How to approach VR as Journalism via 4D
And what Artists, Culturalists et al could bring to its form
There is that stunning visual climatic scene in Interstellar (Chris Nolan) where 5th dimensional viewing in the Tesseract is squeezed into 4D space, so humans can begin to make sense of it. Time and space are infinite and fold on each other.
We presently see the world in 3D, but generally in a 2D planar on screen. Interstellar provides a glimpse of the possibilities for VR, and A.I. in cinema journalism storytelling — my craft skill.
Just as cubism and Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ dared to show in 360 degrees, take-it-all-in-at-once human tragedy, 360 and VR videos reaches for this phenomenon — surround film — in nuanced ways but so far our general approach to mapping the future stems from obvious spaces and places.
In his breathtaking book Art and Physics, Leonard Shlain, informs us of the links between great art and breakthroughs in Physics, yet also hidden in the text is a rich matrix in a future storytelling.
The West’s storytelling brain has accrued three hundred years of generally linear development, some explosive, since the Renaissance. Cracks begin to fashion in the late 19th and 20th century. Newton’s legacy is about to be usurped by Einstein’s entropy. But until then space to Westerners, Shlain tells us, was void of substance and time flowed linearly forward. In the East, this was not the case. 2D paper manifested itself as 3d solid objects in Origami. Space itself is a form and alive, not unlike chi, it possesses a physical energy and presence. And time?
ART and Storytelling
It’s a cold rainy day in Vancouver and I’m in the research area of the University of British Columbia admiring rare 17th century Japanese art from the Edo era. Amongst the dispatch of Ukiyo-e paintings is Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806) one of the famous progenitors of the form.
What’s remarkable, when you settle on the pieces is the lack of any firm vanishing point. A busy marketplace painting offers no clue to what the artist would like you to see. To Western eyes these paintings appeared haphazard, coincidental. Yet, this void of space is indeed organic and balanced.
Something else of Eastern art; the positioning of the viewer is less standing out looking in, but being in the piece, according to H. W. Janson in History of Art. This is the structural and philosophical muse of VR. Japanese art and film as exemplified majestically in Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo story where figures are shot face on, symmetrical. The whole environment, its mise-en-scène is critical to the narrative. This revelation is further borne out learning from Musqueam and first nation citizens in Vancouver where I’ll write separately about in the future.
This is prototypical VR. In 2010, at the Shanghai Expo an attempt to pre-configure young brains for 360/ VR manifests itself in surround curved screen cinema and immersive films where the Internet, in this brief scene I shoot, creates a holodeck.
Hollywood’s general approach to cinema capitalised on Newtonian linear flow around cause and effect. This perceptive conditioning helped our in-world experience to accept film generally flowed in one direction with a beginning and end and scenes generally emerged from a series of directly causal events.
There is fixed perspective, and view point, with often little room for W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness — where thinking about thinking reveals truths beyond presumed direct causality derived form hegemonic cultures. Hence in Russia (e.g.Tarkovsky), French (New Wave), Iranian, African, Chinese and more — their general cultural cinema approach in the 20th century would be viewed as curios. They firmly lay down a tapestry of Einsteinian thinking: non-linear, loose, elliptical thought, what Deleuze would call the Time-image.
In the critically acclaimed documentary Koyaanisqatsi (1982) time and space is synthetically compressed, almost mimicking what Shlain asks us to imagine by riding pillion across light 186,000 miles per second, as Einstein had envisaged. Information would be flat, curved and infinite. Thus far our generally advanced, yet still limited minds, could not process such content into a reducible narrative.
If our brains are generally rewired to conventions (years of the same thing), and Shlain documents how Art, Physics, and Literature have become Einsteinian (you could generally same the same thing for world cinema). Yet in journalism, as I have argued strongly we’re still generally in Newton mode. And hence what follows as a course for creativity is generally Newtonian reductionism.
Speaking at SXSW, I catch up with Henry Jenkins, another inspiration, and later tell an audience that is quite possible to express information (journalism) within a framework of one’s own cultural storytelling which cinema has greatly capitalised upon. Journalism can, and should be taught as problem-solving unencumbered by so called rules e.g. crossing the line, rule of thirds etc in answer of questions. That’s cinema journalism. We can’t stop time decaying, but we can look deep into the mind, and like dreams co-construct narratives that mirror our experiences. Audiences I speak to understand this. Here’s Baratunde ( later to join the Daily Show.) tweeting after my session.
In When Old Technologies were New, author Carolyn Marvin expresses how by the time a technology’s functionality is bedded down, it’s been configured by early adopters. Twitter, I would discover as a speaker conversing with a keynoter at SXSW in 2009, yielded several characteristics, but ambient awareness seemed to be the one that took off.
That’s where we are with VR and to some extent thinkings around A.I. The achilles is of a linear transposition of a generally Western approach to thinking to frame what we do next. This thing we call television news journalism, a new religion, is less we be reminded a construct. Before WWII, the Depression, Spanish Civil war and America First it did not exist. Hence the conditions that shape it, and how its response are also worth considering.
Cinema Journalism
My own passion and doctorate studies which included investigating one wo/man band crews and episteme of videojournalism, is testament to a radically different approach that impacts journalism as much as it has a bearing on VR and A.I. in media.
In 1994 thirty youngsters including myself launched Channel One TV. We immersed ourselves into the form from Michael Rosenblum collapsing multiples disciplines e.g. documentary, art, journalism and little did we know at the time re-framing cinema and cinéma-vérité. I’ve written at length about this on my medium posts and trained and taught around the world, such as Russia, China, Egypt, South Africa and for organisations like the FT, Chicago Tribune, BBC and UN.
As videojournalism began to flourish into cinema journalism and enter mainstream it would be re-engineered by organisations like the BBC, CNN and ITN. It would become an adjunct for television’s normative journalism. These videos below give you a brief insight into the aforementioned claim, starting with Nick Pollard the MD of Channel One, Pat Loughrey who brought videojournalism into the BBC at ITN who used it for their own ends, followed by my presentation at Apple’s flagship store.
We often use our existing paradigms to prefigure or comprehend new technologies. Generally, we can’t help it. There are few epiphanies, Steve Johnson tells us in Where good ideas come from. Hence when newspapers first came to the web, when my colleague reported this below in 1995, it was just another distribution medium. Yet it wasn’t.
How interesting it would be to make VR a dominant platform for youngsters whose nimble minds are not fully set on our conventions? Or otherwise see how Eastern philosophies or African audiences treat it. Myth, Carl Jung tells us are inherited memories of a race. My own experience living in Ghana for eight years leads me to consider how African storytelling in space and time differs from European standards. Come to think of it, Picasso’s cubism was heavily influenced by African art and culture.
This year I head up a new course at my university that flattens tech, philosophy, journalism and cinema. It brings together a learning system that is flaneuristic, where failing is a built in option for hacks and risk taking, where investigating first principles in cultures and societies that have manifestly changed is imperative.
My passion for this creative engineering approach — reminds me of my days as a graduate Applied Chemist. Then I used to wrestle with science and organic chemistry. It was only later that I came to understand that science Kekule’s visual schema as organic structures was indeed beyond logic, but incorporated art — when you allowed it. How would VR be influenced by its substrates?
Will the plot respond to our personal data, so narratives differ for viewers? This is a question I’m in midstream contemplating, particularly how A.I. creates creative surprises. Marshall McLuhan says:
If men sic [and women] were able to be convinced that art is precise advanced knowledge of how to cope with psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists? Or would they begin a careful translation of new art forms into social navigation charts?
Artists, that’s one of the keys also missing from the debate in VR and AI. Just as the likes of Dali, Shelley, Picasso, Butler, Nolan, Joyce, helped us realise new spaces, a combination of artists’ philosophies and scientists/engineers’ rational theories and innovative filmmakers may help us peer into the future. However, such prometheus may require a deeper diverse look at influencers whose work is less publicised e.g. Ashantis. That is unless AI animatronic as seen in my article on Westworld takes a firm foothold first or like 3D TV, the sell becomes a tad too difficult.
Dr David Dunkley Gyimah is a tech, artist, journalist, filmmaker, writer and educator. He leads an interdisciplinary team at the University of Westminster, disLAB. He was recently named one of the top writers in journalism for Medium and recently Asper Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia. His career spans thirty years working for the likes of the BBC, Channel 4 News and various agencies. He’s a former artist-in-residence at the Southbank Centre, and regular RTS juror. More on David’s reputation here. He publishes the award winning viewmagazine.tv
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* Imagineering Revolution in Tech Week. Mobile, digital narratives and Einstein.
Below, gallery of images around David’s practice, his designs, in Russia, His award winning videojournalism, meeting Prince Charles, i/v Henry Jenkins, Presenting at Apple and their article on him etc.
