Page 178 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 178/206
Thomas Edison + William Kennedy Dickson: Kinetoscope 1894
There were two paradigms of cinema in the 1890s, both involving projection- - the cinema as a shared public experience using the model of a magic lantern projector in a theatre - and secondly, the moving image as a private, single-person experience - using personal arcade projectors/viewers like the Mutoscope and Edison and Dickson’s Kinetoscope. As you can see from the images (above), the Kinetoscope was intensely personal - the viewfinder looked down upon a screen of frosted glass onto which the image from the 19mm film was back-projected. The 19mm film itself was looped to account for length, and each frame was stopped briefly (by an escapement mechanism) beneath a magnifying lens and over a small electric-light, then the human viewer would see a perfectly focussed single frame of film projected into his viewfinder. This experience was described in the New York Sun newspaper: “In the top of the box was a hole perhaps an inch in diameter. As they looked through the hole they saw the picture of a man. It was a most marvelous picture. It bowed and smiled and waved its hands and took off its hat with the most perfect naturalness and grace. Every motion was perfect...” quoted in David Robinson: From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American Film 1997. So as early as 1894, we have these twin paradigms - the peep-show (Nickelodeon) and the cinema. The peepshow became the model for interactive movies, as we saw in the videogame arcades of the 1980s...
In the ongoing post 2000 debate about the possibility of interactive movies, and the likelihood of a successful, immersive and interactive multimedia entertainment format that could marry freedom of choice with authorial direction, it is the potential of the single-person console (whose ultimate ancestors were Edison and Dickson’s Kinetoscope and Casler’s Mutoscope) that gets most attention. Large-scale audience interaction by means of electronic polling, biometric feedback – and the use of hand-held wands – a kind of democratic interaction – has been tried (Loren Carpenter’s Cinematrix system, 1994), but these only offer a limited form of interaction. The console-based interactive movie was tried in pre-digital times – see Morton Heilig: Sensorama 1957 – but it is with the digital 3d, immersive computer game that the real potential for interactive movies lies. But while the computer- game can provide the medium and platform, no-one has yet satisfactorily resolved the authorial- narrative versus user freedom of interaction conundrum. So, imagine a fully realised inhabitable ‘world’ in a virtual-reality system - you have the ‘6 degrees of freedom’ to move anywhere you want. How do you retain this freedom while ‘seeding’ the environment with narrative hooks? That’s the issue. It’s not impossible, but no-one has succeeded as yet...