Seth Keen

Film on the Internet By Donato Totaro
Offscreen, Volume 11, Issue 1 (January 31, 2007)

In either case, it is clear to me that internet cinema, barely eleven years old, has yet to find its own niche in terms of aesthetics, style, form, and purpose. Whether internet cinema evolves into something lasting, or a strong voice for alternative cinema, or even remains as a viable exhibition site for cinema, or whether it becomes just another one of the multitude of ‘screens’ that have risen since the beginning of cinema is largely connected to the broader question of interactivity: Do we really want interactivity in our narratives? Do we really want (or need) what Manovich calls ‘ambient narrative’?

The plugin manifesto

The manifesto aims to create a definitive framework that filmmakers can use to produce films specifically for the Internet, to work with the medium, to see technological limitations as a creative catalyst. While traditional film was hijacked very early on in its career, filmmaking for the Internet is at a truly exciting time.

A recent book reference from the videovortex list:

NARRATIVITY: HOW VISUAL ARTS, CINEMA AND LITERATURE ARE TELLING THE WORLD TODAY , Ed by: DIS VOIR René Audet, Claude Romano, Laurence Dreyfus, Carl Therrien, Hugues Marchal translated by Paul Buck & Catherine Petit

To tackle the question of narration in its ruptures and mutations in an age of media culture and influences of videogames – where the ludic
and interactive principle is an important element – is a way to draw up an inventory of the Nineties, a time when art starts to function like some kind of editing table on which the artists can recreate daily reality. Through that reflection on time, the question is to show how its new languages and new ways of writing are representative of the contemporary imaginary expressed in it and to reaffirm that the work of art is an “event” before being a monument or a mere testimony, an event which constitutes an experience drawing in the spectator.