Chris is a long-time specialist in interactive films and installations, as artist-practitioner, educator and researcher. He is a visiting lecturer in various universities and Director of Studies of the PhD in Media Art and Creative Technologies at RISEBA University, Latvia. Exhibitions of interactive film installations include ARTEC'95 in Japan, ZKM's Future Cinema (2003) and the 13th Media Forum in Moscow (2012); Cause & Effect live interactive cinema performances took place from 2002 to 2012; and the 'customisable cinema' project You•Who? was presented in Madeira, Dublin and Cork in 2018-19. Numerous publications include a chapter on interactive cinema in Interactive Digital Narrative: History, Theory, and Practice (Routledge, 2015).

Seminar Talk.

Kinoautomat and the Origins of Interactive Cinema. 

Starting with a short contextual lecture, this talk will include a participative screening of Kinoautomat (1967), the world’s first interactive film system created in Czechoslovakia by Raduz Cincera. Kinoautomat ran for six months at the Expo67 in Montreal, using custom technology that enabled audiences to vote several times to determine what happened next in the film. As a research project, Chris undertook an in-depth archaeology of this neglected film which faded out of view in the early 1970s. The film's importance will be explained in relation to other early experiments in interactivity in the cinema, and its evolution will be traced into other related projects including Cincera's 'Cinelabyrinth' of 1990.

Workshop

A variety of interactive films will be prototyped by the students based on knowledge and techniques presented by Chris. Students will be asked to propose and make prototype interactive films based on:

-Using a brain-computer interface to control branching possibilities in a non-linear fiction film.
-Using a brain-computer interface as a means to analyse the effectiveness of short non-fiction films to induce relaxation. Who can make the most relaxing film?
-Training an AI image-recognition interface to control direction choices in a non-linear fiction film.
-Creating an installation that uses a physical, tangible interface as the basis for an interactive film.