Cybercinematography - Semantics of retro-dynamics of one city

By Natasa Tepavcevic

Beograd, July 17, (Serbia Today) - Cybercinematography is a public event within Belef Festival held on 14th July in center of Belgrade: Plateau near hotel „Moskva“, Academy plateau, Knez Mihailova Streeet. It is an international project, conducted by an association of multimedia artists AUROPOLIS and in cooperation with the Association for interdisciplinary and intercultural research.
Audience could watch two half hour movies, picked up from TV archive, about Belgrade’s past. The first movie has focused on people and the second on urban transformations of the city in last half of the century.
Association for interdisciplinary and intercultural research was established in 2002 in Zagreb, aiming to research and act upon cultural interstices. Since then it has been putting emphasis on producing catalysts of urban, social, artistic and epistemological re-definitions in the widest sense. The project "Cybercinematography" was initiated in 2006 as one of the numerous projects by this organization. Until now it has been seen in Zagreb in 2007, Dubrovnik, Dresden, Prague and Buenos Aires in 2008, and in 2009 it will be seen in Rijeka and Belgrade.
Cyberkino is dealing with integration of media archeology and its presentation through new media. The project communicates with the general public through direct impression – by projecting documentary archive material that becomes innovative illuminative category of semantic redefinition of the urban space. Idea of projecting own simulacra on architectural elements of the buildings builds up very specific interaction between reality and imaginary directly enriching eclectic urban environment. Project Cybercinematography aims to virtualize the picture of public space, creating a platform where the possible and real, real and simulated is synthesized in the eye of the beholder.
Contemplation of the urban space is the aim of this project, as well the art of travel in time. A viewer is invited to construct his own system/history/picture of the city’s past through the movie, “to face the present” and to imagine, assume the future.
Cybercinematografy is live site-specific interactive installation where the viewer becomes an author of the location's individualized history. The goal is resistance to the hegemony and domination of falsified and perverted master narratives of history in one hand and in another also resistance to the total commercialization of semantic codes which dominate cities.
History is not given. History is unwritten. What is the aim of the project like Cybercinematography? The aim is to raise the awareness of city as the human being and to face us with a fact that we are writing/re-writing history, here and now.
Viewers, consumers of Cybercinematography should be aware of the constant transformation of the city through time, but also should be aware how (models/system) collective and individual memory is constructed by “images in the wide sense”.
In the moving images of Cybercinematography, Belgrade is becoming live material, waved out of energetic threads of sound and image. In associatively set form, these moving images act as collective psychological – reflective category in which we recognize almost every family system that exists in these territories.
Apart from projections in public areas, Cybercinematography, through live web streaming and telemetric performance technologies, gravitates towards connecting a series of cities in virtual space World Wide Web – creating hyper-locations which are integrating trans-local phenomena. Unlike globalization, which from the smallest settlement creates a podium for turning big capital, trans-localization creates urban mis-en scenes which over and over question the burdens of its past and which, aware of its own resources, doesn't accept to be the margin of great imposed narratives.
However, this project promotes also the idea of free use of archive material, as well the idea of implementing different scenarios in dull and commercialized media-scopes of cities around the world. Web streaming technology should support intercultural communication, while bridging over geo (political) distances.
The day after displaying the Cybercinematography, on 15th of July, Belgrade’s streets Kralja Petra, Kosančićev venac, and Karađorđeva Street will host one more exhibition entitled Korzo. This project will also present an archive of cities memories, but this time through the photography medium. It is an attempt for mapping the architectural anatomy (facades of the buildings) but also shown photographs marked important moments and figures from history and even Belgrade’s family’s albums from numerous collections.