Compressed Cinema is the series title for five audiovisual works completing in 2020. The images were created by Casey REAS, and each work has a stereo audio track composed by Jan St. Werner. The Compressed Cinema digital videos were created in the tradition of experimental films that use existing films as raw materials. The Compressed Cinema videos are an inversion of Ken Jacob’s 1969 film Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, which expanded the short 1905 film of the same name from 8 to 115 minutes through meticulous rephotography, repetition, and editing. In contrast, each Compressed Cinema video distills a feature-length film into a work of less than ten minutes. A Compressed Cinema video is a complete reimaging of a film through a process of transformation and editing. The collection of five videos created to date are the result of over three years of experimentation and developing new techniques for creating cinematic media with generative adversarial networks (GANs).
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