13 06/13
21:02

Meopta Somet 8 – Kodak Super 8

Tags: , , , | Categories: DIY, technical media

The official history says that the coaxial super 8 cartridge was an innovative design by Kodak Research Laboratories from 1965, but the Czech company Meopta had already produced in 1956 a strikingly similar coaxial cartridge for its camera Somet 8.

Meopta 1956 (photo by Jürgen Lossau)

Kodak 1965 (Photo by Rachel Ryans)
Insides of a super8 cartridge.

13 10/11
09:42

DIY or DIE

Tags: , , | Categories: art, digital media, DIY

DIY encompasses the following propositions:

  • Self-made practices and text. The production and sharing of attitudes and materials is independent of those traditionally imposed by the mass media, namely, by one’s own initiative, own rhythm and way, comprising broadcast-, publish-, design-, and make-it-yourself. The content includes machinimas, game mods, video clips, photo galleries, narratives, news, knowledge, and art.
  • Persistently promotion and circulation across the open media. New tools are embraced to distribute media content. ‘Open media’ describes one single channel without contents. This empty channel is populated and fed by a multiplicity of collaborators. YouTube™, Wikipedia®, and Facebook® are examples of open media that oppose ‘closed media’ that are produced and distributed by one primary collaborator. The ideologies of ‘user empowerment’ and ‘democratization of media’ are permanently and simultaneously repeated by all collaborators of the media, and each member urges others to join, produce, and share.
  • Everything is susceptible of appropriation and becomes source material. During the 1980s and 1990s, postmodernism proclaimed the appropriation of whichever mass media contents happen to be available, generating a frenzied media bricolage [1, p.211]. The nature of source material has changed because of the ubiquity of tools used to capture the world and the ease of production of media content, made possible by digital photo cameras, video cameras, and blogs. Consumers are the source material of the open media; their lives, work, and leisure time are all part of this new content. The media has adapted itself to the logic of the source material.
  • There is no evident intervention of a specialist or a culture industry. Everyone is utterly amateur. There is a blind rejection of hierarchies as seen in professional/amateur relationships, ownership, and scholastic elitism. Although the open media certainly has owners and the tools are designed and produced by professionals, users are kept ignorantly indulged in the pleasure of self-production.



  1. Manovich, Lev. “Generation Flash”. New Media Old Media. A History and Theory Reader. Ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan. 2006: Routledge, New York, NY. 209-18.

05 05/09
08:48

Machinima Fictions: Colloquium

Hi, next week I will present and defend my master’s thesis in Bremen. The colloquium is public and everyone interested on is hearty welcome, for details click on the image below.


colloquium

Title:
Machinima Fictions. A do-it-yourself practice to produce narrative movies from video games.

Abstract:
This thesis investigates the growing phenomenon of the moving image form of machinima, which has been defined as a technique that utilizes 3D video game environments to produce narrative animated movies. The main argument centers on the hybridization of media languages that machinima exhibits, allowing a cultural appreciation of this phenomenon. Two productions that promote machinima qualities such real-time and film language are examined in order to observe how these features mold the expressive potentialities machinima as a hybrid moving image medium. The metaphor of a rhizomatic, tangled surface (maraña) streams throughout the document and fosters a multifaceted view of this moving image medium.

Through my research, which encompasses the critical view of terms, the development of concepts, and a review of relevant literature, I argue that machinima is more than a technique that imperfectly imitates the conventions and codes of mainstream film and television. Instead, machinima is considered a cultural phenomenon that stems from a persistent contact with machinic entertainment media and subscribes to the current widespread do-it-yourself (DIY) mentality in media production that emphasizes production over consumption.

Contents:
Chapter I. The phenomenon: machinima
A. Describing machinima
B. A hybrid form
C. Machinima’s tangled history
Chapter II. Fiction making: real-time
A. Machinima techniques
B. Real-time
C. Marionettes: A Puppet Play
D. Conclusion
Chapter III. Fiction making: The Monad
A. Hammer and Faceposer: the means
B. Virtual worlds: the context
C. Narrative form in The Monad
D. Film Style in The Monad
E. Conclusion
Chapter IV. Context: DIY mentality
A. Video games and popular culture
B. DO IT YOURSELF!
C. Aesthetics of DIY
D. Conclusion

Soon to be available online.
Ricardo Cedeño Montaña.

21 12/08
15:00

Xmas La Jetée (1962)

HI, a post just right before X-mas, Chris Marker La Jetée (1962).

Posted thinking of my good friends Javier and Hugo and our unforgettable times together.

Merry Xmas to all of you for kindly stopping here to read.

Update 26 May 2015:
This website is dedicated to Maker’s work https://www.artsy.net/artist/chris-marker It is worth looking at it.

20 11/08
23:39

Images after the reality after the images.

HI,
recently for n-time I watched again (yeah I know) Blade Runner. I cannot stop finding meanings and inspirations, being awed and getting scared by this film. A couple of sequences made me think again about the nature of the images and its artificiality. Images, in Blade Runner attested both authenticity and proof. In this fictional world there is concern about what is authentic and the humanity of artificial beings is under question. The replicants are perfect simulations of living creatures, they simulate everything at the more finest details, but as simulations they are meant to be something they are not, to possesses something they were denied to have. However, paradoxically they want desperately to be.

The Voight-kampf test.

[…]you are talking about memories

Images, memories, self-imposed references of a source. The production, circulation and consumption of images is a kind of paranoia. Just by looking at my hard drive I came to discover the amazing amount of pictures, images, memories I’ve stored. Some of them are so far away in the time and the space they simulate, that they have become something totally different from my memories, they have life by themselves. Even though I know I’m doomed to continue producing and consuming images. I have to recognised that after a while they are any longer about me and my selfish attempts to save imperceptible moments to live my past again. They replicate themselves and threat me.

A world constructed of images is the final triumph of a chain of simulations to separate ourselves of the alien nature surrounding us. The more clean, immaculate, pure the images the better, this is very well known by Roy Batty, his (its) entire world is an outside-imposed image. Why do we identify much more easier logos, trademarks, people’s images than trees, flowers or mountains? Why do we want to frame everything? Why do we continue believing about the actuality, reality, and neutrality of images? Images are any longer about reality, the world is not the images. Why do we, with anxiety, follow the beauty impose by the generators of images? The meaning-machines are doing a great job, ruling the meanings. We are not away from the images, we are trapped in the images, they one of the new gods. Even worst, as in a Huxleyan nightmare we are happily filling in our world with millions of images every millisecond, all the same, all with an endless replicated selfish meaning(less). The person of the year is you! screamed a big machine, but the picture was empty, nothing in there just a mirror and we looking narcissistically at ourselves, this is our brave world, just a mirror we are too afraid to look beyond it. All these framed moments, are dying like flickrs under a rain of images…

[…] it’s time to die.

[…]you won live, but than again, who does?

30 06/08
10:55

Première: Healing

Tags: , | Categories: digital media bremen

healing xscreen

HI, next Thursday in the Breminale, under the X-SCREEN program, is going to be the première of one of my video productions: Healing.

Healing is a fictional short (8.30) conceptually based on the Dante’s journey in “La Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy)”

A short synopsis: A girl goes through a city to forget. She is throwing away her past. She got a lost and she is not strong enough to live with these feelings, they are too painful for her, therefore she goes through a city to bury her past, her memories.

Where? When?Check Google map

Breminale-Flutzelt
Do. 03. Juli 24.oo
|
|
LichtLuftbad
Sa. 05. Juli 23.oo

Healing/ Cast: Anna Bernhardt, David Black. Music-sound: David Black. Camera: Vita Amanda Putri.  Edited: Ricardo Cedeño Montaña. Script: Ricardo Cedeño Montaña. Director: Ricardo Cedeño Montaña. Bremen 2008.

Many thanks to Vita Amanda, David, Anna, Joachim, Holger and Claudia for advices, support and encouragement. I hope to see some of you there.

Here is the entire X-screen program.

06 05/08
19:19

Sproutbau movie online

Tags: , , | Categories: video studies

Sproutbau online

HI,

I want to thank to everybody for all support, comments and critics on my first documentary, all of them were and are welcome. (¡muchas gracias!, vielen Dank!)
If you could not be with me during the première and still want to watch the film, I publish here a link to its on-line version, it is the same but in a medium-resolution for a good streaming. The largest file is about 23MB and the smallest around 8MB. I hope you do enjoy it, and I’ll be looking forward to reading your opinions about it.

Watch Sproutbau documentary

Recently I was invited to show my recent work on the: “Muestra Monográfica de Media Art” in the Festival Internacional de la Imagen, I’m proud to say that Sproutbau documentary was selected for the show an it was screened in the Modern Art Museum of Medellín. As well, it was selected to be screened in a event called “Curaduría en nuevos medios”, an international seminar organised by: Espacio Fundación Telefónica de Buenos Aires Argentina, this event is going to happen in Buenos Aires. Here a complete list of all selected works in Colombia.



Archives