The Contrary of the Movie Theater Response and the Rutt-Etra Synthesizer

This week’s reading by Gabriel Menotti delves further into the theory behind VJing by looking at the history and evolution of audiovisual performance. Gabriel Menotti looks at the metamorphosis of cinema into the digital medium, and compares its implications with VJing’s precursors such as “cinemas of attractions” and traditional cinema. One thing that I noticed about Menotti is his disappointment with the traditional cinema’s stiffening and prevention of digital cinema’s true potential. This potential is what Menotti’s whole arguments is mainly about, which is that traditional cinema seeks to force the audience into a frame, while VJing and digital cinema allows the audience freedom to interact and find their own narrative. Ultimately, Menotti is defining the projection specialist as a old, ridged model of cinema and the projection designer as a new, almost performer-like, free model of cinema.

As for the Rutt-Etra Synthesizer, it took a while to get it working, but I was able to get it to run with a properly formatted video. Whatever the case, this patch is amazing and it definitely creates some amazing images that could be used for other designs. Personally, I liked this tool. I’m still trying to get it to work with other examples, but the one I got to work so far is a with a video of machinery. I would like to find a video that doesn’t have too many black spaces for a later test, but so far this is a great patch.


-Nathan D

The Contrary of the Movie Theater and Scan Processing

I enjoyed this week's reading as the theorist (Gabriel Menotti) had a concise conveyance of opinion on the presentation of VJ projectionists. Menotti notes the improvisational, non-narrative form of VJ material, and contrasts it to the highly planned and produced works of the cinema. Lastly, Menotti notes the similarities between the highly technical roles of the VJ and the film projectionist, offering one large difference: he assigns the role of the VJ as a "positive performance", in which the VJ creates coherence from imagery. Menotti conversely assigns the role of a "negative performance" to the film projectionist, as it is the projectionist's job to avoid incoherence during the film.

I also downloaded the Rutt-Etra Synthesizer in Max MSP but was only able to get it to behave properly once [image of the chimp from this run-through]. The effect on the Rutt-Etra image looks very similar to the Woody Vasulka video I found, entitled "C-Trend", from 1974.






When I looked into further meaning for "C-Trend", I read that a Scan Processor was used to manipulate the raster and the line deflection of the image. The black areas of the image are not affected as they lack voltage, but the grey/white lines contain energy and can be heightened or depressed. The "Rutt-Etra Scan Processor" I then found out, is another name for the "Rutt-Etra Synthesizer", which I thought tied everything together nicely!