August 7, 2006
Distributed cinema
A grass-roots collaboration project is planned for Wednesday night outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in downtown San Jose, reports The New York Times. Adriene Jenik dubs the SPECFLIC 2.0 project “distributed cinema” because the project unfolds on six screens, with live performance. The scenes are inspired by a dark vision of public libraries circa 2030, when books are black-market commodities and the “attention authorities” apprehend citizens who lack the requisite “reading licenses.”
Passers-by will be recruited to photograph their neighbors with camera phones and submit the pictures to a database. These images feed a kind of lineup of suspects, projected on the largest screen. Audience members can also sign up to receive text messages on the futuristic library theme, written by the cyberpunk author Rudy Rucker.
“A lot of my interest in cellphones has to do with the intimacy of the device,” Ms. Jenik said. “We talk to loved ones on it, we cradle it, our identities are tied up with it. Stories coming to us this way can engage us in a different space.”
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