The Multiscope is a screen sculpture/interface with 3 iPads and a television screen. New Media does not only mean objects, but also ways of seeing, communicating, interacting. Today we have a plethora of windows, of screens, of different sizes, of different mobility; some we can control, and others we cannot. It is only fitting to watch New Media Movies on such a viewing device that exaggerates the multiple, just as the Mutoscope offered the individual viewer a brief moment separate from the crowd before projection on a screen won the day. In many ways, we have returned to the Mutoscope, to the Kinetoscope, individual viewers peering into screens held in our hands, part of our embodiment in the Age of New Media.
"New Media Movies by Lori Landay" screened on debut installation of the Multiscope won the People's Choice and Best of Show Awards at the NMC Summer Conference 2012 Art Show, June 13, 2012. The NMC Summer Conference was hosted by MIT in Cambridge, MA.
Full Description
The four screens of the Multiscope have different functions. The big screen loops the movies, and pushes sound into the area. One iPad displays web information about the movies, and the other two, with headphones, mimic the Mutoscope or Kinetoscope in the way you peer into the screen, but here you can choose which movie you watch.
The movies screened at the New Media Consortium Summer Conference 2012 are seven of the more than forty movies I've made that use machinima--3D animation captured in real-time from a virtual world or 3D video game environment. They represent a range of genres and experiments with the moviemaking affordances of a virtual world, but all of the employ humor to explore serious questions.
New Media does not only mean objects, but also ways of seeing, communicating, interacting. Today we have a plethora of windows, of screens, of different sizes, of different mobility; some we can control, and others we cannot. It is only fitting to watch New Media Movies on such a viewing device that exaggerates the multiple, just as the Mutoscope offered the individual viewer a brief moment separate from the crowd before projection on a screen won the day. In many ways, we have returned to the Mutoscope, to the Kinetoscope, individual viewers peering into screens held in our hands, part of our embodiment in the Age of New Media.
Work metadata
- Year Created: 2012
- Submitted to ArtBase: Thursday Jun 14th, 2012
- Original Url: http://www.lorilanday.com/NewMedia/multiscope.html
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Work Credits:
- Lori Landay, primary creator
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Artist Statement
How many screens surround you in a typical situation? How many windows within those screens? These may be obvious questions to ask as New Media educators and practitioners, but one day, teaching, as I oscillated between an iPad,a classroom computer, the big screen showing projection of either computer input or video, and sometimes other screens as well, looking out at my students with all of their laptop, tablet, and mobile screens, that the multiplication and range of new media screens and windows was an experience of both entering into a new embodiment of technics and also a profound alterity, a recognition of multiple positions of otherness in new media culture.
The Multiscope is the most recent manifestation of my experiments with New Media spectatorship. As a sculpture-interface for viewing my New Media movies, it is inspired by early motion picture viewing devices like the Mutoscope and Kinetoscope, Nam June Paik's sculptures, discourses about windows and interface in New Media scholarship, and the postphenomenological approach to technics advanced by Don Ihde that considers the embodied, hermeneutic, and alterity relations we have with artifacts like iPads, televisions, and other screens.
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