in the spirit of Eisenstein's montage thinking...
Emmi's mind in turmoil, affected by the contagious nature of witnessed violence
The young woman Emmi works in a self-service launderette, managed by her mother Jatta. Jatta is about to give birth very soon and is obviously happy. Nothing in her behavior reveals that the pregnancy started in "daterape". She has wiped past events into oblivion. Instead, the daughter Emmi is going through the grieving and healing process on behalf of her mother. When a strange man comes in to do his laundry, Emmi's "processing" jumps on fast tracks - in Emmi's own obsessive manner.
The cinematic thinking of Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, dating from the first half of the 20th century, inspired the creation of installation. What is called dynamic emotion ecology refers to the interactive dialogue between the spectator and the fully authored artwork. A landscape of potential narrative worlds emerges from interpreting and anticipating experiences of the characters.
Obsession is designed to support the maximal artistic authorship, following the first of filmmaker Eisenstein’s principles. It is the author’s responsibility to prepare a cinematic environment, which best protects the spectator’s emotional construction of cinematic experience.
In the process a special tool set was developed for managing the complexity of the cinematic content described with an ontology of 150 emotional dimensions for each clip. Each clip inhabiting this virtual multidimensional space can then be projected on a similarity map where it automatically appears near similar narrative elements. For example, those cinematic elements, which have violent fast moving content, share the property dimensions of aggression, activity and negativity. Narrative rules - based on similarity - support continuity and scene faithfulness.
In the real Eisensteinian spirit, instead of two tracks, here the unfolding cinema scene involves three: moving image, sound and emotion tracks. The emotional dynamics is given its own cinematic role. The seven continuously turning wheels under each of the screen images display the synchronized emotion data pre-recorded in a lab. This is put in interaction with the spectator’s real-time emotional indicators.
Obsession is implemented by means of a cluster of computers, which manage sensory data, sound atmosphere, and cinematic data for each screen. The process can be monitored and managed remotely over the Internet.
Obsession suggests that unconscious and conscious experience interact in an inseparable and complex manner. The cinema experience is more than seeing and hearing. It is about sensing and re-living of one’s own experience in what happens to the “others” – ENACTIVE CINEMA.
The invitation to enact is very gentle. In the middle of the installation space five chairs invite to sit down. Each spectator’s heart rate and the emotional arousal is continuously measured by means of embedded biosensors.
The spectator decides which one of the four screens to look at. The orientation is tracked with a sensor hidden in the rotating chair. The screen attended is defined a dominating screen while the three other screens refer to the narrative direction taken on the dominating screen.
obsession
enactive cinema installation.
The project Obsession by Pia Tikka (2005) introduced a novel kind of interactive cinema genre, which is described as enactive cinema: How the narrative unfolds, and how rhythm and soundscape emerge, depend on how the spectator experiences the emotional dynamics between the characters.
Enactive cinema emphasizes unconscious interaction between the cinema spectator and the cinema. Instead of the spectator directly manipulating the narrative, its unfolding is affected by the spectator's emotional participation. Particular attention has paid on the cinematic quality. Obsession’s high quality cinematic material is shot on film, and the soundscape is carefully elaborated to support almost infinite range of emotional atmospheres on large-scale cinema screens.
The narrative framework of OBSESSION makes an attempt to describe, how traumatic acts of violence not only affect the individual, but the family becomes violated too.
...we developed our cinematic media editor for managing enactive montage
