Seances is an interactive project by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson and the National Film Board of Canada. The project is a recreation of a multitude of silent films cut and pasted together by an algorithm into unique combinations that will never be made again. The piece explores the idea that roughly eighty percent of silent films produced have been lost, and twists that idea by recreating these films, and making them entirely ephemeral. Though Seacnces is marketed at an interactive experience, users are not given much choice in how the narrative unfolds, rather they are given one opportunity to choose a vague description of a narrative. While Seances is an interesting piece, it is more a piece of generative art than an interactive user experience.
When a user is first introduced to Seances, they are told that to click and hold to “conjure” a film, to “sit back and relax” and finally that this will be their one chance to see the film they conjure. After this the user is greeted with some ominous music, a title, and a one sentence description of a film. After a few seconds, some of the words in the title may be rearranged, replaced, or added, and a new description will be generated. At any point the user can decide that the on-screen description/title is the film they want to see and click.
Seances is more a piece of generative art than an interactive user experience.
The decision of when to click is the only choice the user has. Once the user has clicked, the algorithm decides how the story unfolds and what clips the user will be watching. The piece would be almost identical if you were to remove that one choice from it. The descriptions of the films are incredibly vague and do not give users much of an idea in terms of what the narrative they are about to watch is. This ambiguity lets the user absorb the generative nature of the piece better, and lets the user fill in the gaps between the clips they are shown. As such the use of the word interactive to describe Seances seems inaccurate.
Seances is more a piece of generative art than it is an interactive. Behind everything users see in Seances there is a generative computer algorithm. This algorithm takes the silent film recreations that the artists produced, cuts them into scenes, assigns some descriptive words to each scene, and decides what scenes to put together at what time. The algorithm makes note of what clips went together in what order so that it never makes that combination again and then finally generates a title and description of the film based on the descriptive words it assigned to each clip. It shows the title and description to the user, and waits for them to click. When the user decides to click they will see the film the algorithm has generated, and then no one will ever see this film again. This is by no means a negative thing, generative art is a fascinating art form, creating an algorithm and feeding it data, and still maintaining a cohesive piece is both challenging and beautiful, and is incredibly well suited to Seances as an ephemeral lost story.
In Seances the artists have no control over what the user will see beyond having filmed the clips. Every narrative and artistic choice in terms of what the user is seeing, down to the tint of the image, is up to the algorithm. The idea of an autonomous algorithm creating an art piece is the backbone of generative art. When this is taken into consideration with the fact that the user only has one choice, that isn’t necessary, it is clear to see that Seances is more of a generative art piece than it is an interactive experience.
