artists to create their work.

Vincent van Gogh once said that "there will be a time when my paintings will be worth more than the paint that was used to paint them". Video installations never sell well here in the United States unless one has a strict political agenda. However, here, in 2007, Recombinant Media Labs has created a canvas for artists to test out that theory.