XIII Media Forum of 34rd Moscow International Film Festival, June 22-25, 2012

Organized by: MediaFest, MediaArtLab Centre for Art and Culture, The Cultural Foundation Ekaterina
With the support of: Royal Netherlands Embassy, Mondriaan Foundation, British Council
Partners: The State Tretyakov gallery (Moscow), Museum of Cinema (Moscow), Archive «Anthology» (New York), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Archive Vasulkas (Santa Fe)

The Immersion: Towards Haptic Cinema

For more than ten years the Media Forum of the Moscow International Film Festival has successfully represented innovative and progressive experiments in visuality. At the Media Forum Russian audience meets the most avant-garde and experimental artists whose works are on the boundary between film, video art and contemporary art, and demonstrates new forms of screen culture in era of digital technologies in film, television, video and Internet environment.

The theme of 2012 is «The Immersion: Towards Haptic Cinema». The key difference of this year project is inclusion of historical artefacts into the exposition with the futuristic models of cine-video-artists such as the “Montage of Attractions” by Sergei Eisenstein (the first idea of 4D movie), the concept of online movie by Dziga Vertov, interactive "Kinoauatomat" by Raduz Cincera, Salvador Dali’s idea of haptic cinematography, 'expanded viewing' theory and practices of Russian painter Mikhail Matushin and others. The historical part will be integrated in context of recent experiments of such artists as Chris Hales, Tina Gonsalves, Olafur Eliasson, Alexei Isaev, Boris Debackere, Boris Ukhananov, Paul Klipton, Ken Jacobs, Kent Long and others.

Towards Haptic Cinema as Future of Moving Images…

A significant difference in the morphology of cinema and video art languages lies in their understanding of the categories of movement, time and space. The aspiration towards narrativity and rhetoric was
the main cinema’s meaning, aim and all cinematic means
of expression. Video artist consciously detaches himself from the methods of conventional narrative cinema. He frequently renounces the synchronization of sound and image; he is more interested in the inconsistencies of rhythm, transformations of colour, shades, reflexes and forms. The screen is used by an artist alternately either as a canvas, or as an undercoat, or a scrap of paper used for a sketch, it has no boundaries, taking any shape and filling the surrounding space. In this space one can create a moving image that will last a minute or
24 hours. The space of video is expanding and its time is unfolding, creating a new dimension. A viewer, an ignorant viewer, is frequently uncomfortable in this video space where we are overcome by the feelings of discomfort, insecurity and anxiety from the first minute.

The future of cinema lies in virtual reality and interactivity. This is the development of screen culture anticipated by Sergey Eisenstein: “The fourth dimension? Einstein? Mysticism?
It’s time for us not to be afraid of the “bogey”
of the fourth dimension anymore.
Possessing such a wonderful device of knowledge
as cinema that even the primitive of its own phenomenon — the feeling of movement — solved by the fourth dimension, we will soon learn to find our way in the forth dimension as we do at home in our night slippers. And we will have to pose the question
of ... the fifth dimension!” (Sergey Eisenstein. The Fourth Dimension in Cinema. Selected works in six volumes. Moscow, 1964. V.2, pp.49–50).

The present accelerated progress of information technologies are inevitably defining new directions of how moving images will be experienced in the future, changing the relation between the creator, his tools and the viewer.

We are moving towards haptic cinema...  The cinematic arts are haptic in form because moving pictures accompanied with sound communicates with our memories of feelings that we have once embodied. The cinema can bring us back to such memories through haptic signals in image and sound. Haptic media communicates in ways that written text cannot.

Olga Shishko, art-director of the MIFF Media Forum