Media influences forms of human perception of space, time, and objects, and it is closely associated with the history of human values. In this essay, I will be highlighting the impact of digital media and its virtual reality expressed in innovative narratives on the vision of a real life; particularly I would like to discuss distinguishing features of Beloff’s interactive movie Beyond created in order to connect past and present.
Interactive movie Beyond was created about 1990s in New York by the Scottish artist Zoe Beloff. First, the film made me feel like I am watching something rather strange and even extraordinary as it was completely incomprehensible what the artist wanted to reveal through the movie. However, after a while, passing through the interactive links and reading the suggested sources, I understood the sense of the Beyond.
The Beyond involves the person in a kind of three-dimensional architecture full of ghosts in the environment made of collages and performative DVD-movies – so called media archaeological machinery. Beloff calls it “an investigation of the “dream life” of technology, from around 1850 to 1940” (2002, p. 1).
It confronts the viewer with pathologically magical inner world of the patient, and at the same time makes him close to that world. With the help of the pointer, like a wizard with a wand, one can activate the video sequences of medical training films, home video, and advertising clips that appear as an interactive loop on the matte display of A4 size (DinA4 Milchglas-Display). This historical kaleidoscope seems like properly chosen pieces of art connected with each other that the artist carefully gathered looking through the waste collected in archives.
The movie integrates interactive and visual worlds of the past and the present in the context of resources, experiences, and insights left by the art of the past. In other words, the work integrates different types of architecture, sculpture, painting, theatre, film, and photography through the simulation and inclination in the space of phantasmagorical effects. Beloff visualizes the cinema as intimate and interactive dialogue. One can hear sounds of short waves, popular songs of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as records of atmospheric and geomagnetic disturbances that create an atmosphere of the depressing scenario (Beloff, n.d.).
In its turn, the atmosphere of the cinema explains the evidence of the presented schizophrenia. Referring to the Russian pioneer of the movie, Vertov, Beloff develops her individual movie style. As a result of the installation of specific aesthetic preferences and a peculiar game of inclinations such as the emergence of narratives, for example, she achieved something innovative in the movie value. Narration substantially is absent in the movie as one can only read titles and hear several voices. In my opinion, such a technique contributes to the penetration in the film and in the inner world of an artist.
The interactivity of the Beyond defined by the numerous transitions and inscription that allow the spectator to move through it choosing his or her path. Therefore, I consider that there might be several interpretations and discussions of the film as everyone understand it individually. The digital image opens an interactive visual space, which supplies the information from the sensors and data banks, and is variable. The digital image is flexible, and all blurs the boundaries between spaces, particularly, differences between external and internal, remote and close, physical and virtual, biological and automatic disappear.
Beyond’s hypermedia directly connected with its interactivity (“Overture,” 2001, p. ). Non-sequential linking transforms one’s understanding of the way of a multi-sensory, interactive space in the time stream. In other words, the space images and processes are becoming optional; the parameters of space and time are variable by means of digital technology used.
Speaking of the immersion of the movie, I can say that it is guaranteed. From the first minutes, the movie wins the attention of spectators by its originality and as he has to perform it clicking on photos.
In conclusion, it should be stressed that the Beyond is an outstanding and innovative movie created by the talented artist. It incorporates seemingly incompatible issues such as past and present and technology and thoughts in one interactive video.
References
Beloff, Z. (n.d.). Interactive Photography. Web.
Beloff, Z. (2002). An Ersatz of Life: The Dream Life of Technology. In M. Reiser & A. Zapp (Eds.), New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative. BFI Publishing.
Overture. (2001). In R. Packer & A. Zapp (Eds.), Multimedia: From Wagner to virtual reality (pp. xv-xxxviii). New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company.