Kino Project “Surveillance & Control”

Kino Project “Surveillance”  Sound composition and Image montage 2-3 minutes duration. Hand in 2 2 2017

The Kino project complements the Zero project. It asks you to think about first principles, what is it a camera allows us to do, how does it impact the way we look at the world?

The term Kino derives from the early Soviet filmmakers that formed a collective called the “Kinoks”.

The term Kino roughly translates as Cinema/Camera Eye. Vertov proclaimed the primacy of the Kino eye over the human eye. The camera lens was a machine that could grasp the world in infinite detail, to capture its objective nature.

We saw with Muybridge, Marey that early cameras were used to record the motion of bodies in ways that a human eye couldn’t. Actions of bodies in motion at speed could be recorded and seen, slowed down and made perceptible. A thing not possible before the “Kino Eye”

The camera eye has become ubiquitous, they observe the world everywhere, University, Campuses, shops, malls, streets, satellites. All of us are observed, tracked, monitored. Now not only by cameras but by the networks that we all participate in, images we post, games we play, things we search for and purchase.

Recently the University proposed to be able to track students via biometrics, fingerprints, Iris? Tier 4 overseas students are already asked for fingerprint identification.

The sound composition project asked you to record and make a sound library of the world around you. We ask you to not use sounds downloaded and made by someone else. To then organise these sounds alter them, slow down, pitch shift, reverb, to make something new and strange from them, a poetic composition.

Kino Brief

“Surveillance & Control” Sound composition and Image montage 2-3 minutes duration.

Walter Much in THX 1138 created a soundscape of the future, a future of extreme invasive surveillance and monitoring. Constant observation of the body at work and also the body in private.

We want you to record the sounds of surveillance within the world you now inhabit, registering with your card at the points in the university, checking in at the Hub for Tier 4 students. Notifications you receive, games you play, searches made, your unique online trail.

At the same time we want you to focus in detail on images that suggest this idea of surveillance, the body being monitored, checked, observed. You can make use of Macro shots.

Keep in mind Walter Murch’s suggestion of how he used sound and image together:

I think the greatest thing that sound can contribute to a film is the metaphoric tension between sound and image. If you produce a sound that has no creative tension, which simply reproduces what you see……it doesn’t add very much because you are not soliciting the imagination of the viewer. Whereas if you create a tension….the sound idea and the visual idea don’t immediately go together…….Thats the greatest thing a film can do ….to provoke an image or sensation that is not on screen but elicited from the mind of the audience.

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