[iDC] notes on media remix
Brian Holmes
brian.holmes at wanadoo.fr
Wed Apr 19 21:34:53 EDT 2006
Lev Manovich wrote:
Concisely defined by Matt Frantz in his Master
> Thesis as ³designed non-narrative, non-figurative based visuals that change
> over time,² motion graphics today include film and television titles, TV
> graphics, dynamic menus, the graphics for mobile media content, and other
> animated sequences. Typically motion graphics appear as parts of longer
> pieces: commercials, music videos, training videos, narrative and
> documentary films, interactive projects.
What's literally *fascinating* about motion graphics is the
competition, all over the computer-tweaked remix range,
between diverse attempts to create the most hypnotically
attention-getting pattern of movement. The ones I have to
look at when I read the newspaper Le Monde are particularly
infuriating, perhaps due to the French obsession with
seduction, which definitely loses its residual charms in the
disembodied version. Here you have an aesthetic that's quite
new, decisively influenced by rhythm and its mnemonic
characteristics, but transferred into the visual realm for
the express purpose of capturing the gaze, with undoubtedly
a plethora of neurological studies informing some of the
more sophisticated patterns that are deployed.
I think it would be missing something about media evolution
not to follow the self-reinforcing feedback loops that cause
certain aesthetics - the ones connected to measurable
audience response - to receive the support of all kinds of
scientific studies, now focused increasingly on the advances
in neuromapping (charting the stimulation of areas in the
brain). Just as psychophysical studies influenced many
aspects of information graphics during the mid-twentieth
century (studies of the quantities of information that could
be most transmitted by width of line, shades of color, etc)
so the new studies of abstract motion through the field of
an image are destined to receive sustained attention from
scientists, perhaps for even less interesting ends than
those of accurately and effectively transmitting
rationalized information. The eye wins the prize as the most
mercilously assaulted organ.
Anyway, close your lids and its always possible to get back
to some good dub. Or whatever makes your body move.
best,BH
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