Garage Cinema and the Future of Media Technology

"It may be hard to conceptualize a world in which you engage in a daily practice of making movies from parts of existing ones to communicate and play with others, but your grandchildren will not understand how you ever lived without it."

In this 9-page paper, Marc Davis explores this vision of the future of media technology by examining the concept of "Garage Cinema". His thesis is as follows: "Over the next 50 years we will witness an explosion of access to and production and distribution of video by communities that could not earlier afford to produce video in their homes, schools, and offices. Just as desktop publishing gave consumers the power of the printing press on their desks (but it took the Internet to make everyone a publisher since without it the distribution channel was lacking), and digital audio samplers gave birth to a whole new genre and population of music makers, computational video technology will enable these and new communities to make video a part of their daily communication."

Davis' conception of this paradigm shift in media technology and human communication is centred around the notion that what he calls "computational semasiographic video technology" will take up the challenge to "develop a language of description that both humans and computers can read and write, which will enable the integrated description and creation of video data". Empowered with that technology, Davis envisions Garage Cinema makers being able to access video that has already been recorded and then to manipulate video streams according to their contents. So, one could create Garage Cinema from video downloaded from the Internet, taped from television, and recorded with a camcorder. (The idea is that automatic and semi-automatic annotation will be fully integrated into the process).

This strategy would, Davis thinks, enable media-makers to "create participatory communities around their experience of media by creating artifacts that express personal and shared desires not being satisfied by mainstream media." That is, new kinds of communities could be created through the integration of computational media into daily life - such that Garage Cinema makers become "like dolphins sending and receiving their sonar 'movies' or like...people raised to use computational video as a mother tongue." People are, thus, empowered to create culture through media communication by selecting and producing content that is then "interwoven with the expressive repertoire of materials drawn from popular culture (e.g., movies, TV, news, cartoons)."

In short, Davis holds that, "As computational ideas transform our thinking about media, new apparatuses and new ideas will emerge that will change our relationships to media and to each other. The ways we create, communicate, and play will become computationally revisioned, transforming us in the process..."