Luciferjones

The history of cinema there have been an array of seminal moments that represent major turning points in the artform. Colour and Sound obviosuly strike as the most profound but there are others no less impactful but often far less obvious. The move to building and shaping cinematic form and moving images in 3D space represents such a shift.

In his work-in-progress essay series, Velvet Revolution (word DOC),  Lev Manovich regards the encompassing of 3D space into motion graphics tools as the driving element of a new visual language; “it offers a new method for representing physical reality… With 3D computer grapics we can represent three-dimensional structure of the world versus capturing only a perspectival image of the world, as in lens-based recording.”  Manovich sees 3D space compositing as influencing all media making “the way 3D computer animation organizes visual daya - as objects positioned in a Cartesian space - became the way to work with all moving image media.” All media objects - 2D, 3D, moving, still, animated and live action, can all occupy this singular space. In the context of the ‘frame’ which remains the base of cinematic composition, Manovich comments that “frame based representation did not dissapear - but it became simply recoded. An output format rather than the space the actual design is taking place… not simply a mechanical sum of the previously existing parts but a new species.”

What Manovich skirts around here is the impact on viewers and their aesthetic expectations. He speaks effectivly of Composition happening in 3D space but delivery (and by proxy utreception) still occupying a 2D space. Yet inevitably a sismic shift in the space of composition cannot help by profoundly impact aesthetics and in doing so change reception and viewership.

A comparative analogy might be seen in architecture - the flying buttress of gothic church design allowed for an architectural shift in the space of construction of buildings such as Notre Dame. The church was designed and ‘composed’ in a different conceptual space made possible by a shift in technology. The result however was not confined to the act of Composing, the space in which the composition took place, but also very much in the experience of that architectural space. The church building itself was still engaged in the same manner by the congreation, still idetified as a church, but the experience of that engagement, the shift in what was spatially possible for such a building, altered forever the expectation of what a building of that type could be and could do. And buildings were never the same again.