EG  SERENE  Software

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EG Serene Software is freely available software by Barbara Lattanzi. It is based on the 1970 film, Serene Velocity, by the artist Ernie Gehr.

EG Serene is available for the improvising of digital video in real-time. The software adopts and "open sources" the structure of the 1970 film as the basis for temporal reconstruction of your own selected digital videos in quicktime movie format.

EG Serene derives from the film Serene Velocity its over-arching time structure in which perceptual events emerge out of the incremental alternation of the two halves of a bisected passage of film. With the software interface you are able to continuously vary selected time aspects.

ABOUT THE WORK OF ERNIE GEHR

Ernie Gehr's films span over 30 years. Since the making of Serene Velocity, his work is associated with a materialist aesthetics in filmmaking practice that emerged in the 1960s and 70s. So-called "structuralist film" foregrounded the process of viewing - in both its perceptual and culturally-coded aspects. In such film, the resulting affective intensities depended on how closely the spatio-temporal representations could be made to coincide, as one and the same, with a film's material elements and formal structures. For example, in Gehr's Serene Velocity, one sees an anonymous hallway in which the walls, floor and cieling appear to be an extended continuum of the film frame itself and, by extension, of the viewer's own contained space. However, this spatial unity is dramatically dissolved between the frames as the algorithmically-derived vectoral movement (serene velocity) within the hallway proceeds.

HOW DOES THIS SOFTWARE RELATE TO THE WORK OF ERNIE GEHR?

In Gehr's Serene Velocity the image is made to resonate in sympathetic vibration with the perceptual engagement of the viewer. And this becomes the "game" and goal of the EG SERENE software: to explore video playback for resonant frequencies by means of the temporal-reshuffling algorithm.

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