Attention: experimental film project

How do we watch film? How does the way that I watch a film differ from the way you watch a film? If we were to make a film of the way I watch a film, what would it look like?

These are some of the questions a group of Design and Digital Media MSc. students under my mentoring are exploring in an art installation entitled Attention: experimental film project. Parag Mital, Stefanie Tan Su Ann, and Dave Stewart have create an interactive film experience for their Digital Media Studio Project that will be premiered this Friday (21^st March), 12-5pm in Teviot Row House, Edinburgh University.

The installation is inspired by my research into how we attend to film, how this shapes our experience of a film, and how film manipulates this attention (see my thesis). Film can be interpreted as an analogue of our experience of the visual world. Snapshots of fragmented but related visual information is presented to us in a way that we can comprehend by forming conceptual linkages between them. This is similar to the way we acquire information from the world by moving our eyes. If we take this analogy to its logical conclusion, a visual recreation of the information acquired from a scene as a person shifts their eyes may resemble an edited filmic representation of that scene.

Creating such a filmic recreation of a viewers experience is the intention of this project.

How is this accomplished and what is the result? Check out the project website or come along to the premier to find out

http://www.theexperimentalfilm.com/