New Cinematic Cities: Animating the Digital Image of the City 2010

Cinema and the modern city have been linked to each other as emblems of modernity. While cities like New York and the way we use them have changed relatively little, today’s digital imaging technologies like Google Earth have opened radically new possibilities for looking at and thinking about cities. What has been missing is a new cinematic language for the city that exploits these new modes of representation.
In this class students appropriated images and ‘footage’ from Google Earth to create short 3 ½ minute animated films that explore the contemporary city and its unique manifestation through readily available digital imaging technologies. They explored various strategies for linking image, sound and text, in an attempt to develop a cinematic language for this new digital image of the city.